Sitting with realization that Trotsky haunts so much of our understanding of fascism—incl. among those who wouldn't know who he even is—his collapsist narrative infusing zeitgeist to this day, such that the rise of fascism seems to many inextricable from purported tardiness of capitalism.
That fascism might arise irrespective of any stage of capitalism; that fascism might be the purpose of a system to which capitalism is penumbral—such ideas are not within spectral frame that we have inherited.
Fascism, said Zetkin, was "movement of the hungry, the suffering, the frustrated"—not exclusively proletariat.
Lumpen feature here also—if we've eyes to see them.
Class-categories of Marxism color our vision. Squinting through such lens, one sees petite bourgeoisie.
Yet trifocals of #classposture reveal #conveyancée, #disaccommodation, #conquistadas—each code-switched with #perquisitive classposture.
Folk hungry, suffering, frustrated by unfulfilled retrofuture promises of #FrosteanBargain.
Trotsky's analysis of social dynamics at play was in many ways prescient.
His observation that reformist SPD had been fostering "the belief in the eternity of capitalism" anticipated what a century later would be named as capitalist realism. (In a book subtitled "Is there no alternative?")
Yet his belief that "fascism is…based on the uprooting…of proletarian democracy" presumes that fascism really had so much concern for Marxism, as opposed to seeing a wedge between ideologies to be exploited.
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.