this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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What exactly is a scholar monk? Trots have a selective canon, generally one intended to promote the idea that Trotsky was the co-revolutionary with Lenin and that one should engage primarily with Trotsky's speculative (and historically, a failure revolutionarily) works in exile. They talk about transitional programs so much they forget to engage critically with their failure to produce the revolution that requires transition.
I think there is a parallel in that Trotskyists are often correctly labeled as "academic Marxists", which is really just an insult meaning, "a self-labeled Marxist that is wrong and does no organizing but uses a lot of words and references from Marxist theory". Is that a monk scholar? They catalog and go on at length about hypotheticals but fail to do praxis, e.g. converting the nonbelievers and educating the believers?
Marxists.org is useful in that it makes works available for free and is an easy to remember domain. There are other projects doing similar things but they don't have the luck of owning a domain called marxists.org.
a funny connection my sleepy brain came up with this morning reading a post about trot book clubs i'm not seriously saying they are actual scholar monks that hasn't been a thing since the end of the middle ages
Of course, friend. Sorry if I came across as belligerent or argumentative, I mean to just be riffing along as well.
it's all good. text medium and all and most of us are neurodiverse im sure. sometimes i'm afraid to riff about stuff that goes too deep into serious territory because i am very much a leftist layperson.