Al Nelson (1936-2022)

In the brief obituary for Al Nelson published shortly after he died (Spartacist No. 67, August 2022), we stated: “A more comprehensive treatment of Al Nelson’s life as a Trotskyist cadre will appear in a future issue.” What took so long? The political lives of our founding cadres cannot be properly evaluated separate from the party they built. The International Communist League’s return to authentic Trotskyism required extensive internal party discussion to understand and break with decades of political disorientation. This critical review of our past is an ongoing process for the purpose of honing our interventions today.

The ICL’s Eighth International Conference dug into our degeneration and collapse in the post-Soviet world, and its conclusions are published in Spartacist No. 68 (September 2023). Up until then, as the most formidable central party leader in the 1990s, Al had been resented and blamed for many of the problems in this period of party history. But the truth is that Al’s methods mirrored the party’s strengths and weaknesses. Filling out more of this picture, a recent plenum of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee examined the party’s work in the 1980s, which enabled us to finally write this obituary.

From Racist Philadelphia to Revolutionary Marxism

Al Nelson is a huge part of our history. He was the last surviving party veteran going back to the Revolutionary Tendency (forerunner to the Spartacist League). He was elected to the SL/U.S. Central Committee at its founding conference in 1966 and, after the founding of the International in 1979, to the International Executive Committee. Lessons drawn from Al’s lifetime of party work have enduring value for revolutionaries today.

Al spoke about his personal history and development as a Marxist at a 1991 commemoration of his 30th year since joining the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and subsequently the Revolutionary Tendency (RT). In his own words, Al said:

Al was introduced to the ideas of socialism and Trotskyism by a fellow soldier who lived off-base and received leftist publications. He concluded that Trotskyism was the programmatic continuity with the Bolshevik Party and the 1917 October Revolution. He eagerly read his friend’s subscription to the SWP’s Militant and other periodicals every week. He said, “Finally, reluctantly I accepted the conclusion that the source of every one of the world’s problems that had been weighing so heavily on me was the social system of capitalism, and that it would take a revolution by a Bolshevik type of party to get rid of it.” Discharged from the Army in 1961, Al made his way to New York to join the SWP.

Al was invited to an SWP social, which led to an invitation to dinner with Jim Robertson (founder of the Spartacist League). Jim put Al on a systematic reading program of basic Marxist texts. They agreed that if he read one or two books a week, Jim and his companion would give him a home-cooked meal and discuss the books. Al recalled being “electrified” by Lenin’s State and Revolution:

When Al joined the YSA in 1961, he discovered that he had walked into a raging faction fight waged by the RT against the SWP’s uncritical adulation of Fidel Castro and its refusal to intervene in the civil rights movement to win radicals who were fed up with the go-slow preachers and pacifists. The RT’s starting point was the fight for socialist revolution, led by Trotskyist parties built through active participation in mass struggles and opposition to the misleaders who appeased and propped up capitalist class rule. Al joined the RT and got an accelerated lesson in faction fighting for revolutionary principles. The SWP bureaucratically expelled him in 1964. He and other expelled RT members went on to found the SL.

The party question was paramount for Al. His 1995 presentation was selected as the introduction for the second edition of the Spartacist pamphlet, Lenin and the Vanguard Party:

Al was inspired by the writings of James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism. At the commemoration of his 30 years in the Trotskyist movement, he cited Cannon:

Cannon’s statement resounds loudly in the ICL today. So too does a 1964 letter to all YSA members signed by Al Nelson and other expelled members of the RT: “Although the YSA and SWP have gone very far on the road of political revision and bureaucratic organizational practice, the process is not irreversible.”

Defend the Cuban Revolution!

In Cuba, Al applied the politics he had deeply learned through the RT faction fight. In defiance of a State Department ban on travel to Cuba, Al spent two months there in 1964 on an extensive tour with a group of leftists, black nationalists and liberals. He made a point by visibly carrying a copy of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. He was noticed and sought out by Cuban Trotskyists (followers of Juan Posadas), whose leaders had been jailed, their printing presses seized and the type that had been set for a Spanish-language edition of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution smashed. These comrades had honorable political histories in the underground movement against the hated dictator Fulgencio Batista. They were combatants in the Cuban Revolution, including the final insurrection, in their capacity as union militants and members of their neighborhood Committees for Defense of the Revolution.

At a presentation by Che Guevara to tour participants, Al was called on in the question and answer period. Despite loud heckling, Al challenged the haloed hero of the Cuban Revolution. Through his translator, Che silenced the heckling: “Comrade Guevara says let the man speak.” Al got right to the point: “Don’t you think it would be better if political criticism inside the framework of support to the revolution were handled politically rather than by suppression of views, as was done to the Cuban Trotskyists?” The translator replied: “Comrade Guevara says, ‘that’s not a question’.” Al said, “Well, ask comrade Guevara to answer it anyway.”

Guevara replied with timeworn Stalinist slander and innuendo: “I agree with your statement, but the Cuban Trotskyists are not inside the Revolution, but only divisionists. I did not see them in any mountains, I did not see them dead in any city battle. They appeared after the revolution was over, giving instructions on what to do—in Guantanamo, etc. I won’t say they are CIA agents—we don’t know. They have no history of support to the Revolution.”

In a report on his Cuba trip to the New York Spartacist Committee, Al said, “There is no question that by the end of the trip everyone had some understanding of what Trotskyism is.” Al also reported that there was a hard racial polarization within the group between the black nationalist militants and the liberals and “quasi-socialists” with thinly disguised racist attitudes. Al and his Spartacist comrades sided with the militant nationalists, while also struggling to win them to the understanding that class, not race, is the basic division within U.S. capitalist society.

On the trip, Al discovered that the Fidelistas were hushing up leaders of the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. in order to pursue the pipe dream of “peaceful coexistence” with U.S. imperialism. Robert F. Williams—the black revolutionist who had advocated armed self-defense for the civil rights movement (see his book Negroes with Guns, 1962) and fled to Cuba to escape a racist FBI manhunt—had been censored by the Fidelistas. His “Radio Free Dixie” show was taken off the air for a period of time and the publication of his newspaper, The Crusader, was suspended.

Al wrote the groundbreaking article “Freedom for Cuban Trotskyists!” (Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965). This article shattered the shameful cover-up by the American left of political repression in Cuba, including censorship of black militants as well as the suppression of Trotskyists. With the precision and programmatic clarity that defined Al at his best, he wrote:

Building the Spartacist League

As the civil rights struggles moved North, it became increasingly clear to the most radical militants that liberal integrationism was a dead end. The U.S. ruling class was willing to abolish Jim Crow laws in the South because they had become an international embarrassment. But forcible segregation—economically, socially and politically—of black people at the bottom of society was ruthlessly maintained North and South to divide the working class and buttress the American capitalist system. This led to a series of ghetto explosions in the mid to late 1960s, provoked by the cops, who brutalized black people with a vengeance. Harlem was a hotbed of militant black struggle in the North. The 1964 murder of a black teenager by an off-duty cop ignited mass protest. The Democratic Party liberals who ruled New York City sang freedom songs for King’s pacifist marches in the South while unleashing the full force of police terror on black Harlem.

The only people who actively intervened in defense of the black community were reds. Al Nelson and many other Spartacist comrades had been deeply involved in building the Harlem Organizing Committee. They helped organize rent strikes and block committees to challenge the slumlords, fought for self-defense against brutality and independent political action against the Democratic and Republican parties.

When Harlem exploded in 1964 in response to the cop murder, Spartacist joined the Harlem Defense Council, initiated by Progressive Labor, seeking to provide effective organization and direction to the people in the streets. Outside Harlem, we launched the united-front Harlem Solidarity Committee to rouse the New York labor movement in defense of the black masses and take the heat off the ghetto. The committee rallied about a thousand people in the garment district around the slogans: “Remove the Rioting Cops from Harlem” and “Support the Right of the Citizens of the Ghetto to Defend Themselves” (see “Harlem Riot and After,” Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965). When the state accused Spartacist of being behind the riots in Los Angeles and Chicago, Al was selected to be the Spartacist spokesman at public meetings built with flyers reading, “What is behind these ‘race riots’? How can they be changed into conscious political struggle? What can you do?”

Al Nelson was also the party spokesman for the break with the liberal Vietnam antiwar “Committee for the 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade” in 1965. This was typical of the lash-ups often built by radical leftists and avowed socialists that demand “unity” on the lowest common denominator politically in order to subordinate movements to Democratic Party liberals. Genuine Marxists are banned from raising their own views and debating those of other organizations. In pointed remarks aimed at the SWP that had brokered this class-collaborationist antiwar committee, Nelson said, “We for one value our political viewpoints more than we do such a fake ‘unity’.” Before leading a walkout, he continued:

In 1966, Al was sent on a national tour to politically consolidate the SL’s membership as well as give public talks on “Revolutionary Perspectives for the Anti-War Movement.” The forum flyer proudly proclaimed Al’s credentials: “Central Committee Member and Organizer for Spartacist; Former National Committee Member of YSA; Politically Undesirable Discharge from U.S. Army; Part of Ban-Breaking 1964 Cuba Trip; Spartacist Delegate to Recent NCC [National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam] Convention.”

Al’s forum in New Orleans is legendary. He was the first communist ever to speak at Louisiana State University. The mayor of Baton Rouge sent a telegram to the governor of Louisiana, who phoned the President of the United States to suggest arresting Al and opening an FBI investigation. The Associated Press put this local campus forum on its national wire service. Radio and television crews covered the event for three days. At one press conference, the governor said that “Nelson apparently violated the U.S. treason laws, and the only facility which should be made available to such persons is the jail.” Apparently dissuaded from pursuing charges of treason, the governor then wanted to have Al put in a mental institution. Branches of the Ku Klux Klan that had not met in years carried out cross-burnings.

Al’s forum sparked leftist ferment too. He reported to a meeting of New York Spartacist that the New Orleans forum had convinced one former member to rejoin and more recruits were pending. To say he made a splash in the conservative American South would be quite an understatement. Decades later, people still remembered the Spartacist spokesman in New Orleans who declared solidarity with the North Vietnamese against U.S. imperialism.

Seeking International Extension

The Spartacist League’s founding cadres knew that national isolation inside the U.S. imperialist behemoth would inevitably lead to political degeneration. The international Trotskyist movement had been severely damaged by fascists, Stalinists and bourgeois repression in World War II. Michel Pablo came to dominate the postwar Fourth International with revisionist politics that undermined the struggle to build Trotskyist parties. Pabloism was defined by the capitulatory perspective of joining Stalinist parties for the long term and cheerleading petty-bourgeois guerrilla movements. This liquidationism was a consequence of the theoretical inability of the postwar Trotskyists to apply revolutionary Marxism in a world order that was different from what had been projected by Leon Trotsky, who had been assassinated in 1940.

The Spartacist tendency sided with the anti-Pablo currents in the Trotskyist movement. We sought to clarify the political differences that existed among the various groups that claimed the mantle of Trotskyism, with the goal of forging a unified Fourth International through splits and fusions based on key programmatic criteria.

A delegation of our leading comrades went to the 1966 London conference on reconstructing the Fourth International, called by Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC). We fundamentally agreed with the IC’s written perspectives. But we also were very frank about our differences with Healy—the class nature of Cuba, the strategic nature of the black question in the U.S. and the necessity to combat Pabloism. None of this sat well with Healy, who pompously proclaimed that he had already defeated Pabloism and the IC was the Fourth International. It was clear that we would not be the uncritical acolytes Healy sought, so he fabricated an organizational pretext (Jim Robertson’s absence from one conference session) and expelled the Spartacist delegation (see Spartacist No. 6, June-July 1966).

This split with Healy was a blow to comrades, who were eager to become part of an international movement. After getting the news from Jim Robertson, Al dashed out a memo to all comrades: “Flash!… We must stand firm in the face of this unprincipled attack. Nothing must get in the way of building a revolutionary movement here as part of the rebuilding of the Fourth International.” Al signed off with the words “Granite Hardness!!”—a motto that epitomized Al himself and what he demanded of others.

Leninist parties are built through internal fights over how to concretely intervene to advance the struggles of the working class and the oppressed in a given time and place. Al earned his spurs by fighting to politically cohere our cadre in the party’s formative years, including through key factional struggles (see “On Party History,” Marxist Studies No. 10, June 2018). It is not easy to distill the core political differences underlying fights that first appear to be about organizational or tactical issues or personal grievances. At his best, Al sharply clarified the underlying political differences in dispute for the benefit of the party majority and minority alike. As a member of the RT minority faction expelled by the SWP, Al knew first hand that the majority is not the whole party and that sometimes minorities are right.

Communist Work in the Trade Unions

Al grew up in a working-class family and was skillful with his hands. Against the bourgeois division between mental and manual labor, he appreciated manual labor and maintenance as thinking work and essential problem-solving for men and women. While a young member of the RT, Al was fired from his job at a non-union print shop for organizing his co-workers into the printers union. During the 1965 New York City welfare workers union (SSEU) strike for union recognition, Al wrote articles for Spartacist and an exemplary Spartacist leaflet, “To Win This Strike” (see Spartacist Bound Volume No.1). In 1967 he got a job as a case worker and joined the SSEU Committee for a Militant Caucus. During the union’s hard-fought strike that year, he wrote the committee’s lively leaflet, “Screw the Mayor—Stay Out!”. In retrospect, Jim Robertson argued that this union work had been economist—i.e., narrowly focused on shopfloor issues. Al agreed with this criticism and thought he and our other supporters in the union should have addressed the burning issue young workers wanted to discuss: the Vietnam War.

Al moved to the Bay Area in the early 1970s and worked as a machinist. The powerful May 1968 strike in France had demonstrated to New Leftists that the working class was not “bought off” and had the power to bring down capitalism. Young people who had been radicalized in the New Left, black power and women’s liberation movements went into the factories, eager to fight for radical ideals within the labor movement. The Spartacist League implanted young comrades in key industries in this period, and Al provided political leadership to several of the party’s industrial fractions. In the Bay Area alone, he was the party rep and/or closely involved in the work of three fractions simultaneously—auto, longshore/warehouse and the phone company—and later transit and public utilities.

At the Fremont General Motors plant in 1977, abuse by a racist foreman sparked a strike. In consultation with Al, our friends in the UAW put forward a concrete program that showed workers how to win. The UAW Militant Caucus fought for elected strike committees, building mass picket lines and extending the strike to other GM plants to win better working conditions. Our caucus gained authority and a hearing among the nearly 6,000 workers in the plant.

During the recession in the early 1980s, the caucus fought for sit-down strikes against the nationwide mass layoffs of auto workers. Al played a key role in patiently training caucus members to sharpen their writing skills in order to better direct workers in the fight for leadership of the union to advance their struggles. The caucus came close to organizing the needed sit-down strike despite the union bureaucracy’s active opposition. The September 1981 caucus leaflet stated:

A New Political Period

A new political period had begun with President Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” crusade, the democratic wrapping to refurbish the image of U.S. imperialism as it revved up the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And in 1980, in walked Ronald Reagan, nobody’s idea of a typical liberal. But the capitalist political order transcends the two-party system. All wings of the U.S. imperialist ruling class cohere around the fundamental policies that bolster capitalism in particular times and circumstances—in this instance, liberalism.

The 1980s was a contradictory time for us. We initiated mass labor/black mobilizations against fascist terror. Al led the party in many of the most successful and important of these interventions. We were uniquely the hardcore Soviet defensists in Cold War II against U.S. imperialism’s drive to destroy the deformed and degenerated workers states. In 1989-90, we fought with all our might to lead the working class in a political revolution against Stalinism and the capitalist reunification of Germany. But the party was blind to the role of liberalism as the dominant ideology of the ruling class. Consequently, we became increasingly rigid in our understanding of the world and the internal regime became harsher and more brittle. Al was the concentrated expression of both the good and the bad in the party.

Reagan’s firing of the entire striking workforce of air traffic controllers in 1981 was a catastrophe that redefined the relationship of forces between labor and capital in the U.S. Labor could have won this showdown against the right-wing neoliberal Reagan regime. But the trade-union misleaders—from the AFL-CIO’s top brass to local airport union leaders—refused to shut down the airports. After PATCO, it became routine for private industry to permanently replace strikers with scabs. Labor’s chief weapon—militant strikes to bring capitalist production to a halt—was a downed tool by the union bureaucrats.

The defeat of PATCO took its toll on the working class and the party. The history and long-lasting effects of the McCarthyite witchhunt in the late 1940s and ’50s was a factor in the party’s response to PATCO. We feared that our slender roots and influence in the working class would be destroyed as happened to the Communist Party and other leftists during the Cold War. But more fundamentally, we had difficulty making adjustments to pursue our revolutionary purpose in the face of the heightened conservatism in the working class as the entire country shifted to the right in the 1980s. It was necessary to wage defensive battles as part of forging class-struggle oppositions within the unions. Instead, we wrongly advised our friends in industry to keep their heads down and wait for better times.

This “anti-caucus perspective” was not implemented overnight or simultaneously in all industries, but the trend was undeniable. Party propaganda, while critical of the trade-union bureaucracy, was increasingly economist. Without fighting for revolutionary leadership in the concrete, we had nothing to offer but abstractions and more militant tactics. But every major strike puts workers directly up against the capitalist state, necessitating a political struggle against the labor lieutenants of capital.

This lasting retreat was a break from our very purpose in the labor movement:

Problems in our trade-union work sterilized our efforts to build transitional organizations to win black workers to the party. Under the pressure of the escalating assaults on labor, Al convinced Chicago comrades that it was not a good time to build a caucus in industry, despite the authority they had earned by successfully beating back a 1987 racist frame-up of a fellow transit worker. The Chicago local had correctly argued that a local Labor Black Struggle League was not a substitute for a caucus in the union. The two have different purposes: one inside the plants, one in the broader black community. They must be linked in struggle through communists in the trade unions, who have the leverage to unite and mobilize the organized, integrated proletariat.

Labor and Black: March Forward Together or Fall Back Separately

The domestic reflection of the anti-Soviet war drive was a war against labor and black people at home. In 1979, under Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” crusade, the federal government and local police colluded with the KKK to gun down an integrated group of five civil rights leaders, trade-union organizers and leftists in Greensboro, North Carolina. Ronald Reagan’s election was the green light for KKK and Nazi fascists to emerge from Southern backwaters and encroach on urban centers to terrorize black people and other intended victims.

The KKK announced plans to march in the nation’s capital on November 27, 1982, in full fascist regalia, for the first time since the 1920s. We knew this had to be stopped, but our condition to go ahead was securing solid support from the organized, integrated proletariat in the region. We got labor endorsements and commitments to build labor defense guards. We moved ahead, with Al Nelson as our leader on site. This was no pacifist “ban the Klan” diversion on the other side of town. We mobilized the multiracial working class in black D.C. to be where the Klan said it was going to be and stop the fascist provocation before it could start.

All of Al’s talents and training—military, political, organizational, polemical, pedagogical—were summoned to make this day a huge success. Some 5,000 determined anti-fascists took over the Klan’s intended march route and jubilantly marched to the White House. The state responded by lobbing tear gas grenades and clubbing demonstrators. This sent people running—a classic police set-up to shoot black people in the back and then blame the victims. Al pulled the crowd back from chaos and reunified a militant, orderly demonstration that turned to face the cops while chanting, “Move back slowly!”The antifascist protesters marched back to Lafayette Park for a spontaneous victory rally. Al declared from the stage: “There are no white sheets here today—only the red banner of the working class!”

Al led almost every one of the party’s mass labor/black mobilizations against the fascists, beginning with the heavily black working-class demonstration in Detroit’s Kennedy Square that stopped a threatened KKK march one week after the 1979 Greensboro massacre. In all of the anti-fascist mobilizations, we were up against the black Democratic Party mayors, the city lawyers and the cops—who tried to suppress any such protest—as well as the Zionist Anti-Defamation League and the bourgeois press, which violence-baited us.

A whole lot of black people identified with the Spartacist League for leading the only successful actions in decades against rising racist terror. But we didn’t recruit much. We recognized the obstacles black people faced to joining a flaming red party in a reactionary period. But instead of building transitional organizations to unite the whole working class in defense of black rights and gain purchase from which to fight for broader class interests, we launched Labor/Black Leagues that required agreement with all aspects of the full party program. This ultimatistic approach was doomed to fail in the main task of transitional organizations: to root the party among the oppressed and be a transmission belt into the vanguard.

By the 1980s, immigration had begun to significantly alter the social composition of the American working class. Instead of having a serious discussion on how to combine the fight for black liberation with the fight against Latino oppression, the party demagogically branded comrades who pointed to the importance of Latino workers as unwilling to recruit black people. This only served to make the party more brittle and removed from the changing reality in the U.S. Al Nelson, on behalf of the whole party leadership, led a fight against Stan Gow at the August 1983 Seventh SL/U.S. National Conference that posed the race-baiting, liberal moralist question, “Are You Ready to Live in a 70 Percent Black Party?” In 2015, the Fourteenth SL/U.S. National Conference revised our outlook to one of “building a 70 percent black, Hispanic and other minority Bolshevik Party,” essentially the same perspective for which Gow had argued.

Fighting Capitalist Counterrevolution

Throughout Cold War II, the ICL stood its ground in defense of the Soviet Union in every proxy war provoked by U.S. imperialism. As the petty bourgeoisie and fake left shifted sharply to the right and lined up behind their own ruling class, we proudly defended the workers states against imperialism everywhere Cold War II flared: in Poland against Solidarność that had become a tool of imperialism, in Central America, in Afghanistan. We correctly emphasized the military defense of the states that had overthrown capitalist rule but downplayed the equally urgent need for political revolution to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy that jeopardized and ultimately sold out the remaining gains of the October Revolution (see article).

Notably, our predecessors in the Revolutionary Tendency did not reduce Trotskyism to reliance on the Stalinists to thwart U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary schemes. The 1962 “Declaration on the Cuban Crisis,” signed by 24 members of the RT including Al Nelson, opposed the SWP’s political capitulation to Fidel Castro and the Kremlin. It stated:

The Stalinophilia that marred the ICL’s interventions in the early 1980s was overcome in our full-on Trotskyist fight to stop the Stalinist sellout of the DDR (East Germany) and the Soviet Union to capitalist counterrevolution. We tried to split the working-class base from the ruling Stalinist parties. We sold hundreds of thousands of copies of our new daily newspaper, Arprekorr, at mass protests against the ruling Stalinist party and at factory gates throughout East and West Germany. We distributed Russian-language greetings to Red Army soldiers, got them copies of Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed, and talked politics, suitably lubricated with vodka, in their barracks.

The high point of the ICL’s fight against capitalist Anschluss and for the revolutionary reunification of Germany under the rule of workers councils (soviets) was 3 January 1990. That day, over 250,000 people came out to the united-front rally that we initiated to protest the fascist desecration of the Soviet war memorial in East Berlin’s Treptow Park. For the first time since Trotsky’s exile from the USSR, genuine Trotskyists had a mass hearing in a Stalinist country. Al Nelson led this intervention as our field commander in Berlin.

Our small band of international comrades in Berlin had been schooled in relatively slow years as members of small propaganda groups. Al fought to forge comrades into the subjective factor that was required to lead the proletariat in an objectively prerevolutionary situation. He hammered in the lessons of Lenin’s fight to widely open the door of the Bolshevik Party to the rapidly radicalizing working class in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Similarly, we needed to quickly align our organizational practices with the rare political opportunity evidenced by tremendous receptivity to our Trotskyist propaganda and interventions among broad sections of the DDR.

New organizations—Spartakist groups—were needed to win large numbers to the fundamentals of our program immediately. Returning from a failed attempt to organize a Spartakist group in Halle, a leading comrade explained that we couldn’t get people to sign up. Al thundered:

After the terrible defeat in Germany and the collapse of Stalinism throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union, Al fought demoralization and played a key role in helping the ICL explain what had happened. The International Executive Committee selected his contribution, “For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Perspective,” for publication because it was a programmatically powerful and comprehensive analysis of events in the DDR (see Spartacist No. 45-46, Winter 1990-91). Al wrote:

The ICL’s Degeneration in the Post-Soviet World

The collapse of the Soviet Union represented a fundamental change in the world situation. The ICL dismissed U.S. imperialism’s liberal triumphalism and completely misread the world as rife with fascistic reaction and heightened interimperialist rivalries threatening a new world war. We proclaimed “communism lives” in working-class struggles but failed to vie for leadership of those struggles against the liberals. This was a retreat from the defining task of Leninists—to split the working class from its existing misleaders. We increasingly shelved Marxism as a doctrine for safekeeping until the “retrogression in consciousness” was somehow overcome without the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard.

The ICL’s inability to deal politically with the new period both gave rise to and was reinforced by increasing bureaucratism. Al was in the forefront of this process, just as he had been in every aspect of our party’s life until then. In 1995-1996, Al initiated a bureaucratic fight against longtime WV editor Jan Norden. Norden and his collaborators were purged, fraternal relations with a group in Brazil were broken on unprincipled grounds and the ICL doubled down on a totally sectarian course. The expelled comrades went on to launch the Internationalist Group (IG) and the League for the Fourth International (LFI).

The ICL and the LFI were two virtually indistinguishable organizations, creating confusion and setting back the struggle to reforge the Fourth International. The findings of an extensive investigation by the ICL’s International Control Commission have just been published (see Report on the Bureaucratic Purge of IG Founders and the Break in Relations with Luta Metalúrgica). Al Nelson was but one of the central party leaders who waged this damaging fight. Our repudiation of what was one of the worst crimes in the ICL’s history was made possible only through the intense internal struggles that exposed and reversed our deep political revisionism in the post-Soviet period.

At the commemoration of his 30th anniversary as a Trotskyist, Al said of Jim:

But the political degeneration of the party led to a destructive blowout between Al and Jim in June 2000. Thereafter, Al was perceived by comrades as the source of the party’s bureaucratism, while Jim was credited with everything good about the party, despite Jim’s caution that comrades were too authority prone. Al was marginalized in the party for the rest of his life, causing great suffering to him and his partner and comrade Karen.

In 2003, Al requested consultative membership. In that capacity a decade later, he wrote a razor-sharp letter protesting the following statement in the 2015 SL/U.S. National Conference Document: “We intervened heavily into events and protests around the Black Lives Matter, but our tiny propaganda group does not have the social weight to influence the ideological leadership of the protests, and objective circumstances have not created a layer of left-moving activists.”

Al contrasted this with the Editorial Note in the very first issue of Spartacist (February-March 1964):

Al continued:

Al’s letter did not see the light of day until Karen brought it to the attention of the International Secretariat during its struggle to resurrect the SL/U.S., which had collapsed at the outset of the Covid pandemic. Despite his ongoing isolation, Al remained committed to the party and its cause until the very end. Prior to his death, he and Karen annotated the minutes of the RT, making this invaluable history accessible to comrades and the broader workers movement.

This long overdue comradely salute to Al Nelson is part of reclaiming our revolutionary history—including learning from our mistakes—to reforge the Fourth International that will guide the working class in its struggles to overthrow imperialism.