Leon Trotsky, Barack Obama And The Black “Vanguard Of The Revolution”

By Raymond V. Raehn

Last summer, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced Barack Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser as “a leader that God has blessed us with at this time”. ('Blessed' Barack Obama sounds a note of caution as the cash rolls in, by Tom Baldwin, London Times, August 19, 2008)

And just few days ago, the rock singer Sting echoed her: “In many ways, he’s sent from God because the world’s a mess.” (Sting: Obama 'Sent From God' To Fix World's Mess, WCCO, Oct. 30, 2009).

It took a lot of time and effort to establish the type of moral hegemony that permits such absurd claims about a black left-wing politician not merely to be made, but apparently to be entertained by a credulous, or at any rate cowed, public.

I believe it goes back to strategic decisions made by revolutionary intellectuals decades ago—adapting Marx’s original vision of a proletarian revolution to the apparently unfavorable political realities of the early twentieth century.

A key figure was Leon Trotsky. His Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self-Determination, was first published in 1967. Trotsky’s views on the American "Negro Question" were recorded in two discussions with American Marxists, the first held in Prinkipo, Turkey in 1933, the second in Coyoacan, Mexico in 1939.

In the second edition, published in 1977, editor George Breitman reported that it "had four printings and greater sales in the United States than any other Trotsky compilation in the last decade". Breitman supplied some significant background—such as the fact that Malcolm X had read the book in 1963, before he spoke on "The Black Revolution" in 1964.

Breitman noted, that after the Bolshevik Revolution on 1917, the Leninist doctrine of affirmative support for "oppressed peoples"—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American Communist Movement. The Russians in the Communist International demanded that American Communists shake off their unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.

According to Breitman, Trotsky was a particularly strong advocate of this:

"To show his American comrades how he thought revolutionists should react to the oppression of the Negroes, he denounced the prejudiced white workers in more scathing, more bitter terms than any American Marxist, black or white, had ever done; even in his Black Muslim days Malcolm X never used harsher language. It is unrealistic, he said, to expect the Negro to reach ‘a class point of view’ ahead of the white worker; that can happen ‘only when the white worker is educated’ (class-conscious and anticapitalist), and understands his duty to his black brother. Despite that, the oppression of the Negroes is such that they can become revolutionary ahead of the white workers, furnish the vanguard of the revolution, and fight better for a new society than the white. But, he added, for that to happen, the revolutionary party must carry on ‘an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions [Black Nationalism] of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and makes no concession to them whatever.’ "

Trotsky’s attitude was reflected in a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party Convention, an arm of the Trotskyite Fourth International, in New York City in July, 1939. It began:

"The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary element of the population. They are designated by whose historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution." [The SWP and Negro Work]

What Leon Trotsky was apparently proposing for America was that, if white workers were stripped of "prejudices", then they could be made to tolerate Negro leadership in a real social revolution. Such a social revolution would consist of a reversal of the former social status of the two races, i.e., the Negroes would end on top and the white workers on the bottom.

Did Trotsky and his followers really mean something like that? Appendix B of Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self Determination, a selection of Trotsky’s writings, indicates that he was, in fact, viscerally hostile to the white race—using emotive terms like "white chauvinism"; "white oppressors"; "domination by the whites is terminated"; "mutual struggle against the domination of the white exploiters"; and "closer to the proletarians of the colored races"—by which he meant he preferred the proletarians of the colored races.

Trotsky also wrote:

"It is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that white missionaries, preachers of eternal morals, participated in the corruption of the Kaffirs…No, we prefer the Kaffirs to all missionaries… The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites… The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race." [Their Morals and Ours]

In talking with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in June 1940, Trotsky stated:

"The white slaveholders accustom the Negroes not to speak first…We must approach them everywhere by advocating that for every lynching they should lynch ten or twenty lynchers".

The Fourth International was Leon Trotsky’s attempt to duplicate the First International Workingmen’s Association, founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864 and envisioned as a global industrial army under his command. By founding the Fourth International, Trotsky aspired to command a global proletarian army of his own His vicious attacks on the "prejudices" of white workers were his way of attempting to mobilize all of the world’s colored races under his banner—undoubtedly because the colored races outnumber the white race by far. Trotsky’s international Marxism had, as its effective goal, the elimination of the white race’s former domination of the world, so that its opposite, domination by the majority colored races, could be brought about. This required the submission of the white race through the elimination of "prejudices".

Trotsky’s was a natural reaction for a fanatical Marxist who absorbed the dogma that the white Christian capitalist West was guilty of imperialist oppression. But there is more to it. Trotsky was also a Leninist, who grasped Lenin’s strategy of destroying the colonial empires of the white West and then mobilizing those former colonies to enable the Third World to cut off energy and mineral resources vital for the white West’s industrial factories. In Lenin’s view, this would bring the white West to its knees. (This, of course, could still be accomplished by a combination of radical Moslems, the Red Chinese, and a Marxist South Africa, with or without the cooperation of post-Soviet Russia.)

Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International had much more influence on events in the U.S. than is commonly recognized. One example: the notorious Studies in Prejudice, supported by the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee, in 1943. The ostensible purpose of Studies in Prejudice was to address anti-Semitism in America. The basis for Studies in Prejudice, according to Martin Jay in his book The Dialectical Imagination, was a 1939 essay by Max Horkheimer, the former director of the Marxist Institute of Social Research, entitled "The Jews and Europe". This institute was founded in 1923 at Frankfurt University, Germany and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. Its original purpose was to bring Marxism to Germany, but with the advent of Hitler its members emigrated to America.

The most influential product of Studies in Prejudice was The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. This book was edited by Max Horkheimer and authored by Theodor Andorno, an original member of the Frankfurt School, together with other American Jewish social psychologists who referred to themselves as the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group.

This work on prejudice against Jews, coupled with Trotsky’s hatred of white prejudice against blacks, can be seen as forming the ideological basis for what would become a massive national campaign against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination, eventually encompassing Betty Friedan’s feminist revolution, directed against white males, who would be charged with racism, sexism and anti-Semitism if they did not submit. This national campaign was greatly aided by the efforts of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution was buttressed by something known as "Critical Theory"— in Horkheimer’s rendition, social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. This destructive criticism was specifically aimed and Christianity, capitalism, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, culture, sexual restraint, loyalties, patriotism, masculinity, heredity and ethnocentrism as well as conservatism.

Both these theories had revolutionary practice as their real objective. The campaign against prejudice, bigotry and discrimination directed against white males eventually led to what might be called the "Feminization of America", whereby traditional gender roles would be totally obliterated in all sectors of American life so that women could be placed in every position that was formerly reserved for men. This is the visible face of the social revolution. In effect, women, along with blacks, were to be the vanguard of social revolution in America.

The key figure in the U.S. was Herbert Marcuse, another alumnus of the Frankfurt School. He adopted Trotsky’s ideas on the revolutionary potential of blacks as well as the matriarchal theory of the Frankfurt School. This became apparent when he became the most fashionable philosopher on American campuses in the 1960s.

In his book Soviet Marxism, Marcuse had argued that the USSR was no longer true to Marxism, and that since the proletariat had become integrated into bourgeois society and was no longer capable of revolution, other revolutionaries—such as university students, ghetto blacks, and the Third World—would take their place. (Klaus Mehnert reported in Moscow and the New Left a high level of Soviet interest in Herbert Marcuse, where writers accused Marcuse of making youth and the intelligentsia receptive to Trotskyism and Maoism.)

In a paper written for Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in California in 1947, Marcuse "argued the case for a Soviet Republic and welcomed anarchy, disintegration and catastrophe as the only means through which, in an act of revolutionary freedom, change would be achieved in the class structure of the productive apparatus and in human needs". [The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, p 391]

Marcuse wrote:

"One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment; including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution has ended. These ideas are old fashioned…what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system."[The Carnivorous Society, Sociedad Carnívora (Buenos Aires: Editorial Eco Contemporáneo, 1970).]

What Marcuse meant by "a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system" became apparent when he preached what he called the "Great Refusal"—a process whereby, through sexual liberation and black and feminist revolutions among the college students, they would be induced to hate their own white Western heritage. Marcuse sought, by reorienting the tender sensibilities of gullible students toward sympathy for the poor oppressed colored peoples of the world, to incline them to support Trotsky’s permanent revolution without realizing what the game was really about.

For all practical purposes, the social revolution promoted by Leon Trotsky and Herbert Marcuse has been successfully executed in America. There is no sphere of American life that has been left untouched

But whether the revolution is Karl Marx’s scheme for the overthrow of the bourgeois middle class by criminalizing it in the eyes of the proletarian lower class—or Trotsky’s scheme for a revolution of the colored races on a global scale—or Marcuse’s scheme for revolution among American women and racial minorities to destroy the white male power structure—the same thing must occur first: the moral and mental submission of those in power to the will of the social revolutionaries.

This amounts to a psychological submission to the demands of the lower orders, enabling them to replace the higher orders. It is a true revolution, but by non-violent means.

The Marxist social revolutionaries in modern America who strive to promote the disintegration of the white male power structure not only know all of this, but write about it and put it into practice as part of their grand scheme. They have a tremendous advantage: a body of literature dealing with social revolution that has accumulated over the past one hundred and fifty years. This literature includes the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, George Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, and that of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Leo Lowenthal, Frederick Pollock, Franz Neumann as well as Marcuse. The Frankfurt School group added a new dimension to revolutionary theory with the addition of psychology. Transformation of the subconscious mind became their main focus. They aimed to create a "New American Man", emasculated and rendered passive in the face of the provocations of the social revolutionaries.

In the name of combating Fascism and Nazism in America, this body of destructive criticism was employed by the Marxist social revolutionaries to bring about the disintegration of the prevailing American system of beliefs, attitudes and values. Millions of Americans would come to believe and value the opposite of what they formerly believed and valued. It was a revolution in thinking. It applied to the moral order itself.

The first law of nature is survival—survival of the group—the racial group. The second law of nature is procreation—procreation of the species—the species group—the racial group. But revolutionaries convinced millions that these laws of nature no longer had force or effect. They propagated an opposite first law—that of equality. Differentiation was to be outlawed by depicting racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism as moral evils. Equality became the only moral good—and was to be enforced by law.

The disintegration of the moral order brought about by the social revolutionaries was accompanied by the disintegration of the psychological order. This consisted of deprecating the worth of the white race in general, and white males in particular, while simultaneously increasing the worth of everyone else, especially in school textbooks and in the media. The social revolutionaries were diabolically clever in declaring that white males were guilty of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia as well as oppression of the lower orders. They evoked emotions of compassion, sympathy and pity for the "victims" in the lower orders that placed white males in a psychological iron cage. This caused most white males to adopt passive neutrality, while others sought psychological refuge by identifying with the oppressed victims.

The net effect has been a gradual shift away from the cultural customs and traditions devised and enforced by authoritative white males that heretofore governed higher order thinking and behavior, toward the virtual adoption of lower order thinking and behavior by untold millions of both youthful and adult Americans. No end to this disintegration is in sight.

Concurrent with the disintegration of the moral and psychological order at the hands of the social revolutionaries is their intentional destruction of the biological order. Employing appeals such as liberation, freedom and choice, the social revolutionaries advocated and encouraged abortion, contraception, divorce, homosexuality, career women, drugs, racial intermarriage and unlimited immigration of the colored races together with the destruction of "patriarchal family". This reflects the second law of the social revolutionaries: white procreation is evil; that which retards white procreation is good. This is, of course, the opposite of the second law of nature.

Most Americans will probably have great difficulty accepting that a small band of alien social revolutionaries purposely set out decades ago to change a whole nation’s system of beliefs to set in motion a process that leads to social disintegration. Nevertheless, this is what was done.

Americans will have great difficulty curing their domestic ills unless this reality is commonly recognized.

Raymond V. Raehn (email him) is a former Navy fighter pilot and real estate developer who now ranches in south Texas. He was the founder of the United States Global Strategy Council, (See A Global Strategy Council? By Gregory D. Foster, Parameters, the quarterly journal of the U.S. Army War College, Spring 1986 [PDF ]), which led to the Goldwater-Nicholls Act requiring the United States government to prepare and issue a formal National Security Strategy.