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Trotskyist Bulletin No. 6 Tr otskyist Bulletin No. 6: Polemics with the IG InternationalBols hevik Tendency First published September 1999 International Bolshevik Tendency PO Box 332, Adelaide St. Stn., Toronto, Canada MSC 1JO PO Box 405, Cooper Station, New York, NY, USA 10276 BCM Box 4771, London, WC1N 3XX, Britain www.bolshevik. org Contents Introduction . 1 Document No. 1 . 3 'Workers Vanguard De-Collectivized,' IBT statement, 1 July 1996 Document No. 2 . 6 'A Note on the "Bolshevik" Tendency,' IG statement, 25 July 1996 Document No. 3 . � . 7 IBT letter to IG/LQB, 15 December 1996 Document No. 4 .............. 24 'On "Bureaucratic Methods" & the ICL' Document No. 5. 25 'Willful Blindness,' reprinted from 1917 No. 20 Document No. 6. 32 MEG letter to IG, 26 March 1998 Document No. 7. 33 MEG letter to IG, 4 June 1998 Document No. 8. 3 5 MEG letter to IG, 21 June 1998 Document No. 9. 39 'The Spartacist League-A Case of Political Degeneration,' unpublished draft article by MEG Document No. 10 . 44 MEG letter to IG, 17 July 1998 Document No. 11 . 4 7 IG letter to MEG, 18 July 1998 Document No. 12 . .................... 55 MEG letter to IG, 10 February 1999 1 Introduction Jan Norden, the longtime editor of Workers Vanguard members, supporters and sympathizers who remain an im­ (WV), was purged from the Spartacist LeagueN.S. (SL) along portant constituency for the JG. with several other important cadres in June 1996. The The IG's "political" explanation for the SL's degenera­ 5 "Nordenites" promptly launched the Internationalist Group tion, which they contrast to our "Kremlinology," is limited (JG) and established links with the Brazilian Liga Quarta­ to issues that have arisen since 1996. It is clear that Norden et Internacionalista (LQB-which Norden had earlier con­ al. would prefer to avoid serious discussion of the SL' s earlier tacted on behalf of the SL) and small groupings of former history. It's not hard to see why. The founding cadres of the Spartacists in France and Mexico. IG must all have been long aware, on some level, that some­ The JG is the latest, and perhaps the last, group of cadres thing was profoundly wrong with the SL. IG members re­ purged from James Robertson's Spartacist League with main, to differing degrees, conflicted about their experience enough political energy to set up a competing organization. in the SL and their own acquiescence (or worse) in the process Although neither large nor influential, the JG is of particular of its degeneration. Any serious discussion of their common interest to us because of its formal programmatic proximity, political history would doubtless reveal a considerable range and its claim to represent the continuity of the revolutionary of opinion within the IG. This should be no cause for alarm; SL of the 1960s and 70s. indeed it is to be expected in a democratic-centralist organiza­ The IG's founders have tended to regard the political de­ tion. But the IG has thus far chosen to stick to simple-minded cline of the SL as coincident with their own fall from grace, assertions that the Robertson regime had a spotless record of but, in fact, the SL was already degenerating 20 years ago. revolutionary integrity until it was Norden's turn to walk the When Norden et al.objected to their bureaucratic treatment plank. by the SL leadership, the Robertsonites sneered that they were merely echoing our earlier complaints, and labelled the Discussions Between MEG and IG IG the "ET of the 1990s" (the External Tendency of the iSt [ET], forerunner of the International Bolshevik Tendency The last seven documents in this bulletin contain corre­ spondence between the JG and the Marxist Educational [IBT]). Yet the JG continues to adamantly deny agreeing with Group, a small collective in Albany, New York. The MEG us about practically anything. was initiated by former members of the Revolutionary IBT/IG Polemics Workers League (RWL), an ostensibly Trotskyist organiza­ tion founded in the mid-1970s by two former contacts of the The first five items in this bulletin are polemics between SL's Boston branch. For somewhat obscure reasons they the IBT and JG. The first document, our initial assessment of chose not to join the then-revolutionary SL, but instead the JG, appeared originally in 1917 No. 18. The JG re­ started their own centrist group and subsequently moved sponded in their first publication, "From a Drift Toward back to Michigan where they had grown up. While the RWL Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle," with a copied many of its programmatic positions from the SL, it one-page article reiterating variouf slanders the SL leadership tended to blunt the sharp edges and duck many of the hard has thrown at us over the years. This attempt to distance questions. themselves from us appeared in a pamphlet full of descrip­ In the early 1990s, the RWL underwent a period of explo­ tions of exactly the same sort �f organizational abuse that we sive growth, and briefly attracted dozens of militant youth had exposed a decade earlier. through its anti-fascist activities and its role in defending In December 1996, we replied to the IG polemic in a abortion clinics. Most of these recruits were soon burned out lengthy letter which posed a variety of questions regarding by the RWL's frenetic pace and mindless activism, but the the history of the Spartacist tendency.3 In April 1997, we had militants who launched the MEG sought to make some sense our first opportunity for a serious face-to-face political of their political experience. In investigating the RWL's polit­ exchange with the IG when they gave a public forum in St. ical origins, they became interested in its professed identifica­ Catharines, Ontario. An IBT comrade who attended the event observed that the IGers: tion with the anti-revisionist political tradition of the early SL "acted as if they were still in the ICL [the International and the Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Communist League-the SL's international]. During their Party in the U.S. At the same time, the Albany comrades' ex­ forum they were bragging about ICL work around Mumia, posure to the obnoxious sectarianism of the contemporary etc., just as if they were the ICL, not a micro-splinter. We Spartacist League led them to dismiss it as a credible alterna­ thought it would not be clear to the audience why to join the tive, and so, in early 1998, they began to seriously investigate IG rather than the ICL! They think it was okay for the ICL both the IG and IBT. to stretch points, etc., against us because they were the 'real' Initially the MEG comrades thought that the IBT and IG party.... " merely disagreed over the precise chronology of the SL's po­ Jan Norden's 18 J,\11Y 1998 letter to the Marxist Educa­ litical degeneration, but they gradually came to see that more tional Group (MEG) uncritically endorses everything the substantive issues were involved. While we do not take politi­ Robertson regime did prior to purging the IG. This posture is cal responsibility for all the formulations in MEG materials presumably calculated to appeal to the layer of longtime ICL produced prior to its initiators' recruitment to the IBT, we 1 see Document No. 2 2 see Document No. 5 3 Document No. 3 4 Document No. 11 5 Document No. 4 2 consider their correspondence with the IG important enough curred because the Stalinists were not interested in Robert­ 4 to warrant publication. son's advice." The SL has yet to explain how Robertson's meetings with a Pabloite Appetite & the SL/IG few Stalinist bigwigs were supposed to further the proletarian political revolution they claimed was then underway. In the "Road to Jimstown," our 1985 analysis of the degen­ eration of the SL, we noted that the Robertson regime's policy A Tale of Two Labor Actions of pre-empting factional struggle through leadership-initiated purges of potential dissidents was: Among our many disputes with the Robertsonians over "both the first form of its departure from Leninism and the the years (most of which are documented in TrotskyistBulle­ framework within which all of the subsequent revisionist tin No. 5), one of the most important concerned the SL's departures have taken place ....The Spartacist Leaguetod ay, scandalous attempt to sabotage a 1984 anti-apartheid boy­ crippled by years of suppression of any and all dissident cott of South African cargo aboard the Nedlloyd Kimberley. opinion, has lost the capacity to correct the errors of the This action by longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area leadership as it begins to attack the programmatic founda­ was led by Howard Keylor, an IBT supporter and longtime tions of the movement." militant in the International Longshore and Warehouse Un­ One of the major issues in the polemics between ourselves ion (ILWU). In a powerful display of internationalism, the and the SL leadership during the 1980s was the Spartacist longshoremen refused to handle the apartheid cargo for 11 leadership's episodic political adaptations toward elements days. On the first night of the boycott, the SL set up a "pick�t of the Stalinist oligarchy. The first polemics on this question line" in front of the ship and denounced the 25 (predomi­ involved Robertson's identification with Yuri Andropov, the nantly black) longshore militants who went on board to initi­ former KGB chief who took over as head of thl Soviet bu­ ate the action as "scabs." In the end, the action was broken by reaucracy when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982.
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