Some of you (you know who you are) may be semi-amused by the referenced article below. Back in the day when I was a Trotskyist, I was wounded when I read about James Burnham and his apostasy from the Socialist Workers' Party & his espousal of technocratic capitalism in the wake of his new-fangled theory of managerial capitalism. I guess I had the notion that exposure to Trotskyist ideas was not only an inoculation against Stalinism & Stalinist turncoatism a la Whitaker Chambers, but also against reactionary politics in general. I was realistic enough to know that some Trotskyists might turn away and become mere liberals--a distinction without much difference for our more sectarian comrades, but still...(Um, I should note here for the benefit of those who may not be up on the finer points of left wing splinter group politics that the Socialist Workers Party was the major Trotskyist organization in the U.S. from the 30's onwards. The SWP was a
split from the Communist Party after the conflict between the follower's of Trotsky's ideas and the followers of Stalin's "ideas" erupted into open intra-Party warfare. As CPers I knew never tired of reminding me, Trotsky lost. Some of them liked to make jokes about pick axes that I thought were in poor taste.)
Sadly, I was wrong. Burnham, for example, went on to become an important contributor of Buckley's rag, *National Review* & was regarded by Buckley as the the conservative movement's leading intellectual at the time. Wikipedia notes that some regard Burnham as a founding father of neoconservativism.
And before I was a Trotskyist, I was an adherent of the Young People's Socialist League, i.e. a YPSLer, the youth section of the the Socialist Party U.S.A.--the party of Norman Thomas. (Also, referenced in the article below.) As a YPSLer, I regarded myself as a kind of American Fabian socialist, a position rather disdained by those in YPSL who were more Marxist in orientation.
In fact, I believe I had a tendency to think of bringing socialism to the U.S. by a kind of stealth operation--much the way the Eagle Forum has tried to bring creationism and religious education to public schools by means of stealth candidates for school board and the like. (Even die-hard Stalinists want the masses to consciously believe the stuff they are trying to promote--me, at the time--I tended not to care--I just wanted the masses to accept passively what I thought was good for them...) So, becoming a Trotskyist was actually a move toward a more democratic outlook. In any case, my views at that time were based on a complete misunderstanding of the British Fabian orientation. They weren't trying to fool anybody--they just wanted to downplay the significance of labels and party affiliation and get to, you know, substance.)
In any case, as the article notes, both YPSL and the Socialist Party U.S.A were the beneficiaries of a split in the Socialist Workers' Party between the majority faction led by James Cannon and a minority faction led by Max Schactman. Schactman and many of his followers wound up leaving the SWP and many did join the Socialist Party U.S.A. and/or YPSL. (Schactman differed from the the majority Trotskyist position in that he believed that the Soviet setup was not a "degenerated workers' state" but an altogether new and reactionary formation that he described as "bureaucratic collectivism" and as such was actually inferior to bourgeois democratic capitalism. You can see where that's headed: not only toward systematic right wing anti-Communism, but also the anti-Soviet stance of "cold war liberalism.")
It is true that many of the figures who passed first through Trotskyism and then became Schactmanites ultimately did become some form of conservative. And so did some who skipped the Schactmanite stage. To me, that raises an interesting question. It seems that secular intellectual conservatives do not have much of an intellectual matrix of their own in which to incubate. It's only after exposure to the relatively holistic & global & philosophical kind of thinking one can find in Marxism that they were capable of developing a more or less systematic conservative worldview. (Other secular philosophical views, such as they might be, did not have any determinated political effects or else were hostile to the kind of "totalizing" thought found in Marxism.) My point is that perhaps Trotskyism did supply a disproportionate number of conservative and neoconservative intellectual "turncoats"--but that's merely because they came out of a tradition of
systematic political thought. Orthodox Communists (aka Stalinists) perhaps did not produce as proportionately many conservative intellectuals because they were a tribe of "vulgar" Marxists not as given to systematic thought in the first place.
There emanates from Raimondo's article, cited below, a very faint odor of some kind of conspiracy theory--or maybe better put, an insinuation that Trotskyism somehow is especially morally tainted and prone to generating neoconservative warmongers such as those foreign policy advisors surrounding Romney at present. Well, however many of those folks who may have been Trotskyists in their youth (Irving Kristol and Wolfowitz), they sure as hell aren't now. And erstwhile Trotskyists I have known ran the gamut from being anarchist libertarians to continuing on in Trotskyism, to taking up plain old liberalism, to, in one case, a Tory admirer of Maggie Thatcher and Sarah Palin who also very much dislikes Mitt Romney. I can even imagine that Raimondo has become slightly possessed of that old timey Stalinist spirit that used to lead to cries of "Trotskyite wrecker"
It should be noted that Russ T., who forwarded the link to the article to me, *is* an erstwhile Trotskyist & that his comments are tongue-in-cheek--perhaps with a wistful undertone of *if only it were so*--that is, that these fellows indeed really were Trotskyists, hellbent on a secret agenda of "permanent revolution."
(It was once suggested to me that perhaps George W. Bush was recruited to the Young Socialist Alias (youth section of the *Socialist Workers' Party* while at Yale. A Trotskyist who happened to be in on that conversation said, nah, that would be something that the Progressive Labor Party would do. Progressive Labor was the party with the Maoist franchise at the time. They *were* in fact, given to stealth tactics.)
But be that as it may, the Dark Knight and Avatar of the True Neoconservative spirit, Dick Cheney--he sure didn't need no stinkin' Trotsky--or Mao--to be who *he* is...
R.
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/
----- Forwarded Message -----
>From: "Russtea
>To: roygg9@yahoo.com
>Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 4:29 PM
>Subject: Trotskyites for Romney
>
>
>
>Finally Comrades, we are sooo close to taking power.....
>
>Click here: Trotskyites for Romney by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com
>
>
