Yup. That’s right. I’m a renegade.
I have deserted the path of righteousness. I have abandoned the teachings of Saint Trotsky. I have turned my back on the one true road to revolution. I have become that dreaded thing.
An ex-Trotskyist.
And I have to tell you, it feels great. A burden has been lifted off my shoulders. No more pointless paper sales in the rain. No more cultish party gatherings. No more being given the correct ‘line’ on from on high. No more endless ‘political education’. No more burn-out from picketing and grandstanding ‘interventions’. No more ‘contact work’. I am FREE!
But in leaving the Trotskyist movement, many people I knew and still care about have been left behind. And they are trapped. Trapped within a world has sucked them out of all recognisable reality, into one where slogans and cliches and Trotsky quotes have become substitutes for critical thinking and intellectual engagement. Where banal sayings are taken as profound wisdom. Where hysterical, catastrophising ‘perspectives’ become the framework against which all action is measured. Where a party vocabulary stultifies minds and squanders all creative potential. In which young lives are being ruined, and young minds are being warped.
When I left the International Marxist Tendency/Socialist Appeal in March of 2020, it was at once a terrifying, at once an exhilarating, moment. I knew then and I know now that I was doing the right thing. But my work is not done. I have freed myself, but there may be other long-time Trotskyists who are going through similar feelings of doubt, or green new converts who are in the process of being initiated into such sordid organisations.
It is my hope that this blog will be the place where the false god of Trotskyism – a god that has failed many times over, for eighty-two years and counting – comes to die. In the coming days, weeks, months and years, I will explore in depth the falsehoods of this preposterous doctrine, which masquerades as an opposition to Stalinism, but really replicates its worst aspects behind a benign mask.
The errors of Trotskyism are many, from Trotsky’s false analysis of Stalinism to his delusional perspectives about a coming revolution that justified the founding of the Fourth International in the absence of any mass support among the working-class, to his misguided decision to borrow the internal structures of the Comintern for his own movement.
A big problem is that most of the critiques one will find of Trotskyism on the Internet are from Stalinists. Needless to say, these are hardly the most reliable critics of Trotskyism. One will find more balanced criticisms of the ideology from other people, many of them ex-Trotskyists. However, in the main, the Internet is still filled with Stalinist propaganda. It is too easy for a doubting Trotskyist to dismiss anything that appears overtly slanderous or from a position of bad faith. Trotskyism must be exposed and critiqued on its strongest grounds, using intellectually sophisticated arguments – not absurd claims about Trotsky being in league with Hitler, or spurious suggestions of that kind.
If even a few people read this blog and come away with severe doubts about their ideological commitments, then my work is done. The time of too many good people is being wasted on such fruitless endeavours for the inane saga that is Trotskyism to continue any longer. These Jehovah’s Leninists have ruined enough lives. It is time to stop them in their tracks. And what better way to do this than revealing the cracks in their hermetically sealed belief system?