A couple of ex "Trots" got their breadheads on and became neoCons. That's the extent of the connection, I believe.
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What is the link between Neoconservatism and Trotskyism?
I often see these two compared together--why?
A couple of ex "Trots" got their breadheads on and became neoCons. That's the extent of the connection, I believe.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Christopher Hitchens. That's pretty much the only reason.
"[Marx] laid the cornerstones of the science which socialists must advance in all directions, if they do not want to lag behind events."
-Vladimir Lenin, Our Programme
Economic Left/Right: -9.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.54
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.
Last edited by Lyev; 30th December 2010 at 19:16. Reason: spelling
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew
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.
No, the other way around.So neo-conservatives who are ardently against stalin(to be honest neo-conservatives are just anti- left full stop) then become trotskyists
Oh my.
Not so. Other prominent neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and David Horowitz also came from Trotskyist backgrounds.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
Anti-communism.
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
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_H...r_publications
Maybe he is just insane. I'm taking back anything positive. Nuts.
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.
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.
Yes. He's just the one that everyone knows about.
"[Marx] laid the cornerstones of the science which socialists must advance in all directions, if they do not want to lag behind events."
-Vladimir Lenin, Our Programme
Economic Left/Right: -9.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.54
it's not like any Stalinists or Maoists ever sold out and became capitalists
Orthodox Marxist:
In fact, it usually led to a bullet in the head.
Neoconservatism <- New Left political shit + American "Third Camp" Trotskyism
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.
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.
