The Early Days of a Better Nation

Thursday, September 04, 2003


The Last Circle


Anyone who digs a little deeper into the links on the Ukraine scam will soon realise the element of truth in Kostas Mavrakis's remark on post-Trotsky Trotskyists:

Here we are penetrating the domain of infra-Trotskyism which is no longer amenable to a sustained theoretical critique in the absence of that minimum of coherence and rigour which the founding-father had managed to maintain. It is the last circle of hell in which the confused multitude of sectarians delivered up to their obsessions talk agitatedly to themselves.

To be fair, not all Trotskyists are like that, and Mavrakis's then-favoured sectarians, the Maoists, often are.

The current documents of the FI, such as this one on
LGBT liberation, or this acute analysis of the situation after the war in Iraq, are a good deal more subtle, informed and humane than one might expect from the Trotskyist label.

So, while I have plenty of disagreements with Trotskyists, I don't tar them all with the same brush. As the FI says:

Today there is a very great diversity of groups originating or identifying with 'Trotskyism'. Some have maintained relatively coherent international organizations, while others have broken up into national or federated groups. This is even truer of ex-'Maoist' organizations. Unification of 'Trotskyists' or ex-Maoists, in the name of a programme or politics turned towards a past epoch of the revolutionary workers' movement and based on defending an organization's record, cannot be useful in any way to a regroupment or even a fusion. Rapprochement between organizations identifying with Marxism and the socialist revolution can make sense only in relation to the battles, the real movement and the tasks of today and the future.


If those who fell for the Ukrainian scam had understood this they could have saved their money and their credit, but they are most unlikely to ever understand it. They prefer the last circle of hell, where at least it's warm and they know everybody.


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