what do you guys think of leon trotsky and his actions, his accomplishments and his fall ?
HARD MODE: DO NOT MENTION ANY OF THE CURRENT OR HISTORICAL PARTIES THAT CLAIMED TO CARRY ON HIS LEGACY AND THEIR SUPER RETARDED GLOWIE FUELED DRAMA WE ARE ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE RED ARMY GENERAL NOT WHAT THE SLP OR SWP OR WHATEVER OTHER GAY PARTIES ARE OUT THERE
I think he was alright for a while then turned into an irritant figure. He joined the bolsheviks a month before the October revolution, defended Petrograd against Kerensky and was put in charge of the peace treaty with Germany, which he fucked up and resigned. Then he was put in charge of creating and administrating the Red Army, helping win the civil war, however he came out of it debilitated and lost power to a troika of Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev. Then the CPSU overwhelmingly voted for Stalin and Trotsky attempted one last time to stand up against the party but only pissed them off more. He was removed, exiled and finally banished from the USSR. He spent the rest of his years criticizing Stalin while maintaining that the USSR was a workers state, something trots eventually rejected. He was accused and tried in absence for taking part in a clandestine plot to get rid of Stalin, something trots denied for several decades until his personal archive confirmed its existence. Then he got assassinated. And that's the story of Trotsky. So I guess his real legacy should be helping win the Russian civil war and not modern trot movements. And I'd say War communism was unironically the closest the soviets got to communism. Trotsky wanted to take that and turn it into militarized labor, which would've made a really extreme experiment, a sort of Soviet Prussia. No idea if it would have lasted but admittedly part of me has always admired some of these hyperleft ideas such as war communism, militarization of labor, the cultural revolution, the Khmer economic experiment
>>2448309Great post and I think this is probably the best way to think about Trotsky's actual legacy. Except
>Khmer economic experimentPlease elaborate
>>2448745Stalin died for your sins
Esoteric Stalinism holds that Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was in fact the living dialectic, the dialectic made flesh.
In his body we see, in his one crippled and one good arm, the clear sign of the dual natures contained within.
The internal dialectic of Great Stalin was externalized in the material with his own antithesis: Leon Trotsky. Trotsky is not a villain in Esoteric Stalinism, but a necessary antagonist through which the dialectic is able to progress, both in facilitating the actualization of the will of Great Stalin in inscrutable ways through his distinct actions and in serving to develop the progression of Stalin himself during His time with us on earth.
According to Esoteric Stalinists one can reach an understanding of things simply through contemplating Stalin, as He is himself the greater dialectic which contains all the movements of the universe to ever be.
>>2448146>(cue schizo theories about Hitlero-Trotskyite historians stealing from the archives)Explain this, then:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B3%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_(%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F)
>The station fulfilled the task of protecting the "old Leninist principles." Its political direction was defined by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as "Trotskyist."
>The authors of the broadcasts and announcers of the broadcasts were M. V. Tarnovsky, a member of the anti-Soviet emigrant National Labor Union of the New Generation (NTNSP, later NTS), N. N. Minchukov, a former employee of the Izvestia newspaper, colonels A. G. Neryanin, Yu. M. Niman and A. F. Vanyushin, engineer S. P. Morozov[2] and even Ernst Torgler[3] and Karl Albrecht[4]. The radio station's broadcasts often included excerpts from Lenin's "Letter to the Congress," which, among other things, criticized the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (b), Joseph Stalin.
>Another station of the Concordia group worked against the USSR, For Russia (Concordia G), which opposed the Bolsheviks in order to provoke interethnic tensions. It was headed by Alex Birk, who lived in Estonia until 1938.Just as Stalin has said - any leftist opposition to the party line inevitably becomes the rightist one, lmao
Modern Trotskyists tend to be the worst thing about Trotsky.
They form bands of student unions act insufferable and sell newspapers all day, but then 99% of them will swap over to being DemSocs or more progressive Liberals once they graduate and want an office job.
Something about the general vibe / attitude / feel of Trots is a little icky and I always find explaining why hard to put into words. Is it just how detatched and middle class they are? idk.
On the guy himself: It sucks he killed so many Anarchists and LibComs but he didn't have much choice while at war I suppose. It's not like the Anarchist's wouldn't have killed him too.
Pretty opportunistic to be fine with power to the Soviets being taken away and replaced with a centralised party bureaucracy while he was in the party but then to cry about it being so terrible in exile, even if I think he did have the right view on the matter in the end.
Was also right about Internationalism. SIOC is anti-Marxist revisionary garbage invented by Stalin. If your Socialism is also Nationalist we have a name for that and you are NOT going to like it.
Meanwhile a certain type of (mostly online) MLs like to blame him for everything, he's a splitter who caused disunity across the global left just because of his ego, they use the term Trot as a slur for anything and everything, they believe every conspiracy theory on how he was some secret Nazi CIA spy sending radio messages to RoboHitler in Antartica or some BS.
The seethe he causes in them is pretty funny. They forget (or never read) how he supported the Soviet project even until he died it seems.
The one thing I find most interesting is that when he got icepicked, he didn't die instantly.
He managed to beat the assassin up a fair bit (who likely didn't expect him to fight back after such a head injury), and then when Trotsky's bodyguard walked in with a gun to kill the assassin, Trotsky told his bodyguard not to shoot, that Stalin's assassin should be kept alive to face justice with a proper trial at a court. Only then did he die.
I enjoy the icepick memes as much as anyone but it kinda puts his character in a better light imo. Although I can also totally image he would've sent an assassin after Stalin had positions been reversed too, he wasn't some wholesome gentle chungus.
>>2454761>>2454766no, i don't think so
like I said, it was like 2-4 people, out of thousands of trotskyists and thousands of neocons
>>2454755>Post a picture from a news site claiming that a materially demonic NATOist neolib baby killer and friend of Trump & Bush was actually a Trot as a kidTheir current PM was also a Trot
>The video features an interview with Peter Hitchens, the Daily Mail columnist and self-confessed former Trotskyist, speaking about the Prime Minister. Starmer had previously been referred to by the Mail on Sunday as a “Posh Trot” in an attempt to expose his “radical past”. Hitchens ‘reveals’ that Sir Kier is a ‘Pabloist’, a breakaway sect from the Communist Fourth International (FI).
>Michel Pablo was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis. A Greek citizen born in Egypt in 1911, he became a controversial and innovative Marxist leader. By the 1950s, he was one of the most prominent leaders of the Fourth International. The Fourth International (FI) had been created as a new global Communist organisation, after Stalin’s rift with Trotsky.
<“The success of the (Stalin-led) Soviet Union in establishing a number of client states after that conflict led Pablo to the conclusion that Communist Parties were, contrary to Trotsky’s beliefs, still capable of leading anti-capitalist revolutions. The success of Tito and Mao confirmed this, in his view. This led to him putting forward an idea of “deep entryism” (entryism “sui generis” (“of a special type”)) where Trotskyists would join mass Communist Parties and seek to influence their development without revealing their politics openly. This idea did not go down well among some and the FI continued a process of splits and infighting, a tradition that continues to this day among Trotsky’s adherents.”
>However, this idea didn’t sit well with everyone, leading to ongoing splits and conflicts within the movement. The infighting among Trotsky’s followers has persisted over the years, continuing a long-standing tradition of division within the group.
>In the mid-1980s, Starmer was a member of Socialist Alternatives Editorial Collective. Socialist Alternative was a badly produced magazine where articles on the future direction of the Labour Party and the miners’ strike sat alongside adverts for revolutionary communist organisations and reviews of books on Rosa Luxemburg, the German communist and Spartacist leader. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were executed after their arrest by Freikorp officers on January 15, 1919. Among prominent figures who moved from Trotskyism in college to later becoming conservatives or Republicans are Irving Kristol and David Horowitz
. This ideological journey is also associated with the intellectual lineage of the neoconservative movement.
Irving Kristol
Early life: As a student at the City College of New York in the 1930s, Kristol was a member of a small but influential group of anti-Stalinist Trotskyists.
Political shift: He later became a prominent neoconservative, a label he helped define. Disillusioned by the failures of 1960s liberal policies, he shifted his support to the Republican Party.
Legacy: As a writer and editor, Kristol became known as the "godfather of neoconservatism" and was a major intellectual force behind the movement's rise.
David Horowitz
Early life: In the 1960s, Horowitz was a leading figure of the New Left, identifying as a Marxist intellectual. While living in London, he worked with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and became involved with a Trotskyist group.
Political shift: After becoming disillusioned with the left, particularly following the murder of a friend by members of the Black Panther Party, Horowitz underwent a major ideological conversion.
Legacy: He became a fiercely outspoken conservative writer and activist, detailing his journey in his 1996 memoir, Radical Son. He co-founded the conservative David Horowitz Freedom Center.
>>2455134my point is, it's not interesting that a few people out of the dozens of early neocons were trotskyists as young people. Most young radicals politically degenerated as they got older. We can find similar examples of a "communist to right wing pipeline" for moscow or bejing alligned parties as well. So there isn't anything interesting in particular about Trotskyists on this front.
This Irving Kristol stuff is making a mountain out of a molehill. A much more devastating observation about Trotskyism is that essentially every single American Trotskyist party degenerated into liberals and ended up endorsing democrats at some point, or just abandoned trotskyism all together. The only (arguably) decent American Trotskyist parties are reimports of British Trotskyist parties.
Of course, similar things could also be said about ML parties. The CPUSA for example has been endorsing democrats on the basis of retarded and clearly discredited popular front nonsense since the new deal.
>>2455172Very interesting. Explain this, then
>>2454682 Why were trots working with Goebbels?
>>2455182>according to the daily worker, people at the moscow trials confessed to being trotskyists and working with the nazisIt feels strange to have to explain this, but perhaps you are a 17 year old baby communist. These confessions were elicited under torture and can't be relied upon. When the soviet archives were briefly opened during glasnost and after the fall of the soviet union, some of these signed confessions were found to be covered in dried blood.
The accused weren't Nazis and they weren't even Trotskyists. And they probably weren't wreckers or saboteurs either.
>>2455196>These confessions were elicited under torture and can't be relied uponProve that these confessions were elicited under torture, lmao. Just claiming that they were doesn't prove that they were
>some of these signed confessions were found to be covered in dried bloodMore horror stories, seriously?
>>2455205prove they weren't retard. I'm not the party raising the confessions as evidence of a stain on trotskyism. Many people recanted when they were about to be shot and said they were tortured.
>be me>old bolshevik since 1910ish>devote your life to gommunism>live brave historic life>go through the fires of hell during the revolution and the civil war>stick with stalin during the 20s>in the 30s suddenly decide to become a trotskyist and also a nazi agent>get killed by stalin>this somehow was the life trajectory of literally hundreds of peoplethis is what you actually believe
>>2455219i'm going to be real with you dude, I am pretty sure you are like 16. No adult communist in the current yearthinks this sort of stuff. Not even ML leaning figures like zizek. They all acknowledge the torture.
If you can post a photo of a drivers license with that says you are over 25, I will continue this conversation. Feel free to black out identifiable information.
>>2455225https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session13_c.htmWhy did Trotsky say this about Radek?
>During the trial, Radek testified: “… in February, 1932, I received a letter from Trotsky … Trotsky further wrote that since he knew me to be an active person he was convinced that I would return to the struggle.” Three months after this alleged letter, on May 14th, 1932, I wrote to Albert Weisbord in New York: “… The ideological and moral degeneration of Radek testifies to the fact that not only is Radek not made of first-grade stuff, but also that the Stalinist régime must support itself either on depersonalized functionaries or demoralized people.” Such was my real appraisal of this “active person”!
>No adult communist in the current yearthinks this sort of stuff. Not even ML leaning figures like zizek. They all acknowledge the torture.They all acknowledge torture? Really? Nobody requires proof of tortures, when the eyewitnesses of the Moscow Trials have all said that they've seen no proof of tortures? Says a lot about the "adult" communists, lmao
>>2455231Or this about Pyatakov:
>Involved here is the testimony of Pyatakov. He stated that he met me in Norway in December 1935 for conspiratorial talks. Pyatakov was supposed to have come from Berlin to Oslo by airplane. The immense importance of this testimony is self-evident. I have declared more than once, and I declare again, that Pyatakov, like Radek, for the past nine years was not my friend but one of my bitterest and most treacherous enemies, and that there could have been no question of negotiations and meetings between us. If it were proven that Pyatakov actually visited me, my position would be hopelessly compromised. On the contrary, if I prove that the account of the visit is false from beginning to end, it is the system of “voluntary confessions” which will be compromised. Even if one were to admit that the Moscow court is above suspicion, the accused Pyatakov would still remain suspect. His testimony must be verified. That is not difficult. Pyatakov is not yet shot. He should immediately be presented with the following series of precise questions.Why did Trotsky throw his confidants under the bus so strongly, lol? I thought they were real, true old bolshevik revolutionaries who were wrongly accused at Moscow Trials!
>>2455231your chatgpt tier research betrays a shit understanding and that you aren't really reading any of the history
<radekhe turned in the guy who brought him a letter from trotsky, seemingly a smoking gun indication he had no interest in trotskyist conspiracy
>Pyakatovreading comprehension. Trotsky denied meeting this guy. Based on some brief research, the Norweigan press at the time reported that no plane landed at the supposed airfield in Oslo where this took place.
also you are reported for being underage
https://www.hrono.ru/dokum/193_dok/1937tro00.phpApparently, contents of this trial was recreated from Pravda and other OPENLY PUBLISHED NEWSPAPERS
>>2455251>the Norweigan press at the time reported that no plane landed at the supposed airfield in Oslo where this took place.Oh, but Norway did receive a plane, according to Norwegian Communist Party research
Trotsky's defence is hilarious, by the way. "How could Pyatakov come to me at 3:30, talk with me until 5:30, and fly back? It's impossible! I'm a good host, I would have given him a meal, because he would be feeling hungry! And no way in hell would he fly back immediately, he must had rested in Norway at an inn!" Such childish attempts, lol
>>2455264<you LIE!We can go and read this
https://www.hrono.ru/dokum/193_dok/1937tro00.php and find Radek's confession about how the excuse for travelling to Norway for Pyatakov was an arranged speech to students, lol
As for passport, Bessonov, another witness, has said that DANISH passport for Pyatakov was acquired through bribery of DANISH officials
Norwegian authorities have CONFIRMED TO OFFICIAL SOVIET INQUIRY that during winter months, planes were allowed to land in that airport.
Holmstrom (the guy who in another reserach had acquired hotel Bristol plans and had proved without a shred of a doubt that Trotsky was lying) has apparently found this:
>According to Sven-Erik Holmstrom, some time later the correspondents of Tidens Mystery managed to find witnesses from among the local residents. They gave the journalists some very interesting information. So, one of them did not want to disclose his own name, but expressed his willingness, if necessary, to give evidence to the internal affairs bodies. He said that when Leon Trotsky was staying in a hut near the lake, he saw a plane fly in from the south, passing over Mount Girihaugen and over Ringkollen, and then making several circles over Lake Oyangen before landing. And another local villager reported the discovery of ski landing gear tracks on Lake Oyangen. >>2455264>>2455276https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidens_TegnThis is the newspaper yandex translated as "Tidens Mystery". 25 Jan 1935 issue of that newspaper had a journo investigation of Pyatakov arriving in Oslo, lmao
Did Stalin pay fascist-adjacent newspaper to shit on Trotsky?
>>2455276>accused accuses other accused in confession, therefore other accused is guilty and trials were not show trialscircular argument, retard!
>Norwegian authorities have CONFIRMED TO OFFICIAL SOVIET INQUIRY that during winter months, planes were allowed to land in that airport. permitted to land doesn't mean that any planes landed. civilian plane logs indicated no planes landed. this is such a meaningless clarification that I must once again point out that you are a retard.
Think of it like this. You are *allowed* to hang out with girls. But if we check your paren'ts ring doorbell camera, there aren't any women coming over to hang out.
>According to norweigan grover furr, unnamed witnesses talked some shit a gorillion years agothe smoking gun!!!
>>2455292>accused digging each others' graves is not proof!!!1Legal practice begs to differ, ololol. Practice shows that they, in fact, do dig each other's graves, and their admissions can be trusted (to an extent). You are just being retard intentionally because you can't admit to being wrong, and to Trotsky being a traitor
>civilian plane logs indicated no planes landedSo what? It was a military airport anyway, and Germany was known to fly secret planes all over the place, leaving no reports. For example, they've secretly flown hundreds of planes to Spain
>the smoking gun!!!That's your proof that confession was forced? I thought you had solid arguments, and not an emotional appeal to muh common knowledge
>>2455292>>2455297Besides, why would a "concerted admission of goilt" feature an event which had to be clarified with Norweigian authorities, with those authorities contradicting the evidence? Like, do you think Soviets were playing mindgames to lull the world into not believing them? Like, has there ever been a country that tried to pull such mindgames? Uniqueness of situation in world history is an argument in favor of Soviet account of event, not Trotsky's. Otherwise iit's just a conspiracy theory: super-smart Soviets shitting onto their own arguments so that confessions looked more believable - but by doing so providing Trotsky with fuel to defend himself!
That's totally how forced confessions work, btw
Since the opponent will now pretend to have won and not to care, i'll just post Radek's admission to showcase Trotsky's breadth of betrayal of communism
Radek: If you ask about the formula, it was a return to capitalism, the restoration of capitalism. It was veiled. The first option reinforced capitalist elements, it was about transferring significant economic facilities to both the Germans and the Japanese in the form of concessions, and about obligations to supply Germany with raw materials, food, and fats at prices below world prices. The internal consequences of this were clear. The interests of private capital in Russia are concentrated around the German-Japanese concessionaires. In addition, all this policy was related to the program of rehabilitation of the individual sector, if not in the whole of agriculture, then in a significant part of it. But if in the first case it was a question of a significant restoration of capitalist elements, then in the second – the indemnities and their consequences, the transfer to the Germans, in case of their demands, of those factories that would be especially valuable for their economy. Since in the same letter he was already fully aware that this was a revival of private trade on a large scale, the quantitative ratio of these factors already gave a picture of a return to capitalism, which left remnants of the socialist economy, which would then become simply state-capitalist elements. The first letter did not contain a social program, the second one does. The first was a short letter about the acceleration of the war, and the second letter was an assessment of the international situation, here tactics in case of war were considered. If the first letter should be considered as an impetus for defeatist tactics, then the second letter provided a complete developed program, therefore it differs in its volume. The first letter was on 2-3 pages, and the second was 8 pages on thin English paper, a detailed letter.
>>2455344???????
Walk me through the mental steps, would you. Radek turned in the person who delivered a letter from Trotsky; how's that impossible? What's your opposition to this?
>>2455346Your original hypothesis:
>Radek was a left Oppositionist in the 20s>he entered into a Trotskyist conspiracy and got a letter from Trotsky>he was arrested and then had a change of heart and admitted everything and was fine (not under duress)Anon pointed out that the evidence you surfaced, (the letter from Trotsky), actually strained your interpretation (because he snitched on the guy who delivered the letter) but you glided past that to gishgallop in other pastures despite it being a good point and an indication he definitely wasn’t in a Trotskyist conspiracy at the time.
This is the null hypothesis
>Radek was a left oppositionist and ally of Trotsky>After Trotsky was defeated Radek fell in line with the center>He went as far as turning in someone who was genuinely party of a Trotskyist conspiracy and tried to give him a letter>later he’s forced out of the party and then arrested, presumably in part for being in the opposition a decade previously >under some mixture of duress, socialist patriotism, and loyalty to Stalin, he admits false guilt and names fake accomplicesThis interpretation requires 0–1 political reversals (he might have just been an opportunist all along) or sincere changes of heart instead of 3 under your interpretation. The null hypothesis is a far more conceivable story and more favored by Occam’s razor.
>>2455215The slander against Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Kamenev, Radek, etc, make me so ass mad. Most of all Tukhachevsky.
These are men who's pinky toes did more for the real movement then any of us will do in ten lifetimes. Who risked life and limb. And we are to believe believe they en masse suddenly decided to become German and Japanese agents? Along with countless hundreds of other dedicated Bolsheviks?
And these idiot sectarians believe this, presumably because some fucking asthmatic nerd had the audacity to try to earnestly sell them a shitty newspaper one time five years ago? Get a fucking hold of yourselves.
>>2455564>first time ever shown anywhere: 2006 publication titled "tragedy of Soviet village"Yeah, nah. You can even see how they try to grab as many targets to smear them in "they knew everything and said nothing!" sauce, lol. Suffice it to say that no document, first printed in 1930-40s, ever mentioned any of this nonsense
>>2455381>This interpretation requires 0–1 political reversals (he might have just been an opportunist all along) or sincere changes of heart instead of 3 under your interpretation???? Radek was a trot aka opportunist listening to Trotsky throughout. Conspiracy demanded a lot of, well, conspiracy, and they've said as much "under torture"
>>2455479>The slander against Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Kamenev, RadekWhy these men didn't defend themselves in the Moscow Trials, mr. assmad? Why nobody can answer me this simple question without falling into conspiracy theories?
>>2455882>???? Radek was a trot aka opportunist listening to Trotsky throughout. Conspiracy demanded a lot of, well, conspiracy, and they've said as much "under torture"no, your view requires 3 reversals. As i tried to explain in good faith earlier.
>Radek is a member of the left opposition and a political ally of Trotsky<Reversal 1: Sometime before 1929 he decides to stop cooperating with Trotsky>He snitches on a guy who smuggles him a letter from Trotsky<Reversal 2: Sometime, after this event, he decides to begin conspiring with Trotsky, despite having previously shown no interest in this>Sometime later, Radek is arrested<Reversal 3: without being subjected to torture or duress of any kind, Radek has a political epiphany and decides to cooperate, admit guilt, and denounce Trotskyits, despite the fact that it will not save his life>Radek is killedit's not a parsimonious view. it strains incredulity.
Continuing from
>>2455480, I respect Trotsky and his works in a way that I don't a lot of other non-ML Marxist theorists, because he was in fact involved with the Russian revolution, meaning that, at least to some degree, he was able to put ideas that he condoned into action.
I will say that a lot of what he says feels like it's in response to the Soviet Union specifically, and that he likely wouldn't be espousing these views if he weren't kicked to the curb, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think it's good to have the perspective of someone who was burned by a machine that he helped to build. Even if you don't think his ideas are worthwhile, it's still worth reading him to get that point of view.
>>2448087Meh. Had some good theory, and these anons more or less encapsulate what I think of him.
>>2454735>>2458830>>2455480A man with an extremely polarising legacy, but some solid theory to boot.
He's not some devil, but he's far from an angel of socialism either. Honestly, it's been close to a hundred years. I think it's about time we put down our ice picks and leave him to freeze over.
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