The dead Left: Trotskyism

The Platypus Historians Group

“One cannot separate the ability to know the world from the ability to change it, and our capacity to change the world is on a very small scale compared to the heroic days of the Communist International.”

—James Robertson, founder of the Spartacist League (U.S.), “In Defense of Democratic Centralism” (1973)

Zombies and Sectarians

What does it mean to say, as Platypus does, that “the Left is Dead?”

It represents the desire for a tabula rasa, for a start from scratch. It is the admission that there is no living tradition, no movement to join in the Marxist Left; That it has been defeated and that it has self-destructed. It means that the Maoisms and Trotskyisms that today stumble around like zombies in the form of tiny sectarian groups have either given themselves to dishonestly cheerleading for the Green and Democratic parties or simply have become antiquarian societies reciting old revolutionary pieties with the mechanical enthusiasm of Hare-Krishna monks; While at the same time the “radicals” and “anarchists” that prescribe dropping out of society by building “alternative communities” “outside of capitalism” have rationalized their powerlessness into a lifestyle that poses as politics.

The Left is dead—and whatever undead elements of it continue to stagger among us deserve to be put down before they demoralize and stupefy a new generation.

But it must be said: calling for the end of a previous model of Leftist politics is nothing new. Both the “down with the old, in with the new” and the “return to fundamentals” move is familiar on the Left. Examples of this abound in academia—but also in the militant Left, with examples such as the rejection of Soviet Marxism that characterized the New Left of the 1960s and the “return to Lenin” or “return to Marx” theories of Western Maoist groups in the same era. Also, worst of all, from the false sense of “emancipation” and “freedom from the past” that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “death of communism” gave to most on the self-described Left—a sense of triumphalism that is still with us.

For a Left that has gone from its death agony to its rigor mortis while fighting the good fight, the wish to escape the past has meant the willingness to repeat its mistakes; either by the unreflective disowning of past failures (e.g., New Left anti-communism) or simply by tailing behind events too large to control or influence ( post-soviet triumphalism). To reach for the new without having mastered the old is an indication of a desire to close one’s eyes to the way that the past continues to haunt the present, wresting it from our control.

For these reasons, Platypus looks at the past neither as something to turn away from nor as a tradition to uphold. Instead we see it as the set of failures which have determined our own existence and our own project. We see our task as the investigation of these failures, from the most obtuse ones to the most brilliant ones, for the purpose of critically considering the possibilities for Leftist politics today.

With this in mind, we have offered a set of starting points and critical positions that that have met with hostility and accusations from the walking-corpse-Left. Our interest in rescuing the deep roots of Marxist thought in the high liberalism of thinkers like Kant and Hegel has made us mere “liberals” in the eyes of the undead. For them, we simply cannot truly be “radicals,” since we don’t reject “bourgeois ideology” tout court.

A more interesting accusation has taken place when zombie sectarians such as the ISO and the Spartacist League have called us “pro-imperialist” and “neo-conservatives” in response to our critique of the dishonesty, nihilism and stupidity of the American and European antiwar movements. These movements, we have argued, have tended to fall into support for the “war as bad business” anti-war argument of the Democratic Party—or worse, have tacitly supported the fascistic, right-wing forces that oppose the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The possibility of explaining both the nature of today’s American imperialism and the (all too sane) demented politics of the Islamist opposition to the US in a single unitary critique of present social reality seems to be beyond the perspective of the dwindling anti-war movement and the sectarian “revolutionary” groups that cling to this movement for dear life.

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