Dutch VVI Joins IBT
From the IG to Trotskyism
In the month preceding the U.S./UK attack on Iraq, the web site
of the Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth International (IG-LFI)
highlighted the activity of its Dutch affiliate in the port of Rotterdam:
In contrast to the classless appeals to
citizens and civil disobedience, the Verbond voor de Vierde
Internationale (VVILeague for the Fourth International) has been calling
since last fall to mobilize workers action to stop the war cargos. A leaflet
put out by the VVI in October 2002 appealed to dock workers to boycott U.S. and
Dutch warships, and to refuse to handle military goods.
Internationalist, January-February 2003
On 25 February 2003, a united-front demonstration initiated by
the VVI took place:
In response to the news of trains with U.S. military
equipment heading to Rotterdam, the VVI issued an appeal for a mobilization on
February 25 that would march to the docks of the company shipping war goods to
the Gulf. Leaflets of the VVI and a united-front flyer calling for the action
were distributed in largely immigrant and working-class areas of South
Rotterdam and the protest was announced on Radio Rijmond (in
Rotterdam). Ibid.
Fifty militants, including many immigrants, marched to the docks
in an action that contrasted sharply with the cross-class peace
mobilizations of the reformist left. At the demonstration:
A speech by a representative of the VVI explained the need
to defend Iraq through the call for workers action against the war, including
trade-union boycotts and strikes. He also emphasized defense of the immigrant
population, which is under constant racist attack as imperialist war in
Afghanistan and elsewhere is brought home. Ibid.
It was a good speech and a good initiative. At the time we did
not know that the speaker, Comrade W. Spector of the Dutch VVI, was also its
only member. He had considerable experience in the organized left, having spent
a few years with affiliates of both Jack Barnes Socialist Workers
Party/U.S. and Tony Cliffs British group of the same name, and then a
couple more as the sole Dutch supporter of James Robertsons International
Communist League (ICLformerly the international Spartacist tendency
[iSt]).
Comrade Spector, who had come to understand the importance of a
correct political program from his experience with the opportunist Barnesites
and Cliffites, was initially attracted to the ICLs ostensibly orthodox
Trotskyism. Over time, however, he became increasingly troubled by the apparent
discrepancy between the frequently correct-sounding positions of the ICL and
the commandism and peculiar internal dynamics of the organization. He began to
look around and discovered the IG/LFI on the internet. In December 2001, during
a trip to New York, he had a few days of discussions with IG leader Jan Norden
and other members. It was proposed that he join their group and return to build
an LFI affiliate in Holland. Impressed by the IGs apparent seriousness
and its hard anti-imperialist posture, Spector willingly accepted their account
of the political degeneration of the ICL and its leading section, the
Spartacist League/U.S. (SL), as originating with the demoralization of the
leading cadre in the wake of the destruction of the Soviet Union. He also
accepted the IGs claim that the definitive turning point in the
ICLs degeneration came when Norden et al. were tossed out in 1996.
This was a position that the comrade began to question, in an
increasingly serious fashion, as he explored first one, and then another, of
the historical polemics between the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) and
the iSt during the 1980s. At first Spector expected to find ample confirmation
of the IGs characterizations of the IBT as anti-communist
renegades. But the more he read, the more uneasy he became with his
leaderships explanations. He gradually realized that there were serious
discrepancies between the hard-edged Trotskyist positions advocated by the
contemporary LFI and some of the historical ICL positions they stand on. He was
also surprised to find that on virtually all the disputed questions, the
positions of the IBT (and its forerunner, the External Tendency of the iSt)
were superior to those of the ICL/LFI.
Hailing Brezhnevs Afghan Policy &
Saving U.S. Marines
The first question Spector grappled with concerned the debate
between the IBT and the iSt over the correct formulation of the Trotskyist
position of defense of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In a 4 January
letter to the IG explaining his decision to support the IBT, Spector included
two counterposed formulations that captured the nub of the controversy over
hailing the Soviet Army:
In fact we [IBT] rejected Hail Red Army in
favor of Military Victory to the Red Army in Afghanistan. We did so
because hailing Brezhnevs military intervention in
Afghanistan tended to blur the critical distinction between political
and military support...just as the SL supported the Vietcong against the
U.S. in Vietnam militarily. It was the Pabloites who hailed Ho Chi
Minhs armies....We saw no reason to apply different criteria in
Afghanistan. IBT Letter to IG/LQB, 15 December
1996, reprinted in Trotskyist Bulletin No. 6
We [IG] proudly stand on the [Hail Red Army] slogan and
program we defended at that time, which was deeply and explicitly counterposed
to the Stalinist program of peaceful coexistence with imperialism
and intimately linked to our fight for proletarian political revolution in the
Soviet Union itself. IG letter to MEG, 18 July 1998, reprinted
in Trotskyist Bulletin No. 6
After careful consideration, Spector concluded:
The IBT didnt duck by dropping a
pro-Stalinist (Hail Red Army) slogan that implied political support to the
Stalinists in favor of military victory to the Soviet Army. The facts seemed
pretty well set in cement, while maintaining the call for political revolution
as well as defending the deformed workers states, they had followed the
Trotskyist program of defending the degenerated workers state which was the
USSR.
He observed that hailing Brezhnevs Afghan
policy:
left women, workers & leftists who had placed their
faith in the military arm of the Stalinist bureaucracy, open to the
Kremlins capacity for betrayal whose tragic consequences have brought it
under the boots of US & Dutch imperialism today.
The second major point Spector found himself in agreement with
was the IBTs criticism of the SLs call to save the U.S. Marines
after their barracks had been blown up in Beirut in 1983. The IGs defense
of this position is in contradiction to its openly defeatist attitude toward
the current imperialist interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 4 January
letter, Comrade Spector recalled:
What was most perplexing to me as a member, was that the
IG-leaderships proud defeatist position towards imperialist
kill-crazed Marines (terrorising the Iraqi women & workers
there today, [a] case presented with merit in The Internationalist #16)
is squarely counterposed to that SLs tearful slogan (bowing before
Reagan) they also advanced then, without ever having gone thru an honest
reappraisal of the opposing slogans since the LFIs founding.
What if tomorrow whole US barracks [in Iraq were to] fly sky high with
enormous casualties? This would leave the LFI-membership 20 years later,
in times of increasing military setbacks to bloody imperialist plunder across
the globe, with 2 irreconcilable positions.
Whether in 1983 or 2004, Spector concluded: Revolutionaries
have no enthusiasm whatsoever for saving the lives of colonial troops!
Goring Nordens Ox
Another issue raised by Spector, to which Norden is particularly
sensitive, is the iSts political disorientation during the terminal
crisis of the German Democratic Republic (DDRaka East
Germany) in 1989-90. This is a touchy subject for the IG because Norden
was personally in charge of Spartacist activity on the ground. While
energetically pursued, the iSts intervention was decisively flawed
politically. As the leaders of the DDRs ruling Stalinist party (the
Socialist Unity PartySED) were negotiating a capitulation to the West
German bourgeoisie, the iSt pursued a policy referred to internally as
unity with the SED. This reached its nadir when SL founder/leader
James Robertson absurdly attempted to arrange personal meetings with DDR
master-spy Markus Wolf, Soviet General B.V. Snetkov and SED chief, Gregor Gysi.
The SL, which seems to have developed amnesia about the whole business, today
retrospectively denounces the SED for leading the counterrevolution and blames
Norden for wanting to adapt politically to the Stalinists. The IG, on the other
hand, flatly defends the whole iSt intervention. But neither is able to offer a
coherent rationalization for Robertsons ludicrous, and grossly
opportunist, attempt to counsel Gysi, Wolf and Snetkov.
In bidding Spector farewell, the IG/LFI leadership acknowledged
that: As a comrade of the LFI, under the direction of the executive
committee, you sought to bring about labor actions to boycott NATO war materiel
bound for Iraq with a February 2003 worker-immigrant demonstration at the
Rotterdam docks. But they also sputtered indignantly at the IBTs
anti-communist scandal-mongering and our penchant for
prurient gossip and supposed horror stories. This is somewhat
amusing coming, as it does, from the former long-time editor of Workers
Vanguard which, when it was a revolutionary publication, was regularly
denounced in exactly these terms by various opportunists and political bandits
who resented having their hustles and crooked maneuvers exposed. Name-calling
is easy, but IG/LFI members who are serious about building a genuinely
Trotskyist organization, rather than a Potemkin village, should carefully
investigate the substance of the political differences between the IBT and the
ICL/IG (many of which are documented in our Trotskyist Bulletin series)
and draw their own conclusions.
To defend previous political errors is to open the door for
future ones. The IG has always been reluctant to seriously address the origins
of the SLs degeneration, which was qualitatively complete long before
Norden et al. were unceremoniously driven out. Largely for reasons of personal
prestige, the IGs founders pretend that, prior to their own departure,
the SL had an almost pristine political and organizational record. Yet the
IGs own account of its cadres termination accuses SLers of
willful fabrications, smears, inventions
and mud-slinging. We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of any of
this, as it tallies precisely with our own experience a decade and a half
earlier. However, Nordens own horror stories raise some
uncomfortable questions he would prefer not to answer:
how could the cadres of a revolutionary Trotskyist
organization turn, on command, into purgers, wreckers, witchhunters and
hand-raisers? Where did the layer of self-conscious fabicators and
liars who boast of their misdeeds come from? And why were
Norden and Stamberg so sure that there was no point in bothering to appear at
their scheduled trial? IBT Letter to
IG/LQB, 15 December 1996, reprinted in Trotskyist Bulletin No. 6
[p.23]
We welcome the adherence of Comrade Spector to the IBT and fully
endorse his appeal to supporters of the IG/LFI who are serious about the
struggle to reforge the Fourth International that, as a first step, they seek
to participate in a regroupment of the LFI with the IBT that preserves
the revolutionary elements of the LFI-politics and breaks with the inherited
mistakes of the SL.
from 1917 no. 26, 2004 |