A Shamefaced Defection from Trotskyism

Jan Norden, who for 23 years was the editor of Workers Vanguard, was expelled from the Spartacist League/U.S. by a meeting of the Political Bureau on June 8 for willful violation of the most fundamental condition of membership in a Leninist party: that the party has a monopoly over the public political activity of its members. Marjorie Stamberg, a longtime member of the WV Editorial Board, was also expelled for refusing to accept the democratic-centralist discipline of the revolutionary party.

Norden, who had until recently been a member of the International Executive Committee and International Secretariat of the International Communist League, as well as of the SL/U.S. Central Committee and Political Bureau, had for some time evidently taken a large proportion of his political activity underground. For some eight months, he had stopped asking the party for reimbursement for bills incurred in discharging his political responsibilities from his home by phone, or through fax and computer equipment that had been supplied by the organization. At the same time, he continued to submit bills for all other material he felt he needed for whatever political work he was doing.

Of course, this doesn’t explain much. The anarchist Bakunin was expelled from the First International for financial chicanery. But that tells one very little about the differences between Marxism and anarchism. In Norden’s case, his organizational pathology reflected a shamefaced political defection from the program of revolutionary Trotskyism, not fought or argued forthrightly as such, but rather expressed in an increasingly desperate search for, and accommodation to, social forces other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist vanguard party to advance the cause of the struggle for human emancipation. After a long and exhaustive internal struggle, Norden’s revisionist course had been so thoroughly exposed that, despite his years of authority in the party, in the end he left with only his longtime political collaborator and personal companion, Stamberg, and his protégé Negrete.

Trotsky noted in The Lessons of October (1924) that sudden changes in the world situation always provoke disorientation and confusion within the revolutionary party, especially within its leadership. The period from 1989 to 1992 was marked by profound changes and historic defeats for the working class internationally as capitalist counterrevolution destroyed the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe and the Soviet Union. Buying into the imperialist triumphalism over the “death of communism,” the left generally is rapidly repudiating even any pretense of Leninism, seeking “regroupment” in larger reformist formations together with social democrats and ex-Stalinists. Our small revolutionary international is hardly immune to the disintegrative pressures of this period of post-Soviet reaction. But unlike our centrist and reformist opponents, who wallow in their opportunism while glibly denying any internal problems, we strive to be candid in assessing the tasks and difficulties facing us and are unique in bringing this before the international working class and the left.

This is because unlike other self-proclaimed Trotskyists, who have long forsaken the goal of international proletarian revolution, we fight for a new October Revolution. But the disproportion between this purpose and the current political consciousness of the working class, youth and the left internationally is great. Today, even most subjective leftists view as rather esoteric the idea that a proletarian revolution, like that successfully pursued by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917, is the key to the liberation of mankind. This is due in no small measure to the crimes of the Stalinists, and the Social Democrats before them, who made a mockery of the program and ideals of revolutionary Marxism.

As we wrote in a “Perspectives and Tasks Memorandum” adopted at a meeting of our International Executive Committee (IEC) last January and reprinted in a recently published International Bulletin (“Norden’s ‘Group’: Shamefaced Defectors from Trotskyism”): “Failure to recognize the period we are in and the necessary relationship of our small revolutionary vanguard to the proletariat, and the absence of the Soviet Union as an active and defining factor in politics, have led to disorientation and appetite to follow alien political programs and forces.”

An early manifestation of the liquidationist pressures on the ICL in this period was the 1994 minority faction in our Canadian section of Y. Rad and Marie Hayes, who frantically cast about the world for forces other than the proletariat to lead “the struggle.” This included glorifying various ex-Stalinist formations, like the Russian nationalist, fascist-infested “red-brown coalition”; looking to the murderous Algerian military regime to combat Islamic fundamentalism (while simultaneously retrospectively saluting Khomeini’s mullahs as the “ally” of the Iranian workers in 1979); and calling for support to the bourgeois-nationalist African National Congress in the 1994 South African elections.

Rad/Hayes’ overt proclivity toward unsavory nationalist formations rapidly led them out of our international. Though not as extreme, the pressures of the period have also been manifested in fights over the relevance and purpose of a revolutionary Leninist vanguard in virtually every section of the ICL. These fights have been essential not only as a political corrective but in sharpening our revolutionary program for intervention into those struggles that are erupting and that will break out in the future against the ruthless offensive being waged by the capitalist rulers internationally. But for Norden the disproportion between what we strive for and the current consciousness of the working class had become a yawning, unbridgeable abyss.

He and Stamberg evidenced a deepening pessimism about the ability of our party and its revolutionary program to have any impact in the “New World Order,” expressed in their ever more frequent broadsides against the ICL’s supposed “abstract” or “passive” propagandism. This was matched by an increasingly hostile alienation from the party leadership, in which Norden had been no mere ornament. Stamberg, an alternate member of the SL/U.S. Central Committee, long preceded him in an increasingly frenzied alienation. She was the Spartacist candidate for mayor in the 1985 New York City elections—and it would have been hard to find a better one. But for some time now, she had bridled against a perceived leaden “bureaucracy” that stood in the way of her often “rad-lib” appetites. Over the last year or so, it became increasingly evident that she had essentially quit, at least in her head, as she shed various areas of political and organizational responsibility.

The Pathology of Impressionism

Norden had always had strong tendencies toward impressionism and vicarious adventurism, animated by an often-fatuous optimism about the capacity of forces very distant from Trotskyism, or from the proletariat for that matter, to “struggle” in some successful measure against the depredations of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Within the framework of a political collective, these appetites could not only be curtailed but could also provide for a healthy tension in determining political line and intervention. At the same time, there were occasions when that balance tipped over, introducing distortions in our propaganda.

From the question of the survival of Sandinista Nicaragua against U.S. imperialism in the 1980s, to the capacities of the army of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to inflict serious damage against the imperialists during the Persian Gulf War, Norden always stood at the extreme end of a tendency to impressionistically overdraw (and often fantastically so) the military factor. Correspondingly, this meant conjuring up an anticipated flood of anti-imperialist struggle while seriously downplaying the crucial and related factors of political consciousness and material economic reality. As Trotsky noted, impressionism on military matters can lead either to the idealistic view that revolutionary fervor will make up for any military handicap or conversely can fuel a rightist impulse that any struggle is hopeless. On the latter score, early on in his time in the party, Norden viewed the 1973 Indochina “peace accords” as the end of the war against U.S. imperialism by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.

The defects in WV’s coverage of the Gulf War were particularly addressed in a document by comrade Ralf Eades, of the Spartacist League/Britain, titled “Cold War Impressionism, Workers Vanguard and the ‘Gulf War’.” Noting the overblown statements in WV articles on Iraq’s military might and its ability to inflict serious damage on the forces of U.S. imperialism, Eades asked: “Would it have been a capitulation to ‘smoke and mirrors’ imperialist propaganda to wake the workers of the world to the revolutionary defence of Iraq, to halt, derail, smash by class-struggle means the crushing one-sided slaughter being prepared before our disbelieving eyes?”

Norden’s lightminded attitude toward the military might of U.S. imperialism was reflected in the ironic tone of a front-page article on a U.S. missile attack on Baghdad in WV No. 579 (2 July 1993). Comrades’ criticism of this article, and of the way the paper was managed, was “met with a furiously defensive, turf-conscious, hypersensitive, arrogant, cliquist, anti-Leninist response” (“The Post-Soviet World: Perspectives and Tasks of the Spartacist League/U.S.,” Spartacist No. 51, Autumn 1994). This outburst was an expression of Norden’s stated position in favor of “one-man rule” over the party press (and over any aspects of our international work in which he was personally involved).

In practice this meant creating a parallel apparatus, centered on Workers Vanguard, to that of the central party administration. Norden’s personal power ambitions meant that he was constantly chafing against the Bolshevik practice that the press is subordinated to the party leadership collective. These issues came to a head in a sharp fight at a Political Bureau meeting in September 1993. The PB passed a motion noting that the Editorial Board “was beginning to act in a self-conscious and independent fashion.” Nevertheless, as long as Norden accepted the discipline of the party and the corrective measures ensuing from internal political struggles, he remained as editor of Workers Vanguard.

Norden also had a Stalinoid bent particularly vis-à-vis Castro’s Cuba which was expressed, perhaps most grotesquely, in initial attempts to alibi the Stalinist show trial and execution of General Ochoa on charges of international drug dealing. Ochoa had fought with Castro against the Batista dictatorship and led the Cuban troops in Angola against the forces backed by the U.S. and South Africa. Norden was finally persuaded that the Ochoa trial was a classic Stalinist purge. But in the article “Stalinist Show Trial in Cuba—The Execution of General Ochoa” (WV No. 500, 20 April 1990), Norden insisted on “disproving” Washington’s claims that the Havana regime was involved in the drug trade by upholding Castro’s integrity: “For Castro to lie about this would be to invite an invasion.”

Of course, the White House’s drug charges against Castro were part and parcel of U.S. imperialism’s relentless drive to crush the Cuban Revolution. But to assert, as Norden did, that Castro couldn’t lie about this was a statement of blind faith in the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy. This was fought out, resulting in a clarification in WV No. 501 (4 May 1990). But even in the face of the bitter reality that Cuba’s isolation following the collapse of the Soviet Union had led to a devastating erosion of the gains of the revolution and growing impoverishment and inequality, Norden’s infatuation with Castro’s Cuba did not abate.

Reporting on Cuba to an August 1993 meeting of our International Secretariat, just after Castro had made an enormous concession to the forces of capitalist restoration by introducing the dollar into the Cuban economy, Norden and Stamberg echoed the Stalinoid cheerleaders in North America who proclaim that “The Cuban Revolution is going to make it.” Stamberg enthused that “the regime has a lot of authority…most people want to fight, they are clear, they are class conscious.” In fact, as another comrade later replied, “They are not class conscious. It’s populist consciousness; it’s exactly the consciousness that the Stalinists have instilled.” While calling for unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against U.S. imperialism, Marxists understand that the Cuban Revolution can only be “saved” by fighting for workers revolution throughout the Americas and proletarian political revolution against the nationalist Castro bureaucracy.

With the capitalist reunification of Germany in 1990, quantity turned into quality. Norden’s attraction to Castro’s Cuba was paralleled by his fascination with the East German deformed workers state of Erich Honecker. When the DDR went down, presaging the subsequent collapse of the Soviet degenerated workers state, Norden began to become politically unhinged.

From Impressionism to Revisionism

With the collapse of the Honecker regime and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the DDR was engulfed in a developing political revolution. The impulses of the East German masses were directed not toward capitalist reunification but rather to building what they considered to be a decent socialist society on the foundations of the DDR’s nationalized economy. This produced an exceptionally open situation for Trotskyist intervention. The ICL undertook the biggest sustained mobilization in the history of our tendency, drawing upon the personnel and other resources of all sections.

We published and circulated tens of thousands of copies of a daily newssheet, Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz (Arprekorr, Workers Press Correspondence), centrally fighting to forge a Leninist-egalitarian party to establish a government of workers councils (soviets) in the DDR as a springboard to a unified German workers state based on a perspective of a Socialist United States of Europe. We later learned that our call for workers and soldiers councils had been widely discussed within units of the East German National People’s Army (NVA), leading to the formation of incipient soldiers committees particularly in the northeast. Our political impact was shown when 250,000 turned out for the 3 January 1990 united-front demonstration, to which the SED had acquiesced, in East Berlin’s Treptow Park to protest the fascist desecration of a memorial to Red Army soldiers who died liberating Germany from the Nazis. Spartakist spokesmen addressed the crowd from the platform, denouncing the ruling Stalinist SED bureaucracy and advancing a program of proletarian internationalism. The spectre of organized working-class resistance to capitalist reunification manifested at Treptow alarmed the West German imperialists and their Social Democratic front men, who turned up the heat in their campaign to stampede the DDR into reunification.

The Stalinists in the Kremlin and in the DDR gave the green light for capitalist restoration in East Germany. Two months later, the parties of West German imperialism swept the March 1990 East German elections and the DDR deformed workers state was swallowed up in a reunified capitalist Fourth Reich. The document of the Second International Conference of the ICL in 1992 noted:

Norden was centrally involved in our intervention in Germany, both in editing many issues of Arprekorr and in the political deliberations of our international leadership. But he could not face the reality of capitalist Anschluss. Unable to accept the verdict of history—that mass resistance does not follow in the wake of historic defeats—Norden began to look around for a “fightback” on the terrain of the ex-DDR. This perspective was predicated on looking for a split among the Stalinist remnants of the old DDR regime, now grouped in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), who would supposedly lead such a fight.

To prepare for future struggles, through building the necessary proletarian internationalist leadership, the most conscious workers in the former DDR needed to acquire a political understanding of Stalinism and the collapse of the East German deformed workers state. Such a Trotskyist analysis was cogently put forward in documents by Joseph Seymour (“On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe”) and Albert St. John (“For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Perspective”) which were published in English-language Spartacist No. 45-46, Winter 1990-91. But these documents did not appear in a German-language edition of Spartacist until 1994! Instead, taking advantage of his German language capacity and his role in the International Secretariat, Norden urged on our German section, the Spartakist Workers Party (SpAD), a policy of endless economist sorties into the working class of the former DDR, launching a campaign in 1991 to agitate for mass strikes. This posture of imminent “mass resistance” negated the critical factor of consciousness which only a Leninist vanguard could introduce.

Norden’s ignorant and anti-Trotskyist perspective, that working-class struggle would lead a wing of the PDS to split and “fight” against the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution, had a disorienting impact on the SpAD, which itself could not face the grim reality of the destruction of the DDR. When his fantasy of economist “fightback” didn’t work out (which must have been devastating for Norden, given his skewed, ahistorical expectations), Norden turned his attention to a perspective of recruiting “antifascist youth” through yet another “get rich quick” scheme.

The increasingly murderous fascist attacks on immigrants in Germany which came in the wake of capitalist counterrevolution provoked a significant radicalization of youth who sought to stop the Nazi terrorists. Exemplary united-front actions against the fascists, demonstrating in action our revolutionary program based on the centrality of mobilizing the social power of the working class, was surely one means to win the best of these leftist youth to Trotskyism. But Norden and Stamberg’s idea of “anti-fascist actions” was all photo-op and little political content, as was seen the one time it was implemented, in 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.

Continuing to flail about in his desperate search for a split in the PDS, Norden then came to see the main chance to “clean up” through an opportunist orientation to the geriatric remnants of the former East German Stalinist regime in the Communist Platform (KPF), the supposed “left wing” of the PDS. Excited by the increased vote for the PDS in the November 1994 German elections and opinion polls showing widespread “socialist” sentiment among the population of the ex-DDR, Norden argued for a “regroupment” perspective toward the Communist Platform, conceived as a rearguard action to make up for the recruits we didn’t get in 1989-90.

If one were seeking to recruit workers or youth mistakenly attracted to the PDS milieu as a perceived alternative to the West German Social Democrats, that would mean unmasking and combatting the KPF/PDS as a political prop for Social Democracy. Instead Norden pushed the vacuous idea that these Stalinist has-beens retained “attachments” to the former East German deformed workers state—which they had sold out! This was precisely what the PDS purveyed—playing upon the desperation of the East German working people and their nostalgia for the “good old days”—in order to build up its own social-democratic parliamentary base.

Norden’s opportunist appetites soon emerged in a flagrant public expression in a January 1995 presentation at Berlin’s Humboldt University aimed at the KPF. This speech was a case study in centrism worthy of the late Joseph Hansen, who wielded his able pen to cloak the revisionist degeneration of the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party with reams of “orthodox” formulations. While invoking the program of Trotskyism, Norden presented a liquidationist view which denied the ICL’s role as the conscious revolutionary vanguard, repeatedly intoning that in Germany in 1989-90 “the key element was missing, the revolutionary leadership.” He disappeared the central purpose and intent of the ICL’s intervention: to organize for a political revolution against the Stalinist regime, which had bureaucratically undermined the DDR deformed workers state and was now preparing to sell it off to the West German imperialists. A workers insurrection to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy with genuine proletarian internationalist rule was key to stopping capitalist counterrevolution.

Instead, Norden reduced our own revolutionary intervention to a litany of ineffective tactics, while “reaching out” to the sclerotic remnants of the former ruling bureaucracy as misguided colleagues who had a “grudging respect” for our efforts in 1989-90—which were aimed at sweeping away their Stalinist regime! According to Norden, the “SED tops” had simply been “paralyzed” at the time and not one of them “could even conceive” of a proletarian political revolution. In fact, the SED tops could not only “conceive” of a political revolution, but did everything in their power to suppress one, because they would have been its targets. Far from being paralyzed, these Stalinists took conscious, active steps to prevent a workers insurrection.

Centrist Politics, Bureaucratic Practices

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 international conferences. They declared that any and all criticisms of the “regroupment” orientation to the KPF 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.

James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, noted that there is always a consonance between the politics of centrism and anti-Leninist organizational practices. In Germany, Norden’s opportunist pursuit of the geriatric Stalinist remnants in the KPF was complemented by a vicious witchhunt denouncing any comrades perceived as an obstacle to his orientation as a “comfortable social-democratic” layer opposed to “youth recruitment”! Comrades who criticized an article in Spartakist directed toward the PDS, in which Norden had grotesquely and gratuitously inserted that the Red Army forces who liberated Germany from the Nazis had “Stalin as commander in chief,” were condemned for “capitulating” to the anti-Communism of the Fourth Reich and the popular-front left.

As comrade Albert St. John, who launched the fight against Norden’s centrist liquidationism, said in his remarks to Norden at an SpAD conference immediately following the IEC meeting:

Trotsky emphasized in “The Mistakes of the Communist League on the Trade Union Question” (January 1931):

Norden’s accommodation to alien political forces externally and his increasingly visceral opposition to the party “regime” internally were manifestations of a rejection of the need for a Leninist vanguard party. This correspondingly reflected a demoralization in the capacity of the working class to act as a “class for itself,” i.e., to become conscious of its social position and power to overthrow the entire system of capitalist exploitation and to become the new ruling class in an egalitarian society.

In place of the Leninist party needed to bring revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat, Norden increasingly came to objectify certain political formations and layers—particularly in the former DDR and Latin America—as somehow inherently susceptible to revolutionary politics. In the case of the Communist Platform, Norden saw elements of communist consciousness where none existed. On the Latin American terrain, Norden invested our fraternal relations with Luta Metalúrgica (LM)—in which he and his understudy Negrete, then a leading member of our Mexican section, initially had a central hand—with a level of political sophistication and broad agreement with the program of revolutionary Trotskyism that simply did not exist.

To defend his own “infallibility” regarding our early dealings with LM, Norden generated a revisionist methodology justifying the sort of rotten-bloc “international relations” pursued by centrist outfits like the British Workers Power group and its “League for a Revolutionary Communist International,” in which high-sounding agreements on paper mask all manner of programmatic disagreements in practice. At the same time, Norden and Negrete argued for conciliating LM’s non-Bolshevik organizational practices, implying a different conception of the party question for Latin America. Political struggle for genuine programmatic clarity and agreement with LM brought this to the fore.

Negrete in particular tried to alibi a centrist conciliation of LM’s practices with the patronizing, anti-Leninist argument that these reflected “cultural differences.” This invocation of Latin American exceptionalism represented an adaptation to the nationalism and “caudilloism” which politically characterize the Latin American left. In the course of a political struggle within the Grupo Espartaquista de México, it came out that these features also characterized Negrete’s regime in our Mexican section. The section was deliberately kept isolated from the vital struggles and debates within our international and every attempt to introduce Bolshevik norms of functioning were resisted by Negrete, who worked to maintain the section as his own personal fiefdom in which he was the unchallenged “all-knowing” leader.

When this situation came to a head and was fought out, Norden and Stamberg rallied to the defense of Negrete, arrogantly declaring that the members of our Mexican section were either liars or dupes who had been lined up by the “International.” In return, Negrete attached himself to Norden and Stamberg, like a piece of lint on a pair of serge pants. Toward the end, Negrete fancied himself the modern-day equivalent of a member of Trotsky’s Left Opposition being led away to a Siberian gulag. His (typically) long-winded proclamation in defense of Norden and Stamberg’s refusal to abide by democratic centralism concluded with the grandiose exhortation, “Down with frame-ups and witchhunting methods! For the communism of Lenin and Trotsky, long live the ICL!” But then Negrete was always, as one comrade quipped, something of a “legend in his own mind.”

Disintegrative Pressures on the Revolutionary Vanguard

The ICL is a voluntary organization. But, impelled by his own alien political appetites, Norden increasingly came to see the party and its leadership as some kind of bureaucratic prison with himself as the victim of wanton regime tyranny. The party hadn’t changed, nor had Norden particularly. What had changed was the world. As Joseph Seymour, a member of the WV Editorial Board, wrote in a letter to Norden, with whom he had worked closely for over two decades:

As belligerent and frankly bizarre as Y. Rad’s factional struggle became (which included Rad’s belief in mental telepathy!) at least he forthrightly put forward his political views. Not Norden. He used squid tactics, spilling ink in hundreds of pages of documents that were as obfuscating as they were turgid. Since the beginning of 1995 alone, at least 392 pages of internal material were written by Norden and Stamberg and circulated to all sections and locals of the ICL. Although he had fundamental differences with the program and perspectives of our international, his documents were a study in centrist evasion.

Norden obviously believed the leadership of our international was increasingly going off the political rails. But rather than declaring a faction to fight against this and for a different political perspective and a corresponding new leadership, Norden and Stamberg engaged in cliquist guerrilla warfare against the decisions of the party. Operating under the perception that the party press was his personal fiefdom—“WV c’est moi,” to paraphrase Louis XIV—“His Editorship” (as Stamberg came to refer to Norden’s position) rejected the Leninist understanding that the majority determined the line.

It is said that colleagues of Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democracy advised him not to put his disagreements with, and rejection of, Marxism in writing. Instead they argued that he avoid a political struggle and simply act on his disagreements. But Bernstein was, evidently, an honest revisionist who committed to paper his reformist view that the “movement was everything” and the “goal” of socialist revolution “nothing.” Norden was the opposite. He acted upon and tried to implement the substance of his political differences, which were increasingly antithetical to the program and purpose of the ICL, but would not openly argue for a different program or perspectives.

When caught out he would simply deny everything. But he knew he was operating on the basis of a different set of politics, as evidenced by the fact that he increasingly attempted to operate in secrecy, outside of the scrutiny of the party and its leadership. When asked to submit his phone bills, a common practice among leading cadre of our organization and something Norden had done routinely for at least the last decade, Norden defiantly and categorically refused.

Charges were brought by the International Secretariat against Norden and Stamberg “for violation of the party’s discipline of democratic centralism, specifically [their] 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.” Norden and Stamberg refused to attend the party trial which had been called to allow them to defend themselves against these charges, dismissing the party’s democratic procedures as a bureaucratic “frame-up” and denouncing the request for their phone bills as a demonic ruse to persecute other comrades. As the PB motion expelling Norden and Stamberg noted:

We are still left wondering what game Norden and Stamberg were playing. As to where they are going, the possibilities are wide open so long as the minimum norm of being anti-Marxist is met. In this regard, we have the excellent example of Y. Rad. He left our organization screaming against the supposed “Stalinophobia” displayed in our opposition to the revolting Russian “red-brown coalition” and in our refusal to support the Serbian nationalist forces in the all-sided fratricide in ex-Yugoslavia. A few months after quitting, Rad had made a 180 degree turnaround, denouncing us as “the best defenders of counter-revolutionary Stalinism.” Rad retrospectively took up the defense of Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland, of Yeltsin’s 1991 imperialist-backed countercoup in Moscow, and of the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs!

Pabloism of the Second Mobilization

Years ago, Norden was won over from a quasi-syndicalist, New Leftist position to the Spartacist League. He devoted the best decades of his life to working 16 hours a day for the Marxist socialist movement, struggling to expound revolutionary Trotskyism around the globe, particularly through Workers Vanguard, the flagship paper of our international. An early expression of Norden’s alienation from the party was his increasingly self-conscious view that WV was his fiefdom, and corresponding resistance to party intervention and criticism of the paper. Under the impact of the historic defeat represented by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, and his increasing rejection of democratic centralism, Norden’s episodic impressionism (which always had a centrist bent) became chronic and acute.

Impressionists are prone to wild and quick reversals. A case study is that of Michel Pablo, an adventurer who emerged after World War II as the leader of the decimated forces of Trotsky’s Fourth International and whose impressionism liquidated the political program and purpose of Trotsky’s International. In the 1950s, following the creation of deformed workers states in East Europe, Pablo predicted “centuries of deformed workers states” and pursued a “deep entrist” liquidation into the Stalinist and social-democratic parties. In the 1960s, Pablo’s heirs in Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat (USec) chased after petty-bourgeois guerrillaism and championed “student power.” At their 1972 World Congress, the USec rediscovered the working class, writing: “After May 1968 and, more generally, after the revival of workers’ struggles throughout Europe, an irreversible turn has taken place in this milieu everywhere in the world.” The irreversible was quickly reversed as Mandel & Co. embraced the cause of anti-Soviet social democracy in the 1980s. By the 1990s, Mandel was speaking of the “crisis of credibility” of socialism, and the USec was debating simply throwing in the towel and liquidating their organization outright.

Norden’s liquidationist course was a Pabloism of the second mobilization: denial of reality, suppression of the Trotskyist program, vicarious political adventurism and adaptation to alien political pressures, and liquidation of the Trotskyist vanguard as the necessary subjective factor in history. He was given plenty of opportunity to reverse his course. But he rejected any attempt at a political corrective as a mindless bureaucratic abuse simply aimed at “destroying his authority,” an authority which he correspondingly invested with papal proportions of infallibility.

It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!

We fight to complete the task begun by Lenin and Trotsky when they led the working class to victory in Russia in 1917—to pursue the class struggle to a victorious conclusion, with state power embodied in workers councils around the world. In a period conditioned by the colossal defeats for the international proletariat signified by capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and across East Europe, this puts our small forces in a conjuncturally fragile situation.

Across West Europe, the working class has fought back in some of the largest and most militant battles in years, yet for the first time since the Paris Commune, the masses of workers in struggle do not identify their immediate felt needs with the ideals of socialism or the program of proletarian revolution. In the U.S., where the political consciousness of the working class has long been retarded by a ruling class which has effectively fomented first religious and then raw racial hatred as a fundamental prop for capitalist exploitation, the labor movement has been fractured and driven back by two decades of surrender by the trade-union bureaucracy before a massive anti-labor offensive. Many youth who consider themselves to be “radical” are imbued with liberal-democratic idealism which finds its expression in vaguely anarchist sentiments or variants of “green” radicalism.

Failure to recognize the period we are in and the necessary relationship of our small revolutionary vanguard to the proletariat has generated disorientation, demoralization and appetites to look elsewhere for the “answer.” In this context internal political struggle is inevitable, and desperately necessary, to keep our party on the rails. As Trotsky observed in his 1937 article “Stalinism and Bolshevism”:

As the recent strike waves in France and Italy and the anti-racist mobilizations throughout West Europe demonstrate, there is a new generation of fighters, both in the working class and among radical youth, to be won to the program of international socialist revolution. The fights to reorient and steel our forces in the face of a “New World Order” are aimed at intersecting new social struggles as they erupt and winning the best elements to the program of communism.