michael, you and Neo seem to be regarding 'trotskyite' as an epithet related to 'paedophile' or something ... it's not seen like that by much of the world, the fervour is coming from within yourselves, stems from your own anti-whatever-ism [was evangelical militaristic 'anti-communism', is now evangelical militaristic anti-islam, anti-french, anti-whatever, anti-whomever]
Trotsky, remember, was exiled by both the tsar and Stalin, because he opposed them both ... he stood up to Stalin on the latter's persecution of the kulaks, and for that was exiled then murdered .... just as you see fine distinctions between flavours of current US politics, so you might recognise that such distinctions appear elsewhere as well, and Trotsky was a clear dissident to the russians and to all communists - he was a kinder gentler marxist, he could see that the dialectic did not appeal to the peasant, and proposed leading by example and incentive, not dictating with bullets and the gulag .... for this he was well noted by those trying to sell communism to the campesino of the Americas, and quite warmly regarded, compared to available alternatives at the time .... Castro's brother Raúl wrote a piece saying as much while in México during the fifties, and if it hadn't been for the Trotskys [and Eisenhower's 1959-60 idiocy], Fidel might never have been turned from his course of fairly non-dialectic agrarian reform
Trotsky's politics and chosen methods changed quite a lot from 1905 to that day in August 1940 when such evolution was cut short, and it seems fairly reasonable to expect that he would have continued to change as events transpired ..... Neo mentions how he supported Stalin's assault on the finns, well i've forgotten the details there, so no comment, other than this - you have to see it all in the context of the time, view each position against alternatives available to each individual ..... and, back to where we started this - you have to allow people to change their minds according to new evidence presented them
Today we'll be stopping by a hospital to visit an old friend who's had an interesting life .... strongly political man who never joined any party, 'fellow traveller' to several groups but ended up dissenting with them all ... loves to dissent, lives for it, before a chronic illness he could dissent and/or drink any dozen of us under the table ... too bad i can't type in much biography because it's rich, but he comes to the US at maybe five years of age, works on Grace Slick's teeth, meets and dissents with, face to face, a number of politicians in and out of power, gets in trouble for helping young men of conscience over a certain border, and then has to jump the line himself, and stays .... long story, anyway, point being that he changed his mind on a number of points, quite radically, between 1925 or so when he grasps the meaning of the term 'politics', and today ... he was changing all the way through .... would he in 1935 have described himself as a trotskyite? - i don't know, but i'll ask when he's up to it
He may well have so considered himself, though he would have dissented with them too, by nature ... but he would have warmed to Trotsky's dissent, of that i'm sure .... and probably that of Shachtman, in his turn ... by the way, Shachtman didn't really split with the body of trotskistas until right around the time Trotsky was murdered, according to all i could find on the net last night, so who is to say that Trotsky himself wouldn't have done so, as 1940s events transpired, had he lived and retained the capacity to learn? ..... he might well have, and now 'trotskista' would carry another meaning
... perhaps something closely related to 'neocon' ..... eh -g- ... they are both evangelical, doctrinaire, strident ... not so easily dismissed, this connection
Witness this take on Shachtman -
' Especially during World War II, when the liberals along with the Communist Party and its periphery became uncritical apologists for the Roosevelt administration and its assaults on trade union independence and civil rights, assaults which laid the groundwork for the McCarthy period that was to come, Shachtman and his supporters were among the few effective forces of dissent.*
There is, unfortunately, a sad footnote to Shachtman’s career. Beginning in the 50s he began to move to the right in response to the discouraging climate of the Cold War. He ended up a Cold Warrior and apologist for the Meany wing of the AFL-CIO. '
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