Exchange on Chauvinism and Moralism

Dear Comrades,

I would describe myself as a long term supporter of the Spartacist tendency, one who follows the new ICL with renewed interest.

Some things in the past may best be left in the past, but as you know we sometimes have to reckon with them.

Reviewing serious past errors on the national question, you should probably look again at the “Marxist appreciation” of James Connolly, presented at a Spartacist day school in Ireland in 2006 and published in Workers Hammer https://old.iclfi.org/english/wh/195/connolly.

We read, outrageously in my view, that “calling for a military victory to the anti-Treatyites in the civil war would have been a betrayal of the working class”. In other words, lip service was paid to James Connolly and the Easter Rising, only to repudiate the war against the Treaty state imposed by British imperialism and the young Irish Communists who fought!

I have received from the same source (please don’t ask as I have promised not to) the attached draft transcript (scanned in two docs) of a never published Spartacist League history by Jim R and others in Britain in 1985. One observation: Parodi said he didn’t like it at the time, but “jokes” (?) that he was in something he grossly called the “w--- committee”.

The TLC wrote the “pickle jars” slur, Jim R “joked” about “goat-f---” in Albania while this “w---committee” was running around Britain.

The new ICL has nailed the first.

Please now finish the job.

Comradely,
JS

Dear comrade,

First, apologies once more for the delay in answering your letter. We have certainly been very busy in the last year. That said, as you have no doubt understood, this does not fully explain the delay in our answer. Rather, it is the subject matter itself that has caused us some difficulty.

Regarding Ireland, you are right to stress the importance of the question and our duty to provide answers. You are also right in pointing to serious problems (to say the least) in our previous approach. We have started to do some initial work on the question, but it will still take us a few more months. I hope the work we have done in re-evaluating various other fundamental questions of the international workers movement shows our commitment to laying solid political foundations for our work. Ireland will be no exception.

Now to the thornier question. You point to a number of chauvinist incidents in our past and ask us to “finish the job.”

The first thing I will note is that you seem to misunderstand the nature of our re-orientation. Our accomplishment over the past three years has not been to purge ourselves of chauvinism by denouncing individual instances of chauvinism or backwardness in our nearly 60 years as a tendency. Rather, the point has been to draw the lessons from our, and the entire left’s, failure in the post-Soviet period and put forward a program to advance the fight for communism in today’s conditions. One aspect of this is that we have had to revise the historic approach of the Spartacist tendency to the national question.

Here again the point is not that we were backward as a tendency and wrote some nasty things, but rather that we scorned the struggle for national emancipation. Of course, the result was a capitulation to social-chauvinism. But to address this in a way that will bring our movement forward is just as important as identifying the problem. Radical organizations are often destroyed by liberal and moralistic reactions to what are real problems.

In your letter you mention that “Jim R ‘joked’ about ‘goat-f---’ in Albania” and that the term “w---committee” was used at the time of the London station (no one in the ICL today knows anything about this). You ask us to deal with these the same way we dealt with the “pickle jars” slur in the TLQC in 2016-17. But that fight was not at all a model to follow; quite the opposite, in fact. It was precisely the type of moralistic fight that destroys but does not build.

We were certainly correct in 2016 to object to the way Spartacist Canada had written about the national question in Quebec and the “pickle jars” statement in particular. However, the problem with our internal fight was that it was entirely divorced from how to advance the struggle against national liberation and for socialism today. Because of this, the outrage against what we wrote in the past had nowhere to go but toward moralism. In the midst of a few correct and fundamental programmatic points, much of the party’s energy was directed at “fighting chauvinism” and finding the guilty people, i.e., Seymour and Co. Not only did this not help us in any way in intervening into the world, but it was also destructive.

This is typical of moralism; it seeks to blame ideas and individuals for backwardness. The solution it provides is to denounce, shame and purge. Generally, as in the example above, it is in reaction to insensitivity or chauvinism toward an oppressed group. The problem with this method is that it does nothing to actually overcome social backwardness while demoralizing and disorganizing the struggle against capitalism, which is responsible for backwardness and oppression. It also eventually fosters a backlash against the oppressed—as we can see happening toward liberal anti-racism in the U.S. today.

So, what is the Marxist way to deal with acts of social backwardness? First, we understand that social backwardness, whether in the form of nationalism, sexism or religious obscurantism, is a product of capitalist society. We understand that these will only disappear through eliminating the material conditions that engender them. This does not mean conciliating backwardness. It must be fought, but in a way that will strengthen the fighting unity of the proletariat. That is, not through shaming or preaching but by showing in action how nationalism, chauvinism, religion, etc. are obstacles to advancing the interests of the entire working class. Moreover, we must show concretely how the emancipation of the proletariat as a whole is inseparable from the fight to liberate specially oppressed groups in capitalist society.

Now let’s apply this to Jim Robertson’s comment on Albania. It was a backward joke, and we certainly do not defend it. But the manner in which we distance ourselves from it is important. A moralist response—and there have been many—would be to denounce Jim as racist and to paint the ICL as an organization that tolerated racism. The practical conclusion would be to repudiate our legacy and start fresh on a new, “non-chauvinist” basis. This would be totally wrong. This “blank slate” would be illusory and only in our own heads, because we would still be under the very same pressures. Also, it would break us from all that is good and needs to be defended in Jim and the ICL’s contributions.

More important than denouncing those comments made decades ago is understanding where they came from politically. In this way lessons can be drawn and put into practice today. Jim’s comment was a product of our general approach to the national question. That is, instead of championing the cause of oppressed nations and putting their struggle at the heart of our revolutionary perspective, we scorned the nationalists and tried to show how backward and reactionary they were. Sometimes offending national sensibilities was considered a way to be sharp against nationalism, or in this case Stalinism. This not only led to certain egregious comments, like the one you mention, but more importantly it was totally counterproductive. This approach alienates the oppressed and heightens nationalism.

Coming back to your request to “finish the job,” I say that we will finish the job, but not in the way you propose. We will continue to do exactly what we have been doing. We will put forward a program today that can overcome racial, national, sexual and religious divisions and forge the fighting unity of the proletariat. In this regard there is much to do, starting with the question of Ireland that you mention. To the extent that this work requires us to look back at the mistakes of our own tradition, we will not shy away from going to the root of the problem. But the root is programmatic, not a lack of moral righteousness or liberal sensitivity.

It is precisely this point that the LFI, BT and IBT muddy in their evaluation of the ICL. They are all in their own way blinded by subjective bitterness over past crimes (real or perceived) and are unable to address the substance of the political disagreements today in an honest and fundamental way. Actually, this is how the ICL acted toward the BT. We could not engage them without the mandatory attack that they were morally tarnished by their association with Logan and that they were chauvinist, or by raising other more nefarious insinuations. This was a moralistic and demagogic critique, which did not show how the BT’s politics were contrary to the interests of the proletariat.

Your comments on our debate with the LFI indicate that you are still holding on to this method. You write that you found it “quite bewildering at times and I do not understand how someone like Logan was there.” Again, you are missing the bigger picture. If you put to the side LFI antics and the presence of Logan, you will see that we focused our interventions on the great programmatic questions of our epoch and provided some key answers. Not only is this the Marxist way to advance the fight against social backwardness, but it is also the only way to advance the struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. It is in this way that we intend to “finish the job.”