Why do people here really not like Trotskyists?
Why do people here really not like Trotskyists?
Why do people here really not like Trotskyists? Is it just because of his beef with Stalin and not an actual criticism of his views? Do people really not think a global movement would be superior for the betterment of all people?
Edit: Thank you to everyone who provided context and history, y’all are a wealth of knowledge.
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It also bears to remember that Trotskyists served as a bulwark against “Stalinist” USSR during the Cold War in the West.
Michael Hudson talked about how he was approached by the State Department to work with them after Super-imperialism was published, and at first he was a bit worried because of his Marxist background. He said that once they learned about his actual family history (his father was a Trotskyist labor leader in Minneapolis and he himself is the godson of Trotsky) they were like, “ok, good, not a threat to us.”
It’s actually not a surprise that many Trotskyists ended up being neo-cons in the US, especially since they hated the USSR so much.
Michael Hudson is a based Trotskyist though, so he’s kinda like an outlier.
Michael Hudson talked about how he was approached by the State Department to work with them after Super-imperialism was published, and at first he was a bit worried because of his Marxist background. He said that once they learned about his actual family history (his father was a Trotskyist labor leader in Minneapolis and he himself is the godson of Trotsky) they were like, “ok, good, not a threat to us.”
No fucking way. That's incredible. Do you still have that interview lying around?
My recollection was a bit hazy but here is one I could find. He’s mentioned it a couple more times before but it’s probably buried somewhere.
KARL FITZGERALD: And distilling all of these stories of various revolutions and battles against the state, if you could distill the theory of change, how was change meant to occur, from the real life conversations you had?
MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.
They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.
So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.
KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.
So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.
So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.
So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.
If I wanted to kill a movement, I would try to bury it underneath the weight of people believing there were ten thousand million zillion ways it can go wrong and then letting everyone bicker over how it's the wrong way to do things and therefore nothing should be done at all because it will be worse than doing something.
Once you have people believing that MLs are worse than doing nothing at all then you have half the movement fighting against MLs (or whatever faction actually poses a threat) and you kill it from the inside. You can do this with every movement ever.
The starting point for revolution is the belief that no matter what method we use what comes afterwards can and will be better than before. We need that at the very foundation of the left in order to prevent this from breaking it.
Thank you very much for taking the effort to link the source!
The US not viewing someone as a threat is a pretty clear indictment in my book
At least some of them were viewed as a threat. The Socialist Workers Party was relentlessly harassed and infiltrated by the FBI. At one point a third of their members were paid informants. Prominent members and leaders got yearly investigations where the FBI went to their bosses and landlords to question them about their "subversive activities". This is all despite their incredibly tame platform of entryism and rarely supporting AES countries.
It's all documented in a lawsuit they won against the US government: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/642/1357/2398821/
Being so heavily infiltrated that the organization is basically run by the feds doesn't indicate some kind of inherent danger posed towards the state. It suggests that the organic membership are fools.
UK SWP was used for 20 years by the cops as a base from which to attack left-types. https://www.spycops.co.uk https://www.ucpi.org.uk/ International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party Archives - Undercover Policing Inquiry
Why people don't like trots is because they are often associated with personal and organizational ruin due to being agents of capital.