The Trotskyists
Chapter 4 of the Current State of Things
Moving on to the rival and sibling of Stalinism, Trotskyism is another tendency that sees itself as the inheritor of Lenin. Unlike the Stalinists, the Trotskyists are the closest to being orthodox Leninists—with all its faults. If the Stalinists lack principles that hinder their political aims, the Trotskyists lack ambition, which sabotages their potential to be anything more than an inheritance. Trotsky died almost 90 years ago, and they still cling to his martyred corpse like the Stalinists cling to Stalin. The Trotskyists don’t move forward; they just reiterate the same position they have held for the last eight decades with no thought to context.
This chapter will not be going into the specifics of what Trotskyism is, rather i will be discussing the shared issue Trotskyists have and their failure to become a serious force within the Proletarian movement.
The historic tragedy of the 1936–1938 purges of the revolutionary communists by the Stalinists destroyed the Left Opposition. The Fourth International that Trotsky founded afterward was dead on arrival. Bolshevik-Leninism, as the genuine Leninist counterpart of the falsifier Leninists, died in its infancy and was replaced with Trotskyism.
What do I mean by this? In 1936, the Stalinist government of the Soviet Union brought up false charges of terrorism related to the assassination of Sergei Kirov (head of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party), which the Stalinists linked to a made-up network of “Trotskyite-Zinovievite” terrorists. This led to the famous show trials that killed high-ranking members of the Communist Party. It also led to the systematic assassination of members of Trotsky’s International Left Opposition—an organization within the Communist International that opposed the growing Stalinist chokehold over the movement. Leon Trotsky’s own son, Leon Sedov, was killed during this purge while he was in France. It cannot be stressed how systematic that purge was: it killed almost the entire intellectual head of the International Left Opposition. It destroyed the chances of there being a serious foil to the Stalinists within the larger international Marxist structure (even with how tenuous it was).
Trotskyism was born the day the Fourth International was. While the ILO and the Bolshevik-Leninists were composed of multiple different factions and tendencies that surrounded the exiled Trotsky due to his gravity and sheer reputation, the Fourth International was a conglomerate of sects solely loyal to Trotsky. After the formation of the Fourth International, some of the surviving members of the ILO left after becoming dissatisfied with the growing dogma of the burgeoning Trotskyism—figures like Raya Dunayevskaya, Max Shachtman, and C.L.R. James—or became alienated from Marxism by the sheer brutality of the purges, like Max Eastman and James Burnham. Those that stayed became acolytes of the martyred prophet and started to decay in their worship.
The Fourth International was born from a dead womb, bundled in the blood of an entire generation of revolutionaries killed by their fellow communists. It should be no surprise that it lacked ambition and was held up by melancholy and nostalgia—all traits that continue to this day with contemporary Trotskyists. The Leon Trotsky that came after the purges was a man not completely himself.
It is as Victor Serge described:
“Alone, he continued his discussions with Kamenev—he was heard to pronounce this name several times. Although he was at the height of his intellectual powers, his last writings were not on the level of his earlier work. We forget too easily that intelligence is not merely an individual talent, that even a man of genius must have an intellectual atmosphere that permits him to breathe freely. Trotsky’s intellectual greatness was a function of his generation, and he needed contact with men of the same temper, who talked his language and could oppose him on his own level.
He needed Bukharin, Piatakov, Preobrazhensky, Rakovsky, Ivan Smirnov; he needed Lenin in order to be completely himself. Already, years earlier, among our younger group—and yet among us there were minds and characters like Eltsin, Solntsev, Iakovin, Dignelstadt, Pankratov (are they dead? are they alive?)—he could no longer strike ahead freely; ten years of thought and experience were lacking in us.”
It is easy to psychoanalyze Trotsky here and say his formation of the Fourth International was due completely to the purges, and that the opportunist strategies he and his followers advocated for were solely because of the purges. That isn’t true, sadly. Even as justified as it was, the French Left Opposition entering the social democratic French Socialist Party was a severe misstep that, while it may have made sense in the context of its action, led to its canonization by world Trotskyists who now worship the entryist tactic as it bleeds them of their energy and legitimacy in the eyes of the proletariat.
There are a handful of Trotskyist organizations in the United States that are worth mentioning, even if only one or two of them hold any relevance in the greater American consciousness. I will go over two of these parties, one old and one new. Starting with the first Trotskyist party in the US, the Socialist Workers Party. Founded in 1938 by former members of the Communist Party of America who were expelled in 1928, they spent the 1930s doing entryism into the Socialist Party of America, which led to a small boost of members and then led to the American Left Opposition being kicked from the party for their entryist activity. The SWP was, for a time, the second-largest communist organization in the United States.
Now, the party is a decrepit and irrelevant relic of a period in American history that no longer exists. After putting its full strength behind the Cuban Revolution in 1960—which led to nothing but betrayal, a pattern for Trotskyism—the SWP became nothing more than a booster club for the Castro government and later the reformist student movements of the late ’60s. This period of the party’s history did have something that the party was founded with but no longer has: a penchant for attracting talented people. Be it artists or writers, the party seemed to have gotten the wheat while the party it was expelled from inherited the chaff.
Wasting this talent seems to have been something it also inherited, as most of these members would leave the party for greener pastures. All that is left is an organization with a 97-year-old newspaper and a membership of roughly 300. Why is this the current state of the SWP? Lack of ambition. It settled for being second; it allowed itself to stagnate and rot from the inside. Split after split, the SWP trotted along, proud to be the party founded by legends with no intention of surpassing them. It allowed itself to become a sycophant for the government of Cuba. It betrayed itself in front of the working class.
Stagnation is the death of the proletarian movement. It requires motion and vigor—you can’t travel a path if you refuse to walk it. This is a lesson the SWP did not learn, and it is now where it is: sitting idle in a sea it no longer understands, waiting for the movement to revive itself so that it can attach itself to it, because the SWP does not (and rightfully so) see itself as being an active factor in the movement that has been dying since the ’40s.
Moving on.
The Revolutionary Communists of America, formerly the American section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), is the youngest factor in the current situation in America and, much to the chagrin of the Stalinists, has been able to get mainstream attention for their weird antics that, while still embarrassing, are nowhere near as embarrassing as the Maoists and Stalinists who dress like Red Guards and talk about throwing their detractors into the gulags once their totally, definitely-going-to-happen people’s war finally kicks off. Their “antics” are simply their ability to get their stickers and posters to elicit a response from conservatives.
The RCA is young, so stagnation has not fully set in, and it does have some semblance of ambition. Yet it is tied to an international cabal in the United Kingdom that prevents it from going further and relegates it to the periphery as another booster for larger unrelated events organized by those who actively hate them. It doesn’t help that there is lingering fallout from the sexual harassment allegations levied at members of the wider organization and its coverup of said allegations, which tars the organization with a reputation as being a multi-level marketing scheme that uses members to sell newspapers and fosters a cult-like atmosphere where leading members hit on female subordinates.
The stagnation has not taken hold of the organization, but the roots still have it in its claws. The RCA organizes educational summer camps and conferences where they discuss Marxism and tries to be relevant in the modern social media space to less-than-ideal effect. That’s it, however. The organization has found its niche, planted itself in it, and is happy to hold out and wait for the glorious coming resurrection of the proletarian movement so that it can latch on to it—just like the SWP.
The Trotskyists know they are weak, and so they compensate by creating parasitic organizations that join host organizations with the hopes of siphoning off members to themselves before being expelled for their obviously parasitic actions.
The RCA is a cautionary example of what happens when an organization is dominated by a foreign entity that hamstrings its ability to grow outside of the central organ. The RCA and SWP—the new party and the old party—are two organizations that mirror each other in the youth of the SWP at its founding and the trajectory of the RCA if it continues down this path. A path the Trotskyists are doomed to walk because they are loyal—a good trait for Marxists but a bad trait when that loyalty is to an opportunist organization.
The Stalinists lack principles; the Trotskyists lack ambition. They will defend positions that have failed them endlessly while gaslighting outside spectators that it was actually a success. “If entryism into the Labor Party was a failure, then why did we gain thirty new members?” the Trotskyists say. “If the united front collapsed and left us weaker than before, then we must form another one to defeat fascist capitalism.” Trotskyism is stuck in a permanent cycle that prevents it from fulfilling its potential to be a serious Marxist tendency. What Stalinists and Trotskyists have very much in common is a propensity to valorize tradition.
The Trotskyists’ lack of extrospection has left them with a lack of introspection, which comes off as a lack of self-awareness. This differs from the Stalinists, because they see their failures as the result of outside forces sabotaging them, while the Trotskyists see their failures, refuse to blame anyone but themselves, and continue on their course thinking that if they try again it will work because they solved the problem. This problem will never be solved, however, because it was the course that failed, not the specific people doing it.
Trotskyists will still blame others—usually former members rather than an amorphous other. They take criticism and see it as a problem, but a problem of the other Trotskyists. This is a fine difference from lack of self-awareness, because the Trotskyists are still aware of the failing as being their own rather than that of unrelated others.
Valorizing their failures while also denouncing those they see as having perpetrated the failing, they can’t learn from their failures because they see it as an inherent entity, and so they move “forward” still in their stagnation, worshipping the actions of their ideological forebears because they see themselves too as martyrs to the cause of worker liberation. Meanwhile, their lack of ability to meaningfully learn from failure prevents them from ever actually engaging with that cause. This is the source of their lack of ambition—they don’t see the strategies of their organizations as failures but as upholding the memory of dead revolutionaries.
The lack of ambition is not unique to Trotskyism. Every Marxist organization in the US lacks ambition. The only ones that don’t are the DSA, whose ambition is just pathetic attempts at legitimacy through elections. Lack of ambition is a symptom of the larger defeat of the Communist Workers’ movement in the ’20s and later the ’40s. Writing this, almost every criticism I have levied toward the Social Democrats, Stalinists, and Trotskyists can be applied to any tendency. So why is it like this?
Defeat works twofold: it crushes the current movement and forces the future movement to be more cautious, to take fewer risks. This has the adverse effect of rendering the future movement less potent than its previous incarnation, which is now a lesson on “going too far.”
This caution, to some, is the lesson learned—it is the learning from history Marx described as “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” You aren’t learning a lesson by refusing to accept that the defeat was the symptom of success. The old communists weren’t crushed because they were handing out newspapers and holding protests that didn’t concern the state; they were true movements that were seen as legitimate authorities within the proletariat. Refusing to be ambitious, refusing to go beyond the current strategy, is a folly created by men too scared to succeed and be defeated.
Ambition does not mean going headfirst into failure simply because it’s ambitious. Marxists don’t want to simply confront capitalism but to topple it. How can we do so if we refuse to become an active part of the proletarian movement? Why should we relegate ourselves to the status of boosters for outdated and illegitimate unions? Why should we relegate ourselves to the background of the social landscape of the working class instead of being a part of it?
The Trotskyists try to do these things, but in a way that comes off as parasitic—like their only interest is to attract you to join their party and nothing else. The Trotskyists begin with a false smile like a siren’s call, and like a siren’s call it is to isolate and encapsulate the individual into their organization and make them introverted.
A failing of contemporary American Marxists is their overenthusiasm for their parties and organizations. They are eager to invite new people to their events and “reading groups” with no interest in actually engaging the person in any meaningful way outside of converting them. This gives the impression of cultish persuasion, and if met with resistance to the idea of being converted to the Marxist microsect, the individual is met with hostility and finger-wagging, which does not help the reputation of cultish behavior. Disagreement is met with astonishment: “How can you disagree with the program of my party? This person must be a moron!” runs through their mind, and their only reply is open hostility and guilt-tripping.
This recruitment is a form of false ambition. They aren’t trying to convince you to join the communist workers’ movement; they are trying to convince you to join their organization and give them your time and money with no real intention of revolution.
How do we combat this false ambition? When talking to non-communists about communism, you must go into it without the intention of recruiting them. You must go into it with the mindset of educating them to the best of your ability. If they have a disagreement, accept that they disagree and try to get them to engage with material that might change their mind. Never stop engaging them if they are in good faith, and be available to answer the questions they have. This is a prolonged endeavor, so don’t try to rush them into accepting Marxism.
Ambition for the Communist Workers’ Party is to not simply declare itself the organ of worker political organizing but to be accepted as that organ by the proletarian masses—both in its perception and its action. All current criticism of Trotskyism has been projection of the failures of the current situation, and the Trotskyists have inadvertently accepted that role and made it their identity. Every joke about selling newspapers is made by a person really excited to tell you about their DSA caucus’s online magazine, and those who talk about Trotskyist microsects are currently members of even smaller microsects. Hypocrisy has outstripped the revolutionary theory of Marxism that has hallmarked this period of retreat, which will end with the start of a new period of revolutionary action.
Realizing that the criticism of Trotskyism is a criticism of a dilapidated and dying Marxism is the first step to self-realization as a genuine Marxist.
The future is growing dimmer. The Trotskyists are a dead end, as are the other tendencies that I have talked about. Their ideas are no longer useful, and the ones that were have been absorbed by the larger movement, even if it doesn’t want to admit it (permanent revolution being a good example).
The movement requires the organic establishment of a Communist Workers’ Party—not one founded by a small clique via the demand of no one. It has to be organic, i.e., from the demand of a growing movement that requires a central organ to conduct the demands of the masses. This requires first the formation of autonomous cadres of reading groups and propaganda groups that agitate in their local areas, united in the goal of becoming the organ of proletarian organizing, then the establishment of this Communist Workers’ Party.