>>1602589Oh trust me, I'm plenty out of any "echo chamber". Working in the tenant struggle makes sure you never have the opportunity. I feel like I should reiterate, though: I'm not gonna pretend that Trotskyists can't possibly do good work. This isn't personal or anything, I've read plenty of Trotsky and have essentially the same opinion as what revolutionaries like Walter Rodney have laid out: man lost the plot after Lenin died, and it became more about him than the actual movement, and Trotskyist organizations are by and large alienated from the genuine revolutionary movement. Trotskyists aren't fighting in the streets or in the countryside, Trotskyists aren't seizing state power, Trotskyists aren't generating new formations and strategies for making revolution, and instead fell to the same economism and chauvinism that the 3rd International parties would mostly find themselves mired in after Stalin's death. Say what you will about Marxism-Leninism, these parties and revolutionary movements have had the vitality to creatively produce solutions to the particularities of their conditions (Focoism, Protracted People's War, Urban Guerilla War, etc.) and seize state power, while Trotskyism dogmatically attaches itself to the insurrectionary model which so far has only seen success in the Russian Revolution.
I also think it needs to be said that while all of what you listed
can be great work, rank-and-file union committees are simply not the same as organizing alongside the labor movement towards revolution. The labor movement in the west, and especially in the United States and UK, is completely reformist and the communists involved economistic. Trotskyism has done nothing to resolve this beyond entryism. University and education union organizing likewise (and I'm saying this as a teacher) only has a thin veneer of greater radicalism.
The most advanced anti-war and anti-imperialist action that Trotskyism has produced is that outlined by Sam Marcy, and his practice led to a break with the SWP and resulted in parties which have all seen success
distancing themselves from Trotskyism, rather than embracing it. Even then, the militancy of these demonstrations is entirely rhetorical. They might even call back to the phrase "by any means necessary", but frankly I haven't met a single Trotskyist in my organizing that would go beyond saying those words. There's no room in their revolution for the insurrection and violence they speak of.
As I previously stated, marxists.org is objectively great work. That being said, though the website's originators are Trotskyist, that team of people haven't done everything on that site. For example, the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line was a collaborative project that wouldn't have been possible without the active involvement of people who were entrenched in the history covered by that archive. It's also notable that outside of the impressive example of marxists.org, there aren't any projects of even close to comparable effort or notoriety. To talk of "libraries" as a plural is a bit of an exaggeration then, no?
Literally everyone does online marxist classes. I've done online marxist classes. These are possibly the simplest, easiest form of political education you can engage with, and unfortunately the one with the least impact on real organizing. Where I'm at, we've had far greater success with communist political education as part of leadership development between tenant union and party work.
International meetings are all well and good so long as they have a point. Trotskyists have a reputation for endlessly founding new "Fourth Internationals" for a reason. International meetings like the IMCWP, ICOR, ILPS, etc. all involve parties far more involved in active revolutionary struggle which tackle active points of disunity among Marxist-Leninists and Maoists with the hopes of achieving unity through struggle, rather than declaring new internationals to rally toward before unity is achieved (as an aside, the "Principally Maoist" ICL has made this identical error)
>>1602595>Why haven’t Stalinists or Maoists started the one true bloody Marxist revolution yet? For that matter why haven’t you? Hmmm?Laziest criticism possible. This can be equally levied at any Marxist tendency. There will never be ONE TRUE socialist revolution just as that has never happened with any previous mode of production. There will also never be just one true prophet of the revolution, regardless of how Trotskyists demand we dogmatically view Lenin and Trotsky. Continuity-rupture of one stage of a science into a new one is a collective effort, one which Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. alone couldn't possibly hope to accomplish alone. If you disagree with what I've stated, fine. Actually engage with it like an adult and defend or adjust your position. This engagement is part of that collective effort, and I'm happy to take part.