Inside the communist movement, the most urgent fight is the one against Trotskyism. This is separate from our most urgent fight within the broader left, which is the struggle against anti-Marxist “democratic socialism”; within Marxist circles themselves, the biggest problem comes from the actors who claim to be dialectical materialists, when actually they represent a metaphysical view that rejects building any real mass movement. Because “Trotskyism” as a political brand has a poor reputation within socialist circles, these actors often don’t use the Trotskyist label; yet they are Trotskyists, just by virtue of advancing Trotskyism’s desire to subvert material reality in favor of an ideal.
Whenever we see self-described Marxist-Leninists engage in “wokeism,” and simply practice liberal identity politics under a red rebrand, we’re seeing a repeat of Trotskyism’s original error in which Trotsky sought to militarily export revolution. One cannot base their politics in appealing to the sensibilities of petty-bourgeois liberalism, while expecting to win revolution for the workers; it’s an inherently self-defeating path, like “permanent revolution” is self-defeating. Yet it’s a path that’s become the default within Marxist circles, because the conditions that cultivate Trotskyist thinking came to pervade organizing spaces a long time ago.
To remedy this problem, we have to investigate how our society as a whole has changed since the time when the workers movement was strong; when communism was mainstream, and to be a Marxist meant something really substantial from a proletarian perspective.
What’s changed is that the foundations for working-class power have been destroyed. When I describe this destructive process as “Reaganomics,” I use that term in order to find language that’s easily recognizable, because the proletarian organizational decline that I’m talking about is older than Reagan. A likely moment when it started was with the dismantling of America’s rail system, which provided a critical piece of infrastructure for the workers movement. It was a system that gave the workers massive leverage over the economy, compared to what they have in a society which has mostly transitioned out of that system. The destruction of rail was part of the foundations for Taft-Hartley and de-industrialization, which provided the basis for Reaganomics proper; when the proletariat was reduced in its stature, this let our ruling class take away its rights and reduce its living standards.
This progressive war against the working class is a critical part of why Marxism retreated into a Trotskyist, petty-bourgeois bubble. When the workers no longer had their old connections to the class war, communists no longer had the means available to them for operating within the working class, at least on the level they once did. Now the only way to take the class war forward was by rebuilding this organizational power, which necessarily makes the task more difficult; and petty-bourgeois radicals were ready to steer the movement away from this duty. This is a bleak situation. When we analyze the nature of class society under such bleak conditions, though, we can gain the direction needed for leading the workers to victory.
Within Marxist and left circles, the core problem is that the concept of “socialism” is being gatekept by the class enemy. There is an entire layer among the “tech nerds” and other professional-managerial class members who claim to be “socialists,” and believe this is totally compatible with their ideology of Atlanticist imperialism. This ideology trickles down from these upper strata, especially when the genuine working-class movement is so weak. And it’s within this opportunist layer that the proletariat’s fighters can identify key areas in our fight; areas which we must hone in on so that we can open Marxism up to being retaken by the workers.
One of our essential tasks is to fill the ranks of communist organizing with individuals who share a direct class interest in proletarian victory, unlike the PMC. This was one of the projects that William Z. Foster advocated for in response to the rise of Browderite opportunism, which had infected the Communist Party with a tendency to tail after one wing of finance capital:
To eliminate Browder’s opportunism and to build a strong dike against its future recurrence, the Party must radically improve the social composition of its membership and of its leadership. We must enlist more and more workers from the basic industries. We must, above all, recruit trade unionists and war veterans and bring them into our leadership. The winning of such members will be facilitated by the Party’s present change of line. The morale of our Party members and sympathizers is now being greatly raised by the Party’s new line. They are happy to get from underneath the suffocating cloud of Browder’s opportunism and bourgeois revisionism. We should be alert, therefore, to translate this new enthusiasm into a big Party building campaign that will bring many thousands of new members into our Party, particularly in our concentration districts, and that will vastly extend the circulation of the Daily Worker and the rest of our press. The best answer we can make to Comrade Browder and his revisionism will be to enroll many thousands of new members into our Party—workers from the steel mills, coal miners, automobile plants, railroads, and other key and basic industries.
The other aspect of the anti-Trotskyist struggle is to make sure that as these workers join with our organizations, they avoid reinforcing the petty-bourgeois habits which can afflict the workers themselves. To do this, we will need to consistently advance positions that go against the worldview of the Trotskyist petty-bourgeoisie and PMC.
At every opportunity, we must refute their social chauvinist views about how anti-imperialism is a secondary concern, how the present world war is an “inter-imperialist” conflict, how “no war but class war” means supporting neither side in the war against U.S. imperialism. These manifestations of chauvinism towards the global peoples who are fighting off U.S. aggression translate into the sectarian and identity-centric positions that Trotskyists take on domestic issues; every one of these problems is connected. And when we always set ourselves up against Trotskyism’s anti-worker, imperialism-compatible politics, we provide the workers with clear direction.
Trotskyism is nominally on the side of the workers, but only in a shallow way. Within petty-bourgeois and PMC politics, “socialism” means something fundamentally different from what it’s always looked like in practice, which is part of why these politics reject existing socialism as not being real. This kind of “socialism” can only exist within a class environment that’s separate from the working-class struggle as it’s playing out in reality. To make our movement based within this struggle, we’ll first have to find where it exists within our communities; which spaces to navigate in order to actually connect with the proletariat’s fight, and how to navigate them. This is a challenge that’s been made harder by the destruction of workers power, but it’s an unavoidable challenge. And a key part of how we’ll meet this challenge is by identifying where exactly superficial Trotskyist “socialism” deviates from the socialism we’re tasked with building.
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