/siberia/ - Off-topic

Trotsky was excellent as a tactician, mid as a theorist, and a total narcissist as a person.

He couldn't cope with the fact that he was democratically sidelined by the party, so started trying to topple the political leadership of the USSR, which he did mostly by emigrating to the west, yapping, and engaging in terroristic conspiracies.

Western liberals of all sorts (including those who erroneously call themselves "communists", "socialists") have co-opted him as the idealistic, pure, effete intellectual to Stalin's supposed boorish thuggery. This is "orwell's trotsky", essentially.

The above is funny because Trotsky was a revolutionary and a bolshevik, no less "ruthless" or "authoritarian" than the other bolsheviks, and "permanent revolution" wasn't some kind of idealistic notion about muh freedoms or whatever, it was the idea that the USSR should start invading other countries to spread revolution, especially Poland.

>>685434
Trots are also generally insufferable, posturing as “true socialists” whilst buying into western talking points around china, the ussr, etc

They also make fools of themselves by splitting themselves into billions of different factions that are all functionally identical; think that one monty python bit from life of brian

>>685434
>Why are trotskyists a laughingstock?
Because stalinist fanatics are hyperfocused on trotskyist still after 90 years.

Stalinist slander. Trotsky was the real hero of the proletariat, something that they will never forgive him for.

>>685434
He's just an easily memeable figure and a vast majority of self-identified leftists online get their understanding of marxism and history through passively absorbing memes (icepick, newspapers, etc).
There's also a modern dogmato-revisionist tendency that remains incapable of reckoning with the legacy of the USSR and retreated into a contradictory morass of haphazardly assembled positions basically designed to self-flatter and vicariously enjoy cheerleading for bourgeois states. For them a hatred of Trotsky remains a totem and cornerstone of their historical perspective.

Another reason is that today trotskyism is generally (and ahistorically) viewed as the most prominent communist tendency in the west and thereby somehow shoulders the blame for there not having been a revolution in the west. Besides trotskyism certainly never having been a substantial majority, and hardly existing as a cohesive tendency as such since the 'trotskyist movement' was really just a loose grouping of anti-stalinists of all sorts who rallied around the figure of trotsky and promptly fell apart after his death. Besides that, no other tendency has achieved anything meaningful in the west which is not the fault of some incorrect line but of a generally unfavourable epoch and historical conditions.

As for Trotsky himself, just read his works. Start with results and prospects, then his history of the october revolution, then a new course and the debates in the comintern, then a revolution betrayed.

>>685434
I don't think anyone thinks he's a laughing stock moreso Trotskyists are since they split and morph into weird ideologies and deradicalise people into neolibs

>>685434
This >>685451 here is an example of someone who exclusively gets their political and historical knowledge from memes and video games:
>"permanent revolution" was the idea that the USSR should start invading other countries to spread revolution, especially Poland.
This is entirely untrue and has nothing to do with any conception of permanent revolution, even Stalin himself, no friend to the concept or Trotsky, never made any such claim about it.
This person has no idea what they're talking about given that they are clearly unaware that Trotsky and Radek were the only voices in the central committee opposing the Soviet invasion of Poland during the course of the Soviet-Polish war. Trotsky was a consistent opponent of spreading the revolution to other countries by invasion.

Westoids only care about him because of his exile, similarly to how every butthurt mediocre intellectual who defected from the ussr gets elevated to sainthood in the west, eg Solzhenitsyn

>>685434
Apart from everything else that was posted a number of Trots also became neo-conservatives and neo-liberals supporting the US Republican Party and Tony Blair's New Labour in the UK, who went on to do Iraq using a narrative partly based on their former sentiments but adapted to capitalism as the system of choice instead of communism (we have to invade countries to spread world capitalism and bourgeois democracy)

>>685610
>>685613
Wrong. Read stalin.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/10/23.htm
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1936/moscow-trials/index.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/09/06.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/03/03.htm

>>685641
trot to neoliberal pipeline makes perfect sense, because the premise of trotskyism is that communism is actually impossible.

>>685618
<invasion of poland

lmfao ok dude, those innocent polish nazis deserved self-determination!

>>685656
Not sure if nazi is an apt description of the Poles in 1920, but regardless of your feelings about whether they deserved self-determination the fact remains that Trotsky was opposed to the Red army marching across the curzon line border after pushing the Polish army out of Ukraine, because he believed that the mood in Poland was insufficiently revolutionary to hope for popular support and that the Red army was overstretched for such a campaign. Lenin and the rest of the CC were convinced by the Polish communist party which hoping for the Red army to put them in power sent overly optimistic reports of conditions on the ground.

>>685672
<Not sure if nazi is an apt description of the Poles in 1920

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-1919-pogroms-ukraine-and-poland-one-hundred-years-later

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_19th-century_Poland

https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/jewish-life-poland-holocaust

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501674.2022.2162214

SUPER DISTINCT from nazis LMFAO

'oh but they were just sparkling antisemite fascists, Nazis only come from the Nazi region of Germany!'

>>685434
>New to leftism.
What made you change your mind?

>>685679
>Nazism is when you kill jews
I condemn notorious nazi Bohdan Khmelnytsky

>>685651
When did Trotsky or Trots end up saying that I wasn't aware

>>685604
>They also make fools of themselves by splitting themselves into billions of different factions that are all functionally identical;
Alright you just admitted to not knowing shit.
I've seen Trot orgs which are the same sub-tendency but function completely differently, to the point where one is basically a sectarian student group and the other is mostly workers who often collaborate with M-Ls and unions to move the worker movement forward.
Then you get fucking retiree retards like WSWS (SEP) who are an actual cult and get banned from socialist events. "Orthodox Trotskyists" are the worst of the lot.

>>685616
>There's also a modern dogmato-revisionist tendency that remains incapable of reckoning with the legacy of the USSR and retreated into a contradictory morass of haphazardly assembled positions basically designed to self-flatter and vicariously enjoy cheerleading for bourgeois states. For them a hatred of Trotsky remains a totem and cornerstone of their historical perspective.
Seriously. There are plenty of good M-Ls, but the Online Left is littered with the rabid Great Man Theory simps who formed a ridiculous mythology about Lenin (protip: Lenin was a Narodnik for years until they dipped their toes into Marxism).

>>685874
Superficial differences, still full of the same idiotic west-sympathising liberals

Name one trot org that advances the workers movement and isn’t just a glorified newsagent selling their paper

From personal experience, trots only seem to show up at the end of marches and pickets to do just that