1. I've talked a bit before about how the right wing of British Labour (Starmer and co) and the right wing of the Conservatives (Spiked et al) are both staffed by ex-Trots and I want to talk about how that happened and what we can learn from it.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

2. I'm going to start with the Trot to Labour Right pipeline since it's easier to explain. The basic process of it is that when Thatcherism in its various manifestations smashed Militant its activists had 1 of two choices: leave the Party or

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

3. become functionaries of whoever inherited power next, in essence to become the new rank and file bureaucrats of the Labour Party and hold on to power by shedding their leftist ideological beliefs. This transformation usually hinge on the "stay

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

4. in the party to fight" mentality which gets transformed into pure Labour partisanship as the logic of "harm mitigation" and maintaining what little power they have consumes their politics. It's in essence how left wing movements are coopted and

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

5. destroyed by entering the electoral system. Right Trotskyites on the other hand are an entirely different beast. They're the product of a particular critique of Marxist Leninism which holds, based on some stuff that Lenin wrote, that cultural

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

6. and racial (in essence identity based movements) are inherently reactionary and that 20th century national liberation movements are a Stalinist deviation (and I think they are correct that nat lib movements are products of Stalinism and not

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

7. Lenin considering Lenin's writing on the subject), which puts them firmly in the Adolph Reed anti-idpol camp. This is why, for example, you saw Trotskyite attacks on the 1619 project that were more extreme than even

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://twitter.com/Itmechr3/status/1103842440811810816

8. the attacks from the American right and why a lot of Trots are anti-Black Panthers ect ect. But this also means that those groups essentially have a cultural affinity with the right insofar as their critiques of the institutional center left

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

9. are basically the same. You also see crossover in Spiked's case with things like the way they understand free speech (which is how they got their Koch money) and the bizarre alliance of hard let and hard right figures over support for the Serbs

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

10. during the Bosnian genocide. Anti-idpol, pro-free speech, and anti-left electoral party politics combine to make it easy for Trotskyites to slot themselves into the cultural and political agenda of the international Right, which is essentially

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

11. what happened to Spiked. To close I want to step back a bit to examine why Trotskyites rit large thrive in national political parties, which has to do I think with how Trotskyite "organizing" actually works. Trotskyites, as anyone who's had to

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

12. deal with like the ISO during the Iraq War protests could tell you, are consummate bureaucrats. They're incredibly adept at internal factional maneuvering and hijacking the work other groups are doing, and have a remarkable ability to produce

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

12. and distribute large quantities of literature filled with scathing attacks on their political opponents over seemingly minute political differences, which stems from their belief that the USSR descent into bureaucracy was a product of the

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

13. ideological deviations and opportunism of the Party (and thus the most important thing for any revolutionary cell is to ensure they develop in advance the correct line on every issue lest they too be consumed by Stalinist deviations). That

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

14. kind of political maneuvering and sabotage is, of course, completely goddamn useless if you're actually trying to build socialism but it's incredibly valuable if you're say trying to crush an upstart group of young radicals from taking over

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

15. your party or coopt a radical social movement and transform it into an arm of your political party or failing that discredit them completely as hysterical college students. Those skills make Trotskyites invaluable assets to national political

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

16. parties, they're essentially already trained political operatives searching for an institution powerful enough for their skills to have real political effects. This is how you wind up with ex-Trots fighting ex-Trots at the heights of British

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

17. politics: once their movements are crushed and they've been reintegrated into the mainstream political system, Trotskyite are some of the most effective agents of recuperation capitalist politics have ever produced.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed