or lenin or mao or etc
i’m curious. I don’t think I’m a marxist but I have been trying to read marxist theory and I got caught by my family and had a huge argument with everyone. it was really interesting because it seemed like we weren’t talking about the same thing at all. Things like everyone is paid the same or everything is made by the government etc, I know very little but I have asked and read the basics and I was able to point out that wasn’t true
i’m used to people being smug about things they know nothing about, but it’s interesting how they look down on communists, like looking at a silly child that doesn’t know anything - while not knowing anything about what communists said in the first place. I actually tried to pull out quotes from the book but they didn’t want me to, they actually refused to know what they hate, it’s strange. I mean, I do the same, I’ve never read fascist theory or ayn rand or stuff like that, so I can’t really blame them, but I don’t try to seriously argue with fascists and libertarians anyways
some of them have a lived experience in eastern europe or cuba or something so I can’t really argue against that, but when it’s just an argument I’ve never met someone extremely vehemently against communist thoughts who actually read any of what communists wrote
have you ever had like, a productive, genuine conversation with an anti-communist?
I don’t think Trotsky was all bad, just that he became bad when he turned against the USSR. I will also critically support Trots if they ever actually manage to do anything other than sell newspapers.
To their credit though I think the WSWS is valuable on its own. There’s not a lot of left wing news out there available in the West and WSWS can be a decent entry point into a greater leftist environment, as well as providing valuable labor news in its own right.
From my own reading Trotsky seems to make more sense psychologically than revolutionarily. He goes through this revolution with Lenin and Stalin and others and then loses power to Stalin after Lenin’s death and worries that Stalin will destroy what they worked so hard to build. While we know him to be wrong enough that Stalin guides the USSR successfully in its fight against Nazism and then it outlasts him by another 40 years, I can’t imagine how big a blow that would be to the ego in the moment without the benefit of that hindsight.
pretty much. yeah would never say he was ALL bad but can say historically he’s not really a man worth building an ideology off of