https://twitter.com/DSANorthStar/status/1602758852851531776

Also take a look at their logo

https://twitter.com/jonnysocialism/status/1603024109558206464

  • AHopeOnceMore [he/him]B
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's just what happens when you go all-in on Trotsky's writings, often to the exclusion of all else (even Lenin, lol!), and pick up some of the culture of Western Trots.

    If you go down the rabbit hole of just believing basically everything Trotsky said, it starts looking reasonable to criticize every AES because they all start to look, "Stalinist". Where are the workers' council's? Where is the vanguard party with rotating leadership? Why are there still capitalists and exploitation? Why are there secret police? Etc etc etc. The answer to every one of these questions, to such a person, is: they are opportunists and have betrayed the revolution.

    They also have some very funny ideas about where and how the revolution will happen and it amounts to trying to replay semi-fictional attempts at promoting and then co-opting trade unions in the imperial core.

    • SerLava [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Ah!! Ok you and @GarbageShoot have nailed down a very familiar tendency to me that I think must be the main draw for those kinds of people, something much wider than the group of people who actually identify as trots.

      It seems like they're rejecting or just not making this analysis:

      • Stalin and the Soviet Union did did a lot of crimes, yes,
      • That country was founded in and died in a state of external siege
      • It was common knowledge among all Marxists that the forces of capital would do something like WW2
      • Much of the human suffering in the 20's and 30's was caused by mechanization, which they did barely enough of not to get fully genocided by the forces of reaction
      • Much of the human suffering WAS completely unnecessary, but
      • External siege tends to cause power consolidation around the most cutthroat political agents available -For example in the US we had 3 buildings blown up and lost a ton of constitutional rights within like a week, and then the fascist movement exploded during the following decade. Take North Korea - oh maybe if we point more nukes at them they'll consolidate around a sweet ol' teddy bear.
      • The early plan for the Soviet Union was "we're just the first domino" and when the rest of the world stayed capitalist, it kind of just had to be a state.
      • And if life expectancy is going up, any deaths caused by the system are obviously outweighed by how bad the previous system was
      • And Russia was a complete fucking shit country before 1917, where famines were common, just like China before 1949, Vietnam when France had them as fucking slaves, etc.

      Instead, western Trots must be basically prioritizing an appeal to liberals, who just see this all as deluded, psychotic denialism. And they're spending a lot of time theorycrafting Real AES or some shit, which could only produce eclectic and weird philosophies.

      Basically they need this banger on repeat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uThpIDlfcBQ

      • AHopeOnceMore [he/him]B
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yep, pretty much.

        A very similar angle is that such Western Trots, as Western ultras, can construct idealized forms of socialism amongst themselves that do not suffer from decades of mainstream criticism and propaganda, at least not directly. This is because those forms of socialism do not exist and have not existed. They are very close to the "real socialism has never been tried" line of thinking that provides a cop-out avoidance of criticisms towards AES. They explicitly dissociate themselves from all AES and therefore do not have to rationalize its problems as something of their own tendency, nor do they have to defend them against liberals. On the contrary, they pile on, thereby often serving a pro-capitalist function in the imperial core. Sometimes there's an exception (some Trots like Cuba, for example), but they're definitely exceptions.

        I would argue that most of their staying power stems from not being much of a threat to capital, which makes it easier to bring in liberals, makes them lesser targets for disruption by the feds (though the feds did/do still mess with them). Also their tendency for splitting and coming across as cultish to others limits their ability to influence.

        That said, SA is doing pretty well, mostly due to focusing on local races and funneling a ton of organizing power into a handful of candidates. Also Sawant in particular somewhat stays away from criticizing AES and folks around here claim she's a self-professed ML, though I've seen nothing in her actions that suggest that.