[Bulaba Khan Jones]

I'm curious to see if any Stalinists, Trotskyites, or people identifying as something else wouldn't mind weighing in and providing some perspective on this question of mine. I have seen it brought up in various places, mostly on the web, but also in casual conversations about communism and the USSR by Stalinists. To illustrate examples of what I am referring to, here are some articles I've previously read and a few I've recently pulled up to help illuminate and expand resource material for my question:

Antiwar.com

Spoiler: show

Arnold Beichman was next up at bat, with his own nominee: in any discussion of the neocons and their influence, he wants any reference to Leon Trotsky or the influence of Trotskyism to be strictly verboten. Writing in National Review Online, Beichman is outraged at Jeet Heer's National Post piece detailing the Trotskyist roots of leading neocons

Washington Post

Spoiler: show

Polizeros.com

Spoiler: show

What is a NeoCon? Neocon is a neo-conservative who began as anti-Stalinist Trotskyist before moving to the far right in U.S. politics. NeoCons have roots in the Leon Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1970s that movement morphed into anti-communist liberalism. Today the NeoCons are embedded in the imperial right and militarism of the U.S. defense and foreign affairs departments.

Free Republic

Spoiler: show

Trotsky was also a great military leader, and Schwartz finds support for the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik's writings. "Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist," Schwartz notes. "Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don't refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army."

Paul Berman agrees with Schwartz that Trotskyists are by definition internationalists who are willing to go to war when necessary. "The Left Opposition and the non-Communist left comes out of classic socialism, so it's not a pacifist tradition," Berman observes. "It's an internationalist tradition. It has a natural ability to sympathize or feel solidarity for people in places that might strike other Americans or Canadians as extremely remote."

Christopher Phelps, however, doubts these claims of a Trotskyist tradition that would support the war in Iraq. For the Left Opposition, internationalism was not simply about fighting all over the world. "Internationalism meant solidarity with other peoples and not imperialist imposition upon them," Phelps notes.

Though Trotsky was a military leader, Phelps also notes "the Left Opposition had a long history of opposition to imperialist war. They weren't pacifists, but they were against capitalist wars fought by capitalist states. It's true that there is no squeamishness about the application of force when necessary. The question is, is force used on behalf of a class that is trying to create a world with much less violence or is it force used on behalf of a state that is itself the largest purveyor of organized violence in the world? There is a big difference." Seeing the Iraq war as an imperialist adventure, Phelps is confident "Trotsky and Shachtman in the '30s and '40s wouldn't have supported this war."

National Review

Spoiler: show

On June 7, the National Post, a Canadian daily, published a rather amusing article by Jeet Heer, titled “Trotsky’s ghost wandering the White House.”

For example, I have written on the peculiar fact that French ex-prime minister Lionel Jospin is an ex-Trotskyist

And the fact is that many of the original generation of neoconservatives had a background of association with Trotskyism in its Shachtmanite iteration — that is, they belonged to or sympathized with a trend in radical leftism that followed the principle of opposition to the Soviet betrayal of the revolution to its logical end. The Shachtmanites, in the 1960s, joined the AFL-CIO in its best Cold War period, and many became staunch Reaganites.

This path had been pioneered much earlier by two Trotskyists: James Burnham, who became a founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, who worked on Encounter magazine

The second issue at hand involves the actual ex-Trotskyists who engaged with the issue of the Iraqi war. I call this group, to which I belong, the “three-and-a-half international,” which is an obscure reference I won’t explain fully. But I use it to indicate three main individuals: Christopher Hitchens, myself, and the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya

I do want to make it clear that I have no ideological opinion (at least as of yet) on this. I'm not really sure what to believe, and the opinions for neo-conservatives, Stalinists, Trotskyites, and so on differ on the subject. So, I don't necessarily agree with the articles posted, but they have raised questions I cannot reconcile in my mind: a number of prominent Trotskyites appear to have shifted to adopting right wing ideological positions in support of capitalism. I'm having a hard time fathoming how, at the core, a communist ideology like Trotskyism which supported revolutionary communism and, from what I know, was opposed to nationalism or at least encouraged concepts of international communism could wind up with many of its members becoming neo-conservatives.

Why did so many Trotskyites become neo-conservatives? Is this an exaggerated statement? If it's accurate, what the hell happened to them?

[Rich]

in the list of Trotsky's notable followers one name is always missing: Joseph Stalin. Stalin of course hated Trotsky but time and again he followed Trotsky. Stalin initially sought compromise in 1917 and then switched to Trotsky's line. In 1928 Stalin took on Trotsky's economic programme. He switched to Trotsky's policies of seeking anti fascist alliances after the disastrous rise of the Nazis. With his invasion of Finland he moved to the aggressive military expansionism that Trotsky had long argued for. If Trotsky had lived Stalin would have been compelled to extend the Soviet union to include East Germany.

[The Immortal Goon]

Max Shactman, Philip Selznick, Irving Kristol are really the only ones ever cited as being neo-concervative Trotskyists.

Further, they're not great Neo-Conservatives. Max Schactman was never anything but a hard leftist. He broke with Trotsky by going further to the left than Trotsky to a group Trotsky called, "ultraleft circles of petty-bourgeois intelligentsia." That is to say, where Trotsky advocated unconditional support for the Soviet Union, "ultraleft," individuals did not find it worth saving in WWII, especially after the Soviet-Nazi pact.

So, according to the prominent theory that neoconservatives are Trotskyists, Schactman moved to a more utopian left than Trotsky himself and somehow became a conservative by his endorsement of the New Left and the civil rights movement (darlings of conservatives at they time!) before he died. Though it is true some of Schactman's followers did go onto become neo-conservatives. But this is pretty weak tea to say that some students of Schactman (though never Schactman himself) later became neo-conservatives, thus neo-conservatives are tied to Trotsky in anyway whatsoever.

Philip Selznick has a slightly better claim to neo-conservatism, but a far worse claim to Trotsky. He was part of the Young People's Socialist League for only three year. He recounted it as mostly an, "intense intellectual experience." One thing he took from it that he carried away from it was the concept of bureaucracy being a bad thing (Trotsky took this from Lenin). Here the link wasn't far from anyone that opposed bureaucracy. When Shactman and his people broke with Trotsky, Selznick demanded, "the rejection of Bolshevism and of Leninism."

This is a little better match to conservatism in that much later Tea-Baggers and them would argue that the free-market somehow was the opposite of bureaucracy, but as I hope to show why this itself isn't the best connection either.

Kristol is a better conservative, but a worse Trotskyist than the others. He was attracted to a group of Schactmanites largely for their anti-soviet feeling. This, of course, already separated him far from Trotsky and even pretty far from Max Shactman who was an ultra leftist in his rejection of the Soviet Union, while Kristol was pretty much just against the Soviet Union. He was deeply against the civil rights movement and New Left (separating him from Schactman even further) but for the New Deal and government expansion into certain areas (separating him from Selznick). When allying with Harringtonists for the expansion of New Deal-like programs, Michael Harrington described what he thought was a slur against Kristol as a, "neo-conservative." Kristol picked it up and ran with the idea of a conservative expansion of government and whatnot, based on Reaganomics and the expansion of capitalism.

Alright, so these are the three that are always brought up as the Trotskyists turned Neo-Conservatives. One of them was a Trotskyist for a bit, one was actually a neo-conservitive. They all would violently disagree with each other. So what do they all have in common?

They're Jews. And that's all that really matters, because this theory that neo-conservatism is a Trotskyist thing comes from state-rights Republicans that have a Confederate bend and don't like the big bad Union, something neo-conservatives are more willing to accept. Other things they don't like are big cities and Jews. Since the Civil Rights Movement was accepted in the US, these kinds of Conservatives had to back off and put things into a more libertarian rhetoric. Note this is not saying all libertarians believe this, but that these kinds of Conservatives put their traditional platform into libertarian forms:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*****, N*****, N*****." By 1968 you can't say "N*****" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*****, N*****."

So by 1980 you have the Southern Strategy marries these rather racist former Dixiecrats and social conservatives with Eisenhower "establishment" Republicans. It really only works for Nixon and Reagan, falling apart when an Establishment Republican like Bush (the first) comes into office and alienates the former Dixiecrats. They compromise on Bush II later, but things are already falling apart by that point in the party.

Enter Pat Buchanan, who gives the opening salvo in the Republican civil war that continues today. He lists the charges leveled against him for his anti-semitism, though tellingly alludes to Jews not being able to be completely dependable Americans because of their ethnicity (he is too shrewd to come out and say this directly of course):

The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers … that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”

Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.

Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. … Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London … one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”

Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of … Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”

Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:

The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.

He goes on to define his enemies:

Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.

A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.

Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).

All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.

Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.

...For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?

Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.

Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America...What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.

And then goes onto basically give his version of the summary that I gave before I started quoting his article:

The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and reputation of Israel.

Right down the smokestack.

Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, in late February,

So they come to blows and all this history comes back as the Dixiecrats and Establishment begin to fight.

Just to be fair, this isn't just a hardcore right movement. One of Clinton's advisors (himself Jewish) was pretty happy to use this kind of rhetoric to connect Neo-Conservatism to a Jewish conspiracy:

As a generation of prospective intellectuals in the 1930s, they came to Marxism already steeped in the disputatious heritage of the Talmud. In the alcoves of the City College of New York, they learned the political value of universal principles, the dynamic movement of history, and the crucial role of the vanguard. Even within the left-wing movement, the future neoconservatives occupied a special place of alienation. Most were Trotskyists, followers of Leon Trotsky...

And what better fountainhead for the Jew conspiracy than Leon Trotsky? You'll note that Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and all sorts of other presidents that expanded federal the federal role in the US and US presence abroad are exempted from the status of the insidious Jew conspiracy that Trotsky is head of.

Now, as Buchanan and Blumenthal (obviously) would agree, there are good Jews and bad Jews. They probably both took a page from Churchill's own problematic relationship with Jews:

First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, "I am an English man practising the Jewish faith." This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the "National Jews" in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.

The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honorable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organizations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholder of friendship with France and Great Britain.

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century...

...There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

And certainly this is a good fit for the conservative of the United States. It's similar rhetoric that both Blumenthal and Buchanan use to give the idea of a shadowy conspiracy that's afoot with their opponents. Blumenthal is a good Jew working for the United States, while shadowy Jewish cabals in New York work under the direction of the Talmud and the ghost of Bad Jew Trotsky try to undermine the United States. Buchanan needs to defend his party from the Bad Jews that have an international outlook, and break Jews of an identity other than that of their home country to stop them from puppeteering the goyim into killing each other.

I'm obviously underlying their arguments to make a point, but the point is that the three fathers of neo-conservatism exclude gentiles and pretty much focus on Jews, even if they didn't have much to do with the movement at all. Doing this preys less on overt anti-semitism (which most people are too smart to fall into) but the issues that anti-semitism was historically used to reinforce in politics. Including, but limited to, the fear of a secret cabal somewhere, an international puppet master, a foreign element that doesn't have the country's interest at heart, and so on and so forth.

The idea that neo-conservatives are Trotskyists accomplish all of this, even if the accusation falls apart the moment it is examined in any detail. It's not unlike Karl Rove saying that Hillary Clinton has brain damage, and then backing up off of the accusation the moment he's questioned about it. All that was needed was putting the idea out there, even if there was nothing to it at all.

As such, the issue is often inverted: Trotskyists now become neo-conservatives. This has never really happened. As shown above, even those with a vague association with Trotskyists violently break with them, and there is actually no ideological consistency with any of these "founding fathers," aside from the idea that they have, "forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world," and become Bad Jews in the minds of the thesis.

[Rei Murasame]

Also, here is an article in which an extremely angry Leon Trotsky himself decides to spit specifically in the eye of Burnham and Shachtman, and specifically in the eye of anyone who dared to call themselves a geopolitical 'Third camp' in the context of the war that was going on at the time. He asks them quite simply, 'what the fuck is that?' He is so upset with it that he refuses to even mention it without enclosing it in quotation marks. Because it was a complete mess (as you can see from the incoherence of these supposed 'camps'), and Trotsky explains why.

Here:

The discussion in the Socialist Workers Party of the United States was thorough and democratic. The preparations for the convention were carried out with absolute loyalty. The minority participated in the convention, recognizing thereby its legality and authoritativeness. The majority offered the minority all the necessary guarantees permitting it to conduct a struggle for its own views after the convention. The minority demanded a license to appeal to the masses over the head of the party. The majority naturally rejected this monstrous pretension. Meanwhile, behind the back of the party the minority indulged in shady machinations and appropriated the New International which had been published through the efforts of the entire party and of the Fourth International. I should add that the majority had agreed to assign the minority two posts out of the five on the editorial board of this theoretical organ. But how can an intellectual “aristocracy” remain the minority in a workers’ party? To place a professor on equal plane with a worker – after all, that’s “bureaucratic conservatism”!

In his recent polemical article against me, Burnham explained that socialism is a “moral ideal.” To be sure, this is not so very new. At the opening of the last century, morality served as the basis for the “True German Socialism” which Marx and Engels criticized at the very beginning of their activity. At the beginning of our century, the Russian Social Revolutionaries counterpoised the “moral ideal” to materialistic socialism. Sad to say, these bearers of morality turned out to be common swindlers in the field of politics. In 1917 they betrayed the workers completely into the hands of the bourgeoisie and foreign imperialism.

Long political experience has taught me that whenever a petty-bourgeois professor or journalist begins talking about high moral standards it is necessary to keep a firm hand on one’s pocketbook. It happened this time, too. In the name of a “moral ideal” a petty-bourgeois intellectual has picked the proletarian party’s pocket of its theoretical organ. Here you have a tiny living example of the organizational methods of these innovators, moralists and champions of democracy.

What is party democracy in the eyes of an “educated” petty bourgeois? A regime which permits him to say and write whatever he pleases. What is “bureaucratism” in the eyes of an “educated” petty bourgeois? A regime in which the proletarian majority enforces by democratic methods its decisions and discipline. Workers, bear this firmly in mind!

The petty-bourgeois minority of the SWP split from the proletarian majority on the basis of a struggle against revolutionary Marxism. Burnham proclaimed dialectic materialism to be incompatible with his motheaten “science.” Shachtman proclaimed revolutionary Marxism to be of no moment from the standpoint of “practical tasks.” Abern hastened to hook up his little booth with the anti-Marxist bloc. And now these gentlemen label the magazine they filched from the party an “organ of revolutionary Marxism.” What is this, if not ideological charlatanism? Let the readers demand of these editors that they publish the sole programmatic work of the minority, namely, Burnham’s article, Science and Style. If the editors were not preparing to emulate a peddler who markets rotten merchandise under fancy labels, they would themselves have felt obliged to publish this article. Everybody could then see for himself just what kind of “revolutionary Marxism” is involved here, But they will not dare do so. They are ashamed to show their true faces. Burnham is skilled at hiding his all too revealing articles and resolutions in his briefcase, while Shachtman has made a profession of serving as an attorney for other people’s views through lack of any views of his own.

The very first “programmatic” articles of the purloined organ already reveal completely the light-mindedness and hollowness of this new anti-Marxist grouping which appears under the label of the “Third Camp.” What is this animal? There is the camp of capitalism; there is the camp of the proletariat. But is there perhaps a “third camp” – a petty-bourgeois sanctuary? In the nature of things, it is nothing else. But, as always, the petty bourgeois camouflages his “camp” with the paper flowers of rhetoric. Let us lend our ears! Here is one camp: France and England. There’s another camp: Hitler and Stalin. And a third camp: Burnham, with Shachtman. The Fourth International turns out for them to be in Hitler’s camp (Stalin made this 'discovery' long ago). And so, a new great slogan: Muddlers and pacifists of the world, all ye suffering from the pin-pricks of fate, rally to the “third” camp!

But the whole trouble is that two warring camps do not at all exhaust the bourgeois world. What about all the neutral and semi-neutral countries? What about the United States? Where should Italy and Japan be assigned? The Scandinavian countries? India? China? We have in mind not the revolutionary Indian or Chinese workers but rather India and China as oppressed countries. The schoolboy schema of the three camps leaves out a trifling detail: the colonial world, the greater portion of mankind!

India is participating in the imperialist war on the side of Great Britain. Does this mean that our attitude toward India – not the Indian Bolsheviks but India – is the same as toward Great Britain? If there exist in this world, in addition to Shachtman and Burnham, only two imperialist camps, then where, permit me to ask, shall we put India? A Marxist will say that despite India’s being an integral part of the British Empire and India’s participating in the imperialist war; despite the perfidious policy of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, our attitude toward India is altogether different from our attitude toward England. We defend India against England. Why then cannot our attitude toward the Soviet Union be different from our attitude toward Germany despite the fact that Stalin is allied with Hitler? Why can’t we defend the more progressive social forms which are capable of development against reactionary forms which are capable only of decomposition? We not only can but we must. The theoreticians of the stolen magazine replace class analysis with a mechanistic construction very captivating to petty-bourgeois intellectuals because of its pseudo-symmetry. Just as the Stalinists camouflage their subservience to national socialism (the Nazis) with harsh epithets addressed to the imperialist democracies, so Shachtman and Co. cover up their capitulation to American petty-bourgeois public opinion with the pompous phraseology of the “third camp.” As if this “third camp” (what is it? a party? a club? a League of Abandoned Hopes? a “People’s Front”?) is free from the obligation of having a correct policy toward the petty bourgeoisie, the trade unions, India and the USSR!

Only the other day Shachtman referred to himself in the press as a “Trotskyist.” If this be Trotskyism then I at least am no Trotskyist. With the present ideas of Shachtman, not to mention Burnham, I have nothing in common. I used to collaborate actively with the New International, protesting in letters against Shachtman’s frivolous attitude toward theory and his unprincipled concessions to Burnham, the strutting petty-bourgeois pedant. But at the time both Burnham and Shachtman were kept in check by the party and the International. Today the pressure of petty-bourgeois democracy has unbridled them. Toward their new magazine my attitude can only be the same as toward all other petty-bourgeois counterfeits of Marxism. As for their “organizational methods” and political “morality,” these evoke in me nothing but contempt.

Had conscious agents of the class enemy operated through Shachtman, they could not have advised him to do anything different from what he himself has perpetrated. He united with anti-Marxists to wage a struggle against Marxism. He helped fuse together a petty-bourgeois faction against the workers. He refrained from utilizing internal party democracy and from making an honest effort to convince the proletarian majority. He engineered a split under the conditions of a world war. To crown it all, he threw over this split the veil of a petty and dirty scandal, which seems especially designed to provide our enemies with ammunition. Such are these “democrats,” such are their “morals”!

But all this will prove of no avail. They are bankrupt. Despite the betrayals of unstable intellectuals and the cheap gibes of all their democratic cousins, the Fourth International will march forward on its road, creating and educating a genuine selection of proletarian revolutionists capable of understanding what the party is, what loyalty to the banner means, and what revolutionary discipline signifies.

Advanced workers! Not one cent’s worth of confidence in the “third front” of the petty bourgeoisie!

April 23, 1940

It's an interesting piece of history. Also, pretty harsh.

[Gletkin]

Abrasiveness does seem to be a prerequisite of Marxist polemics.

[The Immortal Goon]

Nice catch, Rei.

It does a good job underlining how hard it is to call these Neo-Conservitives Trotskyist.

[Crantag]

I'm not really qualified to comment on this question.

But, it does remind me of something. I spent some time studying Trotsky. I consider him an inspiration.

When I was studying him, I remember a guy here in Japan telling me of a Japanese writer, who compares the American policy in Vietnam to Trotskyism.

I insisted that this was the opposite of Trotskyism. The American action was counter-revolution.

Not that the Vietnamese were engaged in overt warfare, I don't think, toward the establishment of communist internationalism.

However, the American action against Vietnam is sort of proof of the seriousness which the American power bearers ascribed to such a potentiality.

I wonder whether herein lies the answer. Perhaps these neocons are trying to be on the opposite side of the international revolution.

Trotsky was quite clear, in that the counter-revolutionary structures in the imperialist/capitalist heartlands are too powerful as to warrant much likelihood of popular revolution occurring there. There are also other reasons that weigh against it.

Trotsky emphasized revolution occurring in the 'underdeveloped' world, and the exploited countries banding together to eventually throw off the influence of the imperialist aggressors, by way of mutual aid and mutual assistance.

He also emphasized the potential great success of central planning in the way of rapid economic growth for 'backward' countries, with the experience of post-WW1 Soviet Union representing a legitimate example, of which he was directly a part.

So, this is just my outlook, but while I do not find it surprising that the Neo Cons have learned from Trotsky, I do not think they are ones who Trotsky would ever associate with. I think they are on the opposite side of what he stood for.

[annatar1914]

I always thought that more 'Neo-Conservatives' owed more to Leo Strauss than to Mr. Lev Bronstein in their political philosophy?

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Thank you all for your responses, particularly TIG and Rei for providing a plethora of reading material on this question. Although I'm sure Stalinists and others might disagree and perhaps point to other sources of literature, what you both have provided and linked to had helped put this question into perspective (I've been meaning to post a reply thanking you both, but I've been a little sidetracked with other things).

[Rei Murasame]

Indeed. Strauss is the strongest element in Neo-conservatism. And ultimately, Straussian thought always created a giant vacuum of nothingness which must eventually be filled, because it is codified cynicism. See here:

In probably his most widely quoted comment — his equivalent of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame — Mr. Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.”

It was a description that summarized his experience in the 1960s, along with that of friends and associates like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New Deal Democrats all, they were social scientists who found themselves questioning many of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society ideas.

[...]

And the two major intellectual influences on him, he said, were Lionel Trilling, “a skeptical liberal,” and Leo Strauss, “a skeptical conservative.”

“Ever since I can remember,” he said in summing himself up, “I’ve been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative and, in religion, always a neo-orthodox, even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I’m going to end up a neo. Just neo, that’s all. Neo-dash-nothing.”

And:

[...]Strauss was also influenced by the intellectual battles being waged in Germany at the turn of the century. The Methodenstreit that was taking place amongst economists was also occurring amongst historians and philosophers, and it resulted in a series of conceptual dichotomies that would appear throughout Strauss’s later writings. His trio of bêtes noires (positivism, relativism, and historicism) was at the heart of the conflicts about methodology in Germany, and the outcome of these debates set the terms of critique for Strauss’s youth and beyond.

Finally, there was the political situation in Germany, especially after the disastrous end of World War I. The attractions of fascism to someone like Strauss, whose early inclinations were in a more social-democratic direction, would have been obvious, given the instability of Weimar. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that Strauss’s admiration for Mussolini outlasted the mid-1930s. Instead, the lesson that Strauss took from the fall of the Weimar government and the rise of Hitler and National Socialism was that liberalism was not capable of withstanding the onslaught of historicism, positivism, and moral relativism without solid quasi-religious and quasi-mythical foundations—and that he would be the one to provide those [foundations which could uphold liberalism]. Gottfried is certainly correct in arguing that for Strauss and his acolytes it is always September 1938 and we are always in Munich.[...]

This is also why 'Neoconservatism' is 'muscular liberalism' (obviously) and ultimately could give way to something else, it simply should not last. Once it actually wins against something, it too should ultimately be sublated if people want it to be.

Why? Because out of all of those things listed, absolute historicism - the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought - is the one weapon which liberalism has no way of fighting against, nor can it develop a way of fighting against it. In fact, as Antonio Gramsci demonstrated in his now-infamous argument against Benedetto Croce, liberalism itself creates the ground on which absolute historicism emerges through the sublation of liberal thought.

See here:

Against Croce’s claim to have ‘attempted “to expel” from the field of philosophy every residue of theology and metaphysics to the point of negating any philosophical “system”’, Gramsci argues that his thought remains essentially speculative and within the problematic of theology and metaphysics: ‘every claim of “historicism” is empty, because it is a case of speculative “historicism”, of the “concept” of history and not of history’ (Q 8, §224; cf. Q 10.I, §8). Although Croce had indeed argued that philosophy progresses by solving problems presented to it by historical development, and not in terms of a closed sphere of thought (Q 10.I, §4), he still wished to maintain a qualitative distinction between philosophy, understood as a disinterested search for truth, and ideologies, which he reduced to mere instruments of political action (Q 10.II, §2). Certainly, for Croce also, historical thought is the ‘only and integral form of knowledge’ (1938, 56), which constitutes an absolute historicism in the sense of a unity of philosophy and history. However, he only went ‘half way’, because he ‘takes the categories of Spirit out of this historicity’ (Roth 1972, 68).

Gramsci, on the other hand, in one of the richest passages of the Prison Notebooks, describes the distinction between philosophy and ideology as a quantitative one, related to the level of social, political and historical coherence (in the specific sense this word has for Gramsci; cf. Haug 1996, 21 et sqq., 61) of conceptions of the world. ‘Ideology is any particular conception of groups internal to the class’ which are directed to the resolution of immediate problems. Philosophy, on the other hand, in the positive sense with which Gramsci uses it in this passage, is a conception of the world which tends to raise the level of awareness of historical determination and increase the capacity to act of an entire social class, ‘not only in its current and immediate interests . . . but also in its future and mediated [interests]’ (Q 10.I, §10; Q 10.II, §31). The introduction of the third term of ‘politics’ to the equation ‘history = philosophy’ thus allows Gramsci to think both the extent to which the present is not identical with itself, but rather, is fractured by residual form actions of the past and emergent formations directed towards new social practices, and also the means by which the philosophy of praxis’ acknowledgement of its own determination increases its ability to contribute to social transformation.

It is in the context of these developing critiques that the expression ‘absolute historicism’ appears for the first time in the first note entitled ‘An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy’: ‘Transcendence, immanence, absolute historicism. Meaning and importance of the history of philosophy’ (Q 8, §204). It emerges as a ‘sublation [superamento] of a prior mode of thinking’ (Q 8, §220), produced by appropriating an expression used by Croce and, in an act of immanent critique, attempting to give it a level of conceptual consistency which Croce had failed to achieve. The essentially critical nature of the term, and critical value of the adjective ‘absolute’ in particular, is underlined by the two alternative lines of affiliation sketched out in ‘Introduction to the Study of Philosophy’ (Q 8, §235) (‘Beyond the series “transcendence, theology, speculation – speculative philosophy”, the other series “transcendence, immanence, speculative historicism – philosophy of praxis”’) and the reformulation of absolute historicism as ‘realistic historicism’, in opposition to ‘speculative historicism’ (Q 10.I, ‘Introduction’; cf. Q 10.I, §11; Q 10.II, §6ii) and to ‘abstract or speculative “absolute philosophy”’ (Q 10.II, §31).

The critique of the failings and contradictions of Croce’s version of absolute historicism continues throughout Notebooks 8 and 10, particularly in terms of the critique of speculation, and the suggestion that the philosophy of praxis contains a new notion of immanence – touchstones to which Gramsci constantly returns, and which are central to the development of the status of ‘theory’ within the philosophy of praxis (Q 4, §17; Q 8, §238; Q 11, §63), in which the critique of speculation is linked to the question of hegemony (Q 10.I, §8; Q 10.II, §9; Q 11, §24; Q 11, §28; cf. Boothman 1991, 62–4; Frosini 2003, 143–9).

The most significant conceptual development, however, consists in Gramsci’s synthesis of the terms of his critique of Croce with his renewed attempt to refute the tradition of metaphysical materialism within Marxism. The expression ‘absolute historicism’, one of the spoils of victory of Gramsci’s clash with Croce, is now reforged into a genuinely new concept in Gramsci’s dialectical workshop, coordinating and summarising his many sided attack upon Bukharin’s ‘upside-down idealism’ (Q 11, §14; SPN 437).

[...]

For Gramsci, it is essential to comprehend the concept of matter in a realistic and historical sense – that is, not as an a-historical metaphysical category, but as ‘socially and historically organised for production; consequently, natural science should be seen as essentially an historical category, a human relation’ (Q 11, §30; SPN 465–6).

Gramsci’s declaration that ‘it has been forgotten that in the case of a very common expression one should put the accent on the first term – “historical” – and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin’ should thus be understood strictly and literally: as an ‘absolute “historicism”’, an ‘absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history’ (Q 11, §27; SPN 465), the philosophy of praxis can explain, overcome and incorporate, rather than merely dismiss, the contradictions of metaphysical materialism, just as it resolves the aporiai of speculative, idealist forms of historicism. It is able to ‘translate’ them into a realistic and historical register – and this ‘translation’ between ‘different philosophical and scientific languages’ and ‘different phases of civilisation’ is ‘organic and profound’ ‘only in the philosophy of praxis’ (Q 11, §47).

As the philosophy of praxis possesses a con cept of theory (Q 11, §45) which acknowledges that thought, and the systems of thought known as philosophy, are practices directed to the resolution of determinant problems in determinant historical conjunctures or ‘historical blocs’, it is able to provide an account of the emergence, consolidation, political efficacy and decomposition of these doctrines.

Gramsci acknowledges that the alternative to the metaphysical guarantee offered by Bukharin, namely, ‘to think of a philosophical affirmation as true in a particular historical period (that is, as the necessary and inseparable expression of a particular historical action, of a particular praxis) but as superseded and rendered “vain” in a succeeding period, without however falling into scepticism and moral and ideological relativism, in other words to see philosophy as historicity, is quite an arduous and difficult mental operation’ (Q 11, §14; SPN 436). He nevertheless insists that such an understanding is implicit in the philosophy of praxis, and, crucially, politically enabling.

In distinction to all previous historicisms, the philosophy of praxis’ equation of history, philosophy and politics enables it to comprehend not only the historicity of other thought forms, but also, ‘to explain and justify historically itself as well’ (Q 16, §9; SPN 399) ‘as the result and crowning point’ (Q 15, §61; SPN 417), or ‘the maximum historicism’ (Q 16, §9), of the entire historical-philosophical-political sequence which descends from the nexus of the French Revolution and German idealism. Thus, although the philosophy of praxis, like all thought forms, must ‘hold itself to be “exact” and “true” and struggle against other forms of thought’, it alone is able to do this ‘critically’ (Q 11, §45). It does this by acknowledging itself as an historical product of the dynamic of class society which, as an integral element of these contradictions, seeks to resolve them immanently, positing itself ‘as an element of the contradiction’ and elevating ‘this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action’ (Q 11, §62; SPN 405). [...]

Seriously a good article, having to partially quote it and place highlighting on it is not something I enjoy doing, because I would actually prefer that everyone were to read the whole thing, and to have an understanding of all the different people mentioned in it.

In the end, there is always a chance to overturn the world from within the same world, and that's Gramsci's message in its most oversimplified and boiled down form. Some may say, 'perhaps only a chance in hell'. But in my understanding, there is always a chance in hell.

[Rich]

Gottfried is certainly correct in arguing that for Strauss and his acolytes it is always September 1938 and we are always in Munich.[...]

What idiots. Chamberlain's choice was essentially the right one. It would have been stupid for Britain and France to have gone to war over the Sudetenland.

[annatar1914]

What idiots. Chamberlain's choice was essentially the right one. It would have been stupid for Britain and France to have gone to war over the Sudetenland.

Yes, I agree.

Hitler seemed to think that he had been hoodwinked by Chamberlain later on, and he felt he would've rather begun WWII with Czechoslovakia than with Poland. Chamberlain gained Britain another year to prepare and re-arm for war. Sometimes 'appeasement' is anything but.

But then again, neo-conservatives never were very good at history.

[Technology]

I wonder if the late Hitchens being an (ambiguously ex-)trotskyite while putting so much high profile controversial support behind the big neo-con project of the Iraq War helped to solidify the apparent association.

[slybaldguy]

Trotskyism is a universalist doctrine. People generally move to the right as they gain life experience. Most trotskyites renounce socialism as they mature; while maintaining a universalist outlook. Neoconservatism, as a universalist doctrine, is therefore appealing to such types.