ICL in New York and Paris:
A Tale of Two Cities
In the most recent issue of 1917 we documented the
International Communist League’s abandonment of revolutionary defeatism
during the recent imperialist assault on Afghanistan. The once-revolutionary
Spartacist League/U.S. (SL--leading section of the ICL) still claims to be
Afghan defensist, but found it expedient to drop the call to defeat the
U.S.-led imperialist coalition. Rather than forthrightly renounce Leninism, the
SL attempts to slip its revisionism in sideways:
“From a Marxist perspective, however, there is no
way to ‘defeat’ the inevitable drive toward war by the capitalists
short of their being expelled from power through victorious workers
revolution....”
—Workers Vanguard (WV), 26 October 2001
Capitalism does have an inevitable drive toward war, but this
hardly excuses the SL’s decision not to call for the defeat of the
imperialist attack on Afghanistan. The Marxist position of revolutionary
defeatism toward imperialist neo-colonial adventures is not a tactic but a
principle.
This latest flinch derives fairly obviously from the SL
leadership’s fear of the consequences of appearing unpatriotic. In France,
where the domestic political climate is rather different, the Ligue
trotskyste de France (LTF—the ICL’s French section) has taken
a different position. In its 14 November 2001 statement, reprinted in Le
Bolchévik, N· 158 (Winter 2001-2002), the LTF did not shrink
from open defeatism:
“Today again we take a side against imperialism: we
defend Afghanistan against imperialist attack, without giving the least
political support to the Taliban reactionaries. Every defeat for imperialism
favors the class struggle here. And the opposite is equally true; to put an end
to wars of imperialist depredation it is necessary to break the sacred union
[between bourgeoisie and proletariat] here, and overturn the capitalist class
in the imperialist countries which dominate the world, like the USA and also
France.”
--our translation
While the ICL’s New York leadership advanced the essentially
social-democratic view that a military defeat for imperialism in Afghanistan
requires the prior victory of socialism in the advanced capitalist countries,
the LTF correctly observes that a military setback in Afghanistan can
accelerate the class struggle in the imperialist heartland.
This political disparity is also reflected in differing
assessments of the relevance of Leon Trotsky’s attitude toward
Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s. The SL claims that the
situation in Ethiopia in 1935 was fundamentally different than Afghanistan in
2001:
“the U.S. war against Afghanistan is in important
ways different from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which was aimed at
realizing Italy’s longstanding intention to colonize that country. The
U.S. does not aim at an occupation of Afghanistan—at least not at this
point—although now that they’re in Central Asia the imperialists will
grab what they can. In attacking Afghanistan, the U.S. seeks vengeance for the
insult to its imperial might.”
--WV, 26 October 2001
The LTF, in a polemic against those who refuse to take sides in
such conflicts, asserts that there is a close analogy between Ethiopia and
Afghanistan:
“In the 1930s Trotsky responded to this kind of argument
when he explained that it was necessary to defend the Ethiopia of the Negus, a
reactionary monarch, against Italy.…
“We have a side, we defend Afghanistan against
imperialism without any [political] support to any of the factions created and
supported by the imperialists.”
--Le Bolchévik,
N· 158 (Winter 2001-2002), emphasis added
We have a side, and the LTF has a side, but does the SL have a
side? (Footnote 1) It seems that the ICL’s American
cadres are not sure. Sometimes they emphasize their desire to defend
Afghanistan against the imperialists, which sounds quite a bit like taking
sides. But in that case they would welcome the sort of military setbacks that
drove the U.S. Marines out of Lebanon in 1983 and the U.S. Rangers out of
Somalia a decade later. If the SL leaders do not wish to see more such
defeats for the imperialists’ praetorians, why talk about
“defense”?
The SL tops claim that leftists who call for imperialist defeat
(as the SL itself did as recently as 1999 when NATO attacked Yugoslavia) are
simply engaging in pseudo-revolutionary phrase-mongering. But in Paris the LTF
sings a different tune, and complains that a group of former SLers (the
Internationalist Group) “accuse us [ICL] of ‘Kautskyism’ because
in their eyes we don’t proclaim noisily enough that we are for the
military defeat of imperialism.” Kautskyists do not advocate defeat of
their own imperialist rulers. We welcome the fact that the LTF is “for the
military defeat of imperialism” (the more noisily the better of course),
but suggest that they contact their American headquarters and find out why they
don’t take the same position. (Footnote 2)
1. A comrade has written to draw attention to a
recent issue of Workers Vanguard (31 May) in which Jack Barnes’
Socialist Workers Party is chastised for backing Boris Yeltsin in August 1991
on the streets of Moscow:
"When defense of the Soviet Union, Cuba's main economic
lifeline, was posed pointblank in 1991, the SWP backed Yeltsin's forces of
counterrevolution, exclaiming ‘Soviet Workers Win Giant Victory by
Defeating Coup’ (Militant, 6 September 1991)."
What WV does not mention is that their position was one of
neutrality in this decisive showdown between the remnants of the
Stalinist kleptocracy and “Yeltsin’s forces of
counterrevolution.” This position mirrors the ICL’s current
incoherence on Afghanistan—they advocated the defeat of one side
(Yeltsin), while refusing to defend the other (the Stalinist coupists).
None of this matters much as long as it is just sideline commentary, but the
contradiction in the ICL posture would become immediately apparent to anyone
who tried to actually implement such absurdities.
2. Another IBT comrade commented:
"France poses a special problem for the SL/ICL. They
attempt to construct a tendency with quite decent human material rendered
politically stupid (and therefore unthreatening to the leadership) in part
through various barriers to all external political-educational influences. In
countries where the level of discourse on matters pertinent to a
Marxist-Trotskyist view of the world is rather low, or carried on only by
rather small and isolated groups, it is not so difficult to isolate their
members from those influences. It is a bit more difficult to set up the
impermeable boundaries of a sect based on claims of Trotskyism in Paris, a city
where claims of Trotskyism are widespread and where intelligent, if often
mistaken, discussion highly relevant to Trotskyism is such an important stream
of cultural life. This poses a fundamental difficulty for the SL in maintaining
a French operation." |