I ran into a Trot on here recently and I think I understand their stance. Trotsky himself criticized Stalin for his support of the KMT early on, which he saw as a betrayal of the CPC. But Trotskyists also have to oppose the CPC because they had a successful revolution and thereby tainted the perfect ideal with reality and practical concerns. I suspect that they might have some sort of narrative about the CPC being corrupted and it all being Stalin’s fault.

It’s a staging area for the US that’s very close to China, so there’s that reason strategically. But really, there’s not a lot of reason to which is why they haven’t done so already. China is, as far as I’m aware, perfectly happy with the traditional US approach towards Taiwan, a policy of “strategic ambiguity” that doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan as independent (while informally supporting them) and which has kept the peace for many decades. China does not gain much from provoking a military confrontation with the US, as things stand, China is winning the peace through economic development while the US is going all in on the military. By maintaining the status quo, China can leave the issue open and kick the can down the road, maintaining the possibility that someday in the future they may be in a strong enough position to press the issue.

Even still, China now has its own academia and engineering, and is larger than Taiwan. Hence, even without the corporate espionage mainland China is known for, wouldn’t investing in their burgeoning semiconductor industry make more sense, rather than spending that money on war?

That’s exactly what they’ve been doing. That article mentions that they’ve actually recruited 3000 engineers from Taiwan’s chip industry to help develop their own chips.

Yet while taking Taiwan would mean access to deep-water ports, it’s not as though Taiwan would ever pose a threat to Chinese power projection—their stance is wholly defensive. If China decided to pull an “America” and send a carrier to the Middle East or something, no one would stop them and risk a war.

Taiwan’s stance is defensive, but the same isn’t necessarily true of the US, which operates in Taiwan. The US has recently started throwing around rhetoric and shifting spending focuses towards treating a hot war with China as a serious possibility, insane as it may be. This is (hopefully) just bluster to justify defense spending, but I’m not at all convinced that if China sent a carrier to the Middle East, the US would not retaliate. If anything, they’re looking for a reason.

So a handful of people grew consciences and decided that they didn’t like the Nazis, but what was actually done to them while they remained loyal, or to others who never turned against them? “Some people grew disillusioned” isn’t the same thing as the Nazis actively turning on them personally.

When the Nazis seized property, it was generally the property of minorities which was then often redistributed upwards to the rich. Many bourgeoisie made out like bandits, so long as they were white and didn’t have a conscience.

Like, just google what happens to most oligarchs when they support any kind of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin, they always get shafted in the end.

What on earth are you talking about? The oligarchs who supported Hitler made a bunch of money, saw organized labor crushed, and then did fine after the war. Nazi war criminal Fritz ter Meer, who was a senior board member of IG Farben, manufacturing Zyklon B for the gas chambers, got a couple years in prison and then became chairman of Bayer.

The question you asked me before, multiple times, was “Do you believe all men are violent?” Which I answered. I will now promptly answer every single question you asked.

Do you think vaccines cause Autism?

No, obviously. Irrelevant nonsense.

Do you also have thought terminating memes about vaccines in that vein too?

No, and that logic is complete nonsense. Vaccines do not make people more prone to autism. Do you think they do?

Do you think everyone who got the COVID vaccine is also prone to death too?

No, of course not. This is all coming out of nowhere.

What is the difference between men who are violent and men who are not?

There isn’t a singular difference. Some men are more violent than others because of the conditions they’re born into, or the way they were raised, or different reactions and ways of handling testosterone (as you suggested). This question is largely unconnected from the point I’ve disputed, which is your claim that men are generally less prone to violence than women.

What is the difference between those who are vaccinated, and those who are vaccinated and have autism?

The ones who are vaccinated and have autism happen to have autism. What even is this question?

There you go. I’m not interested in responding to the rest of your rambling. I asked what question I haven’t answered and then answered every question you asked, if you have another question you forgot, I’ll answer that too. What did I have for breakfast this morning? Do I condemn Hamas? Go for it. You can say whatever you like about me, but I’m not afraid from answering questions or engaging with hard concepts, that’s just false.

Strange that Biden won in 2020 despite 2/3 of the country “effectively voting for Trump” by not voting for Biden🤔

I won’t feel bad about not voting for Kamala even if I were sent to El Salvador, or marched into a gas chamber. I made peace with that before I voted PSL.

Y’all fundamentally misunderstand us. You think we’re simply misinformed, that we don’t appreciate the threat, that if only we saw the facts of what the Republicans are like, we’d immediately see things your way. What you don’t understand is that we do see the facts, we’re just operating under a different ethical and political framework from you. The point of disagreement is not about the facts on the ground, it’s about the best way to respond to them. So merely pointing to the awful shit the Republicans do has no chance of swaying, well, I can’t speak for everyone, but certainly me, and anyone who thinks like me.

There are definitely similarities, but China has its own fascinating history there, with a lot of traditional beliefs resurfacing as weird, sanctioned versions of themselves after the cultural revolution had mostly suppressed them.

I think you’ve got it backwards. One of the lesser known, positive parts of the Cultural Revolution (which was primarily a horrible clusterfuck) was the Barefoot Doctors program, in which medical students were fast-tracked in education and sent out to the rural regions of China, which had never before had access to modern medicine. It was a very basic level of care, but it increased the number of doctors per person tenfold in the span of five years, and access to vaccines had a significant impact, increasing life-expectancy and reducing child mortality. However, because medical supplies in those regions were limited (and the scale of the program), the doctors were instructed to supplement care with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This allowed the program to be rolled out more quickly, and the partial reliance on TCM may have helped with public acceptance (since it was what they already believed in), but it had an unfortunate side effect that it legitimized TCM.

This program was phased out in the 80’s with China’s broader economic shift, towards privatization, while also moving away from TCM. The new policies made care less accessible and focused more on curing serious ailments rather than preventative care. China has made some efforts to address these issues, though I’m not well informed enough about their current system to weigh in.

A lot of the modern popularity of TCM likely comes from the time of the Barefoot Doctors program, because people remember their quality of life improving during that time and then declining later when the focus was shifted away from TCM, incorrectly attributing it to TCM’s effectiveness rather than the accessibility of care and focus on prevention. Which is to say, many of the people who believe in TCM may actually be nostalgic for the healthcare system implemented during the Cultural Revolution.

I hate the term. I think what you described is a perfectly valid way to approach conversations, but be prepared to have the term thrown at you and to be accused of bad faith, because a decent part of the internet decided it was because a webcomic said so.

What “hard questions” have I avoided? I responded to everything you asked me.

It’s a clear, objective fact that men are, statistically, more prone to violence than women. That means that you are, objectively, wrong. There’s no reason for me to “admit that I’m wrong” when the facts and evidence are clearly on my side, lol.

What an idiotic, rambling comment. You ignore basically everything I said and latched on to a couple random pedantic points, while accusing me of being pedantic.

Quite literally, you are trying to argue that distress and anger are different emotions, despite both of them coming from the same place.

You are basically saying that Pepsi isn’t cola flavored because the can it comes in doesn’t look like Coke.

Except the distinction does matter, because testesterone is connected specifically to anger and not to general “distress.” Women are just as likely to experience feelings of distress as men, that means that there’s a significant difference in the context of this discussion between the two.

Not ALL men are violent. OBJECTIVELY. Do you agree?

Of course. At NO point did I ever claim otherwise. What I have claimed is that, generally, statistically men are more prone to violence, which is just as objectively true as the fact that not all men are violent, despite your claims to the contrary.

they ALL have TESTOSTERONE. They would ALL be violent.

This is complete nonsense. Testosterone only makes people more prone to violence, generally, statistically, it doesn’t make every single person violent.

This is a ridiculous strawman that you’ve constructed to divert the course of the conversation into utter nonsense. It has nothing to do with anything I said.

Really telling on yourself that you consider undocumented immigrants morally equivalent to literal Nazi soldiers killed in combat by the people they were invading

That’s about what I expected lmao.

When did the USSR conduct “mass exterminations?”

The largest and most sadistic mass murders were by the Nazis, obviously. Are you trying to downplay the Holocaust?

Whenever I’ve tried to do this I get accused of “sealioning”

It’s not “hostility to the working class,” it’s just objective facts. The CCP originally tried to follow the more orthodox approach of focusing on the industrial proletariat, with the exception of a particular member who had personal experience with the rural peasants and believed they had greater potential for radicalization. The CCP ignored him, and were promptly defeated, leading to the Long March. Among the survivors was that man I mentioned earlier, who was now able to implement his strategy of focusing on the peasants, and as a result of that strategy, even though the communists had been thoroughly defeated, hiding in the most remote regions of China, most of the party dead, the revolution caught on and spread like wildfire.

If othodox Marxist theory was objectively not suited to the conditions of China regarding which class had radicalization potential, because the lack of industrialization meant that the proletariat hadn’t really developed, then isn’t it reasonable to think that orthodox theory regarding the bourgeoisie was questionable as well?

And in Germany, the so-called “working class” party of the SDP actively fought against the potential of setting up a socialist government, set the freicorps against communists, and insisted on setting up a system where they would give the bourgeoisie power and then work with them to worsen the conditions of the working class. You yourself acknowledged their betrayal of the working class, it’s just when they take off their “Second International” hat and put on their “SDP” hat they’re absolved of everything, apparently.

Goes to show that the Trotskyist tendency towards blind contrarianism is as strong as ever. If Trotsky and Stalin had switched roles, you’d all be Stalinists, it doesn’t even matter what their ideological differences were, you just want to support the guy who lost so that you can imagine he would’ve done everything perfectly and you don’t have to engage with difficult practical decisions. Classic “support every revolution, except the ones that succeed.”

I have to wonder how much of it is driven by chauvinism towards developing countries too, as you seem actively hostile to considering their material conditions.

I don’t agree with that assessment. The KMT at the time was led by Sun Yat-Sen, who was much more left-leaning than his successor Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT was originally a revolutionary party that deposed the monarchy, and it had left-wing elements within the party (as well as cooperating with the CCP) before Chiang purged them. Also worth noting that as a pre-industrial, colonized society, the class distinctions were not precisely the same as in Western countries, as demonstrated by the fact that it was by mobilizing the peasants rather than the much smaller industrial proletariat that the Chinese revolution was eventually successful. As argued by Frantz Fanon, class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in poor countries is potentially viable because the primary conflict in those cases is with foreign colonizers.

If you ask me to choose between the early KMT under Sun that overthrew a monarchy and cooperated with communists, and the SDP who betrayed and murdered communists, denounced them as being as bad as fascists, and enacted austerity policies that contributed to the Nazis’ rise, I’m picking the early KMT every time.

The correct policy would have been to spread the revolution throughout the world on the basis of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, as advanced by the Left Opposition.

The failures of the revolutions in Germany through 1923 were terrible tragedies, prepared largely by the betrayals of the Second International and the inexperiance of the new communist KPD of the Third International. This is not something you can really blame Stalin for, but it created the conditions for what followed.

The ultraleft line of the Comintern in its third period led to disaster and betrayal in Germany in the 1930s. Stalin divided the forces working class by refusing to allow a united front of the communists with German Social Democracy.

What? These criticisms are all contradictory.

On the one hand, Stalin should’ve done more to spread the revolution to other countries, like Germany. On the other hand, he should’ve convinced the KPD to work together with the SDP instead of taking a more revolutionary approach. Were the SDP not the very people who were in the Second International and betrayed the revolution?

It seems kind of silly to blame the KPD-SDP split on Stalin considering that the social democrats both killed much of the KPD leadership (such as Rosa Luxembourg), and also continued using equivalent language about how the KPD were just as bad as the fascists. The SDP made the decision to align with the bourgeois parties and help them enact austerity policies during an economic crisis, and ultimately to back Hindenburg over Thälmann, who then appointed Hitler. The KPD felt that, in addition to the SDP being utterly uncooperative and uninterested in reconciliation, their association with crushing economic policy made them more of a liability than an asset - in hindsight, this was probably a miscalculation, but the blame is not entirely on them.

Now, if your position was that the USSR should have taken a realpolitik perspective and backed the anticommunist SDP to stop Hitler, despite their attitude to the KPD, that would be a coherent criticism - except that you also criticize the USSR for making a very similar decision in China. The USSR policy viewed the CCP as too weak to win a revolution, and instead aimed to achieve a united front, regardless of ideological disagreements.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this estimation was an error, but I’m asking for a single coherent path. Either be willing to compromise and work together with anti-communists like the KMT and the SDP, or take a hard line and support revolution - even in the face looming threats from the Nazis in one case and the Japanese on the other. Or, I suppose, take it on a case-by-case basis, in which case your criticism would be less ideological and more personal, regarding Stalin’s ability to assess foreign situations - and that’s a bit of stretch because I don’t think most of the leftists in Germany and China foresaw what would happen in their respective countries either.

Aside from these contradictions, I don’t really agree with the Trotskyist demand for an aggressive foreign policy. Of course, Marx predicted a global revolution but Marx was not a prophet, and socialist movements in other countries were not sufficiently developed to follow suit (as evidenced by the failure of the Second International). Trying to create an insurgency within another country is an act of aggression, at least potentially of war, and it seems like you’re demanding that the USSR should’ve gone to war with every country on earth simultaneously to compensate for the failure of those countries’ own socialist movements. That would’ve obviously been suicidal.

The USSR’s (post-Stalin) policy of “peaceful coexistence” was based on the correct understanding that such aggression would (perhaps correctly) be seen as a nationalistic act of aggression. Indeed, to the extent that the USSR expanded militarily, for example under Stalin or in Afghanistan, I think it deserves criticism. It seems a lot more reasonable to consolidate their position and serve as a proof of concept for socialists worldwide to follow on their own initiative than to try to impose those conflicts from the outside.

Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it.

I’m not super familiar with Socialist Alternative, but aren’t they a Trotskyist org? What are they doing waving Stalin flags?

The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution.

What path should the USSR have taken instead? (genuine question)