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One of the least honourable political types to be found on the left is the person who was a Trotskyist, anarchist, or other libertarian radical when a student but has become a Stalinist because they want a career in some bit of movement bureaucracy where that’s the dominant mode.
Undoubtedly the conversion is never quite so directly venal as to involve them saying, even only to themselves, “I’m going to change my politics to get a better job.” Undoubtedly it is lacquered in all sorts of self-justification and rationalisation...
...about how their former politics were faux-radical ultra-left student follies, whilst Stalinism, in whatever biodegraded form they choose to adopt it, is a politics of institutional seriousness that once commanded armies.
But the effect is the same: abandoning a politics, however imperfect, of emancipation in favour of a politics of command and control, so they can function more easily in a bureaucratic clique and progress their careers.
It’s of a lower moral order, IMO, than people who abandon leftism entirely to become bankers or whatever. That kind of surrender is wretched. But to become a partisan of the left’s own organic tradition of tyranny in order to boost your bank balance is utterly contemptible.
