On March 19, 2026, Joe Wrote, a Denver-based member of the DSA who maintains a substack with some 9,000 subscribers, attacked Kshama Sawant on Twitter/X, writing, “After months shitting on DSA, you beg for our help? No wonder Stalin ice picked your boy.”

The “boy” was Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, murdered in Mexico on August 20, 1940 by GPU agent Ramón Mercader, as part of Stalin’s systematic campaign to liquidate a generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Sawant is a former Seattle City Council member and current congressional candidate, who that week had urged the DSA to support her campaign. She herself is part of the pseudo-left milieu, a former member of the DSA and Socialist Alternative, who collaborates with the Democratic Party and sections of the trade union bureaucracy.

The same day, Left Voice posted to its website a lengthy article by Joe Wrote promoting the DSA’s alliance with and functioning within the Democratic Party, and attacking other left groups as “sectarian” and politically irrelevant. Wrote was responding to an invitation by Left Voice to the DSA and other groups to submit articles to its website as part of a discussion aimed at establishing a “united front” and a “new workers’ party.”

When the tweet threatening Sawant drew attention, Left Voice removed Joe Wrote’s article on March 22 with a brief disavowal on Twitter. It has issued no further statement, political accounting or explanation of how a figure publicly glorifying Trotsky’s murder came to write under its imprimatur.

The incident is an exposure of the broader political orientation of Left Voice. Since November 2025, Left Voice has been calling for the construction of what it terms a “united front” of tendencies, including the DSA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Socialist Alternative, Tempest and sections of Labor Notes. Its May Day 2026 statement declared it “essential to build a broad united front of unions, social movements, community and grassroots organizations, and the Left.” In other words, Left Voice seeks a regroupment whose purpose is to channel workers’ opposition back into the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy.

The call by Left Voice comes amid an escalating crisis of American and world capitalism, above all the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran—part of an expanding global war—which is sharply intensifying the economic and social breakdown inside the United States. The response of workers has been a series of major class battles, including strike action by New York City nurses, Kaiser Permanente nurses and other healthcare workers; walkouts by New York City building service workers; mounting anger over union shutdowns of authorized strikes, including among University of California workers; and the repeated rejection of pro-company contracts by Nexteer autoworkers in Saginaw.

In each case, the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy worked in tandem to suppress the fight by workers and force through sellout contracts. One of the most egregious examples was the three-day strike by 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers, which paralyzed North America’s largest commuter rail system, and was shut down through backdoor negotiations between New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the union apparatus and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the DSA.

Joe Wrote’s article, before its quiet removal from Left Voice’s website, was a full-throated defense of these right-wing forces. In it, he asserted that the only way to “bring socialism to Americans” is to “give them a practical alternative” in the Democratic Party because “the duopoly is the prism through which Americans understand politics.” Using this crudely pro-imperialist framework, he then stated that the only “realistic option” was to vote for the Democrats.

Wrote further attempted to justify the DSA’s support for the Democrats by citing figures like Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, promoting them as among the “top five most popular politicians in the country.” Any other “socialist parties ... hold little relevance in American politics,” he declared.

Mamdani has sought to make an ally of Trump himself. He continues to characterize his relationship with Trump as “productive,” even while calling Trump a fascist. Since his election, he has systematically repudiated every campaign promise while moving to implement austerity measures in New York City under the framework of promoting “government efficiency.”

Left Voice published Wrote’s article because it has no fundamental disagreement with the DSA’s reactionary politics. In 2021, following Ocasio-Cortez’s denunciation of WSWS criticism of then-President Joe Biden as “privileged,” DSA leaders and supporters launched a coordinated social media campaign featuring ice-pick imagery and celebrating Trotsky’s assassination, documented in detail by the WSWS.

SEP National Chairman David North wrote to then-DSA National Director Maria Svart demanding the posts be repudiated and those responsible expelled. Svart never replied. And Left Voice, which purports to be a Trotskyist organization, never uttered a protest.

The anti-Trotskyist position of Left Voice stems from the organization’s Pabloite political history. It is associated with the Argentine Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), whose international tendency rebranded itself in 2025 as the Permanent Revolution Current–Fourth International (PRC-FI).

The origins of the PRC-FI go back to the 1950s, when the founder of the Morenoite movement, Nahuel Moreno, initially supported the break by the Fourth International in 1953 from the liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to defend the program of orthodox Trotskyism.

However, Moreno soon drifted back to the opportunist politics of Pablo and began in 1956 to openly support the bourgeois nationalist forces of General Juan Perón in Argentina after Peron’s ouster in 1955. Moreno proclaimed at the 1958 Leeds Congress of the ICFI that there must be “Revolutionary United Fronts” based on the claim that “the crisis of the apparatus releases unconscious revolutionary tendencies.” He rejected the central resolution, which defined the task of the ICFI and its national sections as “building revolutionary proletarian parties, armed with the theory of permanent revolution.”

Moreno emerged as a supporter of the Pabloite program: the liquidation of the Trotskyist movement and the Fourth International into Stalinism, social democracy and bourgeois nationalism.

Moreno’s supporters entered the Peronist movement in Argentina directly. When Juan Perón returned to power in October 1973, he purged the left wing of his Justicialist Party and authorized the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), a paramilitary death squad that murdered hundreds of socialists and trade unionists before the 1976 military coup escalated the killing into the “Dirty War.” The Morenoites continued to advocate blocs with “left Peronists” throughout. Moreno supported the American Socialist Workers Party’s 1963 reunification with the Pabloites and founded the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in 1982 on the same basis. The PRC is its international successor.

The Marxist conception of the united front bears no resemblance to this type of opportunist politics. Lenin and Trotsky elaborated the united front tactic at the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International in 1921 and 1922. It referred to defensive joint action between organizations of the working class—at that point the Communist Party and the mass social democratic parties—on concrete questions of working class interest, while maintaining complete political independence.

Trotsky further developed this conception between 1930 and 1933 in his writings warning against the rise of fascism in Germany and the call for a united front of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. Trotsky proposed defensive agreements between the two organizations to mobilize their combined forces against the fascist threat. He insisted on no mixing of banners, no political concessions to the Social Democrats and no restriction on the Communist Party’s freedom to criticize reformist politics. The Stalinist leadership of the Comintern, having designated the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” rejected this perspective. The result was the disarming of the German working class and the victory of Hitler in January 1933.

Following the catastrophe in Germany, the Stalinist bureaucracy adopted the policy of the “Popular Front,” which subordinated the working class to alliances with bourgeois “democratic” parties in the name of defending democracy against fascism. The Popular Front led to the demoralization of the French working class in 1936-38 and to the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and the victory of Franco. Earlier applications of the same method had produced the crushing of the Chinese Revolution in 1927 and the betrayal of the British general strike in 1926.

What Left Voice advances today is the application in the United States of the opportunist line of the international Morenoite tendency of which it is a part. What they propose is not a mistaken application of the united front, but a variety of the Stalinist Popular Front, applied to organizations such as the DSA—a faction of the Democratic Party that represents privileged sections of the upper-middle class—along with the corporatist trade union apparatus.

As the WSWS wrote on the rebranding of the Morenoites in Argentina:

The cultivation of reactionary political blocs with the demoralized Stalinists and “left-wing Peronists,” in the fraudulent name of applying the “united front” tactic of Lenin and Trotsky, was the political stock in trade of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS)—the party founded by the Morenoites in 1982, during the decline of the Argentine military dictatorship whose rise had been facilitated by their capitulatory policies. …

The “Permanent Revolution Current” (PRC) is being built as a new cover—adorned with “revolutionary” colors—for the Morenoite movement’s promotion of different national pseudo-left parties and trade union bureaucracies that defend the rotting capitalist order from the revolutionary offensive of the working class.

Wrote’s article—which Left Voice published and only removed after the ice-pick tweet—was a full-throated defense of the Democratic Party as the only “realistic option.” Left Voice published it because it shares its basic political orientation.

The real way forward is by building the only organization capable of resolving the crisis of leadership in the working class—the International Committee of the Fourth International. The proof is in our record of struggle, against the bourgeois parties themselves, the trade union bureaucracies and all forms of political opportunism and attempts by the pseudo-left to block the independent mobilization of the working class.