this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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It also bears to remember that Trotskyists served as a bulwark against “Stalinist” USSR during the Cold War in the West.
Michael Hudson talked about how he was approached by the State Department to work with them after Super-imperialism was published, and at first he was a bit worried because of his Marxist background. He said that once they learned about his actual family history (his father was a Trotskyist labor leader in Minneapolis and he himself is the godson of Trotsky) they were like, “ok, good, not a threat to us.”
It’s actually not a surprise that many Trotskyists ended up being neo-cons in the US, especially since they hated the USSR so much.
Michael Hudson is a based Trotskyist though, so he’s kinda like an outlier.
No fucking way. That's incredible. Do you still have that interview lying around?
My recollection was a bit hazy but here is one I could find. He’s mentioned it a couple more times before but it’s probably buried somewhere.
If I wanted to kill a movement, I would try to bury it underneath the weight of people believing there were ten thousand million zillion ways it can go wrong and then letting everyone bicker over how it's the wrong way to do things and therefore nothing should be done at all because it will be worse than doing something.
Once you have people believing that MLs are worse than doing nothing at all then you have half the movement fighting against MLs (or whatever faction actually poses a threat) and you kill it from the inside. You can do this with every movement ever.
The starting point for revolution is the belief that no matter what method we use what comes afterwards can and will be better than before. We need that at the very foundation of the left in order to prevent this from breaking it.
Thank you very much for taking the effort to link the source!
The US not viewing someone as a threat is a pretty clear indictment in my book
At least some of them were viewed as a threat. The Socialist Workers Party was relentlessly harassed and infiltrated by the FBI. At one point a third of their members were paid informants. Prominent members and leaders got yearly investigations where the FBI went to their bosses and landlords to question them about their "subversive activities". This is all despite their incredibly tame platform of entryism and rarely supporting AES countries.
It's all documented in a lawsuit they won against the US government: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/642/1357/2398821/
Being so heavily infiltrated that the organization is basically run by the feds doesn't indicate some kind of inherent danger posed towards the state. It suggests that the organic membership are fools.
UK SWP was used for 20 years by the cops as a base from which to attack left-types. https://www.spycops.co.uk https://www.ucpi.org.uk/ International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party Archives - Undercover Policing Inquiry
Why people don't like trots is because they are often associated with personal and organizational ruin due to being agents of capital.