blinkandwheeze posted:

Panopticon posted:

i think its repressive apparatus has become less important over time.

lmao

Panopticon posted:

i think the eurocommunists were correct and the path to socialism is through democracy.

right, the real history of actually existing people's movements is always going to fall short of the standards of utopian dreaming

i've pointed to a bunch of actual advances socialists have achieved though. just because the end goal towards which i think we should move is imagined, doesn't mean it's impossible to get closer towards it.

tpaine posted:

gyroguy how do you feel about the mentor/protege relationship?

is that a band

After 1923 the opponents of the Stalin bureaucracy found themselves on the defensive. In early 1924, following Lenin's death, Stalin threw open membership of the party ostensibly to bring in large numbers of workers. The real impact of this "Lenin levy", however, was not to strengthen the party's working-class composition, but to massively increase the number of bureaucrats within the party. This gave the bureaucracy the commanding position within the party, which it used to isolate and defeat the revolutionaries. By 1927 an absolute majority of the members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were government officials.

This bureaucracy was conservative, narrow-minded and authoritarian. Its primary interest was the preservation and expansion of its material privileges. It sought to remake the Communist Party and the Soviet government in its own image: rigid, hierarchical, secretive and tyrannical.

In order to accomplish this it had to not only politically defeat the generation of revolutionary leaders who had made the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 but to physically exterminate them. Not only the central leaders of Lenin's party, but almost the entire membership that had participated in the 1917 revolution, perished in the great terror of the 1930s. This fact gives the lie to those who claim that the Stalinist regime was a logical extension of Bolshevism."

http://www.dsp.org.au/node/123

swampman posted:

That shit about "rigid, hierarchical, secretive and tyrannical" is the classic insanely florid language with absolutely no backing that gets pooped out by liars. You should be suspicious of anything that describes the evil internal motives of a person or group, and not the material conditions leading to their actions. Anyway Trotsky really did try to lead a military conspiracy to overthrow the USSR. In now times, Trot groups are always taking the pro-imperialist positions and basically sucking the life out of anything they infest

i am the Guilty Moralizer in this post a lot of the time but yeah. my original personal reason for disinterest in most Trotskyist groups around me is because of that last part, because anything achieved by groups i have worked with and in, as soon as it reaches a certain still-fairly-low-profile, has been subject to "entryism" by Trotskyist parties and organizations. This consists of this half-assed rusty method wherein Trots badger everyone in the group whose contact information they can find about where and when things are happening, combined with condescending language about how everyone involved needs to defer to them when they show up, even though usually they don't actually have anyone who's involved in what's going on (or in a lot of cases, anyone within 50 miles of what's going on). then when they do show up their tactic is basically to try to crowd out locals with people who kite in from nowhere so they can turn everything into a street march using pre-approved nerdlinger signs that all say the same slogans that look like gibberish to anyone from in town. then they leave, i guess to write more passive-aggressive letters to strangers.

this happens every now and then around me nowadays but it happened over and over when i was younger, in a town where a couple different trot parties found themselves unable to muster even a single person actually living in the town to represent or support them, and it forged within me a severe distaste for their tactics and for the dubious tricks-based politics behind them, which i assume to be a holdover from different approaches in the Third International era for communists working with bourgeois trade unions. which again goes to show how this sort of Trotskyist preaches about presenting socialism in a contemporary democratic way but tends to make everything about fights that happened while the Abe Lyman Orchestra was still playing down the block. like, the anarchists were a pain in the ass but at least they didn't bother us and planned to sabotage things all by themselves.