Why do people here really not like Trotskyists? Is it just because of his beef with Stalin and not an actual criticism of his views? Do people really not think a global movement would be superior for the betterment of all people?
Edit: Thank you to everyone who provided context and history, y’all are a wealth of knowledge.
My few experiences with Trots:
I tried to talk to some SA people, all they wanted to do was sell a newspaper, even as I was asking about their platform and what joining might look like. Once I bought the paper they were a little bit friendlier but that was all I needed to experience to not want to be involved.
Two different Trotskyist groups injecting themselves into every vaguely left thing in town. One of the groups was straight up disruptive while the other one would just try to recruit people.
A Trot that somehow snuck into a union organizer position ghosting me and my coworkers when we tried to organize. I found out he quit from someone else in the labor movement a few months later.
Over the last year I’ve been introduced to a number of people who had interest in an ideology that is a weird blend of Trotskyism and anarchism and most of those people and their ideas are absolutely cursed.
I can think of some very cursed ways to combine those, and the ones that are most likely seem quite bad. But if somebody combined the trot ability to show up everywhere with anarchist praxis, that’d be a heck of a movement.
Also if somebody combined Trotskyist splitting with anarchists never being quite the same kind of anarchist as the next anarchist, it’d probably be at least funny to watch from a distance.
The showing up everywhere thing really is the Trot special ability. I don’t know if they have moles or Minority report precognition or what, but Trots have been at literally every left wing event I’ve ever been to, even ones that weren’t announced to the general public.
The Trots are even better than the Avakians at being everywhere
This was basically my experience with a group that hangs out in my city, part of the IMT, “Socialist Revolution”. They talk to people that walk by and say we need to make a communist political party and win elections. They have stickers for sale and pins, but not even a pamphlet or flyer for free which turned me off. I get needing to raise funds but they were clearly well outfitted with a massive high res banner, you’d think they’d want to get the word out better.
The disruption thing I have some experience with. I worked a little with the ISO in college since they were the only game in town. I was at a meeting where they wanted to go disrupt a local Green party event. They didn’t phrase it like that, they were saying we should go to their event and try to sway them into joining the ISO with pamphlets and papers.
I asked why we should do that instead of just joining them and the organizers seemed super confused. Like there was no possible way we could work together if they were still the Green Party and we weren’t. One guy there called them Stalinists?
I should also mention everyone involved in this was like 21 years old at maximum and I was 18. So for years I just thought we were dumb kids until I learned that kinda thing is common
I do love it when the local green party are Stalinists
trot groups in england were very heavily infiltrated by cops for decades as were others in the west. Search “swp” in the Undercover Policing Inquiry published evidence
there was a zine I read years and years ago that explained how (and maybe why) trots love making front groups to ruin every little progressive project. It was before all this infiltration stuff came out but when it did, everything made sense. The title was “monopolize resistance” I can’t find it online.
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