There have been several attempts. What number are we on now, 4? 5? On hexbear we joke about the 27th International sometimes. The issue with all these modern ones is infighting causes splintering, and then we get another international.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
37 points (100.0% liked)
The Deprogram Podcast
1424 readers
157 users here now
"As revolutionaries, we don't have the right to say that we're tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We also know that when the people understand, they cannot but follow us. In any case, we, the people, have no enemies when it comes to peoples. Our only enemies are the imperialist regimes and organizations." Thomas Sankara, 1985
International Anti-Capitalist podcast run by an American, a Slav and an Arab.
Rules:
- No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome; this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.
- No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).
- No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, Strasserists, Duginists, etc).
Resources:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Imo (as someone who starts local groups for commies) it is insanely important (as lenin said I believe) to keep democratic centralism and kick everyone out who will not adhere to it. Trotzkist "freedom of critique" is cancer that derails and stalls any movement. Also people who join need to help, if they dont, they can go. This is very hard to do nowadays as evevyone is so primed on "number go up" and "relevancy".
Thats just my current opinion from forming local groups.
Based comrade right here.
Trotskyist criticism doesn’t add much value. We act and they criticize all the time.
Being critical and supportive is not a bad thing. If there is no critique you can't improve. Be selective about the critiques you value of course, but to just say that any critique is "Trotskyist cancer" is absurd and dangerous.
That is not what I said. Critique, within measure, is of course welcome. But everyone who has historical knowledge will agree that trotzky and trotzkyist thought is cancer. Whoever disagrees on this has serious lack of historical knowledge.
I'm curious, then, as to what kind of critique you're referring to when you call it "cancer" because I grew up basically surrounded by trotskyist librarian types who have been in and around labour struggles their whole adult lives and I've never heard any critique that didn't have at least 3 citations from history and philosophy. Do I always agree with their interpretation? No, but that doesn't diminish the value of said critique.
You can read about the problem of trotzkyism in the prolewiki and many books. One easy to read and quite funny book is gerhard schnehens stalin biography.
The core issue of opportunism and liberalism is that "freedom of speech" is understood in a perverted way. This includes asking for a democratic way to vote for oppression of others. That is of course bullshit.
Then there is the case of racist prejudice in the western world. Most westoids hold unconscious racist beliefs about others, especially non nato states. This leads to "criticism" which uses bigotted views which can through pure exhaustion cause a purely socialist and positive endeavor to fail.
So, again, within measure, criticism is fine. But for example as a german to criticise the cpc is a deeply bigotted endeavor, even if one has read a lot of books.
Ok, so, what I'm understanding of your position is that Trotskyism is inherently racist and uses "critique" to detail conversation? Is this a correct assesment? Or are you saying that the ideas and modes of thought are being used to forward racism?
I'm also interested in your comment about how critiquing the CPC (not sure of the acronym, I'm assuming the Chinese communist party?) is inherently racist. I understand that, especially now given China's rise on the global economy, that sinophobia is for sure on the rise but I don't see why we can't say "the CPC has its faults and those exist for x,y,z reason and therefore we should try and mitigate those in our own context". I think that if we don't take the stance of critical support, you run into issues with dogmatism.
If I've misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said, I'm happy to be wrong.
I'm currently not in the position to have lengthy discussion about things without taking the theoretical basis of this place and the adjacent works (prolewiki) into account. So i'm sorry if what I say isnt easily understandable for you.
Here is the article about trotskyism which portrays it as exactly the menace that it is. I also suggested a book that gives a good overview of why trotsky and his ideas are anti marxist and sometimes completely fabricated.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Trotskyism
I sadly cant find the stuff about china atm but suffice it to say that imo, "critique" on china is ever present in western countries. China is the butt of every news article, every day. Casual sinophobia is everywhere and opposing it is likely to get you chastized.
Even if someone is a marxist theorist (which is incredibly rare) and has insights into china (mostly through living there) that allow them to form an opinion worth listening to (which is a very small number, globally), the pure abundance of racism and "critique" basically forbids them to voice it out of pure antiimperialist supoort as one would just help the unhinged west further entrench their citizens. In a purely theorist setting, in a closed off room, i can see such stuff discussed but nowhere else.
I’m just tired of taking L’s I want to fight back
Organize, join a party, even a union if you can, and help your community. That is how you fight back. Picking up a gun to go and die in Spain didn't make much of a difference back in the day, and it isn't enough today either. For every heroic socialist volunteer fighting to bring about revolution overseas, there should be thousands back home building it in their own society.
But in Greece we didn’t volunteer and imperialist butchered the whole left in Greece with the help of the US?
there really is an xkcd comic for everything
Our party has a yearly communist festival with thousands of people from all over the world attending - China, Laos, Vietnam, several African and South American countries, Europeans, etc. It's this weekend actually.
The entire weekend is filled with debates, music, cultural exchanges, talks, whatever. It's always really fun to attend.
Not really an international but my point was to say that there are international communist events in which we can learn from eachother's progress.
That sounds AMAZING. Can you tell us where?
The festival is called Manifiesta and takes place in Oostende, Belgium.
This is the website with more info but it's in Dutch/French without English translation unfortunately.
There exist some communist internationals, but they are either just meet ups or normal orgs in general
I think the model was tested and found to be faulty. For all the good the com intern did there are plenty of cases where it chose the wrong path and made things worse.
Has it been faulty?
The com intern practically forced the CPC to work with the KMT every step of the way until the KMT murdered a bunch of communists.
Because there is no powerful revolutionary state to fund it. The obvious one would be China, but they have a strict non-interference policy. The CI was the brainchild of the USSR, and like others have said, it had mixed results. I can't remember exactly where I read this, but China stopped funding foreign parties because they looked at their books and basically the parties they were funding were not getting results for the amount of money they were pouring in and needed it for their own national development.
What fucks up the internationales is trying to be one version of communism. Maybe if people accepted each other the workers could actually unite and do something useful instead of having a wank.