Babies, Bathwater, and the International Bolshevik Tendency

Open letter from the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) to:

• International Communist League (ICL/SL)
• League for the Fourth International (LFI/IG)
• Bolshevik Tendency (BT)
• Bolshevik-Leninist (BLA/Australia)
• Revolutionary Regroupment (RR/Brazil)
• Other individuals in the Spartacist tradition

Dear comrades,

We have entered a new period of global turbulence and potentially convulsive class struggle. Imperialism is dragging humanity down into the abyss, but the working class is showing signs it is finally starting to get back on its feet. We are all aware that the trade-union bureaucracy and the reformists will destroy every opportunity that presents itself if they are not politically defeated. A new Leninist-Trotskyist organization is desperately needed to provide leadership and serve as a pole of attraction for the politically advanced layers of workers and youth who could form the nucleus of a Bolshevik-type party. That organization will not simply spring into existence through the frenetic groundwork of an existing group; nor will it emerge from an amalgamation of tendencies in a mutually amnestying merger. Rather, it will be built through the hard work of dedicated communists in different organizations—with a central role played by the anti-Pabloite forces of the revolutionary Spartacist tradition—seeking to effect “splits and fusions” in the course of real-world interventions in the class struggle and, most importantly, the defense, development and application of the Marxist program.

James Robertson and his comrades in the Revolutionary Tendency were expelled from the SWP 60 years ago. A decade later, the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) was initiated. The goal was the reforging of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But by the mid-1970s—despite important opportunities, advances and the dedication of hardworking comrades—the general political climate in the US and elsewhere had shifted to the right, and the coming years were marked by Reaganite reaction, Thatcherism and their equivalents, culminating in the downfall of the USSR in 1991. The downturn in the class struggle internationally was expressed inside the iSt, which lost its revolutionary way despite the continued commitment of its self-sacrificing and talented members. This in turn led to a process of fragmentation resulting in multiple organizations claiming the Spartacist tradition—the renamed ICL, ourselves in the IBT, the LFI, BT, BLA and RR, plus many individuals who are not current members of a cadre organization but apply aspects of their Spartacist education as sympathizers, activists, writers and trade unionists.

Common Heritage

Despite the common heritage, these organizations have important differences in the understanding and application of the Bolshevik program (both historical and contemporary) as well as differing empirical assessments of national and global situations, developed over decades of independent existence and often hostile interactions with one another. It is neither desirable nor possible to gloss over those differences, yet we agree at least formally on some central programmatic points:

1. Working-class independence and opposition to popular-frontism;
2. Opposition to imperialism and the advocacy of military defeat of our “own” imperialist governments in war (and for the military victory of neocolonies attacked by the imperialists);
3. Unconditional defense of the remaining deformed workers’ states (most significantly, China) and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy;
4. Defense of the right to national self-determination and other democratic rights (including for those suffering from special oppression) combined with opposition to petty-bourgeois or bourgeois ideologies;
5. Permanent revolution, i.e., the recognition of the total bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie everywhere and the need to struggle for proletarian revolution even in those countries of “belated” economic development; and
6. The centrality of revolutionary leadership (i.e., the fight for a Leninist vanguard party).

These points grow out of the shared history and programmatic heritage of the iSt, rooted in the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, the first four congresses of the Comintern, James P. Cannon’s SWP, Trotsky’s Fourth International, the RT’s struggle against the SWP’s degeneration and a (critical) identification with the anti-Pabloite IC.

A Joint International Conference and Discussion

The ICL has recently made a new political turn and is in the process of re-evaluating much of its past, unfortunately in a direction away from our shared tradition. However, a side effect of this self-examination is a new openness and willingness to discuss politics, as illustrated by the debate with the BT in London in October, the debate with the LFI in New York City this month and the ICL’s recent acceptance of our proposal to debate in Australasia in the near future. We can only welcome these opportunities to further the process of programmatic clarification between claimants of the iSt tradition, but the gravity of the current world situation demands much more.

We propose that the organizations identifying with the iSt tradition hold, within the course of this year, a joint international conference at which key elements of the Trotskyist program and their application be debated. We furthermore propose a pre-conference discussion period during which formal documents are exchanged between the organizations in a transparent manner and published online. Alongside the formal, public exchange of documents, a secure online server could be established to allow interaction not only between the leaderships of the different groups but between the memberships as well, aiming to break down some of the non-political barriers that exist between us. All these exchanges should also be open to individual former members and current sympathizers loyal to the iSt tradition. Where possible in individual locations, the different organizations could also collaborate in principled united-front work in areas of agreement around specific demands, with the natural process of discussion that accompanies such work.

This would not be a series of privileged leadership-to-leadership talks, for which there is insufficient programmatic agreement. The conference we propose would bind none of the participants to anything, but would instead allow us to explore our differences and promote our ideas in a fraternal yet serious manner. It is clear that regroupment of all the iSt’s descendants around a program of genuine Bolshevism is most unlikely. We are under no illusions that the reforging of the international Spartacist tendency is possible through papering over differences or liquidating into a lowest-common-denominator lash-up. But clarification of differences and of areas of agreement would facilitate the process of splits and fusions that will frame the consolidation of the forces of genuine Trotskyism into a sizable fighting formation, with roots in the working class and a geographic spread around the world. Failure to seize opportunities to advance that process is an admission of political bankruptcy—the promotion of cliquism, ego or political cowardice over the needs of the working class.

Major Obstacles

There are major obstacles to regroupment. The new ICL leadership has moved away from the programmatic heritage of the revolutionary Spartacist tradition towards a kind of neo-Pabloism, though they reject this characterization. In our view, the ICL is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, seeking to liberate itself not only from its self-isolating sectarianism and more obvious political errors but also from those elements of Bolshevism it had managed to retain from its early, revolutionary phase. For the new ICL, it turns out that Jim Robertson was always a “sectarian” and even a “social democrat,” unable to grasp the central role of national-liberation struggles within the “anti-imperialist united front” as the “lever” for world socialist revolution. From the 1980s onward, Robertson’s organization did indeed engage in sectarianism (e.g., its deliberate sabotage of the 11-day anti-apartheid ILWU labor action initiated by ET supporter Howard Keylor in 1984) and social-democratic cravenness (e.g., its call to save the lives of those US Marines who survived the Islamic Jihad attack in Lebanon in 1983). However, these and the many subsequent deviations were departures from, not applications of, the revolutionary program that the iSt had embodied at its foundation. A thorough accounting of Spartacist history and its applicability for the tasks of today is long overdue, but a wholesale break from their revolutionary origins will leave the ICL floundering with no political compass, indistinguishable from many other false claimants to Trotskyism.

The leaders of the IG were wrongly kicked out of the SL in the mid 1990s, i.e., a full decade-and-a-half into what we consider to be the ICL’s period of degeneration, to which the LFI leadership were perhaps conflicted but nonetheless important contributors. Declining to debate or seriously engage with the IBT, the LFI have worked furiously to build their forces while refusing to acknowledge the parallels between their own expulsion from the ICL and previous bureaucratic handling of dissidents (or potential dissidents)—whether the Clone Purge of 1978, the show trial of Bill Logan in 1979 or the purge of the Australian section in 1981. Defending every error committed by the ICL until it was their turn on the chopping block, the leaders of the LFI have barreled ahead with blinders on, creating a more energetic, less bureaucratic version of the ICL circa 1996—one which has been less inclined towards political vacillation or major error but which inherited many of the political weaknesses of its parent organization. If the ICL is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the LFI wants to keep the poor kid sitting in dirty water.

The BT split from the IBT five years ago over what was then a theoretical dispute over the nature of Russia in the 21st century. Their sectarian departure—capped off with a farcical appropriation of our name and the mysterious claim to have “dissolved” a 28-year-old fusion the way kings of yore sometimes had tiresome marriages “annulled”—reflected an unserious attitude toward Leninism and the question of the revolutionary party. Yet the actual outbreak of the proxy war in Ukraine created a genuine programmatic difference: the BT took the side of Russia (as did the LFI, eventually), while the IBT adopted a dual-defeatist position between Russia and the NATO aggressors acting through their Ukrainian pawn (as did the ICL, for different reasons). Only the IBT considers Russia to have become an imperialist power. While program trumps theory, the two are obviously closely related. Among the groups coming out of the iSt tradition, there are both theoretical and programmatic differences on one of the key questions of global politics today.

Urgent Necessity

The volatile world situation will no doubt be reflected in a shake-up of the “Spartacist milieu,” accelerated by the SL’s recent turn. Some comrades have moved to the right and more may follow, others may spin out of politics, but those who remain committed to building a Bolshevik nucleus need to let go of past petty grievances (real or perceived) and get on with the hard work of forging a revolutionary fighting force based on the Leninist-Trotskyist program.

We have no illusions that this will be an easy path. In fighting for the rebirth of the revolutionary iSt, we do not seek a clone of the old, but to reforge an iSt that transcends the flaws of the original—flaws that made it susceptible to degeneration in the way a weak immune system imperils the health of the body. We seek to rebuild an iSt that not only defends its revolutionary origins from the 1970s but extends and applies the Bolshevik program to address the state of the world as it is today, an organization that can become a factor in history, rooting itself in workers’ struggles and building the forces of a much larger Trotskyist international through a broader process of splits and fusions around the Bolshevik program.

We wish to begin undertaking the necessary practical measures to prepare the international conference. We await your response.

Communist Greetings,
Josh Decker,
for the International Executive Committee of the IBT

The ICL reply below was published on iclfi.org.

Dear comrades,

We received your 1 January 2024 letter.

We are in favor of engaging in more discussions with the IBT and with the other tendencies claiming the mantle of Spartacism, as well as with any group in the international left, for the purpose of advancing the struggle to reforge the Fourth International. In this spirit, a joint international conference of various organizations is certainly something we could support.

That said, we found that your proposal was putting the cart before the horse. It is mainly focused on organizational matters (how to organize discussions and a conference) while not dealing seriously with the political questions at stake. Let me explain.

The main document of our Spartacist No. 68, “The Breakdown of U.S. Hegemony and the Struggle for Workers Power,” explains the crisis of the left in the post-Soviet period and responds to the main problems confronting the international workers movement today. It is a proposal to cohere the forces of Trotskyism, which is why it is also titled “A Program for the Fourth International.” Furthermore, the various documents on permanent revolution in this same issue of Spartacist develop a perspective for socialist revolution in the neocolonial world, while demonstrating in depth how the Spartacist tendency’s founding program on this question stood in contradiction to Lenin, to the early Comintern and to Trotsky himself. This entire issue of Spartacist represents the ICL’s contribution to reforging the Fourth International today.

But we have yet to see a serious attempt by the IBT (or any other group) to seriously criticize these documents. The IBT published on October 3 a small diatribe titled “Spartacism Junked,” which consists of a succession of unproven and demagogic assertions about how the ICL is now led by a bunch of cynical Pabloites and bourgeois nationalists. Your January 1 letter is similar, calling us neo-Pabloites who are throwing out the “baby and the bathwater” (the main title of your letter) without bothering to seriously explain what this “baby” consists of and, crucially, why it matters for the struggle to reforge the Fourth International today. Reprinting a series of decade-old articles does not constitute a serious response, and a list of abstract Marxist truisms does not constitute a program.

The first step toward opening a fruitful and clarifying discussion is for the IBT (or any other group) to seriously put forward a fundamental criticism of our new program, and counterpose your own. But because you fail to do this, your proposal amounts to a call for a bloc against the new course of the ICL based solely on a vague and somewhat nostalgic attachment to the “old” Spartacist program. In other words, an unprincipled bloc.

Lastly, your proposal to organize discussions from the base up as opposed to “privileged” leadership-to leadership talks is a species of Menshevism. To seriously engage with us or any other group, you must engage with the elected leadership of the party. That is how we engage with the IBT or any other left organizations. We are in favor of more informal discussions between our respective memberships. We are also open to the possibilities of opening joint internal discussions, provided that serious political exchanges take place. But you cannot achieve political clarity or build Leninist parties by liquidating democratic centralism into informal chatting between members (or ex-members who have quit active political life).

So, to paraphrase Trotsky: program first! Online servers for discussions? Joint conference? Practical measures? Very well, very well. But program first! Your political passports, please, gentlemen! And not false ones, if you please—real ones!

We are looking forward to a serious response to the program put forward in Spartacist No. 68 and a clarifying discussion with the IBT and all the other groups listed in your open letter.

Communist greetings,
Vincent David
for the International Secretariat of the International Communist League

Dear comrades,

Thank you for your 11 January response to our open letter. We appreciate your willingness to engage in a process of discussion.

To first address an apparent misunderstanding—discussion between the organizations that have emerged from the Spartacist tradition should of course be led by their elected leaderships, which represent the most crystalized form of the various political currents. It goes without saying that we propose no diminution of democratic centralism. However, given the number of organizations that may potentially be involved, the time that has passed, the bad blood and sub-political debates that have occurred (where discussion has occurred at all), we believe that it would be most beneficial to include those with a declared loyalty to the same tradition who are not currently organized as well as those who are under discipline of one or another organization. Details can and should be determined by the leaderships of the participating organizations.

The need for leadership is precisely why our proposal for a framework for programmatic discussion is in no way counterposed to “program first.” You have spent the past few years overthrowing many elements of your historical program and you indicate that this process is not yet complete. Of course we plan to respond in more detail—there is a lot to critique. Yet the basic lines are clear. You believe that “the Spartacist tendency’s founding program on this question [permanent revolution] stood in contradiction to Lenin, to the early Comintern and to Trotsky himself.” We believe that founding program is the “baby” you are throwing out in an attempt to rid yourselves of the jagged zigzags and sectarianism that have characterized your organization for over 40 years.

Permanent revolution is a key theme of Spartacist #68, and the topic we proposed to your comrades in Australia as the basis for a debate. They accepted the debate, but suggested that it be held in New Zealand rather than Melbourne (a city with a much greater Trotskyist culture and history than is found in NZ). We replied in late November to say that we preferred Melbourne but would be happy to debate in both locations, and we have heard nothing since. We hope a debate or debates can occur as soon as possible, as a key part of the “serious response to the program put forward in Spartacist No. 68” that you are eager to see.

Our approach is not nostalgia, comrades. This “baby” is the fundamental root of our political practice. We refer you to the following key documents that represent our contributions in the past few years to applying the program of the Third and Fourth Internationals and the revolutionary international Spartacist tendency to the world we face today. Some mention your organization and some do not, but they all contribute to clarifying our differences on the role of a revolutionary organization in relation to the national question, the popular front, imperialist war, deformed and degenerated workers’ states, liberalism and social democracy. As we say, we will be replying specifically to your latest program, but already these documents provide more developed discussion of these questions than you have produced in the same time period.

• Inching towards WWIII: US imperialism targets Russia & China
  
• Ukraine & the Left: Revolutionary defeatism & workers' internationalism
• Imperialist Rivalries Escalate: Russia—capital export & global power
• The Revolution Overthrown: How the Soviet Union was destroyed
• Stop the Gaza Genocide! Marxism & the struggle for Palestinian liberation
• Marxism & Indigenous Peoples: The Canadian struggle
• Nationalism & Nagorno-Karabakh
• Pink Tides & Popular Fronts: Revolutionary strategy in Latin America
• Democrats in Power: ‘Woke’ Liberalism in the Service of Imperialism
• Whither America? Class, Crisis & Imperial Decay
• School Closures, Class Struggle & Covid-19
• The Corbyn Project: A case study in social democracy
• Marxism & Bourgeois Elections