Over the past several days I have felt an incredible lightness of spirit. Perhaps I am finally learning, as Nietzsche taught, to love my fate, and to accept all that has happened to me, awful as it has been. Whilst I am not entirely free of anger at the IMT and its monstrous oppression, I am also convinced that I am turning a corner. Perhaps it has been re-reading Meditations. Maybe it has been reading Dostoevsky and discovering joy in literature. Whatever it is, I can say in all honesty that I am close to free of any feeling of guilt or remorse for all the misery of the past two and a half years. If anything, it has made me stronger, and perhaps helped me to appreciate life more. My experience of being in the IMT has taught me the importance of not wasting time. Two and a half years of my life was taken. Not a minute more! Not a penny more! Not another hour should be wasted by me reflecting on these former ills. I am striving to become, like Nietzsche, an ‘unhistorical’ being, and to live for the present. Like a convalescent who regains their sense of smell and taste after a long period of illness, I feel my enthusiasm for life rushing back. Indeed, I now appreciate much more what Nietzsche said about health and sickness with my own recent travails in mind. Just last night I read this magnificent passage from Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov:
Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced, in fact, that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment – still I should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away – where I don’t know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything – every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some drivelling consumptive moralists – and poets especially – often call that thirst for life base. It’s a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky – that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?
After leaving the Kafkaesque hell that was the IMT, I felt free but a bit lost. But I am steadily finding my way, and I know that I can hardly have anything worse to me than has happened over the past few years. The period when I was a Trot was the period of my lowest lows, of being kicked repeatedly whilst I was down, of being humiliated and rejected. But I have risen up again. And I tell my former comrades, as I have been doing since my departure from their rotten ranks, that I no longer intend to humiliate myself for their benefit, as I did when I was a wretched ‘comrade’, but will live only in accordance with what I deem right and proper.
To suffer bullying, abuse, gossip, slander, betrayal and rejection is a part of life – even a necessary part. I am sure that I would have experienced all these somewhere, sometime. It is better that they happened now rather than later. But none of this will dampen my desire to live – if anything, they will only enhance it, only strengthen my determination to go on in spite of everything, like my good friend Ivan Karamazov. If what has happened recently is not enough to destroy me, I very much doubt that anything will. I am learning to appreciate life anew. Time is precious. My mind is precious. Every single day has been given to us to live and learn, and it is being wasted on nonsense like Trotskyism. But I don’t want to spend too much energy on anger. It is enough that I am free, though I hope my former comrades, those who I have left behind, also free themselves. I know many of them read this blog.
My enemies preach to the rank-and-file that I have ‘degenerated’, become ‘demoralised’, given up on life and hope. They are wrong. My attitude is ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. I know that life will always be tragic, but I love it, not in spite, but even because of that. I don’t believe in a socialist society that will solve all our problems, but I don’t want such a society anyway. For one thing, it would be utterly boring. They are the people who seek to run away from life and the real world by hermetically sealing themselves from reality and cocooning themselves within a cult, forbidding any light to pierce into the harrowing darkness in which they have encased themselves. They are what Nietzsche called ‘traitors to the earth’. Marxism is the ideology of the sick and the stunted, the resentful and the ungrateful, those bitter with life and determined to destroy everything and everyone exalted and elevated in the name of ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. I am very grateful for this life, for this earth. I do not wish to take revenge on anyone or anything. Leaving Trotskyism behind, and setting up this blog to expose its falsehoods, is revenge enough. My Nietzschean prejudices towards Marxism were completely justified prior to my conversion to Marxism, and remain fully justified now that I have experienced it first-hand. If anything, I am more in love with life now and, in some ways, more optimistic about the human condition than I was when I was a member of the IMT and was surrounded by these loathsome, hate-filled fanatics and fed their pernicious ideology.
Look at Trots. Look at their sad and pathetic lives. They rage at the clouds, they denounce this or that person for ‘betrayal’, ‘renegacy’, or some other imagined sin. They write articles and publish books that no one reads. They issue appeals and demands that no one pays any attention to. The workers go about their business, and the security services of the world are utterly untroubled. They are only capable of damaging themselves and each other – bullying, slandering and trying to destroy their fellow revolutionaries and leftists. The idea that these hapless idiots would ever seize power is laughable, and if they did, it is highly unlikely their regime would last five minutes. It took extraordinary circumstances for the Bolsheviks to just about win the civil war and take over a sixth of the Earth’s surface after the Russian Revolution, and even then, the USSR could still have collapsed at any time between the end of the civil war and the beginning of WWII. Trots make themselves sick and miserable, greeting with joy every catastrophe in the belief that it will bring capitalism’s collapse and their seizure of power closer, and being filled with despair and demoralisation whenever there is an upturn. They are addicted to misfortune, for without it, they would have no reason to exist. They would have nothing and no one to rail against, no target to channel their bitterness and anger towards. If they read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, they would bring themselves to understand that we can never rid ourselves entirely of pain and suffering, but merely the focus of it. This means that socialism will always require scapegoats. Today, it is the evil bourgeoisie, tomorrow, it is wreckers and saboteurs within the working-class, then the next day it is traitors from within the party, and so on and so forth. Socialism is the will to a scapegoat, the desire to nail down a class, a culture, an individual, as the source of all injustice and misfortune, and destroy that thing, and, in so doing, ensure a world of endless happiness and plenty. There is nothing I could do to these people that would cause them more pain than what they already cause themselves. The corruption in Trotskyist cults is inherent to socialist ideology, not an aberration from it.
Trots are like the people the Grand Inquisitor describes in his conversation with Christ. They cannot bear freedom. They require a moral authority in the form of the Central Committee and the Dear Leader and the sacred literature of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and (insert sect leader here). Without it, they cannot live their lives. They are in constant need of guidance from an authoritarian higher power. I am in no need of such guidance, and I find people who do require said guidance rather pathetic. The time I wasted on paper sales, reading Lenin and Trotsky, attending branch meetings and other mindless activities is now being better invested in reading Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Camus and other profound writers and thinkers – people who treasured moral freedom, not the moral slavery inherent in Trotskyism, with its demand for complete moral unity, enforced upon all human beings by the vanguard, to bring about universal brotherhood. Here are some rare words of wisdom from Trotsky about the joys of life, free from cultism, in his Last Testament:
“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful.
I’m not a Trotskyist, but I’d like to address your statement that socialism is “the desire to nail down a class, a culture, an individual, as the source of all injustice and misfortune, and destroy that thing, and, in so doing, ensure a world of endless happiness and plenty.”
Many utopian socialists advocated class collaboration and the peaceable transformation of society, including Fourier and Saint-Simon whose doctrines Dostoevsky was familiar with. Yet in another recent blog post you state socialism is a society where “everyone is directed, controlled, subjected to calculation and regimentation by a centripetal force known as the ‘vanguard’.”
The irony is that it was precisely these utopian socialists whose doctrines required an extensive regimentation of life, even if the utopian in question didn’t actually envision that happening. This is because the utopian sets up an “ideal” to impose onto existing society. This led to such things as Saint-Simon trying to devise a “New Christianity” for all human beings to believe in.
Marx and Engels did not impose specific “blueprints” on society. They allowed for the way in which products are produced and distributed to change in accordance with the level of society’s productive forces, and therefore for the rest of society to more or less change in line with this rather than for arbitrary interventions to “abolish” religion or what have you. They mocked what they termed “barrack communism.”
As for the aforementioned “desire to nail down a class. . . as the source of all injustice and misfortune” whose disappearance would “ensure a world of endless happiness and plenty,” could not the Abolitionist movement in the United States be accused by its opponents of having similar “vices”? Not only did many Abolitionists believe that the eradication of slavery would herald great changes in the world for the better (such as an end to racism altogether), but they also generally held that slavery was economically inefficient and that politics in the USA was increasingly concentrated in the hands of slaveowners who were leading the country to ruin. Somewhat like socialist thought, Abolitionist thought started off mostly pacifistic and focused on moral suasion, but by 1860 Abolitionism had mostly shifted to a willingness to support slave revolts and armed resistance to slavery expansion in places like Kansas.
Abolitionist literature wasn’t immune from occasional exaggerations, distortions, the desire to treat rumors as facts, and of relying on sketchy sources or flawed statistics to further their arguments. But at the end of the day Abolitionism was, as the saying goes, “on the right side of history.” This obviously doesn’t mean socialism must be as well, but I wouldn’t be so quick to conflate ideological zeal with a cause being mistaken.
I think that Marx may have genuinely wanted to move away from the extremes of utopian socialism in trying to plan absolutely everything about the new society, but actually existing Marxism in fact replicated all the monstrosities of utopian socialism. The Bolsheviks certainly didn’t subordinate the work of social and cultural renewal to the level of the productive forces. They forced the process, and killed millions in doing so.
Also, there is a world of difference between the abolitionist movement abolishing slavery in the United States, and communist revolutionaries imposing the slavery of a totalitarian state on millions of people. I reject any equivalence between the two.
https://againstthecurrent.org/tim-wohlforth/