Edit: I’m from the Global South, I should’ve clarified that on the post. The lesson has been learned.
Many leftist movements, legit or not, call themselves either Trotskyist or Maoist and keep dissing Stalin for his “socialism in one state” policy and “ruining” Comintern and Deng Xiaoping for his “liberal” policies.
I want to know what they are trying to do by distancing themselves from the USSR and PRC while fetishizing Cuba and Vietnam—you’ll only hear them talking about the Vietnam War, btw—and following either the guy who lost the power struggle or a literal Marxist-Leninist who supported one of the refused countries and founding the other.
i definitely agree with the rest of the comments in this thread (especially about COINTELPRO and emphasizing praxis), but another reason why Trotskyism and Maoism are so common in the west is trying to grapple with the failings of socialist states (sometimes real, more often exaggerated or based on lies). it’s easy to take these failings as evidence that the parties leading those states are succumbing to revisionism in much the same way the CPSU eventually did. it’s also a failure to do a proper analysis of the situation they were in, and very frequently completely disregards the stated analysis of the party in question.
I’m from the East, so I think we had more of a CIA/Gladio problem (our intelligence agency was built by them!)
I also started to think they just want an utopia out of nowhere instead of starting with what they have.
yeah, often there does seem to be a belief that if you have a strong enough party line you can skip some of the hard work of actually building socialism. you can’t just skip to the good part. the struggle is what makes socialism happen, and that’s always going to be messy.