What is the link between Neoconservatism and Trotskyism?

[Lobotomy]

I often see these two compared together--why?

[Hit The North]

A couple of ex "Trots" got their breadheads on and became neoCons. That's the extent of the connection, I believe.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

Christopher Hitchens. That's pretty much the only reason.

[Lyev]

What is the link? The 'link' is a phantom - it doesn't exist. I think it was Murray Bookchin who started out his political life as a Stalinist, but then turned to libertarian socialism. Or actually Trotsky himself as a Menshevik, then a leading Bolshevik. Or many prominent members of New Labour (UK) started out reading Marx and Gramsci and such as students, but obviously now they're as far removed from class politics as any other bourgeois reformist. In short, peoples views change all the time.

[LibertarianSocialist1]

That´s where anti-Stalinism ultimately leads.

[Aesop]

That´s where anti-Stalinism ultimately leads.

So neo-conservatives who are ardently against stalin(to be honest neo-conservatives are just anti- left full stop) then become trotskyists:confused:.

[LibertarianSocialist1]

So neo-conservatives who are ardently against stalin(to be honest neo-conservatives are just anti- left full stop) then become trotskyists:confused:.
No, the other way around.

[malthusela]

That´s where anti-Stalinism ultimately leads.


Oh my.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Christopher Hitchens. That's pretty much the only reason.

Not so. Other prominent neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and David Horowitz also came from Trotskyist backgrounds.

[Nolan]

Anti-communism.

[blake 3:17]

I think it's less ideological than sociological (though that line is pretty blurry).

A large number of academics and campus based activists were recruited to Trotskyism from the 30s to the 60s. Part of the appeal of Trotsky and trotskyism was that he was a beautiful writer, an appreciator of culture and history, and in its more sectarian and academic forms, be divorced from concrete practice. It should be noted that in the US the first victims of what became anti-Communist McCarthyism were Trotskyists.

James Burnham was probably the most prominent American Trotskyist to turn to the Far Right.

You might want to look at Alan Wald's writings. Here's the googlebook version of his New York Intellectuals: http://tinyurl.com/2dhyl2n (http://tinyurl.com/2dhyl2n)

Some of this milieu went further to the Right in the advent of Black Power, the Israeli-Palestinian War of 67, and the defeat of the US at the hands of the Vietnamese. Some ended up on the Hard Right, others moved to a mushy middle. Others, like Irving Howe, became moderate left liberal / social democrats.

The one neo-con I actually sorta like is David Horowitz -- a Trot of another generation. He's truened into a scarey SOB but some of his writing on the 60s are of interest. I was trying to find a book he wrote but it ain't there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz#Books_and_other_publications

Maybe he is just insane. I'm taking back anything positive. Nuts.

[graymouser]

blake 3:17 has part of it. One of the things you have to remember from the Trotskyist movement is what was called the "French Turn," or the entry into the Socialist Party of America. The SPA was leftward-leaning at that point, and included a lot of young, largely Jewish, largely New York based radicals in the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). In 1938, these people went into the Socialist Workers Party. In 1940, they came out the other side with Shachtman, Burnham and Abern. Burnham and Abern went their separate ways and Shachtman was pretty much the leader of the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League.

After World War II, the group around Shachtman was changing and largely the ISL dwindled. Shachtman decided to go into the Socialist Party in 1957 or so, and formed the party's right wing as he did. The Shachtmanites were called "State Department Socialists" and vigorously supported US foreign policy in Cuba and Vietnam during the '60s. The Shachtmanite tradition sprouted a couple of magazines, most notably Dissent edited by Irving Howe and New Politics edited by Julius and Phyllis Jacobson.

In 1972, the main figures of the SP - Norman Thomas and Max Shachtman - had both recently died, and the party blew up spectacularly. The left wing (albeit a left-reformist one) formed the Socialist Party USA. The centrists, pro-Democratic Party reformists, formed DSOC. The right wing, the real Shachtmanites, formed Social Democrats USA which was technically the continuation of the SP, which at the time of its demise had the unfortunate name of Socialist Party - Democratic Socialist Federation.

SDUSA was a relentless influence-seeking organization. Its most noteworthy members served around Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic hawk who earned the nickname "the Senator from Boeing." I think the Jackson presidential campaign of '76 was really when right-Shachtmanism and neoconservatism most coincided. They also had people in National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and with Jeane Kirkpatrick, a cabinet-level advisor in the Reagan administration. The right-Shachtmanites have mostly died off and their ideological successors are the neocons.

The other wing of Shachtmanism went around Hal Draper, an American socialist who took the left side of Shachtmanism as far as it would go. After the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Draper was persuaded to create an Independent Socialist Club, which re-created the politics of the ISL for the New Left. The ISC became the nucleus of the International Socialists, a group Draper was with for a grand total of three years. The IS was the predecessor of today's Solidarity, ISO and (through another split) LRP. Draper gave up on being in groups and wrote a multi-volume study of Marx, called Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution.

Other interesting characters to come out of Shachtmanism were a New York youth group that joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1960s. These youths basically converted to an ultra-orthodox Trotskyism embodied in the leadership: Jim Robertson (founder of the Spartacist League), Tim Wohlforth (founder of the Workers League, now the Socialist Equality Party), and Shane Mage (who went with Wohlforth but was briefly back in the SWP in the late 70s). Just a curiosity.

Right-Shachtmanism came from the dropping of the hypothetical "Third Camp" that the WP and ISL had tried to counterpose to support for the US or the USSR. Seeing in the late 1950s that no such camp was forthcoming, the Shachtmanites - who had already flirted with Zionism, partly because many of them were Jewish - became full-scale partisans for the United States. There was another sociological criterion: they hated the new youth culture and everything that it symbolized. This became an ideological conveyor belt pushing them rightward, and everything fed into each other, until people who had started out against capitalism became its best defenders. Particularly there was a mania against revolutions, which reached its climax in Kirkpatrick's ultra-right opposition to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Was this all carried in the theory of bureaucratic collectivism? Not quite, but it was definitely an objectively rightward split from the SWP. That it took the journey all the way was quite dramatic.

[Palingenisis]

Anti-communism.

Trotskyism attracts radical liberals and neo-cons are all for defending and also bombing for "western liberal values".

[graymouser]

Trotskyism attracts radical liberals and neo-cons are all for defending and also bombing for "western liberal values".
Stalinism attracts people who like to dismiss complex history with bland platitudes. Just saying.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

Not so. Other prominent neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and David Horowitz also came from Trotskyist backgrounds.

Yes. He's just the one that everyone knows about.

[Kléber]

it's not like any Stalinists or Maoists ever sold out and became capitalists :p

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Orthodox Marxist:


That's where anti-Stalinism ultimately leads

In fact, it usually led to a bullet in the head.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Neoconservatism <- New Left political shit + American "Third Camp" Trotskyism

[Glenn-Beck]

Both Neoconservatism and Trotskyism share one thing in common. Both want to export revolutions to other countries.

One wants to export communism revolutions to foreign countries and the other wants to export "democratic" revolutions to foreign countries.

[Nolan]

Stalinism attracts people who like to dismiss complex history with bland platitudes. Just saying.

Write all the walls of text you want. You can't deny the link between trotskyism and neoconservatism and the mindset that drives both of them.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I said "American Third Camp Trotskyism," and I think graymouser said something similar. All I did was make an attempt to summarize his wall-of-a-post (that kind of writing is usually my role, with the likes of him summarizing stuff :D ).

French Trotskyism didn't yield neo-conservative thinkers. Even British Trotskyism didn't yield neo-conservative thinkers (Hitchens is two decades too late).

[graymouser]

Write all the walls of text you want. You can't deny the link between trotskyism and neoconservatism and the mindset that drives both of them.
The problem is, that's simply not true. It is Third Campism that led toward the neoconservative mindset, or more precisely, the failure of a Third Camp to coalesce within the 1950s. (The Hungarian uprising of 1956 was probably the last thing that appeared like it might form a third camp, and Shachtman's final right turn happened almost immediately after it was suppressed.) Trotsky, of course, opposed Third Campism from the beginning, and the Shachtmanites separated themselves from the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International to hold such a position. So there is something of a link - but it's found through a theory that Trotsky and subsequent orthodox Trotskyists have always denied vehemently.

[devoration1]

Graymouser hits on many of the most relevant points of the historical link between Trotskyism and what became neo and to a lesser extent palaeo conservatism.

The history of Trotskyism is one of support for the lesser evil in the bourgeois camp, starting with WWII. At first any democratic or authoritarian state that joined the Allies to fight Fascism were 'the lesser evil' deserving critical or open support. Later it was anti-colonial national liberation movements, then anti-imperialist national liberation movements, then 'deformed' or 'degenerated' workers states, then the anti-imperialist states and movements of today (Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Iran, Libya, etc). This line of thinking is in step with the foreign policy goals of neoconservatism and its righthand man 'compassionate conservatism'. It is no coincidence that these 3 tendencies (Trotskyism and ex-Trotskyism, neo and GW Bush 'compassionate' conservatism) dovetailed into 8 years of adventurist, 'humanitarian' imperialism while the guiding ideology of the American state. Constitutional parliamentarism vs Baathism, a de facto puppet state with federal elections vs tribal based Islamic fundamentalism, etc.

Besides this foreign policy - political link is the economic and social theories of the Trotskyists in the US influenced by the international Trotskyist movement going back several decades. James Burnham's watered down 'state capitalism'-esque theory (of the 'Managerial State') shows the same 'lesser evil' dynamic allowing critical or outright support for a 'friendly' state capitalism (since the socialist revolution, according to him, is not on the historic agenda at least for some time). Cliff early on wrote a few elementary, basic state capitalism texts, but also degenerated in his work (though not swinging as far to the right- though still leaving behind a legacy clearly in the camp of capital, of the bourgeoisie).

The list of former Trots (and New Leftists as well) who swung to the right and became state apparatchiks and advisors is long- especially in the US, but also in Europe.

[Die Neue Zeit]

That's a more typical case of Trots becoming social-democrats. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the chairman of Die Linke's French counterpart Parti de gauche, was once a Trotskyist as well.

[RED DAVE]

Some points:

(1) Very broadly speaking, there were, historically, two major wings of American Trotskyism: Cannonism (after its leader, James Cannon) and Shactmanism (after its leader, Max Shactman). Cannonism remained orthodox Trotskyism. Shactman and his ilk developed into what can be broadly called "Third Camp Socialism."

Two right wingers who calved off early on were James Burnham and Irving Kristol (the father of neoconservatism). Burnham was very briefly a colleague of Shactman. I'm not sure which tendency Kristol came from. He may have left Trotskysm before the Shactman/Cannon split.

Shactmanism itself split into two tendencies, which we can call Shactmanism and International Socialism. The latter includes some prominent figures such as Hal Draper, Kim Moody, Robert Brenner. Organizationally, the ISO and Solidarity stand in this line of descent.

Shactmanism itself, after the split with what became International Socialism, in 1963, moved steadily to the right. There were splits including the defection of Michael Harrington to form DSOC. The extreme right of Shactmanism eventually calved off the famous neocons. The only ones whose names I know of are Joshua Muravchik and Penn Kemble. There are others.

David Horowitz was never a Trotskyist of any shape or form. He came from a Stalinist family.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

David Horowitz was a Maoist from the New Left milieu. I emphasize "New Left."

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Here's an article by a friend of mine on this:


When neoconservatives perish, do they share the same circle of hell as Leon Trotsky, or that of Joseph de Maistre? Is their sin one of revolutionary hubris, or militant reaction? It is a staple of both liberal and right-wing critics of neoconservatism that it is a mutation of Trotskyism, a 'foreign' revolutionary doctrine overthrowing classically American conservative discourse. Justin Raimondo's informative and entertaining discussion (http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/09/20/irving-kristol-rip/) of the late Irving Kristol is an example of such an attack from the libertarian right but, as his linkage makes clear, the analysis is broadly shared by liberals such as John Judis (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51220/john-b-judis/trotskyism-to-anachronism-the-neoconservative-revolution?page=2).

Raimondo's judgment is harsh, but unconvincing: "What the neocons did was simply switch allegiances from the old Soviet Union to the United States, taking their hotheaded Trotskyist temperament with them – and finally aspiring to lead a world revolution with the United States government at its head." This will not do, for a number of reasons. The first reason it will not do is that it implies that "the neocons" were, all of them, former Trotskyists. This happens not to be the case. The first generation of neoconservatives did include a number of people who had once been Trotskyists, including Irving Kristol, the subject of Raimondo's obituary. It also includes those who had never been anything of the sort, such as Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, James Q Wilson, Michael Novak, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I am hardly being exhaustive here. The neoconservative pedigree includes centrist liberalism, as well as right-wing anti-communism. The idols of today's neoconservative movement are 'muscular' empire-builders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Ronald Reagan. None of today's influential neoconservatives have any grounding in Trotskyism. Wolfowitz was trained by the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, Feith was educated by the anticommunist historian Richard Pipes, Libby was a Dukakis Democrat, Perle was a Henry Jackson Democrat, the young Abrams was a liberal anticommunist who worked with Moynihan and Perle, Robert Kagan has always been a Republican while his daddy was never more radical than the Democratic Party mainstream, and David Frum at his left-most was a young member of Canada's New Democratic Party, hardly a Trotskyist trojan horse. Even those lesser figures such as Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman who were influenced by the Shachtmanites tend to have come in contact with the latter as members of the Socialist Party during a period in which the latter were aligned with the right-wing leadership and propounding little but hardline anticommunism.

The second difficulty is that of those neoconservatives who had experience in the Trotskyist movement, it may be questioned just how much "allegiance" they had to the USSR to "switch". The point about Trotskyism, even in its more eccentric variants, was that it was profoundly critical of the Soviet Union in a way that neoconservatives never have been about American society. Indeed, Raimondo concedes this and tacitly confutes his own point when he argues that: "The main goal of the neoconservatives during the Cold War era was the elimination, by military means, of their old nemeses, the Stalinists." So did they switch allegiances from Stalinism, or just find a new means of belabouring their long-standing Stalinist enemies? Did they even bother, at any point following their rejection of Trotskyism, to distinguish between Stalinism and communism as such?

The third problem is that the role of the early Trotskyism of some neoconservatives is in danger of being massively over-stated. Daniel Bell joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) when he was thirteen, but was not a Trotskyist for more than a few months before siding with the right-wing of the Socialists. Irving Kristol and Philip Selznick were also YPSL members and Trotskyists during their college years but had left by the end of the 1930s, and had rejected marxism entirely. By the end of WWII, neither were socialists. Gertrude Himmelfarb had been a teenage Trotskyist in the 1930s, but no longer was when she graduated from Brooklyn College and married Kristol in 1942. Jeanne Kirkpatrick joined YPSL briefly as a college freshman, but it is not clear how much sympathy she had with Trotskyism. Her later political career unfolded in the right-wing of the Democratic Party, where she described herself as a supporter of Hubert Humphrey. In those prominent cases where an involvement with Trotskyism can be established, it was brief in light of their overall career, and did not follow them into full adulthood.

Raimondo is right to emphasise divisions over World War II, and particularly the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and what this revealed about the nature of the USSR, as one decisive factor in turning Trotskyists into ex-Trotskyists. Trotsky and his followers still maintained that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state. Others, such as Max Shachtman and his supporters, felt that the pact showed that the USSR was no kind of workers' state, but a new kind of class society that they called 'bureaucratic collectivism'. Those who went on to become neoconservatives, however, did not bother with such distinctions. The problem, Philip Selznick explained in his contribution to The Neoconservative Imagination, was that marxism and revolutionary politics itself was tainted at source. Their disillusionment did not, therefore, involve transferring 'utopianism' from one plane to another. Bell, meanwhile, rejected any form of revolutionary politics very early on, concluding from the actions of the USSR (and of Trotsky over Kronstadt) that revolution was both an impossible dream and an unliveable reality. Kristol and Selznick concluded that Stalinism was no aberration, but the result of an attempt to impose a utopian blueprint on a species unprepared for it. They went on to become Cold War liberals.

Indeed, most of the early neoconservatives had spent decades as Cold War liberals before moving to the hard right. They had learned from Reinhold Niebuhr about the propensities for evil that were present in the human make-up and the impossibility of eradicating domination and coercion from human affairs. They learned to "take evil seriously", as Selznick has it, perceiving it as a real moral force corrupting people and communities from within. This evil could not be abated by social engineering. Neoconservatism adopted this profound pessimism. Far from being hubristic or 'revolutionary', it is profoundly respectful of tradition and institutions with longevity. The neocons espoused a culturalist reading of social institutions, in which the good or bad within any society was the result of certain cultural practises acquired over centuries. They tend to invoke something they call "Judeo-Christian morality" as the name for those cultural practises. Capitalism itself has been the subject of a religious defence by the neoconservative theologian Michael Novak, though neoconservatives in general have tended to worry, just as their liberal imperialist forebears such as Tocqueville and Teddy Roosevelt did, that capitalism's onus on individualism is a potentially decadent force. Contrary to Raimondo's suggestion, it is this concern, rather than support for the "welfare-warfare state", that led Kristol to offer only Two Cheers for Capitalism (a collection of articles originally written for the Wall Street Journal). In fact, if one theme dominates Kristol's argument in the cited text, it is that he cannot abide the "welfare state".

Far from bringing a "hot-headed" "temperament" with them, the ex-Trotskyists among the neoconservatives became very traditionalist in the face of African American rebellion and student uprisings. Kristol in particular was deeply sceptical of radical challenges to American society, hated those who were "arrogant toward existing authority", and became a 'realist' as far as international relations was concerned. Influenced by Hans Morgenthau, he was open to criticisms of the war on Vietnam, but he preferred the cool power-balancing strictures of 'realism' to anti-imperialist denunciations of US power. Far from frothing about the potential for the US to democratise the world, he asserted that American domination was needed because some societies were unfit for 'decent self-government'. He asserted the need to face "the harsh and nasty imperatives of imperial power". He and his colleagues went on to defend class hierarchies, advocate traditional gender roles, and blame the poor lot of African Americans on their cultural inhibitions.

There are, to be sure, neoconservatives who speak of a "global democratic revolution", most notably Michael Ledeen. However, he has never been a Trotskyist. He was influenced by Italian fascism in his youth, which he considers to have been truly revolutionary before it took power, but he makes it clear that he considers the 'revolution' he speaks of to be a distinctly American affair, rooted in its "historic mission" and traditions of "creative destruction". And in light of America's actual history, he can hardly be called a liar. The mainstream of neoconservatism, however, has always styled itself as a counter-revolutionary movement. When they defended American support for death squads and dictatorships during the Cold War, for example, their rationale was that in supporting even imperfect authoritarian structures they would avoid the nightmare of revolutionary 'totalitarianism'.

It is, after all this, a rather surprising conclusion that militant defenders of capitalism, of religion, of 'Judeo-Christian values', and of the authority of the state, the police, the schools, and fathers, are really the unacknowledged offspring of a Russian revolutionary.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/09/alas-poor-trotsky.html

[RED DAVE]

David Horowitz was a Maoist from the New Left milieu. I emphasize "New Left."Horowitz was indeed a New Leftist. Please show some evidence that he was a Maoist. As far as I know and recall, this is not true. What is your source?

RED DAVE

[electro_fan]

who cares if there is a link, honestly, what does it prove beyond the fact that some people who are left wing in the past become conservative

a lot of people join left wing groups when they are young, frequently not really understanding the groups' ideas, and not really fully grasping what it means, but wanting to be "radical" and so on. also i think there is a problem in that some trotskyist groups like to recruit loads of people and not educate them properly, and not help them to develop their own ideas about things and just want them to follow a party line, but plenty of people who were formerly anarchists etc also develop such views, so i really don't think it's unique to trots

[graymouser]

who cares if there is a link, honestly, what does it prove beyond the fact that some people who are left wing in the past become conservative

a lot of people join left wing groups when they are young, frequently not really understanding the groups' ideas, and not really fully grasping what it means, but wanting to be "radical" and so on. also i think there is a problem in that some trotskyist groups like to recruit loads of people and not educate them properly, and not help them to develop their own ideas about things and just want them to follow a party line, but plenty of people who were formerly anarchists etc also develop such views, so i really don't think it's unique to trots
The problem is that people, like the Stalinists in this thread, say that this reveals some inherent flaw in Trotskyism. But it simply isn't the case; aside from some whackjobs like Lyndon LaRouche, orthodox Trotskyism simply hasn't produced the real conservatives that it has the reputation for.

Also, your sketch is just plain wrong in this case. For the most part, the Shachtmanites didn't join a Trotskyist group in a period of mass recruitment. Aside from Shachtman himself, most of the people who would form the core of the Shachtmanite group were young New York Jewish radicals who joined the YPSL, founded the Socialist Workers Party, and left with the Shachtman / Abern / Burnham split. The handful of Shachtmanites who we would call actual neocons either were recruited in the post-SWP period of the Workers Party and Independent Socialist League, or came around Shachtman in the Socialist Party during the 1960s. So this wasn't some generic "well, they were confused and joined a Trot group" narrative, there was a very specific political, social and ethnic origin.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Can we bring out icepick slurs for the neocon thinkers like Wolfowitz and Perle who have blood on their hands courtesy (at a minimum) of Iraq?

[Apologies to real Trots, though.]

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

Can we bring out icepick slurs for the neocon thinkers like Wolfowitz and Perle who have blood on their hands courtesy (at a minimum) of Iraq?

[Apologies to real Trots, though.]

:laugh:

[electro_fan]

i wasn't aware that i made a "sketch", i'm saying that this has sometimes happened, and without knowing much about the background of these people i can say that i've come across people who've been very politically confused and joined a trotskyist group because they don't know, or are trying to work out their ideas, to some people trotskyism seems like a vague form of socialism but it's not as "scary", especially if you haven't read about it properly. i wasn't discussing this particular case, i was trying to say something about the psychology of it

i would also think that some people do deliberately join these groups to try to infiltrate them and turn them right wing, too

[devoration1]

who cares if there is a link, honestly, what does it prove beyond the fact that some people who are left wing in the past become conservative


The problem is that the missteps of revolutionaries (Trotsky) taken to their conclusion by the caretakers and followers of that revolutionaries ideas (Trotskyists) end up on the opposing class terrain from the working-class.

[RadioRaheem84]

Some neo-cons who were former Trots took the concept of Permanent Revolution and turned into a concept of permanent liberal democratic human internventionism. Neo-Con philosophy swears up and down about the supremacy of liberal democracies and thus see it's spread as inevitable.

The Project for a New American Century thinks that the US should lead the charge in spreading democracy.

[electro_fan]

I can see how that could be the case, yeah

however, I don't think that it's exactly confined to trotskyism. I also think that in some of these cases, especially upper-class people come to see their views when they were young as being a mistake, and end up believing in something that's more in tune with their class interests and lifestyle, and end up despising thier old views and by extension themselves, for that reason imo people who were formerly left wing are often more right wing than people who were just tories all along

[blake 3:17]

Horowitz was indeed a New Leftist. Please show some evidence that he was a Maoist. As far as I know and recall, this is not true. What is your source?

He was a student and admirer of Isaac Deutscher. I'm not aware of him having any affiliations to any left party or micro-party.


The problem is that people, like the Stalinists in this thread, say that this reveals some inherent flaw in Trotskyism. But it simply isn't the case; aside from some whackjobs like Lyndon LaRouche, orthodox Trotskyism simply hasn't produced the real conservatives that it has the reputation for.

As mentioned above by others, it seems like a fairly small number of youthful Trotskyists became prominent neo-cons.

As for LaRouche -- ??? My experience in the Far Left has indicated that a fair number of nutcases appear and given that the pond isn't very big, they appear bigger than they are. I'm sure similar things happen on the Right and in Centrist politics, but they're probably more visible on the fringes.


Some neo-cons who were former Trots took the concept of Permanent Revolution and turned into a concept of permanent liberal democratic human internventionism.

Yep. But then you need to look at what was the dominant wing of human rights imperialism which was largely liberal in nature. The '99 war on Yugoslavia was dominated by liberals and social democrats. The majority of Western Europe had social democratic governments and in English North America we had the Liberals and the Democrats. I'm not aware of any Trotskyists supporting that one.

Samantha Powers, who was let go by Obama because her indiscrete criticisms of Clinton during the primary race, would probably be reasonably left in the Democratic Party, and is a total advocate of human rights imperialism. Her book on genocide is quite if one ignores the political conclusions...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Devoration1:


The problem is that the missteps of revolutionaries (Trotsky) taken to their conclusion by the caretakers and followers of that revolutionaries ideas (Trotskyists) end up on the opposing class terrain from the working-class.

That is just not true. The vast majority of Trotskyists do not end up there, and of the individuals who do, very few of those were Trotskyists anyway.

By way of contrast, of course, Stalinsts just murder Bolsheviks in their tens of thousands, and adopt anti-Marxist strategies that lead to the deaths of countless millions of workers. Maoists are little better.

[Luís Henrique]

What is the link between the Nouveau Philosophes and Maoism?

André Glucksmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Glucksmann), Alain Finkielkraut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Finkielkraut), Bernard-Henri Lévy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_L%C3%A9vy), Jean-Marie Benoist (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Marie_Benoist&action=edit&redlink=1), Christian Jambet (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christian_Jambet&action=edit&redlink=1), Guy Lardreau, (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guy_Lardreau&action=edit&redlink=1) Jean-Paul Dollé (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Paul_Doll%C3%A9&action=edit&redlink=1), Julia Kristeva, why did these people turn from Maoism to the far-right?

And why are there things like Bandera Roja, former Maoist party in Venezuela, now part of the bourgeois opposition to Chavez?

And why did the KLA turn so quickly from Maoism (or was it Hoxhaism?) to liberalism?

Perhaps there is some hidden seed of conservatism in Maoism?

Or perhaps ex-Maoists, just like people of any other convictions, sometimes changes their mind or sell themselves to Mammon?

Luís Henrique

[chegitz guevara]

i wasn't aware that i made a "sketch", i'm saying that this has sometimes happened, and without knowing much about the background of these people i can say that i've come across people who've been very politically confused and joined a trotskyist group because they don't know, or are trying to work out their ideas, to some people trotskyism seems like a vague form of socialism but it's not as "scary", especially if you haven't read about it properly. i wasn't discussing this particular case, i was trying to say something about the psychology of it

Right, cuz that NEVER happens with Stalinist groups.


i would also think that some people do deliberately join these groups to try to infiltrate them and turn them right wing, too

I'd need to see some evidence to support that wild assertion.

[electro_fan]

oh come on - a few senior figures in the labour party have implied things to the effect that New Labour was an "entryist" organisations on the lines of the militant (what later became the CWI) and we all know that the state have tried to infiltrate socialist groups at various times

also, i never said it happened with people trying to turn groups right wing or gave any examples of it, all i said is that it wouldn't surprise me, and given the fact that the state have been infiltrating left-wing organisations for many years, working as undercover police etc in these groups, (as per several scandals that have come out recently) it would surprise me if someone WASN'T trying to do this tbh. it need not even be trying to do it on a conscious level - but look at the recent incidents in the british anti-cuts movement for example - UKUncut had to apologise for calling a protest in favour of John Lewis and "co-operatives" and some of them even suggested that this could be a good model for privitising the post office!!

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/More_than_mutual_I_should_say/

and of course it happens with stalinist groups (re the confused people), in fact i'd probably guess that it happened more often in some places with the tankies and "maoists" tbh lol, but some people join trotskyist groups not knowing what trotskyism actually is and just because they are going through a rebellious phase, same with a few idiots calling themselves anarchists who don't actually understand anarchism. im a trot and i don't see why pointing this out is defending stalinism?