this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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It never ceases to amuse me how the anti-sectarian rule is never actually applied when it comes to trots. Some things transcend principled application of the rules.
I always think of the joke:
I mean, it would really help that Trotskyists don’t conveniently peddle pro-imperialist lines whenever there is an opening in the crisis of capitalism.
This is not a recent phenomenon. This goes all the way back to when Trotsky himself was alive.
I have used this example before, when China was being invaded by imperialist Japan, the Trotskyists in China somehow managed to weave a “revolutionary defeatism” line that communists should never collaborate with the bourgeois nationalist KMT government and should use the opportunity to overthrow the KMT government instead, and if you don’t, you are worse than the foreign imperialists.
Even in the name of anti-fascism, it was always accompanied by an equal measure of anti-communism. To the Trotskyists, they’d prefer to live under the rule of fascist imperialist Japan because that will somehow trigger an international uprising of the working class movements, without regards to the specific national and colonial contexts of the workers movements across different countries and regions. It borderlines on idealism.
Sometimes I shudder to think what would have happened if the Chinese communists did not purge the Trotskyists in time. Granted, the “Stalinist”/Comintern faction (Wang Ming faction) wasn’t good either, but Mao still gave credit where credit is due to Stalin (70% good, 30% bad), and refrained from being overly critical despite their personal and ideological differences. Mao was especially vicious against the Trots and equated them to 汉奸 (Han traitor i.e. traitor of the Chinese people) which is one of the worst insults you could have gotten from him.
Holy shit, the Chinese trots preaching revolutionary defeatism had to be on some wild ideology
For context - Trotsky's own position on the Sino-Japanese War was far more reasonable:
(Leon Trotsky, On the Sino-Japanese War, 1937)
Note the conclusion of "We must win influence and prestige in the military struggle against the foreign invasion and the political struggle against the weaknesses, the deficiencies, and the internal betrayal" - even if skeptical in the KMT being a reliable ally, completely the opposite of "never collaborating with the bourgeois KMT government", and definitely not advocating for taking up arms against the KMT yet.
So, why did the Chinese Trotskyists have a different, incorrect position? Because they were already getting violently purged for years with the help of the KMT out of reasons initially completely unrelated to the Sino-Japanese war. They were already a fringe, beheaded tendency in China, their leaders imprisoned or dead, which is why their positions deformed in this way, and not because they were dirty Trots who just want defeat for all communism. But they sure did make a convenient bogeyman nevertheless.
So they lost the internal Party power struggle and they got so pissy about it they went completely suicidal out of spite? You're not making them look good tbh.
Because unlike the dumb trots, MLs and MLMs definitely always have the correct party line on everything, especially the less members they have and the more generally obscure they are, am I right?
In fact, this is why you can just choose any ML or MLM party you want, no matter how small, and engage with just that one party's line, because they are actually all equally correct! For example, let's say the Italian PMLI, who... support sending weapons to Ukraine?
Uh-oh, not a good look for the Stalinists!
Dumb guy asking you to clarify: they ultimately took their stance because of course they denounced the guy who was killing them?
That makes sense, it is a rare person who could make peace with the people killing and/or torturing their comrades.
I mean, anarchists get criticized for doing this a lot too but the anti-sectarianism rule applies to them too.
tbf trotskyism (at least as far as I see it practiced) is the pro-sectarianism socialism.
Ironic
Whether or not an act of sectarianism actually gets punished or not relies on whether someone is around to complain about it. There are barely any trots here but a decent number of anarchist.