No.161951
I've been thinking, for months, about posting a thread about the duality of Trotsky, but I guess it wasn't worth it. I'll post the reflection here:
When I first learned about Trotsky, it was a gateway, because I thought "oh, wow! Not all communists were like Stalin, some criticized the USSR and disagreed with the party line!" and so on. You know, so Trotsky was the good communist, and then, briefly, when I learned more about ML, he was the good ML who could have saved Marx-Leninism or whatever. Not like that evil monster, Stalin! So, he played a role in warming me to communism and rethinking the stupid propaganda I had been taught as a child.
On the other hand, the more I've learned, the more I realize that Trotsky was actually fucking shit as a potential leader and if he had taken over after Lenin, instead of Stalin, it probably would have been much worse. Some of his critiques of the USSR might have been valid, but his ideas overall of how things should be run were not actually better, and, if anything, were worse and stupid. He also probably was a dishonest actor with ulterior motives, whether or not he was an outright Fascist as some say he was. The bit of western/elite sympathy towards Trotsky over Stalin which existed, or was allowed to be expressed and celebrated in popular media (see: 1984, Animal Farm, etc.) was, I think, a reflection of an actual material utility which the world's capitalist class saw in Trotsky, and I don't think it's even a coincidence that, after Trotsky died of mysterious causes, a bunch of his acolytes immediately became the first neocons. So my view of Trotsky today has come so far that I now see him as the bad ML, and it sort of bothers me that many or most significant present-day western ML organizations are either Trotskyist or appear to have some Trotskyist component at their core.