I am baffled as to how so many Western leftists are either shitlibs, revisionists, or ultras and rarely any principled leftists? Does labor aristocracy have to do with this? My candidate for the start is when the CIA started funding the glowies (i.e. the Anti-Stalinist left).
My first instinct was to say it started with McCarthyism when many of the genuine Marxist-Leninists were driven underground, and then over time replaced with COINTELPRO Trotskyists, while at the same time the “Secret Speech” made being a real ML now not just professional suicide due to persecution by the bourgeois state but also social suicide even among most of the “radical” leftist circles, particularly the more academic ones.
But really, the more i think on this the more i realize it goes back much further than that. Already in the 1930s you had a lot of bad takes in what was then the “Western left” on the Soviet Union. You could blame this on Trotsky but again this doesn’t go far enough back, because even as the October revolution was happening there were a lot of social democrat type leftists who denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks and sided with the Mensheviks instead.
So really for me it goes all the way back to the opportunistic betrayal that happened at the beginning of WWI when so many among the “left” jumped on board the pro-war bandwagon. The “Western left” never got over that split and the pro-war social democrats ended up essentially winning the struggle. Hence the German SPD, the British Labour party, etc. all eventually but inevitably ended up slowly degenerating until their final betrayal in the 1990s when they embraced neoliberalism.
So long as this traitorous social democracy defines the “Western left” all other leftist forces, even many of those who call themselves socialists or communists, end up being just the furthest left part of that same broader social democracy. They may be nominally opposed to the socdems and profess more radical views but they are fundamentally compatible and share many of the same liberal and western chauvinist assumptions about the world and modes of thinking.
As for the driving forces behind these dynamics and behind why opportunism has been so successful, yes i think you are essentially right, it has a lot to do with labor aristocracy and the elevated position that the Western working class enjoyed as a result of imperialism and colonialism. Their material and class interests were not completely but at least partially aligned with the preservation of the imperialist system and hence with the preservation of capitalism, albeit in a milder form with more handouts for them.
I also noticed that the white working class, especially those in the rural regions, had now been abandoned by the Capitalist class who need to import a large number of immigrants of colors to replace the free Indigenous child slaves in Residential fake schools that secretly continued after 1997 and the free stolen inheritance from abducted Indigenous children in the fake cultural assimilation projects. After their displacement into poverty, the conservative group among the white working class refuse to subject themselves to their own victim blaming policy and instead decided to shift to Fascism, xenophobia, and even projection of their toxic parasitism to the Indigenous people that sustained the prosperity of the British diaspora. Those rural white working class rejects the reality of their abandonment and continued to support the white Capitalists that previously provided free riding benefits to the white working class as compensation for the exploitation of the working class. Their projection towards the Indigenous people indicated that they know that they are being exploited by the Capitalists of their own racist caste system, but that they decided to trap themselves in their own little fantasy world where the Capitalists provide free stuff to the white caste and where the white caste are somehow ‘worked’ for the free stuff that they stole from other people.
You’re already underselling the level of crosstalk between US white labor unions and the KKK. The St Louis “Soviet” formed a lynch mob during WW1.
Bernstein started it way back in the day and it has been a steady process of decline ever since. In a short, glib answer to a serious question
