János 🇭🇺🪖

The direct line from one injustice to another.

But really, we know why. I know why so many of my friends and relatives are just now getting upset. We know. We see.

Comrades i miss him :-(

Source

And among other things, he asked them why they did it, what sentence they thought they should get, and crucially, what they would do if they were trying to prevent hijackings

And this one dissident was complaining about how Fidel had said they weren’t dissidents, they were mercenaries paid off by the US

And the host asked this guy, so how do you make a living? His genuine response? He got given 50k by a US agency the year before

I think the main appeal is how readily it gives you an excuse to dismiss most socialist experiments under the label of "stalinism". You don't have to challenge your understanding of the history of communist victories and defeats because Trotsky gives you an out : the USSR was socialist until some members of the Left Opposition got kicked out, then it's a bureaucratic machine. This sounds wonderful to a population that has been taught that nazism and communism aren't so different after all because they're both "totalitarian"... Essentially it speaks to idealist notions of socialism and speaks to the mass of people who have been taught anti-communist rhetoric since birth.

The appeal in his writing specifically is beyond me. It's dated and he has no problems coming to the worst conclusions. For example, he has this part about how some cultures are superior (UK, Germany and France) and thus are more suited to socialism. Which is an extremely ironic thing to say given how the rest of the 20th century played out. His supposed monopoly on the concept of internationalism is also an attractive feature, and when you look at what the ICR has done with linking multiple countries' communist parties, you can easily be tempted to believe that this is the way forward. You can point to Cuba and other examples of siege socialism and declare that they wouldn't be choked out by Western imperialism if there was an international socialist movement. This negates the fact that trotskyist organizations have never led a successful revolution.

Although I would say the organizing and strategic aspects of trotskyism might be its biggest appeal. Since no trotskyist revolution has succeeded (I know they claim the Russian revolution but let's be serious here), it is enough to declare that everything is part of your permanent revolution and many of the most dogmatic trotskyist orgs will launch campaign after campaign on the next hot topic that has garnered media attention. Essentially taking over militant spaces by their sheer size and activity all while suffocating other organizations and burning out their own members. Which has contributed to a stagnant communist movement that's experiencing a historical low in my country. Less dogmatic trotskyist orgs also fall into a similar trap, for example the ICR's branch in my country is well established and has a considerable following, but aside from selling their newspaper, I couldn't tell you what they do. They also have the added appeal of calling themselves leninists at the same time as being trotskyist. To anyone who hasn't studied ML theory, this seems fine, but both in theory and in practice it cannot hold up : you're either an organization for the masses or a vanguard party. Either way, the trotskyist strategy is very appealing in the sense that you can do "communist organizing" without having to look critically at why your movement hasn't succeeded in challenging bourgeois state power. It is enough that the mass party grows, that the newspapers are sold etc.