Disclaimer: I adore my anarchist comrades and I don’t write for a newspaper, I have in fact never even read one.
You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good (Michael Hudson and China Mieville come to mind). I’ve also read individual Trots as they often have good article and essays. They run the world’s best website, marxists.org; and IIRC they keep International Publishers going.
I feel similar about leftcoms (doubt we have any here, either). Dunk on some takes they might have, maybe allow for ACTUAL, thoughtful critique of positions, too. But no uncharitable generalizations.
I would love the rule to be that there’s no ripping on any genuine leftist movement in general, only ripping on specific takes by individuals.
Yeah this site is kinda weird about trots. I know trots that do way more than anarchists and have better takes and vice versa. Most ML’s I know are armchair socialists but that’s not reason to dunk on every ML.
Some people on here think that there’s some specific tendency that, if they subscribe to, will push the socialism button.
Most of those were MLMs, they should get appropriate credit.
Also nobody has pulled it off in the imperial core yet.
You know what, I think you are right. I don’t know any Trots personally but there are plenty of them out there IRL that are cool and good
Cool and good until you say the word China and then the conversation turns into a complete shitshow.
Also every single article they have ever written has something in it about “stalinists”. It is in fact the only way to tell something was written by a trot compared to any other ideological branch.
Not too much really, the downside is that they actively reinforce a lot of anti-communist stuff by agreeing with the right on it.
Socialist Appeal is also kind of cult-ey. I worry that their methods end up turning off a lot of the young student crowd that they burn through who get a bad taste for “organising” because all they do is rock up to events organised by other people, set up all their highly visible branding to make themselves look associated with it and then sell newspapers and shit. Their member turnover is extremely high. But that’s just my experience with one specific group of trots I suppose and might not be the case for all of them, but it’s a big group here.
The old Labour Militant members are fucking good organisers though.
I’ve had people turn an organizing strategy meeting into bullshit about “stalinism” because I was the only ML there. It was a conversation about recruiting, and that always gets to this point. The Trots hated whenever I didn’t want to denigrate China or really any leftist project. Also many got pissed that there was a Soviet aesthetic in some posters, which I get, but disagreed because they hate the Soviet Union, not because it’s ineffective.
In my experience, active recruitment always brings out the differences very fast, because factions want to recruit more to their faction.