‘The USSR wasn’t real socialism’

Trotskyists are fond of saying that the USSR wasn’t ‘real socialism’. They have any number of excuses – economic and cultural backwardness, imperialist encirclement, counter-revolution, diplomatic isolation, etc. They are convinced that this was unique to the experience of Russia, and that other revolutions in the ‘advanced’ countries of the West will not have faced … Read more

Advice to Doubting Trotskyists

I made this blog for those doubting members of Trotskyist cults who are reconsidering their commitments. It would make sense, then, to make a post advising all those who find themselves having second thoughts about their involvement with the sordid sects of which they are a member. Here are some of the things to watch … Read more

Leszek Kolakowski describes the IMT

‘So far I have been discussing an ideal totalitarian society, of which the existing ones are (or were) only more or less successful approximations. Later Stalinism (like Maoism) was a reasonably fair approximation. Its triumph consisted not simply in that virtually everything in the Soviet Union was either falsified or suppressed—statistics, historical events, current events, … Read more

The Sensational Anti-Semitism of Trotskyists (and Marxists in general)

In the IMT, I was always taught that Lenin and Trotsky had conducted a heroic battle against anti-Semitism, and that it was revived by the evil Stalin as part of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ that reversed many of the ‘gains’ of the Russian Revolution. I had no idea of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to stamp out … Read more

Leon Trotsky, cultist

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. . . . [I]f the Party adopts a decision which … Read more