I don’t mean to be sectarian. I know a fuck ton of Trot individuals and orgs and their position on Gaza is very good. But SWP is so bad it’s almost comical.
I discovered this as I was trying to find out why We Are Many dissolved 5 years ago. Did SWP go right??
Not wanting to be sectarian doesn’t mean to just accept everything as long as the person/org is nominally on the left. Condemning the actions of a genocidal settler state is an acceptable red line.
Yeah. I saw a lot of Trots and Bordiga types saying something similar lol.
Politsturm in particular had an awful take on the genocide.
Oh shit yeah I forgot about those tailist reactionary assholes lol.
Bordiga types
I don’t think the anti-sectarianism rule extends to the pro hitler asshole
Why do we have 37,345 different socialist parties in the US?
Combination of fed infiltration, general social malaise, lack of money in organized worker groups, lack of unions, and the Marxist type of alienation.
Also a lot of parties split because of personal disputes among membership. In a lot of cases it’s over stuff like cheating spouses or someone got caught doing harassment. America has no shortage of horny cranks and they’re often the only ones with enough charisma and/or derangement to try starting a political party in this environment. So they end up unstable from the very outset.
It’s telling that the early successful mass parties in Russia and China and Germany had any number of arguments and affairs and yet pretty much everyone was able to work together with their exes in solidarity, even friendship. The cause wasn’t just greater than personal pain it aided in reconciliation.
“The” big one (CPUSA) was destroyed by the red scare and cooprion into liberal politics and organization. There has never been a replacement since. The closest they ever came was the BPP and it was violently destroyed.
Do you like the CPUSA? No? Then you go and form your own with blackjack and hookers
The Trot group and anti-revisionist (with majoe ultra left tendencies) groups at my city were, at best, both sidesing Israel and Hamas (all resistance gets reduced to Hamas for them whom they then endlessly fear monger about). They just say shit like workers on both sides should unite against their oppressive IDF ans Hamas bosses, etc.
They make a mockery of internationalism, and dismiss anything in the realm of anti-colonialism. These were just the groups in my town. They were absolutely disappointing, but not surprising for Western Leftists. Not sure if they’ve changed their tune now, though, I’ve avoided them for a while.
Yes, Trots are effectively religious believers in the capacity of the settler working class. In rejecting “campism” they substitute it with a childish idea of revolution by international solidarity between trade unions and around 50 Trots per country. No material analysis of those unions or their interests enters the equation. They are the working class, per the logic.
These were the same people who went to Palestine and told everyone that the “Israeli” working class would ally with them, contrary to the groups that said they must take up arms ans become militant immediately.
they substitute it with a childish idea of revolution by international solidarity between trade unions and around 50 Trots per country
You underestimate the power of 50 trots. That’s over 200 orgs, 600 competing newspapers.
And, believe it or not, 1600 grooming allegations
Thanks for the comment. It’s very frustrating these types of leftists. And the other party that wasn’t a Trot group, but an “anti-revisionist” group (they were similar to Trots in ways but like Stalin and Mao) were the worst of the two when it came to the above problems. When I brought up settler colonialsim (I’m no scholar of it, but I thought the party members should at least uh… know about it) at one of their public events they got real mad. Asking me if that meant I was just against immigration and believed people couldn’t move around then. They said it “divided the workers” and they then tried to set up a debate against me. I am not one for debates though. And I doubt it would have been in any sort of good faith. I decided to nope out of there and hope they they made a big enough ass of themselves at the event that they’ve since faded away. But, unfortunately, I know it’s not that easy. They’re still around with their damaging line.
It’s incredible that they do not know the difference between immigration and settler-colonialism. The differences literally couldn’t be more stark. Even Marx divided workers into subcategories, and if they like Mao and Stalin, then they must at least recognize the difference between peasants and proletarians.
Terrarium made a point above which I can agree with, having interacted with them, they don’t actually seem to study any of their supposed heros. I was making an argument for national liberation movements and supporting anti imperialist struggles even if they aren’t explicitly socialist in nature, and I was pulling literal quotes from Stalin in the Foundations of Leninsim, but they just handwaved it away and pulled some other quotes from the book that made it appear that “nationalism is bad”.
I had an argument with them where I was stating my understanding of socialism as the transition period etc etc, standard stuff I thought. But they argued against me. Saying that we don’t need a transition. We will, literally, just jump straight into communism. And this is why the Russian and Chinese revolutions failed, because they didn’t push the communist button I suppose.
Again, I tried to find some text from their heros to explain my viewpoint, but it did no use. They also wanted to do away with money entirely. I hate money as much as the next communist, but I think you can’t just get rid of it tomorrow and expect logistics to continue. That seems like you need some sorta of, hmmm, transition period almost? I even quotes parts of The Gotha Program about money being replaced with labor tokens as an example of a transition. But again… no. I realized that any further papers on cybernetics or etc. even just for brainstorming or having a fun hypothetical with were pointless to bring up too.
Their answer is to simply press the big red button, and everyone else was to stupid or blind to know how.
And they don’t read any theory except for what they themselves published back in the 60s.
There’s more I can say, but I’m already afraid of doxxing myself
The fun part about these people is that they are literally the utopian socialists Marx was railing against, they just don’t understand enough about overall socialist history to understand that. It seems like they are Luxembourgists without actually reading any Luxembourg or understanding what side of the nationalism debate Stalin and Mao were on.
They are definitely utopians without evem knowing what that word means. They were frustrating to deal with, but the only way to defeat them is to outorganize them (which wouldn’t be hard) and let them stay in the marsh.
I haven’t read Luxemburg’s works, I only know of Reform and Revolution and some broad history of the German Revolution, so may I ask what Luxemburgists believe in? And I imagine that even if I were more familiar with Luxemburg’s writings it wouldn’t explain those who call themselves Luxemburgists. I’m just imagining they are some different flavor of Trot - but that’s probably unfair as I haven’t investigated it.
They are not Trots, they were a flavor of German Communists specifically from the KPD if I am remembering my acronyms correctly.
Anyways, to summarize, while they were in theory allied with the Soviet Union, Rosa Luxembourg argued against, for example, giving Ukrainians their own nation, as they didn’t actually have a distinct ethnic identity outside of recent nationalist romanticism, whereas Lenin and Stalin believed that allying with the Ukrainian nationalists and giving them their own nation after the revolution, would allow them a more united front against their actual enemies in international capital and the white army. Stalin, especially, being a minority Georgian, was early on very big on the idea of giving persecuted ethnicities within the Russian empire latitude to form their own nations, ultimately compromising with others in the Bolsheviks with his idea to literally split up most of Russia into local nations.
In hindsight, Luxembourg may have been correct, but it literally took the collapse of the Soviet project to see her visions of ethnic conflict fulfilled. Yet with the fall of Yugoslavia, we also saw what could have been the eventuality of her ideas as well. It turns out that the national problem is really really difficult.
There are plenty of other theoretical differences as well, but I am not going to bore you with the details here.
lmao setting up a debate is the most Troy thing ever. They probably would’ve packed the audience too. They have weird habita like that.
The “divide the workers” nonsense is a tailist canard. It’s an excuse with over a century of history peddled by people who want their socialism to be simple more than accurate. The working class is already divided. Our task is to frame how it might be leveraged, and having a large settler component ia just a material and relevant fact that has to be contended with. These are not serious people, they don’t even really read Marx, just Trot (etc) summaries, and they end up aubacriving to cartoon ideas of the analysis, idealist ones, rathee than subjecting it to material interests like those of settlers. The same way that anyone trying yo organize under segregation would beed to understand that the working class was already divided by anti-blackness and that this had both a material and psychological draw for whites. Recognizing it would not be dividing the working classz it would be understanding an existing divisiin so that you can think about how it might be overcome.
On the plus side it us not that hard to out-organize these types. They are internally volatile. That anger they showed you is the kind if thing they also do internally to those they “mentor”. Of course, if therr isn’t already a good anti-imperialist / ML group to join it would be a lot of work to build one, but it is also very rewarding.
Exactly what you said about it being an existing division. I tried framing it that way too, that I am not the one making these divisions, these divisions already exist and we have to include it in our analysis. But no, they acted like me speaking the word itself is what is dividing the working class.
And they were alo very anti nationalism. Because, guess why, it “divides the workers”. I put more energy than I should have pulling quotes and arguments from Fanon, and even the big man of steel himself Stalin (as this group claimed to be Stalinist), as to why national liberation should be supported.
But every time just just sent me a doc their party wrote in the 60s about why I was wrong and why the BPP should be opposed.
I don’t have to deal with them anymore thank god
SWP has always been complete dog shit. Pro Euromaidan freaks who try to suck vulnerable people into their cult.
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I think this applies more to White people in the US generally, including so-called Leftists. Especially since they are the ones in these groups for the most part.
I’ve known many Leftists for over a decade that were pro-Palestine, but most weren’t White so they had a decolonial analysis out of necessity. I would be interested in seeing the position on Palestine among non-White people in the US generally over the last 15 years. I’d say among Leftists it was always pretty high but maybe just gained more ground lately among the general public. White people generally lagging behind and just catching up.
There were 2 people knocking the door of an acquaintance last year saying they are part of a Communist Party in my city. They basically started to talk about the 40 beheaded babies and hospital pentagon to her and how Palestine is a Theocratic Regime.
Trotskyist groups are mostly composed of intellectuals in colleges and unis. some of them will eventually grow up and become Liberals or Neocons, which is a sign a honesty.
I just genuinely don’t get what attracts people to Trotskyism when it’s had nothing to show for itself nearly a century on.
It’s “pure” of the hardships and stains that successful resolutions have to go through and endure. They get to live in an ideal world where their revolution would have been perfect and done with no flaws, if only they weren’t betrayed by the traitorous Stalinists. Every leftcom gets to live in their fantasy world where they would have been the ones to do the revolution perfectly, with no flaws or difficulties. No compromises or mistakes.
Their martyrdom fetish lets them wash their hands of all sins that real revolutions have to face. In exchange, they have helped nobody and have inched us nowhere closer to socialism.
Every failed political project is just a goldmine for some PhD student’s research paper
They have another one of these in the same issue: Jews outmobilize pro-Hamas thugs
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So sorry that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is making you tired :(
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