As part of the process of leaving Trotskyism behind, I have had to unlearn a lot. It began with a few small steps of questioning, to the full-blown collapse of my faith in the space of less than two months. Something that all cults or religious fundamentalisms have in common is a set of dogmas which we are meant to accept on faith. Subject any of these dogmas to even the slightest bit of critical analysis or scrutiny, and the whole structure comes falling apart. It must either be accepted without question, or the religion must be given up entirely. It is for this reason that Trotsky warned the ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’ in the American Socialist Workers’ Party that if they went down the road of questioning dialectics or rejecting his thesis of the workers’ state, they were on their way to renouncing Marxism altogether. The regional full-timer made the same threat when I expressed my doubts to him shortly before I left the organisation that, if I continued questioning the sacred science of Trotskyism, and challenging its immutable tenets, I would become a liberal. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his brilliant 1956 essay, ‘The Death of Gods’:
So the extinction of myths requires certain conditions. But it will be a mass extinction: once one myth is exposed, the rest will follow, hurtling down like an avalanche. It will be enough, too, if just one priest is exposed – or, better still, if another priest exposes him, for whatever reason; for the faithful believe no one, not even the exposer. The first step is the hardest; the rest comes easily. Even if the believer has only stopped believing in the efficacy of the rosary, it is safe to predict that he will shortly be an atheist. That is why – priests, take note – a mythology, if it is to be effective, must be all-encompassing. The death of gods is a chain reaction; each drags another down into the abyss. Abyssus abyssum invocat. Hence the necessity – of which experienced priests are well aware – of maintaining the mythology as a system in which every detail is equally important and equally holy. The logic of mythology is familiar to every priest; it is there in his mind when he says: today you will miss Mass, tomorrow you will curse God, and the day after that you will become a Bolshevik. This is why only Stalinism, because it was all-encompassing, was a viable mythology. Stalin’s priests said: today you will admire a painting by Paul Klee, tomorrow you will cease admiring socialist-realist architecture, the day after that you will start to doubt the leap from quantity to quality, and the day after that you will renounce your loyalty to Caesar. And since Caesar’s rule is the rule of the people, you will be an enemy of the people. So by admiring a painting by Paul Klee you become an enemy of the people in potentia; you are ‘objectively’ an enemy of the people, a spy and a saboteur. The power of this strategy, confirmed by centuries of historical experience, is undeniable. And its collapse had to be as total as its rule had been: a chain of divinities, collapsing like a pack of cards. What folly to imagine it was possible to extract just one!
Of course, this is the slippery-slope fallacy – but how effective it is for suppressing doubt! Moreover, it is half-true. Once you question one dogma and debunk it, it is considerably easier to move to yet another, and another, and before you know it, your idol is in ruins. Once the taboo has been broken, and the psychological strictures on doubt and questioning have been removed, there is no telling where your chainless mind might take you. Such attitudes can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Kolakowski explains in the above passage. Is it so surprising that people like James Burnham became staunch, right-wing anti-Communists after their brief career on revolutionaries? They were told that Marxist doctrine presented them with an all-or-nothing proposition, and, preferring to take things to their logical conclusion, were undeterred by the prospect of losing friends or influence – they sought out the truth, and this led them to abandon Marxism. Others preferred to hold on to some aspects of the faith, but in a different form. After all, CLR James, Hal Draper and other ex-Trotskyists deserted the SWP and remained Marxists in some way, and remained politically active. To each his own. What is clear is that there is no inevitability to the political trajectory of former members of these organisations, despite their claims to be the only true believers. As Vivian Gornick explains in The Romance of American Communism:
There are as many different kinds of ex-Communists today as there were Communists yesterday. “The idea,” as one Communist said to me, “that once we were all there, and now we are all here, is wrong, dead wrong, willfully wrong. It is a political convenience to have it so, and like most political conveniences it is at a great distance from the truth.”-p.192
It all began in January 2020 when I started reading Louis Proyect’s blog avidly for the first time. I don’t fully remember how I came across it, but as chance would have it, I discovered it after having done some googling on Marxism. I may well have encountered the website even earlier than that. I began reading about his experience as a former member of the SWP. He pulled no punches in his merciless polemics against the whole concept of vanguardism and sect-building in the Trotskyist universe. It took me a while to adjust myself to this revolutionary way of thinking, but the more of his articles and analyses I read, the more convinced I became. It was Proyect who convinced me that the IMT and other Trotskyist sects were caricatures of the Bolshevik organisation as it existed under Lenin (at least prior to 1921), and that the Comintern’s degeneration preceded the period of Zinovievite degeneration. In the IMT, the first five years of the Comintern’s existence, when Trotsky was one of its leaders, were held up as exemplary and above reproach. Proyect showed me that this was not an intellectually honest position. I recognised many of the unhealthy aspects of Trotskyist sect-building in his own account of his experiences in the SWP, and began to question my two and a half years of dedication to the IMT, which I was increasingly coming to realise had less to do with ‘science’ and more to do with the way in which I had become emotionally attached to the feeling of ‘comradeship’ and fulfillment I got from being in the group. It was utterly heretical of me to be having these thoughts, but Proyect being a Marxist, and criticising Trotskyism from a Marxist perspective, helped reassure me that I was not being led down the path of apostasy from the cause of revolutionary socialism altogether.
It took me some time to accept Proyect’s position. I was still a loyal member of the IMT. But within a few weeks, I would come to see that the sect was corrupt beyond salvation.
At the same time I was discovering Proyect’s critiques of Trotskyist sects, I began pondering the truth about Kronstadt. I was indoctrinated to believe that the rebellion was a reactionary plot backed by White Guardists that needed to be crushed in order to save the nascent Soviet regime. I knew that this position was controversial. Out of curiosity, I began researching. I found this damning account on An Anarchist FAQ, among others. This well-sourced account incinerated the preposterous notion that the Kronstadt revolt had been anything less than a revolution against Bolshevik dictatorship in favour of democratic socialism. Suddenly, the scales fell from my eyes, and two and a half years of indoctrination designed to make me see Trotsky as the defender of democratic socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism began crumbling like Jericho’s walls before the horn blasts of the Israeli marauders. I learned that Trotsky himself had been guilty of Stalin-like repression of dissidents, like the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists. Trotsky, by his ineptitude, had defined Bukharin as the real enemy instead of Stalin, leading directly to his defeat at Stalin’s hands in the intra-party struggle in 1927. I must have read all this in Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky in the months after my joining the organisation, but I hadn’t internalised these facts – I had simply accepted the IMT’s position that the Stalinist degeneration was down to objective conditions that Trotsky was powerless to prevent. I was now forced to revise this view. I no longer bought into the idea that Stalinism was something which happened entirely because of unfortunate circumstances – economic backwardness, imperialist encirclement, the civil war. I was coming to accept that there had been flaws in Bolshevik ideology that made Stalinism possible – an untenable position for a ‘Bolshevik-Leninist’ to take. If the ideology were one based on reason and not dogma, it would have been possible for me to hold this position and look into how Trotskyism could be adjusted and improved so as to remove those aspects of it which continued to borrow from Stalinism, but since Trotskyism is a fundamentalist doctrine, this was not possible.
Ironically, throughout this period of questioning, I saw myself as making use of the Marxist method of dialectical materialism. What I was taught in the IMT was that dialectical materialism insists on the whole-sidedness of every question, rejecting a simplistic or one-sided analysis. The position that Trotsky and his associates were blameless for the degeneration of the revolution was one of mechanical, as opposed to dialectical, materialism. It held that Trotsky and his confederates were not agents, but passive spectators to the unfolding disaster, buffeted by the winds of fate and being acted upon by the ‘objective conditions’. Our interpretation, which is to say, Trotsky’s interpretation, ignored the dialectical relationship between the objective conditions of Russian backwardness, civil war and imperialist encirclement on the one hand, and the subjective factor of Leninist ideology and the party on the other. And what was Leninism if not a voluntaristic departure from the mechanical interpretation of Marxism held by the Mensheviks, who argued against a revolution on the grounds that the objective conditions were not ripe for Russia to build socialism? Surely, the logical conclusion of Trotsky’s analysis was that the revolution was a mistake and that the Bolsheviks should not have seized power?
I went from questioning one sacred cow to another. I had questioned Kronstadt. I then moved to questioning the whole period from 1918-1923, a period regarded as above criticism by Trotskyists because Trotsky was at the helm of the state together with Lenin. I subjected Bolshevism itself to scrutiny. I was on a dangerous path. Where would I end up? Would I lose faith in Marxism altogether? Maybe. But nothing would prevent me from challenging my faith. I had to know if this was true before going any further. I became excited at the prospect of seeing things in a new way and of casting aside old fetishes in favour of fresh thinking. I also knew that it would probably mean my being forced to resign from the organisation. But my conscience and belief in the virtue of truth-seeking drove me to continue casting one shibboleth after another into the flames.
I read articles on Libcom and Solidarity that gave further support to my critiques of Bolshevism. I began questioning the concept of the USSR as a workers’ state. I no longer bought into the idea that everything would have been different if the German Revolution had spread. After all, had Germany had a revolution, it would have suffered the same devastation and destruction as Russia faced, and would have had no resources left to help its fellow workers’ state. Even if it had, there is no reason to believe it would have made Stalinism any less likely, as force would still have been necessary to impose collectivisation. Stalin implemented Trotsky’s program in the only possible way. The only real alternative to Stalinism was Bukharin’s proposal, which Trotsky and large parts of the party scorned as allowing capitalist restoration. On my way home from the Marxist Student Federation conference of February 2020, I re-read Leszek Kolakowski’s riposte to E.P. Thompson, ‘My Correct Views on Everything’, which I had discovered around this time on the Internet. I was inspired by the force of Kolakowski’s fight against Stalinism in Poland to challenge the staid ideas of the IMT.
When I raised my differences with my comrades, their apostasy detectors went into overdrive, and they did all they could to discourage me from reading such heretical material. I was warned that I was headed down a path that would take me out of the organisation altogether. I still recall the testy conversation I had with the regional full-timer about my differences. ‘Scraps of facts, taken out of context,’ he snapped. He threw doubt on the sources I provided him, since, after all, they had been written by anarchists and bourgeois historians who could not be trusted. Only Trotskyist historians could be trusted to have the correct interpretation of history. This anti-intellectual idiocy did nothing to dispel my doubts, but caused me to further lose faith in Trotskyism.
Frustrated at the way the institutional mechanisms of the sect were used to repress my criticisms, I began looking at more and more critical information about the way Trotskyist groups operate on the Internet. I soon realised that Proyect was right, and that the organisation I had dedicated myself to for two and a half years was a cult. It was time to leave. But I am proud of the bold steps I took towards individual freedom in these heady weeks, when I emerged from two and a half years of brainwashing to a fully human and intellectual existence.
These days, I no longer consider myself a Marxist or a socialist. No doubt the sect is holding up my renegacy as a warning against anyone who would seek to challenge the doctrine. But they should remember the wise words of Leszek Kolakowski, and remember that this is simply a lazy slippery-slope fallacy that serves to suppress any critical thought. There is no inevitability in human thinking, and there is no reason to believe that those who take up similar criticisms to me will inexorably end up drawing my conclusions. Whether these conclusions are right or wrong has no bearing on whether the specific criticisms are valid. Trotsky’s ridiculous claim that those who rejected his ‘correct’ position on the USSR, or challenged the dogma of dialectical materialism, were necessarily going to end up as Mensheviks or liberals, is obviously false. Using the same logic, one might argue that those who embraced the Trotskyist position of ‘critical support’ for the USSR would inevitably become Stalinists, since the Stalinists were in charge of the regime. It is one step from arguing that nationalised property relations are inherently progressive, to arguing that the bureaucracy which manages the planned economy is a progressive force. Isaac Deutscher moved in this direction when he broke with the Trotskyist movement. Thankfully, in the real world, most people remain in a state of fuzzy inconsistency, which is just as well, or we would all be fanatics. As Kolakowski put it in ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’:
What is required of a citizen? Consistent loyalty to the state or government. Therefore a consistent citizen will always be proud to cooperate with the secret police, knowing it to be necessary to the existence of the state, to its glory and growth. To prove this is so is the easiest thing in the world, and every citizen who hesitates to write systematically to the secret police informing on his neighbours is surely inconsistent. Let us assume that we consider a certain matter to be the most important in the world; for example, a universal obligation to wear a top hat. Why then, should we object to imposing our idea by means of war, aggression, provocation, blackmail, assassination, intimidation, terror, murder or torture?
…The race of those who vacillate and are soft, the inconsistent people…continues to be one of the greatest sources of hope that possibly the human species will somehow manage to survive. For this is the race of which part believes in God and the superiority of eternal salvation over temporal well-being, yet does not demand that heretics be converted at the stake; while the other part, not believing in God, espouses revolutionary changes in social conditions yet rejects methods purporting to bring about these changes which openly contradict a certain moral tradition in which these people were raised.