I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.

My friend, the Trotskyists have long been integrated into the US government in the form of neocons.

The whole regime change strategy was derived from Trotsky’s exporting revolutions to the third world countries to foment world revolution, except here they want to export regime change to the third world countries to ensure America’s interest in the region.

Michael Hudson talked about the Fed actively recruiting Trotskyists in the 20th century to fight the USSR:

MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.

They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.

So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.

KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.

So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.

So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.

…

spoiler

All you have to do is set up a group of non-governmental organizations to begin grooming future leaders like Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock in Germany. You set up something like the World Economic Foundation that appoints leaders like presumably the George Soros Foundation. And you’ll get people that look like they’re very smart but also very corruptible and basically who want a really good greedy life.

In the early 1970s the Catholic Church had sent me around the country. They were one of my first backers, for various reasons. I had gone to New Mexico and had a plan for state and local finances. And a man came up to me afterwards and said, “I’ve never heard a banker talk like that. That’s wonderful. Will you come to the Ford Foundation? I want to meet you next week. Let’s have lunch.”

He explained that he worked with the CIA and the Ford Foundation basically was a front for the CIA to recruit people. So I went and met with him and I found it was quite cool. I found that he was quite cool. I found that his demeanor had suddenly changed.

This was early in the 1970s, before the Carter election by about five years. He began by trying to impress me, and he said, “We’re trying to create future presidents of the United States. When I first met you I thought that you could be material. But we decided that a southern governor is basically the kind of person that fits. Somebody who’s progressive. Somebody who can sort of not be an anti-Black racist, but somebody who, being southern, has all of the ways of thinking that a southerner has.”

Today we would call that neoliberal, basically. Non-socialist.

He said that he had been brought up by Malcolm Moos who had written the part of the (unintelligible) Eisenhower farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex. And so of course that’s what we’re doing, we’re all here [at the Ford Foundation] to support the military-industrial complex.

And I could see that I was not going to have any future with the Ford Foundation and it was obvious to me that he’d gone to the FBI and said, “Look I think I got someone here, could you give me his file?” and then he read the file on me and said, “Uh oh.”

So his advice to me was that if I wanted, since I was at a PhD in economics, that if I wanted to rise in economics I should attach myself to some prize winner — a Nobel Prize winner ideally — it was just beginning to be given — and try to just jump up and find a backer among the prize winners.

I realized that, wait a minute, the Nobel Prize is going to be given to people who — what we know now is neoliberalism, in the Chicago School, the one thing that I don’t want to do is take this guy’s advice, and indeed the only Nobel Prize winner that I ever was friendly with was the Swedish prize winner of the second Nobel Prize who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, [Gunnar Myrdal].

He invited me to come and work in Sweden and be his successor, but it turned out that almost all the Swedes in that group were mainly into disarmament and tended to fall asleep in an alcoholic daze at the end of each meal, so I never did follow him up there.

So I wasn’t groomed, to make a long story short.

I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.

try and keep it that way. The UK has a whole bunch of them (even if they dont use the label) under the Socialist Worker’s Party and their front orgs (“stand up to racism” being the main one).

They were the only left-wing force that survived the state’s crackdown on socialist organising, as much as controlled opposition as the fact they seemed to confidently police themselves into passivity.

I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.

With the soviet union gone there isn’t really a need for ultra left opposition to it which was its function throughout the mid 20th century with the american new left. I know they were big in latin america as well but i’m unsure how much relevance they hold nowadays.

Anglo political circles aren’t just shifting everything right, they just don’t even know these words or what they mean. To them, cops are socialist because they are publicly funded by also socialism is when Mao killed everyone in China. Communists are the dictators that force everyone to wear the same gray jumpsuit and work in the smog factory and the only Westerners that call themselves communists are confused college students that haven’t learned better yet. Don’t worry, though, they will become “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” (they describe fascist sympathizers in reality) as they age.

Mention a lefty identity and they will just tell you something wrong, often different things depending on which TV show they watched or pundit they heard last. Tell them you are a socialist and they might tell you that Nazis were socialist (it’s in the name!) and how their friend’s family had to flee Castro because he was evil and nobody liked him.

trots were a lot more common ~30 years ago or so. swp (socialist workers party) was big (for an american communist party) when i was a kid and in true trot fashion ended up splitting into a number of nominally active and defunct parties. PSL actually comes from that lineage via the workers world party who split from swp. these days socialist alternative had been fairly active though they don’t come from the US swp tree. Kshama Sawant was a city councilor in Seattle under SA though i believe she also did a split along with a faction of that party. trots in general are still a going concern pretty much everywhere but with the frequency of party splits and the lack of the USSR as a foil you see where they get the reputation for factionalism and being smallish newspaper/book club orgs.

i think to your first question there’s some accuracy there but, taking off my hexbear hyperbole hat, social democrats are common enough even if they don’t have the terminology for it and social democrats with neoliberal characteristics aren’t exactly uncommon anywhere you find social democrats. democratic socialists being social democrats is common enough to be a thing but it’s not a given and for some people this is a sort of intermediate stage. online is whatever, but Communist is a loaded term in the US when you’re interacting with the waking world where it’s much more rare to hear used as a descriptor and usually not without some meaning behind it. on-the-ground anarchists who use communist as a descriptor are usually anarcho-communists who work within mutual aid and bloc circles, ml and trot leaning people will usually have some sort of theoretical development even if it’s nascent or piecemeal. in the US those people are of course rare but that goes back to what I mean about ‘communist’ being a rare descriptor offline for a variety of reasons.

At least in USA, I feel like M-Ls often prefer “socialist” though some definitely don’t mind communist (myself included) but its still a bit more of a loaded term than socialist. But trots are always calling themselves communist and the largest trot newspaper paper is “The Communist”

that’s surprising, trots have a pretty wide range though in latin america they are mostly in argentina and brazil