We are five years on from my desertion of the International Marxist Tendency (now rechristened as the Revolutionary Communist International). Nonetheless, here I am to tell you why you should desert Trotskyism. If you are a doubting member of any one of the dozens of fissiparous, impotent, hermetic Trotskyist sects existing on the fringes of civilised society, this post is for you. Please consider jumping ship.
False Prophecies
Trotsky is a false prophet. I know this belies the title of Isaac Deutscher’s famous biography, but every single prediction he made for the post-war period was falsified. Even before then, his understanding of politics within individual countries during the interwar period was risible. More information is available here, here, here and here. Continuing to believe in Trotsky and Trotskyism after the unsentimental light of reality has set his perspectives aflame is delusion. Trotskyists pride themselves on their belief system being ‘scientific’. In fact, Trotskyists are no more ‘scientific’ in their beliefs than the early disciples of Christ, who could not bring themselves to abandon their false doctrine even after the promise of Christ’s imminent return to Earth went unfulfilled for decades after his apotheosis. In another century or two, Trotskyists will look much like those millenarian hooligans in seventeenth-century Europe, who falsely believed that the long-awaited return of the Messiah, after so many centuries, was now at hand. When a belief system has been so comprehensively falsified, what rational basis is left for believing in it? You must honestly accept that your belief system is based on nothing more than blind faith and unreasoning hope. How many more years are you prepared to sacrifice to the irrational?
Marxism has failed everywhere it has been tried, not due to ‘difficult objective conditions’, but because economic planning quite simply does not work, and because the ideology necessitates totalitarian suppression of individual freedom. It is a virtual law of politics that Marxism will always lead to this. After almost two centuries of complete failure, I think it is time to give up.
Consider, for example, the ridiculous notion that ordinary people can democratically run society in their own interests, exercising direct control over the economy in the interests of everyone. Did the working-class ever manage to do this anywhere? By the admission of Lenin and Trotsky themselves, the Russian workers and peasants were incapable of doing this, hence the degeneration of that revolution. The working-class have totally failed to meet the expectations that were set for them. German workers and peasants happily sent Jews to the concentration camps, and failed to rise against the Nazi regime during World War Two, despite Trotsky’s predictions to the contrary.
When I was a member of the IMT, we always insisted that the objective conditions were actually better now than they ever have been. The peasantry no longer existed in the developed world, society was now overwhelmingly made up of urban wage-labourers, and the workers were more educated than ever before. Surely this gives up cause for hope? Well, no. In America today, the premier nation of world capitalism, millions upon millions of ordinary, working-class people voted for the racist, sexist, fascist Queens rapist Donald Trump as their President. This is excused by Marxists and other apologists for right-wing populism as being down to ‘economic anxiety’. This can be dismissed very easily. If people voted for Trump because of racism, then that of course is self-evidently evil. If they voted for Trump in spite of his racism and sexism, because they genuinely thought he could ‘fix’ the economy, or simply as a protest against the ‘system’, then they are both stupid and evil. Either way, such a class is utterly degenerate and cannot possibly run society. Let us not even get started on the fact that millions of ordinary working-class people in America and elsewhere in the industrialised West are functionally innumerate and illiterate. These Fox-News consuming, hate-filled, low-IQ troglodytes, who can barely read, write or count, are the last people who can be relied upon to democratically run society. If the USSR, with its educated, trained bureaucrats, could not make the planned economy work, millions of ordinary, ignorant people in America and elsewhere in the developed world are not even going to come close.
It was pointed out by Marx’s contemporary critics that if the workers were really as oppressed and corrupted by capitalism as Marx said they were, they could not possibly be in a position to make a revolution or transform society. What American capitalism, in the form of Trump, Elon Musk, social media, and many other decadent and degenerate individuals and social processes, has wrought on the mind of ordinary people, is destructive enough to make one abandon the very notion of a positive mass transformation of society. The idea that the same people who have loyally supported Trump for years, and are reporting their immigrant neighbours to the Gestapo – sorry, ICE – can be won over to Communism is complete rubbish, just like the idea that pro-Nazi German workers and peasants who sent their Jewish neighbours to the death camps could ever have been won over to the cause of proletarian internationalism, despite all the nonsensical talk of ‘missed opportunities’ for revolution in 1930s Germany. Nazism was defeated not by mass working-class action, but by Western liberal-capitalist regimes in alliance with a totalitarian Stalinist regime which used the workers as slaves. This should give us pause for thought.
Both morally and intellectually, the working-class is incapable of running society and this delusion should be abandoned. A five-minute conversation with the average worker will convince anyone who is not brainwashed of their impoverished cognitive capabilities. There is no rational ‘dialectic’ in the political behaviour of the working-class. Anyone who wants to understand the psychology of the masses should read, not Marx, but Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Le Bon, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Machiavelli, Pareto and other, more clear-eyed scholars of the human underclass. Marx has nothing to offer here but false prophecy, false optimism and unjustified expectations and assumptions. Every single day of their lives, Marx and Engels endured nothing but disappointment and false hope as they observed the political developments on the continent of Europe, and saw one failed rising of the masses after another. Their predictions were routinely falsified without exception. The Russian Revolution, their greatest legacy, is now acknowledged to be one of history’s great disasters, and the state it created collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. What is left of Marxism today? Mere fragments, useful bits and pieces mixed in among the rubbish. The finest scholar of Marxism, Leszek KoĊakowski, has provided what must be the last word on this ideology, and anyone wanting to wean themselves off Marxism should make it their first port of call.
The proletariat cannot overcome the backwardness of human nature. The all-too-human bigotries against which liberalism prides itself in combating have never been annihilated by socialist revolutions, but simply displaced, sublimated and transformed into fresh exercises of bigotry and evil. The Jews of Russia never suffered more than they did during the horrendous Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent civil war, when both Reds and Whites subjected them to pogroms and mass slaughter, destroyed their communities and crushed their independent organisations. Was there more or less racism after the Leninist takeover? I think more. There are many more examples of proletarian degeneracy. Soviet workers and peasants perpetrated mass rape against German working-class women at the end of WW2. British trade union members overwhelmingly supported Enoch Powell in the 1960s. The list goes on. If the working-class is the saviour of humanity, the human race is doomed. A study of twentieth-century history will show that it was the action of ‘bourgeois’ governments, often against the will of the masses, that protected the liberties of vulnerable minorities from a barbarous majority, not revolutionary socialist agitation.
Totalitarianism
Trotskyism is a totalitarian ideology. I don’t care that Trotsky identified himself as an enemy of Stalin and of totalitarian socialism. I care about the consequences of the policies that he adopted when he was in power and continued to defend thereafter, even in exile. This was in fact also the policy of his partner-in-crime, Lenin, from 1917 to 1923. This method of governance led directly to Stalinism. When one accepts that everything Trotsky wrote about this period in Soviet history is nothing more than self-serving mythology, you have entered into the real world. This lengthy post should be your first port of call in educating yourself on this subject. The claim that Stalinism is purely the product of conditions unique to Russia, and has nothing to do with Leninist ideology, should be rejected based on a careful survey of the evidence.
Moreover, Trotskyist organisations are totalitarian regimes in miniature, repressive secret societies which deny their members intellectual and political freedom using bureaucratic and social pressure. They are little different from the sects that Marx and Engels attacked during the 1840s and 1850s – millenarian cults waiting for history to catapult them to power and redeem the human race. They do untold damage to their members psychologically, intellectually and morally. They cover up rape and sexual assault, extort money from their vulnerable supporters, and corrupt unthinking young people into following their poisonous worldview and abandoning reason and common sense. They are utterly undeserving of anyone’s time and energy.
Loss of Culture and Intellectual Capacity
Every minute spent in a Trotskyist cult is time lost that one could spend reading Shakespeare, Kant, Nietzsche, Goethe, or some other profound work of literature and philosophy. Instead, you are forced to read the dreary, intellectually risible works of the ‘great teachers’ who run the organisation. You are made to waste time selling the revolting literature of the organisation – the organisation’s paper, the books and pamphlets, the sacred texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, filled with false prophecies and distortions of reality. Every time you find yourself at the pub singing another tuneless rendition of ‘Solidarity Forever’, remember that life is short and you could have spent that time listening to Mozart, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Schubert or any number of fascinating composers.
Leaving the organisation allowed me to devote serious time and attention to reading and listening to all of these wonderful individuals, who have filled what was a deeply empty hole in my life. I cannot recommend it more to any thinking individual. Also, remind yourself than Lenin and Trotsky never wrote a novel or a play worth reading, never composed an uplifting piece of music, never brought anything beautiful in the world. Lenin wrote only hate-filled filth in monstrous prose, and disparaged the idea of listening to music altogether – Beethoven’s Apassionata apparently made him feel ‘too soft’ and weakened his desire for revolutionary cruelty. Trotsky has only meretricious phrases about the glories of the socialist future, believed in by nobody, and does not seem to have cared for music in the slightest. His ‘Literature and Revolution’ sucks the marrow out of the concept of creative genius, subordinating it to the dictates of revolution. Is it any wonder than Marxist-Leninist Russia was so culturally and intellectually impoverished?
The aesthetic and cultural barrenness of Trotskyism should be evident to anyone who has spent time in the ranks of these organisations. Has it produced any great novelists, philosophers, musicians? (Victor Serge does not count.) No. It has produced only agitprop that barely rises to the level of literature. The Stalinists, funnily enough, have all the great socialist tunes. This, too, is proof that the ‘dialectic of history’, if there is one, is not on the side of Trotskyism. Their greatest work of philosophy is Trotsky’s idiotic ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’. None of the great Soviet writers, as far as I am aware, were Trotskyists.
Loss of Individuality
My favourite writing by Marx and Engels was and is The German Ideology, in which they spell out how a socialist society would allow for a fuller development of the human personality than capitalism, where the dictates of survival force the individual to sell the lion’s share of his time on this earth to a job that takes up most of his energy, and yet, because of the tyranny of specialisation, develops only a portion of his potential. I still sympathise with this critique of capitalism and believe it to be largely correct. Unfortunately, Marx’s solution to this, a socialist planned economy, was monstrous, solving none of the problems they raised and creating more.
Moreover, all Marxist political organisations, whilst paying lip-service to the idea of a world in which a freer individuality will be possible, have exercised the most merciless tyranny on their individual members, completely denying them any meaningful intellectual, cultural or personal development. Certainly, when I joined the IMT, I found myself under enormous pressure to sand down and moderate any quirkiness and conform more with the group. Most normal organisations do not subject their members to such pressure, but Trotskyist cults, with their apparatus of bullying, busybody full-timers and judgemental, bigoted members, definitely do this to a great extent. The only thing these people are interested in is scooping up everything useful to the group out of your soul, and discarding the rest. They exert a parasitical influence over the individual personality, wrenching it this way and that like a sponge, until all the free-flowing liquid of your uniqueness has been drained and sieved away, and the bits which the organisation requires for its purposes alone are preserved. My personal development was assuredly retarded during my membership of this satanic cult.
Leninism, with its ‘barracks socialism’ mentality, is not compatible in the slightest degree with individualism. The morality of Leninism is one that demands the most ruthless intellectual and personal self-abnegation in service to revolution. This is far away from the world of The German Ideology. All the time and energy spent in a group like this is time you are not spending reading new ideas and improving your mind, developing a new talent, spending time with different groups of people and learning from them, or bonding with a romantic partner. No ‘better world’ is worth such monstrous sacrifices. I value my life too much to want to sacrifice it to a political organisation, and I would hope anyone reading this has enough self-esteem that they feel the same way. The fanaticism with which these organisations call upon their members to sacrifice all for the ‘revolution’ is not all too different from that which Islamic terror cells demand from their members – except Trotskyist groups are, thankfully, not carrying out suicide bombings.
There are more reliable defenders of individualism than Marx. Nietzsche, Emerson, Wordsworth and other great thinkers have much to say on the idea of individual genius and the worth of the individual human personality. The individual is something worth celebrating in itself, not simply as an adjunct of a social group. The idea that complete unity can be attained between individual interests and group interests is a delusion of nineteenth-century German pan-Hellenism and its romanticisation of Ancient Greece. (Terry Pinkard’s biography of Hegel provides plenty of confirmation of this thesis.) Such unity is only enforceable through totalitarianism, and even then, it can only ever be an approximation. Wanting to escape oneself and live vicariously through the herd – this is the very height of decadence!
Conclusion
You only have one life! Start living it and abandon this ideology!