I had an IRL discussion with a lady about Twitter communists and the yoof, and I suggested sh read Trotsky if she wanted to understand it. This came back again in the Sanders hellthread (which seems, luckily, to have died). It's good to know about Trotsky, because when people talk about the far-left academics or Antifa chanting "No Trump, no wall, no USA at all", it's not completely accurate to call it Marxist: the main influence is Leon Trotsky.

People quote Trotsky without knowing who he was or what he wrote, talk about democratic socialism, insisting that's not communism. (I don't want to argue about Sanders; it's boring. I mean only to point out the origin of a political philosophy he supports. It's history, not politics.)

Trotsky was part of the Bolshevik uprising that established the Soviet Union after the revolution, leading the Red Army. He split with Stalin and lost the early power struggle, Lenin favoring Stalin over Trotsky, who was not the type to compromise. Trotsky was eventually ousted and fled the USSR, spending years writing communist agitprop in the West before Stalin finally got him. It should be no surprise that he's the primary influence on commies in the West.

What you have from Trotsky is the origin of the entire philosophy of far-left in the US and Europe: a fixation on oppression, the idea that everything that is not socialism is (or leads to) fascism, the idea that being anti-union is directly pro-fascist, rejection of national borders, stress on slogans/propaganda, the long march through the institutions ("entryism"), confused notions about democracy, the necessity of an elite vanguard to lead the workers, oppressive language, the necessity of sacrificing freedom for socialism (but this paradoxically gives you more freedom), and, in fact, the totalizing nature of Western socialism (in both senses: that no facet of life may remain the same under socialism and that nowhere should people be free from politics), all the way to the idea that it's become impossible to get rich in America (the "late capitalism" meme), the "BAMN" philosophy, punching Nazis, and disrupting or taking control of public meetings (though the last bit usually comes through Alinsky) and the insistence that all of his philosophy is objective truth.

Here's a summary of his 14 postulates (In full: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm .)

> 1. Permanent revolution is the most important part of the class struggle.
> 2. Permanent revolution is the solution to colonial oppression and problems of the developing world.
> 3. The peasantry and the worker are two distinct classes that must unite against the national-liberal bourgoisie.
> 4. The international Party should lead the worker vanguard, which leads the worker/peasant alliance.
> 5. Workers must lead peasants to keep them from allying with the bourgois.
> 6. Peasants' class loyalties are divided and the party must keep them in line.
> 7. Replacing the slogan "The dictatorship of the proletariat" is yielding to the petty-bourgois.
> 8. Democratic revolution creates socialist revolution and the elimination of property rights.
> 9. National/international class struggle are the necessary foundations of the revolution.
> 10. The revolution starts in but cannot be confined to a single country; it is necessarily global.
> 11. Socialism depends on the revolution being international: it cannot be completed in underdeveloped nations and cannot be sustained in developed ones.
> 12. Confining a revolution to a single country falsely assigns superiority to that country, and specialization has made it unsustainable.
> 13. Stalin and Bukharin are dumb and bad.
> 14. Bukharin is a centrist and the USSR is not real communism.

That's from 1931, which is especially hilarious when you consider that postulate 14 is still a poular refrain if you replace Bukharin's name.

I'm going to split this up, because I'd like to quote him at length. I'll include source links ahead of summaries and quotes.
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