Not always 100% with Shea but worth reading
They tend to be ultras (and, in contradiction, sometimes obsessed with electoralist approaches) and fairly disruptive to others’ organizing. Discussing Trotsky himself or permanent revolution can be a good exercise and a way to develop theory but that’s usually not what is actually happening.
Examples:
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Notorious for trying to enter other left spaces and take them over. Especially if those spaces seem “ascendant”. A lot of this weird tendency of self-congratulation and appointing themselves as the vanguard or whatever even though all they did was show up to something that someone else organized and then take a picture of themselves.
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So critical of the USSR, historically, that there was a serious pipeline from Trots to neocons. The USSR is gone but terrible international takes are still the norm. These are the people telling you to believe in the Israeli working class rather than criticize settler culture in the Zionist entity. Not all, but it’s dominant.
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A belief in leading through publications that nobody reads that say a lot about what should happen according to them. Kind of harmless I guess but it does waste people’s time when they could be doing useful things or becoming educated. It’s also a funny contrast to how they usually characterize themselves as (the only true Marxists).
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A dogmatic subscription to certain approaches to labor that simultaneously alienate everyone else in the space while also supporting labor imperialism. This is annoying to deal with because when other socialists enter the space it will already be hostile to them. I’ve dealt with this A LOT.
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A cynicism that I don’t want to overgeneralize about and can’t perfectly explain. Maybe it’s just that a lot of them are older. But their approach to issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, etc is often only a way to relate to their target audience rather than a principled position. This really shows in how they use language, incorporate others into their processes, etc. Everything is working class this, working class that, and then some token words so they can pass for “progressive”. This does not apply to all Trots but it’s very common. I’ve had to have many talks with Trot orgs’ leaders about not being transphobic it casually racist when they want to have a speaker at a rally or something.
A lot of what I’m describing are also behaviors common to the reactionary Western leftist stereotype and is not necessarily about Trotsky or a lot of what constitutes Trotskyism. Think of them as the only acceptable Marxists allowed to survive the Red Scare because of their hypercritical approach to other leftists and the fact that they are usually dependent on the approaches to “organizing” handed down by American and British cishet white dudes in the 1950s and 1960s.
Anyways I should mention again, “not all Trots”. I know plenty of Trots I can work with and bring into coalition etc. But I know way more that will basics ruin the space lol. Some of the issues are attributable to Trosky in the sense that he created a narrative for himself as the anti-Stalin and a hypercritic of the USSR. But a lot of it is also just that “which way, Western leftist man?” thing I’ve harped on.
Wow, thank you for the breakdown. Can I ask specifically what you meant by:
A dogmatic subscription to certain approaches to labor that simultaneously alienate everyone else in the space while also supporting labor imperialism.
Do these Trots look down on certain forms of labor?
If you ask a Trot what should be done with a Western labor union, they will tell you that you need to kick out the labor aristocrats at the top of that staff food chain and make it accountable to the workers. Every time. No other answers will ever be given outside of maybe trying to drive union demands from below.
In theory these are usually good ideas. In practice they fail to actually accomplish these things because the answer they gave is actually their praxis. They said the thing, they are done. Or maybe they even got 1-3 people in the union on their side. But still, their praxis is to have those 2-3 people say the line and call it a day.
Then their org writes about it in their paper saying that you’ve gotta kick out the union bosses at X union or Y workplace. This is usually the nail in the coffin for gaining the trust of people involved with the union, staff or not.
In contrast, there are folks that do the actual work of building reform causes and kicking out leadership, etc. These are usually multi-tendency, inducing anarchists, commies, SocDems, etc. Part of the Trot stereotype is to take credit for that work in their little papers and to tell them what they should really be doing… again in their little papers.
Now imagine that you wanted to do something much more radical, like building independent unions or at least something different from the large, mostly captured spaces. They become entirely useless or even a distraction. One particular Trot group I know of even does little fake photo ops where they talk about the workers rising up and it’s literally just 3 salts (people that get themselves hired with the goal of unionizing a shop) from their org and it fails to achieve results. They have convinced zero (0) existing employees at that shop to join them. It’s been 9 months. If that place ever had any potential, it’s now been squandered.
Appreciate the time. An international proletariat and permanent revolution are things I feel strongly about, but it doesn’t sound like I want to be associated with the name, even if I don’t think these people are actually practicing Trotskyism.
