NUMBER 56 ENGLISH EDITION SPRING 2001 I i . i;r~:"';RiarmlnJtlins~evrsmlrf~~ A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern PAGE 4 i~:\\~\4:t:3iriW? f;~:{'t:?/:: =i :\A:: it' '; ............ h···J··'i··:·C·'·ii1;·c·if'li;····Bala'Ii'c'i'j+S·he:it'.::i,:·;};!!·· •• :::;·1·:'11: .,.d.. ". ....,:,. Trotsky and the I .I I Russian Left Opposition i I PAGE 26 , :1 , 'Susan Adams, 1948-2001 .......... '................... ' ........ 2 " I. ) ICL Statement for Prague Protest Against IMF, World Bank ' I , Smash Imperialist Exploitation Through ,:.' I '. " ' i " World Socialist Revolution! ................. ~ ...............46 ' " ", I :···Womenand the French Revolution PAGE 64 - ,AUSTRALIA.!,.,A$2 BRI!AIN ... £1: ,'imCANADA ... CDN$2, ,,:I l IRELAND.. .IR£1 SOUTH,AFRICA.,.. R3 , " : USA ... US$1.50 ·2 SPARTACIST Our comrade Susan Adams organization, the Spartacus Youth died at home on the morning of League. As always, she took on February 6 after a two-year strug­ Susan Adams this task with energy and political gle with cancer. In her 30 years as determination, frequently touring a communist cadre, Susan served the locals, initiating or directing on many of the battle fronts of our 1948-2001 local and national SYL cam­ international party. .. .There. is paigns, overseeing the publication hardly a section of the Interna- of a high-level monthly press, tional Communist League or an Young Spartacus, with an empha­ area of our work which did not sis on Marxist education and benefit directly from her political polemics. counsel and from her exceptional In 1976, as the Spartacist ten­ talents as a teacher and trainer of dency began to gain small foot­ a new generation of proletarian holds in Europe, Susan took on leaders. She continued to carry another crucial area of party work. out vital work as a member of the this time for our International Sec­ leading committees of the Spar­ retariat. Stationed mainly in Paris, tacist League/ U.S. and the ICL she became the central leader of until her death. We salute her our work in Europe, and Paris be­ memory and share in the pain and came one of three main political loss of her longtime companion centers of our International. Until and comrade, Fran~ois, her family 1992, Susan was the principal and her many comrades and leader of the Ligue Trotskyste de friends around the world. France. She was centrally in­ Like thousands of youth, Susan volved in the debates and discus­ was propelled into political ac­ sions undertaken in the LTF and tivism in the mid-1960s by the the International to hammer ,out civil rights movement, the grow­ our strategy and tactics in this ing opposition to the Vietnam War international center of ostensible and the ncar-revolutionary up­ Trotskyism, particularly in re­ heaval in Francc in May 1968. sponse to the resurgence of the She vehemently rejected the mys­ popular front in the form of the ticism and hypocritical moralism "Union of the Left" in the late of her Catholic background and 1970s and early' 80s. Determined struggled against the internalized oppression that it caused. to implant the Cannonist understanding of party huilding and While at the University of California in San Diego, she Bolshevik norms of functioning which were largely alien to joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was European cadre, she worked closely with often inexperienced drawn to the pro-working-class wing led by the left-Stalinist leaderships in the European sections, getting them to seize on Progressive Labor Party. Susan was won to Trotskyism as she opportunities for building the party, to carry through regroup­ began working with the SL-led Revolutionary Marxist Cau­ ments with leftward-moving clements of opponent organiza­ cus of SDS in 1970 after moving to the State University of tions and to combat the incessant pressures of' french paro­ New York in Stony Brook. Having moved back to California, cialism, British Lahourism, resurgent German nationalism she became a member of the Spartacist League in December and so on. 1971. Within months, she was elected organizer of our rapidly In July 1994, helping to redirect the work of the ICL in a growing Bay Area local committee, helping to integrate new genuinely new and difficult period signaled by capitalist . recruits from a variety of political tendencies. counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, Susan wrote a letter When we moved to set up a branch in the "Motor City," to the International Secretariat: Detroit. in early 1973, Susan was chosen to lead it. She 'The main task of the I.S .. is the production of the appropri­ proudly described this center of the black industrial working ate, necessary and urgent Iilerary propaganda, quadrilingually and in part pentalingually, i.e., also in Russian, mainly in the class as the Vyborg of the American proletariat, in reference Sparlacists. 00. Publishing propaganda presumably gives polit­ to the militant proletarian stronghold of Bolshevism in Petro­ ical direction; it creates the scaffolding inside which the sec­ grad on the eve of the Russian Revolution. She was aggres­ tions construct their work, in the spirit that Lenin developed sive in ensuring that our Trotskyist propaganda penetrated in Whllt Is 7i) 111' nOli!' :)" the combative proletariat in the auto plants, often taking a When the incipient proletarian political revolution erupted direct hand in writing. mimeographing and distributing our in East Germany in the fall of 1989, Susan of' course threw first leaflets: Susan saw to it that the local carried out a pro­ herself into guiding and pushing forward our Trotskyist inter­ gram of intensive Marxist internal education and that the vention, playing a major role in huilding the united-front industrial comrades, who were working 50 hours or more on mobilization we initiated to protest the fascist desecration of swing shift on the assembly lines, got their share of polemi­ a Soviet war memorial. which drew 250,000 people to East cal combat doing campus work. Berlin's Treptow Park on l January 1990. After little more than a year in Detroit, Susan moved to In 1992, when the I TF leadership itself succumbed to the New York to be the central leader of our national youth same pressures Susan had seen so clearly and fought so well ''''!I'.II1''I'I'1 SPRING 20'01 3 Spartakist East Berlin, 14 January 1990: Susan (at left) with Spartaklst contingent at demonstration honoring Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during incipient political revolution. elsewhere, there was a sharp political tight at an ICL confer­ cow. To her last days, Susan would speak fondly of her "Mos­ ence. Susan sought to assimilate the political lessons of the cow boys," as she called the young members from various fight and only a few months later accepted the difficult countries, among them recent recruits from the former DDR, assignment of heading up our small ICL station in Moscow, who had volunteered for this arduous and dangerous assign­ taking up the work of our comrade Martha Phillips who had ment and who received their shaping as Leninist cadre under been murdered at her post there earlier that year. Working in Susan's tutelage. a situation where there was little room for mistakes, our­ After nearly 20 years of overseas assignments, Susan Moscow group fought to reimplant Bolshevism in the face of returned to the U.S. to work in the central party administra­ the devastation of capitalist counterrevolution and of the ret­ tion, directing her energies particularly on working with a rograde Stalinist-derived chauvinists of the "red-brown" new layer of youth recruits in New York and nationally. Seek­ coalition. , ing to capitalize on our very successful anti-Klan mobiliza­ Although foreign languages did not come easily, Susan tion in October 1999, Susan addressed the New York Sparta­ embarked on learning Russian with the same discipline and cist branch, of which she was political chairman: resolution that she had applied to studying French. The com­ "This demonstration really does put into context the last decade, when there wasn't very much going on, In the last bination of limited party resources and the overwhelmingly couple of years, there have been many struggles in the party. negative objective situation in the former Soviet Union ulti­ We have sought to grind off the rust in the party and prepare mately forced us to abandon an organized presence in Mos- ourselves for exactly the kind of situation that I think our party responded to very well this month. And now the question is the follow-up. In short, the whole poin't here is: this is what we live for, this is what we prepare for, and now we're in it and we must take advantage of it in the maximum political way." '~,~ During this period she also devoted much of her waning I Ens911PARTACJST " " "I .1 '" energy to preparing her public presentation on "Women and the French Revolution" and expanding it I for publication. r'Even, while homebound! -in her last few days, she was " An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism involved in helping select graphics for the layout. Several of Published by the International Executive Committee of the her other projects remain to be completed, including an index International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) for the first bound volume of French-language Spartacist. , EDITORIAL BOARD: Elizabeth Gordon (editor), James Robertson Susan's beauty and graciousness. struck all. who met her. and Emily Tanner (associate editors), Helene Brosius, Jon Brule, She solicited,and listened intently to the opinions of the new­ George Foster, Jane Kerrigan, Len Meyers, AI Nelson, Amy Rath est youth member no less than those of the most senior party .(Women and Revolution pages), Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer cadre, arguing with them openly when she disagreed.