Editorial Note

In the span of a few weeks in 1996, comrades Norden, Negrete, Stamberg and Socorro were driven out of our organization, the International Communist League. These comrades then went on to found the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International (LFI). This bureaucratic purge went hand in hand with a break in fraternal relations we had established with a group in Brazil—Luta Metalúrgica/Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LM/LQB)—with whom Norden and Negrete were heavily involved.

The main document of this bulletin, on page 5, is the report of the investigation into this purge by the ICL’s International Control Commission (ICC), a body that, among other things, investigates breaches of democratic-centralist norms. The investigation was mandated by our 2023 International Conference, and its findings were unanimously adopted at the April 2025 plenum of our International Executive Committee. The ICC investigation concluded that the comrades who went on to found the LFI were driven out of our organization through frame-up internal trials, demagogic fights and multiple breaches of the party’s internal democratic norms. The investigation also concluded that the break in fraternal relations with LM/LQB was completely unprincipled and destructive.

Along with the report on the investigation, we have included a number of attachments, including the accounts by the purged comrades (see pages 14, 20, 27 and 49), which we find accurate in depicting what took place. We also include the Workers Vanguard articles from the time justifying the purge and the break in relations (see pages 37 and 44). Also, we are publishing for the first time the presentations by leading ICL comrades Robertson, Kendall and Nelson at the Spartacist League/U.S. Bay Area District Conference meeting on 28 May 1996 (see page 15), which clearly show how internal disagreement with this purge was treated as disloyalty to the party.

There is no doubt that this entire episode represents one of the worst stains on the history of the ICL. Comrades were hounded out of our ranks in a manner similar to how Trotskyists were purged from Stalinized Communist parties in the 1920s. Then, for almost 30 years the ICL defended these actions tooth and nail, falsely branding the LFI as “defectors” and the LM/LQB as “union-suers.” This fueled a vicious cycle of resentment. However, while the purging of the LFI comrades as well as the break in relations with LM/LQB were outrageous in themselves, there was something more fundamentally nefarious about this episode. There were no fundamental political disagreements between the ICL and the purged comrades. Therefore, the result was that two organizations with virtually identical programs were now competing against each other, spreading great confusion and disorientation in the movement to reforge the Fourth International.

The documents in this bulletin mainly focus on the organizational measures taken against the LFI and the LM/LQB comrades. So, for many readers they might raise more questions than provide answers. How was such an obvious bureaucratic frame-up even possible? Why was there not more resistance in the ICL? And why has it taken 30 years to overturn it? The reason the ICL is repudiating this purge decades later is not the result of any moral epiphany. At the root of the events was the ICL’s erroneous political program in the post-Soviet period. And what enables us today to repudiate the purge has been an intense internal struggle, which led to repudiating our entire course in the post-Soviet period. This is developed in the document “The ICL’s Post-Soviet Revisionism” (Spartacist No. 68, September 2023) adopted at our 2023 International Conference. We recommend that this be read alongside the documents in the bulletin.

After having uniquely fought with all its strength against the destruction of the USSR, the ICL entered the post-Soviet period completely disoriented. The party was without a compass to navigate what was a difficult period for all Marxists, who were confronted with the need to find a purpose in the shadow of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, the worst historic defeat for the world proletariat. The triumph of U.S. hegemony and liberal ideology, along with relative economic growth and social progress, threw the Marxist movement to the margins of society, unable to affect the class struggle or justify its own existence. As liberalism came to dominate the workers movement and the left, no Marxist groups understood the necessity to combat this ideological poison—and thus ended up adapting to it or retreating into sterile abstractions.

This is the background of the purge, which was fed by a number of factors. The party leadership was confronted with the need to maintain the organization while being unable to advance the revolutionary movement and lacking an understanding of the historical period and the tasks of Marxists in it. This laid the basis for an ever shriller and more brittle internal regime. The party came to measure itself exclusively by upholding the achievements of the past rather than by engaging in the effort of making new ones in the present. Any sign of dissent and disagreement was treated as an attack on the party itself, and any perceived opportunist mistake as a repudiation of our entire legacy. With Norden, Negrete and their collaborators being critical voices pushing for more active party intervention, the leadership drew a circle around them, falsely branding them as inherent opportunists. This is what eventually led to their purge. This also explains in part why so many ICL members agreed with it, although some did so with much hesitation, as the Bay Area presentations show, while a few members chose to quit.

However, if one looks back at the post-Soviet period, it is clear that this process was not unique to the ICL. Many groups on the far left have seen equally damaging purges and unclear splits in the last 30 years, indicating how far back our movement has been thrown and how incapable it was of charting a way forward. What distinguishes the ICL today has been our ability to look back critically at this period and understand our failure as well as that of the entire communist movement.

In many ways, the more profound tragedy is that while the comrades of the LFI were able to identify many of the ICL’s departures from Marxism, they were never able to get to their political roots and generalize them in a broader understanding of the crisis of the Marxist movement and its tasks in the post-Soviet period. Unlike Trotsky and his followers, who, after their purge, developed a materialist understanding of the degeneration of the Comintern and an analysis of the tasks of revolutionaries in that period against Stalinist perversions, the LFI’s agreement with the ICL’s perspectives for the post-Soviet period tied their hands politically. Thus, they were unable to provide a Marxist explanation of what had happened to them and what needed to be done in the world. This is why in “The ICL’s Post-Soviet Revisionism” we characterized the LFI and the ICL as two satellites orbiting around American liberalism, unable to combat and defeat its poisonous influence on the left and in the workers movement.

The contents of this bulletin go a long way toward explaining why the LFI comrades hold a deep distrust toward the ICL. Certainly, one reason we publish this material is to seek to repair decades of complete hostility between our organizations. But whether this will work also depends on the LFI. While our two tendencies held a public debate in New York in January 2024, the LFI leadership has refused all of our proposals for formal discussions.

Our main goal in publishing this bulletin is to come out clean in front of the broader movement to reforge the Fourth International. We believe that nothing will be gained by sweeping the crimes and errors of our party under the rug. Only full transparency can advance our cause. Furthermore, we hope that this bulletin can serve as a warning of what might happen when parties created to lead social revolutions find themselves unable to chart a way forward for the working-class movement. Such a warning is particularly timely as the world is seeing profound changes, and as many Marxist organizations are facing internal crises while having drawn no lessons from the last 30 years.