“The involvement of leading members of the DSA in this anti-Trotsky campaign clearly indicates that it was a coordinated response to the WSWS’s criticism of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, which had been read by thousands of DSA members. Rather than attempting to reply to the WSWS with legitimate arguments, the DSA leaders descended to the level of political pornography. A tweet by Ben Davis, a prominent DSA member in Washington, D.C., featured a drawing of the assassin preparing to strike Trotsky from behind with an ice pick. Davis added the caption, ‘Clear out the wreckers’ — thereby invoking the very words used by Stalin to sanction the murderous terror he unleashed in the Soviet Union in 1936.”

This “political pornography”, the advocacy of political violence, has its roots in the entire history of political reaction. More importantly, however, it represents, within the current context something more than a reaction to one writer Eric London’s criticism of one lawmaker, Ocasio-Cortez. To put it down to that only lulls the workers’ class consciousness, appealing to liberal backwardness. The capitalist class as a whole has reached a turning point where they can no longer rule by democratic means. This means they must turn to open violence, mass repression, and political assassination.

The SEP has encouraged this very process by censoring the Democratic Power Faction and denying it rights within the ICFI. It has used character assassination against this writer, Bertrand Poster, and worked, through criminal methods, to suppress legitimate participation according to established rules on factions deriving their legitimacy from the Declaration of the 46, the founding document of the International Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, the predecessor of the Fourth International over which the ICFI assumes organizational leadership. In order to end the open acceptance and encouragement of political assassination, the SEP must apologize at once and openly break from its recent turn towards character assassination, illegitimate expulsion, and vote-rigging.

As the threat of fascism looms, social democrats will need to prepare a betrayal of the working class. The DSA has essentially opened up relations with the SEP in order to offer them a gift, a Trojan horse of sorts. This fantasy they have spun has the aim of convincing the SEP leadership that they are Trotsky. Whoever they choose to illegally expel, then, must be Ramon Mercador. The SEP must turn down this gift and state that the greatest threat continues to be the Nanobureaucracy. As Trotsky himself explained, Stalin’s agents answered to Stalin, and Stalin answered to the bureaucracy of the Soviet state created by the 1917 workers’ revolution, the greatest revolution against capitalism up until today. The Soviet bureaucracy needed to create Stalin in order to allow imperialism, the dominant system in the world, an agent within the encircled Soviet state and the world revolution it controlled through the various Communist Parties.

The SEP must recognize this objective process in theory and not ignore Trotsky’s warnings in Revolution Betrayed. The hunt for a Ramon Mercador within the SEP will become a witch-hunt that permanently damages the original democratic principles of Democratic-Centralism and the Left Opposition. Only an unceasing fight against Nanobureaucracy within the ICFI will return the ICFI to its founding principles, represented in the founding document of the Left Opposition, the Declaration of the 46. Anything else will relieve the present-day Ramon Mercador of his responsibility to act, and turn over the organizational power over the ICFI to him and his chum clique.