Reply to a Frame-Up "Trial"

In a “Call for a Trial” dated 31 May 1996 and delivered at 23:45 that night, the International Secretariat charges comrade Norden with “defiant and categorical denial of a fundamental condition of membership, that the party has a monopoly over the public political activity (i.e. not personal activity) of its members.” The “same identical charges” are brought against comrade Stamberg. 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 suppositions based on lies, it calls for our expulsion from the ICL. This is a frame-up.

Included in the catalogue of phony charges are:

• Norden supposedly being “caught in an act of indiscipline” for speaking on the phone with another IEC member, Negrete;
• charging Norden with “failure to declare a faction and instead take his opposition underground,” even though pages of I.S. and IEC motions are attached to the charges condemning his positions and a motion was passed by the I.S. explicitly to limit the circulation of documents by us;
• accusing Stamberg and Norden of a “de facto and unilateral withdrawal from membership” over the course of eight months, even though we have continued to play central roles in putting out Workers Vanguard and numerous other party activities;
• insidiously concocting “hefty suspicions” of “political collaboration with non-members”; and
• slanderously speculating about an “outside source of political funding.”

Withdrawal from membership, going underground, political collaboration with and even political funding by outside sources, seeking to wreck the party’s work and set up comrades for injury—every one of these charges is false to the core. They are in total contradiction with our entire political history of over three decades of struggle in the cause of revolution and our years of proudly fighting to build the Spartacist tendency and ICL. Does the I.S. expect anyone to believe these charges?

A Fishing Expedition

The only true fact in the whole list of charges contained in the “Call” is that we refused to hand over our phone bills when these were demanded on 30 May. What is the sudden interest in these bills now? It can only be to see the numbers called, and thus to identify the persons (i.e., comrades) we have spoken with. This is a classic fishing expedition aimed at stifling inner-party discussion. Far from denying the party’s right to a monopoly of public political activity by its members, we protested that there is no legitimate party interest in this information, that we have done nothing against the rules of our party, and this demand to turn over what amounts to a list of comrades we have talked with was raised solely because of our internal political differences.

We have engaged in no public political activity outside the control of the party. As for communication among comrades, this is protected by the statutes of the SL/U.S., which stipulate that “material exchanged entirely privately between SL/U.S. members, i.e., between individuals or within a tendency or faction” may not be demanded by the Control Commission (CCC). Now these charges against us redefine this key point in the statutes to claim that since Norden and Stamberg “denied and continue to deny vehemently that they are members of any faction”…“Therefore their communications with Negrete or any other members of the ICL are not protected by confidentiality.” This throws our party rules out the window and opens the door to rampant bureaucratic intimidation.

According to the charges, “The fact that comrades Norden and Stamberg have not submitted any phone bills for eight months indicates that for some time they have not considered themselves to be subordinate to party discipline.” Later they claim that not having submitted these bills constituted “a de facto and unilateral withdrawal from membership”! This is monstrous. Since when is turning over your phone bills a standard of membership? Is every member of the ICL or the SL/U.S. or its Central Committee required to turn in their phone bills monthly, or else be deemed no longer members? Of course not! So why are we required to do so? Because we have disagreed with positions taken by the Political Bureau and I.S. That is the only reason for this unheard-of measure.

Since this would be an all-too obvious reprisal, now a story is invented to justify why we in particular must turn in our phone bills. It is alleged that there was an “existing arrangement” whereby Norden, like other members of leadership bodies, submitted “bills for payment of political/organizational calls” made from our apartment. There is an important sleight-of-hand here, for never was there an arrangement that all “political/organizational” calls from our home phone would be paid; rather, we were reimbursed for those calls made carrying out organizational assignments. These alone were submitted to the party for reimbursement. We never asked the party to pay for personal calls, including those to comrades that were not directly connected to specific assignments. If there was a different practice with other comrades, we were never aware of it.

Why were org calls not submitted for payment in recent months? The charges coyly ask, “did Norden unilaterally suspend his political responsibilities...or was he engaged in secret correspondence to be kept hidden from the party?” This cynical question is designed to get around the fact, which the I.S. knows full well, that Norden didn’t “unilaterally suspend his political responsibilities,” but rather he was removed from them. Following the 20 July 1995 I.S. meeting, Norden was removed step by step from operational responsibility for the work in areas which he previously oversaw. This was immediately true for everything concerning Germany except work on Spartakist; Brosius took over phone contact with the SpAD. On Mexico, Richard D. was assigned to maintain regular communication with the GEM. This can be verified simply by looking at the reports and fax traffic. On Brazil, Norden supervised the trip by Negrete and Adam in August 1995, but after that communication with Brazil was handled through other comrades.

This culminated in the January 1996 IEC meeting, where Norden was removed from full IEC membership; thereafter he was no longer responsible for any particular area of work in the I.S., and hence there were no org calls to present for reimbursement. So first Norden is removed from his assignments; then, when he doesn’t have the same expenses to submit, this is deemed evidence of an eight-month conspiracy to (a) unilaterally withdraw from membership; (b) go underground; (c) collaborate with non-party members; (d) have someone else pay the bill! How grotesque!

Committee “Discipline”

There is another significant “redefinition” of party statutes contained in the charges against us, namely the introduction, for the first time in the history of the Spartacist tendency, of committee discipline. The charges reproduce a motion passed at the I.S. meeting of 17 April criticizing Norden for not immediately reporting a call from Negrete while an I.S. delegation was in Mexico, ostensibly to aid the discussion of the GEM over “a dispute between the I.S. and Negrete over our work in Brazil” (letter of Parks, 8 April), but actually to purge him and Socorro from leading roles in the work of the Mexican section. Now the charges against us claim that “The above motion indicates that Norden was recently caught in an act of indiscipline which undermined the I.S. and the work of the ICL.” So it is now “indiscipline” for Norden, a member of the I.S., to speak with a member of the IEC, a body on which Norden had served as a full member for almost two decades and was still an alternate, after being punitively deprived of his decisive vote on the committee at the January IEC for refusing to agree with the utterly false line on the work in Germany.

How can one IECer talking with another IECer be a breach of discipline? Not only are communications “between individuals or within a tendency or faction” protected by confidentiality (according to Article VII, Section 6 of the SL/U.S. statutes), but Article VI, Section 7 of the statutes states explicitly:

This provision of our statutes is no minor matter, being the product of the experience of the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP where RTers opposed the concept of “committee discipline” and were bureaucratically prohibited from discussing differences with youth members. Now this same bureaucratic procedure is being introduced into the ICL, in order to ex post facto declare Norden guilty of breaking discipline for talking with another leading member of the international. For some documentation on this question of “committee discipline” see Spartacist Nos. 38-39 (Summer 1986) which reprints three letters by James P. Cannon under the title, “Don’t Strangle the Party.”

Party Membership Called a “Charade”

It’s particularly ludicrous for the charges to claim, “It would appear that when Norden (and Stamberg) stopped submitting these [telephone] bills it was a de facto and unilateral withdrawal from membership, and that since that time, their nominal membership, which they took full advantage of, was a charade.” Some “withdrawal from membership”! Does the I.S. think that being editor of Workers Vanguard was a “charade”? Norden continued to edit WV up to the day he was bureaucratically removed as editor after 23 years in the job. Not only that, even after the January IEC, Norden heavily participated in formulating policy for the ICL’s work in Brazil, including producing the final version of a major I.S. letter to Luta Metalúrgica laying out our differences over their practice relating to key questions of the party and state. On 25 May, in the midst of the recent uproar, he wrote a seven-page letter with a detailed critique of and suggestions for the draft Mexico article for Espartaco.

In addition, Norden contributed to the last issue of Spartakist with a lengthy and detailed letter on the comrades’ approach to the DGB union tops’ “Bundnis fur Arbeit” (Alliance for Jobs) and labor struggles in the present period, raising criticisms which were shared by other members of the I.S. He also wrote a major contribution criticizing the reworked “Tasks and Perspectives” section of the SpAD conference document for lacking any concrete perspectives and for taking a policy of ignoring the PDS. Of course, this was characterized in an I.S. motion as “permanent factionalism.” Evidently, active participation in the life of the organization counts as the work of genuine (as opposed to supposedly “nominal”) members only when it does not involve disagreement.

The same is true in the case of Stamberg. In addition to being a long-time alternate member of the SL/U.S. Central Committee, public spokesman for the SL and member of the WV editorial board, Stamberg initiated and for several years led the ICL’s beginning work in South Africa. It was at her initiative and in response to her written proposal in April 1995 that the Johannesburg station was set up. During the last eight months, while she was allegedly being a “nominal” member and going “underground,” in fact she was writing major policy documents on South Africa, including correcting misformulations over the “power sharing” Mandela/De Klerk regime, and earlier this year reorienting the station over the question of how to fight neo-apartheid in the schools in South Africa, which is not a simple reproduction of the Jim Crow American South but requires a struggle for permanent revolution. Most recently, Stamberg wrote the South Africa lead article in WV No. 646 (24 May), and at the moment she was suspended she was at the computer in the office working on an article in defense of imprisoned Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu. But according to the I.S. charges, this party work was just a “charade.”

While we have faithfully and loyally carried out our party assignments, virtually everything has been dealt with by the I.S. and PB in factional terms. The latest case was a document against our proposal to run a lead article on the upcoming Russian elections in WV No. 647. In April, Stamberg was removed as de facto managing editor, a role she had filled for the last decade and a half, by the formal appointment of comrade Bishop to this position. The purpose was, as stated by several speakers in the PB discussion, to get “control of the paper.” Yet as pointed out in the countermotion by Norden against his removal from the Political Bureau and as WV editor, while he has been in charge of the paper it has always been the organ of and expressed the positions of the Political Bureau and Central Committee of the SL/U.S. and of the leading bodies of the international, bodies of which he has been a member. But now all that has been “rectified.”

The Night of 29 May

The charges abound in utterly false statements. Thus under the heading of “Background,” it is claimed that on 29 May, the day after the motion was passed to poll the IEC to remove him from the I.S., “comrade Norden was caught photocopying material from the party files of the International Secretariat.” Nonsense. Norden went into the I.S. office in full view of everyone, looked through the “Yesterday” folder, asked for the “Today” folder, selected a few items relating to the current fight and walked down the hall to the xerox machine to copy them, as he was entitled to do. Among these items were the motions passed by the I.S., which he had not been given a copy of. He then returned these documents, handing them to Richard D. Two and a half hours later, we received a call at home from Parks saying that Norden had “no right” to copy that material, and if she heard of this happening again, his keys to the floor would be taken. An hour after that a team was outside our apartment demanding all our keys and party equipment in our possession.

The portrayal of the events of the “evening” of 29 May in the charges is thoroughly dishonest. First, they do not mention that we received a phone call at 23:22 p.m. from comrade Brown, who announced that he would ring our buzzer “in two minutes” to demand to be let in to seize the computer and our keys. Exactly two minutes later to the second, as Norden was on the phone to the office asking for confirmation of this outrageous measure, Brown—who was in charge of the five-man repossession squad—rang the buzzer. Meanwhile, Norden was speaking to Parks, who said that this was a decision of the I.S. and PB. When asked why, she said because Norden had allegedly been copying material that he had “no business copying.” Norden replied that he was still a member of the I.S., to which Parks said, “Polls are in, you are off the I.S.” and also removed from the PB. When Norden asked repeatedly if there had been a meeting of the I.S. to confirm the poll, as required by our norms, she replied “no.” When Norden responded, “Therefore it is not valid,” Parks dropped this excuse and declared that the privilege of having keys was being denied “because you are untrustworthy” and “you have no loyalty to this party.”

The charges state that Norden “protested that this was a bureaucratic abuse,” which he certainly did. But the claim that Norden “particularly heatedly denied that the party had any right to retrieve keys to party offices from him,” is a flat lie. He repeatedly and clearly stated that he objected not to the party’s right to party property, but to the decision to take it back for no justifiable reason. When Parks declared “it’s our property,” he replied that he “did not question for one minute” that it was party property. “What I am objecting to is this decision.” What Norden “particularly heatedly denied” was the vicious, lying charge of “disloyalty.” When he angrily stated, “I object to this procedure. I have done nothing that is disloyal, and I have done nothing that in any way contravenes the norms and rules of our party,” Parks replied haughtily: “You can object all you want. All you need to do is turn over our keys and our equipment.”

According to the charges, “Norden then said that he would put the party’s computer and fax machine ‘on the sidewalk’ in 30 minutes and that if comrade E. Brown or Collins were still there then he would turn his keys over to them.” In fact, early in the call with Parks Norden said he would bring the equipment and keys down to the street, to which Parks replied, “Okay, that’s fine.” The second time he said “I will be down in half an hour, and possibly before, with the computer, and the fax machine, and our keys.” When Parks kept yelling, he repeated, “I will get them down there as soon as humanly possible.”

At times, the charges descend to the level of utter absurdity. Thus at one point, it is stated that “since the party has repossessed its fax machine from comrade Norden it is revealed that only Mexico City and Berlin were programmed as his ‘one-touch’ fast dial keys.” What startling revelations this research has produced! Of course, to any reasonable person, this would seem only logical since Norden was responsible for work in Latin America and Germany. Actually, although we can’t verify this since we no longer have the machine, we recall that there was a third “fast dial” key—to the C.O. in New York.

Outright Slander

From untruths in small things as well as big, the I.S. charges escalate to dirty smears, vile innuendo, baseless speculation and wild flights of fantasy in classic witchhunting style. It is claimed that “the outright refusal by comrades Norden and Stamberg to turn over the phone bills can only reasonably be 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. over a protracted period beginning in September 1995.” Freelancing? How—by talking with other comrades?! But this is only the jumping-off point for the escalating slanderous accusations.

The charges declare that refusal to turn in our phone bills raises “hefty suspicions” of “political collaboration with non-members.” Taking this fiction as fact, the charges then go on to ask, “And who was paying the bill? Do they have some outside source of political funding?” The technique is all too familiar. On top of this insidious attempt to smear us as collaborating with sinister unknown outside forces, we get this gem of the frame-up genre: “It is enlightening to ponder the possible extent of comrade Norden’s undirected reach in the eight months he took his political activity underground. A reasonable projection can be made through careful examination of the previous year through documentation provided by the treasury.”

Whatever ponderings, musings, conjecture and groundless speculation the I.S. has become capable of, this is a set of formal charges proposing the expulsion of comrades. The documentation from the treasury will show no evidence of collusion with forces outside the ICL, nor can anything else for the simple reason that there has been none on our part, ever! Moreover, we have paid every penny of our phone bills ourselves, except for those organizational calls reimbursed by the party. We resent the despicable attempt to question our loyalty, to smear us as collaborating with and even being funded by an “outside source.” We do not need to prove our loyalty, because we have always been disciplined and loyal to the Spartacist tendency.

The dirty accusations keep piling up. The charges state: “In view of their escalating opposition to the I.S. and particularly over our extremely sensitive relations with our fraternal Brazilian comrades, the consequences of Norden’s and Stamberg’s indiscipline could be extremely injurious to the party’s work and its comrades.” What is this supposed to mean, that we are setting up comrades for injury and repression?! It is on the basis of this vile statement that our expulsion is called for. The charge is totally without foundation in fact and is but the “projection” of the fevered imaginations of the authors of the charges. Norden has stated before, and we repeat here again, that neither of us have had any independent communication with Brazil whatsoever. We have energetically sought to advance the ICL’s relations with our fraternal comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil/Luta Metalúrgica, seeking political clarity while defending them against threats emanating from the bourgeois state and its agents. There were no acts of indiscipline, and we have done nothing to injure the party’s work or our comrades. On the contrary, we have done everything we can to defend them. We repeat: this is a frame-up, pure and simple.

Norden has outlined the course of the ICL’s relations with Luta Metalúrgica and refuted various false claims about those relations in two documents (17 April and 5 May) on the subject. The latest blow-up came over his “Comments on Draft Letter to LQB/LM” (24 May), in which he particularly objected to the draft’s accusing LM of seeking “union sinecures and positions of privilege” on the basis of no evidence, and asked to change a formulation in the draft which uncritically repeated the claims of a provocateur in league with the cops concerning a reputed arrangement for the LM spokesman to serve as paid advisor to the Volta Redonda Municipal Workers union. Norden also objected to the categorical statement by Parks that we should not “set foot in that town [Volta Redonda] again,” and while endorsing the removal of the ICL rep from V.R. in the face of the threat of imminent police repression, he argued it “could be urgently necessary to send someone else to Brazil to aid in defense efforts,” rather than staying out “until this matter is resolved,” as the draft letter stated.

This is what produced Parks’ outrageous statement that Norden was “cop-baiting” the ICL, that he was on a “wrecking operation against his party,” supposedly staging “a filthy, dirty provocation against the party,” and allegedly trying to “engineer a split with LM against the ICL.” It is Norden’s criticisms, in a document submitted to the I.S. containing his solicited comments on a series of points raised in an unsent draft letter, that precipitated his removal from the I.S., PB and WV editor!

A Political Purge

The call for the expulsion of Norden and Stamberg for supposed indiscipline is the culmination of a push to drive us out of the party for supposed hostility (repeatedly cited in the charges) and disloyalty (as stated by Parks in her 29 May phone call with Norden and implied throughout the charges). That this is a political purge is made clear from the “particularly relevant motions from recent IEC and I.S. meetings” against Norden and Stamberg which are appended to the charges. These document how Norden has been removed from one post after another, first from full membership in the IEC, now from the I.S., the PB and as editor of Workers Vanguard. Even here the charges resort to distortions, listing endless votes with Emilio [Norden] opposed, whereas in two instances (on 17 April and 28 May) he presented counterposed motions, which are not deemed “relevant” enough to reproduce.

As this drive has shifted into high gear, motions have been supplemented by attempts to provoke us. Just look at the time sequence in the latest episode. On the evening of 28 May there were back-to-back meetings of the International Secretariat and Political Bureau held to set in motion the removal of Norden from the I.S. and PB and to oust him as editor, declaring him “unworthy of being a member” of the ICL. Both at that meeting and at an earlier NY local meeting there were choruses of demands that we “get out” of the party. The next night (29 May), using the pretext that Norden had copied relevant materials about the fight, a team shows up demanding, on two minutes notice, our keys and party equipment. These were turned over. Later that night, at 1:10 a.m., we received another call, this time from comrade Meyers, the new editor of WV, instructing Norden not to turn up at the office before 4. Why not? No reason was given. Then, when the late-night visit by the hefty repo squad didn’t produce a refusal to comply, or perhaps inspection of the fax machine and computer didn’t yield the hoped-for results, we are presented with the demand for our phone bills.

One of the themes in this purge campaign has been howls of outrage over “Norden’s failure to declare a faction” (from the “Call for a Trial”). Prior to the 11 May I.S. meeting, a draft motion declared an “undeclared faction of four (Negrete, Socorro, Stamberg, and Norden) identified by their opposition (abstention in the case of Norden) to the motions and decisions voted for by the GEM and the I.S.” When objections were raised to this (see Norden’s 10 May document “On the Invention of ‘Undeclared Factions’”), this was changed to officially declaring the four to be a “declared group,” without factional rights, of course. Since no one had requested factional rights, this was unexceptionable—except that now in the charges calling for our expulsion, the confidentiality of communication between individual members of the party is declared only applicable to factions or tendencies (and not to individual members, as stated in the party statutes). In other words, if we had acceded to the enormous pressure to declare a faction, we would not be up on charges, but since we refused, we are fair game. This is, of course, a hoax. If the telephone bill ploy didn’t work, some other pretext would have been found.

So why this push to force Norden and Stamberg to declare a faction, and why have we refused to do so? In the year-long fight over Germany and now again in the much faster-paced fight over Mexico (which totaled less than two weeks from the beginning to the removal of Negrete and Socorro from the GEM leadership) and Brazil, all opposition to the line of the I.S. was labeled “anti-internationalist” and fundamentally deviant on the party question. We replied that the Germany dispute was a false fight to find a Stalinophilic deviation, that the alleged facts, analysis and conclusions bore no resemblance to reality. Defenders of the I.S. and IEC line declared that if we thought that, then we must believe that they are bureaucratic witchhunters. Evidently they have set out to prove this over Mexico and Brazil.

We have sought not to leap to premature conclusions over these fights. Norden initially abstained on the Mexico motions because he wanted to hear the tapes of the GEM meeting and see the evidence for the charges of “anti-internationalism.” Having done so, he declared at the I.S. of 11 May that he would now vote against the Mexico motions. At the same time, in several documents and in interventions before the I.S., Norden made clear that he had differences in the past with Negrete, over Mexico and the Brazil work, and laid out what those differences were. Negrete, in turn, voted with the majority against Norden’s positions on the work in Germany at the January IEC. It is obvious from this alone that there is no “faction”—declared or not—of a “gang of four.” Yes, there have been some common positions, notably against the purge in the Mexican leadership and to uphold the Declaration of Fraternal Relations with Luta Metalúrgica, now called into question by the I.S. motion of 11 May. But by itself this is not a sufficient basis for the declaration of a faction or tendency, which requires a common platform or document.

By upping the pressure on and going after perceived “internal opponents” and trying to force the declaration of a faction, the I.S. clearly has sought to make a preventive strike. The result has been to create a poisonous atmosphere in the party. Thus in the NY local meeting of 14 May, comrade Paul C.—arguing that “the four” must be a faction—quoted the phrase, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” He was apparently unaware that this was the infamous witchhunting test proposed by Walter Reuther to ferret out Communists in the UAW. Underlying the right to form internal political groupings within the party is the intention of aiding in clarifying party discussion. But seeking to identify which comrades are talking to each other through examining phone bills and trying to prematurely provoke the formation of factional groupings where there is insufficient political basis for them only results in obscuring political discussion.

With the cascading removals of comrades from leadership bodies, involuntary placing on leave (twice in two months in the case of Negrete), a trial, expulsion (leading to great mirth in the last I.S. meeting that the “gang of four” had been reduced to a “gang of three”), and now suspensions aiming at expulsion, there has not been adequate time for far-reaching discussions.

Ironically, the I.S. motion of 28 May accuses Norden of pursuing “an escalating hostile ‘regime fight’” against Parks, whereas in fact there has been a concerted drive to remove him from the leadership of the ICL and now both of us from the membership. In recent months, we have been called Stalinophilic, Castroite, Shachtmanite, Pabloite of the second mobilization, accused of running a Healyite regime, with a touch of Loganism, like the BT, like Hansen, and partly like Goldman-Morrow and Cochran-Clarke. Oh yes, and also believers in Saddam Hussein’s war propaganda. To be all that at once is quite a feat. This string of invective, including various mutually contradictory accusations, makes it clear that what we have here is not a serious attempt at political debate but rather a serious attempt at vilification. Norden’s several documents on Germany and Brazil have for the most part not been answered, and instead dismissed as “voluminous” (which is at least in considerable contradiction to the charge of having gone “underground”).

So what does this supposed “regime fight” consist of? Over the recent period, and particularly in the past several weeks, the I.S. has taken a series of measures breaking sharply with our Spartacist traditions and norms of internal debate governed by Leninist democratic centralism and instead imposing increasing restrictions and reprisals.

At the meeting of the International Executive Committee last January, after he was overwhelmingly defeated in a vote falsely charging the work in Germany directed toward the Communist Platform of being “Stalinophilic” and no less falsely accusing him of running an internal witchhunt against perceived opponents of this work (of which there were neither, no witchhunt and no opponents of the work at the time), Norden was “reduced” from full IEC member, which he had been since the 1970s, to alternate by a poll of the IEC. This was explicitly presented as an innovation on past Spartacist practice, according to which such changes in the composition of the ICL’s leading executive body should be accomplished by an international conference which elects the body, except under extreme circumstances. Norden voted against this. Now this precedent has been used again, first to poll the IEC to drop Negrete from full IEC to alt and then, when he objected, to remove him from the IEC altogether.

More recently, over the Mexico fight, Stamberg spoke strongly in I.S. and New York local meetings in opposition to the removal of Negrete and Socorro from the leadership of the GEM and the characterization of their “regime” as “anti-internationalist.” She wrote a document (8 May) pointing out that these charges had been demonstrated to be false, and criticizing the scandalously loose use of facts by comrade Kidder, who headed the ICL delegation to the mid-April GEM meeting. Stamberg’s document was condemned by one of the motions attached to the I.S. charges against us.

On 11 May, the I.S. voted a motion declaring that since the “group” of four was not a declared faction, it had no factional rights—fair enough—and therefore “the majority of comrades on the I.S.” would decide what documentation is circulated internationally, particularly over the fight about “Negrete’s regime in the Mexican section” and “disputes over our approach to Luta Metalúrgica.” In the discussion at that meeting, I.S. Secretary Parks stated: “No we’re not going to circulate your documents.... You can write them all you want. You can even mail them to people if you like. It’s not any kind of official party discussion—won’t be translated. That’s what we’re saying.” And this body, what Parks calls the “new I.S.,” accuses us of “going underground”!!

On 21 May, a meeting of the I.S. was held to determine which documents concerning “Mexico I.S./IEC Discussion” should be circulated in an international mailing. Norden objected in a letter to the I.S. that 11 documents concerning the trial of Socorro had not been included, and that this selection of documentation left out significant aspects relevant for the comrades’ information. He wrote: “In particular, by not including these items, comrades would not be informed of (1) the protest by Negrete against the trial call by the GEM executive committee and his demand that he be placed on trial as well; (2) the objection by Socorro that the trial was moved up by six days, and that instead of the required seven days notice of the trial date she was given only four days; (3) the counterposed motions about the trial at the I.S. meeting of 9 May, which set the trial for 12 May; (4) the discussion about defense counsels in party trials; and (5) Socorro’s statement of 15 May on her remarks at the NYC local meeting.” At the meeting, the I.S. voted to include seven of those items in the mailing, while dismissing others as irrelevant or worthless.

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. These latter two changes are explicitly contrary to the statutes of the SL/U.S. All of them go significantly in the direction of bureaucratization of internal party life.

The Trial of Socorro

The trial of Socorro was a real eye-opener to events underway in the ICL. The charges—that she had allegedly lost touch with her team for two hours during the huge Mexico May Day march (with hundreds of thousands of participants), that she had her companion Negrete carry her camera bag although he had been placed on leave, and that she had given her phone number to an ex-member—would hardly be the stuff for a party trial. Socorro contested all the facts. The normal course would have been to name a commission of inquiry to investigate. Instead the GEM exec brought charges against her on 7 May of conspiring to violate discipline. She was to be put on trial before the GEM membership eleven days hence. Socorro and Negrete vociferously objected, including that since the membership included only one more comrade than attends the exec which charged her, this could hardly be a fair trial. So on one day’s notice, without there being a vote by the I.S., the trial was switched to New York (where Socorro and Negrete were moving) and moved up by six days.

When the I.S. met on 9 May to officially set up the trial (now three days away, with Socorro and Negrete still not arrived in New York), Norden put forward a countermotion for a commission of inquiry, pointing out that it would be almost impossible for the accused to adequately prepare her defense. He also proposed that she be allowed to have a defense counsel, as she requested and was originally dismissed by Parks, noting precedents in Soviet Russia under Lenin. When the motion for a trial was passed, Norden requested that the trial body postpone the proceedings for one week in accordance with the SL/U.S. statutes and to allow her time to prepare.

We observed the trial itself which could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered fair. We are well aware of and defend the distinctions between our Bolshevik norms of justice and the Anglo-Saxon juridical system of the U.S. The presumption of our traditions is that all parties to the proceedings are seeking the truth. But this was not the case in the trial of Socorro. The defense was not allowed to make a statement to the court, only to answer questions and to submit questions to be posed to other witnesses. It was so egregious that at one point, when a witness had misunderstood whom the question was coming from, it was put to her again by the prosecution and she changed her answer.

Most striking was the behavior of the trial body, which included all members of the CCC resident in New York as well as Richard D. Not only was Socorro not allowed to present her case, the trial body itself refused to ask obvious questions of the two witnesses from the GEM exec about several statements during the trial which confirmed her version of events. The verdict’s stipulation of 18 weeks’ reduction to candidacy might be taken as not very severe, but she was outrageously and falsely found guilty of committing a “willful breach of discipline” and “a deliberate provocation” against the party. It is inconceivable that such a trial would have taken place over comparable charges in any setting other than the present factional frenzy. The “trial” was clearly meant to send a lesson to the membership as a whole.

At the New York local meeting two days after the trial, there was a report and discussion on the trial. Stamberg described it as a “travesty” and said it was a continuation of the campaign to oust the Mexican leadership. Norden said the trial should never have taken place, that it was not a fair trial and the verdict was false. During the course of the heated discussion, Socorro made an unconscionable and false remark, comparing the trial to that of some men who had abducted her and raped her several years ago, saying they had gotten more justice from a bourgeois court than she had gotten from this trial, and calling it a kangaroo court. Later that night the Political Bureau was polled on a motion to expel Socorro for her statement. Norden voted for that motion, as did Stamberg later when the CC was polled. Such a statement is not compatible with membership in the party, and Socorro must take responsibility for it, even though she retracted those remarks in a letter to the comrades the next day. At the same time, this enraged outburst was obviously related to the extreme pressure that she had unnecessarily been placed under, particularly considering her diagnosed medical problems stemming from her earlier traumatic experience. And her outburst did not alter one iota the unfair nature of the trial.

Now we have another impending “trial.” Under the present circumstances, with frame-up charges based on a bureaucratic rewriting of our party rules, with this clearly intended as the dramatic culmination of the political fight that has gone on over the last several months, with a trial body consisting of a subset of the comrades who brought the charges, and with the recent example of the trial of Socorro in which any defense was totally hamstrung, we see no point in lending credence to this bureaucratic purge trial by our presence. This is not a legitimate party judicial proceeding but a farce—we protest and reject it as Leninists. We remain true to the Trotskyist program and practices of the Spartacist tendency which are now being trampled on.