https://iclfi.org/pubs/wv/1182/poland
In April 2019, the International Executive Committee (IEC) of the ICL expelled two members of the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski for “violations of democratic-centralism,” thereby liquidating the Polish section. Printed below is a motion adopted this past March by the IEC elected at the 8th International Conference upholding the Polish section’s appeal to rescind their bureaucratic expulsion. It was an oversight not to have printed this in the recent Spartacist [English edition] No. 69, August 2024 (Spartacist.org/en/69). The motion now appears here as the expulsions of the SGP comrades were first announced in Workers Vanguard (see WV No. 1152, 5 April 2019).
Motion: To uphold the SGP’s appeal and to rescind their expulsions. The IEC concurs with the following characterisation made by Wartecki and Jedniak of their expulsions in March 2019:
“We do not agree with the IS [International Secretariat] decision and we think that, under the pretext of an inconsequential incident, the IS has closed down an internal discussion inconvenient for it.” (SGP motion, 24 March 2019, cited in Letter by Jedniak and Wartecki, 17 September 2023)
The “inconsequential incident” in question consisted of texting a non-member about frustrations with the party, which does not constitute, as the I.S. argued at the time, political collaboration. While comrade Wartecki should not have done this, as he acknowledged at the time, this act did not warrant expulsion.
The expulsions of Wartecki and Jedniak meant the liquidation of the Polish section of the ICL. To further concur with the Polish comrades’ argument that this violated the ICL’s own Organizational Rules which note that “Sections may be admitted to or expelled from the ICL only by the International Conference, or by decision of the IEC to be submitted to the ratification of the next International Conference” (Article IV).
This decision was a bureaucratic consequence of a revisionist programme for Poland that rendered the ICL fundamentally incapable of dealing with the national oppression of Poland and the Stalinist bureaucracy, and thus unable to deal with the various political questions repeatedly raised by the comrades. From this revisionist framework, we proceeded to slander them as backward on the woman and Jewish questions, Stalinophobic, and capitulatory to Polish nationalism.
We note that the ex-SGP comrades do not presently wish to be members of the ICL. We seek to open discussions with the Polish comrades on what constitutes a revolutionary perspective for Poland today and the tasks for Marxists therein. We should publicly acknowledge this decision on their appeal in the next Spartacist, including, importantly, the slanderous nature of our so-called criticisms of their politics.
