Trotskyism’s Mutation into Neoliberal Fascism

Trotskyism’s Mutation into Neoliberal Fascism

Part I: Trotskyism and Its Seeds of Mutation

Leon Trotsky’s name evokes both tragedy and intensity. As Lenin’s comrade, revolutionary general, and later exiled prophet, Trotsky embodied the permanent revolutionary spirit. His break with Stalin in the late 1920s created a movement that defined itself by its opposition to two enemies at once: the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalinism and the brute authoritarianism of fascism.

But Trotskyism was never just “anti-Stalinist” or “anti-fascist.” It carried within it a particular DNA — certain traits that, under different historical pressures, would be prone to mutation.

1. Permanent Revolution as Zeal

Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution insisted that socialism could not be built in “one country” but had to spread across borders, overturning systems continuously.

This created a kind of missionary drive, an almost eschatological certainty that history was on the side of relentless upheaval.

2. Internationalism as Vanguardism

Trotskyists saw themselves as the tiny minority who truly grasped the lessons of October 1917.

This gave their cadres an elitist streak: they were the intellectual “vanguard” destined to shepherd the masses.

3. Anti-Stalinism as Defining Obsession

Hatred of Stalin’s “degenerated workers’ state” made Trotskyists uncompromisingly hostile not only to Soviet power but later to any leftist movement tinged with Stalinist influence.

This obsessive anti-Stalinism would later be re-coded into blanket hostility toward any rival to Western hegemony.

4. Authoritarian Habits

Though Trotsky denounced Stalin’s purges, he himself had shown a willingness to use military discipline, censorship, and suppression (e.g., Kronstadt rebellion) in the service of revolution.

This meant that, beneath the rhetoric of “workers’ democracy,” Trotskyism contained authoritarian reflexes that could be repurposed in other contexts.

Thus, within Trotskyism, we find a paradox: the most passionate critique of fascism and Stalinism, and at the same time, structural traits that could mutate into authoritarian crusading for entirely different masters.

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Part II: From Revolutionary Zeal to Neoliberal Fascism

The collapse of Trotskyism as a coherent revolutionary project did not mean its extinction. Rather, fragments of it survived by mutating. Over the course of the Cold War and beyond, sections of the Trotskyist tradition — particularly in the United States and Britain — transfigured themselves into what might best be described as the ideological engine of neoliberal fascism.

1. The Cold War Realignment

After Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the Fourth International splintered.

Figures like Max Shachtman in the US argued that the Soviet Union was not a workers’ state at all but a new kind of totalitarianism. This drew Trotskyists into alliance with Cold War liberalism.

By the 1950s, former revolutionaries were collaborating with anti-communist trade unions, State Department officials, and social-democratic parties aligned with NATO.

2. Trotskyist DNA Re-coded

Permanent Revolution → Permanent Intervention

What was once the dream of spreading socialism became a mission to spread liberal democracy — or more bluntly, US military and market dominance.

Internationalism → Globalization

The vision of world workers’ solidarity mutated into neoliberal globalization, with institutions like the IMF and World Bank enforcing “structural adjustments” worldwide.

Anti-Stalinism → Anti-Authoritarian Crusade

The obsession with fighting Stalinism translated into blanket hostility against any regime that resisted US hegemony — from Cuba to Iraq to Russia and China.

Vanguardism → Technocracy

The elitist Trotskyist cadre re-emerged as neoliberal technocrats, policy advisors, and think-tank strategists.

3. The Revolutionary Flair of Empire

The American empire does not present itself as a stagnant, conservative order. It sells itself as dynamic, liberating, progressive, and world-transforming.

Here lies the Trotskyist ghost: the language of revolution survives, but it has been inverted. Where Trotsky once preached permanent upheaval for socialism, Washington and Brussels now preach permanent upheaval for “democracy” and “free markets.”

Regime change wars, “color revolutions,” humanitarian interventions — all bear the stamp of a secularized, inverted Trotskyism: history as a permanent crusade, carried not by workers’ soviets but by NATO jets and IMF austerity packages.

4. Neoliberal Fascism Defined

Economically: unrestrained neoliberal capitalism (privatization, deregulation, monopolies).

Politically: authoritarian controls, mass surveillance, militarized policing, suppression of dissent.

Ideologically: the aura of revolutionary transformation — “making the world safe for democracy” — masking the consolidation of oligarchic power.

Thus the Western order we confront today is not simply “capitalism” or “liberal democracy.” It is something more insidious: a neoliberal fascism whose intellectual lineage runs through the shattered fragments of Trotskyism.

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Conclusion

Trotskyism was born as a revolutionary opposition to both Stalinist tyranny and capitalist fascism. But its very zeal, its missionary internationalism, its vanguard elitism, and its uncompromising anti-Stalinism made it vulnerable to inversion. Once the revolutionary horizon collapsed, these traits were repurposed by the emerging neoliberal order.

The result is the paradox of our age: the American empire dresses itself in the garb of revolution, invoking progress, freedom, and democracy, yet in practice it enforces a system of neoliberal exploitation backed by authoritarian coercion. The revolutionary fire of Trotskyism has been extinguished as socialism — and reignited as the ideological fuel of neoliberal fascism.