I was engaging in some interesting discussions with a communist in some other forum.
The moment I brought up Trotsky’s influence on neoconservatism, he told me that Trotsky was not a real communist and hurt the communist movement.
He then clarified the various differences between communists.
And my god, socialists and communists are so utterly sectarian, and are made up of so many narrow sects which disagree with each other on nearly everything.
It’s thus so that it would probably be impossible to say who is a communist and who is not. This particular communist was of the radical kind, but he did say, “Libertarians have the right ideas but the wrong premises.”
Just to give you a little sample of the sectarianism, one of the things he said was: “It sounds like a Trotskyist outfit to me. The Trotskyists form the legal defense fund for Mumia Abu Jamal. It’s also worth noting that street Trotskyists and school campus Trotskyists are considered dumbfuck by self described Trotskyist intellectuals like the type that write for Internationalist Socialist Review and host Marxists.org. They are also anti-Iran, which a true communist would not be.”
I mean, compared to them, us libertarians are surprisingly tolerant of people who are moderately libertarian at best, and LewRockwell.Com publishes articles from all the variety of people from small government conservatives to left-libertarians.