Prestige Politics & Programmatic Confusion:
ICL & the Russian Question
The following is excerpted from a forthcoming IBT
pamphlet.
In the Spring 2004 issue of Spartacist (No. 58), the
International Communist League (ICL) characterizes its recent political record
as one of "opportunist lunges," "sectarian moralism" and an "increasingly
abstract and sterile approach to politics," concluding that: "An inability to
deal with the world created by the fall of the USSR, and the consequent
retrogression in consciousness, lies at the root of the ICL's current crisis."
This is a significant admission, given that the leaders of the Spartacist
League/U.S. (SLthe ICL mothership) have always claimed a special
expertise on the "Russian Question." Capitalist restoration in the Soviet bloc
represented a world-historic defeat for the international workers
movement, demoralizing millions of leftists. It produced enormous confusion
within the ICL, eroded the self-confidence of its cadre and undermined the
political authority of the leadership. But it is not the root cause of the
SL/ICLs malaise.
Long-time readers of Spartacist may recall a similarly
"candid and critical assessment" that appeared a decade earlier in the Autumn
1994 issue (No. 51) following the SLs Ninth Conference, which reported
"flare-ups of philistinism," "impressionism," "sectarian posturing,"
"time-serving" and the "passive and propagandist (at best) or abstentionist (at
worst)" appetites of the groups "office-bound leadership." We commented
at the time:
"This unflattering self-portrait undoubtedly reflects the
thinking of [SL founder/leader] James Robertson, who, from his vantage point of
semi-retirement in the Bay Area, can look upon the organization he built with
greater detachment. He is obviously not pleased with what he sees. But,
precisely because the Spartacist League is his own creature, Robertson cannot
provide a plausible explanation of what went wrong." 1917 No. 15, 1995
The 1994 Spartacist piece also attributed the SLs
morbid condition to the demise of the Soviet Union, and complained that the
victory of counterrevolution "has ushered in a fundamentally new, turbulent and
radically different period in world history" for which there are no "close
historical precedents to guide our analysis and political line." But the
ICLs admitted "inability to deal with the world created by the fall of
the USSR" can hardly be explained by the absence of "historical precedents," as
the essential issues were addressed by Leon Trotsky in his brilliant analysis
of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the Stalinist Communist Parties constructed on the basis of
loyalty to the Soviet bureaucracy, the Spartacist League identified with
Trotskys view of the Stalinist ruling caste in the USSR as an unstable,
parasitic and historically transitory formation that functioned as the "organ
of the world bourgeoisie within the workers state." The revolutionary SL
of the 1970s combined intransigent Soviet defensism with denunciations of the
crimes of the bureaucracy (see, for example, "Stop Stalinist
Psychiatric Torture in the USSR!," Workers Vanguard
[WV] No. 96, 13 February 1976).
During the 1980s, however, the SL leadership began to depart from
its Trotskyist program with a series of Stalinophilic gestures. The resulting
confusion, combined with the leaderships subsequent lurch in a
symmetrically Stalinophobic direction, accounts for much of the ICLs
ideological disarray over the Soviet collapse. Yet why would the cadres of a
Trotskyist organization (which the SL was in the 1960s and 70s) swallow such
deviations in the first place? The explanation lies in the incremental
transformation of the SL from a revolutionary, democratic-centralist
organization into a group in which the fundamental organizing principle is
unquestioning obedience to the leadership in general, and founder/leader James
M. Robertson in particular. The poisoned internal regime of the SL was both the
initial departure from Leninism and the framework within which all subsequent
deviations developed.
The transformation of the SL took place over several years, during
which its internal life was dominated by repeated, and increasingly apolitical,
authority fights and purges. By 1982, the predecessor of the International
Bolshevik Tendency estimated that:
"the central core of the leadership of the SL is today
too consciously cynical to be capable of spontaneous self-reform. The fact that
the organizational abusiveness of the regime has developed largely as a means
of bureaucratically short-cutting the expenditure of time, energy, cadres and
opportunities which is demanded by the repetitive educational process by which
a Bolshevik party retains and develops its older members while politically
assimilating its newer ones, (not to mention the draining effect of a faction
fight) does not make it any less destructive." "Declaration of an External Tendency of the
iSt" [international Spartacist tendency], October 1982
We also observed that the "hyper-centralist, paranoid and
personalist characteristics" of the SLs internal regime "have reached a
point where they call into question both the possibility of significantly
enlarging the organization and of reproducing Trotskyist cadres within it."
By the early 1980s, the SL was an organization with an arid
internal life in which petty authority fights and witchhunts (inevitably
directed from the top) took the place of substantive political discussion and
debate. Many cadres were forced out, others got tired and quit, but enough
stayed to maintain the SL as a viable player on the American left. Yet
pressures generated inside the group were increasingly manifest in the peculiar
and frequently obnoxious behavior of its members in their public political
activity. The problem persists to this day, despite periodic memos from the
leadership instructing members to try to refrain from appearing as "pests."
Loosening the Screws
In recent years the SL leadership has become seriously concerned
by difficulties in recruiting and retaining new members. Youth who uncritically
accept everything they are told frequently turn out to be of limited value. In
an attempt to attract and integrate higher quality individuals, the reins have
been loosened somewhat and more emphasis is now being placed on education and
persuasion rather than intimidation. At the same time, the leadership is trying
to make the ICLs political line more coherent by repudiating some of the
particularly absurd and outlandish positions taken in the past. While the
positions to be corrected, and the parameters of permissible criticism, remain
the exclusive prerogative of Robertson and his intimates, by a strange
coincidence most of the errors identified happen to be ones that we and/or Jan
Nordens Internationalist Group (IG) have previously noted.
The Spartacist article reports that the ICLs 2003
conference occurred after an "intense internal discussion" was triggered by our
exposure of a vulgar chauvinist reference to Kurds as "Turds" by Robertson 25
years earlier (documented in our pamphlet Kurdistan & the Struggle for
National Liberation). The attempt by the WV editorial board to
sidestep the question resulted in a "pre-conference discussion [that] was
dominated by an attempt to grapple with the political drift from our
revolutionary purpose that took graphic expression in the WV Editorial
Boards actions." To rectify this problem, the ICL conference elected a
new, more atomized, international leadership designed to be less capable of
acting independently.
Impatience and Impressionism
The Spartacist account admits to some pretty serious
mistakes in the past period. However, instead of a thorough examination of how
these errors originated, and why they have been tenaciously defended for so
many years, the article glibly ascribes all problems to a lack of political
depth in the ICL cadre: "Impatience and impressionism, epitomized by the likes
of Michel Pablo, are the characteristic weaknesses of cadre who have been
schooled in only one historical period
."
True enough. But where exactly were the supreme leader and his
claque when all these errors were being made? The SL is a very tightly
disciplined organization in which all significant policy decisions are made, or
at least reviewed, by the top leadership. And the SLs core cadre, who are
now mostly in their 50s or 60s, have been politically active for 30 or 40
years. The political weaknesses of the SL are indisputable, but they can hardly
be attributed to youthful inexperience.
Revisionism on the Russian Question From Hailing
Brezhnevs Foreign Policy
While the SLs oft-repeated assertion that "We Are the Party
of the Russian Revolution" was never taken seriously by anyone outside the
group, internally the leaderships claim to special competence on the
Russian question was an important element of its political authority. The SL in
the early 1980s distinguished itself from its pseudo-Trotskyist competitors by
backing the Soviet Army against the imperialist-sponsored Afghan
mujahedin, and also by its forthright opposition to the
capitalist-restorationist leaders of Polish Solidarnosc. Yet since then,
the SLs record on the Russian question has been characterized by a
continuing series of revisionist zig-zags.
The recent Spartacist article admits to some important
deviations on the Russian question, but, in the interest of preserving the
prestige of the leadership, makes no serious attempt to politically account for
these failures or to trace their origin and development. The IGs
commentary on the SLs self-criticism (The Internationalist, No.
19, Summer 2004) contains some insightful observations, but shrinks from any
analysis of the roots of the problem, and is largely concerned with showing
that prior to their own departure in 1996, all was well in Jimstown. But this
does not square with the facts.
To our knowledge, the Robertson leaderships first
consciously cynical revision on the Russian question occurred in September 1981
at the national conference of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (TLD) when
the iSts International Executive Committee presented a motion pledging to
"take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities [the
Polish Stalinists] may commit" in the suppression of Solidarnosc. We
commented:
"Trotskyists give unconditional military support
to Stalinist regimes battling internal counterrevolution (i.e., Solidarnosc) or
external capitalist forces (i.e., Finland 1940). This is quite a different
matter than extending political support to the Stalinists. We take
no responsibility for the crimes of the Stalinists against the working
peoplewhether in the course of military defense of proletarian property
forms or otherwise. Military support is extended despite such crimes."
Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt No. 1, August
1983
The ICLs Stalinophilic motion was intended as a loyalty
test, and a smokescreen for purging those TLD cadres who refused to blindly
endorse this blatant revisionism as Shachtmanites. Meanwhile, in its public
press, the iSt maintained a formally correct posture on the question.
This episode prefigured an increasingly Stalinophilic tilt by the
iSt leadership throughout the 1980s. The SLs first consequential error on
the Russian question was its decision to "hail" (i.e., uncritically salute)
Leonid Brezhnevs decision to send the Soviet army into Afghanistan in
late 1979. This slogan went beyond extending military support to one side in a
conflict, as the Trotskyists had in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s or
Vietnam in the 1960s.
For years we upheld the "Hail Red Army" slogan, but eventually,
when a comrade who objected to it won a majority to his view, we corrected our
mistake. In doing so, we tried not to exaggerate the dimensions of the
SLs error:
"In fairness, it should be pointed out that the
Spartacist League did warn of the possibility of a Soviet betrayal at the time
it first advanced the slogan. While the supposed Moscow-loyalists of the
Communist Party were wincing and looking for places to hide, the SL advanced
this deliberately angular formulation in the face of a wave of anti-Sovietism
which was sweeping America. Commendable as this impulse may have been, there is
no getting around the fact that taken literally and by itself, the slogan
amounts to a blanket political endorsement of the Soviet role in Afghanistan."
1917 No. 5, Winter
1988-89
We also discussed the connection between this particular mistake
and the SLs political trajectory:
"The degeneration of a revolutionary organization does
not take place overnight. It is only under the pressure of events and in
sparring with other political tendencies that revisionist appetites gradually
emerge. At the outset of Reagan's anti-Soviet crusade, the Spartacist League
correctly adopted a hard Soviet-defensist stance. But by this time the
degeneration of the SL's internal regime was already at an advanced stage. It
was only a matter of time before the SL, having lost confidence in its ability
to lead the working class, began to look around for other forces to accomplish
this task." Ibid.
The tendency to reduce Trotskyism to a sort of leftish Soviet
patriotism, which increasingly characterized the SLs politics in the
early 1980s, was, at bottom, a reflection of political demoralization:
"If an organization no longer believes in its own
revolutionary capacities, why not play it safe domestically and entrust
Marxisms revolutionary mission to someone else far awaylike the
Red Army in Afghanistan." Ibid.
Our critique of the SLs decision to "hail" the Soviet
military in Afghanistan anticipated a key political error that was to
characterize the ICLs subsequent intervention in the DDR (German
Democratic Republic, aka "East Germany"):
"Is the SL implying that the Soviet military somehow
embodies the progressive side of the Stalinist bureaucracy as
opposed to the civilian apparatus of the Communist Party, which represents its
conservative side? On this premise alone can the slogan Hail Red
Army! be seen as an attempt to exploit the contradictions of
the Soviet ruling casteby setting the bureaucracys left wing (the
military) against its right wing (the Politburo)."
"Could
the implication of a left/right differentiation between the Soviet military and
the rest of the ruling stratum suggest that the SL is giving up hope in the
Soviet workers and banking on some bureaucratic faction to redeem the USSR
instead?" Ibid.
To Hailing Brezhnevs Successor
While we were slow to identify the error on Afghanistan, we
immediately recognized the crude Stalinophilia of naming an SL contingent at a
November 1982 anti-fascist rally the "Yuri Andropov Battalion." Our criticism
drew a reply from Robertson himself who defended this Stalinophilic deviation
as perfectly Trotskyist. In the course of the ensuing polemics, the SL
leadership declared that our "comparison of Andropov with Stalin and Beria, the
mass murderers of tens of thousands of Communists and Red Army officers, is an
obscene amalgam worthy of the pages of Commentary" (WV No. 348,
17 February 1984). The same issue featured an in memoriam box for the
recently deceased Andropov, giving him a 75 percent approval rating.
Andropov had been the architect of the bloody suppression of the
1956 Hungarian political revolution (see Trotskyist Bulletin No. 1), but
in the eyes of the SL leadership, he was a tough guy willing to stand up to the
imperialists. In our polemic, we reminded the SL of Trotskys observation
that "Stalinism and Bolshevism are mortal enemies," and warned that Andropov
and the caste he headed were ultimately unable to defend the gains of October.
This was characterized by the SL leadership as virtual Third Campism. During
this period the SL cadre gradually internalized the notion that defending the
deformed and degenerated workers states meant identifying with the more
intransigent elements of the bureaucracy.
ICL in DDR: Bluster, Wishful Thinking & Centrist
Confusion
The ICLs Stalinophilic drift reached its zenith in the
winter of 1989-90 with its solicitation of the bureaucratic rulers of the DDR.
The implosion of this perspective and of the DDR itself confused and
demoralized the ICL membership, but this campaign is apparently still viewed by
Robertson as the high point of his groups history:
"Individual Marxists will not necessarily live to see
revolutionary proletarian opportunities in their lifetime. Nonetheless, many
ICL cadre have lived through one such opportunitythe nascent political
revolution in East Germany (German Democratic RepublicDDR) in 1989-90."
Spartacist No. 58, Spring 2004
The ICLs intervention in the DDR was certainly the most
significant and sustained mobilization in the groups history. For a few
weeks Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz (Arprekorr), the ICLs
near-daily newssheet that was eagerly read by thousands across the DDR, was a
small, but real, factor in the political life of the disintegrating deformed
workers state. Yet the ICLs activity, which the recent
Spartacist article lauds as a "defining struggle for our party," was
decisively flawed by exactly the "impatience and impressionism" that it warns
against.
The ICLs political propaganda on the DDR was characterized
by bluster, wishful thinking and centrist confusion. In "A Chicago College
Student Sees It FirsthandThe Political Revolution in East Germany"
(WV No. 494, 26 January 1990) an SL neophyte breathlessly reported that
upon arrival in East Berlin: "I found myself in the midst of the unfolding
workers political revolution against Stalinist bureaucratic rule." The next
issue of WV (No. 495, 9 February 1990) implored readers to send money
because "The fate of the unfolding German workers political revolution hangs in
the balance." Many ICL supporters did send money, and a large proportion of the
groups membership visited the DDR for a week or two to participate in the
"revolution."
But there was no political revolution, as one of our comrades
reported after touring the DDR:
"To make such assertions the TLD/SpAD
[Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands] simply closes its eyes to political
reality. No workers councils are contending for power. No proletarian
formations posing, or even aspiring to, dual power have developed in the DDR.
The soldiers councils are either limited to simply addressing
soldiers work conditions, or they represent pressure groups
for professional military personnel, and are dominated by officers."
1917 No.8, Summer
1990
The ICLs intervention was profoundly skewed from the outset
by two fundamental mistakesfirst, the claim that a workers
political revolution was actually underway, and second, a perspective of some
sort of strategic united front with a hypothetical pro-socialist elements in
the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party/Party of Democratic
Socialism (SED/PDS). These mutually reinforcing errors (which, in an
organization where criticism flowed upwards as well as downwards, might have
been corrected) disoriented the activities of ICLers on the ground. On the one
hand, the ICL claimed to be in the midst of, or poised to lead, an "unfolding"
workers political revolution against the SED/PDS bureaucracy; on the
other it was simultaneously angling for a bloc with the top leaders of the
crumbling Stalinist ruling party. The ICL has never explained how this
contradiction could have been resolved.
In a special January 1990 German language 1917, we observed
that "the confused program for a non-existent third way [between
capitalism and socialism] through social market economy of the
SED/PDS reformers" would "lead sooner or later to a capitalist
counterrevolution," and warned: "Workers in the DDR cannot for long defend
themselves against capitalist restorationist forces and/or Stalinism without
their own Leninist internationalist party." In contrast to the ICLs claim
that a workers political revolution against (or with!) the decomposing
Stalinist apparatus was underway, we noted:
"At this moment there exists a political vacuum in the DDR.
Unless workers councils are organized and establish their own organs of
administration this vacuum will shortly be filled to the disadvantage of the
working class
."
"The urgent task of this moment is
to prevent the capitalist reunification through workers soviets to fill the
power vacuum in the DDR."
We also warned against illusions in the SED/PDS bureaucrats:
"Gorbachev, Modrow
and Co. are organically incapable
of trusting the working class or of implementing real working class
internationalism. Nowhere has even the most reform of the
Stalinists called for or supported workers councils as the basis of state
power as Lenin did in 1917. This is no accident. The creation of such bodies
can come about only through the destruction of all wings of the
bureaucracy."
None of this was particularly originalit was merely the
application of the program of workers political revolution that Trotsky
and the Left Opposition had elaborated over half a century earlier. That is why
it contrasted so sharply with the approach taken by the ICL, which, in true
centrist fashion, abandoned the Trotskyist program which they ostensibly upheld
in an attempt to find a shortcut by nudging the Stalinists to the left.
In October 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the rug out from
under Erich Honecker, the Stalinist SED was thrown into disarray. A few weeks
later, on the eve of a special emergency conference called by the SED for 8
December 1989, the ICL wrote to the Stalinists requesting to address the
participants:
"We believe that a new Communist Party of Germany is urgently
required, a new party that stands for socialism and is opposed to the crimes
and lies of Stalinism, and is against imperialist capitalism, and which has to
be forged in the spirit of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany,
comrades Luxemburg and Liebknecht and comrade Lenin of the Communist
International.
"We believe that many comrades of the SED share these views.
Because of this, we would like to present our brief greetings to your extremely
important conference." quoted in Arprekorr No. 8, 18 December
1989
On 8 December the SED conference met briefly, apologized to the
people for leading the DDR into a "crisis of existence" and suspended
proceedings. On 16 December, when the conference reconvened, it decided to
change the partys name to SED/PDS (Socialist Unity Party/Party of
Democratic Socialism), elected Gregor Gysi as its new leader, and declared that
unification with West Germany would turn the DDR into "an underdeveloped
Bundesland with an uncertain social future for its citizens." The
ICLs 16 December greetings to the reconvened congress denounced socialism
in one country as a "cruel swindle," but couched its criticism of Stalinism in
terms echoing those of the SED/PDS leadership:
"They [the workers of the DDR] are rightly outraged about
the spectacle of corruption, which has been committed by those who pretended to
rule in their name. Without real workers democracy the economy cannot
survive." Arprekorr No. 8
In a declaration to the SED conference the following day, the
ICLs International Secretariat addressed the economic situation in the
DDR, and particularly the issue of workers strikes. The ICLs
approach to the question implicitly adopted the standpoint of the SED
leadership rather than the disgruntled ranks:
"The right to strike of the Soviet miners
during the last summer was more than justified. Every strike, especially in the
DDR, has to be justified on the basis of its impact on the whole population and
the workers." Arprekorr No. 9, 19 December 1989
While making it clear that they supported any workers
strikes against fascist provocations, the ICL leadership avoided commenting on
the economic strikes actually breaking out across the DDR at the time. This was
at least an improvement from an earlier declaration by the TLDs New
York-appointed leader, Max Schütz, who at an 18 November 1989 public forum
in West Berlin, had declared simply that DDR workers should not strike against
themselves! The issue was a difficult one for the ICL to finessestrikes
were likely to be among the first symptoms of a developing workers
political revolution, yet if the TLD were seen supporting actions that the
Stalinists were desperate to squelch, they risked aborting their "unity"
maneuver with the SED/PDS. So the ICL leadership, in its wisdom, opted to deal
with the issue by restricting itself to ambiguous abstractions.
The thrust of the ICLs intervention in the DDR was not aimed
at splitting away dissident leftist elements from the SEDs proletarian
base, but rather was designed to encourage a wing of the Stalinist apparat to
move to the left. In "What the Spartacists Want" the ICL denounced "the corrupt
parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies" in the abstract, and called for "forging a
Leninist-egalitarian party," but they failed to make the essential point that
all wings of the SED/PDS leadership shared responsibility for the
impasse. Instead, the ICL proclaimed:
"We stand with those members and recent ex-members of the
Stalinist SED, as well as numerous others seeking to build a socialist world,
who vow that the heirs of Hitler must not expropriate that which, by the
workers toil, has arisen out of the ruins." "What the
Spartacists Want," printed in every issue of Arprekorr, reprinted in
WV No. 492, 29 December 1989
The complaint, in the same document, that "the communist program
and ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution
have for decades been perverted and
betrayed by Stalinism" did not prevent the ICL leadership from making
flattering overtures to the commander of Soviet forces in the DDR, General B.V.
Snetkov. In a 28 December 1989 letter (reprinted in WV No. 494, 26
January 1990) concerning "the peaceful development of the political revolution
unfolding in the DDR," the ICL respectfully suggested to Snetkov that: "We
internationalists must combat nationalist chauvinism
."
Treptow Demo: High Tide for the ICL
Shortly after the wall came down in Berlin, ICL members met
Gunther M., a leftist SED cadre from an East Berlin factory, in front of a West
Berlin public meeting of the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA), an ostensibly
Trotskyist rival of the TLD. A few weeks later, by a fortuitous circumstance,
Gunther (still only a contact at the time) was able to get the SED/PDS to
endorse the ICLs idea of a mass protest against the fascist desecration
of a Soviet war memorial in Treptow Park. Gunther obtained the Stalinist
partys agreement on New Years Eve, when a lower-ranking apparatchik
he happened to know was left in charge of the headquarters (the senior leaders
had gone off to drown their sorrows).
The official announcement of the demonstration in Neues
Deutschlands (the DDRs leading daily) was enthusiastically received
by the SED/PDS ranks, and on 3 January 1990 a surprisingly large crowd of
250,000 turned out. The size and leftist character of the mobilization alarmed
both the imperialists and the Kremlin. While the Robertsonites subsequently
exaggerated their role in mobilizing the massespretending that their
agitation had forced the SED/PDS leadership to endorse the event, when in fact
the TLDs call for the demonstration was not issued until after the
Stalinists had agreed to sponsor itthe protest would certainly never have
occurred without the ICLs initiative.
The TLD/Spartakist Gruppen announcement of the demonstration
called for "Workers and soldiers councils to power," and denounced social
democracy as "the Trojan horse of counterrevolution," proclaiming: "Throttling
the hydra-headed fascist monster now is to blunt this Social Democratic
penetration" (WV No. 493, 12 January 1990). Yet, while vigorously
attacking the social democrats:
"In the TLDs call for the demonstration
there was absolutely no criticism of the SED-PDSs course of
capitulation, and not one word about Modrow bowing to BRD imperialism
and German nationalism. But it was these politics that had initially emboldened
the Nazis who had carried out the attacks [at the war memorial]." 1917 No.10, Third Quarter
1991
The presence of an ICL speaker on the platform alongside the
various Stalinist officials at the huge Treptow mobilization was as close as
the Robertsonites were to come to "unity" with the SED/PDS. The speech
delivered at the event by TLD spokesperson Renate Dahlhaus (reprinted in
WV No. 493, 12 January 1990) had been written in New York and faxed to
Berlin. It was carefully formulated to avoid offending the ICLs hoped-for
partners:
"In her speech at the Treptow demonstration, TLD/SpAD
comrade Dahlhaus laid out the SED-Unity line in full: Our [!]
economy is suffering from waste and obsolescence. The SED party dictatorship
has shown that it is incompetent [!] to fight this. (Arprekorr No.
15, 4 January 1990). This statement, along with the SEDs monopoly
on power has been broken was all that was said about the politics of the
Stalinists (Ibid.). In Dahlhaus speech only Honeckers SED,
which the demonstrators wanted nothing more to do with anyway, was mentioned.
But the actual illusions in the reformed SED-PDS were not
attacked." 1917 No.10,
Third Quarter 1991
Instead of pointing out that the SED/PDSs capitulatory
course was encouraging the growth of rightist sentiments, Dahlhaus speech
concentrated on attacking the social democrats for "selling out the DDR."
From SED-Unity Fantasies to Fake Mass Posturing
The success of the Treptow demonstration led Robertson to imagine
that he had a direct pipeline to the top of the SED/PDS. He demanded that
Gunther arrange meetings for him with three top Stalinists: DDR masterspy
Markus Wolf, Soviet General Snetkov and SED/PDS leader Gregor Gysi. When all of
these bureaucrats passed up their chance to be brain trusted by a small-fry
American megalomaniac, and Gorbachev gave the green light for the absorption of
the DDR by German imperialism, the ICL was finally compelled to abandon the
fantasy of "unity" with the Stalinists. Instead of frankly acknowledging that a
fundamental strategic mistake had been made, the whole unity gambit was blamed
on incompetent underlings who had supposedly misinterpreted "Jims"
instructions. In the ICL, as in Pyongyang, nothing can be permitted to put Dear
Leader in a bad light.
Without wasting any time, the ICL leadership decreed an abrupt,
180 degree course correction, and announced that the moment was ripe for the
direct conquest of the masses. The handful of ICL supporters of the
TLD/Spartakist Gruppen were declared to be a new, independent workers
"party"the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SpAD). When the DDR
news agency picked up the SpADs press release announcing its creation,
the ICL leadership was so pleased that it reprinted the entire dispatch in
Workers Vanguard No. 495, 9 February 1990. And, just for good measure,
they quoted the following particularly juicy bit on the front page of the same
issue: "The party, founded on January 21 in the DDR, considers itself a
vanguard party that will represent the interests of the working
class
."
The hope was that the SpAD could somehow galvanize the masses
through running a few candidates in the March 1990 elections. In its new guise
as a revolutionary mass workers party competing directly with the
Stalinists, the SpADs propaganda was naturally less conciliatory to the
SED/PDS than it had been when the watchword was "unity." For fund-raising
purposes, WV ludicrously exaggerated the SpADs role in the
situation:
"
our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party stand out
uniquely as the conscious Leninist vanguard, the one party defending the
workers of East Germany against this [capitalist restorationist]
onslaught
.
"The fate of the German political revolution hangs in the
balance, and there is little time." WV No. 497, 9 March
1990
While the ICLs publications were widely disseminated and
eagerly read by thousands of workers in the DDR, and its members worked as hard
as humanly possible, the SpAD never had more than a couple of dozen active
supporters. The pretense that it was capable of defending the workers
interests, and even of shaping the outcome of a non-existent "political
revolution," was, as we remarked in a 15 December 1996 letter to the
Internationalist Group, "a notion worthy of a Posadas or a Healy."
The Bubble Bursts
In our March 1990 election statement giving critical support to
the SpAD we reaffirmed our desire to see the DDR workers take the road of
proletarian political revolution, but warned:
"While the SED-PDS is in disarray, it is unfortunately
not the case that, as yet, the working class is actively engaged in a
revolutionary struggle to wrest political power from the discredited Stalinist
bureaucrats and the parties promoting capitalist reunification which are
already filling the power vacuum. A workers political revolution can open the
road toward genuine socialism through instituting proletarian democracy and the
rule of workers councils. We urgently hope that the workers of the DDR take the
road of proletarian political revolutionbut it does no
good to mistake our subjective desires for reality." 1917 No. 8, Summer 1990
The ICLs exaggerated claims to have directly mobilized many
of the workers who turned up at the Treptow protest led to fantastic
projections that hundreds of thousands might vote for the SpAD in the election.
But any such illusions were dashed on 6 March 1990, twelve days before the vote
was held, when a demonstration called by the SpAD to protest privatization
legislation drew no one outside their own ranks. Workers Vanguard (No.
497, 9 March 1990) had devoted most of a page to reprinting their German
"partys" call for mass protest, suitably illustrated with a photo of a
section of the vast crowd at Treptow. The next issue did not bother with a
story on the non-event, but did run a photo documenting the fact that fewer
than 20 people had participated.
In the same issue, WV reported the results of the 18 March
election as an overwhelming mandate for Anschluss: "We ran candidates in
four districts (Berlin, Halle, Leipzig and Rostock), receiving 0.06% of the
vote in those districts" (WV, No. 498, 23 March 1990). With its bubble
burst, the ICL leadership sagely intoned: "Responsibility for the fateful
results must be laid squarely at the door of Stalin and his heir
Gorbachev."
DDR Political Revolution Down the Memory Hole
Even after the landslide for counterrevolution, the ICL was still
refusing to admit that no workers political revolution had in fact been
"unfolding." Instead, WV puzzled over why the working class had sat out
their "political revolution":
"The DDR political revolution was marked from the
beginning by the absence of any organized participation by the working class as
such. Why?" Ibid.
Try Occams razor: there was no political revolution.
The SEDs proletarian base had not revolted against their leaders, and no
section of the working class had participated in anything approximating a
struggle for political power. But to admit the obvious would mean that the ICL
leaderships whole orientation had been wrong. So the issue was just
shoved down the memory hole where it could be retrospectively re-jigged.
The SL leaderships new "recovered memory" of its DDR policy
was unveiled in its 1995 pamphlet "The International Bolshevik
TendencyWhat Is It?," where the previously "unfolding" political
revolution was downgraded to merely a "nascent," or "incipient" possibility. To
avoid having to admit that events had proved us right, we were simply assigned
a new positionwe had supposedly "declared that [in the DDR] there was no
possibility of a proletarian political revolution."
The article in Spartacist No. 58 alleges that Jan Norden
"denigrated and denied the ICL's role as the conscious revolutionary vanguard
[in the DDR], repeatedly intoning that the key element was missing, the
revolutionary leadership." This comment by Norden in his January 1995
Berlin speech provided one of the central pretexts for his purge the next year.
Today the ICL dismisses its boast to having been "the revolutionary leadership"
of a non-existent political revolution as a polemical exaggeration invented
mainly for the purpose of attacking Norden.
In its 1994 "Perspectives and Tasks" document the SL brazenly
congratulated itself for its political flip-flops:
"Programmatically this party kept on track through the
Reagan years
.The partys capacity to internally correct political
deviations and problems through exhaustive internal discussion and fights is
also clear. The extensive discussion and critical examination of our
intervention into the DDR events stands out in this regard and politically
prepared our tendency for the Soviet debacle." Spartacist No.
51, Autumn 1994
The spectacular collapse of the ICLs Stalinophilic fantasies
in the DDR did indeed "prepare" the group for its subsequent Stalinophobic
lurch expressed by a refusal to take sides in the decisive August 1991 showdown
in Moscow. It also laid the groundwork for the now-repudiated, Third-Campist
claim made in the same document, that: "The Chinese Stalinists
are moving
to attempt a cold restoration of capitalism from above" (Ibid.).
A decade later, the ICL is once again re-examining the 1989-90
events in the DDRthis time unanimously repudiating the unanimous
conclusions reached after the previous "extensive discussion and critical
examination":
"It is not correct to say the PDS led the
counterrevolution in the DDR and we were the revolutionary
leadership in the incipient political revolution in the DDR in 1989-90.
These formulations are better: We were the only contender for
revolutionary leadership of the working class in the revolutionary situation in
the DDR in 1989-90. We can be proud of our fight for revolutionary
leadership. And When the Kremlin sold out the DDR to West German
capitalism, the SED-PDS tops adapted to the betrayal and became the PDS."
Spartacist No. 58, Spring 2004
It would be even "better" if the ICL leadership could come clean
and tell the whole truth. In that case, their motion might read more like
this:
"We attempted to suck up to the Stalinist bureaucracy,
but were rebuffed. We claimed to have been in the midst of an unfolding
workers political revolution, but there was no such political revolution.
We claimed to stand out uniquely as the conscious Leninist vanguard, the
one party defending the workers of East Germany, but we were not such a
partywe were only a tiny propaganda group without significant influence
in any section of the working class, and one, moreover, that was seriously
politically mistaken on many of the most crucial issues. On all disputed
political questions at the time, the comrades who subsequently formed the
German section of the IBT were essentially correct against us."
We will not, however, see such a statement. Like Robertsons
notion that the top layers of the SED/PDS could somehow be induced to assist in
the "unfolding" of a workers political revolution, the spontaneous
self-reform of the ICL leadership lies outside the realm of the possible. It
would indeed have been "better" had the ICLs leadership approximated our
position (which they furiously denounced as "Stalinophobic" at the time). The
really important question, which neither the SL nor the IG can address, is how
such an elementary mistake could have been made in the first place. The
character of the Stalinist bureaucracy of a deformed workers state is a
long established element of the Trotskyist program. The fact that this position
could be tossed aside without generating any internal opposition demonstrates
that, in the ICL, formal program and "principle" count for little when they
conflict with the whims of the founder/leader.
ICLs 1990 Postmortem on the DDR
The ICLs venture in the DDR was by far the most ambitious
undertaking in its historythe leadership promised a great deal and the
membership made many sacrifices, so the colossal failure of the entire
perspective, as well as the inability to realize any appreciable gains,
required some explanation. Accordingly, an internal discussion was immediately
announced to digest the historical lessons of the collapse of Stalinism. The
issues appear to have been posed on a high enough level of historical
abstraction to avoid the question of how the ICL leaderships projections
in the DDR could have been so wildly unrealistic. The two contributions deemed
most valuable were reprinted in Spartacist Nos. 45-46, Winter
1990-91.
In a 6 September 1990 document, Albert St. John (aka "Al")
Robertsons longest-serving supporter who seems to have recently slipped
into the category of persona non grata, suggested that workers in
Eastern Europe had acquiesced to capitalist restoration because they had been
atomized and politically disarmed by Stalinism. He denounced the
"petty-bourgeois" left in the DDR which had "obscured or avoided any
programmatic or social analysis of Stalinism," and indignantly declared:
"
it wasnt the case that the workers of the
DDR had no leadership. Rather the program of the [DDR workers]
traditional party, in the new colors of the reformed PDS, as well
as the parallel programs of the other leftist DDR groupings, ran at
an angle of 180 degrees to the objective interests and periodic impulses of the
working class." Spartacist Nos. 45-46, Winter
1990-91
This would have been worth something had the ICL raised it when it
mattered. But by September 1990, criticism of the PDS was pretty cheap. It is
also worth noting that at this point Al was no longer clinging to the pretense
that the tiny SpAD had been leading the working class (although he did
cynically revive it a few years later as a factional stick with which to beat
Norden). Today the claim has once again been designated "not correct."
Anschluss for the DDR & the Destruction of the
USSR
A second contribution, by SL theoretician Joseph Seymour, was a
sensible and well-informed essay explaining why the destruction of the East
European deformed workers states without civil war did not invalidate the
Marxist theory of the state. In his article, dated 10 October 1990, Seymour
anticipated that the Soviet Union would soon see a confrontation between
Stalinist conservatives and pro-imperialist democrats:
"Faced with the disintegration of Soviet society, the
Kremlin bureaucracy splintered, signaled by the splitting up of the original
Gorbachev team into mutually hostile figures. Yegor Ligachev became the
spokesman for the conservative Stalinist apparatchiks, who desired to maintain
the status quo with minimal changes. Boris YeltsinMoscow party boss in
the early Gorbachev regimebecame a pseudo-populist demagogue allied with
the pro-Western democratic opposition." Spartacist
Nos. 45-46, Winter 1990-91
A couple of months earlier, in August 1990, the ICL had sent a
final "Letter to the Kremlin" (with a copy to General Snetkov) "demanding" that
Gorbachev stop conciliating imperialism (WV No. 590, 7 September 1990).
Seymour suggested that, unlike in East Europe, capitalist-restorationists in
the USSR would not come to power without a struggle:
"Russian society today is polarized (prefiguring a
possible civil war) between the forces of the bourgeois-democratic
counterrevolution
and an amalgam of conservative Stalinist and Slavophile
elements, with the working class divided between the two camps."
Seymour did not discuss the ICLs position on the impending
showdown in the USSR. However, he did propose that in any future clash in
either Romania or Bulgaria between the "leftist" governments comprised of
former Stalinists and more aggressively right-wing restorationist elements:
"Our perspective should be to combine united-front
military defense against the right with a political struggle to discredit and
destroy the workers illusions in the present
erstwhile-Stalinist-cum-social-democratic regimes."
This was clearly written prior to Robertsons Stalinophobic
pronouncement that the SED/PDS bureaucrats he had previously been so eager to
meet were in fact the leaders of the counterrevolution in the DDRa
position that was soon extended to the Soviet Union and, somewhat later, to
China. By March 1991, Workers Vanguard was floating the new line,
suggesting that there was little to choose between the Yeltsinite "democrats"
and the conservative Stalinist "patriots" who were still clinging to the
CPSU:
"Soviet working people must cut through the false
division between democrats and patriots, both products
of the terminal degeneration of the reactionary and parasitic Stalinist
bureaucracy. Both are enemies and oppressors of the working class in the
interests of world capitalism." WV No. 522, 15 March
1991
In May 1991, at the Lutte Ouvrière fete, where we debated
Workers Power on the Russian question, one of their leaders, Keith Harvey,
predicted that in any showdown between the Yeltsinites and the CPSU "hards," we
would find ourselves alone among all the worlds ostensible Trotskyists in
backing the Stalinists. Harvey predicted that "even the Sparts" would not be
backing the Stalinists this time. We thought it possible that when push came to
shove the ICL would come down on the right side, but Harveys estimate
proved correct. In the final confrontation in August 1991, the erstwhile "Yuri
Andropov Brigade" refused to militarily support the Stalinists against the
counterrevolution, thus ignominiously abandoning the last-ditch defense of the
Soviet degenerated workers state. The ICLs shameful neutrality in
this confrontation, a mistake it compounded with the stubborn refusal to admit
that Yeltsins victory represented the triumph of counterrevolution, has
continued to pose awkward political problems for the Robertsonites.
The Spartacist No. 58 article blusters: "At the crucial
hour, in sharp contrast to much of the left, the ICL stood at our post in
defense of the gains of the October Revolution of 1917." Paper will take
anything written on it, as Stalin observed, but nothing can change the fact
that "at the crucial hour" in August 1991, the ICL declined to take a side.
The fundamental incoherence of the ICLs 1991 position has
been a source of continuing confusion, and the conflicting rationalizations and
interpretations of the position that have appeared over the years simply
dont add up. While indignantly denying that they were in any way neutral
in the August 1991 confrontation, the ICL leaders also claim that neither side
warranted military support because both were equally pro-capitalist:
"The IBT attempts to dress up its defeatism in August
1991 by declaring military support for the Stalinist coup plottersa
ludicrous position since the coup plotters, who were just as committed to
capitalist restoration as Yeltsin, were not about to undertake the kind of
political and military mobilization required to mount a serious opposition."
"The International Bolshevik TendencyWhat Is It?"
We replied:
"If in fact the Yanayevites were just as committed
to capitalist restoration as Yeltsin, then why should Trotskyists care
about whether or not they undertook a political and military mobilization? If
the Stalinist bureaucrats (including the heads of the KGB and the military) had
been just as committed to capitalist restoration as the CIAs
friends gathered around Yeltsin in the Russian White House, then there would
indeed have been nothing of great importance at stake in August 1991. Yet, if
one asserts that Yanayev et al. were just as committed to capitalist
restoration as Yeltsin, then it follows that at some point prior to 19
August 1991 the CPSU bureaucracy had been transformed into a formation that was
counterrevolutionary through and through and to the core." Trotskyist Bulletin No. 5,
1996
The ICL cannot answer these questions. While admitting that
Yeltsins victory had opened the "floodgates of counterrevolution," they
adamantly deny that state power (however weak and disjointed initially) from
that moment on was wielded by forces committed to restoring capitalism. The
Soviet degenerated workers state had been smashed, and the whole world
knew it. But in the interest of preserving the prestige of their leadership,
the SL refused to admit it and spent a year in the company of Jack Barnes of
the American Socialist Workers Party, Ernest Mandel of the United Secretariat
(USec), Workers Power and an assortment of other revisionists, ludicrously
claiming that the Soviet degenerated workers state survived under Czar
Boris. As time passed and Yeltsins grip on power became increasingly
assured, this posture became just too ridiculous to maintain, and so by
November 1992 Workers Vanguard was referring to the Soviet workers
state in the past tense. But to this day, the ICL cannot explain when or how
this transformation occurred.
Everyone knows what took place in 1991; the only thing that
changed in 1992 was Robertsons mind. The catalyst for this, so we have
been told, was a written exchange in August 1992 between two Toronto
Robertsonites and Marc D., a former USec cadre and prospective ICL recruit who
refused to swallow the notion that "the Soviet Union still exists as a
degenerated workers state." Upon reading this correspondence, which we
reprinted in 1917 No. 12, Robertson is reported to have commented that
Marc was right, the Soviet workers state was no more.
The ICLs new position solved one problem, but created
another. The destruction of the Soviet workers state could not be
backdated to Yeltsins August 1991 victory without admitting that the
"renegades" of the IBT had been right all along. Having refused to militarily
bloc with Yanayev, Pugo et al, the SL leadership could hardly admit that
Yeltsins victory represented the end of the workers state. So the
ICL (and the IG, which also clings to this particular stupidity) embraced the
profoundly anti-Marxist notion that in "1991-92" the degenerated workers
state, under Boris Yeltsin, was gradually and incrementally transformed into a
bourgeois state. Trotsky aptly dismissed this sort of nonsense as "reformism in
reverse."
The SLs position on the August 1991 confrontation has
occasionally been at odds with its polemics with other groups. For example,
WV recently denounced Peter Taaffes Committee for a Workers
International (CWI) for dispatching its Moscow supporters to
Soviet factories during the coup to discourage workers from
backing the Stalinist "hardliners":
"The adherents to Taaffes Militant tendency did not just
climb on Yeltsins barricadeswhere they were, in any case, not
needed. They went to the factories, where these social-democratic traitors
tried to head off workers mobilizations against Yeltsin and
Bushs democrats:
"From the declarations of the [putschist State Emergency
Committee] it followed that they were acting against the so-called "democrats,"
and that posed the danger of support to the putschists by workers organizations
that did not share the principles of the "democrats" the rule of private
property and capitalist power. And that is exactly what happened. Some of the
workers organizations were getting ready to send greetings of welcome, and at
several factories the workers even tried to organize defense detachments in
support of the putschists.
"From the morning on, all of our members explained to
workers at their workplaces that the position of the Emergency Committee did
not coincide with their interests. In addition to this, they connected up with
worker activists of other organizations, in order to prevent hasty
actions. "Where We Were [CWI
statement]"
"The impulse of these workers was far better than that of the
Militant tendency, whose support to Yeltsin put it in the same camp as every
imperialist power on the face of the globe." WV No. 828, 11
June 2004
True enough, but the "impulse of these workers" was also "far
better" than the hypocritical ICL leadership, whose refusal to take sides
between the two camps put it in a third one.
In a 1995 article, we noted the connection between the SLs
programmatic departures on the Russian question and its highly bureaucratized
internal regime:
"The Spartacist League now finds itself in a state of
complete confusion regarding the single question that more than any other had
defined it as a tendencythe Russian question. This is not simply a case
of faulty analysis. The adaptation to Stalinism in the early 1980s, like the
social-patriotic deviations, could easily have been reversed in a healthy,
democratic-centralist group. Even the misestimate of the situation in the DDR,
or the failure to grasp the significance of the August 1991 events, do not in
themselves constitute betrayals. Honest revolutionaries can make mistakes. The
SL, however, lacks the capacity for correcting these mistakes that only a
democratic internal life can provide. It is the doctrine of Robertsonian
infallibility, and the adamant refusal to acknowledge that an opponent could be
right where it was wrong, that drives the SL to persist in and compound its
original errors, to play havoc with reality in the process, and finally to
descend gradually into incoherence." 1917 No. 15, 1995
The SL/ICL is an organization in which criticism only flows
downward. In cauterizing potential opposition from below, James Robertson and
his acolytes originally imagined that they would be able to avoid the costly
overhead of faction fights and splits, but only succeeded in strangling the
once-revolutionary Spartacist League and setting it on the path to political
oblivion. The SL/ICLs current intractable problems demonstrate the
inextricable connection between the internal regime of a revolutionary
organization and its formal political program. The necrosis of the Spartacist
League, like the split between the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903,
demonstrates that in the final analysis, for revolutionaries, the
organizational question is a political question. |