3 September 2024
The International Bolshevik Tendency debated the Spartacist League of Australia (section of the International Communist League/ICL) in Melbourne on 29 June 2024 on the topic of “Permanent Revolution & the Struggle for Revolutionary Leadership Today”. We believe debate across the self-described revolutionary left is essential to the regroupment of Marxists today—but this debate was of particular importance.
The ICL was launched 35 years ago as a rebranding of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt), whose legacy and program it no longer represented in practice. The politics of the revolutionary iSt were, instead, defended by the founders of the IBT, who had regrouped after being expelled or otherwise pushed out of the iSt as it descended into bureaucratism and centrism in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League?).
The ICL has recently undergone an unusual political turn. Its new international leadership has formally renounced the key aspects of the historical program of the revolutionary iSt, embarking on an enthusiastic criticism of ICL and iSt history and proclaiming in vague but bold terms that it has found a new strategy for the international class struggle (see Spartacist No.68). It is our view that this shift amounts to the abandonment of the Trotskyist tradition (even in the degenerated manner in which “middle Spartacism” claimed to uphold it) for a kind of neo-Pabloism.
The ICL’s main critique of the IBT is that we see “the world through the lens of sterile formulas and dogmas” and therefore are not effectively (or actually) fighting to build revolutionary leadership. Furthermore, our supposed inability to provide leadership makes the IBT a roadblock to revolution “especially in the neocolonies” owing to our insistence on certain “formulas and dogmas” we defend from the revolutionary iSt’s understanding of permanent revolution and the national question.
In the two presentations and several interventions from the floor reproduced below, our comrades covered a lot of ground. As well as permanent revolution and the national question, we touched on how those seeking to build revolutionary leadership address the problems of social-democratic organisations and electoral politics and fighting the many types of oppression encountered under capitalism. We also took the opportunity to highlight some of the ways the Spartacists have failed to provide revolutionary leadership over the last several decades. In their contributions, Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah drew on their experiences in the iSt in the 1970s to analyse how the organisation degenerated, raising some (as yet unanswered) questions for the Spartacists. Some might see this as a diversion from the topic of the debate, but we say that understanding the past has everything to do with revolutionary leadership today.
The debate does not cover all possible, or even all important, aspects of the differences between the new ICL and the IBT. For instance, the idea that a tiny sub-propaganda group of the size of either the ICL or IBT could directly approach the masses to “fight for communist leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle” is delusional. While the Spartacists might agree with that conclusion in theory, it is more than reasonable to conclude from their press that the new ICL, consistent with its trajectory towards Pabloism, has adopted a fake mass orientation. Certainly, their repeated claims to actually be fighting for leadership (as opposed to the academic bookkeepers of the IBT) suggests that the ICL sees itself as vying for leadership against much larger political forces. This impression is backed up by the concluding summary remarks of the ICL representative, who chose to evoke the myth that the ICL was contending for power in Eastern Europe in 1989–91: “the Spartacists put forward a program to fight for revolutionary leadership in the DDR and the Soviet Union, against counter-revolution, against the Stalinist bureaucracy. We fought for political revolution, not in words, but deed.”
The role of a numerically weak Trotskyist organisation—a fighting propaganda group—is to fight for leadership on a realistic scale while outlining a program and strategy for workers’ power. The latter will necessarily have something of an abstract and anticipatory quality insofar as the key factor (a mass revolutionary party) cannot yet be concretely incorporated into the picture, since it is precisely this key factor that the propaganda group is fighting to bring into existence. One recent example of a scale-appropriate “fight for leadership” was cited during the debate by IBT comrade Max Schade: our exemplary intervention into the trans rights movement in New Zealand. By contrast, the ICL presents itself as directly challenging the national bourgeoisie (and its parties) for leadership, as indicated in their representative’s comment: “what part of the EFF’s freedom charter that you actually oppose? Is it the peace, the land or the bread? Because what the EFF’s doing is they have their own demands, and we are actually trying to show that they are unable to achieve their own demands.” The call for “Peace, Land and Bread” was appropriate for the Bolsheviks when they had become a mass party on the verge of taking power. The ICL is suggesting that, by critically supporting the bourgeois Economic Freedom Fighters in the recent South African election, they were “exposing” them in the eyes of the working class. But the working class was not looking to or even at the ICL, which has a handful of supporters in South Africa. More importantly, the ICL is now willing to cut programmatic corners to exercise the sort of influence over the masses that their size alone would preclude. In this case, that involved ignoring the class line and voting for a party that is entirely outside the workers’ movement.
For all their denunciation of the IBT as promoters of “sterile formulas and dogmas”, it is the ICL that has shackled itself with the “sterile formula” of the “anti-imperialist united front”. This is tied to their assertion that the struggle for national liberation in the neocolonies is “the motor force” for revolution. Our comrades attempted to address the schematism that the ICL uses to justify this “dogma”. In her summary, IBT supporter Vera Ashbourne noted that “we have never once denied that national revolution can be the motor force of a revolutionary struggle”, while Bill Logan observed in his own summary: “Nationalism is contradictory, it’s certainly not reactionary through and through, certainly very often highly revolutionary in a way that can make the transition to communist revolution.” The ICL representative picked up on these points in her summary:
“Bill, on nationalism’s reactionary, I say, what you’re saying that’s not your line. I suggest you read what you published on your website on nationalism of the oppressed.…”
“It’s not about, oh, do you put your leg in, do you put your leg out on the national liberation struggle. Do you see it as a motor force for revolution and do you look to combine it with proletarian revolution? We have penned plenty of words denouncing us, but now you’re suddenly saying, oh, yeah, actually we do all this.”
Our comrades were making the observation that the struggle for national liberation (or “nationalism”, not as an ideology but as a mass movement in the neocolonies) may indeed open the floodgates for socialist revolution. The point is that we do not have a preformulated schema according to which the working class must form, not simply temporary blocs as the situation may demand, but the “anti-imperialist united front” with the bourgeoisie to wrestle for control of the national liberation struggle as the only way to achieve workers’ power in the neocolonies. For all its talk about fighting for leadership, the ICL has shown itself incapable of advancing the Marxist program in a tactically adept and principled manner. They have demonstrated that the real content of their bluster about the fight for revolutionary leadership is not righteous indignation but desperation and a certain flailing about. Equally, the real content of their claim that national liberation struggle is “the motor force” for socialist revolution is not a recognition of the destabilising potential of such struggle for the imperialist order but the practical renunciation of the centrality both of the class struggle and of proletarian leadership in the seizure of power by the working class. As Bill explained:
“[T]here is no automatic process that goes on, and that’s what we’re trying to introduce into the conversation—a sense of how you make the transition to communist politics. And that means doing something to change the struggle that is.
“I actually think as I stand back from the discussion this afternoon that what we have here is a difference on the kind of way we are going to build an organisation. It seems to me that the Spartacist League, overall, is trying to build an organisation from the bottom up, that it is trying to say: right, we are going to lead the working class and we want to get a program for the working class. Now we obviously want to get a program that we want the working class to accept, but we see the importance of doing what is possible, in the best possible way, now.”
It has always been the centrist’s view that (genuine) Marxists are “sectarian” and hamstrung by “dogma”. The irony is that centrists are doomed to political irrelevance precisely because they cling to their own non-revolutionary dogmas while deluding themselves into believing that they are cleverly playing high-stakes poker with forces much larger than themselves.
Reproduced below is the introductory speech from the Spartacists (one comrade speaking for 30 minutes) and those from the IBT (30 minutes divided between two comrades), plus interventions from the floor and summaries by IBT supporters and the ICL representative’s summary remarks. We have made light editorial corrections to improve comprehension and readability. Further documents on the ICL’s degeneration are available here: Reforge the international Spartacist tendency!
The full event is available on video:
Hello comrades.
Permanent revolution and the fight for revolutionary leadership today.
This question is not an academic one, not one of theoretical differences in abstract understanding of the theory of permanent revolution. No, at its core, this debate is between two fundamentally opposed methods.
There’s one, the IBT’s, that sees the world through the lens of sterile formulas and dogmas. The IBT proudly stakes its claim on all that is sterile, reactionary and counter to Leninism and the historic Spartacism’s distortion of permanent revolution. Then, there is our own, orientated by the fight to advance class struggle through the struggle against imperialism.
Both groups proclaim the need for revolution, but unlike the IBT, we actually forge a path to put those words into action. In this presentation, I will demonstrate what a fight for revolutionary leadership actually entails and why the IBT fails to wage a fight and is in fact a roadblock to the struggle in general, but especially in the neocolonies.
Today, the imperialist hegemony of the US is in decline. The American empire has responded hysterically by holding ever tighter to their position and eyeing any potential threats, from Russia and Ukraine to China through the AUKUS military pact. In part motivated by weakened US hegemony and in reaction to years of brutal siege on the Palestinians, Hamas attempted to draw neighbouring states into war. Another crack in the US-led order, the reaction has been the holding on ever tighter to their Zionist enclave in the Middle East as it rolls through and bombs Gaza.
The US is looking to drag the workers of the world down with it in a spiral of war and destruction, and the world over the workers’ movement has been completely tied to this cause by its bourgeois misleaders. In this decline, the US is squeezing its allies and clients. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the neocolonies.
These countries have been defined by imperialist oppression, which has plunged the working class into the depths of misery. Austerity is dictated through imperialist debts. The backwardness of pre-capitalist relations that denied peasants land and bread are maintained and reinforced by foreign domination.
Under globalised imperialist hegemony, the massively growing proletariat of the neocolonies are kept super-exploited and in a stagnating social position. It is here that the workers and toilers yearn to modernise and resist the deplorable conditions enforced by the imperialists, giving an explosive dynamic to the struggle for the most basic demands and propelling the working class to its feet.
This felt sense of imperialist oppression has thus far been channelled into support to bourgeois nationalists from AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] in Mexico to Modi in India, who claim they represent the interests of the nation and pose as a progressive or modernising force in developing the country, capable of uplifting the masses from the conditions enforced by imperialism.
They are the representatives of the national bourgeoisie of the neocolonial countries, what Trotsky described as a semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class veering between foreign finance capital and a national proletariat. As a propertied class, they are perennially in fear of the independent mobilisation of the proletariat, the only class with the capacity to fight and ultimately defeat imperialism. For all their rhetoric about defending the nation, under their leadership there is neither national nor social emancipation.
AMLO, Modi, Lula, etc. only offer dead ends for the working class and offer no solution to escape the trajectory of misery and imperialist carnage. The question is, what way forwards? Over the past decades, there have been two reactions on the left to the seemingly unbreakable grip that the bourgeois nationalists have over the neocolonial masses, both of which surrendered the fight for proletarian leadership.
On one hand, there are those who tail the bourgeois nationalists as a progressive force, openly repudiating the necessity of independent revolutionary leadership, or at least postponing it to an indefinite future. A classic example were the Pabloites, who saw the nationalists not as an obstacle, but as a blunt instrument against imperialism. There are countless contemporary iterations of these politics today, each of which cheer on or play left critic advisors to bourgeois nationalism as it leads the working class into betrayal after betrayal and defeat after defeat. One example is how much of the left cynically fawns over Hamas, promoting the movement under their leadership as the path to Palestinian liberation.
Against such flagrant opportunism, there are those with a name of proletarian leadership [who] drew sterile and rigid lines against the national liberation struggle, juxtaposing national liberation with socialism. In this camp stood the old ICL and stands the current IBT, who often denounce the struggle for national liberation as bourgeois in itself, or otherwise a barrier to class struggle.
Under this schema, national liberation is not something to champion, but to remove off the agenda, but this only leaves the national liberation struggle firmly in the hands of the bourgeois nationalists.
The former amounts to competing with the national bourgeois by matching it with nationalist sloganeering, that is to tail and cheer them on. The latter denounces the struggle to compete at all. Both are a roadblock.
What is really necessary is to fight for communist leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle. This is the core of permanent revolution and its strengths. As the Comintern’s thesis on the Eastern Question outlined in 1922, our duty is to demonstrate that even the smallest day-to-day struggles of the working class must be directed at imperialism to permit any real victories. Even in the struggle against them for the most basic democratic tasks, we must fight to guide the workers to the question of class power. At every step, we must expose these nationalists and their program of conciliation to the imperialists as incapable of achieving even their own limited demands, let alone broader democratic and national tasks necessary to achieve national emancipation.
Our task is to push forward the struggle against the imperialists, to counterpose our strategy of independent action of the working class against the ones of the national bourgeoisie, and show that in fact they constitute the main political roadblock to a victorious struggle against imperialism. In fact, by advancing each struggle against the imperialists, by bringing the masses to their feet, we do not push the working class closer to the national bourgeoisie, but deepen the polarisation between the two classes. As the struggle against imperialism is pushed to its limits, torn asunder is the nationalist lie of a common interest between the two classes against imperialism. Only through this can we destroy the nationalist illusions that have a stranglehold over the masses.
This cannot be done through endless pontification of Marxist sounding formulas, but by actively participating in the anti-imperialist struggle and fighting for a communist program within it, and for communist hegemony over it. Only through actively intervening and championing the movement for democracy and national independence against imperialism can a proletariat take leadership and come to power, the only thing that can ensure resolution of these fundamental questions. This is what it means to fight for revolutionary leadership of the working class of the neocolonies, not as what the ICL has done previously and the IBT does today, abstractly juxtaposing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the real daily needs and aspirations of the masses.
As Trotsky said in reference to Mexico:
“[T]he Fourth International recognizes all the democratic tasks of the state in the fight for national independence, but the Mexican section of the Fourth International is in competition with the national bourgeoisie, before the workers, before the peasants. We are in permanent competition with the national bourgeoisie as the only one leadership which is capable of assuring victory of the masses in the fight against the foreign imperialists.
“In the agrarian question we support expropriations. That does not signify, of course, that we support the national bourgeoisie. In every case where it is a direct fight against the foreign imperialists or their reactionary fascist agents, we give revolutionary support, preserving the full political independence of our organization, of our program, of our party, and the full freedom of our criticism.”
—[Latin American Problems: A Transcript]
In response to this, in response to this Trotsky quote, the IBT would say they agree with him, that they too would have supported the expropriation of the imperialist assets. In doing so, what they miss is the forest for the trees, that is, they miss that Trotsky’s method centres the fight for revolutionary leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle.
Of course we support expropriation of imperialist assets, but this narrow view of viewing whether something is supportable or not misses the basis of Trotsky’s support. The very thing that it is trying to accomplish, fighting to show that communists are the best and most consistent fighters against foreign imperialists, is something the IBT denounces us for. For the IBT and the old ICL, Marxism is not a guide to action, but little more than a grab bag of formulas to wave at the end of articles to ward off opportunism.
The struggles and works of Lenin and Trotsky, hell, all the lessons of the Russian revolution as codified in the first four congresses of the Comintern, are not so much distilled but sterilised into abstract principles to use at any occasion. Such cross-referenced Marxism teaches you not how to navigate the world as a class struggle, but to stay on land to avoid drowning. It is no surprise when we actually laid out a program for revolutionary leadership in the neocolonies in Spartacist 68 against our old sterility, the IBT has only been able to cry out: “opportunism!”
At best they declare that we have crossed some imagined line of opportunism, at worst they distort our position beyond recognition. Not once do they motivate how their own program advances the fight for revolutionary leadership and ours does not. To be fair, I wouldn’t know how to argue on this basis against the ICL’s program either.
In their article “Spartacism Junked”, to argue that we are now orientating to bourgeois nationalism, they pull up a quote from us, criticising our old position as opposition to “bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity”. With such a statement they seemingly imply that we now support bourgeois nationalism, but what they neglect to quote is the second half of the sentence, which says that the old ICL method “opposes bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity instead of seeking to break its hold on the masses by showing how it is an obstacle to both social and national liberation”. In fact, the full quote is a pretty apt summary of the difference between the ICL and IBT, two fundamentally opposed methods to break the hold of bourgeois nationalism, only one of which is actually capable of doing so.
The actual basis of their opposition to our struggle is really reflected in their repeated assertion that we champion the national liberation struggle instead of class struggle as the fundamental lever of revolution in the neocolonies. Their method of reaching this conclusion is simple: Trotsky says we need a dictatorship of the proletariat to overthrow the imperialist yoke in the neocolonies, thus what is needed is revolution. Revolution can only be achieved through class struggle, thus we need to preach for class struggle and revolution to criticise the nationalist leadership not on the basis of their ability to actually wage the struggle, but on the basis that they are not revolutionary and aren’t for class struggle.
Such methods are very easy for those who would not like to think, but can we be real? People who support AMLO and Modi already know they aren’t revolutionaries. Such an argument convinces them of nothing other than the fact that these would-be Marxists have nothing to offer the national liberation movement of today.
What are the implications of juxtaposing class struggle and national liberation? The world today is defined by a handful of imperialist countries dividing up and dominating the rest of the world through the export of finance capital. In Lenin’s words, our current epoch is defined by imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. To think that in this situation the anti-imperialist struggle is not key to liberation, that the struggle against imperialism is in any way separated from the struggle against capitalism, is to renounce the Leninist understanding of capitalism altogether.
The difference between ourselves and the IBT is not that we see class struggle or the struggle against capitalism as subordinate to a struggle against imperialism. Our difference is that the IBT puts one against the other. The IBT treats the goal of a national emancipation not as intimately connected with social emancipation, but as a diversion from class struggle, something to strike off the agenda to focus on some pure class struggle, untainted by the pesky reality of imperialist oppression.
Or, as it said in IBT’s favourite old Spartacist article, the 1977 “Theses on Ireland”, “we support the right of self-determination and national liberation struggles in order to remove the national question from the historic agenda, not to create another such question”.
That is bankruptcy to the highest degree, as Lenin argued against those who dismissed the struggle against the British in the Easter Rebellion in 1916: “to imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, the monarchy, against national oppression, et cetera. To imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in place and says, we are for socialism, and another somewhere else says, we are for imperialism, and that will be a social revolution. Only those who hold such ridiculous pedantic views could vilify the Irish Rebellion”. There lies our difference.
In place of an actual argument, their “Spartacism Junked” article can only call out and decry us as Pabloites. Our crime? Fighting for national liberation as key to revolution in the neocolonies. The Fourth International was liquidated by the rise of Pabloism because it was a political tendency which represented, at its core, an open repudiation of the necessity for revolutionary leadership. But the IBT transforms the whole struggle against Pabloism into a caricature.
For them, the fundamental problem with Pabloism is that it championed national liberation. For the doctrinaire, repudiating the fight for revolutionary leadership is a secondary question. The IBT’s decrying of our defence of the anti-imperialist united front is premised on the same distortion of Leninism.
In the fight for revolutionary leadership against imperialism, we must seek to find every avenue to expose the bourgeois nationalists for their betrayals. That includes united fronts. To paraphrase Trotsky, it is necessary to reach episodic agreements with the bourgeois nationalists within the framework of strictly defined practical tasks while maintaining complete political independence.
This is perhaps not the case for the IBT, but communists use the united front not just to cohere broader forces, but for a common purpose in itself, but also for communist hegemony within this united front. This does not mean we are entering permanent blocs with the national bourgeoisie as the IBT implies. Even the IBT seemingly understands the necessity of this in certain situations.
After all, do they not take a military side of Hamas against Israel? Again, for the IBT, they see capitulation and opportunism not in the failure to fight for revolutionary leadership, but in crossing of imagined principles. To accomplish this, they resort to distorting the fourth congress of the Comintern, which this call derives from. The ICL’s position on the anti-imperialist united front and the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole was not invented by us.
Our framework on the anti-imperialist struggle is based on the second and fourth congresses of the Comintern. I ask the IBT: do you stand on the second and fourth congresses, or do you denounce it just like the old ICL did? In criticising what they call our “junking of Spartacism”, the IBT declares that we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In their words “the SL was distinguished from the Pabloites on a range of important political questions, from Northern Ireland to Israel-Palestine, from the Iranian Revolution to the Malvinas–Falklands War, from Mexico to Quebec and beyond. All of that has now been erased”. From Mexico to Palestine, the IBT cries we have dropped everything Spartacist, but really we have only junked the junk, which the IBT still desperately clings on to.
Take a look to Mexico, for instance, a country whose entire history is defined by imperialist bondage and devastation. The NAFTA trade agreement opened today’s era of unrestricted pillaging. The IMF imposes the harshest austerity measures on Mexico for the interests of US imperialism. US companies are the direct employers of most of the workers.
Imperialism dictates every single political and economic aspect of Mexico, and the whole struggle of the Mexican people has been resistant to such imperialist oppression. In response to this, the ICL argued in 2000 “we Spartacists insist that in Mexico the main enemy is at home. It is the Mexican bourgeoisie, lackey of imperialism”.
We insisted that the main enemy is not imperialism in Mexico. This is a reiteration of earlier articles that the IBT upholds today, such as the 1972 “Not Green against Orange but Class against Class”, which declares “the main battle of workers in one nation must always be against their own bourgeoisie”. So the main enemy isn’t the one actually calling the shots, but the national bourgeoisie, a class which in reality is at best a local branch manager administering imperialist dictates?
We later repudiated the “main enemy is at home” slogan in Mexico, but still approached each question from some pure class struggle against the Mexican bourgeoisie, not by using the struggle against imperialism to expose its national lackeys. This is what GEM, Mexican section of the ICL, repudiated. Today, we actually have a program to expose the bourgeois nationalists as nothing but an obstacle to national liberation.
So what does the IBT oppose? That we say the main enemy is imperialism? That we say that the struggle against imperialism is key to liberation? That we criticise the nationalists for betraying the struggle against imperialism? This is not isolated to Mexico, of course, but look around at Asia and the Pacific. How the hell are you going to win any workers from Indonesia, Kanaky, Papua New Guinea, if you argue that the main enemy is not imperialism, but in fact that in the neocolonies, the main enemy is at home? Or argue that the struggle against imperialism is not central to their liberation? The IBT’s position amounts to arguing from the heights of Wellington that the struggle to liberate the nation from imperialism, the root oppression in the neocolonies, is nothing but a distraction. Nowhere is the IBT’s method more obviously bankrupt than in Israel/Palestine.
Today, there is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In response, their recent “Stop the Gaza Genocide!” article reiterates the IBT’s support to the old ICL “interpenetrated peoples” theory, a theory which amounts to little more than a justification to not have a side with the oppressed nation against the oppressor and deny permanent revolution in the region. This theory argues that championing Palestinian liberation could only come at the expense of the democratic rights of the Israeli-Jewish nation, which would necessarily entail reversing the terms of oppression and outright national annihilation of the Jewish people.
Instead, the IBT calls for class struggle and revolution. But how are you going to have either if you don’t champion the fight for Palestinian liberation, the only basis that you can break Israeli workers from Zionism and win over the Palestinian masses? The IBT goes on further to lament how we have renounced this theory in favour of our current position, which they quote us saying how “the struggle for national liberation is not an obstacle to be moved aside but the motor force for revolution” as long as communists take leadership of the national liberation struggle. Actually, this quote is right on the money. The ICL looks to treat the struggle for Palestinian liberation not as a distraction, but as a key part of socialist revolution in the region, and what is necessary for that is communist leadership of this national liberation struggle.
So what about this quote does the IBT have a problem with? Does the IBT renounce that communists must fight for leadership of the national liberation struggle? Does the IBT see the struggle for Palestinian liberation as nothing more than an obstacle to be moved aside? For the IBT, is the Palestinians’ resistance to their national extermination a mere distraction? Exemplifying this bankruptcy is the affirmation of the slogan “not Jew against Arab, but class against class”, aka don’t get distracted with the fight to free Palestine. Focus on some pure class struggle instead. Soon after October 7th, the IBT released a leaflet “Down with Zionist Terror!”, which argued:
“The apartheid regime run by Tel Aviv is the inevitable result of the Zionist project to establish an ethno-religious state for Jews. Some 75 years ago, this led to a violent expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians and a confiscation of over 90 percent of the land. The current attack on Gaza is a direct continuation of that unfinished campaign of ethnic cleansing.”
Yes, correct. The Zionist state, established and codified in the 1948 war, was premised on the expulsion of the Palestinians. It is a settler-colonial project predicated on ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, of which the genocide in Gaza is a continuation. So where did the Spartacist tradition lie on the question? Well, the original position on the 1948 war, a position the SL took in 1968, was that there was a side to take in the war with Israel. This was the war that led to the expulsion of entire cities of Palestinians and the establishment of the Zionist state within the Green Lines, and we justified it under the lie that the Israeli-Jewish nation was threatened with extinction. The same 1968 article also called for a peace treaty on the 1949 boundary lines and equated the Zionist state with the Israeli-Jewish nation. In a later 1974 article, “The Birth of the Zionist State”, which the IBT actively promotes today, the old SL changed their position to a dual-defeatist one, arguing not that this was a bankrupt capitulation to Zionism, but that new facts were discovered that indicated the Jewish nation was not threatened.
Since then, the old ICL had maintained, as the IBT does today, that the borders that came from the 1948 war constitute a core part of Israel that must be defended if threatened. That is to say, the IBT still defends the settler-colonial conquest of the 1948 war as legitimate, which is the same line of the liberal Zionists. This updated defeatist line on the 1948 war, while less egregious, is still a gross capitulation to Zionism and imperialism.
By having such a position, the IBT puts an equal sign between the Zionists, who were looking to expropriate Palestine, and the Arab nations that were fighting against it. Yes, it is true that Arab leaders will only betray the struggle for Palestinian freedom, but the task of communists was to intervene in the struggle against Zionism and show how these corrupt regimes only undermined the fight for a free Palestine, including by fomenting anti-Jewish reaction, which only rallied the Jewish workers to the Zionist cause. Instead of this, the IBT, like the historic SL, called to point the gun the other way in a conflict which was, in the IBT’s own words, a “violent expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians and the confiscation of over 90 percent of their land”, which the current genocide in Gaza is a continuation of.
I ask the IBT, which side are you on in the Nakba? This is not a historical question, of course, but has its implications in ongoing war today. In contrast to the IBT’s approach of treating Palestinian liberation as a mere distraction, the ICL produced an article, “A Revolutionary Road for Palestinian Liberation”, which puts front and centre the question of national liberation. The entire basis of our intervention is centred around putting forward a strategy to defend Gaza, smash the Zionist state and defeat imperialism.
We motivate the necessity of joint Jewish-Palestinian struggle, not through moral preaching to love one’s neighbour and focus on class struggle, but by putting forward a counterposed strategy to free Palestine and demonstrate that communists are the best fighters of Palestinian liberation and that under Hamas, there is only death and defeat. Only by centering the question of Palestinian liberation are we able to motivate how Hamas’ approach of looking for mates with the bourgeois nationalist rulers while lumping Jewish workers for the Zionist state is, in fact, completely counterproductive to the struggle to liberate Palestine. That, in fact, to destroy the Zionist state, what needs to happen is to break it along class lines, which can only happen if Jewish workers can be won to the struggle for Palestinian freedom as their own.
At the same time, we must convince Palestinians of the necessity of joint struggle and to defend the national rights of Jewish workers to live in Palestine, whose liberation also demands the smashing of the Zionist state. Above all, it emphasises that joint class struggle in both Palestine and Israel “must be connected to breaking the main obstacle standing in the way of any social progress, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians”, which is the fundamental, central question of the conflict.
For the IBT, in their “Stop the Gaza Genocide” article, they clearly have a lot to complain about ICL. To try and respond to our article, they repeat their distortions on the anti-imperialist united front to imply we see no reason to expose the bourgeois nationalists and that revolutionary leadership objectively springs from such tactics automatically. They lament how we centre the question of national liberation in Palestine. What do they put forward in this place? Class struggle, as if class struggle is abstracted from the struggle for national liberation of Palestine.
This long and turgid article reads more like a wish list for joint class struggle and revolution, rather than actually counterposing a strategy to Hamas. And when they finally do try to motivate how to break Palestinian workers from Hamas, it is almost comical: “Thus Palestinian communists would not simply bloc militarily with Hamas but also advance transitional ’economic’ demands (for example, during the protests against Hamas’s social austerity in July 2023)”. Gaza is being turned to rubble. There’s an active genocide that threatens to destroy the Palestinian nation. Palestinians are not supporting Hamas because they think they have the best social welfare schools.
Palestinians are supporting Hamas because they think Hamas are the best fighters against Zionism and imperialism, because they believe Hamas is the best bet to free Palestine from the river to the sea. To imagine that the Palestinian people will break from Hamas because you are critical of their austerity reforms is not only economist, but pathetic. The ICL puts front and centre the struggle for communist leadership with a program to expose Hamas for betraying the national liberation struggle.
The IBT renounces this fight and in place offers budget critiques. This is the fruit of separating class struggle against the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In imperialist countries, where the IBT does almost all their work, it is clear they are not looking to fight for communist leadership of the Palestinian movement either.
In fact, the speeches they have published on their website are pretty openly laudatory of the elements of the pro-imperialist union bureaucracy, praising what they call “honourable unions” who advance collective actions for Palestine, which in their May Day article they make pretty explicit include those friends of Palestine bureaucrats in Australia. In truth, these friends of Palestine, most notably in the CFMEU and MUA, are the main political roadblock to any real workers’ action for Palestine in this country and has consistently opposed strike action and [inaudible] bans due to their bloc with the open supporters of genocide in government. The SLA’s work in the recent period has been primarily to expose the treacherous role of these bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, the IBT plays their left cover. In imperialist countries too, they betray the struggle for national liberation of the neocolonies. I would like to end the presentation by quoting the theses on the Eastern Question: “any refusal of communists in the colonies to take part in the struggle against imperialist tyranny on the excuse of supposed defence of independent class interests is opportunism of the worst sort that can only discredit proletarian revolution in the east”.
This is not only true when there is a military side in the case of a war, but in peacetime as well. After all, war is politics by other means. This is the road the ICL has rejected and this is the road the IBT is currently on.
Thank you.
Thank you for this debate. The clarification of political ideas through argument is important.
The new Spartacists believe their forebears were sectarian and fundamentally wrong about permanent revolution. They were “a bottomless pit of confusion and sterility”, apparently. They claim to have transcended this centrist mess during a brief moment of enlightenment after the death of James Robertson, while in a bout of paralysis during the Covid crisis.
Now of course the early Spartacists had flaws, but they continued the program and organisational methods of the Fourth International, methods qualitatively sufficient to lead a revolution.
The pre-Spartacists emerged as a tendency in the United States while politics was starting to revive after the relative stagnation of the McCarthy period. What was distinctive about the Revolutionary Tendency and the Spartacists was that they did not pretend that the growing struggles had any inbuilt tendency to become revolutionary. They saw the necessity to intervene with a program to transform the struggles—the Transitional Program, which draws the class line, builds consciousness of the class as a class, and mobilises the class to fight in its own interests, transforming the struggles around today’s non-revolutionary consciousness and activity into revolutionary consciousness and activity.
As we in this room know, in the early 1950s Michel Pablo infected our movement with the illusion that the working class could take power without the intervention of a revolutionary vanguard. Originally, Pablo saw the Moscow-line Stalinists’ struggle as having an inbuilt impetus toward proletarian revolution. But over time different fragments of world Trotskyism focused on other movements as imagined sources of self-generating revolutionary consciousness and action: trade-unionism, various nationalisms, social-democratic reformism, Castroism, Maoism, the movement against the Vietnam War, feminism, and so on. The method was the same: seek to join the movement, seek to build the movement, seek influence in the movement and try to take a prominent part in the movement.
But the fight for revolutionary program was forgotten.
As we know, the Spartacists were built in the struggle against this kind of Pabloism [see “Genesis of Pabloism”]. Back in those days we fought against imperialist domination, or black oppression, or Māori oppression, without becoming nationalists, and without pandering to the illusions in the national struggle that it could turn itself into a proletarian revolutionary struggle.
We fought against the Vietnam War, without either capitulating to the Vietnamese Stalinists or becoming implicated in the bourgeois-pacifist campaign to pull the movement behind the anti-war wing of the imperial bourgeoisie. We joined every struggle against oppression, but we didn’t accept the non-revolutionary politics of the struggle—we fought against the boss but opposed reformism, we fought for women’s liberation but we opposed feminism.
We knew how to draw the class line. That lies at the core of Bolshevism. At the most fundamental level Marxism is about engendering class consciousness and organising the working class as a class against the bourgeoisie.
When a reformist party standing in parliamentary elections, in an incomplete and approximate way, claims to represent the working class against the parties of the bourgeoisie, then critical support and voting for such a party may be a tool to engender class consciousness. But when a party which makes no attempt to represent the working class as a class—a party like the Democrats in the United States or the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa—then that party is fundamentally bourgeois, and critical support or a vote in no way leads in the direction of class consciousness.
And when a party stands for election, pretending to represent the working class, but in alliance with an openly bourgeois party—a liberal party, for example—there is no way that a vote for it draws the class line, and there’s no excuse for critical support. As the record shows, such alliances are used to disarm the working class and prepare the way for right-wing repression.
When Salvador Allende stood as the Popular Unity candidate for the Chilean elections of 1970, everyone else on the left supported him. Would our new Spartacists have supported him too? The old Spartacists argued that Allende’s win would end in disaster [see “Chilean Popular Front”]. Is that part of the sectarian abstentionism you charge your forebears with?
There was nothing abstentionist about our work on Chile. We joined the demonstrations, we called for the political independence of the working class, we opposed Allende’s instructions to the class to hand in its weapons to appease his bourgeois allies. We raised revolutionary demands. We knew how to combine political opposition to the Popular Unity government with calls to defend it militarily against the rising threat of takeover by the army.
In the event, as you know, the government was liquidated. The organisations of the working class were destroyed. Thousands were killed and the most conscious elements of the Chilean working class were forced into exile. We helped them escape, and we made some important friends politically.
It was in 1971 that the Spartacist tendency really took off. Social struggle was elevated and talk of imminent revolution was rife. We expanded our capacity with some key regroupments. And under the influence of extraordinary optimism and stirring rhetoric about being halfway up the greasy pole, the membership was raised to new levels of sacrifice and dedication. If only our revolutionary optimism at that point had been tempered a little.
Nevertheless, the Spartacists built a highly successful fighting propaganda group, especially in America, with a fortnightly newspaper, implantation of fractions in carefully selected workplaces, extraordinary work among women, a highly professional legal defence arm, and an active intelligent youth movement. There were also international breakthroughs.
In Britain, the breakthrough in building Spartacism involved opposition to the Pabloism of Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League, particularly on the questions of trade-union work and Ireland. We intervened to show how you could join the trade-union struggle with a program which made the transition to revolutionary politics, and how you could stand against the British occupation without capitulating to Irish nationalism [see “The Rebirth of British Trotskyism”].
So this was a time of great promise.
But then something happened. Something far bigger than the Spartacist tendency. Class struggle and leftist activity particularly in the United States stalled, and reversed. Optimism collapsed. Revolution no longer felt imminent. This had profound effects on us. The fish started to rot, and as usual, it rotted from the head down.
1978 is a key year. It was a year of many changes, which together had a huge impact—not yet on the program, but on the organisation—on the guardrails of democratic centralism which maintain a program.
At the beginning of that year Liz Gordon, the most authoritative woman in the tendency, was degraded and humiliated in an editorial dispute about an article on Roman Polanski. Liz’s argument was in fact sensible, but even if she’d been wrong, trashing her so demeaningly hung a sword of Damocles over the head of every senior member of the organisation.
With the downturn in struggle was a downturn in hiring, with a direct financial impact. The fortnightly Workers Vanguard had to go monthly. That hit the organisation hard.
The headquarters moved from rented space to a building purchased in Lower Manhattan, and there was a big shuffling around of personnel to refurbish and maintain the building. That was in 1978, too.
This was also the year we won 24 members of the Workers Socialist League, including comrades with deep roots in the British and Irish left, considerable experience and huge talent. It was a fusion which signalled great promise, but also upset the evolved political and organisational balance of the international tendency.
Only a few months later the international leadership intervened to remove the elected leadership of the new British section and install its own nominees. So much for international democratic centralism.
A few weeks later, the leadership did a similar thing in the youth organisation in the United States, reconstituting its elected leadership in what was called the Cloned Youth fight. So much for the principles of youth-party relations.
All in all, the Spartacist tendency was a very different creature at the end of 1978 than it had been at the beginning.
But these were only changes in the mechanisms of corrective discussions about program. The actual programmatic consequences were a little delayed. Within three years, however, the international leadership were denouncing and driving out members in Germany who had the temerity to oppose a motion to “take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities” the Polish Stalinists may commit against Solidarnosc.
And by 1983 the Spartacists were advising their American imperialist masters to avoid losing troops in Lebanon. Soon they were doing their very best to trash an extraordinarily valuable anti-apartheid boycott of South African cargo on the Bay Area waterfront, simply because it was led by a member of the External Tendency, the forerunner of the IBT. And they liquidated their own painstakingly built and sometimes highly effective trade-union fractions. Increasingly there was an erratic and nasty element to Spartacist politics, with wild accusations of police collaboration and so on, hurled at leftist political opponents.
What had been a fine revolutionary organisation, had, by the mid-1980s become a mere remnant. The Spartacists were incapable of addressing the impending collapse of the Soviet bloc.
There are some wonderful myths about Spartacist heroics around the fall of Stalinism, but the truth is sad. In the German Democratic Republic, during the first two months of 1990, the ICL fooled themselves that they were playing a significant role in a political revolution. In fact, there was no political revolution. That was a delusion, and the working class was becoming increasingly demoralised—and the Spartacists were playing no role whatever. In the elections which drew this period to a close, the Spartacists got fewer votes than the German Beer Drinking Party.
And with the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union which followed in August 1991, the ICL were even more disoriented, and simply did not recognise the critical moments, adopting a position of effective neutrality and then denial of reality [see “Soviet Rubicon & the Left”].
I think we here are all agreed that the fall of the Soviet Union was the most serious defeat ever dealt to the working class, leading to a precipitous decline in class struggle. We presumably also agree that we are now in a period of revival of class struggle, with new possibilities for revolutionary intervention.
The neo-Spartacist reaction to this revival is, frankly, banal. They say we should take the lead in the developing struggles. Now, of course we should. Every political tendency seeks to take a lead in the social struggles of the day. The question is: On what program do we seek to lead the struggles of the day?
[Charlotte waves Spartacist No.68]
But it doesn’t actually tell you what to do, except join the leadership—to try to lead it. The point is to introduce a program. How can we lead by simply waving a thing which doesn’t actually say anything except you should join and lead.
The point is we don’t have any new things to say, but the answers you claim are new are terribly familiar to us—the tired old answers of Pabloism and its offshoots. But there are answers to all these questions—these answers are in the Transitional Program. You hardly mention the Transitional Program. It’s apparently a bit old hat. I’ve been told that the Transitional Program is a bit old hat all my life, but it is terribly disappointing to see the Spartacist League treating it that way.
Trotskyism as a current was founded on the understanding, won from bitter experience, that the colonial bourgeoisie cannot carry out the revolution against imperialism—while they may oppose imperialism temporarily to advance their own position, they will betray the national struggle every time. As Trotsky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution: “this bourgeoisie of backward countries from the days of its milk teeth grows up as agentry of foreign capital, and notwithstanding its envious hatred of foreign capital, always does and always will in every decisive situation turn up in the same camp with it.” This is the core truth of permanent revolution, written in the blood of workers from China to Spain.
The fight for national liberation thus rests on the workers’ shoulders. They must win the peasant masses to a revolutionary program fusing democratic and socialist tasks, and wrest leadership of the national struggle from the bourgeoisie. Per the Transitional Program: “Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.… On the basis of the revolutionary democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the ’national’ bourgeoisie.” Accordingly the Fourth International saw political independence of the proletarian party from the bourgeoisie as vital.
My comrade Bill spoke about the corrosive effects of Pabloism on this revolutionary line. The Pabloists turned permanent revolution on its head: they claimed the objective necessity of socialist measures to the revolution would impel petty-bourgeois leaders to adopt a socialist program at the critical hour. The early Spartacists defined themselves through fierce opposition to this inverted Trotskyism. In Chile 1970 they alone refused support to the Allende government. In Iran 1979 they alone refused support to the mullahs who butchered the Iranian revolution. They did groundbreaking work towards a revolutionary program for the interpenetrated peoples of Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Palestine. It is this work that we are defending today.
This is not to say we defend the whole history and positions of Spartacism. Bill discussed the iSt’s degeneration, and your recent writing has hit on some of its resulting errors: we’d agree, for instance, that the line you adopted on Puerto Rico in the 1990s was chauvinist, and that it was thoroughly mistaken to say calls for constituent assemblies are “wrong under any circumstances.” One critical error relevant to this discussion concerns the 1983 bombing of a US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed roughly 300 American and French soldiers. In response the iSt shamefully called for “Marines out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!” Alive! We’re certainly for imperialist troops out of anywhere, but we don’t ask for mercy from their victims while kicking them out—so when you called for sparing the precious blood of US Marines, we termed this a social-patriotic flinch, a sign of deeper rot in the iSt [see “Marxism vs. Social Patriotism”]. Your response was to call us “bloodthirsty” and claim there was no “just, anti-imperialist side” in Lebanon. But the “just side” against imperialist occupation is whoever is fighting it, regardless of their other political practice. As far as I know, the ICL has not repudiated “Marines out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!”—and nor has the Internationalist Group, whose leader Jan Norden was editor of Workers Vanguard when it was written. Do you still hold this rotten position?
In rejecting interpenetrated peoples theory, Spartacist No.68 states “the task of communists is not to counterpose the struggle for national liberation to the struggle for socialism but to fuse them.” We agree. That’s what the theory does. When two nations are vying for self-determination on the same territory, one people’s self-determination within the framework of a bourgeois nation-state is possible only through oppressing the other. We defend whatever nation is oppressed at the moment from attacks by the other, but Marxists can’t simply support their bourgeoisie’s nationalism as resolving the question. Instead, workers of both nations must unite against both national bourgeoisies, resolving each nation’s democratic tasks by transforming their conflicting national struggles into conjoined socialist revolution. This is not abstention or neutrality, but consistent permanent revolution.
Against this, Spartacist No.68 has slander. You disavow the “Theses on Ireland” based on two lines that seem gloomy about home-grown revolution in Northern Ireland, ignoring that the entire document is a program for just that revolution! This is deeply unserious. On whether the iSt claimed revolution in Palestine “is most likely impossible until there is a revolution in a neighboring country” [Spartacist No.68]. I can’t speak to your writings since the 1980s, but the key documents from its revolutionary period make no such claim. And you entirely ignore Cyprus, the third early example of interpenetrated peoples, perhaps because the conflict there ended in a reversal of the terms of national oppression—a possibility for which your new approach has no revolutionary answer.
Your new position is frankly a mess. You claim interpenetrated peoples “reject[s] the need to put national liberation struggle. at the centre of our revolutionary strategy.” But your piece “Only Death and Defeat with Hamas” asserts Palestinian struggle is not the sole central factor in Palestine: class struggle in Israel is also necessary, and fusing the two is the road for both peoples. So are Palestinian and Israeli workers to overcome their national conflict by making it a joint class struggle? Well, that’s interpenetrated peoples, which we’ve now learned is wrong. The anti-imperialist united front you now espouse instead implies alliance with bourgeois nationalists, but your article condemns support to Hamas even under direct Zionist attack. It’s right to reject political support to Hamas, and we oppose attacks on civilians of course, but Trotsky endorsed military support even to fascists against imperialist forces. You’ve somehow achieved neither class independence nor unconditional military support against imperialism. This isn’t Trotskyism; it’s nonsense!
Your line on Iran also makes no sense and veers into Pabloism. It is indeed true “the mullahs were a reactionary answer to the imperialist pillage of Iran that the Pahlavi monarchy facilitated.” But that in no way implies any struggle against the Shah was automatically progressive on that basis alone. You agree the mullahs were reactionary, but you seem to think this has no bearing on the movement behind them. You reproach us for denying this movement, with that leadership, was progressive—your only evidence being that it opposed the Shah! The Pabloists and Stalinists back then also thought the Islamic Revolution was progressive, its leaders an afterthought. The Sparts alone called for workers to organise independently and fight for leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle on a class basis.
The tragedy of 1979 is that this was possible—the Iranian workers were organised and militant enough—but their leaders thought a movement uniting worker, merchant and cleric under slogans like “The only party is the party of Allah!” and “Death or hijab!” was progressive. When we cited Hitler as proof that sometimes there are in fact reactionary movements against reactionary regimes, your response was worrying that this was too hard on the Ayatollah in ways that might offend his partisans. Yet you say elsewhere in Spartacist No.68 “there is no such thing as being ’too hard on Stalinists.’” Comrades, do you prefer the Ayatollah to the Stalinists now?
“For Communist Leadership of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle” rejects the idea that the main enemy of Mexican workers is their own bourgeoisie: the main enemy is now the imperialists, the Mexican bourgeoisie “a mere lackey.” Your refurbished Mexican section likewise says its former incarnation “basically took sides with imperialism” by rejecting “the fact that the whole country, including the national bourgeoisie, is oppressed by the imperialists.” But the revolutionary iSt’s position was not that communists in neocolonial countries should fight the national bourgeoisie rather than imperialism, but that these fights are usually one and the same. The colonial bourgeoisie’s typical relation to imperialism is as agents, not just victims. So in general the practical task of fighting imperialism in the neocolonies requires fighting the compradors in some fashion. And while it’s true the national bourgeoisie is oppressed by imperialism, assuming some qualitative similarity between that oppression and the oppression of other classes under imperialism is a gateway to burying the class line through building strategic united fronts.
This is a common theme in your new works. Take the article “Guns for Women”, which calls for mass arming of Mexican women to combat misogynist violence. Now I’m for arming working women, but “Guns for Women” assumes militancy alone sets this demand apart as communist, not feminist. Not so, comrades: I know radical feminists who’d take your demand even further and call for a women’s guerilla war. A communist demand would orient the anti-feminist struggle on a class basis, through calls like “union defence guards for working women” or “workers’ and neighbourhood councils to organise transitional housing and support for abuse victims, homeless people, etc.”
There’s no such transitional demand in “Guns for Women,” no framing of femicide as a class issue at all. Instead we get an individualist, non-class demand (which the article itself calls inadequate) appended to a call for social revolution, with no bridge between the two. It does nothing to turn women’s struggle towards class struggle; it is an adaptation to feminism, comrades, not a rebuke! And here is your new turn’s essence: “rediscovering Trotskyism” means downplaying the class divide on the most pressing questions facing oppressed groups, implicitly making class merely one struggle among many.
All this finds its logical outcome with Spartacist South Africa’s [SSA] recent critical vote for the bourgeois left-nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] [see “The Road to Land and Jobs”]. Why? Because they’re popular, and—as in Mexico—the bourgeois-nationalist program represents genuine struggle against “the brutal national oppression faced by all black people in South Africa,” regardless of class, explicitly encompassing the national bourgeoisie. Sure, you claim the EFF can’t implement their program, and communists can exploit their vacillations and betrayals, but you’re still calling workers to fight for a bourgeois program, rather than raising an independent class position.
This is a step backwards even from SSA in 2022, which wrote “the struggle for national liberation will be the strategic motor force for proletarian socialist revolution in this country. The key requirement is the proletariat’s complete political independence from bourgeois nationalism.” Your old group, even in the twilight of middle Spartacism, was able to maintain a class line. By contrast your new policy is to seek alliances with black bourgeois or aspirationally-bourgeois layers in the struggle for power—popular frontism, in other words.
SSA’s writings were very useful in understanding your new course. Here Spartacist No.68’s vague accusations of sterility, chauvinism and dismissing nationalism find concrete conclusions: the non-sterile, non-chauvinist method is to bloc with the nationalists if they appear to have popular support. Thus concretised, we can name the new line for what it is—not rediscovery of permanent revolution but negation.
It is sad to see the organisation that once upheld Trotskyism best against Pabloism turn towards it. Sadder yet to see it treat its past so light-mindedly. You may aspire to wrest leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle away from the nationalists, but in practice you are beginning to tail them. The core truth of permanent revolution is that leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle can only be a working-class leadership, and that it is carried out by breaking with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists, not joining them. This is the “revolutionary leadership today” in the title of our debate.
We encourage ICL comrades serious about this heritage, comrades not seeking a shortcut to revolution through effectively abandoning permanent revolution and Trotskyism, to re-evaluate your recent transformation in light of the IBT’s long-standing and comprehensive critique and see that transformation for what it really is: not an exciting step forward but the culmination of a process of degeneration that leads into the Pabloist abyss.
The following contribution was drafted by Elle Brocherie, who could not be here today.
The ICL has made the anti-imperialist united front slogan central to its work in the last year. You proclaim it in South Africa, Mexico and even in Melbourne. You might deny it, but the Trotskyist movement abandoned this slogan in 1927, and it was right to do so.
We are for fighting imperialism—which, yes, involves building united-front actions on a strict, limited, practical basis. Trotskyists would fight alongside nationalists for Kanak independence and alongside even Islamist militants in Gaza against the genocidal assault of the IDF. But to proclaim “the anti-imperialist united front” as a strategic orientation is wrong. Just like the Stalinists’ slogan for “the workers’ united front” evolved from a tactic of temporary blocs into a permanent alliance with reformists, your line will tend to deform into an alliance with bourgeois nationalists.
You say that because the revolutionary Comintern used this slogan it is revolutionary today. But Trotsky abandoned it for a reason. The Comintern policy for colonies was guided by the example of the Javan communists, who under the leadership of Sneevliet made an ostensibly “successful” entry into the pan-Islamist Sarekat Islam. The result was that they were purged and left with politically disoriented cadres with deep illusions in the anti-imperialist credentials of pan-Islamism. Read the proceedings of the Fourth Congress, not just Lenin at the Second.
Under the name Maring, Sneevliet would lead the CCP to enter and build the Guomindang. The immediate practical result of “the anti-imperialist united front” slogan was Comintern acceptance of similar policies. It accepted that class independence is for the imperialist countries, but in the colonies you can’t get by without a little bit of class collaboration. Despite Lenin’s good words about “safeguarding independent class organisation” at that congress, this time he let an opportunist deviation go unopposed.
Trotsky opposed the Chinese communists’ entry into the Guomindang. But it was not until the logic of that entry came to fruition under Stalinism, with the massacre of the cadres by the Guomindang, that he publicised his position—and you can check this in “The political situation in China and the tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition”—communists never merge organisationally with alien classes. And we must see that a strategic, long-term bloc is a step towards merging.
And class independence did not prevent the Trotskyist movement from fighting on the side of colonised nations, so why resurrect this slogan if not to reintroduce the immediate practical conclusions communists took from it?
The entry tactic does not differ essentially from the tactic of critical support. Both are a special form of the united-front tactic based on a fight to advance the consciousness and power of the working class. We don’t build bourgeois forces. We don’t trust them to fight imperialism. When they do, we fight alongside them, but even when they make radical noises about a Freedom Charter, we don’t vote for them. In other words, tactical blocs without giving political support is one thing, “the anti-imperialist united front” is another—and it isn’t a lever for revolution, it’s a step towards popular frontism. And in China 1926, Spain 1937, Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973, we know where that leads.
In the last year the Spartacists have rediscovered the critical-support tactic, engaging in a dizzying array of electoral blocs with bourgeois workers’ parties, small reformist groups and even petty bourgeois nationalists. Some of these blocs aren’t unprincipled, but taken together these instances aren’t just tactical. You’ve told us plainly—this is a global strategy: Marxists must search the world for electoral formations to attach themselves to like male anglerfish, and anything less is abstention from the class struggle.
In Germany and the United States, the new Sparts support small Stalinoid outfits, the DKP and Marcyite PSL respectively. In France, and in Greece, you argue that a mess of small reformist groups must unite against the far right and EU. In Australia, you call to kick out the AUKUS hawks in the ALP leadership, in doing so critically supporting the opposing faction of independent Australian imperialists. In all cases, the average worker either hasn’t heard of these forces or doesn’t care about them.
In Left-Wing Communism Lenin describes situations to employ the critical support tactic: where the majority of workers have illusions in reformism, where calling to vote for future class traitors gains us a hearing we wouldn’t otherwise get, and where all the parties of the bourgeoisie have drawn a class line against reformism. Sure, one might occasionally give a tactical vote in other circumstances, but the Leninist approach to critical support is clear, and it is not a strategy for all situations.
In Britain, the new Sparts have simultaneously called for Labourites to remain in Labour to kick out the Zionist leadership, and for workers to vote for the departees. You also call to support the Socialist Party front TUSC, even after they kicked you out for rightly criticising their line on screws. And you support George Galloway’s Workers Party, a populist mess propped up by transphobia, anti-migrant racism and support pinched from UKIP as much as any reformist demands. Sure you criticise them, but in the same article laud their opposition to the “liberal ’woke’ left”, and say anyone who refuses to vote for them is a liberal themselves. You concede that there are some candidates so “dodgy” that even you don’t support them, a tacit admission that the Workers Party is an unprincipled bloc with elements alien to the workers’ movement.
It’s this latter alliance that has led to the shameful sight of Spartacists in Union Jack colours, hocking Galloway’s “Britain Deserves Better” pamphlets, while your own material argues that workers must unite to “fix broken Britain”. Softening on nationalism is a predictable consequence of blocking against perceived liberalism at any cost, and it has led you to don the red, white and blue rosette as you drum up votes for a party that promises to unleash the Royal Navy on migrants. [See “The Flotsam & Jetsam Election”.]
What’s the sum of this global strategy? Instead of positioning you as a serious, independent grouping that sometimes votes for flawed programs to gain a hearing, you will be dismissed as serial parasites desperately seeking any marginally larger host, even a diseased one. The message sent to workers will not be that they need to engage in struggle and break movements away from reformist leaderships as you hope, but that politically blocking with reformist leaderships is an essential stage in the recomposition of a revolutionary party, which must take place in every country. This, like so much new Spartacist politics, represents a centrist over-correction of the mistakes of the Robertson years. You’ve rediscovered one tactic but not when to stop using it. Our job isn’t to zig zag between abstentionism and liquidation like this, but to plot a course through. Thank you.
Thank you comrades. My name is Max Schade, I am based in Wellington, New Zealand, and I have been with the IBT for about a year now.
The Wellington branch of the IBT has grown in the last few years. We are still a tiny fighting propaganda group, but we are cohering a modest number of serious people around our revolutionary program.
I and others of the comrades you see here today were won in no small part by the IBT’s exemplary participation in the trans struggle. A field of intensifying struggle that is plagued by a liberal, risk-averse leadership and abandoned by much of the leadership of the working class. Within this domain the IBT has fought for mass mobilisations to protest against the increasing number of anti-trans speaking events and marches, frequently butting heads with those who defer to NGOs and the parliamentary left, and has fought to draw the unions into the struggle. Our work culminated last year in a rally of over 4,000 people opposing the far-right-affiliated TERF Kelly Jay Keen, the largest rally in Wellington of that year and the largest pro-trans rally in the country, ever [see “Transphobia & Fascism”].
Furthermore our youth wing at Victoria University of Wellington, which I am a part of, was a significant force in revitalising a student/worker protest movement in opposition to a substantial program of job cuts last year. Within this movement we staged a sharp intervention in favour of a militant working-class perspective. Small and with only a tiny base in the union, we ultimately lost the fight to initiate a strike due to the sabotage of the bureaucrats and the reformist left. But in doing so, the radically minded of the student body and junior staff saw us expound and fight to implement our program.
Key in both of these struggles has been the tactic of the united front. We leverage the speaking opportunities to expose students and staff and the thousands that showed up for trans people to our revolutionary perspective, while also fighting for definite demands and actions alongside all those who are willing to join in, without expecting participants to accept our wider program and political perspective. This allows radically minded people under reformist leadership to witness our program in action.
Indeed on and off campus, we have gradually developed a reputation as the org that is consistently for militant trade unionism, that is willing to criticise the union bureaucracy and the parliamentary left, and is willing to demand more than the scraps they offer. This reputation continues to allow us to develop around us a periphery, some of whom are on their way to becoming good communists in their own right.
What I want to highlight is that the fight against liberalism and Labourism, growth, winning people to a revolutionary consciousness—they do not necessitate, and in fact cannot include, trading away the principles of class independence and honesty to the working class that the Spartacist League was built on in its revolutionary period. The fusion documents between the former Bolshevik Leninist and the ICL speak of the ICL offering direction after Bolshevik Leninist’s years of stagnation. But the direction they offer is one of abandoning the revolutionary program in favour of scrambling, liquidationist manoeuvres, not one of fighting for its implementation. You charge us with not doing anything. I disagree.
I joined the Spartacist tendency in 1970, and together with Bill Logan I was a leader of the Spartacist League of Australia from 1972 to 1977. We were expelled at the Colchester Spartacist conference in 1979 and have been vilified and slandered by Spartacists ever since [see On The Logan Show Trial].
While we made many mistakes during that period, we made them in collaboration with the international leadership, particularly Jim Robertson. And we have acknowledged those mistakes. But the ICL never has. The international leadership was fully informed about the life and activity of the section.
Lots of money was spent to get witnesses against Logan to that trial, and I was his only witness against the trial, and for him. And at that time I was living illegally in New York, working part-time so had no money. Robertson said my presence was not needed at the trial as there were no charges against me. Robertson lied. I was on trial. I was expelled and both my expulsion and Bill’s were travesties.
The specific issue which has been given most prominence over the years is the accusation that Bill Logan pressured a young woman to have an abortion. Bill had little involvement during that pregnancy. The couple, David and Vicky, and I were the only comrades in Melbourne in 1972 when David told me that Vicky was having problems with her pregnancy. The doctor advised them to let nature take its course. David said he did not want a baby, and asked what he should do.
I telephoned New Zealand and discussed this, not with Bill but with Joel Sallinger, a more experienced Spartacist, recently arrived from the SL/US where he had been an alternate member of the Central Committee. Joel and I took the side of David and the doctor, and I passed that information on to David, who acted as the go-between with Vicky.
By the time the rest of the comrades from New Zealand arrived in January 1973 Vicky’s pregnancy had stabilised. At that point Bill talked on the telephone with Robertson and then put the core points of that discussion in a letter to him, which is published in the ICL’s own account. As a result of this communication the Spartacist League of the US paid for David to travel to the US and work there until the baby was born. In the event, he stayed away for a further three months. So at Colchester Robertson claimed he knew nothing about this. This is another lie.
The Sri Lankan Trotskyist Edmund Samarakkody was on the trial body in Colchester—a centrist, but an honourable comrade of unimpeachable integrity. He was appointed precisely because of the authority his presence would give to the proceedings. Samarakkody noted that the international leadership had a longstanding campaign against Bill Logan. He identified serious procedural inadequacies. He said his own questioning of witnesses proved the involvement of the whole leadership of the Australian section. And while Samarakkody said Logan was guilty of most of the charges, so was everybody else.
The conclusions that Samarakkody reached would jeopardise his ability to join the Spartacist League. But that was the truth as he saw it. And that is the truth as I see it.
The question is: How do you see it, comrades? You of the Spartacist League. This is your history, and you have a necessity to account for it.
Thank you again. I wanted to respond to some of the points in the SL’s opening speech. In particular, it was claimed that we consider national liberation bourgeois and unsupportable—this is slander. We wish to be active in national liberation struggles. We call for workers’ action to bring about the military victory of national liberation forces in Kanaky. We would work within national liberation demonstrations and in more militant mobilisations. The key point, and one that the SLA doesn’t seem to get, is that interventions into national liberation struggles have to retain independence, and to be independent one has to retain strategic flexibility. Strategic blocs, of the kind such as the anti-imperialist united front, threaten that flexibility and thus our independence.
This misunderstanding leads to other distortions of our program. The idea that we would only work with revolutionaries in the anti-imperialist struggle is another lie. We are for some blocs with reformist and bourgeois forces, some of the time, but also blocs against them. One cannot present a ready-made formula that we will always find “national bourgeois” bloc partners in the neocolonies, and that this kind of bloc takes a strategic importance over and above blocs against them.
On 1948, it is historically illiterate to suggest that the Spartacists’ dual-defeatist position on the 1948 war, adopted in 1974, meant dual defeatism between Israel and the Palestinians undergoing the Nakba. You are ignorant of your own history. This was a position of dual defeatism between Zionist fighters and the Arab armies from surrounding countries no less tied to imperialism; no more capable of liberating the Palestinians. Of course we are for defence of Palestinian homes in the Nakba—just as the old SL was. But the means of doing so would have been working-class action across sectarian lines—such as occurred in the port of Haifa, and which was on the cards—not a bloc with the foreign Arab armies. You allege that we were not opposed to Zionist settlement of the Middle East; of course we were, and the old SL was, and everyone in the Trotskyist movement up to a certain point, but by 1948 a Hebrew-speaking nation was a fact that had to be worked with, and yes that nation has, and had, national democratic rights. Only revolution can finally resolve the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians for national democratic rights.
To build that revolution, we also require tactical blocs both for and against forces like Hamas at different times. Of course we would not raise economic demands right now in a bloc against Hamas. The point is that this would have been appropriate at the time of those demonstrations in Gaza in early 2023.
We have been accused of stagnant formulations. But it is the ICL who applies formulae that threaten our flexibility and thus our independence. Thank you.
Thank you. And thank you for the various contributions from the floor. I would like to start by talking about your repeated denunciations of the line in “Theses on Ireland” about removing the national question from the agenda. Specifically I want to say your objections are a facile misunderstanding of our position that is of a piece with the rest of your new turn. You’ve extrapolated from that line an attitude toward national struggle in toto. What it is, is a position in relation to the national struggles of interpenetrated peoples. The full line, again, is “we support the right of self-determination in national liberation struggles in order to remove the national question from the historic agenda. Not to create another such question.” What do you think “creating another such question” means, outside of that specific context?
One of your contributions held up Lenin’s support for the Easter Rising as some kind of checkmate against us, but we maintain that position. It is not at all in contradiction with our views. The position of interpenetrated peoples in Northern Ireland was created after the Irish Civil War, not before. The theory of interpenetrated peoples is not relevant to supporting the Easter Rising.
Our position in that regard, interpenetrated peoples, is not as you seem to believe inherently alienating to people of oppressed nationalities. In fact it amazes me that you can even ask a question like “how the hell are you going to win workers from Indonesia on the old line of Spartacism?” I don’t know—ask the Indonesian section of Revolutionary Regroupment. If your new course is the necessary correction against Robertsonite chauvinism and it is obvious that no worker in places like Indonesia and Brazil can be won to the old Spart line, why didn’t you bring these neocolonial sections with you when you fused with the ICL? Why was it your one section in an imperialist country? What have you won in the neocolonies through this turn, comrades?
On the point about breaking with nationalism—we are not particular about the exact borders of Israel. What we maintain is that there is an Israeli nation and it has national rights. You don’t seem to disagree with that, so in a lot of your objections I’m not really sure what your point is overall. We are for communists fighting for leadership of the national liberation struggle in Palestine, and (apparently like you) we are for fusing that struggle with class struggle in Israel. It is fairly easy to answer your question “whose sides are the workers on in the Nakba?” Amal already laid it out quite well. Your point about the slogan “from the river to the sea” is interesting not because of the point you’re trying to make in particular but because your argument appears to be that we’re exiling ourselves from the pro-Palestinian movement over whether we do or don’t endorse a slogan, a chant. There’s no greater proof of a tailist mindset.
We do not deny that the national struggle is key to revolution in the neocolonies. If you’d listened to what I said, you would have heard me endorse your old South African section making a statement along those lines. It is perfectly possible to actively intervene in the anti-imperialist struggle without giving any support at all to the bourgeois nationalists. We have done so in the past and we will do it again. And we have never once denied that national revolution can be the motor force of a revolutionary struggle. That is in many ways at the heart of permanent revolution. But it can only be done through an intransigent opposition to the national bourgeoisie. This allows for alliances with the national bourgeoise on certain points of common interest for a limited time. What it does not allow for is the full endorsement of a bourgeois political program because left-leaning masses hold illusions in it.
Your writings about the EFF are very telling in this regard. Your criticisms are all about how the EFF will fight for its program, not what it is fighting for. Are we to conclude that the ICL believes the Economic Freedom Fighters’ program is adequate? It isn’t.
You can expose the national bourgeoisie without giving them political support. You can expose any reformist or bourgeois formation without doing that, in fact it staggers me that you seem to believe this is the only way one can combat mass illusions in these groups. You castigate us for calling for no vote in the British election, saying our position does nothing to expose Labour, but you have leaned so far into your critical support that as Amal mentioned we are now faced with the scandal of British Spartacists decked out in [the colours of] the British flag. You cannot possibly claim to be combatting the Little Englandism of certain sections of the British working class while you are draped in a Union Jack. And what on earth message does that send to the victims of British imperialism around the globe?
For all your arguments about the sterility of our line, your attempts to maximise opposition to the British Labour party appear to begin and end at the ballot box. In fact all you have done is prove your new focus on opportunist electoralism. Our comrades in Britain do plenty of work outside the voting booth. The fact you think this all amounts to no work at all shows you are losing your way about what the real work of communists is. Our primary job is not to go and find left-leaning parties to vote for. And in fact a lot of the parties you’ve managed to find are pretty dubious in their class politics to start with. In practice a Workers Party vote is only a class vote if one doesn’t consider migrant workers, trans workers etc. to be on our side of the line. And an EFF line is only a class vote if one considers that petty bourgeois are workers. I’m not sure you have a clear idea of what a class line is any more.
I’d like to close out by responding to an RCO member. I would also very much like to discuss the transitional program. It is much neglected and it actually provides very useful keys to intervention in and winning the leadership of all sorts of struggles. We’ve put its principles to use in very effective ways in queer struggles in New Zealand which is why all the younger people who we’ve sent across today are trans in some way or other. But I would like to take that up after the debate also if that is alright. It would be quite a segue at this point. And that’s it from me.
The chairman from Platypus asked—at least I think he was asking—is revolution on the cards? And yeah—of course there are times when things are going against us, and there are times when things are going in our direction. And the fact is that we have recovered, or we are starting to recover, from a period in which the chances for revolution have been quite slim, or the levers towards it have been fewer than at other times. But there is an upsurge in struggle, and I think that is something which the comrades from the Spartacist League pick up on usefully—that there is an upsurge in struggle and that we have got to join the struggle. Great.
But I think that is all they are saying. We’ve got to join in the struggle. And the question is on what program?
[Charlotte gives extended and noisy flourishing of Spartacist No.68.]
And they wave their thing saying it’s their program. And the content is merely to say join in. The actual content is merely to say there is a national struggle and we have got to join.
So it is important to say what you will do. Yes we want to join the national struggle. Absolutely. It would be stupid not to. Anyone on the left must join the national struggle. But the question is whether you are going to join in the national struggle as it is, or you’re going to try to draw a class line in it—and that is going to have to be through the transitional program.
Someone was asking—it was perhaps one of the RCO comrades—what would a revolutionary leadership do in the national program. And it’s a thing that’s very difficult to give an answer to, because the national struggle is so different in each situation. Nationalism is contradictory, it’s certainly not reactionary through and through, certainly very often highly revolutionary in a way that can make the transition to communist revolution. But there is no automatic process that goes on, and that’s what we’re trying to introduce into the conversation—a sense of how you make the transition to communist politics. And that means doing something to change the struggle that is.
I actually think as I stand back from the discussion this afternoon that what we have here is a difference on the kind of way we are going to build an organisation. It seems to me that the Spartacist League, overall, is trying to build an organisation from the bottom up, that it is trying to say: right, we are going to lead the working class and we want to get a program for the working class. Now we obviously want to get a program that we want the working class to accept, but we see the importance of doing what is possible, in the best possible way, now. So this idea of promiscuous critical support actually means no real critical support anywhere, because if you’re going to critically support twenty different organisations, you’re not actually going to critically support any of them. Nobody is going to know how to critically support.
Firstly, Bill, on nationalism’s reactionary, I say, what you’re saying that’s not your line. I suggest you read what you published on your website on nationalism of the oppressed.
So I think you kind of gave it away and your whole thing is doing what is possible in the best possible way now, as in to preach these little lines to convince your little circle of these broad, abstract Marxist principles while not actually fighting for revolutionary leadership today.
I think there was a lot of obfuscation on the net. It’s not about, oh, do you put your leg in, do you put your leg out on the national liberation struggle. Do you see it as a motor force for revolution and do you look to combine it with proletarian revolution? We have penned plenty of words denouncing us, but now you’re suddenly saying, oh, yeah, actually we do all this. Actually, we emphasise throughout the entire speech for communist leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle. We are fighting for class independence from start to bottom.
So I would like to go into a few of these things. Hard to say. Yeah, so I think there was a lot of things.
Briefly on Israel and Hamas. We do take a military side. We said we are for putting maximum military pressure on the IDF. That includes taking a military side with Hamas. That’s not the be all, end all, though. That’s actually the key thing is fighting for communist leadership.
I think, Amal, you brought up a lot of baloney, I think, but ultimately I think you did double down. It’s not about the 1948 war as legitimate borders, no, but you actually correlate the Zionist state, as you say, based on the expropriation and genocide as Palestinians as a core part of the Jewish nation. You put an equal sign between them. So yes, I think you do treat it as there is a core part of the Zionist state that you must defend when it comes down to it.
I think, yes, so I think this is how it is like when you say, oh, not to create new questions, what you mean is reversing the terms of oppression. So the whole question of championing the struggle of Palestinian liberation, the central task of revolution in the region, it’s like we have to, oh, we can’t really champion it because then we might possibly reverse the terms of oppression.
I think, and I really would like to emphasise this question of, how to say, the title, Permanent Revolution and the Fight for Revolutionary Leadership Today. I think this is a question that talks about the great strength of the neocolonies, of revolution in the neocolonies. And like what you put forward in your presentation, Bill, is not a single word of how to actually fight for revolutionary leadership or not in the neocolonies.
You just wrote, said some bizarre fan fiction on SL history. This is . it’s ridiculous. And I think this whole bringing up a hundred different stuff by the IBT is really quite indicative of the difference in method. For the IBT, what matters isn’t what they put forward today, our program, but actually to have some unsullied flag to brag about on their website.
What is the point, what is the point of what they put forward? That we are bureaucratic? We have already said that there have been bureaucratic expulsions in the past. Or how about the trade-union caucuses? Right now we have trade-union caucuses from the US to Germany. What are you doing?
You say we have prestige politics and can’t admit mistakes? We have an in-depth explanation of our mistakes, not just the past 30 but 50 years. And unlike the IBT, we actually pointed out what was programmatically wrong and how it applies for the fight for revolutionary leadership today.
And really, I think our whole problem with your method is put on show like today. You brought up a whole bunch of history, but you never actually put forward how to actually advance the struggle today, and actually you gave it away with your slander of the second and fourth Congress, which I would like to clearly refer to. I think like you say, Trotsky drops essentially the thesis of the Eastern question, the fourth Congress in 1927. And you’re pretty open that the Comintern’s line on the semi- and neo-colonies is wrong.
And to do this, you have to, like, distort the fourth Congress and attack it as opportunist. But in fact, your slander of it is actually the same as the Stalinists. The Stalinists had the line on the second and fourth Congress in the Comintern, and that the Trotskyists broke from that.
And on this thing on what you’re fighting for, on the EFF, I would like to say, I think the whole thing is all what you’re fighting for. Actually, what part of the EFF’s freedom charter that you actually oppose? Is it the peace, the land or the bread? Because what the EFF’s doing is they have their own demands, and we are actually trying to show that they are unable to achieve their own demands. Like as Trotsky said, the Bolshevik-Leninists [inaudible] unmask before the native masses the inability of the [African National] Congress to achieve the realisation of even its own demands because of its superficial conciliatory policy. In contradiction to the Congress, the Bolshevik-Leninists develop a program of revolutionary class struggle, and that’s the key.
And I think the whole thing on the AUKUS, you say, oh yeah, we’re giving support to the left bureaucracy. I think that’s really hilarious, actually, because of our Chuck the AUKUS hawks out thing. For a bit of context, what we’re doing today, we’re trying to drive Albanese and other supporters of the US Alliance, aka the people that are actually backing the genocide, out of the workers’ movement. This is actually, today, there’s all these honourable unions, dare I say, that voice their support to Palestine.
But they are actually, because of them, all the support is going to them, but they are not actually striking for Palestine. They’re not actually doing any black bans for Palestine. And the whole reason is because they don’t want to upset their mates in government. And what we’ve been doing, our whole thing, is actually to expose them. And in contrast, you’re like, oh yeah, you’re actually supporting them. But meanwhile, you’re calling the left Laborites the main political roadblock as honourable unions.
So this really shows the difference between our strategies. This is the definition of centrism. You have all these revolutionary words, you have all these revolutionary lines, but when it comes down to it, you actually don’t have a counterposed revolutionary policy. And I think this is true from New Zealand, but also true throughout the neocolonies.
And actually, I really want to bring up something. Before I run out, I really do want to clearly address a few of the people in the audience.
I think, for example, RCO want an example of communist leadership of the national liberation struggle. Well, I think a concrete example is what we were doing in Mexico with the GEM [Grupo Espartaquista de México]. The GEM had previously dismissed nationalisations as nothing more than anti-worker measures. Maybe they said, oh, we support it, but it’s like a tick box. It’s like one to win. In recent months, AMLO’s proposed electrical reform, which eventuated to an offer of buying 13 power plants from the imperialists, a de facto nationalisation with compensation of these plants. We didn’t say, oh, yeah, we support it. Oh, yeah, we don’t support it. Actually, not only we supported it, but we actually put forward a communist strategy calling to mobilise the working class to implement the reform and defend it from the imperialists through occupying energy plants and struggling for expropriation without compensations.
This is actually what it means to actually fight political independence in practice, not just a phrase “we have had political independence”. We’re actually putting forward political independence and putting forward a counterposed strategy to the national bourgeoisie in the struggle. And this is what revolutionary leadership is.
And one more thing on junking everything Spartacist. I really wanted to talk about why we still call ourselves Spartacists, because it actually was talked about a bit today. No, we actually aren’t throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And I think really the best moment, what was a critical moment for the Spartacists, was when counterrevolution threatened the Eastern Bloc, the Spartacists put forward a program to fight for revolutionary leadership in the DDR and the Soviet Union, against counter-revolution, against the Stalinist bureaucracy. We fought for political revolution, not in words, but deed. For all the criticisms you can have here and there and what have you, for us, political revolution and the unconditional defence of the workers’ state were not mantras you can tack on at the end of articles. It was a living, breathing struggle, a real application of our program in the critical moment and despite our small forces, due to the strength of our program, we had a real impact because of it. We fought [for] a revolutionary leadership then, and now we have affirmed the fight for revolutionary leadership in the neocolonies. In truth, we are not junking everything good with the ICL. In fact, we have affirmed the best of it and extended it.
Back then, the IBT, like today, sneered and belittled this fight for political revolution. Today, they similarly sneer at the fight of us using national liberation as a motor force for revolution in the neocolonies. For the IBT, revolutionary leadership, communism are all phrases they like to tack on at the end of articles, but are nothing but a mantra. This is the definition of centrism.
Thank you.