distancing themselves from the USSR and PRC while fetishizing Cuba and Vietnam

Not so sure about that second part. I've heard plenty of Trotskyists call Vietnam "Stalinist". Sometimes they even call Cuba that. And Maoists tend to have the same problem with Vietnam as they do with China: they call it capitalist roader and revisionist for its market reforms. I've even seen that accusation leveled at Cuba for its own reforms.

Trots and Maoists are two sides of the same ultra coin. They criticize socialist states from seemingly different ideological directions, but they share a functional commonality: ultra-leftists advocate for socialism/communism in theory while always opposing it in practice. Ultra-leftism thrives on dogmatic and puritanical thinking.

The result of this kind of detachment from material conditions is to sabotage the success chances of socialist movements in the real world.

The debate sure is nuanced, but all theory must ultimately be practical. Praxis is the heart of Marxism. So I would question what does X organization to support present struggles.

All those guys are long dead and all have their merits and their defects. Here on Lemmygrad we tend more to the tankie side (that's Stalin, but not only him) because we understand we are about to live in the times of the Second Anti-Fascist World War and that'll require more than hugs & prayers. But rightists really love leftist infighting over dead guys, so most of the time it isn't worth.

TL;DR: support Cuba, Venezuela, etc. and critically support anyone who's doing their share to bring down the Empire.

None of the theoretical disagreements are actually important. If Trotsky had wound up in charge instead of Stalin, then all the Trotskyists would be Stalinists. It's the rhetorical position of opposing AES states in practice while extolling the purely theoretical merits of socialism which defines them.

Basically, they have this perfect vision in their heads of how things could've gone and then they look for whoever lost and assume their loss is the reason things didn't go perfectly. The reality is that material conditions impose restraints on these perfect visions and the results were always going to be grittier than what they imagine no matter who was in charge.

Maoists and Trotskyists seem to differ mostly on vibes. They both hate AES states for not being ideologically pure enough but one positions themselves more as high-minded intellectuals and the other as more radical. But the powers that be don't really care either way so long as they primarily focus on criticizing their geopolitical enemies.

I want to know what they are trying to do by distancing themselves from the USSR and PRC

Well, reading about COINTELPRO operation helps to understand what is their goal:

• US cops and feds use anarchism and ultra-left ideology to disrupt the socialist movement and disguise imperialist talking points as “left-wing.”

As for either Trotskyists And Maoists fetishizing Cuba, I had a complete opposite experience with them where they denounce Cuba as "not socialist" or a "failed revolution". Even Ho Chi Minh wrote about Trotskyists here -> https://espressostalinist.com/2013/12/31/vietnam-trotskyism-three-letters-from-ho-chi-minh/

This is a good essay on the subject as western Marxism is concerned: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture

For other places that fall into that trap, there may be different kinds of causes. For example, I don't think Maoists in India would be the same cause as that essay.

This is the result of the CIA funding.

Western "Marxists" are permitted to support socialist victims but not socialism when it is successful and strong. What these groups are trying to do is be palatable to the socially conscious while not threatening the western empire. They exist to soothe the conscience of the class aware by allowing them to think socialist™ thoughts while not doing socialist actions. They demonize the USSR and PRC because life under socialism must be believed to be suffering and a lost cause.

So the CIA funded and boosted "thinkers" and organizations that promoted these ideas while repressing all other Marxist thinkers and groups.

Trotskyism isn't a real ideology. They have no actual beliefs. If you ask them what "socialism in one country" even means, either they will just straw man it and claim that Stalin believed you can have socialism in one country as a permanent and unchanging state of affairs, or they will just reduce it to pure pedantic arguments over definitions.

In the first case, it's obviously false, as Stalin argues the direct opposite in Foundations of Leninism that capitalism is a global system and thus socialism in one country is going to be inevitably dragged into international politics, and that socialism needs global victory to guarantee against capitalist restoration in the long-term. Many Trots will say this almost verbatim and pretend they are disagreeing with Stalin even though you can just read FoL and see that is Stalin's position.

Socialism in one country was not an argument that we should only build socialism in one country, but an argument that we can build socialism in one country. It was a response to the Marxists who argued that the Bolsheviks should abandon socialist construction after it was clear the international revolution had failed and they would be isolated for some time. Stalin argued that they can build socialism in one country as a temporary state of affairs to later help facilitate revolutions in other countries.

Other Trots just transform it into a purely definitional disagreement with no material substance. They will say that, by definition, socialism is international, so socialism in one country is by definition impossible. If your country has overthrown the bourgeoisie, expropriated the means of production for the working class, and replaced production for exchange with production for use, it is still not socialism by definition because they say the definition should include "+ also it's international."

This is just definition mongering and doesn't have any practical implications.

Trots fit into two categories.

Some really are just MLs in denial with Stalin Derangement Syndrome. Nothing in ML theory says you have to worship Stalin. You can, if you wish, be an ML who just is critical of Stalin. But these kinds of Trots just make it their whole personality obsessing over Stalin, constantly bringing him up in every discussion, and try to pretend there is some big ideological definition between Stalin and Leninism which doesn't exist.

They can't just say "I don't like Stalin" and move on, they are obsessed with making it their whole personality and ideology, and making sure everyone knows who much they hate Stalin, calling everything they dislike "Stalinist" and trying to pin all problems on Stalin personally. Just search the word "Stalinist" in any Trot article and you will see it said multiple times. They are so petty that Trot parties will often refer to themselves as "Marxist+Leninist" rather than "Marxist-Leninist" because they argue that Stalin used "Marxist-Leninist" first and gave it cooties and so they cannot use the dash and so they replace it with a + or the word "and".

Others are leftcoms in denial, although some don't even deny it. They will call themselves Trots but then copy/paste leftcom rhetoric which Trotsky himself argued against. I have seen so-called Trots for example claim that you shouldn't have a revolution at all in a poor country like Russia was, which is a leftcom take but something Trotsky strongly denounced as that was the Menshevik position.

Again, Trotskyism has no real ideology, so a person telling you they are a Trotskyist doesn't tell you their beliefs. They always have some other underlying belief, which is either Leninism or left-communism, and what unites them is just Stalin Derangement Syndrome. They also are united in opposing all real-world attempts to build socialism, arguing they are all influenced by Stalin and therefore are all "Stalinist" and should be condemned.

So-called Maoists, who don't even read Mao, are basically just utopian socialists. They don't believe in historical materialism, which argues that the economic base is derivative of the material conditions and is thus ultimately not something you can "decide" but forms itself unconsciously. Human societies do not have the "free will" to decide their economic base. It is determined by the historical conditions at that time.

What you can "decide" is only the superstructure around it: the political system, property rights, etc. Utopian socialists instead believe that you can indeed "decide" the economic base and try to force the economic base to be a particular way according to their moral philosophy, but this leads to economic devastation, hence the Gang of Four saying "it is better to live under poverty" than to stop trying to enforce a particular morality onto the economic base which was destroying the economy.

Their utopian socialist vision of the world is just not economically viable, and so every Maoist revolution inevitably will just evolve towards "dengist" reforms when they actually are faced with building a real economy in the real world that has to take into account their actual material conditions and not just morality, so Maoists will support a revolution until it actually succeeds, then they will condemn it. Maoists also end up opposing every actually-existing socialist project, viewing themselves as holier-than-thou because those projects have abandoned the Maoist morality and so the Maoists see themselves as morally superior to it.

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 have no idea. My guess is they have read enough and just took western propaganda as its word

Are you talking about the Maoists who don't read Mao?

I've always viewed it more as a difference in methodology not philosophy, with a bit of ego thrown into the mix. Stalin represents the domino theory of one state at a time expansion, Trotsky more of a shotgun approach of hitting as many targets at once, and Mao switching from an urban vanguard to planting revolutionary roots in rural areas first. Critiquing movements and revolutions that have established some form of socialist government is healthy, as long as its not just an attack for attack sake. Unfortunately, there are so few examples to analyze, that critique often ends up looking like infighting. We all have the common end goal of destroying the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Its always funny seeing the difference between Western 'Maoists' and everyone else lol.