From a Drift Toward Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle

https://iclfi.org/pubs/pamphlets/icc-ig-lm/appx-drift

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Last month the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), expelled long-time leading cadres, comrades with two dozen years each as party members. This political purge was intended to silence internal opposition to the increasingly erratic course of the ICL’s International Secretariat (I.S.), which has in recent months veered sharply to the right toward a policy of abstention from the class struggle. In order to carry out its bureaucratic action, the SL leadership had to trample underfoot the party’s traditions of Leninist democratic-centralism, and even to violate its own statutes. The expulsions of Jan Norden, a member of the I.S. and the Political Bureau of the Spartacist League/U.S. and editor of Workers Vanguard for the last 23 years; of Marjorie Stamberg, a member of the editorial board of WV and alternate member of the SL Central Committee; and of Negrete, a member of the International Executive Committee and principal leader of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, took place on June 8. The ruinous meaning and consequences of the I.S.’ course were brought out less than two weeks later, as the ICL formally dissolved fraternal relations with the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil/Luta Metalúrgica on June 17, demanding that the LQB/LM turn its back on a crucial struggle it had undertaken, to remove the municipal guardas (police) from the ranks of the Municipal Workers Union in the steel center of Volta Redonda. When the LQB refused to abandon this urgent class battle, undertaken with the I.S.’ encouragement, the ICL leadership abandoned them.

This is a sharp turn for the ICL and Spartacist League, with grievous consequences for the course of the party which for more than three decades has represented the continuity of Trotskyism internationally. The ICL leadership’s recognition of the gravity of what it accurately calls the crisis in the party is gauged by the fact that Workers Vanguard, the paper of the SL/U.S., devoted almost half of its last issue (WV No. 648, 5 July) to these events: three pages (out of 16) trying to explain the split with the LQB/LM and four full pages seeking to justify our expulsion. These two events are intimately linked together, and not only in the columns of Workers Vanguard. The expelled ICL cadres had objected to the I.S.’ renunciation of the 1994 Declaration of Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica. Norden opposed the uncritical acceptance of slanderously false charges against the LQB/LM, raised in the bourgeois press by a pro-police provocateur in Volta Redonda, as an alleged “proof” of “trade-union opportunism,” and statements by International Secretary Parks that the ICL should never “set foot in that town [Volta Redonda] again.” For this internal criticism, he was accused of “cop-baiting” (!) the ICL and of trying to “engineer a split with LM against the ICL.” Yet less than three weeks later, it was the I.S. that “engineered a split with LM.” And they did so precisely in order to avoid association with the LQB/LM as pressure mounted from the capitalist state on the class-struggle activists. The ICL leaders caved in to the pressure of the bourgeoisie.

The I.S.’ shameful policy in Volta Redonda was a betrayal of the working class, and particularly of the ICL’s Trotskyist program, the program we continue to defend. This fact is cynically disguised in the Workers Vanguard articles, and was also hidden in good part from the ICL membership. While WV professed to support “Revolutionary Trotskyism, Not Trade-Union Opportunism,” readers were not informed that the fraternal relations with the Brazilian comrades were broken “one day before the union assembly called to separate the police from the municipal union!” as the LQB’s 4 July letter answering the ICL bitterly pointed out. Two days earlier, ICL representatives had told the LQB that there was a danger of a bloody confrontation if it continued to pursue the fight to oust the cops from the union. With its forces, they claimed, the LQB “cannot, at this time, stand up to this whole offensive of bourgeois reaction, which is trying to destroy the union and which is trying to wait for the best moment to destroy our organization in Brazil…. We are telling you: let’s pull our hands out of that boiling water and dedicate our attention and time to building a revolutionary party.” What a grotesque perversion of Leninism—“building a revolutionary party” by pulling one’s hands out of the boiling water of the class struggle!

This was not some off-hand remark, but the synthesis of a whole policy that has been pursued for some time by what Parks terms “the new I.S.” On June 5, the I.S. passed a motion saying that “given the sinister provocations and threats of state repression,” association of the ICL with the union work of the LQB/LM “presents unacceptable risks to the vanguard”—as well, it said, to the LQB and the union itself. A June 11 letter to the LQB by Parks declared that continued leadership of the union was “not sustainable.”^* In the meeting with the LQB immediately before the ICL broke relations, ICL representatives told the Brazilian comrades that it was necessary “to formally leave” the “leadership of the union,” because it was “the most prominent issue” used by the bourgeoisie against them when the union “is in the crosshairs” of the bourgeois state. But in the face of these risks, the Brazilian revolutionaries cannot simply walk away from the struggle at its high point without being traitors to the workers’ cause. It is to its immense credit that the LQB categorically rejected the I.S.’ outrageous demand, and has continued to fight for the separation of the cops from the union. The ICL will be known for years, in Latin America and elsewhere, for its ignominious flight from this battle because it deemed the “risks to the vanguard” to be “unacceptable.”

But more than that, in calling on the Brazilian comrades to walk away from the responsibilities of leadership they have undertaken in the class struggle, the I.S. policy and the view expressed by its representatives point toward a fundamental revision of Leninism on the central question of the revolutionary party. V.I. Lenin, the founder of the Russian Bolsheviks and co-leader together with Trotsky of the Russian October Revolution of 1917, insisted in his fundamental work, What Is To Be Done? (1902):

“Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.”

The fact that communist consciousness must be brought to the workers from without is the fundamental reason why there must be a separate party of professional revolutionaries. But that party does not stand outside the working class and its struggles—rather it is the most conscious part of the proletariat fused with declassed revolutionary intellectuals. This is axiomatic for Trotskyists, who stand on the program of the early Communist International led by Lenin and Trotsky. The theses on “The Role of the Communist Party in Proletarian Revolution” (July 1920) of the Second Congress of the Comintern stated:

“1. The Communist Party is a part of the working class, the most advanced, politically conscious and revolutionary part. The Communist Party is composed of the best, most politically conscious, most dedicated and far-sighted workers. The Communist Party has no interests other than those of the working class. It differs from the general mass of workers in that it surveys the whole historical path of the working class in its totality, and tries at each stage of the struggle to defend the interests of the working class as a whole, rather than of individual groups or trades. The Communist Party is the organizational and political lever which assists the more advanced part of the working class to direct the mass of the proletariat and semi-proletariat onto the right path.”

What does it mean when the I.S. tells the LQB, “let’s pull our hands out of that boiling water” of the class struggle, and “dedicate our attention and time to building a revolutionary party”? This is the outlook not of a revolutionary workers party, but of someone standing outside the class, who can decide to simply walk away when the risks become “unacceptable.” This is not bringing the communist program to the workers from the outside (including recruiting from among the intelligentsia and other layers of the population), but rather reflects the viewpoint of a petty bourgeois haughtily observing the class struggle from without. Moreover, it reflects a tendency to retreat from the class struggle, to adopt a policy of passive propagandism, that underlay the fights over Germany and Brazil that have been boiling in the ICL for the last year and a half. The I.S. resolved the internal fight by slicing off a section of the leadership, and “solved” its problem in Brazil by pulling its hands out.

Brazil: “Police Are the Armed Fist of the Bourgeoisie! Cops Out of the Unions!”

Luta Metalúrgica grew out of a nucleus of proletarian militants forged in the struggles of the workers at the Volta Redonda steel plant, the largest in Latin America, where three workers were killed by the Military Police in a 1988 steel strike. Entering into struggle at the beginning of the 1980s, during the last years of the military dictatorship, they were strike leaders and became local leaders of the newly formed Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT—Workers Party) of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. But when in the 1989 elections Lula set up a coalition with bourgeois politicians, the Frente Brasil Popular, the LM comrades fought against this class collaboration. This largely black group of class-struggle militants joined the ostensibly Trotskyist organization Causa Operária (C.O.), followers of the Argentine Jorge Altamira, and were the first victims of a purge of left-wingers from the PT later that year. (The hatchet man sent to carry out the purge in V.R. was a prominent member of the Democracia Socialista current of the PT, followers of Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat.) However, while the Altamiristas attacked the popular front in the pages of their newspaper, in typical centrist fashion they called to “Vote Lula!” in the elections.

Inside Causa Operária, the Volta Redonda local fought to take up the struggle against black oppression, ignored by virtually the entire Brazilian left, and made contact with the ICL via trade-unionists in São Paulo who had received our material. In the run-up to the 1994 elections, the V.R. local went into opposition to the “Vote Lula” line, and wrote documents calling for no vote for any candidate or party of the popular front on principle. After splitting with C.O. in July of that year, the Luta Metalúrgica group pursued talks with the ICL, leading to the signing of the Declaration of Fraternal Relations in September 1994. This Declaration was published in Portuguese by LM, and in English, Spanish, French, German and Polish by the International Communist League, including in Spartacist, the organ of the IEC. Until recently the entire ICL was rightly proud of this Declaration and our ties with the Brazilian fraternal comrades. Now the I.S. pretends that it was all phony and they were hoodwinked. On the contrary, it is the ICL leadership that is trying to deceive the comrades and the world at large in order to cover its own betrayal.

There are real risks in any serious class struggle, all the more so when the issue is the role of the cops in a country like Brazil, where police death squads have been at work for years. The Volta Redonda Municipal Workers Union (SFPMVR), with supporters of the LQB in the leadership, pointed out that V.R. is one of the areas with the highest number of street children murdered by police. But the “sinister provocations and threats of state repression” that the I.S. considered “unacceptable risks” to itself are directed above all at the Brazilian comrades. In early March, a SFPMVR meeting was invaded by shotgun-wielding Military Police, at the instigation of a pro-cop provocateur in the union, one Artur Fernandes. The ICL and the Partisan Defense Committee launched an international campaign for solidarity with the class-struggle unionists, demanding “Police Hands Off Volta Redonda Union!” In May, Fernandes claimed to have been fired at in a transparent ploy to deflect mounting support for the campaign to remove police from the union. Undeterred, SFPMVR president Geraldo Ribeiro, with the support of LQB, continued the campaign, including through a series of leaflets, workplace assemblies and a union conference with delegates elected on this point, among others. But instead of standing by the Brazilian comrades, the ICL leadership cut relations and ran from the struggle. “We feel stabbed in the back,” wrote one LQB comrade in a personal statement, noting that he began his struggle in the metal workers union opposition under the military dictatorship in 1982.

The June 19 SFPMVR union assembly brought out 200 workers. It was dissolved by a judicial order sought by the popular-front mayor, at the instigation of the same pro-cop provocateur. The police intervened just as union president Ribeiro was reading the motion to disaffiliate the cops. Two days later, during a nationwide general strike, the Municipal Workers Union struck in Volta Redonda, and LQB militants led the strike actions. One comrade, Marcello Carega, was arrested on charges of “disobedience” for refusing to move the union van blocking a gate at the head of 150 workers. Subsequently, the courts have suspended Ribeiro from the presidency, using as a pretext the printing of a union bulletin containing a column on the police by Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and acclaimed journalist on death row in Pennsylvania. Ribeiro is now being sued by the mayor for defamation of the city (potentially facing four years in jail) for denouncing as racist the firing of a black woman, Regina Célia, for not having a “good appearance,” a racist codeword in Brazil, and for leading a union campaign for her reinstatement. Most recently, on July 26, a membership assembly of the SFPMVR voted to reaffirm Ribeiro as president and to disaffiliate the cops. Yet Workers Vanguard and the I.S. claim these courageous Trotskyist militants are just “trade-union opportunists” engaged in “endless unprincipled blocs and amorphous combinations in the trade unions.”

What kind of “trade-union opportunists” are these, who are suspended by the courts for demanding cops out of the union, who are sued for defending victims of racist discrimination, who are arrested for defying the Military Police to shut down work in the midst of a general strike? The WV article quotes a June 11 letter from the I.S. taking the LQB to task for running for leadership of a union with cops in it while not “specifically and forcefully addressing this crucial question” in the campaign, and then saying: “The point is to do something about it….” Yes, indeed. But the WV article fails to mention that the program of the Municipários em Luta (Municipal Workers in Struggle) slate supported by LM stated that the armed forces and police, including the guarda municipal (municipal police), are “all of them, the armed fist of the bourgeoisie,” and any “alliance” with them is incompatible with class independence, “since they bring men armed and trained by the bourgeois state into the unions.” And WV tries to disguise the fact that something is being done about the cops in the V.R. municipal workers union. Every city worker and reader of the local press in Volta Redonda is well aware that a raging battle is going on over precisely this key question of the capitalist state.

The I.S. claims that Norden and Negrete, who were earlier principally responsible for the ICL work in Brazil, conciliated the LQB. Yet the issue of police in the Brazilian trade unions was raised by comrade Negrete two years ago, long before the SFPMVR elections. In the aftermath of the victory of the MEL slate, when we became aware at the January IEC of the presence of cops in the union, a discussion was begun (again by Negrete, along with comrade Bride), in which the I.S. correctly insisted that removing the police from the unions was urgently necessary and a fundamental matter of principle. As a member of the I.S., Norden played a leading role in this fight, including writing the final draft of a 23 February letter to LM, and the key sentence quoted in the recent WV article: “The fight for removal of the cops from the unions is the equivalent of the call for no vote to Lula: it is the concrete expression of the Marxist principle of the independence of the labor movement from the capitalist state.” This sharp discussion had an effect, spurring efforts (which had already begun in December, as Ribeiro described in a written statement) to separate the police from the SFPMVR. In line with the earlier advice of the ICL, they have sought to accomplish this avoiding unnecessary confrontations but also by building class consciousness among the union ranks.

In the entire three pages in WV on the ICL’s break of fraternal relations with the LQB/LM, the only mention that the Brazilian comrades are actually doing something about the cops in the union is the laconic statement that “Since the battle was brought to LM, they have waged a principled and difficult struggle against the police presence in the union.” What cynicism! This statement is clearly incompatible with the picture of ingrained opportunism the article presents. Obviously inserted in order to be quoted when they are attacked for ignoring this whole dramatic battle, that sentence proves that the ICL leaders know the truth and are consciously covering it up. WV does not report, and I.S. secretary Parks has denied, but every V.R. municipal worker knows full well that the police invasion of the March union meeting was in direct response to the position of the elected union leadership under Geraldo Ribeiro that cops are not part of the workers movement. The provocateur Artur Fernandes issued a leaflet calling the March 13 meeting to “defend the guardas,” reproducing the section of the MEL program that called the cops part of the “armed fist of the bourgeoisie.” The leaflet began:

“Geraldo clearly wants to exclude the Municipal Guardas and watchmen from the union movement, stigmatizing them as ARMED FISTS OF THE BOSSES, claiming that an alliance with the Municipal Guardas and Watchmen is incompatible with MUNICIPÁRIOS EM LUTA, making clear the intention to disaffiliate all the Municipal Guardas and Watchmen from the Union.”

WV does not report, and the ICL leadership did not even distribute internally, a MEL union leaflet of May 6 headlined: “THE RANK AND FILE IS DECIDING: Police Out of the Union; Reaffirmation of the Municipários em Luta Program.” That leaflet reported on a 6 a.m. union meeting at the municipal garage which:

“voted unanimously that: The police should not be part of, and should not interfere with, the SFPMVR or the workers movement in general. Because they are the armed fist of the bourgeoisie. They also decided in favor of the MEL program, which defends workers’ class independence; women, their rights and gains; blacks; children; socialism and the construction of a Revolutionary Workers Party which fights to put an end to capitalism; for proletarian opposition to the Popular Front and for workers mobilizations to defeat the starvation plan, firings and misery of FHC [Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso] and the IMF.”

It is no secret in Volta Redonda who is leading this fight. In May, amid the uproar caused by the claim of the provocateur to have been shot and his sinister attempts to implicate LM, the local papers were full of articles on the subject. One began:

“Guardas Say They Feel Pressured by Members of Luta Metalúrgica

“Commander says the group wants to exclude municipal guardas from the Municipal Workers Union

“Volta Redonda—The commander of the Municipal Guarda, retired army lieutenant Paulo Roberto Freitas, will call the troops together this morning to find out if his subordinates are being subjected to pressure as a result of the statements by the leader of Luta Metalúrgica and vice president of the regional CUT [union federation], Alexandre Cerezo. Luta Metalúrgica made its support to the election campaign of Geraldo Ribeiro’s slate—which ended up winning the election for the leadership of the Union of Municipal Workers of Volta Redonda—conditional on carrying out a program drawn up by the organization ‘Municipários em Luta’ which precludes municipal guarda being part of the union.”

The same article ominously declared: “The attacks and provocations of Cerezo and Geraldo Ribeiro are not being well-received by the guardas….” Not a word of this entire incident was reported in WV.

In Brazil, however, it is impossible to pretend nothing is happening about the cops in Volta Redonda. The Petroleum Workers Union (whose strike was broken by Military Police last year) has supported the V.R. municipal workers against the provocations, as have Belo Horizonte municipal workers and other unions. Various pseudo-Trotskyist groups have written about it, and the provocateur Fernandes liberally uses their material to attack Ribeiro, the LQB and the ICL. The alleged shooting was his response to the fact that the SFPMVR ranks were backing union president Ribeiro and his campaign to remove the cops from the union. Instead of informing the ICL membership of this, the I.S. passed over the steps being taken to remove the cops in silence and falsely claimed that the LQB was being persecuted for proclaiming its fraternal ties with the ICL. (Parks complained that they were “dim” about “the dangers of international affiliation”!)

The I.S. secretary even drafted a letter accusing LQB leader Cerezo of seeking “sinecures” and “positions of privilege” in the union by repeating a false accusation from the bourgeois press quoting Fernandes, who openly brags he is “advised by the police,” about Cerezo supposedly asking for a salary ten times the minimum wage as an official union advisor. In response to this charge, the union’s president and its accountant (who was part of a previous administration) have published affidavits stating not only that the union never paid Cerezo anything, but that no such salary was ever discussed or requested. When Parks wrote, in a draft letter to the LQB, that “we really should not have to learn about such things” from the bourgeois press, Norden objected to the uncritical acceptance of this slanderous charge—and for this, he was vilely accused of “cop-baiting” the ICL! This, too, is not reported in WV.

The WV 648 article states:

“Despite abstract agreement with the need to forge a Trotskyist nucleus in Brazil, LM subordinated necessary party work—such as publishing a newspaper to openly make their case to the workers and expose the witchhunters—to preserving their control of the union from the top through the unelected position of ‘union advisor’.”

Once again, it was the provocateur Fernandes who first attacked LM leader Cerezo being an official union advisor. Moreover, Fernandes himself announced in a leaflet in February that this was no longer the case, as was stated as well by union president Ribeiro on a radio program in March. It is not as “advisors” but as comrades that LM contributes to leading the union. Ribeiro has made no secret of the fact that he is a supporter of the LQB/LM. Did the Minneapolis Teamsters hide the fact that they were Trotskyists and part of an international during the 1934 strike? And what of charges that James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, the most prominent leaders of the Communist League of America, were unelected “union advisors” when they went to Minneapolis to help lead that strike? The American Trotskyists in the ’30s responded to the anti-communist “outside agitator” baiting by ridiculing it (see Cannon, Notebook of an Agitator [1973], pp. 84-86). Today the ICL fearfully echoes it.

While gratuitously claiming that the LQB comrades were “dim” about the “dangers of international affiliation,” Parks even came out (two years after the fact) against the public announcement of the fraternal relations of the ICL with Luta Metalúrgica, saying that there should only have been an “internal document”! This amounts to calling for hiding international affiliation. This is in direct contradiction to the principles and practice of the revolutionary Third and Fourth Internationals. The ICL has always denounced the pseudo-Trotskyists who hide behind the bourgeoisie’s witchhunting laws (like the Voorhis Act in the U.S.) to downplay international ties. The Morenoites have often used this same methodology in Latin America. We protested this policy inside the ICL, pointing out that whatever the motivation, this amounts to capitulating to the ideological pressure of nationalism and imperialism.

Moreover, the LQB is not seeking to “preserve control of the union from the top” but is waging a determined struggle among the ranks. With several supporters in the SFPMVR, they have put out hard-hitting propaganda in the union. The union paper put out by Ribeiro featuring the defense of Regina Célia had a front-page excerpt from Trotsky on the woman question, and the paper repeatedly stresses that the struggle is against capitalism and its popular-front administrators. In the face of the court intervention suspending Ribeiro, they gathered almost 300 signatures—roughly 15 percent of the union membership—on a petition demanding a meeting to reinstate the elected president and to remove the police from the union. And the newspaper that the ICL leadership claimed the LQB/LM had “subordinated” to a power fight in the union and didn’t really want now exists. The first issue of Vanguarda Operária was published on July 16, and we are proud to have aided as fraternal comrades in that effort. The I.S., on the other hand, was content to denounce the LQB for the fact that it hadn’t appeared, although the publication was held up for several weeks because the ICL rep hadn’t given them the computer codes (attributes) needed to open the files!

Has the ICL membership been informed of any of this, of the fact that the ICL broke off relations on the eve of a meeting called to vote for cops out of the union, and that the ICL representatives called on LQB/LM to desert from this vital class battle at the high point of the struggle on the grounds that the forces of the bourgeoisie and its state were too strong?! Certainly nothing of this was reported in the two articles in WV No. 648.

Instead, the readers are given half-truths, distortions and outright lies. Thus the I.S.’ June 17 letter breaking fraternal relations attacks the LQB for “unprincipled blocs and amorphous combinations in the trade unions….” In fact, it was Norden who wrote, in the 23 February I.S. letter to Luta Metalúrgica, the criticism of the MEL as an “amorphous union formation.” As a result of debate and experience (including the treachery of Fernandes), in its 4 July reply to the ICL’s breaking of fraternal relations, the LQB/LM recognizes that the ICL made correct criticisms on the formation of the MEL slate and that the ICL was also correct in criticizing the original MEL program for not explicitly demanding the disaffiliation of the police from the union—while scoring the hypocrisy of the I.S. for then abandoning the struggle.

Contrary to a May 11 I.S. motion attacking “Norden and Negrete’s attempt to blunt the necessary sharp fights with LQB/LM in Brazil,” we were the first to address problems in LM’s union work, in several letters to LM and memos to the I.S. and IEC warning of a syndicalist danger in their practice. At the time, in the greater interests of waging the fight against Norden over Germany, this was denounced as slandering LM. At the January IEC meeting and in a subsequent letter to LM, leading comrades (with justification) said the V.R. group potentially had the significance of the Trotskyist cadres who led the Minneapolis Teamsters and Belgian coal miners of the Charleroi basin in the 1930s. Yet only a few weeks later, many of the same comrades were declaring LM to be nothing less than “trade-union opportunists” and claiming that our warning of a syndicalist danger was just a cunning cover-up!

On June 11, Parks wrote to the LQB on behalf of the I.S.: “More delays in the subordination of principles to daily struggles for influence in the leadership of the union will only lead to a continuation of the provocations of the cops, the political forces behind the cops, and ‘leftists’ who do their bidding.” Not only does this letter (as well as the June 18 letter breaking fraternal relations) dishonestly portray the situation in Volta Redonda as if the LQB was not waging a struggle for the separation of the police from the union—when readers of the local press are bombarded with articles about Luta Metalúrgica’s fight to remove the cops—it outrageously blames the LQB for inviting police provocation! And what the I.S. leadership’s fine words about principles mean in practice is not an effort to intensify the struggle for cops out of the union, but a demand that revolutionaries run away from the battle! Contrast this shameful back-stabbing to the policy of Trotsky’s Fourth International as put forward in the Transitional Program:

“The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the unions to the bourgeois state and bind the proletariat to ‘compulsory arbitration’ and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist but also ‘democratic.’ Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy.”

Now, in order to drive home the false “lessons” of recent fights in the ICL, the WV 648 article on “A Break in Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica” claims that the Declaration of Fraternal Relations with LM was fundamentally deviant from the outset. (The article conveniently fails to explain why almost two years went by without anyone noticing this.) To back up this claim, the article asserts: “Indicative of the flawed character of the Declaration of Fraternal Relations was its failure to even mention permanent revolution.” There follows a disquisition on the importance of this fundamental part of the Trotskyist program, supposedly demolishing the “flawed” Declaration we uphold. Yet like so many other allegations in the article, the claim on which this whole edifice is based is demonstrably false. Not only is the entire document imbued with the program of permanent revolution, the Declaration explicitly declares:

“As the tribune of the oppressed, it is indispensable that the Leninist party raise the banner of struggle against the oppression of women, rooted in the institution of the bourgeois family—a question of utmost importance in Brazil—as part of the program of permanent revolution.”

It also quotes Trotsky saying that unless the road is found to the deeply oppressed black population in the U.S., “The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.” Read it in Spartacist No. 52 (Autumn 1995) or Workers Vanguard No. 608 (14 October 1994).

So WV’s claim that the permanent revolution was left out of the Declaration of Fraternal Relations is a flat lie. In fact, the entire article on the ICL’s break of relations is one long lie. While there is not enough space here to refute every false statement and distortion, many are answered in two documents by Norden, “On Relations with Luta Metalúrgica” (17 April) and “Once Again on Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica” (5 May). Then there is the comparison of fraternal relations with the Brazilian LM, who were long-time recognized union fighters with authority gained from leading mass struggles, with the Japanese Rekken, which had existed for over a decade as an isolated study group. It is because they were actively engaged in political struggle in competition with other ostensibly Trotskyist tendencies that LM requested that the Declaration be quickly approved so that they could publish it in Brazil, where they were the only group to take a principled position against voting for Lula’s popular front in the 1994 elections. The I.S. duly approved the Declaration of Fraternal Relations, which was later ratified without controversy by the IEC—as has been the case with numerous other decisions over the years.^** Behind the phony hue and cry, two years after the fact, over the procedure by which the document was adopted lies the fact that the “new I.S.” would prefer a study circle to having to deal with the difficult problems facing a group like the LQB/LM.

We can proudly say that Workers Vanguard in the 23 years Norden was editor and the more than a decade and a half that Stamberg acted as managing editor consistently told the truth. WV had a deserved reputation for uncompromising honesty. Those who were skewered by our sharp polemics frequently squealed like stuck pigs. But we could always back up our assertions with proven facts, and did so when challenged. This cannot be said of the SL’s paper today. The “new WV” lies! And it does so in the service of a program of fleeing from the class struggle, of abandoning in practice the Trotskyist program of independence of the unions from the state. We have argued that the ICL has recently shown a strong tendency in the direction of abstract or passive propagandism, counterposed to the long-standing Spartacist conception of building a “fighting propaganda group” that fuses Trotskyist propaganda with intervention in exemplary actions where the party has the ability to do so. While over the years many centrist pseudo-Trotskyists have falsely accused the SL of being “ultraleft sectarians,” what is happening now is the opposite: the developing tendency to abstentionism is a rightist policy that means betraying the ICL’s own historic program and liquidating the party as an active factor in the class struggle.

Germany: A False Fight…

The Workers Vanguard 648 article on our expulsions states:

“After more than six months of internal party discussion and struggle that definitively exposed Norden’s revisionist course, which if left unchecked would have destroyed us as a revolutionary Marxist tendency, Norden’s opportunist policies were decisively defeated at the January 1996 International Executive Committee meeting. Norden, and Stamberg, completely rejected this decision of the highest leading body of the ICL between conferences. They declared any and all criticisms of the ‘regroupment’ orientation to the KPF [Communist Platform of the PDS] and Norden’s Humboldt speech were completely false. At the same time, Norden arrogantly denied all responsibility for nearly destroying our German section with the concomitant bureaucratic practices he pushed to realize his perspective.”

As with the rest of the WV article, the claims about the fight over Germany consist of a massive accumulation of distortions, false assertions, and outright inventions. To begin with, we didn’t “reject” the decision of the IEC by refusing to abide by it; we completely opposed its false conclusions. Also, the Germany discussion didn’t last for six months but for an entire year, during which there was a desperate search for a “Stalinophilic” deviation in the SpAD; after about six months, in which the “evidence” for this assertion kept constantly shifting, the I.S. with Al Nelson leading the charge declared that the source of the deviation had been found in the person of Norden, the policies he had pursued (which the I.S. had approved), and his January 1995 speech at Humboldt University in Berlin on the collapse of Stalinism in East Europe. The next half year was spent in demonizing Norden’s work in Germany, after which another six months were consumed with a similar operation over Mexico and Brazil, culminating in our expulsion.

Contrary to the allegation that Norden ran a “vicious witchhunt denouncing any comrades perceived as an obstacle to his orientation,” there was no witchhunt. Nor were there “bureaucratic practices…pushed to realize his perspective.” No one in the German section was bureaucratically abused, and certainly not as a “perceived obstacle” to the KPF intervention, since that perspective had been universally supported in the SpAD. The accusation of “nearly destroying our German section” is a vicious lie. The KPF work was an excellent Trotskyist intervention that built the SpAD. But in the frenzy to find a pro-Stalinist deviation where it didn’t exist, the ICL leadership endorsed a line that capitulated to the social-democratic anti-communist campaign which equated Stalinism with anti-Semitism. And this along with intimidating leading comrades of the German section to recant their views, which they did, has taken a terrible toll in severely damaging and even destroying their revolutionary fiber.

We said at the time that this was a false fight from start to finish, that there was no truth in the alleged “facts” on which it was based, the analysis and the conclusions drawn. The only “answer” of the I.S. majority to our refutation of the string of falsehoods was to demand that we answer what does that say about them—we must be calling them lying bureaucrats. We did not jump to conclusions. But in the aftermath, with the explicit codifying of the SpAD “perspectives” of passive propaganda, the subsequent equally false “fights” over Mexico and Brazil, and the welter of bureaucratic measures against us and other comrades for continuing to oppose the “lessons” drawn, one has to conclude that what the I.S. claimed we thought about them was in fact what they knew to be the truth about themselves. There was a campaign of lies in the service of a policy of abstention from intervention as a Trotskyist fighting propaganda group—as was the case even more dramatically over Brazil a few months later—and of purging those who were perceived as obstacles to consolidating the “new I.S.” And to properly carry out this operation, the history of the SpAD has now been systematically rewritten on a whole series of previous fights and interventions over the past six years.

The tendency to passive propagandism was pronounced in the German section of the Spartacist tendency (then the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands) even before the demise of the DDR. At the height of the stormy events of 1989-90, when the ICL mobilized its forces to the maximum to intervene in the beginnings of a political revolution in the East German deformed workers state, the TLD was excruciatingly slow to shift gears and overcome what the document of the second international conference of the ICL (1992) termed a “propaganda circle mentality.” From October through early December 1989, when political events were moving so rapidly that years of “normal” development were compressed into days, crucial weeks were lost in getting our propaganda into East Germany. There was foot-dragging resistance to getting comrades to take time off from work. In December, at a time when streams of East Germans were coming daily to our meeting hall in West Berlin, the founding of the Spartakist-Gruppen as transitional organizations was inexcusably delayed by almost three weeks. And even after fights about this, a section of the TLD sat out most of the battle for the DDR in Hamburg, right up through the March 1990 Volkskammer elections.

In the aftermath of the capitalist reunification, there was a strong tendency, particularly among former members of the TLD to retreat from struggle into their accustomed narrow and self-satisfied propaganda circle mentality. This was manifest in a number of sharp fights, notably against resistance to the Spartakist campaign in the 1990 Bundestag elections; resistance to maintaining Halle as an East German center, through necessary in-transfers of cadres from the West; and resistance to the January 1993 united-front defense of an immigrant workers hostel in Berlin. Accompanying this, there was a pattern of political flip-flops by the SpAD leadership centered on Max Schütz, who is notorious throughout the ICL as a wildly changeable impressionist. In the recent Germany discussion, we emphasized that the deviations of the SpAD were all over the map, with a kaleidoscopic character politically. The common denominator was the lack of a dialectical outlook on virtually everything, particularly a failure to recognize contradictions. But of the SpAD’s various deviations, the most dangerous were those reflecting the pressure of their “own” bourgeoisie.

The German discussion began in response to a December 1994 document by Mary Ann Clemens arguing that the SpAD had over a period of years capitulated to, conciliated and failed to fight Stalinist conceptions among its own members, particularly those relatively newer East German recruits from the former DDR. Norden remarked at an SpAD central committee meeting in January 1995 that there was some truth to what Clemens was saying, and those points should be incorporated in a conference document. There have been pro-Stalinist errors in the SpAD—for example, it was repeatedly necessary in Spartakist articles on the witchhunt trials of former DDR leaders to put in from New York that they were being tried by the wrong class for the wrong crimes. Norden also opposed a decision by the SpAD CC to make defense of former DDR security minister Mielke a condition for joining the Spartakist-Jugend. But such errors are only part of the story—the SpAD also capitulated to social democracy, and in Germany, the economically most robust and now politically aggressive imperialist power, the social-democratic pressures were the greatest. Clemens gave a partial and somewhat skewed picture of the party. Moreover, she falsely argued that at the height of the 1989-90 struggle in the DDR, “the SpAD intervened with the slogan: ‘For the Unity of the SED’.” Yet this was never the line of the SpAD and ICL, public or internal.

“Unity of the SED”: While the new secretary of the International Secretariat of the ICL, Parks, has vociferously accused Norden of capitulation to Stalinism over the KPF work—where there was no such capitulation—it was Parks who in late January 1990 first raised the slogan of “Unity of the SED,” along with Brosius, claiming (wrongly) that this was suggested by comrade Robertson. That slogan directly transmitted pressures from dissident SEDers the SpAD was in contact with in Rostock and Schwerin, who were panicked at the sellout of the DDR by Gorbachev and Modrow and sought to resist by closing ranks of the Stalinist “party.” This line, which really did conciliate and capitulate to Stalinism, was fought—by Norden, among others—and defeated as soon as the I.S. heard of it. These facts can be verified by any member of the ICL by consulting the International Internal Bulletin No. 21 (“Documents and Discussion on the Collapse of Stalinism,” Part II), pp. 94-99 and 104-109. As Norden wrote at the time:

“Take the proposal for the slogan ‘unity of the SED.’ It wasn’t just Parks getting it wrong, since various comrades argued for it. Partly, I’m sure, it was a product of exhaustion and not being able to think straight. But it also has to be in part a reflection of the widespread sense of panic over the stepped-up imperialist campaign to swallow the DDR. We’re not big enough, so people look around for a force that could stop it, and they come up with the SED. Except the SED, the political mouthpiece of the crumbling Stalinist bureaucracy, can’t stop the imperialists—that’s precisely why this crisis is coming to a head. But the working class can, and in fact actions by the most conscious sections could have a tremendous impact.”

This is not some minor question. The professional anti-Spartacists of the Bolshevik Tendency, in their pamphlet on the ICL in Germany in 1989-90, have a whole section falsely claiming that “Unity of the SED” was the actual policy of the SpAD, just as Clemens said five years later. In fact, at Norden’s January 1995 Humboldt University forum, BTers argued this and were refuted from the podium. In essence this is the same as the line put forward by the revisionist Michel Pablo on Hungary in 1956—the line of self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy—only here in a situation where the bureaucracy was handing over the country to imperialism! The line of “Unity of the SED” in the DDR in 1989-90 inevitably recalls the Zinoviev/Kamenev line of unity with the Mensheviks in Russia in 1917, that is with the counterrevolution in “socialist” garb. And now the same people who conceived this truly Stalinoid, truly liquidationist line, at the height of the battle for the DDR, cynically accuse Norden of capitulating to Stalinism!

“Stalinophilia”? When comrade Doris Kohn objected in a January 1995 document that “‘Stalinophilia,’ as the BT always accuses us of, is not the problem of the SpAD,” Clemens went ballistic, denouncing the vile “insinuation” that she was suggesting the section was Stalinophilic; she claimed she was being charged with “Stalinophobia,” and that this was part of a witchhunt against her. No one ever said she or her supporters were Stalinophobic: she invented this charge.^*** But a year later, the IEC passed a resolution claiming that there was a witchhunt against her and her co-thinkers for objecting to the SpAD’s “Stalinophilic collapse”! In response to Clemens’ furious telephone campaign to line up the international leadership behind the claim that Norden and Stamberg had launched a witchhunt against comrade Clemens and her document at the January 1995 SpAD Central Committee meeting, we asked that the discussion at that meeting be transcribed and translated. The charges were repeated over and over for almost a year, but when the transcriptions were finally completed in January 1996, all references to the SpAD CC meeting were suddenly dropped—everyone could read with their own eyes that there was no onslaught against Clemens or her document but a comradely discussion with partially differing views.

1993 Berlin hostel defense: In actuality, the initial reaction in the German section to Clemens’ paper was rather muted. Far from there being a witchhunt against it, the biggest complaint voiced in the I.S. at the time was that there were hardly any responses to it. Many comrades weren’t quite sure what point Clemens was trying to make. However, when she came back with another document, titled “For Round 2,” that sneered at the 1993 defense of an immigrant workers hostel in Berlin as a “mountain bringing forth a mouse,” a “Potemkin village” action and an example of “fake mass work,” this produced a justified outburst of opposition from much of the SpAD leadership. Documents against this were written by Petersen, Hecht and others. At an 11 April 1995 I.S. meeting, in his report on Germany, Norden said of Clemens’ new document: “Behind that, if you take that seriously and develop that out, is the logic of a different program a program for, at best, a De Leonist and sterile propaganda sect.” At the time, he was not the only one in the international leadership to hold this view. During the discussion at that I.S. meeting, George Foster said: “The heat on the hostel stuff is completely understandable. The key point there is not so much exemplary actions, but if we’re to be a real fighting propaganda group you cannot stand aside in a situation in which there are fascists running amok and you’re sort of duty bound to do something—or you do become a De Leonist.”

But that was then. Now the Workers Vanguard article on our expulsion calls this “an entirely tokenistic defense of an immigrant hostel in Berlin in which no damage was done to the fascists and out of which not one youth was recruited.” It was hardly “tokenistic”—the hostel defenders were fired on by fascists, the action received a number of labor endorsements and brought out well over 100 youth and leftists who spent the night of the 60th anniversary of Hitler’s takeover of power doing shifts on the perimeter of this large building complex and talking about Trotskyist politics inside during their rest periods. It is also false that no youth were recruited out of it; several who later joined the Spartakist Jugend participated in the hostel defense. This was a militarily competent action which provided a concrete example pointing to the kind of worker/immigrant defense the SpAD has called for in its propaganda. It grew out of months of work among the immigrants there, and had a big impact at the time among leftist youth, from Autonomen to those in the PDS milieu. And we would repeat today that behind the ICL’s retrospective dismissal of this action is indeed “the logic of a different program a program for, at best, a De Leonist and sterile propaganda sect.” (See accompanying text on the 1993 hostel defense, page 43 [see From a Drift Toward Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle].)

Stalin as commander in chief: The next clash in the Germany fight was over an article in Spartakist No. 117 which supporters of Clemens claimed glorified Stalin as commander in chief of the Red Army. This was a classic example of a quote taken out of context in order to distort it. The article was about the anti-communist witchhunt by the PDS leadership of Gysi and Bisky in response to demands by the Social Democrats (SPD) to purge the Communist Platform (KPF); the SPD, in turn, was responding to the demands by Kohl’s Christian Democrats that the SPD break all contact with the PDS for harboring “Communists.” At the PDS conference a resolution was put forward saying that support for “Stalinist views” (defined as “vanguardist and centralist conceptions of socialism and the party”) were just as incompatible with party membership as support for “nationalist, chauvinist, racist, anti-Semitic views.” The KPF voted for this witchhunting motion. Spartakist noted:

“This equation of anti-Semitism and ‘Stalinism’ exactly 50 years after the Red Army (with Stalin as commander in chief) liberated Auschwitz, chimes in scandalously with the totalitarianism ‘theory,’ with which the German bourgeoisie trivializes the crimes of the Nazis.”

In no way does this glorify Stalin—it cited a historical fact that powerfully undercuts the obscene campaign, then running full-blast, by the bourgeois and social-democratic (SPD and PDS) witchhunters to relativize Nazi genocide under the sign “Hitler = Stalin.” Moreover, the same issue of Spartakist contained the text of Norden’s speech at Humboldt University, which spoke of “Stalin’s sabotage” of the Soviet Army, “his beheading of the general staff under Marshal Tukhachevsky, his criminal trust in his pact with Hitler Germany,” despite warnings from the heroic Soviet spies Richard Sorge and Leopold Trepper, and said that “this illusion almost led to the victory of Nazi Germany over the Soviet Union.” So the charge of glorifying Stalin, now embraced by the ICL leadership, is a fabrication.

This question is dealt with extensively in part 2 of Norden’s document, “For a Trotskyist Fighting Propaganda Group in Germany” (3 July 1995), placing it in the context of the voluminous “anti-Stalinist” propaganda being churned out by the media of the Fourth Reich on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz; and in a document by Bert Matthes, “On the Question of Stalinism, Anti-Semitism, PDS” (14 March 1995). We will be publishing these and other documents of the Germany fight that the ICL leadership would now like to forget.

Communist Platform: The WV 648 article on our expulsions claims that “Norden argued for a ‘regroupment’ perspective toward the Communist Platform.” Nelson claimed that Norden talked of winning a “big piece” of the KPF in a “non-Trotskyist regroupment with homeless Stalinists.” In fact, in an 8 March 1995 letter to the SpAD, Norden wrote of the possibility of a “revolutionary regroupment” not with the Communist Platform, but by winning “a small layer, out of the KPF” through hammering away at “the fundamental question of Stalinism vs. Leninism/Trotskyism.” The previous October, while insisting the main priority must remain youth work, he had raised to the German leadership a proposal for some limited work directed at the KPF. In a memo, “Observations on the Kommunistische Plattform of the PDS” (10 December 1994), Norden argued:

“I think the SpAD should be paying attention to the Kommunistische Plattform in the PDS. Not necessarily for prospects of recruitment directly out of its ranks (two-thirds of KommPlatt members are reportedly over 50)—although we could get some, especially if the party leadership tries a purge. Rather, there are likely to be potential recruits around it, and in any case, given the prominence of attacks on the Plattform in redbaiting the PDS, it will be a reference point for revolutionary-minded youth.”

It should be noted that the KPF is not simply a homogeneous bunch of “geriatric remnants of the former East German Stalinist regime,” as WV claims. The Communist Platform had perhaps a couple thousand members (it claimed 5,000), and at that time was drawing radical-minded youth around it precisely because it was the object of an anti-communist witchhunt. Its best-known spokesman was 25-year-old Sahra Wagenknecht, whose excuse when confronted with the KPF’s line of selling out the DDR in 1989-90 was that she was still in secondary school at the time. KPF supporters were active in the PDS-linked youth group at Humboldt University where we had a fraction and contacts; and we had several active youth contacts around the KPF in Halle. The KommPlatt also had a layer of “thirty-something” leftist intellectuals from around the dissident “Les Lenin” (Read Lenin) group centered at Humboldt, formed in the late ’80s, which had contact with Mandel’s United Secretariat and whose members were reading Trotsky before the Wall fell.

Contrary to Nelson’s arguments and the line of the WV article, this was a grouping that any serious Trotskyist tendency would seek to intersect and win people from, particularly at the height of an anti-communist witchhunt against them that had thrown the KPF into turmoil. In the course of its work, the SpAD published a sharp and rich polemic, “Communist Platform: Red Fig Leaf of the PDS” (Spartakist No. 116, January-February 1995) and made several very good interventions in state and national meetings of the KPF. Norden gave a speech at Humboldt University in January 1995 on the collapse of Stalinist rule in the DDR and East Europe, and a debate was held between Fred Petersen for the SpAD and former Platform leader Eberhard Czichon on the 50th anniversary of the Red Army’s victory over the Nazi regime, centered on Stalinism vs. Trotskyism and the popular-front “anti-Hitler coalition.” This all had considerable impact on the KPF and the PDS. Two powerful resignation statements by Communist Platform cadres (Dorte and Michel) in solidarity with the SpAD and ICL were written, read to KPF meetings and circulated. Dorte, who was recruited to the party in the course of the KPF intervention, wrote last July:

“I want to defend our recent successful interventions into the PDS/KPF milieu, and I’m glad of having had a small part in this ORO-work. Also it was during these interventions that I learned a lot more about the nature of ex-Stalinists (even in the KPF there are hardly any hard Stalinists…). After all, our intervention in this milieu, beginning with the KPF conference and the PDS party congress, laid the basis for our broad mobilization for the Mumia campaign, and we won many supporters, also prominent ones, from the PDS. Our PDS/KPF work, Mumia campaign and youth recruitment—these things are firmly integrated into one another and cannot be taken apart.”

However, as part of the factional campaign against Norden, this excellent Trotskyist intervention has been declared deviant. We hold that, on the contrary, this was some of the best work the SpAD has done.

A Social-Democratic Bulge: The January IEC memorandum claims that Norden “stigmatized” a layer of older, mainly ex-TLD comrades and tried to drive them out of the party. False. Nelson elaborated on this to claim Norden was responsible for the removal of a number of ex-TLDers from the SpAD central committee. False again. Norden did say that there was “a social-democratic bulge in the organization that does not want to confront hardships engendered by counterrevolution.” This was a generalization of fights in the SpAD over a period of several years. And this was not some new invention by him but was codified at the 1992 SpAD conference (and reprinted in the ICL document—see Spartacist [English edition] Nos. 47-48, Winter 1992-93, p. 25). Referring to “the leadership’s abusive neglect of Halle,” the conference document said: “There is a social-democratic bulge in the organization that does not want to directly confront hardships engendered by counterrevolution which has destroyed the livelihood of millions.” A motion passed at that conference stated: “The struggle to build Halle up as a strong regional center” was “sabotaged by the outgoing CC…. This means not only passive resistance but an explicitly social-democratic adaptation in our party. It plays into the hands of the social democracy, which pursues the splitting of the working class.” The motion noted that “all former TLD members in the CC but Weiß, who was seen as a ‘troublemaking element’ in the CC, were taken out of the cadre list for reinforcing Halle.”

The WV 648 article accuses Norden of waging a “vicious witchhunt denouncing any comrades perceived as an obstacle to his orientation as a ‘comfortable social-democratic’ layer opposed to ‘youth recruitment’!” What Norden actually said, in a report to the I.S. of 11 April 1995, was:

“There’s a layer of older comrades in the party, mainly coming from the TLD, who have rather comfortable lives and don’t want to see that threatened by the activities of the organization. That was behind the attempt to liquidate the Halle local, because we initially could not get any of the West German comrades to move there to strengthen a weak and endangered local…. There are real social pressures here, and I think this is part of the context in which the complaints about softness on Stalinism in the SpAD comes.”

In part II of his document, “For a Trotskyist Fighting Propaganda Group in Germany,” Norden elaborated:

“To state that there is a layer of older, mainly ex-TLD comrades from among whom there has repeatedly been resistance to struggle—from the 1990 Bundestag election campaign to the 1991 Halle anti-fascist mobilization to the 1992 fight to save Halle to the 1993 underground opposition to the hostel defense and Menshevik mutiny in Hamburg^**** to the endless obstacles placed in the way of youth recruitment in 1994—is to describe a social reality in the party.”

In a conversation before the 20 July 1995 I.S. meeting, Nelson conceded that there was a similar layer in the Bay Area, but in the interests of his witchhunt thesis, he argued that to mention this in party discussion was to “stigmatize” those comrades. On the contrary, because there was a serious problem that was faced early on in Germany and openly fought, things improved in the SpAD in 1993-94 and a leadership began to consolidate that was not oriented to abstention. Youth recruitment began in earnest, and Spartakist-Jugend groups were formed in Berlin and Hamburg. The fact is that there was no stigmatizing of anyone in the SpAD for being older, ex-TLD comrades. The SpAD’s Political Bureau and the CC always consisted mostly of former Western comrades. Far from seeking to purge ex-TLDers, it was Norden who objected (in a 28 June 1993 letter to the SpAD CC) when several long-time TLDers were knocked off the Central Committee at the SpAD conference.

As for Nelson’s claim that Norden tried to drive these comrades out of the organization, this is another lie. In fact, he said the opposite. At the 11 April 1995 I.S. meeting, Norden cited Trotsky on how to deal with “vague, semi-centrist moods,” and concluded: “I think the way to deal with that is to have the discussion, deal with the points that have been raised, but also to integrate them into the work of the party.”

The Class, the Party and the Leadership: The whole indictment against the work in Germany and Norden’s role in leading it is a string of falsehoods made up out of the whole cloth. But the central charge contained in the IEC memo, and now elaborated in the WV article, is that, in the January 1995 speech at Humboldt University, “While invoking the program of Trotskyism, Norden presented a liquidationist view which denied the ICL’s role as the conscious revolutionary vanguard” (WV’s emphasis). This is the core of the characterization of Pabloism now being thrown against us. And what is the “proof” of this absurd characterization? That Norden said that in Germany in 1989-90 “the key element was missing, the revolutionary leadership.” Nelson even claimed that Norden insisted that “we were not the revolutionary leadership, and according to him could not have been” (Nelson’s emphasis). This is all a cynical invention. Here is the passage in Norden’s document “A Reply on the German Question” (17 November 1995) that Nelson utterly distorted:

“But Nelson claims that by saying the revolutionary leadership was missing, I was somehow denying that we were ‘the proletarian, internationalist and revolutionary formation there at the time.’ This is false to the core, and so downright grotesque that it makes one’s jaw drop in disbelief. Just before the passage [in the Humboldt speech] Clemens disparages, is where I called for an ‘internationalist workers party’ as ‘the goal to which we Spartakists devoted ourselves then, as we do today.’ Some Pabloism! I was making the point that we were fighting to build the revolutionary leadership, but that time was too short to overcome the damage to proletarian consciousness that decades of Stalinism had wrought. We were not yet the leadership of the class, to which we aspired and for which we fought.”

In the Humboldt speech, Norden stated: “What was lacking was above all the genuinely communist leadership, which could have turned the real existing possibilities of a socialist development into reality.” A “liquidation” of the ICL’s role as the conscious revolutionary vanguard? Not at all. This passage referred to “the voices for socialist-minded opposition and reform” in the DDR at the time. It was in a section on “‘Critical’ Socialist Currents in the DDR” polemicizing against the Mandelites, the United Left, Markus Wolf, the WF Platform and Communist Platform of the PDS, pointing out that “all of these…are more or less explicit social-democratic” currents. Norden’s statement that “precisely the key element was missing, the revolutionary leadership” was not Pabloism but the core of Trotskyism. This is the heart of the Transitional Program, which declares: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.” The claim that Norden conciliated Stalinism and liquidated the role of the ICL and the program of Trotskyism in Germany is a monstrous lie.

The ICL’s intervention in the DDR in 1989-90 was the focus of the Humboldt speech, which was titled, “Who Defended the DDR, Who Fought Against Capitalist Reunification: The Spartakists on the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe.” Norden stated at the outset that the purpose was to talk “about the struggle we of the ICL carried out then, first for a proletarian political revolution in the DDR, then, and really from the beginning, against the imperialist conquest and destruction of the workers state.” Conciliating Stalinism? Hardly. The entire last third of the speech was devoted to the question of Trotskyism vs. Stalinism in relation to counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc. This was not just abstract. Norden stressed that “practically the entire left, from the SED/PDS through its Communist Platform to smaller groups like the KPD, Die Nelken and the Vereinigte Linke in practice accepted reunification; at most they haggled over the price for selling out.” In particular, Norden said, the SED “handed over the DDR” and “made a present of the DDR to the class enemy.” And he went after the KPF for its line that it was “unrealistic to defend the existence” of the DDR, its call for a coalition government with the SPD and talk of a “reunification process” with “new ecological, feminist and humanist qualities.” The SPD was the “Trojan horse of counterrevolution,” we Spartakists had said, and the KPF wanted to be the “tail on the Trojan horse.”

It is a grotesque distortion to claim that this speech “denied the ICL’s role as the conscious revolutionary vanguard” (WV 648). The ICL strained its resources to the hilt to fight for proletarian political revolution against the bankrupt Stalinist regime in the DDR and to oppose capitalist counterrevolution in 1989-90. In this it was unique among tendencies claiming to be socialist or communist. Far from belittling this intervention, in which he played a leading role and of which we are proud, as all ICL members should be, Norden highlighted this intervention. Moreover, as all ICL cadres know, in debates leading up to and at the ICL’s second international conference, he led a fight against proposed amendments to the conference document that exaggerated the mistakes made in that intervention. Norden did, indeed, mention in the Humboldt speech those self-criticisms the ICL had agreed upon and which are explained in the 1992 conference document (printed in Spartacist). This is hardly “conciliating Stalinism,” but rather following the rules of Trotsky’s Fourth International to “speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be.”

Because the ICL was present and fought to the best of its abilities in 1989-90, does that resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership? What about in France in December 1995—the ICL was present and active there as well. The revolutionary vanguard must become the revolutionary leadership of the class by defeating the present misleaders in struggle. You can’t simply proclaim this and be done with it. The Spartacist tendency has always fought against this methodology, for example at the 1966 London conference, opposing Gerry Healy’s insistence that his International Committee was the Fourth International, and stressing that the task was to reforge the FI by combating Pabloism, including in particular through revolutionary regroupment, a process of “splits and fusions.” But now to state this fundamental fact of the absence of a revolutionary leadership is labeled “liquidationism.” On the contrary, it is to state clearly the tasks of the Trotskyists.

At the January IEC meeting, comrade Robertson read some notes on this hotly debated question:

“Re: ‘Were we the political leadership in Germany?’ We shouldn’t pose the question in a metaphysical or theological manner but in the concrete. We weren’t the leadership in the DDR but we had the potential to become it. And we were clearly a factor: the SED saw the sales of our APK [Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz] among particularly the factory councils, the NVA and the Red Army soldiers and they saw Treptow, that is, they saw and even exaggerated the influence we had in the moves we were making and sensed that we were a counterweight to their own disintegration, which was a large factor in them going for a deal with the West.”

This is fully in accord with the Humboldt speech and everything Norden has written since. No doubt these remarks were intended to clean up the condemnation of Norden’s role in Germany. It was Robertson, after all, who proposed removing Norden from full IEC membership. But it was a sign that the discussion had moved beyond rational Marxist discourse that even these sensible observations were simply brushed aside in the stampede to convict Norden of denying that the ICL was the revolutionary leadership in Germany in 1989-90.

Consider this: if it is Pabloism for Norden to say that the revolutionary leadership was missing in Germany in 1989-90, what are we to make of this statement by Leon Trotsky 50 years earlier summing up the defeat in Spain?

“…the insurrectionary proletariat was strong enough to have conquered power. Had it possessed a revolutionary leadership and not a treacherous leadership, it would have purged the state apparatus of all the Azañas, instituted the power of the soviets, given the land to the peasants, the mills and factories to the workers—and the Spanish revolution would have become socialist and unconquerable.

“But because there was no revolutionary party in Spain, and because there was a multitude of reactionaries imagining themselves as Socialists and Anarchists, they succeeded under the label of the Popular Front in strangling the socialist revolution and assuring Franco’s victory.”

There was a Trotskyist group in Spain, numbering as many as we had German speakers in Berlin in 1989-90. They had an impact during the Barcelona May Days workers uprising of 1937. Does this mean that when Trotsky wrote that there was no revolutionary party, no revolutionary leadership, he was denying that the Fourth International was the conscious revolutionary vanguard? Of course not! But that was Trotsky, and that was then. This is now, and the ICL has now adopted a different viewpoint.

As comrade Dorte stated in her 28 July 1995 document:

“Because Norden in his speech at the Humboldt university said that the revolutionary leadership was missing during the political revolution in 1989, but that we were fighting to build one, he is now accused of false modesty and of not centering around the party. Well, Norden was answering to one of the most common lies spread around by the PDS/ComPlatt all the time: that it was useless to fight, because the workers didn’t want to fight, so the proletariat was guilty of the counterrevolution. This criminal accusation Norden answered by counterposing the Trotskyist position that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of communist leadership. Knocking the ex-Stalinists on their own failure of even defending their own bureaucratic regime is hitting them at one of their sore points….

“Repeatedly there was the accusation that Norden was apologizing (to the Stalinists) that we came out too late during the political revolution. However, I cannot see what is wrong about stating in a public forum a fact which can be read in our own official propaganda. Lenin said, ‘The one who is afraid of admitting an error, because this might be utilized by the opponent, is no communist’.”

Under the tremendous pressure to denounce Norden in the last several months, Dorte has since renounced the views she stated here.

This touches on another important aspect of the recent fights—both in Germany and Mexico, several leaders of the sections initially opposed the false attacks coming from leaders of the I.S. on the grounds that they were simply wrong. Comrade Jäger objected to letters from Nelson and Seymour, saying in a 19 May 1995 response to the latter that Nelson’s “charge of a ‘Stalinist-style witchhunt’ was false, unfounded and destructive. Comrades like you and Al, with your immense authority in the organization, could do a little more research before firing off missives.” For this he was accused of “narrow-minded national parochialism,” opposition to Leninist internationalism and with a “logical implication” of a “break from democratic centralism.”

Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Max Schütz, who is wont to confess early and often, wrote a document (14 May 1995) saying “I can rightly be accused of being a force behind the witchhunt.” In July, Fred Petersen wrote letters to the I.S. and to comrade Robertson, criticizing the I.S. for supporting “the cliquist campaign of initially Clemens and Schütz, later joined by others, that there is going on a ‘witchhunt in the SpAD’ against them,” and for the destructive role the I.S. was playing in Germany. He refuted in detail, with quotations, the charges that Spartakist had glorified Stalin or that Norden had ignored the key question of consciousness or the ICL’s fight for political revolution in the DDR (the initial charges against his Humboldt speech, later dropped). Nelson (in his speech to the 20 July 1995 I.S. meeting) denounced Petersen’s letters as “an unmistakable threat of a break with the International.” Under a barrage of accusations of “anti-internationalism,” Jäger and Petersen repudiated their letters.

It should be pointed out that the recent 142-page ICL International Bulletin on “Norden’s ‘Group’” includes Petersen’s recantation statement but not his earlier documents, and also none of the several documents by SpAD members disagreeing with the “general line” being laid down. It is also worth noting that the method of intimidating leaders of national sections into disavowing their views by accusing them of anti-internationalism and of threatening to break with the international was repeated in Mexico. Over Brazil, Norden was accused of trying to engineer a split of LM with the ICL. The fact is, no such threats were ever made—not in Germany, not in Mexico, not over Brazil, not anywhere. But as a means of browbeating comrades whose deepest desire is to be internationalists into recanting, this proved to be a very effective device.

When we refused to bow before this onslaught and continued to refute the endless false allegations, we were charged with claiming “infallibility” and running a “100 percent regime.” This, too, is false. In his document, “A Reply on Germany” (17 November 1995), Norden stated that there were a couple of misformulations in the Humboldt speech, notably the statement that “a proletarian political revolution was necessary, which no one among the SED tops, nor in the critical currents among the cadres, could even conceive of at the time.” Nelson (and the WV 648 article) seized on this sloppy formulation to charge that Norden was looking to the Stalinist bureaucracy to lead the struggle. Yet the speech emphatically stated, “That nothing could be expected from the Stalinist SED leadership was clear from the outset.” What Nelson, Parks and other ICL leaders objected to in the Humboldt speech was that it didn’t simply denounce the sellouts—though it did that as well, very strongly—but it also sought to give a Trotskyist explanation of what had happened in the destruction of the DDR. This was and remains an urgently necessary task, for there are significant numbers of would-be revolutionary youth in Germany who are deeply confused about Stalinism and the DDR.

The Humboldt speech was a good exposition of Trotskyism vs. Stalinism and the fight of the ICL against counterrevolution in the DDR and the rest of the Soviet bloc, which had a considerable impact on the quite varied audience. Likewise, the intervention directed at the Communist Platform effectively exposed the bankruptcy of the KPF and sought to win youth and cadre from this milieu. The WV hatchet job tries to make hay out of Norden’s comment, in his December 1994 “Observations” on the Communist Platform, about KPF members’ “grudging respect” for the SpAD, because they know well that the ICL stood for defense of the DDR, whereas they betrayed it. But if this is so deviant, what is one to make of the sentence in the 1992 ICL conference document that says of France in the 1980s: “Our principled stand earned us grudging respect at the time as the ‘Soviet-defensist Trotskyists,’ particularly among broader layers of Communist Party members and working-class militants who had never before encountered authentic Trotskyism”?

One significant error was made: a 2 April 1995 meeting of the SpAD central committee passed a motion declaring that the documents by two comrades who had argued that the article in Spartakist 117 glorified Stalin “ignore this overall context of our polemic against the PDS and Communist Platform, concentrate mainly on the crimes of Stalinism and thus express a capitulationist stance toward the witchhunt and the popular-frontist politics of our opponents.” This was and is a politically accurate characterization. However, as comrade Robertson later pointed out, by voting on a definitive characterization prior to a conference, this had the effect of preempting the discussion process, and thus “violating the basic substrate of democratic-centralist functioning,” as a motion adopted by the I.S. at its July 1995 meeting said. Norden stated, already before that meeting, that this had been an error, for which he shared the responsibility. But that is a long way from a “witchhunt”—and it is nothing compared to the months of demonization directed against us on the most cynical, trumped-up charges of “nearly destroying” one section after another, ultimately leading to our bureaucratic expulsion on yet another pretext. Moreover, we reaffirm that the charge (now formally adopted by the SpAD and the IEC) that the Spartakist article glorified Stalin represents a capitulation to the social-democratic anti-communist witchhunt in the Fourth Reich.

And we would add: if the 2 April 1995 SpAD CC motion, coming after more than a month of discussion, with a number of documents written on both sides, was preemptive, what is one to say of the 14 April 1996 motions in Mexico, after barely a week of discussion, during which the focus shifted abruptly from Brazil to the GEM, with the most serious charges of supposed “anti-internationalism” first raised in the meeting itself, thus constituting a one-day discussion; a discussion which ousted two comrades from the GEM leadership and ordered them to leave the country, with the former leader (Negrete) immediately placed on involuntary leave so that he couldn’t talk to members who were unsure about the whole business? The April 1996 GEM motions, confirmed by the I.S. three days later, were a wholesale assault on Leninist democratic centralism.

…Leading to Revisionist Conclusions

In fact, over the course of the recent fights, whether for simple factional animus or reflecting a deeper shift in the party, the ICL has now not only revised its own Leninist organizational norms and parts of its recent history, it has begun to adopt revisionist positions at the formal programmatic level. Most significantly, in the Germany dispute, the ICL has rejected important aspects of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism. Nelson, in his 16 January 1996 document on “Norden’s Role in Germany,” states: “What Norden can’t seem to grasp (because his centrist impulses won’t let him) was that the SED in 1989-90 was leading the counterrevolution” (Nelson’s emphasis). Actually, it is basic Trotskyism and the real development of events that stand in the way of “grasping” this revisionist contraband. Nelson is here portraying the Stalinist bureaucracy as spearheading the destruction of the proletarian property forms on which it was an excrescence. In reality, this is the line that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through.” The Spartacist tendency has always fought this kind of equation between the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and that of direct representatives of the capitalist class. It is false, and deeply anti-Trotskyist.

In the first place, it is not what happened. Did Gorbachev “lead the counterrevolution” in the Soviet Union? Or perhaps the Stalinist “conservatives” around Ligachev spearheaded the establishment of capitalist rule? No, as the ICL always insisted, it was led by the open counterrevolutionary forces grouped around Yeltsin. The ICL rightly raised the call: “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin/Bush Counterrevolution!” Yeltsin represented a sector of the bureaucracy which had broken from its previous ties to the collectivized economy and made itself the direct instrument of the imperialists. In doing so, they ceased to be Stalinists. It is true that Gorbachev’s perestroika “reforms” led to the shattering of the bureaucratically planned economy, and that Gorbachev, Ligachev and all the other sectors of the bureaucracy eventually embraced a program of “controlled” introduction of a capitalist “market economy” within a “Soviet” state. But they were overwhelmed as “the imperialist bourgeoisie grasped this long awaited opportunity to destroy the governing apparatus of the Soviet Union and install a pliant capitalist-restorationist regime in Moscow,” as the document of the second international conference of the ICL put it. In that document you will read of the “collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy,” of the “collapse of Stalinism,” of the “Terminal Disintegration of the Stalinist bureaucracy,” but never of the Stalinist bureaucracy leading the counterrevolution—because it didn’t.

This was the same throughout East Europe. Did Jaruzelski and the Communist Party lead the counterrevolution in Poland, or was it Walesa and the open pro-capitalist forces of Solidarność? To ask the question is to answer it, at least for authentic Trotskyists. (There are, of course, a host of pseudo-Trotskyists who, in order to alibi their support to Solidarność, claim Jaruzelski led the counterrevolution, but the ICL has fought against that pro-imperialist line for more than a decade and a half.) The Stalinist bureaucracies, a parasitic intermediate layer, undercut the defense of the workers states by their treacherous policy of conciliating imperialism and politically suppressing the workers, and thus prepared the way for counterrevolution. In this way the Stalinists play a counterrevolutionary role, even more so in their international policies. But the actual overthrow of the bureaucratically deformed workers states and installation of capitalist rule was led not by the bureaucracies but by the direct agents of capitalism.

In Germany, it was not Gysi/Modrow and the SED-PDS who led the counterrevolution but Kohl and the other representatives of German imperialism. Because Germany was one nation, though divided on a class basis into two states, West German forces from the outside—both Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (SPD)—played a much greater role in spearheading capitalist counterrevolution through reunification than was the case elsewhere in East Europe. We said at the time that the SPD was the “Trojan horse of counterrevolution,” not the SED. The SED capitulated to and went along with capitalist reunification; the communiqué from the Moscow meeting of Gorbachev and Modrow in late January 1990 accepted the destruction of the DDR; and the Stalinists clamped down hard on the working class, dissolving the Betriebskampfgruppen (factory fighting groups) and NVA (National People’s Army) units that had established soldiers councils (in good part as a result of the Spartakist calls to form workers and soldiers councils). All that was said in the ICL conference document, and in Norden’s speech at Humboldt University. What was not said was that the SED “led the counterrevolution,” because that didn’t happen.

It is not just empirical. For the Stalinist bureaucracy to head up the counterrevolution would imply a different theoretical understanding of that contradictory and brittle social formation. The fact that the bureaucracy was not irrevocably committed to defense of the workers state and its economy, from which it obtained its privileges, that large sectors of it would go over to the capitalists, was foreseen by Trotsky and corresponds to his analysis of this parasitic caste. But the line that the bureaucracy as a whole could lead the counterrevolution, without fracturing, would mean that the class nature of this social formation was different from that analyzed by Trotsky, who always emphasized the dual nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Thus, he wrote in his essay “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937):

“The struggle for domination, considered on a historical scale, is not between the proletariat and the bureaucracy, but between the proletariat and the world bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy is only the transmitting mechanism in this struggle. The struggle is not concluded. In spite of all the efforts on the part of the Moscow clique to demonstrate its conservative reliability (the counterrevolutionary politics of Stalin in Spain!), world imperialism does not trust Stalin, does not spare him the most humiliating flicks and is ready at the first favorable opportunity to overthrow him…. For the bourgeoisie—fascist as well as democratic—isolated counterrevolutionary exploits of Stalin do not suffice; it needs a complete counterrevolution in the relations of property and the opening of the Russian market.”

Trotsky stated in the Transitional Program that “all shades of political thought are to be found among the bureaucracy: from genuine Bolshevism (Ignace Reiss) to complete fascism (F. Butenko).” But Nelson rejects this analysis today. In fact, right before he declares that the SED “was leading the counterrevolution,” he objects to Norden’s statement that:

“At the same time, it is our Trotskyist understanding of the Stalinist bureaucracy that it is a contradictory caste, which will fracture and split under the impact of revolutionary class struggle, and one can anticipate the possibility [of] sections of it, the size of which cannot be predicted in advance, coming over to the workers side in a political revolution.”

Seymour, as well, argues that it is impossible today for a section of the bureaucracy to come over to the workers in a political revolution.

You will look in vain in ICL materials on Germany during 1989-90, or in the 1992 ICL international conference document for the claim that the SED “led the counterrevolution.” You will, however, find it in the publications of the Stalinophobic BT, who in 1989-90 were screaming at Spartakist meetings that DDR prime minister and SED leader Modrow was the main enemy. This was also the line of the Workers League of David North, who since the mid-1980s claimed that Gorbachev and the Stalinists were leading the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. In Latin America, it is the line of Jorge Altamira, from whose tendency the LM/LQB broke in 1994. Ultimately, this is a “Third Camp” line.

In line with Nelson’s anti-Trotskyist argument, the WV 648 article on our expulsion pretends that Norden’s description in the Humboldt speech of the SED tops as “paralyzed” contradicts them taking an active role to suppress workers action or being for capitalist restoration. Not at all. The Stalinist tops were paralyzed because they saw no way to maintain the deformed workers states they fed off of within the framework of “socialism in one country”; hence they went over to counterrevolution, seeking to bargain for the best terms for themselves—setting up dummy companies, refounding the Stalinist SED as the social-democratic PDS, and so on. Meanwhile they kept the lid firmly clamped on the working class. Trotsky wrote an essay which is relevant to this matter, under the title “‘Progressive Paralysis’: The Second International on the Eve of the New War” (July 1939). Commenting on an article by the Menshevik leader Dan, he noted that “this progressive paralysis [of the Social Democracy] started in August 1914 and has today entered its final stage.” The Second International was paralyzed and incapable of acting as a coherent force in the face of imperialist war, as its key sections actively lined up with their “own” bourgeoisies.

In an analogous manner, the Stalinist bureaucracy was paralyzed in the face of the final counterrevolutionary onslaught and ultimately shattered, with some sections (Yeltsin) openly going over to the capitalist side and others being cast aside (Gorbachev) or rolled over by the imperialists. A perfect example of the paralysis and the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinists was the behavior of the “State Emergency Committee” coup plotters in Moscow in August 1991: they did not attack Yeltsin’s headquarters, they were quick to assure the imperialists of their support for a capitalist “market economy,” and they firmly told the workers to keep out of the streets. This also was the analysis of the role of the SED in the 1992 ICL conference document, which stated:

“The East German deformed workers state, which had been established from the top down and from without, was swallowed by more powerful West German imperialism. Lacking any viable perspective, the bureaucracy simply collapsed.”

This was also a key part of comrade Robertson’s point about the East German Stalinist bureaucracy’s “disintegration, which was a large factor in them going for a deal with the West.”

Bureaucratic Purge to Consolidate the ICL’s New Leadership…

Earlier this year, Al Nelson remarked during the Germany fight that this was the first time that an internal struggle in the ICL had involved the core cadre of the tendency. This is certainly true. It is significant that of the recently expelled comrades, two have 24 years in the Spartacist tendency, a third has 23 years and a fourth 18 years in the organization. We are long-time Spartacist cadres who have devoted our political lives to building the International Communist League as the political continuity of Trotsky’s Fourth International. And we continue that struggle for authentic Trotskyism, despite the bureaucratic purge that removed us from the ICL’s ranks and against the centrist political course on which the leadership has embarked. Contrary to the title of the recent 142-page ICL internal/public document against us, we are not “defectors” from but defenders of Trotskyism against a misleadership whose policies have shown a growing tendency toward abstention from the struggles of the working class, which means emptying the role of the party as an active force in fighting for leadership of those struggles. What this leads to was shown most dramatically by the ICL’s shameful desertion from a key class battle being waged in Brazil.

The WV 648 article tries to draw a parallel between us and the Rad/Hayes faction, which arose in the Canadian section of the ICL in 1994, as examples of “liquidationism” and a “Stalinoid bent.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Y. Rad renounced Trotskyism by calling for political support to Nelson Mandela’s now bourgeois-nationalist ANC in the South African elections and for military support to Russian troops in the UN/imperialist intervention in Yugoslavia. He was a political adventurer, who shortly after leaving the ICL simply discarded all the positions he had stood for and put on a whole new set of political clothes. Moreover, we played a leading role in the fight against Rad’s genuinely Stalinophilic politics. Stamberg wrote a document on “South African Elections—Reply to Leninist-Trotskyist Faction” (25 April 1994). Negrete wrote a document on Rad’s embrace of bourgeois nationalism, “Permanent Revolution vs. Capitulation to Nationalism” (2 May 1994). Norden wrote three major documents in the fight—“The Politics of Ex-Stalinist Despair” (11 May 1994), “For a Bolshevik Workers Party in South Africa” (1 June 1994), and “Straw Men and Red-Brown Herrings” (14 June 1994)—and led the debate against Rad for the party majority at the June 1994 conference. Of course, there is not a mention of all this in the WV article, for that would undercut its lying amalgam between Rad/Hayes and “Norden’s group.”

Also contrasting to what happened with the Rad/Hayes faction, in order to accomplish its bureaucratic purge of internal opposition to the I.S.’ turn to the right, the ICL leadership has repeatedly resorted to lies, staged frame-up trials, introduced new anti-democratic practices and openly violated the statutes of the Spartacist League/U.S. Thus, Norden was removed from full membership in the IEC for opposing the IEC majority’s phony claim of a “Stalinophilic” deviation in Germany; condemned for “permanent factionalism” for writing a document pointing out that the SpAD had no perspectives for external work; removed from the International Secretariat and the Political Bureau of the SL/U.S. and sacked as editor of WV for the “crime” of objecting to passages in an unsent draft letter to the Brazilian LQB on which his views had been solicited! Negrete and Socorro were ousted from the Mexican leadership, and Negrete removed from the IEC for opposing the lie that they had led an “anti-internationalist” regime in the GEM. When we wrote documents contesting the charges against us over Mexico and Brazil, including supposedly “blocking” and “blunting” fights with the LQB/LM—in fact, we had started the discussions with them on the key points in dispute, and wrote some of the major letters and statements by the I.S.—measures were passed to drastically limit the number of pages written by us that would be circulated. “No, we’re not going to circulate your documents,” announced I.S. secretary Parks, making matters perfectly clear.

There was a concerted effort to drive us out of the party, and when pressure didn’t work, more energetic measures were resorted to. Less than 24 hours after the vote to remove Norden from all positions of leadership (claiming he was not fit to be a member of the party), even before polls of the IEC and SL/U.S. CC were completed, a hefty repo squad showed up at our door at 11:22 p.m., giving us “two minutes” notice to turn over keys to party offices, a fax machine and a computer purchased by the party, using as a pretext that Norden copied some materials about the fight, including the motions which were faxed around the world but never given to us. Twelve hours later, our phone bills were demanded, and when we refused to aid this blatant fishing expedition, aimed at seeing what comrades we had spoken with, we were suspended and our expulsion demanded. The catalogue of charges of supposed “indiscipline” concocted against us was totally trumped up, beginning with the lying claim that we denied the party’s monopoly over the members’ public political activity. As we wrote in our “Reply to a Frame-Up ‘Trial’” (7 June):

“These charges are false: neither of us has ever asserted any such thing, and all of our public political activity in 24 years in the party has been in accordance with Leninist democratic centralism. Starting with its initial false premise, the I.S. proceeds to spin out an entire fantasy of groundless assumptions, wild conjectures and filthy smears, culminating in the outrageous slander that ‘the consequences of Norden’s and Stamberg’s indiscipline’—which does not exist—‘could be extremely injurious to the party’s work and its comrades,’ and on that basis of speculation based on supposition based on lies, it calls for our expulsion from the ICL. This is a frame-up.”

In our “Reply,” we detailed some of the previously unheard-of (in the SL) measures used against us, summarizing:

“So following the ‘innovations’ of (a) removing comrades from the IEC for political grounds, and (b) deliberately restricting the circulation of documents from comrades declared by the I.S. to be a ‘group,’ we now have the additional changes to Spartacist norms contained in the charges against us, namely (c) communications between individual members are not protected by confidentiality, and (d) the introduction of ‘committee discipline’ incumbent on the I.S., even concerning communications with a member of the IEC, which is a higher body of the international.”

For public consumption, the I.S. has tried to clean up some of its more outrageous violations of Leninist organizational norms. Thus the official PB statement of our expulsion pretends “comrades…have the right to discuss their views with any member of the party.” Yet the “Call for a Trial” specifically charged that Norden, a member of the I.S., had been “caught in an act of indiscipline” for having spoken with Negrete, a member of the IEC, while an I.S. delegation was in Mexico, ostensibly to discuss differences over Brazil but actually to purge Negrete and Socorro from the GEM leadership. This bogus “indiscipline” was used as the pretext to demand we turn over our phone bills, and then as the basis for speculating that our refusal “can only be reasonably understood as a ploy to shield them from exposure of other acts of freelancing and political activity outside and perhaps against the direction of the I.S….” Yet despite the I.S.’ “hefty suspicions,” we engaged in no political activity with outside forces, and the charge of a possible “outside source of political funding” is pure slander.

A notable aspect of the recent fights and sharp turn to the right by the ICL has been its systematic use of distortion and outright lies, in flagrant contradiction to the proud tradition of the Spartacist tendency. On Brazil, the I.S. under Parks made unsubstantiated claims that the LQB/LM had engaged in “unity negotiations” with the centrist Brazilian LBI and had supposedly formed a bloc with Causa Operária in the union, despite the fact that these two groups were up to their centrist necks in the dirty provocations aimed at destroying the LQB. Parks also uncritically repeated the slander by a police-connected provocateur that an LQB leader had asked for, indeed fought for, a salary as paid adviser to the Municipal Workers Union at ten times the minimum wage. (This was not only slanderous but absurd, as it would have come to more than a quarter of the union’s monthly income!) When we objected to the multiple inaccuracies and unsupported outrageous claims, Parks flew into a rage and proceeded to purge first Negrete and Socorro from Mexico and then Norden from the I.S. In both cases, invented charges were tossed around with abandon, and when one didn’t fly it was simply replaced by a new one. This mud-slinging is an all-too familiar witchhunting technique, based on the assumption that eventually something will stick or the targets will tire of scraping off the slime.

The method of spewing out a barrage of false charges with no regard for the facts was repeatedly used in the Germany fight (for example, claiming that there was a “witchhunt” against “perceived opponents” of an opportunist adaptation to the Communist Platform of the PDS, when in fact there was no adaptation, no opposition and no witchhunt), and again in the lightning strike to remove the leadership of the Mexican section, claiming Negrete was a “sexist bully,” conciliated the LQB and isolated the section from international discussion. A letter by Socorro to Nelson of 30 April refutes these charges in detail. The I.S.’ response was not to answer her arguments but to bring her up on trumped-up disciplinary charges over May Day. Stamberg exposed this methodology in a document (8 May) complaining of blatant disregard for truth by the head of the I.S. delegation to Mexico, Kidder. The latter had charged that Socorro and Negrete were violating the terms of his enforced “leave” by secretly setting up a meeting with two young members; when this was revealed to be false, she simply reasserted her conclusion of secret factionalism without a shred of evidence, saying this was a war. It is a norm of bourgeois historiography that “the first casualty of war is the truth,” and Kidder, Parks and the rest of the “new I.S.” seem to believe their ends justify those means. But such contempt for truth grievously undermines the integrity of a revolutionary party. In response to Stamberg’s demonstration that there had been a conscious disregard for facts, a motion was passed by the I.S. denouncing her document as “despicable and dimwitted” as well as “slanderous.” That is the method in a nutshell: lies covered by vituperation.

This is only one of many examples that could be cited from the recent fights. On such “evidence,” leading comrades were removed from one post after another for their political views; motions were passed in order to stop the official circulation of their documents; party trials were called on phony charges, and we were quickly expelled. What is behind this outbreak of heavy-handed and increasingly bureaucratic measures is in good part a transition in leadership in the Spartacist League and International Communist League. In the last several years, Jim Robertson has gone into semi-retirement, and a new generation of leadership has taken the helm, led by Parks, first as national secretary of the SL/U.S. and then as head of the International Secretariat of the ICL. This transition has been marked by the increasing weight in the ICL leadership of elements lacking any experience whatsoever in the class struggle, with insecure footing in Marxism (inversely proportional to their arrogance), and whose terms of reference are heavily shaped by the stultifying Reagan and post-Reagan years in North America.

Comrade Robertson has often repeated the axiom that no revolutionary party outlives its founding leadership. This was certainly true of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and James P. Cannon’s SWP, where the political degeneration coincided with the withdrawal of the principal leaders due to illness or age. Cannon himself, while not actively leading the fight against the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP, did condone it, and Robertson has unfortunately played a similar role in the fight against us. Early on in the Germany discussion, Jim Robertson wrote (15 May 1995) that the first part of Norden’s document, “For a Trotskyist Fighting Propaganda Group in Germany” read very plausibly and “corresponds to what I do know…. to me the story of the TLD and more particularly of its successor the SpAD had been one of endless flip-flops, i.e., shallow impressionism.” Previously, in the Italy fight during 1994, he had said that he wanted to be associated with Norden’s document, which Parks hated (because it didn’t come out against calling for general strikes). As recently as mid-October 1995, Robertson said in a phone call with Norden that “I can’t see you as an opportunist.” A couple of weeks later, he objected to a proposal by Parks to exclude Norden from the delegation to the German conference (see below). But with Nelson and Parks firmly determined to smash Norden, comrade Robertson eventually joined the onslaught, evidently seeing this as necessary for the consolidation of the new leadership.

We were clearly seen as a big obstacle by this new regime led by Parks. We are accused of waging a “regime fight,” whereas the reality is that for several years a fight has been steadily waged against what was termed the “WV collective” and which was portrayed as an alternative leadership. Thus the WV 648 article is full of charges of “a parallel apparatus centered on Workers Vanguard, to that of the central party administration.” In Robertson’s notes on “Some Major Considerations that the New I.S. Confronts” (9 February 1996), printed in the ICL bulletin on “Norden’s Group,” he writes: “It appears to me that the ICL leadership now passes from the American Political Bureau to the I.S., if you look at the composition and the dynamics. Comrade Foster wryly notes that the actual shift in leadership was from the editorial board of Workers Vanguard to the I.S. with a brief stop at the American PB along the way.” But as Norden’s countermotion to the 28 May PB motion removing him as editor stated:

“The removal of Norden from the Political Bureau and as WV editor is punitive, as was his removal from full membership in the IEC and now his removal from the International Secretariat for his political views. With Norden as editor, Workers Vanguard has expressed the line of the Political Bureau and Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S. and of the leading bodies of the international.”

This motion, of course, is not printed in the ICL bulletin.

The new leadership of the ICL has had a recurring tendency to bureaucratism even before the final act of the recent fights. In November 1995, Parks mooted a proposal to exclude Norden from the international delegation to the upcoming German conference—even though, or rather because he was by then the main target of the attack—on the grounds that he didn’t have the majority position. Parks’ “thought” was discussed informally in the I.S., but not mentioned to Norden, nor was a note shown to him which came in during the 2 November 1995 I.S. meeting with a message from comrade Robertson that this was “wrong and sets a dangerous precedent.… To exclude Norden or to have him go in but not be part of the delegation would be most similar to Zinoviev-ization of the Comintern where higher bodies are put under discipline in lower bodies and could only present a common face.” In a 5 November 1995 letter to Parks, Robertson elaborated on how Parks’ tentative proposal smacked of Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” of the CI, and admonished her to look into this “so that we don’t go on to laboriously attempt to reinvent Stalinism” (our emphasis).

The reference to the early stages of the bureaucratization of the Comintern is stunningly appropriate. Another salient aspect of the “Zinovievization” of the Comintern was the removal of leaderships of any national sections who appealed to Moscow for restraint towards the 1923 Opposition of the 46. As Isaac Deutscher notes, “Others allowed themselves to be browbeaten and apologized for their faux pas” (The Prophet Unarmed, Chapter 2, p. 146). This was already seen in the Germany fight in the ICL, where several leading comrades were intimidated into renouncing their documents or face charges of splitting. Then the same thing occurred in Mexico. When Negrete was accused of “sexist bullying” and “browbeating” Cirrus [Camila] into raising what were supposedly his positions in a letter she wrote to the I.S. correcting some misstatements by Parks on Brazil, comrades Humberto and Arturo wrote documents objecting to the charges. Humberto actually proved that the charges were false by stating what he witnessed of the discussion in question, in which Cirrus [Camila] was the first to raise questions about Parks’ statements about the LQB (see their letters of 6, 7 and 8 April 1996). Again, they were attacked as anti-internationalists, and they capitulated, with Arturo quickly becoming a rabid witchhunter.

How was this accomplished? In the opening statement for the I.S. delegation to the April 14 GEM meeting, Kidder began by reeling off a list of the names and ranks of eight full or alternate members of the IEC who had written documents on the fight, then saying: “You don’t have to take anybody’s word for it in our organization, leadership or not. Yet comrade Negrete would have you believe that these comrades who together represent about 150 to 200 years in our international tendency have it all wrong, don’t really know the facts, are simply engaging in gratuitous insults against him. What kind of organization is Negrete saying that you have joined, comrades?” Beginning with a naked argument by authority, Kidder proceeded to pose the question as a loyalty oath. Even then, several of the youth abstained in the final vote, unable to swallow the charge of nationalism about the leadership of a section of the ICL that had recruited them to proletarian internationalism.

In the aftermath of the April 14 vote ousting Negrete and Socorro from the GEM leadership there was a rapid escalation of bureaucratic administrative measures accompanied by disgusting personal insults and vilification. Negrete was immediately placed on leave against his will. When Negrete wrote the I.S. saying he and Socorro wanted to ameliorate relations in the Mexican section, which had become “terribly poisoned,” Parks in her inimitable style fired off a response: “You really don’t get it, do you…. For the third time, let me make it very simple for you: LEAVE TOWN!” Comrade Socorro, a chicana former farm worker, was reviled as “dim” and having her head in a “sewer”! Then she was accused of violating discipline for allegedly losing contact with her team at the huge Mexico May Day march and having her companion Negrete carry her camera bag. When Socorro objected that the reported facts are all wrong, she was put on trial. When Socorro and Negrete objected that this was unfair, since essentially the same body was having the “trial” as brought the charges, the proceedings were moved to New York (without a prior vote by the I.S.). Negrete’s demand to be put on trial on the same charges was dismissed. When the I.S. got around to voting on the change in venue, a motion by Norden to instead have a commission of inquiry was voted down.

Socorro was given four days and one-hour notice of the trial date, contrary to the statutes of the SL/U.S., which require seven day’s notice. The trial took place two days after they arrived in New York, with a heated nine-hour I.S. meeting on the intervening day which focused on Brazil and Mexico. A request to postpone the trial for documented medical concerns was denied. Also denied were all requests for delays—even for one hour—to consult the depositions. The trial body never asked key questions of the two members of the GEM exec present as witnesses which would have confirmed Socorro’s account that she in fact met members of her team, that she followed instructions on how to proceed and that Negrete’s presence was sanctioned. Witnesses were crudely led through their testimony. One question was restated to make it clear that it came from the prosecution not the defense, whereupon the witness changed her answer. To get around the fact that two of the witnesses admitted that Socorro was not told the team was leaving, a supposed “signal” that she allegedly ignored was simply invented. Even then, they couldn’t get a straight story from the comrade who supposedly gave the “signal.”

In the trial decision, Negrete is repeatedly referred to as Socorro’s “burro” and “pack horse.” (In the WV article he has gone from animal to inanimate, being compared to “a piece of lint on a pair of serge pants,” as well as being accused of being an egomaniac and so forth). After the harrowing experience of the frame-up trial, at a New York local meeting two days later that was filled with howling choruses of “get out,” Socorro was driven into a rage and made an impermissible statement, for which she was expelled from the SL. The PB decision expelling her is reproduced in the 142-page ICL bulletin; her letter the next morning retracting her statement is not. But in the WV account, Socorro is not even mentioned: not a word about her ouster from the GEM exec, nothing about her trial or expulsion—she has been turned into a non-person. Thus they avoid discussing the shameful “trial” of this comrade.

This gives a measure of the methods of the “new I.S.” The situation in the ICL today recalls in some respects the early period of the bureaucratization of the Communist International. Obviously, the proportions are vastly different; in the Soviet case the party held state power, had hundreds of thousands of members and had made a revolution. But the techniques are uncannily similar. In an early 1924 article, “Down with Factionalism,” Nikolai Bukharin raised a hue and cry because oppositional comrades had stated, “The center wants to intimidate the party with [talk of] a split.” Bukharin also said the opposition appeals to the youth in order to “go after the ‘old cadres’.” Shades of the recent fight in Germany, where we were accused of trying to drive out a layer of older TLD cadres in favor of youth recruitment. Trotsky was referred as a “superman standing above the CC”—read, “caudillo,” advocate of “one-man rule,” etc. Stalin said (at the 13th Conference of the RCP[b], January 1924) that “It is not a question of the regime here,” and took Trotsky to task for denying that there was an opposition “faction” but admitting there were “groups.” Such charges were “laboriously reinvented” in the recent ICL fight.

Ah, but when we charge you with going “underground,” the I.S. will say, we were only seeking to bring it above ground. Except that when Norden talks with Negrete, both of them members of the IEC, this is declared a violation of discipline. Then a motion is passed saying if there were declared factions, then there could be a proportional circulation of documents (i.e., the number from the opposition would be drastically cut down); but since there are no factions and only a “group,” the I.S. will decide, and the I.S. secretary says “we’re not going to circulate your documents.” And when Norden hands in solicited comments to the I.S., objecting to statements in a draft unsent letter, he is removed from the I.S., PB and WV editorship, and we are shortly expelled. To explain this all to the radical public, the ICL issues a 142-page bulletin which complains in its introduction that Norden and Stamberg had submitted “392 pages” of documents for internal party discussion (pretty good for going underground!), but prints none of them except for our final protest against the frame-up purge “trial.” This is quite a shift: a party that used to pride itself on publishing the attacks on it by external opponents (the Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League series) now purports to document an internal fight giving only the official story. Any reader of the ICL bulletin must ask, what is the other side?

And then the entire international is called upon to take a position—as is the LQB in Brazil, even though they were given almost none of the documents. Complaining of Menshevism in the Bay Area, where there was considerable unrest over the Socorro trial, Nelson writes that anyone who does not agree “100 percent” with the expulsion of Socorro should be out of the organization. This is a “100 percent regime” of a new type indeed. As Trotsky wrote in The Third International After Lenin (1928) of Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” campaign during 1924-25:

“A revolver was held at the temples of the leading organs of the communist parties with the demand that they adopt immediately a final position on the internal disputes in the C.P.S.U. without any information and discussion; and besides they were aware in advance that on the position they took depended whether or not they could remain in the Comintern.… Of course, the work of purging was also necessary after 1924 and alien elements were quite correctly removed from many sections. But taken as a whole, the ‘Bolshevization’ consisted in this; that with the wedge of the Russian disputes, driven from above with the hammer blows of the state apparatus, the leaderships being formed at the moment in the communist parties of the West were disorganized over and over again. All this went on under the banner of struggle against factionalism….

“But to employ the split as a preventive measure against differences of opinion and to lop off every group and grouping that raises a voice of criticism, is to transform the internal life of the party into a chain of organizational abortions. Such methods do not promote the continuation and development of the species but only exhaust the maternal organism, that is, the party.”

Such bureaucratization is not peculiar to Stalinist organizations. German social democracy, in a different social context, was quite heavy-handed and bureaucratic toward internal opposition, particularly on the left, even before it went over openly to the side of the bourgeoisie by voting war credits in August 1914—witness the treatment of Rosa Luxemburg, or the systematic purge of left-wingers from editorial boards in 1910-12. To repeat, the ICL is neither the massive apparatus of the German SPD nor a party with the power of vast state resources behind it, as with the Stalinists. But it is not immune from the kind of social pressures that produce bureaucratic degeneration. The ICL has itself recognized this in the past. The document of the 1992 second international conference stated:

“Thus far, the American section has weathered the Reagan/Bush years rather well. But as comrade Robertson recently pointed out, there are three ways we can wreck ourselves unless we make a conscious effort otherwise. We could degenerate into: (1) Menshevism, (2) Stalinism (i.e., become some sort of bureaucratic organization) or (3) De Leonism (i.e., drift into abstract propagandism, concomitantly withdrawing from struggle.”

These categories are not mutually exclusive, and indeed the course that has been undertaken by the ICL today has aspects of all three tendencies.

Turn Toward “Passive Radicalism”: De Leon and Kautsky

The escalation of bureaucratic measures never before practiced in the Spartacist tendency, the unprecedented purge of long-time cadres of the International Communist League for their political views, the dissolving of fraternal relations with the Brazilian LQB and the ICL’s shameful flight from a major class battle underway in Volta Redonda are all part of a sharp turn in the party. As James P. Cannon stressed against the petty-bourgeois Shachtman-Burnham opposition in the SWP, organizational questions in the Marxist movement are not “independent” of but directly reflect the political program:

“What is the significance of the organization question as such in a political party? Does it have an independent significance of its own on the same plane with political differences, or even standing above them? Very rarely. And then only transiently, for the political line breaks through and dominates the organization question every time.”

Cannon emphasized, “Thus it is clear that the question stands not organizationally in the first place, but politically. The political line is and must be the determining factor. It is and must be placed in the center of the discussion.” So what is the political line behind the sudden appearance of bureaucratic practices in the ICL?

A short answer is that there has been an increasingly pronounced tendency toward abstract or passive propagandism, which divorces the party propaganda from active intervention in the class struggle. In the communist movement this tendency is known as De Leonism, after Daniel De Leon, one of the early American Marxists, who opposed fighting for any kind of “immediate demands,” arguing that this watered down the revolutionary program, and instead confined himself to abstract propaganda for socialism. This policy is justified with the argument that since this is a reactionary period, little can be achieved; that perceived opportunities for intervention are illusory, and thus only a reflection of opportunism; and that the job of revolutionary Marxists is defined as (limited to) keeping the flame alive against attempts to squelch it.

The fight against revisionism must be a constant and central focus of communists, particularly in reactionary periods when the ideological pressures of the bourgeoisie mount. Part of that fight is to guard against tendencies toward abstention from class struggle, which are ultimately social-democratic and Kautskyan. The German SPD theoretician Karl Kautsky, even before Lenin, insisted that socialist consciousness must be brought to the workers from the outside by the socialist party. However, Kautsky’s conception of the party was very different from Lenin’s. Not only did he conceive of a “party of the whole class,” rather than a Leninist vanguard party of professional revolutionaries, in the period leading up to World War I Kautsky developed the policy of what he called “passive radicalism,” i.e., that the job of the party was to concentrate on educating and to “wait for the appropriate opportunity” (from “The New Tactic” [1912]). This policy was a key component of Kautsky’s centrism, allowing him to maintain a veneer of Marxist orthodoxy while cohabiting with the increasingly reformist trade-union and SPD party bureaucracy.

The present period grows out of the world-historic defeat for the proletariat represented by the triumph of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states. Yet despite and as a result of this defeat, there have been numerous sharp outbreaks of social and class struggle, from Brazil, South Africa and Mexico to the upsurge of workers’ struggles in Italy (autumn 1992 and autumn 1994) and the December 1995 strike wave in France. These struggles have been set off by the bourgeoisie’s drive to gut the trade unions and dismantle social programs instituted to counter the “communist threat,” and by the drive to form trade blocs in this period of heightened inter-imperialist rivalry. They provide important openings for intervention by revolutionary Trotskyists, to combat the manifestly bankrupt programs of Stalinism and social democracy, and to show the road to take these initially defensive struggles in the direction of a fight for power, through a transitional program. But there has been a tendency in the ICL to draw defeatist conclusions from defeats—to conclude, as WV 648 puts it, that the present post-Soviet period is one in which the forces of the “small revolutionary vanguard” are in a “conjuncturally fragile situation” and their “necessary relationship to the proletariat” is one of distance. What this boils down to is waiting for an appropriate moment, i.e., “a better period.”

To be clear, this is only a tendency, and is uneven across the ICL. In a country where it knows its way around the political terrain and the dangers are less pronounced, the Spartacist League/U.S. is prepared to initiate the recent admirable action that trounced KKK racist terrorists in Chicago. This is in line with the SL’s correct policy of seeking through labor/black mobilizations to interdict the hooded Klan fascists from staging their provocations in the major cities. Yet the increasing tendency of the ICL leadership is to “pull our hands out of that boiling water” of the class struggle, particularly where it feels out of its depth politically. This is a tendency toward what Kautsky called “passive radicalism,” toward the construction not of “fighting propaganda groups” but of passive propaganda groups, whose activity consists of commentary to the exclusion of ongoing active intervention in the class struggle. In order to cut short a developing fight over this abstentionist policy, the I.S. resorted to bureaucratic measures never before practiced in the Spartacist tendency. And the results are seen in Volta Redonda, as the ICL deserted from a class battle.

Facing attacks and provocations by the bourgeois state and its agents, the I.S. was seized by panic. The I.S. secretary wrote that the ICL should never “set foot in that town [Volta Redonda] again.” (As it turns out, while sending ICL representatives to Brazil was ruled out for purposes of defense of the Brazilian fraternal comrades, ICL representatives were dispatched to Brazil for factional aims, to demand that the LQB line up against us.) The I.S. declared (in a motion of 5 June), on the basis of no evidence, that “The state appears ready to use the pretext of a ‘foreign red threat’ to weaken an entire sector of the labor movement and through this to destroy the present and future perspectives for a revolutionary vanguard in Brazil.” In the last discussion with the LQB before breaking relations, one of the ICL representatives summed up: “The reality is that right now the police are using all their power to smash you and the municipal workers union,” and while the present situation may be demoralizing for the ranks of the municipal workers, “it would be even more demoralizing for them to see one of their leaders dead in the street. That is the point. The point has to do directly with the power of the bourgeois state.”

Some may recall the fate of the French OCI and its youth group, the FER, during the events of May-June 1968. While the context is different, it’s hard not to be struck by the parallel of leftist verbiage to cover a rightist course. A popular history describes what happened when the Lambertiste youth marched up on the key “Night of the Barricades” (May 10-11, before the bulk of the working class entered the struggle):

“…at the sight of the barricades, their leader was seized by doctrinal doubts: This was clearly going to be murder. It was an ‘adventurist’ enterprise, in which the FER would have no part. Their squad marched off the field to the derisive hoots of the embattled students. FER’s defection at the hour of combat will long be remembered.”

And indeed it was. The Lambertistes never lived it down, despite the “orthodox Trotskyism” they brandished like a protective talisman. While they continued to maintain a “revolutionary” veneer over the next few years, this episode showed what their real politics were in practice.

The corollary of the ICL leadership’s panicked response, and the broader tendency to passive propagandism, is the accusation against us of “vicarious political adventurism.” So now, after all the epithets thrown at us over the last year (Stalinophilic, Castroite, Healyite, ultra-Shachtmanite, BT-like, like Hansen, like Cochran/Clarke, like Goldman/Morrow, and don’t forget dupes of Saddam Hussein’s war propaganda), the I.S. has settled on “Pabloists of the Second Mobilization.” Of course, they have the small problem that Norden authored the Prometheus Research Series No. 4 bulletin on Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism.

The hard core of the accusation against us is adventurism. For doing what, exactly? Obviously in the first instance for fighting to continue fraternal relations with the LQB/LM and to pursue the fight to remove cops from the V.R. union. “Adventurism” for saying that it’s wrong to say “we” should “never set foot” in Volta Redonda again, for saying that it might be necessary to send an ICL representative to Brazil to defend the LQB/LM against the mounting witchhunt. Grotesquely, Parks wrote in the ICL discussion: “With Norden in command it is likely that…LM would be destroyed, the union would be busted, and the ICL would have the reputation as international hitmen.” Norden responded: “What’s next—will I be named ‘fingerman for the international bourgeoisie’?!” Parks’ charges are pure slander. As the comrades know, Norden was in charge of the iSt/ICL’s Latin American work for over two decades. In “A Reply to Parks” (28 May), he asked: “Where is the slightest scintilla of evidence to back up Parks’ dire fantasies? It doesn’t exist.”

Taking its fantasies for reality, the I.S. expels internal critics from the highest level of the ICL leadership, cuts its ties to the LQB and flees from the struggle. Its reputation will not be of “international hitmen” but of panicked deserters, who abandoned a fight after encouraging it. Interestingly, a description that Cannon wrote of the petty-bourgeois Shachtman-Burnham opposition in the SWP applies to the ICL leadership today:

“The driving impulses behind the opposition as a whole are petty-bourgeois nervousness at the prospect of impending struggles, difficulties and sacrifices, and the unconscious desire to avoid them at all costs.”

This description certainly applies to the leadership of the “new I.S.” today. In that same fundamental text, Cannon takes aim at the tendency of “isolated groups to console themselves with the monotonous repetition of adherence to great principles without seeking ways and means and new opportunities to apply them.”

This rightist tendency toward abstract propagandism is not simply, or even particularly, the expression of a literary conception of politics. Real social pressures, to which the SL is not immune, are at work here as well. An outlook and orientation geared to the labor aristocracy is increasingly in evidence, in tandem with the weight of this sector (and the disproportionate number in white-collar jobs) in the wake of the decimation of the SL trade-union fractions in the late-1970s layoffs. That this requires serious analysis is indicated, for example, by the fact that despite our interventions in one PB meeting after another to get effective party intervention in Los Angeles—where low-paid immigrant workers have spearheaded some of the most dynamic labor struggles of recent years and the upsurge against the racist acquittal in the Rodney King case rocked the triumphalism of the U.S.-dominated “New World Order”—the branch is just as stagnant as ever.

The I.S.’ desertion from the fight to oust the cops from the union in Brazil represents a major departure from Marxism toward centrism, a policy of mouthing revolutionary phrases while flagrantly contradicting them in practice (see Trotsky’s essay, “Centrism and the Fourth International,” Spartacist No. 9, January-February 1967). But this is not the first time such tendencies have appeared in the ICL. As the reporter for the I.S. at the second international conference, Brosius, put it, the Australian section has been the “bellwether of social-democratic deviations in the ICL.” At the beginning of the 1980s, it flinched badly on the Russian question, beginning with dropping the slogan “Defense of Cuba, USSR Begins in El Salvador.” Over the years, the SL/A has had a series of sectarian responses, most recently in failing to demand a halt to French nuclear testing in the Pacific, out of a knee-jerk reaction to the disgusting Australian nationalism of the anti-nuke protesters. Moreover, until a recent fight, the SL/A didn’t call for independence for East Timor, the beleaguered island under the jackboot of the Indonesian military for over two decades.

The most stunning examples of the Australian section’s repeated “social-democratic drift” came in the last several years, when it repeatedly placed itself in opposition to union strike struggles. The first was an October 1991 24-hour general strike against anti-union laws of the New South Wales state government. In this case, some comrades even went to work during the strike. The section also missed a one-day general strike in the state of Victoria. As one comrade put it during the ICL’s second international conference, “The lesson learned in Australia was that a general strike means ‘oh shit!’” But even after a 1992 emergency conference called to deal with this tendency, the editorial board of Australasian Spartacist in 1994 wanted to publish the position of “militant indifference” (!) to the privatization of Australia’s nationalized shipping line. In all cases, this very rightist sectarian abstentionism was justified with supposed left arguments against the wretched trade-union bureaucracy. This was also the posture adopted by the Spartacist League/Britain (later corrected) in declaring the Liverpool dockers strike dead last fall, even though union mobilizations for the strikers continued.

Now Parks has taken up the position in several countries that it is wrong for a small Trotskyist propaganda group to call for a general strike. This arose in Italy, when G. Maggi produced a draft leaflet during the workers upsurge of autumn 1994 headlining a call for an all-out general strike. In fact, this represented a capitulation to the popular front then being formed, as the reformist union and party leaders wanted a show of worker militancy to build pressure for their class-collaborationist parliamentary coalition against the rightist Berlusconi government. For Trotskyists, the key was to highlight opposition to the popular front and the need for a revolutionary party. But Parks went further, opposing a call for all-out workers struggle against the cutbacks and inclusion of a call for a general strike among the listed demands. Over the years, pseudo-Trotskyists have routinely called for general strikes as an all-purpose, radical-sounding demand on the union bureaucracy, to disguise their actual policy of tailing the labor fakers. But Parks’ lesson from this 1994 Italy fight, that it is wrong for small propaganda groups to call for a general strike at all, is a caricature of Trotskyism. What about the campaign of the French Trotskyists for a general strike in the mid-1930s?

During the December 1995 strike wave in France, the CC of the French section was paralyzed, incapable of producing interventionist propaganda to bring the Trotskyist program into the developing struggle. In this case, the LTF leadership collapse was fought from the I.S., and particularly by Parks—while at the same time she was denying that this had anything to do with passive propagandism. But subsequent events have shown that this tendency has been increasingly generalized. For example, in Germany not only was the intervention directed at the Communist Platform repudiated after the fact, but after the SpAD conference in January, the tasks and perspectives section of the conference document was redone to rule out any work directed at the PDS. Nor were any concrete perspectives raised toward the Autonomen, or indeed any other focus for external work.

In the months before our expulsion, we found ourselves constantly fighting for articles in the ICL sectional presses to pose transitional demands as a tool of intervention, instead of simply passive commentary. In Germany, an article on the Balkans for Spartakist in January raised no call for, or even any perspective of, working-class action against imperialist intervention, even though this was the first time the Bundeswehr has been deployed outside the Reich since World War II. Instead the draft declared: “The task of Marxists, however, is to raise the consciousness of the workers and to convince them of the necessity and tasks of the socialist revolution.” True, but the whole question of how to mobilize the working class in struggle leading to a fight for power is not addressed.^*****

In March, a Spartakist draft on the “Alliance for Jobs” (a stillborn scheme by the union tops for a “partnership” with Kohl) virtually ignored actual labor struggles and failed to put forward a program of demands to lead the struggle forward. In a draft for Spartaco on the Italian elections, where the recently elected Ulivo (Olive Tree) popular front promises to push through the austerity program the right-wing Berlusconi government couldn’t implement, Parks opposed a suggested slogan to “Prepare for Hard Class Battles Against the Ulivo’s Anti-Worker ‘Reforms’.” She argued once again that a small Trotskyist propaganda group should simply put forward general propaganda on the popular front and the need for a revolutionary workers party. It’s classical De Leonism—no transitional demands.

Parks also objected to any reference to the Italian bourgeoisie’s push for a “strong state” to ram through the brutal “restructuring” of government and industry, including the massive layoffs and drastic lowering of real wages, that the ruling class is driven to accomplish following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This has been a point we have raised in numerous articles on Italy for the last several years. In the same vein, a lead article on Mexico for Espartaco omitted any reference to the semi-bonapartist nature of the Mexican regime and the corporatist character of the PRI-controlled “unions,” while seeing big opportunities in a split by dissident corporatist “unions.” Thus the key point of Trotsky’s analysis of Mexico is simply dropped!

Skipping over the question of bonapartism, the Mexico article calls for “combat” against the “glorification” of “trade-union struggle” in order to “leap from the struggle for mere demands for higher wages” (in a country where real wages have been slashed to below 1940 levels) “to political struggle which coheres and raises the consciousness of the working class about its tremendous social power.” Rather than this glib rhetorical “leap,” what is urgently required is a system of transitional demands as a bridge from the present demands and consciousness of the working class to the struggle for socialist revolution. Naturally, no demands were raised in the article for a sliding scale of wages and hours, turning strike pickets into workers militias, factory committees, etc. If ever there was a situation crying out for the Transitional Program, Mexico today is it. But this is not to be found in the “new” Espartaco.

In his speech at the SpAD conference in January, Nelson cited a quote from Trotsky’s 1937 article “Stalinism and Bolshevism” as summing up the tasks of Marxists today:

“Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions, the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: It must swim against the current…it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly purchased experience of the past.”

This quote (repeated and expanded in the WV 648 article on our expulsion) is utterly correct, but Trotsky never intended these words to be counterposed to the tasks of participating in and giving leadership to the struggles of the working class. The year after he wrote the above essay, with the Spanish Revolution strangled and World War II fast approaching, at a time that Victor Serge characterized as “midnight in the century,” Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program:

“The strategic task of the next period—a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization—consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard.… It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

The ICL leadership notes one way in which the pressures of the period and historic defeats weigh on the proletarian vanguard, in the form of attempts to revise and reject our fundamental Leninist-Trotskyist programmatic positions. But in addition to outright programmatic revisionism there is another way in which the pressure of defeats takes its toll on revolutionary organizations. In the Transitional Program, Trotsky notes that “the influence of the betrayal by the historic organizations of the proletariat” led some elements to “a refusal to struggle for partial and transitional demands, i.e., for the elementary interests and needs of the working masses” and to conceive of revolutionary struggle as “convincing themselves of the superiority of socialism.” He noted:

“These sterile politicians generally have no need of a bridge in the form of transitional demands because they do not intend to cross over to the other shore. They simply dawdle in one place, satisfying themselves with a repetition of the selfsame meager abstractions. Political events are for them an occasion for comment but not for action.”

Here, too, one can recognize elements of the SL/ICL leadership today, more comfortable with “calling for” a revolutionary vanguard than shouldering the responsibilities, challenges and dangers of intervening to build one in the class struggle. But as Lenin stressed in What Is to Be Done? (at a time when the Russian party was still consolidating as a fighting propaganda group): “it is not enough to call ourselves the ‘vanguard,’ the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognize and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard.”

So far we have seen a tendency toward passive propagandism. The ICL can still make other turns, it can zig and zag, carrying out an action against the KKK in Chicago at the same time that it abandons a struggle against the cops in Volta Redonda. But with the recent purge of long-time cadres, the accumulation of bureaucratic measures never before practiced in the organization, the dissolving of fraternal relations with the Brazilian LQB and precipitous flight from a major class battle underway in Volta Redonda, there has been a turn in the ICL in the direction of bureaucratization and a policy of “passive radicalism.” Particularly its shameful abandonment of the fight for cops out of the unions in Brazil marks the turn as centrist, revealing a sharp cleft between the ICL’s stated program and its policies in practice. We would be fighting within the ranks of the ICL to defeat this disastrous course were it not for our unjust expulsion, which we hereby appeal. We have fought to build the ICL based on the Trotskyist program, which we have helped formulate and defend. We continue to fight to build a Leninist world party of socialist revolution, a reforged Fourth International Trotsky would recognize as his own.

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1. ** June 5 and 11 quotations retranslated from Portuguese.

2. ** The fusion with the Japanese Rekken group is now held up by the “new I.S.” as a model counterposed to the Declaration of Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica. Yet the Spartacist delegation to the fusion conference was selected by no official body. The minutes of the August 1988 fusion conference include the statement by Foster that “the IEC must be polled, but this is only a formality.” A 1 October 1988 cover letter to a poll to be sent to the IEC states: “Participants considered the iSt delegation as constituted to be authoritative,” while noting that the decisions of the conference were only recommendations to the IEC. However, due to intervening events, the IEC poll confirming was not sent out until late December. While these procedures were perfectly valid, the fact is that they were qualitatively less rigorous than those used to approve fraternal relations with LM.

3. *** Correction: Two and a half months after Clemens claimed she was being accused of Stalinophobia, allegedly by Kohn, who never wrote or said that, Gerrard did make such a charge, in a 19 April 1995 document. For Norden’s criticism of Gerrard’s statement, see Part 2 of his document “For a Trotskyist Fighting Propaganda Group in Germany” (3 July 1995).

4. **** In early 1993, the Hamburg leadership refused to bring comrades to Berlin for a scheduled national educational the week after the hostel defense on the question of the state and how to fight fascism, claiming this would upset local priorities.

5. ***** In the June 11 I.S. letter to the Brazilian LQB, the formulation is: “The task of Marxists is to have a program which conceptually opens the road to revolution for the working class” (retranslated from Portuguese). But the mere “having” of revolutionary “conceptions” is nothing but an idealist veneer for opportunist passivity, unless an active fight is waged to transform the consciousness of the proletariat in the class struggle, without which it is impossible to open the road to revolution really, and not just conceptually.