Here is the paragraph before it:
The trauma of these years broke the Russian working class. By 1921, Lenin would go so far as to argue that the working class, “owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat.” The withering away of the state had reversed. In place of local working-class militias organizing themselves, the Bolsheviks were forced to professionalize the Red Army. In place of vibrant democracy and frequent elections, famine and unemployment discouraged political participation. In place of a multiparty state with competing parties, the other political parties turned on the Bolsheviks and were in turn banned under the exigencies of civil war. The material conditions for a healthy workers’ state were destroyed. Antidemocratic measures initially justified as wartime necessities mutated into virtues as the revolutionaries grimly hung on for dear life.
Aren’t trots largely a western phenomenon anyways?
I mean the most loud and annoying ones are.
Yeah but I don’t think non western Trots are any less annoying. I suspect there are just fewer of them because westerners are subject to the most rabid anti communist propaganda. Trotskyism allowed westerners to arrive at communist conclusions without having to question the lies they had been told about AES states.
I'm fairly certain the Venezuelan government's ruling party is trotskyite or at least a derivative from their movement.
I can't really think of any more off the top of my head because I don't keep track of 'em.