The last and final moment is yours; mciver's analysis of trotskyism

Listening to these people, I could join in their lives: I would feel their rags on my back, I would be walking in their tattered shoes; their longings, their needs would all move through my soul, or my soul through theirs. [...] Dropping my own habits, becoming another person through a kind of intoxication of my imaginative faculties, and playing the game at will - that was my delight [...] I will say, though, that from that time on, I have gone on teasing apart the elements of the heterogeneous mass we call ‘the people’, analysing and evaluating its good or bad features

Honoré de Balzac

Balzac famously catalogued the emergent commodity form, in its infinite variety and its stultifying uniformity. His readers were familiar with the thickets of things which surrounded his characters because they too threaded themselves through the very same features of the produced world. Balzac documented the remarkable unprecedentedness of the commodity form, its receptivity to categorisation, and, to some extent, he indicated how classificatory systems altered human relations. 

Today, it is a convention of writers to cram their novels with the affective properties of the most up-to-date kit. It is their overriding concern to place their work in its precise moment. But the digital novel is not what is required. Balzac presented instrumentalisation and commodity fetishism at that juncture in which it was both everywhere and yet also, almost, unnoticed. He foregrounded and described that which had gone otherwise unremarked. 

But today, it is different. There is nothing but instrumentalising rationality. We cannot escape, even if we wanted to, the ubiquitous categories of techie talk. From our position in history we understand that Balzac wrote at the point of capitalism’s emergence from its historical determinations. Today, we record phenomena which seems bound up with the accelerating and intensifying logic of exploitation, but it is not sufficient to list the details of all that has been upgraded. If Balzac recorded the beginning, perhaps we are now recording the end - or perhaps we should write as if we were recording the end.

Then, there is a project, a historic project if you like, which is not ours but which has been assigned to us. It has something to do with the empathetic encounter with the ‘other’ which Balzac’s narrator describes in the quote above. It has something to do with describing social relations in the moment of their being machine processed. And it also has something to do with the drawing out of the human soul in a pristine state from its current diffusion, just as a drawing salve is used to extract the deeply embedded splinter.

The work of the project, which records occurrences as if at the end of things, is the opposite in character to that of Balzac’s delighted cataloguing of capitalism’s dawn chorus. It is a matter of bringing decisive moments back in order to lay them to rest. It is a matter of putting beyond use certain modes of violence. It is a matter of de-commissioning, de-weaponising, de-monetising - of taking the sting out of things. It is a matter of therapeutically de-energising circuits of accumulation and acceleration, and of taking out of circulation the harmful materials which are being amassed there. It is a matter of gently interrupting those behavioural tendencies which slip back into the same addictive patterns.

The anarchists are enamoured with the idea of what they call the ‘safe space’, it is poetically redolent of Sei Shonagon’s swept floor. Or, more accurately, I project this impassioned interest in it onto them as I find it to be the most fascinating anarchist concept since the affinity group... not least because of the impracticability of its implementation. In practice, the ‘safe space’ is rigourously defined by acts of therapeutic expulsion; oppressive structures and habits are located and systematically removed. But what if the relations which positively constitute the space are themselves sociopathic? What if the anarchists reproduce received modes of domination within the relations that constitute their project’s institutionalisation of the ‘safe space’? 

Of course, it is possible that the ‘safe space’ is not safe at all, that it is a differently vulnerable space, and subject to other modes of violent irrationality. And it is probable that no space founded on the mechanism of expulsion could ever really be felt to be ‘safe’. This would suggest that the ‘safe space’ might be better generated by other means, for example through a vigilant, or active, tolerance. The purpose of such spaces, their institutional project, would be to realise themselves as structurally incapable of supporting the logics of domination. The ‘safe space’ would then be better described as the ‘healthy space’. 

But for the moment, radical terrains continue to support patterns of violence, some less discerned than others. What would it mean to scrub out racism and sexism if apologists for historical mass murder were tolerated? Nothing is more appalling than the revelation that an ostensible politics of liberation is shown to be nothing but a racket which systematically cultivates exploitative relations. We would prefer not to be shown this, we would prefer not to think about it. For example, the ongoing preference for not thinking about the violence unleashed by the exigent logics of marxist-form communism continues to impede the project of the ‘safe space’. But then, it is not always easy to identify the methods by which apologetics for leninism become obscured by current activities. 

Within marxist-form communism it has become historically expedient to misdirect attention from actual politics (as this is defined by leninism) to the ‘neutral’ practice of value-form critique. For example, relations are established on apparently ‘neutral’ territory whilst the political project which lies behind the single issue campaign public meeting or the no strings ‘capital reading group’ is withheld.  And just as there is a preference within most radical groupings to evade theorisation of oppressive internal relations (without in any way wishing to condone here episodes of individualising/externalising witch hunts, and the blaming and denunciation which is the path many groupings take when they do attempt to theorise their own pathologies) so it is that such groupings prefer not to engage with the systematic violence of their history. 

It is strange, this tenderness towards ‘our’ mass murderers, strange and disturbing. Even those groupings, such as Endnotes (which are historically placed to separate themselves from the inheritance of Bolshevism) remain somehow indebted, grateful even, to leninism. Even those groupings like Endnotes that are positioned precisely in that historical space where such habits should have become intolerable, from whom something beyond adherence to inherited forms is expected, still hold onto the fetish of ‘partisan’ violence. It is strange, strange and disturbing, that we still must ask of radical groupings is that all there is?

And so it is, that the connection to this inheritance must be decomposed. And the ‘safe space’ requires the natural death of distorted forms. But this is not so easy. Group patriotism, the fetishisation of the ‘movement’, and ancestor worship are still obstacles to the work of allogrooming by which social health is maintained. The function of decomposition is not celebrated, and its workers, its writers and thinkers are not recognised for the benefits which they bring. To decommission toxic structures and bury dead forms is an unglamorous activity. But to be institutionally enabled to let go of injurious obligations to the dead is the sweetest release. 

Who then, is prepared to thank mciver for seeking to interrupt the transmissions of the Bolsheviks to those awarenesses which are still tuned in to receive them? Who is there left to thank him? Who does not agree that, as he works methodically and at his own tempo, this an important undertaking, a historic task, that he is performing a political and social service? Or, at least, who does not agree that in de-calibrating the imperatives of certain forces which have no business being still active in the world he is part of some improvement, and performing of a role in the process of laying to rest (Who'll be the parson?/I, said the Rook,/with my little book,/I'll be the parson.)? 

What, nobody? Is the work of burial also to be buried? Well then, sobeit, mciver does indeed perform a thankless task. Let us hope he can derive some compensation from it. But even so, whether it is appreciated or not, the work is ‘necessary’ to the extent that the project of the ‘safe space’ remains viable. It is necessary for radical groupings not to function in accordance with those old patterns of violation. It is necessary for society as a whole to release violence from its relations, and to (in Captain Beefheart’s lyric) ‘let go flocks of them.’ 

I reproduce extracts of mciver’s work on ‘Trotskyists in the Gulag’ below. I do not reproduce all of the text as it is embedded within a discussion and should be read in that context (a link to the original is posted at the bottom of this reproduction). 

[...]

As 'acts of kindness' (see Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and Everything Flows), shouldn't one have felt empathy for these victims whose fate was grisly under the new ruling butchers? This is a similar empathy one should feel for Trotskyists in the Gulag. Not a revengeful 'Now you pay!', but a concern for victimised humans, no matter how inhuman and degraded their ideas and previous acts.

However, by focusing on the Trotskyists' 'attitudes' in the Gulag, a broader dimension is ignored. Trotskyists and other oppositional Bolsheviks were not the only victims in the Gulag -- millions of 'ordinary citizens' were arrested and huge numbers perished after dreadful cruelties soon to be emulated in the Nazi Lagers. In fact, many more were murdered in Stalin's camps than in Hitler's. These concentration camps were established by Lenin and Trotsky's régime, to imprison Mensheviks, anarchists and other political opponents, including survivors of the Kronstadt insurrection. http://www.islandnet.com/~ltmurnau/text/kronstadt.htm

[...]

More recently, historians like Stephen Cohen (The Victims Return) confirm that the target of the Gulag – under Lenin and Stalin – was the atomisation of the whole civil society, not just the elimination of leading Party opponents. As stated above, many of these had been butchers themselves under Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov, and Trotskyists were a minority (probably not much more than 40,000 in 1938), in the Gulag's immense demographic. In any case, these devotees of 'the workers' state', including the smarmy 'rightist' Bukharin and thugs like Ryutin, never represented a road to human freedom. This is the point about them, not that any of them deserved the annihilation that Stalinism viciously meted out to them.

Yet, regardless of the historical evidence, left communists today root for the eternal flame of Bolshevism. No opportunity is wasted to repeat how intransigent the 'ultra left' was in sorting out Bolshevik brainteasers. 

[...]

Ciliga's view is less self-serving – he mentions that Bolsheviks who were not 'orthodox Trotskyists' like Kuklin, a leading Zinovievist, "... thought that 'all was lost'; the Russian revolution, the Party, the International.... It was to be begun all over again." (ibid, page 297) But there is no proof that Kuklin's 'ultra-leftist' positions came from such influence. In the sales-pitch of left communism, individuals can't sort things out for themselves – they need the influence of ultra-left lessons and 'the framework' – to achieve 'communist clarity'. Of course, it's highly unlikely that a Zinovievist boss like Kuklin would have started anything worthwhile had he miraculously escaped from the Gulag. If we go by the examples of ex-Zinovievists like JP Cannon of the American SWP and Albert Treint, a murderous martinet, protégé of Zinoviev in the early French CP (and Marc Chirik's mentor), only the usual paranoid brutality ensued. There was no fundamental difference between a Zinovievist and an 'Intransigent' goon. But, following the logic of left communists like the ICC, Zinovievism should be included in the 'ultra-left' pantheon. After all, didn't they join with Trotskyists in the United Opposition, and in Western Europe provide the mentor for the ICC's founding egocrat?

Still, very few inmates, like Densov and the Decist Volodya Smirnov, had Kuklin's courage, to declare the whole experience of October 1917 as the unfolding of a 'state capitalist counter-revolution'. Many Russian anarchists and Kronstadt sailors had come to a similar conclusion long before 1930, and millions of peasants and thousands of workers had risen against the new despots as early as 1918. That was the awareness and experience that mattered, not the humbug about a 'world revolution', which diverted attention from what Bolshevism was really doing within and outside Russia. The ultra-left ruminations came too late, and always apologetic of Bolshevism or of 'a bourgeois revolution' in Russia. But the Western left communists performed a vital role: they promoted an imaginary 'heroic Bolshevism', an image that concealed the atrocities of the Lenin-Trotsky-Dzerzhinsky Triad.

The Marxist oppositionists in Russia (Trotskyists, left communists and Mensheviks) didn't have the capacity to recognise that they had participated in the hoodwinking and crushing of all classes in Russian society from day one. In Russia Lenin's government unleashed genocidal famines against the peasantry in vast regions of the Russian empire. This was a man-made mass-murder, a rehearsal for the vast exterminations during the collectivization of the late 20s.

Later, even in opposition, most of the Bolsheviks in the Gulag held on to their party loyalty, to the legend of the 'good Leninist Party' that had 'degenerated', made 'mistakes' (like in Kronstadt) or had been taken over by the 'intelligentsia', the 'bureaucracy' or the 'petty bourgeoisie' (the vast kulak hordes). In this way, by projections against 'others', they remained unsullied, martyred internationalists to the end, waiting for the re-start of the world revolution that never came, and which would have endangered the Lenin régime had it happened.

The infantile idea that the 'state principle', like an evil incubus, possessed the innocent Bolsheviks in power, is pure ICC fabrication. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had prepared themselves for state power since their inception. Naturally, it didn't help that they took over a despotic semi-Asiatic state, but in a profound sense this fostered the criminal habits and nihilist vision – contemptuous of human life – they had acquired in their underground war against Tsarism. The voices against such de-humanisation were few, and soon silenced as 'Tolstoyan' or 'petty bourgeois' pacifism.

Ciliga is scathing about the Trotskyists in the Gulag: "Their outlook was not very different from that of the Stalinist bureaucracy; they were slightly more polite and human, that was all." (ibid, page 263). But Ciliga also spreads half-truths: "The Communists ... were the victims of a system which they themselves had installed. The revolution had begun by destroying its enemies, the bourgeoisie and the great landowners; then it had attacked its socialist and anarchist allies; finally it struck down its own children, the Communists." (ibid, page 243) Ciliga omits that from the beginning the 'enemies' weren't only 'the bourgeoisie' and 'great landowners' but workers and peasants. It was a simultaneous attack against all classes. The self-organisations of the workers were dissolved from within and strikes crushed brutally. As stated above, the peasants as a class endured predatory requisitions and Bolshevik-induced famines from early on, ending in the genocidal collectivizations of the late 20s.

Ciliga's mention of 'children' conjures a tragic image -- the 'revolution' as Medea, murdering her sons. This ridiculous mention ignores the real children that suffered starvation, hostage-taking, outright shootings, bombings and gassings of villages (by heroes like Tukhachevsky and Antonov-Ovseyenko), death-marches and ethnic deportations, loss of parents and extended families (the millions of bezprizorniki), and other barbarities unleashed by the Bolsheviks and their equally necrophilous White rivals. As these bloodbaths soaked Russia, Lenin and his gang of brothers enjoyed the safety and comforts of a new ruling class in the Kremlin. Behind them, the Western ultra-lefts played bombastic trumpets and rah-rah chords, hailing the world revolution as moveable barracks.

Ciliga has this to say about the Bolshevik crushing of the Georgian insurrection of August 1924: "The suppression was carried out with unbelievable cruelty, mingled with provocations and mass-executions, with no form of trial; people who had been in prison a long while and had nothing to do with the insurrection were suddenly shot. This blood-bath [around 12,000 people were murdered] was organised by Stalin, Ordjonikidze and Bela Kun. Numerous Georgian Opposition Communists whom I knew at Verkhne-Uralsk told me the truth about it, which they knew by having seen the suppression or by having played a part in it." (ibid, page 305)

Indeed, 'having played a part in it'. In reality, it was the Bolshevik Party-State that crushed the Georgian insurrection, not just Stalin, Ordjonikidze and Béla Kun. No available record shows that Trotsky's faction in the RCP opposed this orgy of killing by Stalin/Zinoviev/Kamenev and their Chekists. To Trotsky, it must have been 'another Kronstadt', even if he saw it provoked by Stalin's terrorists. This insurrection, like Kronstadt in 1921, isn't listed as an episode of the 'world revolution' by Trotskyism and left communism. Background information on these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Uprising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Affair

The mention of the Cuban POR ('Posadist', post 21) is another eye-opener about the pathology of Trotskyism. Even imprisoned by the Cuban Stalinist state, in the tropical Lubianka of La Cabaña, these Trotskyists defended their totalitarian captors. We read that they "... pushed so the prisoners could work for the revolution in the fields or wherever they could be useful." Ferrara, their líder-mínimo, another enemy of 'equivalences', thought that this was "... the difference between a Stalinist gulag and a Castro prison.” Obviously, Orwellian toadyism can be comforting.

When some 'right-wing prisoners' took the Trotskyists as infiltrated Castro agents, the KGB-trained guards protected the Trotskyists. It goes without saying that any prisoner who aptly described the Trotskyists as Stalinist stooges, was a 'counter-revolutionary', a 'gusano' or a 'CIA agent'. Following the line of their líder-máximo, Juan Posadas, the POR advocated a Russian/Chinese nuclear first strike 'against capitalism', not only during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis but thereafter, radiant mushrooms as communist forceps. The unhinged Posadists expressed chillingly the logic in Bolshevism – exterminatory, punitive projections to bring forth a dystopia where control and subordination played the main roles. To a Trotskyist like Posadas, nuclear omnicide equalled human freedom, or 'communism'. In Posadism one finds autodidactic stupidity combined with new-age love for dolphin chats and UFO channelings ('our space brothers', ignoring the wise warnings of ex-Jesuit Salvador Freixedo). For an amusing obituary of Posadas: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/180/juan_r_posadas.html

But there's nothing really amusing about the intentions and deeds of political rackets. Posadas belongs to the same gangster line-up as the wily Mandel, the gun-smuggling Pablo-Raptor, the serial-rapist Healy, the demagogue Cliff (founder of what is now a rapist coven, the SWP), the dipso-stalinoid Robertson and other Trotskyist gurus of the postwar era. Bolshevism could not have had a more suitable offspring than Trotskyism, inside or outside gulags.

The régime founded by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 ended in total ignominy, metastasing into Putin's Mafiatschina. A régime founded on duplicity, manipulation and relentless violence to hang on to power, had to come full circle in a spiral of barbarism. None of the groups sharing the Bolshevik ideology could describe the Leninist usurpation of October 1917 for what it was – a huge onslaught against humanity, or counteract its historical sham.

The healthy sentiment below refers to crimes among members of rackets (although the author doesn't use the word). But unfortunately it's not only intra-racket crimes that matter, but those committed in history by such organisations against the fabric of civil society, against all classes, in the name of egalitarian causes.

"It would be better for humanity if all radical and revolutionary organisations voluntarily disbanded on the grounds of the crimes committed by its members upon each other - the safe space must fling open its windows and disperse the foetid miasma at its heart" http://insipidities.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/whence-does-earth-procure-its-food_1463.html

The following works are a small selection of critical studies that may help the (rare) new left communist or Trotskyist convert, to reconsider what they're sinking into, and help disperse some foetid miasmas.

Ex-Trotskyists attracted to 'anarchism' or left communism may benefit too. However, these converts almost never transcend the racket mindset; the workerism shared with Bolshevism drives them to switch to a new factory of fanatics. Lenin may be replaced by 'soviet power', but the sect practices remain.

Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993 (This informative study shows how most Russian populist and Marxist organisations prior to 1917 got corrupted by mounting acts of terror against the population, under the ideological cloak of a struggle against the Tsarist autocracy. It's untrue that the Bolsheviks 'degenerated' into terrorist practices only after they took power. Most of its future leaders and minions were virtuosi of terror long before 1917, and many, like Stalin, thrived on it)

Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin, Frank Cass, London 2003 (A plausible and well researched work, suggesting that Stalin had been an Okhrana provocateur since early years. Thus his psychotic and murderous need to destroy all the evidence and each and every possible witness, after October. Brackman also describes in detail the criminal careers of the early Bolsheviks – bank robbers, intriguers, falsifiers and sadistic murderers, shielding behind lofty slogans. Lenin of course was fully aware and supportive of these sordid fund-raising schemes. Thus German gold in 1917 via Helphand & Co. is not surprising)

Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking, 2004 (Rayfield conveys the sinister atmosphere of the vast charnel house Lenin founded in Russia and Stalin expanded and perfected. He focuses on Stalin's Cheka mates, like Dzerzhinsky, Peterss, Menzhinsky, and demented killers like Béla Kun. Zinoviev, Trotsky and Radek also promoted the bloodthirsty Red Terror, giving it an 'intellectual' gloss These worthies, and many more, are exposed as fiends of a monstrous inhumanity)

Brian Pearce, How Haig Saved Lenin, Macmillan, London, 1987 (Dispels the myth that Lenin's régime was saved by working class resistance to WW1, or by an unfolding 'world revolution'. It was the failure of the German Army in the Western front in July-September 1918 that secured Bolshevism's survival, allowing Russia to become a revamped imperial player in the postwar network. Pearce quotes: "...in the spring of 1921, 'Lenin applied formally to the German Government for assistance in the reorganisation of the Red Army'..., page 92. Naturally, he got it)

Piero Melograni, Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State, 1917-1920, Humanities Press International, Atlantic Highlands, 1989 (This work demolishes, with documentary evidence and relevant analysis, the myth of 'world revolution' supposedly promoted by Lenin and the Comintern. This body was from the start an arm of the Bolshevik state, demanding subordination and sacrifice for Russia from its member parties. Most of the leaders of these parties were satraps and opportunists rolled into one. Only a minority were naive idealists, who, if perceptive enough, abandoned the miasmic abattoir asap)

Dariusz Tolczyk, See No Evil, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999 (A perceptive philosophical and literary dissection of the Bolshevik attempts to legitimise the Red Terror and the gulag, showing the utter moral illiteracy of types like Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Mayakovsky, Gorky, Brecht and other purveyors of 'Bolshevik ethics')

Michael Pearson, The Sealed Train, GP Putnam's Sons, New York, 1975 (Quite conclusive on the funding by the German High Command of Lenin's racket during and after WW1. Many historians have been saying this for years, based on contemporary reports – Eduard Bernstein's comes to mind – and evidence from German military archives. Not for believers in Lenin's immaculate connections)

Yuri Felshtinsky, Lenin and His Comrades, Enigma Books, New York, 2010 (A revelation of the endemic gangsterism and moral corruption among the Bolsheviks in power. Apparently first General Secretary Sverdlov tried to kill Lenin using Fanny Kaplan as pawn, and paid with his life for the attempt. A well informed hypothesis, but the shooting remains a murky mystery – no serious investigation took place and Kaplan, perhaps a Cheka patsy, was tortured and murdered under Sverdlov's orders shortly after. The Red Terror unfolded with utmost ferocity a few days later. There's strong circumstantial evidence pointing to Stalin and the Chekist Yagoda as poisoners of the crippled Lenin. This is also backed up by a recent study (2012): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/health/research/lenins-death-remains-a-mystery-for-doctors.html?_r=0

Considerable amounts of sensitive archival evidence in Russia remain sealed, and key files and records were undoubtedly doctored or destroyed by Stalinism, and even by the German SPD in power, so the truth may never be known about many of these shabby and debased affairs. But there's enough to prove that duplicity and manipulation were intrinsic to Bolshevism from the start. Contrary to advocates like Victor Serge, this was the main, and enduring, bacillus in the corpse.

Felshtinsky also confirms the around 50 million German gold marks to fund the Bolshevik coup, making 'Soviet Russia', in effect, a junior partner of Hohenzollern imperialism up to November 1918. This funding does not explain the popular movements that overthrew Tsarism in February 1917 and undermined the pro-war Kerensky coalition, as described by historians like Alexander Rabinowitch, Marc Ferro and propagandist John Reed. But it helps grasp the material growth of Bolshevism through massified propaganda prior to October and its survival after. Again, not for true believers, as the realistic picture that emerges from this work is one a viper's nest at the top of the Bolshevik pyramid)

Robin Blick, The Seeds of Evil, Steyne Publications, London, 1995 (The political usurpation of October revealed in all its sordid details. The true meaning of Leninist 'soviet power' in October 1917. Blick also writes that "serious German funding of Bolsheviks" started in April 1917, ending in March 1918. Page 120)

Gennady Shkliarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolution, St Martin's Press, New York, 1992 (Hard-hitting and conclusive survey of the early Red Fascism's deployment against the Russian working class. The author stresses the different interests between functionaries and rank-and-file workers in 'class-oriented' organisations, as analysed by Robert Michels and Max Weber. Of course this is applicable to Bolshevism and the groupings and classes it pulverised. Shkliarevsky has no fawning time for Bolshevism, a nostalgic condition afflicting ex-Trotskyist journalists)

Citing sources because of the relevant material doesn't mean agreement with these writers. However, no critical researcher would abandon a critique of Bolshevism because others of different persuasion share his findings (be they 'the CIA' plus the "... main political ideologues of capital [for whom], the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion is one more proof that Bolshevism and Stalinism are two peas in a pod" – as the ICC's all-purpose Alf has claimed, amalgamating 'main political ideologues of capital' with Rühle and Mattick). Just like quoting Stéphane Courtois or Ernst Nolte on the historical equivalence of Stalinism and Nazism doesn't make one a supporter of either.

Macintosh, another of the faithful, considers that The Black Book of Communism "... consists largely of tendentious anti-Bolshevik diatribes ..." http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_41_bolsheviks-civil-war.html Understandably, left communists weren't part of the editorial board, but the chapters on 'The Comintern in Action', 'The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain', for example, help expose the real history of Bolshevism. This is what upsets apparatchiks, that Bolshevism and Stalinism are revealed as symbiotic, devaluing left communism's usp ('unique selling proposition').

By these amalgams, left communists show an undying attachment to the Leninist counter-revolution, and thus, by default, to Stalinism, as there was no fundamental difference between both régimes. The irrational insistence that there was, constitutes the historically failed PR project of Trotskyism and left communism (which may now include a sprinkling of 'anarcho-leftists', some 'not particularly enamoured of Lenin', but zealots nevertheless of shams, like 'soviet power' under his despotism). Apparatchiks without apparats constitute probably the majority of left communists today. Current Trotskyist and left communist rackets will probably disintegrate in a few short years, as biological and membership returns diminish, reaching their dead ends.

 [...]

A hidden Marxist strain was revealed by Bolshevism – human progress required torture, executions and mass exterminations of whole classes via famines and gulags.

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/trotskyists-gulag-questions-25072013#comment-537193