In 1981 the leadership of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) fostered a muddled conflict in the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand, resulting in a purge of the leadership and the resignations under extreme pressure of a substantial layer of the membership. These events demonstrate that the process of degeneration of the iSt was already well established by 1981, far earlier than argued by other commentators such as the Internationalist Group, who date its degeneration 15 years later—from their own ousting in 1996.
At the time the SL/ANZ was clearly disoriented and conflicted by the Spartacist League of the United States marching on demonstrations carrying the flags of popular-frontist organisations in Vietnam and El Salvador, and by scholastic claims about where the “defence of the Soviet Union” might begin, with the use of slogans such as “Defence of Cuba and the USSR begins in El Salvador.”
Different elements of the SL/ANZ argued over various assessments of what its New York masters expected of it, and the New York leadership of the tendency sent in two very senior international representatives to direct the process, resulting in the effective re-registration of the section's membership and installation of a new leadership. The section was seriously and permanently weakened, and has suffered a continuing series of leadership changes ever since.
When we commented on these events in a letter to the Internationalist Group in 1996 our information was from the contemporaneous Internal Discussion Bulletins (IDB), but we publish here additional material recently written by Steve Hooper and Jim Shaughnessy who were closely involved in these events and offer details that were not available to us until now. Whatever differences we have with these comrades, we know of nothing to suggest their recollections are anything but entirely honest. Alongside these recent personal reflections, we are publishing a document Jim wrote in 1981 which was never released by the iSt leadership or published in an IDB, presumably because it did not fit the official narrative.
Steve Hooper was recruited to the SL/ANZ from the Communist Party of Australia in 1975, became chair of the section as a result of these 1981 events, and departed the organisation in 1986. Jim Shaughnessy was recruited to the Spartacist tendency from the Workers Socialist League in Britain in 1978, and in 1981 was an alternate member of the SL/ANZ Central Committee and managing editor of Australasian Spartacist. Other key figures in the section at the time, and mentioned in these documents, were full Central Committee members Chris Korwin, Robbye D'Amico, John Sheridan and Phillipa Newman, and alternate members Paul Connor and David Reynolds.
Jim notes:
“When I first read the International Bolshevik Tendency's [1996] account of the SLANZ fight in Trotskyist Bulletin No.6, I felt strongly that this was a partial account of what happened. Not wrong, by any means, but partial. When I eventually read the internal bulletins, I realised why: what is left out can be as significant as what is included. In this respect, I note that while there are many letters from Australia to New York, very few replies were included.”
These accounts by comrades who were present at the time highlight in particular the way in which the international leadership fostered an atmosphere of competitive obsequiousness among the Australian comrades. The leadership artificially posed the defence of the Soviet Union as primary in a context where it was secondary, leading to unnecessary tension between that defence and legitimate national priorities, and fostered bizarre conflicts about the non-issue of where the defence of the Soviet Union began.
The very senior IEC delegation to Australia (Al Nelson and George Crawford) crossed the PATCO picket lines to get there, and proceeded to systematically break down the mutual trust of members of the Australian section, almost destroying the section as a whole—a process for which they blamed the national leadership. Acting without local input in re-registering the membership through the creation of an artificial faction, they dissolved the democratic centralist relationship between the section and the international. All this is in accord with other degeneration seen across the iSt, and documented by the IBT and our predecessors (for a summary, see Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League).
International Bolshevik Tendency
November 2024