this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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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.
I've seen an ML here in Brazil saying something to the tune of: Maoism is a left deviation. Trotskyism is a right deviation pretending to be a left deviation.
I want to add that there are several Trotskyst and Maoist lines. Those have fractured enough to be more umbrella terms than specific lines. As a result, some trotskysts and maoists are more reasonable than others. This might come as a surprise when you've only dealt with the more unreasonable ones.
Another curious thing: trotskysts and maoists will often agree in their conclusions while denouncing each other for the different arguments they made. "You're right for the wrong reasons."
It's probably a regional difference. I'm from the Global South, so people tend to deify Lenin, Fidel, Che, and Ho Chi Minh for their struggle against the imperial powers (as if Stalin was eating brunch with them.)
Stalin led the struggle against the most aggressive imperialist power in Europe at the time. He deserves just as much respect as the rest of them. The Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War was also a war of resistance against colonization, very similar to the struggles of the global south, since the German plan for the East involved ethnic cleansing and settlement.
Afterwards, the Soviet Union actively supported decolonization efforts across the globe.
The Comintern and "socialism in one state" bother some people too much, especially Trots, for them to support Stalin. Idk what they were expecting from him and what they believe if Trotsky was the secretary instead.
Well, most people who criticize "Socialism In One State" don't actually understand what it means. But setting that aside because it's a longer theoretical discussion that is probably not worth getting into in 99.9% of cases, i find it amusing how the same people who criticize "Socialism In One State" for not being internationalist enough can simultaneously criticize the Comintern, when the Comintern represented precisely that internationalism which they claim the Soviet Union abandoned*.
It's very contradictory in my opinion, but the point of course is not logical consistency or theoretical coherence, it's that people need a excuse dressed up in the appearance of theoretical justification for disliking the Soviet Union.
Also the Comintern was founded by Lenin, not Stalin.
*(And to be completely fair, they did dissolve the Comintern for a few years around the time of WWII, again for reasons that probably made sense at the time but we don't need to get into now, but it was replaced soon after.)
One of the criticisms I hear about the Comintern is that USSR made it a Soviet-adjacent organization instead of a true International, like the first and second ones.
The USSR was the birthplace of the revolution and the only socialist state in the world at the time. Of course they were central to the Comintern. They had the most power to materially affect the course of world events.