My phone recommended me read an article from a website I’ve never heard of before. It’s supposed to be socialist news so I look and boom. It’s trot shit.
Why do they do this?
Because money comes out.
Printing your own propaganda was a very powerful tool in the 1800s-early 1900s. It was a relatively low cost way to directly counter bourgeois media who has no real technological advantage, just largesse for mass printing and distribution. Your propaganda could scale with your membership - more money, more labor power. This was something the Bolsheviks emphasized and so Trots treat it as dogma.
It’s not actually wrong in its essence. Communists should have regular publications as part of agitation, recruitment, and providing a counterweight to bourgeois media, at least when they have enough org members to support this activity. PSL does it via its constellation of associated groups. A good part of Tricontinental’s work is in this vein. They’re not perfect at propaganda by a long shot but they’re trying and learning.
The problem is that Trots have weird and wrong ideas about basic things like how to communicate understandably with other humans that might actually read their newspaper. Or that they think they should just stand on various street corners just handing out their newspapers and being fairly unpleasant to speak with. Or, of course, writing ultra polemics against countries like China as if burgerlanders will understand this as anything other than “China bad” and won’t bring them any closer to “communist revolution now”.
i think its because of lenin’s line that newspapers are crucial to organising, so trots just ran with it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trotskyist_internationals
I like the list of internationals that have occurred since the international that WSWS is one branch of.
