In many ways it's even worse than this. The Marcyites, like all Trots, view the AES (actually existing socialism) world as fundamentally illegitimate. They may use the pretense of these "degenerate workers states" as a basis of some form of anti-Imperialism (at least in relation to the Imperial Core) but they have no interest in launching any kind of copasetic movement to achieve a proletarian dictatorship outside of their project within the Imperial Core.
This is called "defensism": appearing to defend AES projects whilst secretly undermining them and heightening the contradictions for the "real" and "true" revolution inside of the west.
This is the consequence of Trotsky, who demanded that the western industrialized powers lead the revolution while also demanding that revolution also occur again in the USSR.
This thought system leads to all kinds of new frontiers of eschatological predictions. All of it boils down to accelerations from within the Imperial Core. Any aspect of derailing a spontaneous and organic proletarian movement from a Marxist-Leninist engine is therefore bad. We can, and should, as Trotskyists, sabotage these movements from within while simultaneously sharpening all contradictions from within the body politic (usually the DNC).
Fascism as a result of the contradictions within the Imperial Core is good, and this is simply a realization of the original contradiction Marx proposed. In other words, barbarism is tolerable as long as it produces the underlying revolution they so desperately crave to come from within the "global north".
This is completely unknown to the rank and file. The leadership operates like the damn Scientologists, you need to be a 9th level Thetan to be given this knowledge. Instead, the average member is never told much of Leon Trotsky or his machinations. It's bog standard "Leninism" and red flags and university students who really want to piss off their boomer Republican parents. It piggybacks off of Bircher red scare propaganda demonizing Stalin.
Agitprop reified from 1917 slogans and bad historical oversimplifications appears everywhere. So many otherwise intelligent and well meaning people fall into the effective Bolshevik larp like fanaticism. Because their radicalism is limited in the aggregate to a few years in their early twenties, the Trots achieve their ultimate aim through adventurism, sloganeering, and appeals to pathos and emotive psychology through the false pretense of revolutionary language and logic. The wet blanket approach. The jouissance of big terms, big thinking, PMC (professional managerial class) axiomatic processes, and bureaucratic logistics.
Many many Trots I have known, over drinks and after some long conversations, have revealed similar eschatologies to me over the last 40 years. They are so high on their own supply they break over the most nuanced of differences in perceptions and party programs, etc. In many ways this deep pathology of knowing that the object of the process is complete futility allows for the over the top attitudes, adventurist mentalities, and personal individual egos to thrive.
Another way to put it: let's get drunk at the big party, at least we can act it out. That's why there are more left Trot orgs than there are elements in the periodic table. They split as a matter of individualized particularities down to the simplest deviation of opinion.
Imagine arguing endlessly about whether the USSR was a DWS (Degenerated Workers' State) or if it was never socialism at all in the first place, but this is the reality of the difference between Cannon, Healy, North, Grant, Taaffe, Woods, Pablo, Mandel, Cliff, Marcy, Robertson, Shachtman, Mendel, and Moreno. There are many many more, these are just the major org henchmen.
But make no mistake, they all align on the theory that anything that accelerates the "true" revolution is a good thing. The right wing trots are much more cohesive and focused (the Neocons) and don't have as many atomization problems, and they have just resorted to claiming finance capital is as good an engine as any to get them to the finish line - and to do it completely openly. Therefore they are successful and have real institutional power.
Meanwhile the reality is that revolutions have occurred, the AES world is the real movement of socialism in world history, and simple appearances and forms align perfectly with essences. These kinds of gnostic heresies and demiurgical paradoxes are simply the projections of bourgeois reality and are the quintessential example of anti-Communism.
Why does all of this pathology have such a strong grip in the western urban Imperial Core and amongst the literal inheritors of the "upper middle class" in the universities? It's because the underlying contradiction is simply the class politics of an urban menial service class, whose interests more or less directly coincide with the ruling elite, who want to accelerate finance capital to its final conclusion so they can be the true inheritors of the legacy of Marx and Engels. They can lead the real final "revolution" and have their cake and eat it too.
Stated simply: the global liberal universalized version of bourgeois socialism and unproductive rentier fascism.
Originally published on x.com.
