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Describe your 'political tradition' in one sentence

frogwoman said:
Im not a trot any more but I was an SP member from 2010-2013 and it had a,massive effect on my politics.
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Oh-ho! Quintessentially British variety of Trotskyism, that one.

What made you break with Trotskyism? I have many mates who are Trots and they seem to be pretty dogmatic, even though they supposedly criticise stalinism/Maoism from the left!
 
danny la rouge said:
In a phrase, I'm an anarchist communist. (I'd have thought that this tradition would be fairly well understood, but there seems to be at least one anarchist on this thread who doesn't understand it). So that's my formal position.

However, there's much in all these named traditions and others that I like and admire. I'm comfortable to see the areas of overlap as reason enough to rub along. I don't restrict that common cause to social anarchists, but to left socialists, and anyone who likes ideas akin to libertarian municipalism.

In the event of communism coming - as come it will, for a' that - the imperative will be to find the common ground, not to argue over the niceties.
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Still this.
 
dialectician said:
Oh-ho! Quintessentially British variety of Trotskyism, that one.

What made you break with Trotskyism? I have many mates who are Trots and they seem to be pretty dogmatic, even though they supposedly criticise stalinism/Maoism from the left!
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I know, its a mixture of trotskyism and right wing Labourism :D

Think the final straw was at the SP conference when they voted on a load of stuff (with the microphone not working so nonody knew wtf they were voting on) in blocks with almost no discussion. I'd also say they make Trotskyism into a bit like a religion a lot of the time with lots of religious sounding rhetoric and not very much critical thought and self reflection, especially with the leaders (who tend to live quite a different lifestyle than the average SP member). i think there's a bit of sexism among a few members, too.

I dont agree with vanguardism and i think they've been fairly dishonest about a few things, their electoral strategy(at least here) has failed and known to be so by most of the members, etc. I don't like Trotsky either and think he was a bit of a shit, the fetishism of him is just embarrassing.

That said, i still think the SP are probably the 'best' trot group you could join. But we need something different than Trotskyism tbh. By the way let me know if you want more detail, typing this in a bit of a hurry.
 
Apathetic, often in the past a class traitor.
If I'm entirely selfish, my personal priorities are slightly mixed up ..
I've hardly ever felt personally affected by any government's policies - until Iraq ....
Natural Green voter I suppose, but I've always assumed we were going to hell in a handcart.
 
dialectician said:
Well yes, Trotskyism as an ideology crossed over to the bourgeoisie a long time ago :p
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Yeah, pretty much. Dunno what i'd describe myself as these days, pretty sympathetic to left/council communism (altho ironically i dislike the labour party less these days than when i was a trot.) Confused as fuck i think;)
 
These days I'd class it as left-communist, but I fully expect some cunt to pop up and say I haven't read enough books to be on that line. I'm more interested, these days in community work. Bread and Butter stuff-they cunts in charge are just going to carry on wrecking the entire planet and causing the deaths of a million children with every 'no fly zone' or sanction. Just so fucking tired of it. How do we fight what is? Of course it must be challenged and opposed but what does some whip thin kettering twat have to offer to that. I can do stuff local though.
 
DotCommunist said:
These days I'd class it as left-communist, but I fully expect some cunt to pop up and say I haven't read enough books to be on that line. I'm more interested, these days in community work. Bread and Butter stuff-they cunts in charge are just going to carry on wrecking the entire planet and causing the deaths of a million children with every 'no fly zone' or sanction. Just so fucking tired of it. How do we fight what is? Of course it must be challenged and opposed but what does some whip thin kettering twat have to offer to that. I can do stuff local though.
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communist still does for me.
 
DotCommunist said:
These days I'd class it as left-communist, but I fully expect some cunt to pop up and say I haven't read enough books to be on that line. I'm more interested, these days in community work. Bread and Butter stuff-they cunts in charge are just going to carry on wrecking the entire planet and causing the deaths of a million children with every 'no fly zone' or sanction. Just so fucking tired of it. How do we fight what is? Of course it must be challenged and opposed but what does some whip thin kettering twat have to offer to that. I can do stuff local though.
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Pretty much me.
 
chilango said:
I tried to do this the other day whn my mother conflated my views with that of the Welsh Labour Party.

I guess I'm infkueced by, but not a partisan of, various strands of the libertarianish communist tradition -notably autonomism, situationism and stuff like Midnight Notes, Processed World, Echanges et Mouvement etc. with a heavy dash of EF! style radical environmentalism.

My mother looked at me very blankly.

"Sort of a communist" worked much better.
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Still this I guess.

But funnily in the two years since I posted it its never dropped in conversation IRL!

It is almost entirely irrelevant nowadays and afaics its all about small, local baby steps in rebuilding a culture of solidarity and mutual in my community and in my workplace.
 
I used to try to be clever and nuance it. I don't any more.

I'm a socialist. Most of the important stuff people need to know is in that word. The nuances of what I think will come out with further discussion.
 
I started as a Labour supporter in the late '80's and have steadily moved leftwards as the cognitive dissonance became too much to bear. My old man was a Fabian leaning civil servant from a working class background; he had a huge impact on my initial political outlook. It's been a source of pleasure to see him following retirement volunteering at Citizen's Advice and at the food-banks, and seeing many intellectually constructed scales falling from his eyes.

Tradition: Raised by a Gaitskellite. Now: Angry, socialist/communist(?). This is war. I am a product of a middle-class bubble and I'm very aware of it (now). But my partner and step-kids are working class Bermondsey and have challenged my shit assumptions over ten years, and my job sees me bearing witness to the toll of poverty and marginalisation every fucking day.
 
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