Not always 100% with Shea but worth reading
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.
All commies like an international proletariat and world revolution! The devil is in the details on how one wants to build a practicable movement to achieve it, and one with a solid base in both theory and material conditions. I would recommend that anyone reading Trotsky also read widely so as to have a solid ground for critique in many directions - and to compare how well theories from 100+ years ago bore out re: the history from which we can now all benefit in our analyses. One of the things that makes toxic Trots end up toxic is that they don’t actually challenge themselves or leave their bubble. They only trust other Trots when it comes to international analysis, for example, which is why they’re pretty much always wrong about Israel - they’re getting all of their takes from like 7 trade unionists that are trying their best to wish a radical Israeli working class into existence.
Ruthless criticism of all that exists!
