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).