Trotskyist Bulletin No. 5: ICL vs. IBT

Introduction

Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary, noted that centrists tend to disparage revolutionaries' "active concern for purity of principles, clarity of position, political consistency and organizational completeness". We take these things seriously. A recent pamphlet by the International Communist League (ICL—centered on James Robertson's Spartacist League/U.S.), entitled "The International Bolshevik Tendency—What Is It?, seeks to demonstrate that: "The IBT is a political animal of a truly bizarre and dubious sort". Despite the Robertsonites' hysterical sectarianism and lack of political principle, we propose to respond to each and every one of the criticisms leveled by the ICL. Lenin once remarked that in any political dispute it is necessary to:

"study calmly and with the greatest objectivity, first the substance of the differences of opinion, and then the development of the struggles within the Party. Neither the one nor the other can be done unless the documents of both sides are published. He who takes somebody's word for it is a hopeless idiot, who can be disposed of with a simple gesture of the hand."

We have therefore reprinted each paragraph of the ICL pamphlet with a response.

We consider the SL to have been a very important group historically—indeed a vital link in the chain of revolutionary continuity. In the first issue of our journal 1917 we stated:

"We stand on the documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International; on the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist political counterrevolution; on the founding documents of the Fourth International and the revolutionary traditions of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) led by James P. Cannon from the 1930s to the 1950s. The SWP leadership abandoned the struggle to build a Trotskyist vanguard in the early 1960s in favor of reliance on the objective process of history (personified, in the first instance, by Fidel Castro). The Revolutionary Tendency, the progenitor of the Spartacist League (SL) was born in the struggle against the liquidationist implications of the ersatz Castroism of the SWP majority. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the programmatic heritage of Trotskyism was represented by the Spartacist tendency. This tradition we claim as our own."

The Spartacist League's attitude toward the IBT (and our North American predecessor, the External Tendency of the international Spartacist tendency [ET/iSt]), has fluctuated considerably over the years. Initially the SL leadership was prepared to engage in substantive written political exchanges with us (two of which we published as Trotskyist Bulletins). After a time the SL/iSt leadership moved away from political polemics and sought instead to draw a hard line against us with a combination of physical intimidation and slander. The ICL leadership continues to criticize us politically on the one hand, and, on the other, to denounce us as embittered anti-communists, "unnaturally obsessed" with the SL and therefore "dubious" and even "COINTELPRO-like." Internally, considerable attention has been paid to hardening the membership against us.

We do not regret the political attention we have paid to the SL/ICL. The SL remains an important political competitor internationally, not only for historical reasons but also because, at first glance, it appears to have politics substantially similar to our own. In addition to a variety of polemics, we have produced several articles evaluating critically the history of the SL/iSt, in particular the October 1982 "Declaration of an External Tendency of the iSt" and the 1985 article entitled "The Road to Jimstown" (published in the fourth and final issue of the Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt [ETB]). We also published an extensive interview with Geoff White, one of the original leaders of the RT/SL in 1917. The SL/ICL leadership's attitude toward us is profoundly contradictory. They have written more polemics against us than any other political tendency, yet we are the only leftist group that they refuse to debate in public. They obviously feel that a full and free exchange might not be advantageous to them.

We therefore find ourselves in the unusual position of welcoming the publication of this attack on us. Despite the misrepresentations and manipulations of fact (as well as outright lies), it assembles the main strands of their polemics against us into a single document. This permits us to present a detailed response to each of their charges and should, we hope, permit the interested reader to weigh the merits of the arguments on both sides.

—February 1996

We have numbered each of the paragraphs of the ICL pamphlet in the order they appeared with our comments interspersed. Every word of the SL text is reproduced below exactly as it was originally published. Note that in the web edition, for the sake of clarity, the text of the ICL pamphlet is in bold type whereas the IBT response is in non-bold type. Also each section of numbered paragraphs with the original ICL text and the IBT response is marked off by a horizontal line.

For the last 13 years a grouping calling themselves successively the "External Tendency" (ET), "Bolshevik Tendency" (BT), and (currently) the "International Bolshevik Tendency" (IBT), has claimed to be the true repository of the principles and program on which the International Communist League (ICL, formerly the international Spartacist tendency) was founded. While the IBT currently includes the New Zealand-based Permanent Revolution Group, most of whose members have never had any contact with our organization, almost all of the founding members of the IBT individually resigned from our international tendency in the early 1980s. When they were members, they never acted as a political grouping and never fought—much less mentioned—what they subsequently claim was the irreversible "degeneration" of our party. Rather, they simply quit, one by one, in the period after Ronald Reagan's election as president of the United States.

In contrast to the days of the Vietnam antiwar movement when most of these people joined in the late 1960s/early '70s, the political climate had shifted dramatically to the right as U.S. imperialism, after a period of "détente," again made aggressive anti-Sovietism the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. The American government armed Islamic fundamentalists to kill Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, raised a hue and cry for the reactionary, priest-infested, pro-capitalist and anti-Semitic Polish Solidarnosc, spent billions for a high-tech military buildup and waged surrogate wars against the guerrilla forces considered to be proto-Soviet agents in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. All the NATO powers lined up behind the U. S.' strident Cold War II anti-Sovietism. Internationally, our organization stood out for our Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and the forces of internal counterrevolution.

In the United States, the domestic corollary of Reagan's anti-Soviet war drive was brutal union-busting and, incidentally, the attempt to identify Marxist political advocacy with "terrorism." The Spartacist League/U.S. was compelled to initiate a series of lawsuits against the capitalist authorities who sought to brand us as a criminal "violent" conspiracy. Beginning in Detroit in 1979, we had also won some prominence in the U.S. for initiating and leading a series of united–front anti-fascist mobilizations which succeeded, for a time, in keeping the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from rallying in Northern U.S. cities.

Our labor/black mobilizations brought thousands of largely black workers and youth into the streets under communist leadership. We won real, if exemplary, victories, putting the SL squarely in the cross hairs of the racist, capitalist American state, which has always been haunted by the spectre of the confluence of black and red. As the stakes of being a communist got higher, a number of our members opted to quit. Many simply went away to pursue their own personal lives; others remained sympathizers of the organization. But those few who went on to form the ET/BT/IBT had their own peculiar pathology.

Nos. 1-4

The SL suggests that the IBT was launched by iSt members who ran for cover as the "stakes of being a communist got higher" with Reagan's election to the U.S. presidency. The fact that we have maintained an unbroken record of political activity is enough in itself to disprove such an assertion. It is true that the founding cadres of the IBT did not comprise a tendency within the iSt when we were members. In the quarter century after 1968, the SL/iSt did not have any internal tendencies or factions. The 1982 founding Declaration of the External Tendency of the iSt cited this as evidence that the internal regime of the SL was fundamentally different from that of Lenin's Bolshevik Party, Trotsky's Fourth International, or James P. Cannon's Socialist Workers Party:

"Trotsky's method of dealing with intra-party political struggle was quite different than that of the present leadership of the iSt. Political differences were fought out politically and where possible attempts were made to re-integrate oppositionists. Seymour [the SL's preeminent intellectual] makes the same observation as regards the Bolsheviks.
"The fact is there is something pretty unhealthy about a Trotskyist organization in which there have been virtually no political tendency or faction fights for a decade and a half."

This is a point the ICL leadership cannot answer.

Many of our founding cadres were driven out of the iSt in a series of purges during the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time none of us was fully conscious of all the dimensions of the transformation underway in the degenerating iSt. The May 1984 issue of Bulletin of the ET commented:

"Unfortunately most future ET members were not able to generalize and draw the proper political conclusions while they were still in the organization [iSt]. In many cases, our present comrades remained so loyal to the Robertson regime that they acquiesced in their own 'purges,' (as they were described internally at the time). We should have stayed and fought."

Hindsight of course is 20/20. But serious revolutionaries do not lightly decide to turn their backs on their organization. In explaining why he did not immediately rally to Trotsky and the Left Opposition, James P. Cannon remarked that "Dissatisfaction, doubts, are not a program....A serious and responsible revolutionist cannot disturb a party merely because he has become dissatisfied with this, that or the other thing" (History of American Trotskyism).

They coalesced in late 1982 from several interlinked clots of embittered ex-members in the U.S., Germany and Canada. The fact that they had quit, one by one, was then alibied by claims that they had all been unjustly "purged" for their political opposition. The fallacy of these assertions is easily proven by the simple fact that they could produce not one oppositional document written by any of them when they were members, nor any motions expelling them for their ostensible political views. All they had were their own resignation letters (which to this day they seem curiously disinclined to print).

No. 5

We say there were purges; the SL responds that: "The fallacy of these assertions is easily proven by the simple fact" that there were no oppositional documents. But all that the absence of documents proves is that there was no organized internal opposition—not that there were no purges. We propose a different test of truth. In each purge involving our comrades, the proceedings were recorded and the tapes deposited in the ICL's archives. Anyone listening to the tapes of the meetings leading up to the "quits" could quickly form his or her own opinion about whether the individuals concerned were being driven out of the group by the leadership or were merely leaving because of personal demoralization. In the past the SL has not been prepared to play these tapes, ostensibly on the grounds that they are "internal." The tapes in question would certainly reveal quite a bit about the internal norms in the iSt at the time—but after all, that is precisely what is in dispute. Serious people can draw their own conclusions from the SL's reluctance to provide the evidence.

We have never claimed that most of these purges took place because of "political opposition" to the leadership. The iSt at that time was a group with no factions, no tendencies and very little organized internal discussion of any sort. In fact most of the cadres slated to be purged retained considerable political respect for the leadership. This is why the purges were so disorienting for them. The ET Declaration observed:

"The central expression of the degeneration of the SL however has been the series of sub-political (and depoliticizing) 'fights' (aka 'purges') launched by the central leadership to rid itself of imaginary, or at least only potential, internal enemies. At least from the famous 'clone purge' of 1978, the SL leadership has shown an accelerating tendency to rip up whole areas of work and significantly weaken the tendency through driving out talented, political cadres on charges which were of secondary importance or irrelevant when they weren't entirely bogus."

As for printing our "resignation" letters, we note that to date the ICL has only printed one. It is from comrade Tom Riley, and appeared in the September 1980 issue of Spartacist Canada (which Riley had edited). The letter, published under the headline "Former Editor of SC Resigns from TL," begins:

"I never thought I'd be writing out a resignation from the iSt, the only revolutionary organization in the world, but here it is. At the request of the organization I am resigning from the TLC [Trotskyist League of Canada]."

In his resignation statement, Riley specified that "of course I agree with the political program" and added that "I am very reluctant to do so [resign]." Normally intelligent people understand what it means when someone resigns "at the request of the organization."

This is not to say that the BT wasn't, and isn't, animated by political appetites that were, and are, quite divergent from those of our organization. Although they came together as a formation largely motivated by subjective malice, on a political level they were the crystallized reflection of the pressure of anti-communist public opinion. Insofar as the BT claims to present a version of Spartacist politics it is a counterfeit one: along with their anti-Sovietism goes an indifference—at best—to the necessary link between the struggle for black freedom and the struggle for working-class emancipation in the United States.

No. 6

By "anti-Sovietism" the SL means criticism of its programmatic departures in the direction of Stalinophilia (e.g., naming a contingent of its supporters the "Yuri Andropov Brigade"—see paragraph No. 19 below). In fact, at the most critical junctures, when the heat was really on, the IBT and its predecessors remained Soviet defensist while the SL flinched (see paragraph No. 29 below for discussion of the KAL 007 flap and the "tragedy" that befell Reagan's Star Warriors aboard the Challenger; the question of military support to the Stalinist coupists in August 1991 is discussed in paragraph No. 25 below).

The ET screamed that the SL was abandoning trade-union work in favor of "community organizing" when we initiated labor/black struggle leagues linked to the party, attempting to build on the success of our anti-fascist actions (needless to say, the ET was to be found nowhere near most of these actions). As the SL noted in its 1983 conference document, the ET "sees the 'working class' as separate from and counterposed to the black plebeian masses. What the ETs really mean by the 'working class' is the labor bureaucracy pure and simple."

No. 7

We have consistently participated in anti-racist actions—including a variety of anti-fascist actions from which the SL has abstained. In our press we have published articles taking up the question of racism and special oppression. The charges of "indifference—at best" to the struggle for black liberation in the U.S., like the assertion that we regard the black plebian masses as "counterposed to" the working class, are malicious inventions.

The SL leadership manufactured these slanders in response to the ET's criticisms of their wholesale liquidation of the once-promising SL-supported trade-union work (see the 1982 Declaration of the ET and the Bulletin of the External Tendency). In June 1983 the ET published a document entitled: "Stop the Liquidation of the Trade Union Work," which sharply criticized the SL leadership's advice to its supporters to resign their positions as stewards in the phoneworkers' union. This meant turning their backs on a working-class base which had been built over more than a decade of patient and persistent struggle by the Militant Action Caucus (MAC). MAC had won recognition from militants around the U.S. as the preeminent opposition to the pro-imperialist national union leadership. The SL leadership also ripped up work in auto, longshore and other industries. Today the SL has no trade union work at all.

The SL leadership ordered the retreat from the unions because it feared that class-struggle militants with a proletarian base could potentially provide a focus for the crystallization of political opposition internally. Robertson et al sought to cover their turn with the announcement of the formation of "Labor Black Struggle Leagues" (LBSLs), organizations which, to this day, remain empty shells. In our June 1983 document we wrote:

"It is no accident that the LBSLs are being announced at the very moment that the caucuses, as we know them, are being liquidated. The LBSLs are designated to replace the union centered caucuses as the SLUS' main transitional organizations. The tactic of the LBSL is fine; it is only wrong if it is counterposed to and built on the corpses of the union centered caucuses.

. . .

"Without the anchor of the trade unions and the nucleus of their leadership in the caucuses, the effect of anti-Nazi/KKK mobilizations, however powerful, will tend to be dissipated back into the amorphous community. This is an ABC lesson about work among the unemployed and the unorganized drawn by Cannon from the CLA's [organization of American Trotskyists] experiences in the 1930s.

. . .

"At a time when the fascists are on the offensive, trying to polarize the US working class along race lines, it is critically important that revolutionaries remain in the integrated industrial unions and seek, by building alternative leaderships around the transitional program, to turn the unions into 'instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat' as Trotsky advocated in 'Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay'."

The ET also occasionally postured to the left. When 240 U.S. Marines were blown to pieces by a car bomb—placed by persons and forces unknown—in Lebanon in October 1983, the SL/U.S. raised the slogan "Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!" This highly conjunctural call was meant to take advantage of a situation where 1) the U.S. had only a token military presence in Lebanon and all of the competing fratricidal factions were jockeying for U.S. support—none were fighting a just war against the imperialists and 2) there was widespread revulsion in the American population against the imperialist machinations of the U.S. rulers abroad. The ETs insisted that this slogan marked our descent into "social patriotism," never mentioning the fact that it was raised in an article which also opposed the U.S. invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and hailed those fighting against U.S. imperialist troops there. The same WV front page that carried the call "Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!" also carried the slogan "U.S. Out of Grenada, Dead or Alive!"

No. 8

The SL's scandalous call to save the lives of the U.S. Marines in Lebanon is the subject of our Trotskyist Bulletin No. 2. It contains the ET's original critique, the SL's response, and all subsequent polemics. (The SL published a very limited selection of the polemics in its "Hate Trotskyism" Bulletin No. 5.) The SL's flinch over the Marines was the subject of a parallel criticism by Adaire Hannah and Bill Logan (two founders of the IBT's New Zealand section) in a November 1983 statement entitled "Spartacist Principles Betrayed."

The blow suffered by the U.S. military in Beirut has continued to reverberate. Every time the U.S. military prepares to intervene in a neo-colonial country, the media recalls Reagan's humiliation in Lebanon. When a gang of trigger-happy U.S. Rangers bit off more than they could chew in Somalia in October 1993, Workers Vanguard (22 October 1993) commented that although: "The U.S. death toll of 18 troops killed and 85 wounded was slight compared to the butchery inflicted on the Somalis....it caused many Americans to have flashbacks to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam." The capitalist press was also full of comparisons between the Rangers' setback and the blow inflicted on the Marines in Beirut, but the SL ignored this obvious parallel.

A few months earlier WV had published a letter from an SL supporter who drew a parallel between Clinton's plans to send "peacekeepers" to Bosnia and Reagan's disastrous adventure in Lebanon. This presented difficulties for the SL leadership, which could only explain the discrepancy between its position on the two situations by falsifying the historical record (see Workers Vanguard, 2 July 1993). We commented on this exchange in 1917 No. 13.

The above paragraph (No. 8) in the ICL's text reveals the contradictions in the SL's social-patriotic flinch over the Marines in Lebanon. When a group called "Islamic Jihad" claimed responsibility for detonating simultaneous truck bombs at the barracks of U.S. and French imperialist gendarmes, only the SL had trouble figuring out who wanted an imperialist pull-out. There was a vicious communalist civil war under way in which various Muslim militias were pitted against the Maronite Christian "government" (and, sometimes, each other). The U.S. and French troops were supporting the government. A year prior to the barracks bombing, the 15 October 1982 issue of WV explained the mission of the U.S. Marines in Beirut: "They are there to shore up the new Gemayel regime which is based on the Phalange killers who carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre." The article commented that:

"By sending in the Marines on an open-ended mission in the Near East, Reagan has brazenly reasserted U.S. imperialism's role as world gendarme....The U.S. forces in Lebanon are a beachhead for large-scale military intervention in the region...."

A few weeks before the bombing, the 23 September 1983 WV reported that U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig saw the opening in Lebanon as:

"...'a great strategic opportunity' for 'redrawing a new political map for the region'. Lebanon was going to become the beachhead for Pax Americana in the Near East. The U.S. thought it could rush in, find the most unsavory and reactionary gangster among the competing feudalist chieftains, and create a viable puppet government. The Gemayel clan was supposed to be the Pahlavi dynasty [U.S. client regime in Iran] of Lebanon."

WV quoted a New York Times report that the Reagan administration "saw the survival of the [Gemayel] Government as essential to American interests, even if this meant moving more American forces into the region." Workers Vanguard further observed that:

"The Pentagon has abandoned the pretense that U.S. forces fire only when fired upon. A few days ago U.S. warships shelled positions deep in Syrian-controlled territory in retaliation for anti-Phalange forces bombarding the defense ministry in Beirut. U.S. forces are now routinely providing artillery cover for the Lebanese army....

. . .

"The U.S. is now much more heavily involved militarily in Lebanon than in Central America both in the number of troops and the direct role they play. And that role is rapidly expanding."
—emphasis added

Thus the assertion that "1) the U.S. had only a token military presence in Lebanon..." is belied by the SL's own account. A photo caption in WV's 23 September 1983 issue (published only weeks before the bombing) described the American intervention in Beirut as the "Biggest display of U.S. combat firepower since Vietnam," while the accompanying article explained:

"...the U.S. is now committed to defending the Phalangist gangsters with an additional 2,000 troops drawn from the American fleet in the Indian Ocean, a total of 14,000 Marines both on shore and off with 12 warships standing off the coast and 100 warplanes."

All other reports confirm that the U.S. military had become heavily involved in defending the Maronites. Pulitzer prize winner Thomas L. Friedman reported that:

"Early on the morning of September 19 [1983], the guided missile cruisers Virginia, John Rodgers, and Bowen and the destroyer Radford fired 360 5-inch shells at the Druse-Syrian-Palestinian forces, to take the pressure off the beleaguered Lebanese troops."
—From Beirut to Jerusalem

A few short weeks later, when one of the "anti-Phalange forces" leveled the marine barracks, the U.S. military lost more men than on any single day since the Vietcong's 1968 Tet Offensive. It was a traumatic blow for the Reaganites, and the SL leadership responded in an abjectly cowardly manner by suddenly calling for getting the survivors out "alive."

While the U.S. and its allies were supporting the Phalange, it is also true that "none [of the Muslim militias] were fighting a just war against the imperialists" in the multi-sided communalist conflict underway in Lebanon in 1983. But that is no reason not to defend blows struck by any of the contenders against the imperialist gendarmes. The fact that revolutionaries defended the Serbs against NATO attacks in September 1995 did not imply that we favored their victory over the Croatian or Muslim militias.

As for the claim that, "2) there was widespread revulsion in the American population...", we would note that it occurred after the Marines were bloodied. As a rule, aborted military interventions are less popular than successful ones. In any case, for Marxists, opposition to imperialist intervention in the neo-colonial world is one of principle. Leninists want to see the imperialist troops out immediately and unconditionally. We do not specify that they must be brought out alive. We have no special interest in preserving the U.S. Marine Corps. The SL leadership's call to save the U.S. Marines in Lebanon was a cowardly, social-patriotic flinch.

We addressed the distinction between the SL's slogans for Grenada and Beirut in ETB No. 2 (January 1984):

"The real difference between the SL's positions on Lebanon and Grenada is that Grenada was a cheap victory for Reagan. It didn't cost a lot in terms of casualties and nobody is very worried about what a small socialist propaganda outfit has to say about it one way or the other. So it's easy to be principled on that one. Lebanon is a different story....It might look 'unpatriotic' to be seen applauding that action. So the SL leadership, despite all its huffing and puffing about hanging tough in the crunch, flinched and adjusted the program of the organization to make it more palatable to the bourgeoisie. A 'profile in cowardice.'"

The BT's bloodthirsty insistence that Marxists should always and everywhere hail the death of soldiers considered expendable by their rulers is more than obscene in a country where astronomical rates of minority unemployment mean that a high percentage of those joining the military are black and Latino. This is an Achilles' heel of American imperialism. But the BT has always turned a blind eye to racial oppression in America.

No. 9

If you cannot deal with your opponents' arguments, why not ascribe to them a position you can deal with? We have never suggested that "Marxists should always and everywhere hail the death of soldiers considered expendable by their rulers..." We said simply that Marxists do not concern themselves with preserving the military cadres of imperialism, and that when the U.S. Marines invade a neo-colonial country, we support their immediate, unconditional removal by any means necessary. In a 7 February 1984 letter to the SL (reprinted in our Trotskyist Bulletin No. 2), we remarked that, "Communists no more call for the death of every American marine in Lebanon than for every British soldier in Ireland." Every military reversal handed "our own" imperialist rulers by neo-colonial peoples" whether in Lebanon, Somalia or Bosnia—is a good thing.

The SL attempted to deflect attention from its scandalous call to save the Marines by pointing to the fact that many of them were black or Latino. We addressed this in our 7 February 1984 letter:

"In the first place, the Pentagon did not intend to expend any of its marines in the bombing of the Beirut headquarters. Secondly, let us remind you that revolutionaries no more regret the 'loss' of Reagan's black hitmen than his white ones. Those who sign up to fight the dirty colonial wars of U.S. imperialism can expect to occasionally encounter some resistance from their would-be victims, and some will inevitably pay the price."

The lower ranks of the Marines and the U.S. Army are indeed disproportionately black and Latino. This is a fact with potentially important implications in periods of sharp social struggle. But it does not change our attitude toward imperialist gendarmes intervening in Third World countries. As we wrote in ETB No. 2 (January 1984):

"It is true that in the event of a massive proletarian upsurge, some elements of the Marine Corps might well be open to revolutionary propaganda"but to orient to them today is worse than a stupidity. In the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the bulk of the police force went over to the strikers. Should we therefore change our attitude toward the cops? Of course not. The cops are the relatively lightly armed bodies of men who are trained and paid to protect capitalist property at home. The Marines are more heavily armed colonial troops chiefly used to protect American capitalist property overseas....Neither the Marines nor cops are part of the working class...Both are the sworn enemies of the workers and the oppressed."

This was not something we contrived as part of a "posture against the Spartacist League" but part of the programmatic heritage of the revolutionary SL. The April 1977 issue of Young Spartacus (No. 53) observed:

"In a programmatic sense, the volunteer army should be regarded like the police force. It is against the interests of labor to support the economic demands of volunteers and their self-organization into unions to improve their material conditions. While rejecting a positive orientation for 'democratizing' the volunteer army we oppose particular manifestations of racial and sexual discrimination....
"Only in a pre-revolutionary period would our political orientation toward a volunteer army in the U.S. differ from our attitude toward the cops."

Furthermore, their oh-so-radical "anti-imperialist" blood-thirstiness over Lebanon was simply a convenient posture against the Spartacist League, not a seriously held position. As we noted at the time, the bloodthirstiness was always proportional to their distance from where the blood was being shed. When the question came home during the Persian Gulf War, with red-white-and-blue "antiwar" coalitions calling to "Bring Our Boys Home," the BT wasn't shrieking, "U.S. Marines, Live Like Pigs, Die Like Pigs!" On the contrary, they were shrieking about the "sectarianism" of the Spartacist League for our political opposition to the social-patriotism of the popular-front left. In contrast, the BT was so eager to be at one with these yellow-ribbon "radicals" that in the Bay Area they even voted against adding the call to "end the blockade of Iraq" to the coalition's list of demands.

No. 10

The slogan "Colonialists: Live Like Pigs—Die Like Pigs" appeared as a headline on the front page of Workers Vanguard No. 207 (26 May 1978) in response to the hysteria over the killing of 70 Europeans in Zaire. The WV article commented that:

"it should by now be clear to those Belgians, who for generations have been the most arrogant and parasitical of all the white settlers in Africa and who go to their ex-colony to participate in renewed exploitation of the toiling masses, that they might not come back alive."

In other words, "you pays your money, and you takes your chances." We see no reason why Marxists should assume a different attitude toward members of the U.S. Marine Corps.

The allegation that our comrades "voted against adding the call to 'end the blockade of Iraq' to [a San Francisco] coalition's list of demands" is simply untrue. This is the first time the SL has ever raised such an allegation—five years after it supposedly took place! At the time, the 5 October 1990 WV quoted a 13 September 1990 leaflet by the Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency (RTT) mistakenly claiming that at a meeting of the Emergency Committee to Stop the U.S. War in the Middle East (ECSUSWME), "the BT 'abstained from the vote when the RTT asked the Committee to adopt the slogan of "End the Blockade"'". The SL was happy to repeat the RTT's criticism of us, but hastened to add that this did not mean that it endorsed the slogan:

"Let's be clear here. We do not appeal to Bush and Thatcher to 'end' the blockade, but rather call on those who oppose the imperialist invasion to 'break the blockade.' And this is anathema to the reformists precisely because their desperately sought for Democratic 'doves' are definitely not going to countenance siding with 'the enemy.'"
—WV, 5 October 1990

In 1990 it was enough for the SL to repeat the RTT's mistaken claim that we had abstained on the vote. Five years later, to sharpen their polemic a bit, the SL suddenly claimed that we had voted against adding such a demand. In fact, as we explained in our press, at the meeting in question our comrades had earlier put forward a motion to transform the coalition from a popular-frontist pressure group on the Democrats into a genuine united front:

"After losing this critical vote, which confirmed the popular-frontist character of the ECSUSWME, the BT comrades sat through the rest of the meeting as non-voting observers. A subsequent leaflet by [the RTT] erroneously stated that the BT 'claims to be the left wing of the Committee,' and chastised us for not voting for one of the many RTT amendments put forward to give the coalition's popular-frontist program a more leftist coloration."
—1917 No. 9

We also reported how IBT comrades intervened in the other major anti-war coalition in the Bay Area, the "Committee Against a Vietnam War in the Middle East" (CAVME). This was controlled by the reformist Socialist Action group, which, in the interests of building a "broad" mobilization (i.e., attracting Democratic Party politicos and other pro-imperialist liberals) prevented the expression of any kind of socialist or anti-imperialist views:

"the 22 September CAVME meeting attracted a hundred people, at least half of whom had no organizational affiliation. Several BTers were there, along with a dozen supporters of the Spartacist League (SL). Socialist Action was clearly worried about losing control of the meeting and seeing their front group turned into a united front that granted Marxists, like everyone else, the right to put forward their views.
"Unlike the BT, the Spartacist League did not try to contest the policies of SA; they were happy merely to denounce them. SLers at the meeting criticized CAVME because its program did not include a call for breaking the imperialist blockade of Iraq. Such a call would be perfectly appropriate for a united front against U.S. war provocations. Yet, instead of pushing to amend the basis of unity to include this demand, or supporting the BT's efforts to 'break the blockade' against Marxist politics in CAVME, the SL cited these as reasons not to be involved."

An all too familiar story for the SL.

From a Whiff of Anti-communism...

There was more than a whiff of "God that failed" anti-communism in the tall tales of "nightmarish internal meetings," forced confessions, high dues rates and other horrors spun by the early ET. But their polemics had a certain educational value for our membership, and we published three internal bulletins full of them in preparation for our 1983 conference. As the document noted, "We should hope the ETs go on for a while in their present fraudulent posture...they are a crystallization of everything that is backward and wrong in the SL."

No. 11

Tall tales? The SL dues schedule was steep, and acknowledged to be so at the time. If indeed there were no "nightmarish internal meetings" then the SL leadership could easily discredit our account by agreeing to play the audio tapes of the events in question to interested parties in the workers' movement. Yet the SL steadfastly refuses to play the tapes.

As for "forced confessions," we recall that Al Nelson, Robertson's longest-standing collaborator, wrote out a "confession" for Bob Mandel to sign. Mandel is a former ET/BT supporter who was a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area New Left in the late 1960s. During the 1970s he was one of the SL's best-known trade-union supporters, and his activities were reported regularly in Workers Vanguard. When he fell out of favor in the SL, he was considered to be especially dangerous politically. In ETB No. 3 we described how, when the SL leadership began to organize his purge, Mandel was:

"distraught and badly shaken by the prospect of separation from the political tendency to which he had devoted his life. Mandel did everything he could to prove his loyalty to the organization. He was presented with a statement penned by Al Nelson. The statement reads like an FBI-style confession. It begins: 'I freely admit the following statements to be true and understand they are to be filed as a confidential statement with the Central Committee of the Spartacist League....' This bogus 'confession,' composed of some pretty bizarre allegations, as well as various other statements, a few of which are true, was intended to be used to discredit Mandel publicly in the future. Having signed it, he found himself in a Catch-22 situation which the SL leadership has since sought to exploit. Mandel certainly made a big mistake in blindly signing such a 'confession,' but the whole incident casts an unpleasant light on the routine practices of the SL leadership."

The SL leadership's antipathy for Mandel did not abate after he was purged, particularly when it became clear that he was not ready to give up left-wing politics. Workers Vanguard of 5 March 1982 alleged that a group of ex-members had staged a "walkout" from a February memorial meeting for Toni Randell, a deceased comrade. In fact the walkout never occurred. Nedy Ryan, at that time secretary to George Foster, then the Political Chairman of the Bay Area Spartacist League, wrote a remarkable deposition dated 28 December 1983 (reprinted in ETB 3), which casts light on how things worked in the SL:

"The WV report on this memorial said that 'In the California meeting, the observation that Comrade Toni had nothing but contempt for quitters actually triggered a walkout by some of the ex-members present,' calling this 'an unseemly display.' Specifically, we were all told that the ex-members referred to were led by Bob Mandel. Because of the incident related below, I've always assumed it was George Foster himself who gave this information to WV.
"As you can image [sic], the idea that 'Bob Mandel walked out on Toni's memorial' caused quite a flap among the leadership in New York and among all the members in the Bay Area. While it could be considered a small incident, the well-deserved affection and respect in which Comrade Toni was held automatically evoked feelings, in any decent breast, that any 'quitter' who would walk out on her memorial because his own petty feelings were hurt is a thorough heel and someone to be held in revulsion and contempt. So the charge was very effective. It was also a lie.
"The day after I heard the story, I spoke to George Foster about it. At that time I was assigned to work as his 'secretary'....I asked him to describe the walkout to me. I knew that I had been on the other side of the room from both Bob and the door, and thought I had missed all the fun. George told me that the 'quitters' had 'walked out' after the singing of the Internationale. I said in confusion that was the end of the meeting. Yes, he said (and I do remember these exact words, because they are so astonishing), 'maybe I should have said they walked out after the meeting was over.' Then he appeared to come to a decision, shook his head and said something like no, never mind. So before my very eyes he consciously decided not to correct the slander which was proving so useful and had so pleased New York.
"As you know, Bob wrote a letter to WV the next month, urging a retraction. WV replied, not by retracting but by branding Bob as 'snivelling' and 'self-centered' for bringing the matter up....
"I knew the truth too, of course, but I also knew that to accuse George of lying, in defense of the 'traitor' Bob Mandel, would have subjected me to abuse, persecution, and possible exclusion from the party to which I had devoted 13 years and of which I still hoped to remain a member. This was cowardly and wrong, and for the little good it does now I apologize to Bob for it. Of course this incident contributed to my bitter disillusionment with the S.L."

Figuring that sharp internal debate would do the party good, in December 1983 the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee voted to make a public offer to readmit the ET with full membership rights, including of course the right to engage in internal struggle based on democratic-centralist democracy and discipline. No sooner had we made this decision than we discovered that the ET in San Francisco was circulating a petition claiming that one of their number, Bob Mandel, had been assaulted by our comrades during a demonstration in support of striking workers.

This was a blatant lie. Even the one eyewitness affidavit which the ET finally produced (a month later) alleged only that a heated argument had taken place. Mandel later admitted that our comrades had never touched him. But the ETs launched an international campaign labeling us as "violent." We were at the time engaged in a very serious legal fight against the FBI, which had targeted our organization as "violent." And here we have a group of ex-members of our organization screaming that we are "violent." Whose interests did this serve?

We obviously were not going to readmit to membership those who had engaged in a slander campaign which—animated by subjective malice and counterposed political appetites—was purely aimed at trying to destroy our organization. Nonetheless, we did keep the offer open for the Canadian ETs who had not signed this petition claiming that we had assaulted Mandel. Their response was to immediately sign it! In short the ET/BT deliberately closed the door to its own readmission with full rights of membership—including factional rights—in the second year of its existence.

Nos. 12-14

The chronology as presented by the SL requires some explanation. On 3 December 1983, at a mass picket in support of striking Greyhound bus drivers in San Francisco, SL supporters carried out several provocations against supporters of the External Tendency. We immediately sent a mailgram protesting this behavior to the SL Political Bureau. When that was ignored, we followed up with a letter. In our 14 December letter (reprinted in ETB No. 2) we recounted how Eva, an SL supporter, had approached our comrade Ursula:

"and repeatedly accused her of defending a Hitler-lover....Ursula at first denounced these slanders but finally turned away, thereby preventing an altercation in front of a group of curious leftist onlookers, attracted by the 'Nazi-lover' accusations and the accents....Later, Eva approached Howard Keylor and loudly accused him of being a racist. Unbeknownst to her, the individual for whose benefit she was slandering Keylor, is a longshoreman and thirty-year friend of his. The longshoreman just laughed at her."

The accusations of "Nazi-lover" were occasioned by our defense of Uli Sandler, a member of the central committee of the German section of the Robertsonites' international, who, after resigning, was retroactively expelled as a "proto-fascist"! This outrageous slander was the subject of protests from various former iSt members and German leftists who knew Sandler (including Oskar Hippe, one of the few survivors of the pre-Hitler German Left Opposition—see articles in ETB 1, 3 and 4).

Our 14 December letter also protested a physical provocation carried out later that same day against Bob Mandel by Peter Woolston and Ritchie Bradley, two SL supporters:

"Mandel had just said 'hello' to Martha Phillips, his ex-companion and also formerly a Spartacist candidate for election in Oakland. She responded with a series of political attacks. Woolston immediately approached Mandel from the front while Bradley placed himself behind Mandel. When Mandel quietly responded to Phillips' points by raising the SL/US' social-patriotic position on the Marines in Lebanon, Woolston began to shout. He yelled that Mandel was a member of a racist organization which defended Nazis...When Mandel quietly responded, 'What about Lebanon? What about the FMLN flags?' Woolston shouted, 'I don't care' and began to shove Mandel repeatedly in the chest with his forearm. Each time Woolston yelled about racists, finks or Nazi-lovers, Bradley said, 'Yeah Mandel, yeah, Mandel' and shoved his elbow into Mandel's kidneys.
"Closely observing the scene from Mandel's left and no more than 7 feet away, were George Foster and Al Nelson. They made no attempt to stop the physical assault and verbal provocations, demonstrating that these were not isolated actions of disoriented supporters, but organizational policy."

In ETB No. 3 we commented that:

"What happened that day is simply that two SL supporters attempted to set Bob up for a beating, and did a little shoving in the process to get him to throw the first blow. Even the dishonest account published in WV [No. 349] tacitly admits that they tried to set Mandel up for attack. When 'Mandel showed his face at a labor demo [he] was loudly and politically confronted by indignant and vocal SL supporters who called him a scab.' Certainly the experienced 'military' leaders of the Bay Area SL, Foster and Nelson, who stood no more than a few feet away throughout the whole incident, knew that to yell 'scab' in the middle of a crowd of angry pickets is like yelling 'fire' in a crowded auditorium....It is entirely possible that a couple of 'hotheaded supporters' [read: angry pickets] could have been incited to take 'a swing at the worm Mandel.'"

The meeting of the SL Central Committee that decided to "offer to readmit the ET" took place two weeks after the 3 December incident and thus after the receipt of our original protest. The SL leadership was fully aware of our objections to their supporters' behavior at the Greyhound picket prior to the plenum where they supposedly decided to readmit us. We submitted a formal letter of application on 15 February 1984 and received a preliminary response from the iSt dated 27 February 1984 (reprinted in ETB No. 3). The 2 March 1984 issue of Workers Vanguard suddenly announced that our protest meant that we could not be admitted. We traced the chronology of these events, and their political significance, in the third issue of the Bulletin of the ET:

"On December 6 we sent a mailgram to the Political Bureau of the SL/US protesting the provocation at the Greyhound picket lines. No response. On 14 December we sent a registered letter, again to the SL/US PB, explaining in some detail exactly what had happened....Still no response. After another few weeks, we began to cautiously solicit a few signatures, mainly from former SL supporters widely respected within the organization, for the protest declaration reprinted in WV No. 349. Far from trying to scandalize or discredit the organization which we seek to rejoin, we hoped that this kind of pressure would make the leadership think twice before engaging in similar acts in the future.
"Unfortunately, the response of the leadership has been to compound their provocation with a lying denial that anything untoward occurred. Instead, in the timehonored tradition of those who practice such tactics, they have sought to 'blame the victim' and have counter-charged that our protest statement is a 'Cointelpro-style' provocation against them!"

. . .

"So now the 'Cointelpro-style' smear is being used in an attempt to effect what the original provocation failed to achieve: sealing off the ET from the membership of the iSt.

. . .

"The SL leadership has a problem with the ET. They decreed that 'the ETs ought to inspire fanatical hatred in iSt members,' but that didn't wash. Our Trotskyist criticisms have stood as an obstacle to a smooth transition to revisionism. There are still enough cadres in the iSt who...don't mourn Yuri Andropov and who aren't interested in saving the U.S. Marines in Lebanon. As the leadership's political disorientation is increasingly manifest to the cadres, our influence has increased. We haven't automatically inspired hatred and we can no longer be simply ignored. "So what to do? Perhaps half-believing their own lies that we are not interested in winning the SL cadres and are just a motley crew of burnt-out quitters, Robertson & Co. decided to try a maneuver. They would pretend to offer the ET membership in the SL with full democratic rights....

"When we called the readmission bluff, the leadership (which certainly does possess 'fanatical hatred' of us) was forced to find some excuse to keep us out, without having to renounce its initial demagogic offer. Accordingly, they seized on our protest statement"which does no more than restate the facts which we elaborated in our letter to the Political Bureau of 14 December."

As for the allegation that "Mandel later admitted that our comrades had never touched him," it is simply a lie. This can be confirmed with Mandel himself.

... To the Stench of Provocation

In the following years the number of lies and provocations against our party emanating from the BT was simply astonishing for an organization which claimed on paper to stand for our principles and program. In May 1985, the BT published a highly inventive piece of reptile journalism worthy of the anti-communist ravings of Ayn Rand or Reader's Digest, titled "The Road to Jimstown," smearing our party as an "obedience cult" and spinning lurid, slanderous tales of political intimidation, "sexual groupies" and internal corruption. Thus the BT sought to feed the anti-communist American political climate which targeted us.

No. 15

We published "The Road to Jimstown" in 1985. It briefly outlines the course of the SL's degeneration from Trotskyism to political banditry. This is the first time, after ten years, that the SL has commented on it. Attentive readers will note that the ICL pamphlet denounces it as a pack of ravings and smears without citing any specifics. There is a good reason for this: it is all true, and there are lots of people who know it. We admit that some of it is pretty "lurid," but lurid is as lurid does.

In the initial "Declaration of an external tendency of the iSt" we wrote that: "The iSt remains a revolutionary organization. Its members constitute the largest repository of Trotskyists in the world." We took no joy in having to conclude, barely two years later, that the "gradual molecular transformation" of the SL "into an obedience cult (a process which has been underway for some years) had reached the point of no return." To substantiate this assessment it was necessary and appropriate to describe "some of the more cultish features of the SL's internal life."

It is not entirely clear to us which passages in "The Road to Jimstown" the Robertsonians take umbrage at. We do not imagine, for example, that they would wish to challenge the veracity of the following:

"For several years Robertson has had his own little coven of sexual groupies with its own bizarre initiation rituals. They made a semi-official debut internally when, dressed in black and carrying candles, they appeared as 'the Susanna Martin Choir' at a social held during the 1983 SL National Conference. (Susanna Martin was an early American witch.) In the report of the conference which appeared in WV (No. 342, 18 November 1983), it was noted that the choir's 'performance was received with wild and overwhelming acclaim.' What wasn't reported is that running such an 'informal interest association,' as WV coyly referred to it, is Robertson's exclusive prerogative in the SL. Nor did WV mention that being one of Jim's groupies confers great 'informal' authority within the group."

The SL leadership complains that telling the unpleasant truth about life in Jimstown "feed[s] the anti-communist American political climate which targeted us." This recalls Stalinist complaints that Trotsky's exposure of the corruption and cynicism of the Soviet bureaucracy aided imperialism. Trotsky replied that the job of revolutionaries is to "say what is."

At the same time, this article alleged no new major programmatic departures on our part. Instead the BT expressed shock at our use of mocking guerrilla theater tactics to fight a ban on our youth organization at San Francisco State University (no one ever accused the BT of having a sense of humor), and outrage at our attempts to get the San Francisco longshoremen's union to take official responsibility for a solidarity boycott of a South African ship. The material basis for our supposed "degeneration" was alleged to be that we had acquired "valuable real estate," i.e. a modest office building in New York to house our international headquarters!

No. 16

No programmatic departures? In concluding that the SL was "Over the Brink" we reported how:

"In November 1984, cadres of the Spartacist League/U.S. donned witches' hats, false noses, pigs' faces and Nazi regalia and paraded around San Francisco State University (S.F. State) as the 'Red Avengers of the Underground SYL.'....Meanwhile, on the docks on the other side of town, the Spartacist League was doing its best to wreck an 11-day boycott of South African cargo"the most important political strike by any section of the American proletariat in decades..."
—"The Road to Jimstown," (emphasis added)

We regard sectarian wrecking of workers' struggles as a "programmatic" departure from Trotskyism. And it was not the only departure. As we pointed out in "The Road to Jimstown," one of the sickest aspects of the "Red Avengers" was the misogynist "jokes" aimed at the SL's feminist opponents—e.g., the description of them as "rabid doberman pinschers of the female persuasion" (Workers Vanguard no. 367, 23 November 1984). This all took place in the SL's flagship Bay Area branch, under the direction of the group's top leadership.

The story of the longshore boycott and the SL's wrecking is documented in ETB 4. At the beginning of the action (in which ET supporter Howard Keylor played the leading role), the SL had its supporters set up a "picket line" and declared that the twenty-five (mainly black) longshore militants who ignored this provocation and went on board the Nedlloyd Kimberley to initiate the boycott of South African cargo were "scabbing." For eleven days the longshoremen refused to handle the cargo until, in the end, the action was broken by a federal court injunction. The biggest scandal was that SL trade union supporters violated union security and provided the written evidence that the company and the cops used as "Exhibit 1" in getting their injunction! The SL's activities throughout the boycott were driven by blind factional malice. Its attitude closely paralleled that of the Stalinized Communist Party toward the 1934 Trotskyist-led Minneapolis teamster strike.

The suggestion that a five-story Manhattan office building and the other assets enjoyed by the top leadership (like Robertson's house on a Bay Area marina paid for with an internal fund drive—see 1917 No. 4) does not constitute a sufficient "material basis" for bureaucratism recalls similar arguments used by Gerry Healy and his American lieutenant Tim Wohlforth to explain away their own corrupt internal regimes:

"Wohlforth always dismissed the Spartacist tendency's allegations about the grossly bureaucratic practices of the Healy/Wohlforth regimes with smug demands that we demonstrate upon what materially privileged stratum the WL [Workers League] is based."
WV No. 61, 31 January 1975

We commented in "The Road to Jimstown" that such arguments are:

"Very neat and tidy. No room for the development of mini-personality cults or small group megalomania. But life is more complex"which is why we have the Posadases, the Healys and the Robertsons...."

In September 1986, the BT staged a physical confrontation at one of our Bay Area forums (the BTs tales of our supposed bureaucratism have always been belied by the fact that they attend and speak at our public events). In November 1986, a second BT provocation in the Bay Area was narrowly avoided when we moved the venue of our meeting at the last minute (the BT declined to attend the event at the new location). In October 1987, the BT tried to rush the mike at a Spartacist-initiated united-front rally for jailed Black Panther Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). The BT had done nothing to build the rally (indeed to this day they have never published an article on Geronimo), but they were allowed to speak after they endorsed the demonstration—the insulting $1 donation they offered as token of their "support" was refused.

No. 17

We will address each of the above incidents in turn.

i) There was indeed a "physical confrontation" on 19 September 1986 at an SL forum in the San Francisco Bay Area. But it began when SL "ushers" started to push our comrades out of the room at the end of their meeting. In an April 1987 collection of documents detailing SL violations of workers' democracy, we included statements on this incident from Workers Vanguard (26 September 1986), ourselves and the Left Trotskyist Tendency. The introduction to our "truth kit" noted:

"It is hardly surprising that in its account the SL disclaims all responsibility for the attack and instead seeks to blame the victims. But note the extremely vague character of WV's account:

"'When the meeting adjourned, as is our policy with this group, the BTers were asked to leave the room. At the door they resisted leaving and precipitated a fight, suddenly punching and kicking the comrades ushering them out.'

"The SL leaders are plenty cynical but they are not stupid. Perjurers are often tripped up by discrepancies in their testimony. We suspect they deliberately left out any details from their account in order to preserve some wriggle-room for later.

"According to WV we were merely 'asked to leave the room.' But at least one SLer who was involved in the fracas has, in private conversation with reputable leftists, admitted that their 'ushers' were physically pushing our people as we were leaving. A number of people saw our comrade Kathy Z. roughly pushed to the floor by the 'ushers' and heard her cry out. This was the first act of real violence.

"Al Nelson, the Spartacist honcho whose remarks are reprinted in WV disingenuously inquires, 'Besides, who would resist leaving a meeting after its over anyhow?' In the first place the only sense in which any of our comrades 'resisted leaving'" note that even according to WV they had all got 'to the door' under their own steam"was by being on the floor where they were pushed or thrown by the SLers 'ushering' them. Secondly, the SL's policy of excluding us from meeting halls at the end of their formal discussion period is a cowardly attempt to seal off their members and contacts from political debate."

The LTT account of the September 1986 incident began by noting that "Only one of us had attended an SL forum before; for the rest it was the first time." Unlike the SL, the LTT's 30 September 1986 account of what transpired was specific and direct:

"We were appalled to take notice of the SL's undemocratic proceedings, especially in relationship to the Bolshevik Tendency....

"When the BT was told by the SL they had to leave, they proceeded to do this only verbally protesting the political exclusion. The SL's goon squad, however, apparently in a hurry to get them out of the room, began to push the supporters of the BT toward the exit. We clearly saw that the goon squad began the manhandling of the BT as they protested. Upon reaching the exit a female BT supporter was pushed to the floor and another supporter, Howard Keylor, [a long-time union militant then in his 60s"ed.] was pushed and thrown from the room onto his back. At this point, the BT began to defend itself.

"....Arriving outside the room we saw that the SL goons were savagely attacking two BT supporters: Bill S."who was being kicked while he was on the floor; and Howard Keylor, who was getting his head banged against a bench by the goons. One of our female supporters came to the defense of Howard and was herself punched in the back, lifted off the floor, and thrown toward another of our supporters."

In the introduction to our 1987 "SL truth kit" we speculated that the attack had not been planned by the SL:

"We rather doubt that the SL leadership intended their 'ushers' to go quite so far as they did. They were probably only supposed to rough us up"a little provocative, low-grade physical violence of the sort they have engaged in before. Had the SL leadership planned such an extremely violent assault in advance it would probably not have taken place with so many witnesses around. But whatever their original intent the SL tops decided to brazen it out with a big lie. In doing this the SL leadership assumes full responsibility for the despicable, anti-Marxist hooliganism of their thugs.

"Hand in hand with the violence goes the slanderous charge that BTers are 'provocateurs' who seek 'to bring the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state into play against' the SL. This is a serious charge which, in its own way, is as much a breach of proletarian morality as the original attack."

ii) The second incident referred to was addressed in 1917 No. 3:

"In a follow-up item WV devoted a full page article in its 5 December 1986 issue to the fact that we chose not to attend the next SL event in Berkeley. We had, in fact, planned to attend and asked a variety of left organizations to send observers with us in the hope that the presence of independent witnesses would forestall more SL gangsterism. Representatives from the Revolutionary Workers League, Workers Socialist League and Chile Solidarity Network as well as several unaffiliated leftists agreed to accompany us. So on 21 November, equipped only with newspapers, pencils and notebooks, we went to the SL meeting for a political debate.

"When we finally found the hall (the location had been changed at the last minute for 'security' reasons), we didn't much like the look of it. It was a church basement in a semi-deserted middle class neighborhood with the only access down a narrow flight of concrete stairs. A knot of SL goons stood at the top of the stairs brandishing heavy police flashlights while more lurked at the bottom inside the door. We don't know what they had in mind, but it looked like it might have been more than political debate. Given the SL's increasingly erratic and violent behavior and their obsessive and fanatical hatred of the BT, we decided that it wasn't worth risking serious injury to find out. So we went home."

We drew the following political conclusion:

"Political differences among leftists must be dealt with politically. If a particular organization resorts to slander or falsification, the appropriate response is political exposure, not suppression. Invariably in the history of the workers movement, exclusions, physical suppression of opposing points of view and slander have been the weapons of reformists and bureaucrats against Marxists. This is not accidental, for they are the means of destroying consciousness and avoiding political debate."

As we noted in our 1987 SL "truth kit":

"The SL's campaign of slander and provocations against the BT/ET have gone hand in hand with a refusal to engage in open political debate. The whole point of the SL's tactics has been to harden up their members and supporters to prevent a political reckoning with the ET/BT."

iii) The final incident referred to in fact took place in February (rather than October) 1987, when Howard Keylor approached the podium of an SL-sponsored rally for Geronimo Pratt to ask if it would be possible for us to have a speaker. The SL responded by shoving Howard off the platform and then bragging about it in a article entitled "BT Provocation Lands in the Mud" (WV No. 423, 6 March 1987). After this initial response the SL informed us that if we wished to speak at their rally we had to endorse the event (which we of course did). When our comrade Ursula asked to purchase a Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) pamphlet on the Pratt case a young SLer told her that she would have to make a donation to the defense case. Ursula promptly donated $20 and asked for a receipt which the SLer went off to get. Before long he came back with SL honcho Joan P. who demonstratively returned the money and loudly announced that the PDC did not want our money. The "insulting $1 donation" is another invention by the SL—although Joan P. did state at the time that they would not want a single dollar from us. (At this point the SL was making a point of refusing donations from us. In June 1986 they had returned a check we sent for the defense of Guillermo Bermudez, one of their youth who had been charged by police on campus).

We have participated in activities in defense of Geronimo Pratt. We have not (yet) published an article on his case (or on those of scores of other class-war prisoners in the U.S. and around the world.) There are also many other important questions that we have not (yet) been able to publish articles on. So what? As our journalistic capacity and financial resources increase, we will cover a wider variety of topics. We recall that similar considerations prevented Spartacist from publishing any major articles about police attacks on the Black Panthers in the late 1960s.

What Makes the BT Tick? Anti-Sovietism...

From their inception, the BT claimed to hold many positions in common with us. For example, they too raised the slogan "Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolution in Poland!" But when the question of stopping Solidarnosc was most urgently posed, they went crazy over our statement that if the Kremlin Stalinists intervened militarily, in their necessarily stupid and brutal way, that we would support this and take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities they might commit. The Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states meant exactly that, i.e. no conditions. For the BT, this was simply further evidence of our supposed "Stalinophilia."

No. 18

This paragraph is a Stalinophilic perversion of the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the bureaucratized workers' states. As we noted in ETB No. 1:

"Trotskyists give unconditional military support to Stalinist regimes battling internal counterrevolution (i.e., Solidarnosc) or external capitalist forces (i.e., Finland 1940). This is quite a different matter than extending political support to the Stalinists. We take no responsibility for the crimes of the Stalinists against the working people"whether in the course of military defense of proletarian property forms or otherwise. Military support is extended despite such crimes."

The SL's willingness to "take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities they [the Stalinists] might commit" is precisely the opposite of the position put forward by Leon Trotsky in the context of the defense of the USSR against Nazi Germany in World War Two:

"While arms in hand they deal blows to Hitler, the Bolshevik-Leninists will at the same time conduct revolutionary propaganda against Stalin preparing his overthrow at the next and perhaps very near stage.

"This kind of 'defense of the USSR' will naturally differ, as heaven does from earth, from the official defense which is now being conducted under the slogan: 'For the Fatherland! For Stalin!' Our defense of the USSR is carried out under the slogan 'For Socialism! For the World Revolution!' 'Against Stalin!'"
— In Defense of Marxism, (emphasis in original)

The slogan "Against Stalin!" signified that instead of "taking responsibility" for the anti-working class crimes of the bureaucrats, the Fourth International opposed the atrocities committed by Stalin and the caste he represented.

In a similar vein, they howled at a statement printed in Workers Vanguard following the sudden death of the then-head of the USSR, Yuri Andropov, which read in toto: "He sought to curb the worst excesses of the bureaucracy. He sought to increase the productivity of the Soviet masses. He made no overt betrayals on behalf of imperialism. He was no friend of freedom." The BT condemned this rather balanced assessment as a Stalinophilic "eulogy." That the BT took such offense at this statement was simply another reflection of their own capitulation to Cold War anti-Sovietism. While they put forward positions that were a distorted mirror of our own on the Russian question, not only we but the whole anti-Soviet popular-front left knew that the BT wasn't serious (this was evidenced by the fact that the BT was welcome at rad-lib protests, meetings and rallies from which the Spartacist League was regularly excluded).

No. 19

The origin of our rather extensive exchanges over Yuri Andropov (see Trotskyist Bulletin No. 1) was the SL leadership's decision to name one of their contingents in a 1982 anti-fascist demonstration in Washington D.C. the "Yuri Andropov Battalion." As we noted in our original letter (13 December 1982) on the subject, "On the most general level Andropov and the bureaucrats he represents are counterposed to everything that Trotsky fought for." We reminded the SL that "One of the fundamentals of Trotskyism is that the effective defense of the Soviet Union is inextricably linked to the necessity of proletarian political revolution against Andropov and his caste...."

When Andropov died, and WV ran a black-bordered obituary with his picture on its front page, we commented:

"We note that Andropov scored a 75% approval rating in his 'in memoriam' box in WV No. 348. Three out of four ain't bad. But we don't rate him so highly. Andropov's failure to make any 'overt betrayals on behalf of imperialism' can properly be attributed to his short tenure in office. He certainly didn't send any more MiGs to Nicaragua or AK-47s to the Salvadoran leftists than his predecessor. He did want to raise productivity—but big deal, so did Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. (In any case, Trotskyists must view any productivity schemes devised by the bureaucracy sceptically since they usually have an anti-working class character. Trotsky was no endorser of Stakhanovism!) Any sensible top-ranking bureaucrat is going to be interested in curbing 'the worst excesses of the bureaucracy' in order to increase the efficiency, security and stability of the regime he runs. Your little homily for Andropov focuses on his subjective intentions rather than the objective inevitability, and even necessity, of corruption and inefficiency in a planned economy run by bureaucratic fiat and secret police. You take a semi-Deutscherite approach and, it would appear, arrive at semi-Deutscherite conclusions. "The working class lost nothing when Yuri Andropov died. Regrettably his career as a Stalinist bureaucrat was terminated by kidney disease rather than by an insurgent Soviet working class determined to smash the rule of the Brezhnevs, Chernenkos and Andropovs and to return to the path of Lenin and Trotsky."
—letter to the SL, 22 April 1984, reprinted in ETB No. 3

During his time as head of the KGB, Andropov vigorously suppressed political life in the USSR. Workers Vanguard of 13 February 1976 ran an article entitled "Stop Stalinist 'Psychiatric' Torture in USSR!" The then-revolutionary SL had no difficulty denouncing "the repulsive atrocities of the Russian bureaucracy."

Earlier in his career, in 1956, Andropov played a key role in the repression of the Hungarian workers' movement, a point we made to the SL in our April 1984 letter. We quoted Bill Lomax, an authority on the Hungarian uprising:

"Lomax observes that: 'In the first months of direct military suppression of the revolution, Andropov was effectively the Soviet overlord of Hungary...It was in this period that the last remnants of armed resistance were wiped out, the workers' and intellectuals' organizations crushed, and tens of thousands of Hungarians arrested and interned....' This is a powerful indictment of the decision by the leadership of the SL/US to besmirch its Trotskyist heritage by association with this unlamented Stalinist bureaucrat."

Finally, while we have ourselves often been subject to political exclusions by various pseudo-leftists (as has the SL), one reason the SL is particularly unpopular is because, in Alexander Cockburn's memorable phrase, they frequently act "like assholes." We uphold the traditions of workers' democracy and have consistently opposed the exclusion of the SL (or any other left group) from events in the workers' movement.

In an early polemic against the then-External Tendency, we noted: "If the ET were more honest, they would admit that they hated it when we hailed the Soviet Red Army's military intervention in Afghanistan" (see "The 'External Tendency': From Cream Puffs to Food Poisoning," WV No. 349, 2 March 1984). Four years later, they finally openly renounced and denounced our call, "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" arguing that it was "not a Trotskyist slogan, because what it tells workers is to trust the Stalinists, put your faith in the Stalinists, hail the Stalinists."

On the contrary, our hailing of the Soviet Army intervention was based on the recognition that, whatever the intentions of the venal bureaucrats in the Kremlin, this military action offered the possibility of extending the gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan. Many Soviet soldiers saw themselves as fulfilling their internationalist duty in fighting to defeat the imperialist-financed forces of Islamic reaction. But for such internationalism to have been fulfilled required, as we pointed out, a political revolution to oust the Kremlin Stalinists and a return to the proletarian internationalist program of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party.

Nos. 20-21

One would hardly guess from reading the SL's polemic that we proposed to substitute the slogan "Military Victory to the Soviet Army!" in Afghanistan for the SL's call to "Hail Red Army!" Only occasionally, in the fine print, did the SL mention the need for a political revolution to oust the "venal bureaucrats in the Kremlin" (including, presumably, Yuri Andropov!) For the first few years of its existence, the External Tendency of the iSt embraced the slogan "Hail Red Army" as an emphatic declaration of which side we were on in the conflict. With our subsequent correction, we maintained our position of military support to the Soviets and their Afghan allies against the reactionary, CIA-backed mujahedin, while sharpening the formulation used to convey it. We explained our reasoning in an article entitled "Bending the Stick Too Far...On the Slogan 'Hail Red Army!'":

"The trouble with the slogan 'Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!' is that it failed to distinguish between political and military support. The Soviet army (which has not officially been called the 'Red Army' since 1946) is the military arm of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The army's policies are those of the bureaucracy. Its role is therefore a contradictory one, like that of the bureaucracy itself. Insofar as the Russian army defends the Soviet Union against imperialism (and this was indeed its purpose in going into Afghanistan), we are on its side militarily. If it sweeps away oppressive social structures and replaces them with collectivized property in the areas under its control (and this was undoubtably one possibility of the Russian intervention), we will support such measures. But to support the Soviet army uncritically (i.e., to 'hail' it) would put us in the position of having to apologize for the Stalinists when they accommodate themselves to the social status quo or undertake a cowardly retreat. And, not surprisingly, this is exactly what they have done in Afghanistan.
"...the SL advanced this deliberately angular formulation in the face of a wave of anti-Sovietism which was sweeping America. Commendable as this impulse may have been, there is no getting around the fact that taken literally and by itself, the slogan amounts to a blanket political endorsement of the Soviet role in Afghanistan.
"...The call for 'Military Victory to the Soviet Army' corresponded to the concrete situation in Afghanistan because it placed us squarely on the Soviet side of the battle lines without assuming any responsibility for Stalinist betrayals."
—1917 No. 5

In a subsequent polemic, the SL sought to defend its position by claiming that the Trotskyists had "hailed" the Soviet military during World War Two. We replied in 1917 No. 7:

"The question of 'hailing' the Stalinist military came up in 1939 during the historic faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party against the revisionist opposition, led by Max Shachtman, which no longer wished to defend the USSR. Shachtman had a different agenda than the contemporary SL, but he shared their interest in blurring the line between political and military support to the USSR in conflicts with capitalist states. Thus he facetiously asked: if the USSR remained a workers state, 'why does not the majority propose to hail the advance of the Red Army into Poland....' as revolutionaries had in Lenin's day. In response Trotsky explained quite clearly why the Fourth International did not propose to hail Stalin's Red Army:

"'This newness in the situation [as compared to 1920] is the bankruptcy of the Third International, the degeneracy of the Soviet state, the development of the Left Opposition, and the creation of the Fourth International....And these events explain sufficiently why we have radically changed our position toward the politics of the Kremlin, including its military politics.'"
—In Defense of Marxism

In its polemics against us on this question, the SL claimed that, by calling for "military victory to" rather than "hailing" the Soviet intervention, we were heading straight to the Third Camp. We responded in a letter dated 8 April 1988 proposing "a public debate on this question—in either New York or Toronto—at the earliest mutually convenient date. But the SL showed no interest. They were well aware that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan underlined the problems with "hailing" Brezhnev's intervention in the first place.

The 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan—ordered in the name of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism—was the opening step in the capitalist counterrevolution that would engulf the Soviet Union a few years later. Eager to get rid of the nagging "Russian question" and any nominal claim to being Soviet defensists, at the time of Yeltsin's August 1991 countercoup the BT rushed to proclaim that the Soviet degenerated workers state had been destroyed. They happily wrote off in advance (but only from afar and certainly not in Russian) any possibility that decisive working-class resistance could have swept away Yeltsin and his supporters and opened the road to a political revolution against the entire panoply of bureaucratic Stalinist fakers who were busy selling out the country wholesale to the capitalists.

While recognizing that the state power had been decisively fractured by the August events, the ICL looked to spark working-class action in defense of collectivized property. We distributed tens of thousands of copies of our leaflet "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution" throughout the Soviet Union. It was only when it was clear that the working class was not going to move against Yeltsin, who was rapidly consolidating a capitalist state apparatus, that we recognized that the Soviet workers state had been definitively destroyed.

Nos. 22-23

The SL charges that our recognition at the time of the significance of Yeltsin's victory over Yanayev and his decrepit Stalinist coupists was a result of our "Eager[ness] to get rid of the nagging 'Russian question' and any claim to be nominal defensists." But this hardly explains why the imperialist chieftains, the Soviet military cadres and most of the rest of the world drew the same conclusions we did regarding the significance of the aborted coup.

We were not "happy" to "write off" the Soviet degenerated workers' state; but, as Trotsky said, Marxists have to "face reality squarely" and to "speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be." And we did. In our September 1991 statement on Yeltsin's victory (entitled "Defend Soviet Workers Against Yeltsin's Attacks—Counterrevolution Triumphs in USSR"), we observed:

"The victory of the openly procapitalist current around Boris Yeltsin after the coup collapsed shattered the state power created by the October 1917 revolution. This represents a catastrophic defeat not only for the Soviet working class, but for workers everywhere."

. . .

"The momentum toward capitalist restoration had been building in the Soviet Union for the past several years. All available evidence leads us to conclude that the defeat of the coup and the ascension to power of the elements committed to reconstructing the economy on a capitalist basis constituted a qualitative turning point."

We also remarked:

"All is by no means lost for the working class of the Soviet Union. The procapitalist governments that have hoisted themselves into the saddle are still extremely fragile, and have not yet consolidated their own repressive state apparatuses. Most of the economy remains in state hands, and the Yeltsinites face the formidable task of restoring capitalism without the support of an indigenous capitalist class. Workers resistance to the impending attacks on their rights and welfare will therefore involve a defense of large elements of the social/economic status quo. The embryonic bourgeois regimes now forming in the ex-USSR can be swept aside much more easily than mature capitalist states.

"None of this, however, can change the fact that the workers will now be forced to fight on a terrain fundamentally altered to their disadvantage. They have not yet constituted themselves as an independent political force, and remain extremely disoriented. The Stalinist apparatus—which had an objective interest in maintaining collectivized property—has been shattered. Further resistance by the Stalinists is unlikely, since they have already failed a decisive political test, and those cadre who attempted to resist are now in forced retirement, in jail or dead. In short, the major organized obstacle to the consolidation of a bourgeois state has been effectively removed. Before the coup, massive working-class resistance to privatization would have split the Stalinist bureaucracy and their armed defenders. Now workers struggling to reverse the restorationist drive will face 'bodies of armed men' dedicated to the objectives of Western capitalists and their internal allies. This incipient state power must be disarmed and destroyed by the workers."

By contrast, the SL said the Soviet workers' state had been "decisively fractured," but still survived. This resulted in a headline in the Autumn 1992 issue of Australasian Spartacist that read: "USSR Hangs in the Balance."

A young IBT supporter, who was a member of the ICL at the time of the coup, pointed out in an open letter to the SL (reprinted in 1917 No. 16) that, "more than three years since August 1991, the SL still can't say when the USSR ceased to exist as a workers' state." He went on to put his finger on the methodological problem with the SL's position:

"The SL writes that Yeltsin carried out a 'piecemeal consolidation of a capitalist state' (WV No. 564). In practice that could mean that Russia was 80% a workers' state and 20% a capitalist state, then 40% a workers' state and 60% a capitalist state, etc. This is ridiculous! Revolution and counterrevolution are not piecemeal processes. To say they are goes against the Marxist teachings on the state. Only one class can hold state power at any one time, the working class or the capitalist class....
"Is the SL now implying that...the USSR under Yeltsin was initially a workers' state with a bourgeois government, which was gradually transformed into a bourgeois state at some unknown later point?
"If, as the SL says, program generates theory, what program could have generated the theory of 'piecemeal' counterrevolution in the USSR? Trotsky would have denounced this as 'reformism in reverse.' The answer is in August 1991, when counterrevolution really triumphed, the SL abstained from the showdown between Yeltsin and the Stalinist coup makers, i.e., did not support either side militarily.... What makes it so difficult for the SL to admit to being wrong is the fact that one of their main competitors in the workers' movement, the International Bolshevik Tendency, was right in siding with the Stalinist coup in defense of the gains of October, and recognizing its defeat as the death of the Soviet workers' state."

In adopting a fighting posture for the proletarian vanguard in the period following Yeltsin's coup, we were following the methodology of Trotsky's Fourth International in the early months of 1933, after Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany. Far from proclaiming, "All is lost," the FI geared up for a campaign of international support to the expected proletarian resistance to Hitler in power. Trotsky later explained the necessity for this fighting perspective:

"The complete absence of resistance on the part of the German workers has provoked certain troubles within our own ranks. We expected that the onward march of the fascist danger would surmount not only the perfidious policy of the reformists but also the ultimatist sabotage of the Stalinists. These hopes were not confirmed. Were our expectations false? This question cannot be put in such a formal manner. We were obliged to proceed from a course based upon resistance and to do all in our power for its realization. To acknowledge a priori the impossibility of resistance would have meant not to push the proletariat forward but to introduce a supplementary demoralizing element."
—Trotsky, "Germany and the USSR," 17 March 1933, in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

No. 24

The SL's insistence that Yeltsin headed a workers' state during his first year in power has nothing in common with Trotsky's anticipation of resistance to Hitler's ascension to power. In fact, the ICL leadership's refusal to acknowledge the truth about Yeltsin's victory (and its condemnation of those who did) closely paralleled the response of the Stalinists to the German disaster:

"There is no need to recall the insults that were thrown at us by the Stalinists in all countries. L'Humanité, even after Hitler's definitive victory, kept saying in issue after issue: 'There has been no defeat in Germany'; 'Only renegades will talk about defeat'....There is nothing surprising in the fact that this criminal bombast in the face of the greatest of historical catastrophes has still further demoralized the other sections of the Communist International: an organization that has lost the capacity of learning from its own defeats is irrevocably condemned."
—Leon Trotsky, "Once Again, Whither France?", 28 March 1935

Trotsky did not deny that Hitler had taken power—he recognized that it was a momentous, but not irreversible, victory for the counterrevolution. Accordingly he called for a working-class counteroffensive. This is exactly the stance we took in relation to Yeltsin's victory over the CPSU "hardliners":

"Yeltsin's hold on power is fragile, but this does not change the fact that Yeltsin and his republican counterparts are using their newly acquired power to unleash a social counterrevolution. Imperialism, perestroika millionaires and the black-market mafia now call the shots in the Kremlin. Many former Stalinist bureaucrats are appropriating huge chunks of state property. Yeltsin's men hold the top military positions....A year ago Gosplan was still issuing planning directives and joint military-police patrols were on the streets harassing black-market speculators, and arresting and confiscating the property of perestroika profiteers. Now Gosplan is no more and profiteers and millionaires are in the saddle.

"The social counterrevolution is far from fully consolidated, but it is victorious. A resurgent proletariat struggling for power would face far less resistance today in Russia than it would in a mature capitalist state."
—1917 No. 11

The IBT attempts to dress up its defeatism in August 1991 by declaring military support for the Stalinist coup plotters—a ludicrous position since the coup plotters, who were just as committed to capitalist restoration as Yeltsin, were not about to undertake the kind of political and military mobilization required to mount a serious opposition. In any case, the BT's position that "it's all over," if propagated in the Soviet Union at the time, could only have had the effect of demoralizing and paralysing any nascent proletarian opposition to Yeltsin's takeover.

No. 25

We took sides in August 1991—with the Stalinists, against the Yeltsinites. The SL, which claimed to be the party of the Russian Revolution, didn't support the victory of either—which amounts to being neutral. The SL is uncomfortable with this characterization, but the political logic of it is contained in their contention that:

"military support for the Stalinist coup plotters [is] a ludicrous position since the coup plotters, who were just as committed to capitalist restoration as Yeltsin, were not about to undertake the kind of political and military mobilization required to mount a serious opposition."
—emphasis added

All the contradictions of the SL position are contained in the above passage. If in fact the Yanayevites were "just as committed to capitalist restoration as Yeltsin," then why should Trotskyists care about whether or not they undertook a political and military mobilization? If the Stalinist bureaucrats (including the heads of the KGB and the military) had been "just as committed" to capitalist restoration as the CIA's friends gathered around Yeltsin in the Russian White House, then there would indeed have been nothing of great importance at stake in August 1991. Yet, if one asserts that Yanayev et al were "just as committed to capitalist restoration" as Yeltsin, then it follows that at some point prior to 19 August 1991 the CPSU bureaucracy had been transformed into a formation that was counterrevolutionary through and through and to the core.

If Yeltsin's triumph was merely a victory of one gang of counterrevolutionaries over another, if by 19 August 1991 the social counterrevolution had already taken place, then the coup and counter-coup were merely squabbles over the spoils. Yet such a position would conflict with the SL's equally absurd assertion that Yeltsin, the historic leader of capitalist counterrevolution, presided over a workers' state for over a year, until, at some undisclosed point in the latter half of 1992, Jim Robertson decided that "it was clear that the working class was not going to move against Yeltsin." If Yeltsin's successful countercoup opened the "floodgates of counterrevolution," as WV asserted, then the SL should have taken sides. (See the extensive polemics on this question in 1917 Nos 11 and 12.)

In our September 1991 statement, after noting the political bankruptcy of the coup leaders, we commented:

"But the Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union always meant defense of the system of collectivized property against restorationist threats regardless of the consciousness or subjective intentions of the bureaucrats. The status quo the 'hardliners' sought to protect, however incompetently, included the state ownership of the means of production—an objective barrier to the return of capitalist wage slavery."

This is why Trotskyists were not neutral in the confrontation between the Stalinist apparatus and the Yeltsinites.

At bottom, the IBT's position reflected complete defeatism over the capacity of the Soviet working class to struggle. They had an identical posture toward the nascent political revolution in the former East German deformed workers state following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, i.e. they declared that there was no possibility of a proletarian political revolution. Correspondingly, they denounced the ICL for mobilizing our resources heavily and internationally to intervene with a revolutionary Trotskyist program into the events in the former East German workers state in 1989-90. Their founding statement even claims that our intervention in the DDR "made it obvious that the ICL could not be considered a revolutionary organization, but rather an obstacle to revolution."

No. 26

For comprehensive comments on the events in the DDR see 1917 Nos. 8 and 10. In a January 1990 special German-language 1917 supplement we asserted:

"At the moment what exists is a political vacuum in the DDR. Unless workers councils are organized and establish their own organs of administration this vacuum will shortly be filled to the disadvantage of the working class through a newly elected or appointed Volkskammer [DDR parliament]."

Our March 1990 statement critically supporting the ICL candidates in the DDR elections noted that:

"the SpAD/ICL's assertion that the DDR today is in the midst of a proletarian political revolution is simply false....We urgently hope that the workers of the DDR take the road of proletarian political revolution—but it does no good to mistake our subjective desires for reality."
—translated in 1917 No. 8

Our comment that the ICL's DDR intervention "made it obvious that the ICL...[is] an obstacle to revolution" came as a conclusion to the following passage:

"The ICL's activity in the crisis of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in late 1989 and early 1990 sharply revealed the fundamental nature of the Spartacist operation. With prodigious infusions of members and cash, the Spartacists founded a new German section, the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, which briefly made significant gains. These were soon squandered as a result of heavy-handed interventions from New York. Moreover, the Spartacist intervention was badly flawed by political adaptation to sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and by the absurd claim that the DDR was in the midst of a 'workers political revolution.'"
—1917 No. 9

Any small propaganda group in a situation like the one in the DDR in January 1990 would have serious difficulties making headway. But the ICL's fundamental problems flowed from the particular character of its leadership: bureaucratic, hyper-centralized and anxious to find a short cut to the big time through some sort of accommodation with a section of the Stalinist apparat. While there is no question that the ICL cadres subjectively wanted to see a political revolution, and worked as energetically as they could to bring about the conditions for one, the leadership demonstrated in practice that the ICL is indeed a centrist obstacle to revolution, not a revolutionary formation.

That the restoration of capitalism in the DDR and the Soviet Union—and indeed throughout East Europe—was accomplished without a civil war was above all conditioned by the lack of an active, authoritative proletarian pole fighting to defend collectivized property. But the lack of such a pole was neither necessary nor inevitable. In both Germany and the USSR the ICL had forces active on the ground. We did not prejudge what would be the outcome of our efforts to forge the party and leadership required to defend the workers states and open the road to the political revolution necessary to replace the discredited Stalinist bureaucratic caste with genuine organs of working-class democracy.

But in both cases the BT did prejudge—proletarian political revolution was impossible—and so, in the aftermath they are forced to deny reality. In the case of the DDR they deny that there was any chance that the profound social crisis which wracked the country from October 1989 through March 1990—accompanied in the beginning by mass demonstrations demanding both the defense of "socialism" and reform of the ruling Stalinist party—could have resulted in anything but capitalist counterrevolution. In the case of the USSR, they claim that the spineless Stalinist coup plotters actually led a credible fight against capitalist counterrevolution. What unites these two positions is a denial that the intervention of Trotskyists could have been a decisive factor in bringing about a different outcome. What a profound negation of the very basis for the Fourth International: "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership."

Nos. 27-28

Here the ICL utilizes one of its favorite polemical techniques—ascribing a position to an opponent and then attacking the invention. We certainly did not argue that proletarian political revolution was impossible in the DDR—simply that, contrary to the ICL's assertions, it was not under way. "In the aftermath" it has been the ICL, not ourselves, that has had to adjust its position. It is easy to understand why the ICL's "optimistic" position with regard to the DDR proletarian political revolution is one they would prefer to bury quietly.

In the case of the August 1991 confrontation in Moscow, we simply asserted that the Stalinist coupists were a lesser evil—and that they opposed the Yeltsinites, however incompetently. The necessary posture for revolutionaries in the last days of the Soviet workers' state was therefore one of a military bloc with the Stalinist remnants against the open restorationists in the imperialist-backed Yeltsin camp. Again the ICL attempts to rewrite our position: we have never claimed that Yanayev et al "actually led a credible fight against capitalist restoration," merely that they favored the preservation of the status quo as against the social counterrevolution represented by the Yeltsinites. The Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the USSR does not depend on the "credibility" of the forces ranged in opposition to capitalist restoration.

The intervention of Trotskyists with roots in a section of the proletariat could indeed have been decisive in both the DDR and the USSR—but only if they had been able to approximate a correct assessment of the objective situation and advance an appropriate programmatic response. A pseudo-Trotskyist formation which intervened on the basis of wishful thinking (as the ICL did in the DDR), or waited to gauge the military "credibility" of its allies before taking sides (as the ICL did in Moscow in August 1991), could not have been a decisive factor, however serious and hard-working its cadres.

An Unnatural Obsession with the Spartacist League

One would have expected that an organization whose political appetites and aims were increasingly clearly divergent from our own would have simply gone off to "do its own thing." But to this day the IBT has remained unnaturally and schizophrenically obsessed with the Spartacist tendency. Sometimes the IBT claims in their publications that the ICL is terminally "Stalinophilic." At other times the IBT emphasizes the political positions they claim to hold in common with us and assert that the ICL has a formally "correct" paper program. Sometimes the IBT tries to reconcile the two positions, as in the formulation (contained in No. 14 of their journal 1917 , dated 1994) that the ICL is "a formerly revolutionary organization that was transformed by degrees into a highly bureaucratized and hyper-centralist obedience cult, marked by capacity for erratic programmatic deviations." The only constant is the slander that we are some kind of violent, deranged organization, "Jimstown."

No. 29

The SL's complaint that the IBT has not "simply gone off to 'do its own thing'" seems a bit peculiar coming from an organization well known for its aggressive polemics against opponents on the left. We continue to pay attention to the SL, despite its non-revolutionary character, because it remains capable of attracting revolutionary-minded people. It is perhaps noteworthy that this, the first "ICL Pamphlet" ever produced, is entirely devoted to our organization. And, as the advertisements contained within the pamphlet clearly show, this is only the latest in a long series of polemics. The SL has devoted more attention to us than any other group, yet it persistently refuses to engage us in public debate.

The SL's polemicists complain that we are not merely obsessed, but "schizophrenically obsessed" with them. They also claim that our characterization of them fluctuates wildly. In fact it has only changed in accordance with the magnitude of the SL's departures from revolutionary Trotskyism. The initial 1982 "Declaration of an external tendency of the iSt" (a document which the IBT stands on) began:

"The SL/US-iSt today is an organization with a profound contradiction. It is a degenerating, but still revolutionary organization which is nonetheless the only contemporary organizational embodiment of the program of Bolshevism....Yet while the SL's program remains revolutionary, its leadership collective increasingly exhibits hyper-centralist, paranoid and personalist characteristics."

The document concluded with the observation that the SL:

"is neither a cult nor a sect (although it increasingly manifests some of the attributes of both) because its membership remains centrally defined by adherence to the program of revolutionary Marxism....At the same time the SL/US-iSt is a revolutionary organization which is degenerating and the process of degeneration appears to be gaining momentum."

We were successful in regrouping some former iSt/ICL cadres, as well as winning the sympathy of wider circles in the SL's milieu. As the SL engaged in an escalating series of overt departures from its Trotskyist history, we were forced to conclude that the SL was finished as any kind of revolutionary organization. In the fourth (and final) issue of the Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt, we traced the SL leadership's "gradual molecular transformation of their organization into an obedience cult" which, "while remaining formally 'orthodox' on a wide range of historically derived political questions," had decisively broken from its revolutionary past.

Contrary to their assertions, we have never characterized the SL/ICL as simply, or even essentially, "Stalinophilic." Over the years we sharply criticized a range of Stalinophilic deviations (e.g., "hailing" Brezhnev's Afghan policy and parading around as the "Yuri Andropov Brigade"). But we also criticized their cowardly flinches from Soviet defensism. This was exemplified during the imperialist hysteria over the downing of the South Korean airliner KAL 007. When the Soviet military terminated this apparent spy-flight over its territory in September 1983, Workers Vanguard (9 September 1983) proclaimed that if the Soviets had known that there were civilian passengers on board then, "despite the potential military damage of such an apparent spying mission," shooting it down would have been "worse than a barbaric atrocity" (see ETB No. 2).

A few years later, in January 1986, the U.S. government launched the space shuttle Challenger to deploy a major new spy satellite aimed primarily at the Soviet Union. When the Challenger spontaneously aborted, the SL volunteered that "what we feel toward the astronauts [i.e., the military personnel and technical specialists who were to set up the military hardware] is no more and no less than for any people who die in tragic circumstances, such as the nine poor Salvadorans who were killed by a fire in a Washington D.C. basement apartment two days before." To our way of thinking, there is something self-evidently wrong with "revolutionary communists" who feel the same about the fate of impoverished refugees from rightist terror and a bunch of Reaganaut Cold Warriors on a Star Wars mission (see 1917, No. 2).

In "The Road to Jimstown," we commented that the flinch on the KAL 007 was:

"far closer to State Department socialism than Stalinophilia and illustrated that in breaking with its revolutionary past, the SL had become profoundly unstable politically. Such erratic programmatic gyrations in response to immediately perceived interests are characteristic of political banditry"a peculiar and particularly cynical form of centrism."

That has remained our characterization of the iSt/ICL, and corresponds precisely to the position quoted from 1917 No. 14. The SL tacks on the gratuitous lie that: "The only constant is the slander that we are some kind of violent, deranged organization, 'Jimstown.'" We do not consider the SL to be, in general, a violent organization. Nor, for that matter, do we consider other groups in the workers' movement to be "violent, deranged organizations." The SL, like various other left groups, has at times engaged in unprincipled attacks on its political opponents—ranging from slander to cop-baiting to, on occasion, strong-arm tactics.

In its political schizophrenia toward us—on the one hand we have major programmatic differences, on the other we have no differences—the IBT reveals everything about itself. For the IBT defies political definition, at least as understood by the traditions of the Marxist movement. If they have a counterposed political program to our own, then they should struggle to win our members to their organization based on that political counterposition. If they fundamentally share the same political program with the ICL then why do they exist? If their only raison d'être is their (lying) claim that they were wrongly expelled or otherwise driven out of our organization, then they would presumably seek to convince the ranks of the ICL that such was the case by demonstrating that they fundamentally share our political program through participation in the major campaigns of our organization.

No. 30

While the SL claims that we defy political description, there is in fact a very close analogy between our polemics against the Robertsonians and the attempts by the early SL to unmask the cynical pseudo-Trotskyism of Gerry Healy's political-bandit operation. In its attempts to avoid seriously confronting our criticisms, the ICL/SL has periodically thrown a barrage of Stalinist-style slander at the IBT and its predecessors. (See for example "ET: New Name, Same Game?" [WV No. 388, 4 October 1985], and "Garbage Doesn't Walk by Itself—What Makes BT Run?" [WV No. 428, 15 May 1987]).

The SL polemicists feign confusion about whether or not we "fundamentally share" the same program with them when it is abundantly clear from the polemics between us that, on a whole range of important political questions, we have sharply divergent views. For over ten years we have been absolutely unambiguous that the SL is in no sense a revolutionary organization, but rather a political-bandit operation qualitatively similar to Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League of the late 1960s.

While the SL remains quite capable of enunciating formally correct positions on a wide variety of issues, we do not consider that "the ICL has a formally 'correct' paper program." The only programmatic position that really counts in Jimstown is complete obedience to the whims of the infallible leader. Sometimes this has meant defending the USSR and opposing the U.S. military, and sometimes it has meant the opposite.

But such is not the case. On the contrary, since its inception the IBT has reviled virtually every major campaign of our organization internationally—a fact which hardly endears them to our membership. The whole profile of the BT is that of an organization defined by anti-Spartacism, whose mission in life is to dirty our good name and seek to sterilize our efforts.

No. 31

The SL has made this cynical accusation periodically in the past. In fact we have participated in, endorsed and materially supported a range of SL-initiated activities, just as we have participated, on a similar basis, in campaigns organized by other left groups in defense of abortion clinics, against fascists or in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal and other victims of repression by the capitalist state.

When the SL first advanced this brazen lie (WV No. 349, 2 March 1984), we responded promptly with a letter dated 12 March 1984 (reprinted in ETB No. 3):

"In the past period we have stood side by side with you physically and financially against the attacks of your sworn enemies. We joined your San Francisco demonstration against Deukmejian, endorsed and contributed to the anti-Moonie suit and our supporters in the ILWU aggressively defended [SL supporter] Stan against the bureaucrats' witchhunt last year. We have participated in numerous Bay Area demonstrations and court-room appearances in defense of Lauren and Ray [victimized SL phoneworker supporters]. A trade-union supporter of ours in Ohio obtained the endorsement and a $100 donation from his local for the two trade unionists. In Canada, our comrades actively built the defense rally for Paul and Mike [anti-fascist iSt supporters], postering and leafletting with the comrades of the TLC [Trotskyist League of Canada]. One of our supporters also managed to get his union local to endorse and send a $50 donation for the campaign."

In ETB No. 3 (May 1984) we reproduced WV's charge that:

"whenever our party is out front...and the target of the combined hostility of the capitalist state and the reformist 'left,' then does the ET show at best indifference to our survival and often an active appetite to see us go down."

Beside this we printed photostatic copies of four checks we had sent to various iSt defense campaigns in the six months preceding the publication of this slander. Defending the SL has not always been easy. In June 1986 when we sent a donation to the Guillermo Bermudez Defense Fund, the SL returned the check (reprinted along with their letter of refusal in our 1987 "truth kit").

We have also participated in SL-initiated cam