The term “pseudo-left” denotes political tendencies that utilize democratic and populist phraseology to advance the interests of privileged sections of the upper middle class and defend capitalism against socialist revolution. There are many representatives of this politically reactionary tendency internationally, including the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, Socialist Alternative in Australia, the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the NSSP in Sri Lanka.
In his foreword to The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, published in 2015, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North provided a concise “working definition” of the pseudo-left, as follows: 1) It is “anti-Marxist, rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism”; (2), It is “anti-socialist, opposes the class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of socialist revolution in the progressive transformation of society”; (3) It “promotes ‘identity politics,’ fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, higher-paying professions, trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favorable distributions of wealth among the richest ten percent of the population”; and, (4) “in the imperialist centers of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of ‘human rights’ to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.”
The development of an independent socialist movement of the working class requires an unrelenting struggle against all forms of pseudo-left and opportunist politics. On this page, readers will find major polemics published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) against the pseudo-left, including in relation to the major political experiences and world events of the past decade, as well as major documents from the history of the ICFI in its struggle against Pabloism and all forms of anti-Marxist revisionism.
The polemical essays in this volume examine the complex interaction between history, philosophy and politics. The author defends historical materialism against contemporary anti-Marxist philosophical tendencies related to the Frankfurt School and postmodernism.
On October 7, David North, International Editorial Board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following lecture to a well-attended public meeting in Colombo, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka).
We are publishing here the opening report to the Socialist Equality Party (US) Second National Congress, given July 8, 2012 by SEP National Chairman David North.
The warnings of the ICFI and WSWS that Syriza was a pro-capitalist party, hostile to the working class, have been completely vindicated.
In March, 2011, the United States, Britain and France launched a neo-colonial regime-change operation to overthrow the Libyan government of Moammar Gaddafi and install a client state. The war involved a bombing campaign and the arming of local Islamist right-wing proxy forces, who ultimately captured and murdered Gaddafi. In the eight years since, the war has contributed to a humanitarian catastrophe in Libya and across North Africa and the Sahel.
The Libya war was supported by a coterie of pseudo-left organizations, who uncritically repeated the lying claims of Washington and its allies that the war was a “humanitarian” intervention aimed at saving the population from Gaddafi, and which had nothing to do with imperialist control over Libyan oil reserves or the critical supply routes of North Africa.
The escalating civil war in Libya has served as one more demonstration of the criminal role played by the pseudo-left proponents of “humanitarian” imperialist intervention.
The New Anti-Capitalist Party’s support for the unprovoked military aggression against Libya by the US, Britain, and France brands the NPA and its co-thinkers in the Pabloite United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) as political agents of French and world imperialism.
Among the most striking features of the US-NATO onslaught against Libya has been the widespread support that this “war of choice” has evoked among left-liberal parties and the affluent middle-class milieu that comprise an important part of their constituency.
The World Socialist Web Site demands that Professor Cole retract his slanderous claim that the WSWS supports a massacre in Libya.
On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Cairo and other major industrial cities of Egypt, marking the starting of a revolution that within three weeks toppled a decades-old US-backed dictatorship headed by Hosni Mubarak. The working class played the leading and decisive role in the revolution. Politically, however, it lacked a revolutionary leadership, based on the Trotskyist theory of Permanent Revolution. This enabled the bourgeois Islamist and pseudo-left groups to politically disorient the revolutionary movement, giving the ruling class sufficient time to maintain its control, and ultimately launch a military coup in July 2013.
Throughout the revolutionary upheavals over this period, the WSWS sought to outline a revolutionary program for the Egyptian working class, and exposed the efforts of pseudo-left parties in Egypt and internationally to subordinate the working class to one or another faction of the bourgeoisie.
This article analyzes the role of the pseudo-left organizations in opposing a struggle by the working class to bring down the military junta in Egypt.
The Revolutionary Socialists have played a vital part in a political conspiracy against the Egyptian working class.
Masses of Egyptian workers and youth are once again taking to the streets, this time demanding the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.
Demonstrations last Friday in Egypt were among the largest since the revolutionary movement of workers and youth forced out the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. They raise basic questions of political program and perspective.
Beginning in 2011, the US and its allies, including France and the UK, conducted an increasingly open regime-change operation against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The CIA-led operation involved arming and funding Islamist proxy forces, some with direct ties to Al Qaeda, to overthrow the Syrian government, a key ally of Russia in the Middle East.
Throughout the regime-change operation, pseudo-left organizations in the imperialist countries, including the ISO in the United States, the NPA in France, and Socialist Alternative in Australia, backed the US proxy war, and labelled its Islamist proxy forces as democratic revolutionaries.
The ISO’s May 1 statement “Solidarity with the Syrian revolution” is written in support of the imperialist-orchestrated conspiracy to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The International Socialist Organization is concerned that politically radicalized students and youth who are attracted to socialism are hostile to American military interventions in Syria and elsewhere.
The overt shift by Socialist Alternative into the imperialist camp is bound up with the new political requirements of the Labor government.
The declaration that Turkey’s flagrant act of war was “a small victory for humanity” underscores the pseudo-lefts’ support for imperialist provocations, including those that threaten to trigger world war.
In February, 2014, after months of right-wing “Maidan” demonstrations, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forcibly removed from power by a coup. This coup was openly supported by US and European imperialism and implemented primarily by far-right shock troops such as the Right Sector and the neo-Nazi party Svoboda.
Internationally, pseudo-left forces supported the coup, falsely proclaiming it a “revolution”. The ICFI and WSWS alone advanced a principled, socialist opposition to this imperialist operation, warning the working class of its dangerous consequences.
This, the second part of a two-part article on two years since the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, reviews the role of various pseudo-left organizations. The first part was posted on March 7.
The ISO has responded to the events in Ukraine like a State Department-funded NGO tasked with providing a “left” cover for US imperialist policy.
The politically reactionary implications of the definition of Russia and China as imperialist powers are exposed by the positions of the German-based Revolutionary Communist International Tendency.
Following a presentation of the new German edition of The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, North was interviewed by the newspaper Schattenblick on the theoretical and political issues addressed in his book.
The NPA’s statement, fraudulently published under the name of the ICFI, calls for the deployment of “UN peacekeepers” to police Ukraine in the interests of the imperialist powers.
The “Open letter on the future of Ukraine” issued by Western academics and foreign policy operatives is a vile defense of the ongoing far-right protests in Ukraine.
Syriza (the “Coalition of the Radical Left”) was elected in January 2015 to the government of Greece, amidst mass opposition to years of uninterrupted austerity enforced by the “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Its election was hailed by other pseudo-left parties around the world as a triumph for the left and a model for how it could come to power.
In the ensuing eight months, Syriza betrayed all of its pledges, including by repudiating the landslide “no” vote in the referendum on EU austerity in June of that year. It enforced police-state policies and enacted some of the most brutal anti-refugee measures in all of Europe. Its betrayal, which confirmed the warnings published by the WSWS, constitute a strategic experience for the international working class as to the real nature of pseudo-left politics.
The warnings of the ICFI and WSWS that Syriza was a pro-capitalist party, hostile to the working class, have been completely vindicated.
The intention of this series of articles is to explain what four years of Syriza’s government has meant concretely for workers, youth and retirees in Greece.
Hailed as a “radical” alternative to capitalism by the middle-class left, the Syriza-led government of Alexis Tsipras spent four years carrying out austerity measures on behalf of the EU.
The anti-Trotskyist blog site of Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner recently reported on a meeting that they hosted in Brooklyn, New York, on April 12.
Varoufakis’ essay on becoming an “erratic Marxist” is a damning exposure of the political role of the new Syriza-led government in Greece and the social layer that it represents.
Syriza has come to power based upon a programme that articulates the interests of a powerful section of the Greek bourgeoisie and more privileged sections of the upper-middle class.
With extraordinary speed, the Syriza-led government has repudiated the landslide “no” vote in Sunday’s referendum by proposing €13 billion in austerity measures.
This speech was delivered by Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Chris Marsden to a public meeting titled, “The Blairites’ anti-Semitism witch-hunt and the failure of Corbynism,” held on November 15, 2020.
The Socialist Campaign Group acknowledge the “class war” only in order to complain that Johnson is waging it rather than acting in the “national interest.”
Labour haemorrhaged support across the UK and among all sections of workers, young and old, from the north and south, those in favour of leaving the European Union and those for remaining.
Corbyn’s defence of the Labour Party’s grip on the working class and his continued opposition to any struggle against the right wing is a vindication of the political stand taken by the Socialist Equality Party.
On Saturday, Jacobin magazine published an extended interview with anti-lockdown activist Martin Kulldorff, who demanded that “schools and universities should reopen” because “young, healthy people contribute to…herd immunity.”
“I am preparing myself for the fact that we must learn to live with coronavirus,” Left Party State Premier Bodo Ramelow said last week.
The Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs around Corbyn finally, in August, announced its support for a Zero-Covid policy, but its statement was careful to make clear that the measures proposed were in the best interests of capital.
The pandemic places workers in every country in irreconcilable conflict with pro-imperialist, middle class parties that the ruling class has long falsely presented as the left.
The DSA Democrat is a stalwart supporter of the Biden administration, which has from the onset of the Israeli campaign of mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza last October 7 provided the Zionist regime with the arms and political and diplomatic support required for it to carry out its ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In an interview in Jacobin, DSA member Aidan J. Beatty repeated his slanderous biography's claim that Gerry Healy and the British Trotskyists employed violence against political opponents and party members.
Of all the stage acts in the Democratic Party’s 200-year-old playbill of political deception, perhaps the most hackneyed is the sleight of hand the party conducts at election time to paint its candidates as progressives, even as they move ever farther to the right.
Like New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Bush lost support within the working class despite her anti-war posturing due to her unstinting support for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
The Morenoites’ Izquierda Diaro has lined up with the Democrats in dismissing Trump’s attempt to nullify the US election as of no significance.
The slanderous rant sent to the WSWS by the editor of the Brazilian edition of the Morenoite Izquierda Diario website exposes his own organization’s hostility to Trotskyism.
The approaching mayoral elections are exposing all the political forces that claimed a vote for the Workers Party against Bolsonaro in 2018 would advance an “anti-fascist” struggle
Far from an objective presentation of the political legacy of Leon Trotsky, the FT’s video is, in essence, an attempted second assassination directed against Trotsky’s entire revolutionary historical legacy.
Did the political strategy advanced by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara provide a new road to socialism or did it turn out, as the ICFI warned 35 years ago, to be a blind alley and a trap for the working class?
This document, adopted by the ICFI in 1987, deals with the proposed fusion between the British renegades of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), led by Cliff Slaughter, and the Morenoite Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in Argentina. The document provides a review of the history of the political origins and history of the tendency of Morenoism in Latin America.
The formation of the government capped two months of manoeuvres within the Spanish ruling elite after the November 10 elections produced yet another hung parliament.
In August, the Left Party’s parliamentary leader Dietmar Bartsch backed the German Army’s foreign deployments. Now foreign affairs spokesperson Gregor Gysi is going further.
Despite the war crisis and growing social anger among workers, NPA leader Alain Krivine insisted that internationalist opposition to capitalism would find no popular support.
The Fourth International was founded by Leon Trotsky, the co-leader, with Vladimir Lenin, of the 1917 Russian Revolution, in 1938. The crimes and betrayals of the Stalinist Third International and the social democratic parties had led humanity to catastrophes of war, depression and fascism. In its founding document, Trotsky explained that the crisis of mankind was the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The International Committee was founded in November 1953, to defend the Fourth International against an opportunist current, Pabloism, that sought to liquidate the Fourth International into the parties and organizations controlled by Stalinism, social democracy and bourgeois nationalism. The struggle against Pabloism within the Fourth International spanned more than three decades. It was brought to a conclusion in 1986 with the defeat of the opportunists by the orthodox Trotskyists of the International Committee.
The ICFI’s fight against revisionism ensured the continuity of a genuine Trotskyist perspective in the 21st century. The subsequent evolution of the Pabloite and state-capitalist tendencies into the pro-imperialist pseudo-left demonstrates the historic significance of the political and theoretical fight against revisionism inside the Fourth International. A number of critical documents from this struggle are included below.
The origins of this work lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Euality Party (US), from 1982-1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section. It establishes the continuity of orthodox Trotskyism in the political struggles inside the Fourth International in the 20th Century.
This series of four articles was originally published in the Bulletin, the newspaper of the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party (United States), from October-December, 1982, five years after the assassination of Tom Henehan.
In 1985, after a protracted process of political degeneration, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the British section of the ICFI, broke decisively from Trotskyism. This work demonstrates that the crisis in the WRP was bound up with its retreat from the principles that the British Trotskyists had previously defended.
In 1985, after a protracted process of political degeneration, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the British section of the ICFI, broke decisively from Trotskyism. This work demonstrates that the crisis in the WRP was bound up with its retreat from the principles that the British Trotskyists had previously defended.
The Second Plenum of the ICFI (held September 29–October 12, 1986) examined the impact of the WRP’s opportunism throughout the ICFI and developed a critique of the “tactical opportunism” which distorted the development of perspectives in different sections.
The Third Plenum of the ICFI (March 10–23, 1987) produced an analysis of the relations between the WRP and MAS (Movement for Socialism) in Argentina, entitled, “No to Stalinism and the Popular Front,” which also reviewed the origins and political record of the Morenoite tendency in Latin America.
These lectures address the history of the ICFI from 1982-1995: from the initial formulation of a detailed critique of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s revisions of the theory and program of Trotskyism, to the decision to transform the leagues of the ICFI into parties.
