I have recently been interested in organizing more (outside of animal rights and anti-racism) and was looking to join a communist org. Unfortunately the choice for these kind of movements is incredibly limited where I live. I found a trot org that is linked to IMT near me and was willing to give them a chance as choice is limited.
After reading their manifesto, I think I won’t bother... Here’s a translation of some paragraphs.
Our position is very simple: in every struggle, we always take the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. But this general position is not precise enough. We must add that our position is essentially negative. This means that we are opposed to all forms of oppression and discrimination - whether they target women, people of color, homosexuals, transgender people or any other minority.
However, we firmly and categorically reject “identity” politics which, under the pretext of defending the rights of this or that group, play a reactionary role, dividing the working class, weakening its unity and providing invaluable aid to the ruling class.
The labor movement has been contaminated by a whole series of ideas that were alien to it. Postmodernism, identity politics, “political correctness” and other oddities have been smuggled in from the universities by the “left” petty bourgeoisie, who act as a conveyor belt for reactionary ideas alien to the working class.
Stemming from “postmodernism”, identity politics have confused the brains of many students. But these ideas have also been introduced into the workers' movement, where they are used as weapons by the bureaucracy to combat the most resolute militants.
They have a whole FAQ section dedicated to how inclusive writing is wrong because it divides the working class ffs.
You should read Marx and Engels 'The German Ideology' to get a firmer grasp of how this whole dialectical materialism thing is supposed to work.
That said, the basis is so simple that it has literally been smuggled into conditional psychology, despite being formulated before Freud was even born.
Basically, human ideals and ideology are not grounded in approaching a divine will (as Hegel would say) but in what is rewarded by classes of ownership. As the ruling (ownership) class changes and benefits from changes in production, so to does the ideology created by them.
An ideology that does not materially benefit the ruling class is largely phased out losing it's 'conditional' (this bit is my words not Marx or Engel) properties on the working class. Literally, ideologies are skinner boxes for the ruling class based on what the current model of material production is. An ideology without some type of material reward system will (statistically speaking) be discarded in favor of one that does. There will always be outliers, but that does not make something the primary ideology of the era. The goal of the revolutionary then, is to seize the means of production by any means available, and orient them towards rewarding an ideology that has communist/socialist ideals, which should be oriented around the ideals of the working class, as the primary creators of value, not the ideals of the ruling class, who are parasitical on that labor-value.
It's incredibly unclear to me how these trots get to their conclusions outside of a complete reactionary rejection of Marxist-Leninist analysis. It's basically "Lenin said there are labor aristocrats, so therefore there aren't."
Thanks for the recommendation and the explanation, I’ll add it to my reading list.