Truest statement of the week

The fake left at the Left Forum should be distinguished from the fake left of the non-profit industrial complex. The non-profit industrial complex indeed hires fake activistsbeholden to government and corporate funders responsible for the very problems that non-profit activists oppose in the first place. Fake left activists reside in non-profit organizations such as MoveOn.org and Indivisible. The fake left I refer to in this piece are perhaps even more insidious than those paid by foundations and non-profits. This band of leftists verbally states opposition to imperialism and an embrace of socialism in theory yet behaves more like amateur soft agents of the US intelligence services in practice.
These fake leftists reside in an alphabet soup of so-called Trotskyist organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO). So-called “Trotskyist” organizations have a long history of supporting US imperialism. I don’t pretend to know which organization the fake leftists who protested Baraka belonged to. An attendee told me that the organizers of the protest of Baraka stemmed from the League for the Revolutionary Party. Thetrend is more important than the organization. Just days prior to the Left Forum, activists in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote an opinion piece claiming that “The 2,000 US troops in Syria are not there to conduct ‘regime change.’ They are there to defend the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in North East Syria and to oppose ISIS. Trump has made that clear.” One of the authors of the piece has been active on social media denouncing Baraka and the Black Alliance for Peace for being so-called apologists for Assad. This falls in line with the ISO, which has long been known to support US-led operations in Libya and Syria in the name of “revolution.”

While claiming to want revolution, there are many activists in these organizations that choose to insult and defame every revolution that has ever occurred in history, even the Russian Revolution of 1917. According to their pro-war ideology, every socialist revolution in history has been led by despotic, self-interested authoritarians who wielded “state capitalist” formations to repress and impoverish the working class. This includes the Chinese and Cuban revolutions in addition to the Russian. And it ultimately includes any government that the US doesn’t like and wants to overthrow. As Diana Johnstone put it simply, “The trouble with these Trotskyists is that they are always “supporting” other people’s more or less imaginary revolutions. They are always telling others what to do. They know it all. The practical result from this verbal agitation is simply to align this brand of Trotskyism with U.S imperialism.”
-- Danny Haiphong, "The Fake Left at the Left Forum" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).