31 August 2026
In late July 2026, representatives of the IBT attended the Ninth International Conference of the International Communist League/Spartacists (ICL) in Mexico City. In addition to the IBT, there were representatives from a handful of other organizations, including International Socialist Alternative–Revolutionary (ISA–R), Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) and Communist Unity (Australia).
Our invitation to the conference followed a series of in-person debates and discussions with the ICL in London, Melbourne and Johannesburg over the past two years. In his greetings to the conference, the IBT representative highlighted “significant disagreements between our tendencies on the question of imperialism and the current global order, as well as on the relationship between national struggles and proletarian revolution.” Throughout the three-day event, we participated in the formal sessions and held informal discussions with ICL members and other invitees covering these programmatic elements. We appreciated the openness and comradely environment in which we exchanged our views, but on leaving we found ourselves no closer to political convergence with the ICL than when we arrived.
Our greetings connected our political critique of the ICL trajectory over the past few years to the topic of a major educational session on the conference agenda:
“We have characterized your new orientation as representing a slide towards neo-Pabloism. It therefore comes as no surprise to us to see that you are re-evaluating the history of the Fourth International in the post-WWII period and considering the argument that Cannon and the anti-Pabloite IC did not represent, even in a flawed manner, the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism.”
Leading ICL comrade Vincent David gave the main presentation for the educational, edited for Spartacist No.71 as “Why Trotskyism Fractured” with some changes from the original speech, which is available on their SpartTalk podcast. While there was no vote on any document or motion following the educational, all of the ICL members who spoke seemed to be in agreement with David’s basic thesis:
“The central task posed in the postwar world was the struggle against the American empire. The task of Trotskyists was to put forward an internationalist and revolutionary strategy to defeat it, in opposition to the strategies of the Stalinists and nationalists, the main forces leading workers and the oppressed.
“Neither the Pabloites nor the anti-Pabloites were able to do this. After the war, the movement retreated into rigid, pre-war dogmas. As I will explain, this sterile orthodoxy bred Stalinophobia, which, in the heat of the Cold War, generated a sharp reaction in the opposite direction: liquidation into Stalinism and nationalism—what will be called ‘Pabloism.’ Ultimately, because both those trends failed the test, neither could justify the independent existence of Trotskyism as a living, necessary political force for the working class in the postwar era. This is the root cause of the 1953 split as well as the endless succession of splits into ever smaller groupings.”
This is an explicit renunciation of the historic position of the Spartacist tendency, which traced its origins to the Revolutionary Tendency of James P. Cannon’s SWP, the leading component of the anti-Pabloist International Committee (IC) of the splintered FI. The article “Genesis of Pabloism,” which first appeared in Spartacist No.21 (Fall 1972), represented an attempt on the part of the then-revolutionary Spartacist League (SL) to critically assess the origins of, and struggle against, Pabloism, a liquidationist tendency that formed within and ultimately destroyed the Fourth International. Yet the SL’s identification with the opposing IC tradition was always highly critical, for many of the reasons comrade David outlined.
“Genesis of Pabloism” speaks of “the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement.” Among the reasons the anti-Pabloite current was flawed was the fact that it clung to a “sterile orthodoxy” retaining the pre-war perspectives for revolutionary breakthroughs at a time when Stalinism was suppressing revolutionary opportunities but also bureaucratically overturning capitalism in Eastern Europe and leading peasant-based social revolutions in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Korea to create deformed workers’ states. The “orthodoxy” lay in the attempt to maintain a revolutionary proletarian perspective independent of the Stalinists and Third World bourgeois nationalists. The “sterility” lay in the failure to recognize the changed circumstances coming out of WWII that required a revised perspective, and it was marked by an undialectical understanding of Stalinism, which produced both Stalinophobic and Stalinophilic deviations when confronted with a contradictory reality.
This sterility of the FI leadership (and later the IC) weakened the organization, leaving it theoretically and politically unprepared for the emergence of a revisionist current that would seek to generalize the confusion of the post-war FI, e.g., over the Yugoslav revolution, into an objectively liquidationist project:
“The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth International.”
—“Genesis of Pabloism”
The majorities of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), American SWP and other sections reacted to the emergence of Pabloism, at different tempos, when confronted with its implications in their home countries. In a letter written during the discussions leading to the 1990 formation of the IBT, our comrades noted that “though the fight against Pabloism was profoundly flawed, it was not without political substance”:
“The issues posed in the SWP’s Open Letter (the East German uprising and the French general strike) were not inconsequential. It is therefore a mistake to equate the positions adopted by the IC sections on these events with those of the Pabloites. As in the Cochran fight, despite our criticisms of Cannon et al, we cannot accept the position that this was a case of two 'complementary’ revisionist positions which were qualitatively similar. That is why the course toward 'reunification’ with the Pabloists over a shared capitulation to Castroism was a significant development, which signalled the irreversible consolidation of the SWP leadership around revisionism, while simultaneously initiating the Revolutionary Tendency (RT).”
—“Revolutionary Continuity & the Split in the Fourth International,” 1917 No.8
Comrade David rejects the notion that the IC embodied even a flawed expression of revolutionary continuity:
“Our tendency has claimed that they represented the revolutionary continuity—albeit with a heavy dose of criticism, to be fair. But the truth is that the International Committee was equally incapable of offering a Marxist response to the fundamental questions of our movement.
“While Pablo openly tailed Stalinist and nationalist movements, the International Committee retreated into a thoroughly sectarian, sterile, and reality-denying approach to those same movements.”
David traces the destruction of the FI as a revolutionary organization to the period before the emergence of Pabloism:
“[I]t is absurd to claim that the Fourth International was somehow 'revolutionary’ before the rise of 'Pabloism’ as we have argued in the past. And as Workers Power also argues, I should say. As the human material to build revolutionary parties was to be found inside the mass Stalinist and militant nationalist organizations, the Fourth International’s sterile and Stalinophobic course only guaranteed its disorientation and isolation.”
Left out of the edited version was a parenthetical acknowledgement that the IBT “defends to this day” the claim that the Fourth International was a revolutionary organization, as the Spartacists used to do. Their new argument that the post-war FI and, later, the Pabloites and anti-Pabloites were “equally” non-revolutionary rests on the premise that:
“Organizations claiming to be revolutionary cannot be judged by programmatic purity on paper, by the personal qualities of leaders, or even by the accuracy of their prognoses. The true revolutionary mettle of a tendency is tested concretely in the course of great events: did it fight for a course of struggle which advanced the interests of the working class as a whole? Or did it become the tool of another class?”
David’s renunciation of the post-war FI and the IC tradition comes down to the view that they did not “concretely” advance an effective “strategy” for revolution:
“Stuck in sterile orthodoxy, the Fourth International was incapable of understanding how the Cold War was forcing Stalinist and nationalist leaders into confrontation with the American empire and its imperial partners. Because they could not grasp these living dynamics, they dismissed mass support for these leaderships as mere subjective and temporary confusion. Unable to engage the real contradictions within these movements, the International retreated into an abstract, Europe-centric framework—paying lip service to the colonial revolution while remaining politically blind to its true significance and specific tasks.”
While justly critical of Pablo, comrade David offered “to defend Pablo on a number of points” and jocularly warned, “Comrades of the IBT should fasten your seat belts. It’s about to get worse!” (not in edited version). Indeed, it did. David explained that “Pablo wasn’t just a chemically pure opportunist consciously seeking to destroy Trotskyism” since he “was trying to grapple with real life; his fatal error was drawing non-revolutionary conclusions from it..” Pablo’s advantage, we were told, was that he and his followers “understood that revolutionaries had to link themselves to the masses, particularly in the national liberation movements.” Specifically, it “was entirely correct for small propaganda groups to seek entry into mass Stalinist or nationalist organizations, even with a long-term perspective. Whether this is possible or how to do it depends on the concrete.”
What, then, was the central problem with Pablo? David explained:
“Since our reorientation, we are often accused of being neo-Pabloites. But these accusations just show that the accusers do not understand what Pabloism actually is.
“Pablo’s entire analysis was based on the notion that 'Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.’ In those situations, he argued, those parties would 'cease to be strictly Stalinist parties.’ Here is the nub of revisionism that robbed Trotskyism of any raison d’être.
“History has shown that, under certain specific conditions—a revolutionary uprising of the masses, huge pressure from imperialism, the weakness of the local bourgeoisie, etc.—Stalinist parties, and even petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations, can go way beyond the aims of their leadership, fight for power and even break with capitalism. This is without a doubt a revolutionary act. But it is not a 'revolutionary orientation.’ This is an ambiguous formulation that was used by Pablo and others to basically argue that those Communist parties had become revolutionary.”
Comrade David concluded that what was needed was “a revolutionary synthesis of what was good with the Pabloites and what was good with the anti-Pabloites.” This was edited to read “forging the kind of revolutionary synthesis which our forebears didn’t,” but the less careful original is more clearly revealing of the direction of travel.
There is a lot to unpack here.
What is Pabloism? Pabloism was not defined by realism or concern for effective tactics, nor was it even based on the view that “Communist parties had become revolutionary,” as comrade David put it. As “Genesis of Pabloism” argued, “Pabloism was more than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.” Concretely, this impulse manifested itself, not in the formal renunciation of building an independent revolutionary party (this remained nominally the goal), but in the perspective of pressuring Stalinists, Third World nationalists and social democrats to the left.
In “Where Are We Going?” (March 1951), Pablo spelled out the theoretical foundation for this implicit rejection of Leninist vanguardism: “the objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.” He saw the historical process itself as objectively pushing towards socialism, and argued that it could find a blunted instrument in the form of Stalinism, though the latter itself was still considered an obstacle to socialism. At least in some situations, the role of Trotskyists was to intervene in these movements, not to set the base against the top and split off the proletarian-revolutionary elements to form a new party, but to serve as a left-wing pressure group fighting to reduce or eliminate the deformations of the series of deformed workers’ states that would inevitably be thrown up in the course of an “objective process” of transition to communism.
In 1951, however, Pablo was still guarded in his formulations and possibly in his intentions, and he himself emphasized the “exceptional” conditions that had led the Stalinist parties “to go further than their leaderships and above all the Kremlin would have wished” in breaking with capitalism:
“Thus the rise of Communist Parties to power is not the consequence of a capacity of Stalinism to struggle for the Revolution, does not alter the internationally counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, but it is the product of an exceptional combination of circumstances which has imposed the seizure of power either upon the Soviet bureaucracy (in the case of the European buffer zone), or upon certain Communist Parties (Yugoslavia, China).” [emphasis in original]
Pablo acknowledged that “the objective revolutionary process is not automatic,” though in the next breath projected a centuries-long period of capitalist overturns as an “ascending objective totality” to which revolutionaries must adapt:
“[W]hat distinguishes a genuine revolutionary movement from a tendency which is at bottom petty bourgeois is that the revolutionists base their fundamental orientation on the perspective of the Revolution and Socialism. As against the counter-revolutionary alternative of the period they base themselves on the revolutionary possibilities which are practical, actual and not theoretical; they appraise these possibilities at their full value; they survey the revolutionary process in its ascending objective totality and do not get lost in this or that secondary episode of this process.”
Pabloism is based on the fantasy that the revolution unfolds almost of its own accord and that the job of revolutionaries is to push Stalinist, petty-bourgeois nationalist and social democratic movements to break with capitalism and move towards socialism. Pablo viewed this not as an abandonment of the fight for revolutionary leadership (or “the need to forge a revolutionary current within them”) but as the framework in which to conduct that fight. His watchword was “contradiction,” and he sought not only to recognize the contradictory nature of Stalinism but also to exploit the contradictions to push along the objective revolutionary “process.” His tactics were at the service of, and informed by, a perspective that transformed the struggle for an independent, proletarian-revolutionary party into the fight to pressure non-proletarian forces to approximate revolutionary Marxism.
The ICL rejects our characterization of their reorientation as a slide towards neo-Pabloism essentially on the grounds that they are “fighting for leadership” against nationalists, reformists, Stalinists and trade-union bureaucrats, unlike Pabloites (or, indeed, anti-Pabloites). In fact, this is the ICL answer for everything: other groups are not really fighting for leadership, as they fail to intervene with a strategy or tactics aimed at exploiting the contradictions of Stalinism or bourgeois nationalism. We heard this refrain in many of the conversations we had with ICL members at the conference. Frankly, it is a frustrating argument to deal with because the idea of exploiting the contradictions of political opponents and enemies is both the ABC of politics and, in itself, an empty container into which almost anything can be poured. On its own, the statement provides no basis to distinguish Trotskyism from Pabloism. Pablo also claimed to be fighting to build revolutionary leadership.
Comrade David’s “revolutionary synthesis” of Pabloism and anti-Pabloism involved arguing that it “was entirely correct for small propaganda groups to seek entry into mass Stalinist or nationalist organizations, even with a long-term perspective” ICL members argued that revolutionaries should have sought to enter the Yugoslav Stalinist party to turn it into a “mobilization point” to defend the revolution (which was sometimes conflated with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia [CPY] itself) and “solidarize” with the CPY leadership against Moscow. Although this was framed as an attempt to set the proletarian base against the top and “fight for leadership,” the strategy seemed to have more in common with the Pabloite vision of pushing the CPY to the left.
From our point of view, it was necessary to exploit the contradictions of post-war Stalinism through a sharp political attack on its leadership and program. This may or may not have involved a tactic of entry—it is rather difficult, 80 years later, to determine with any degree of certainty what specific tactics would have been most effective or even possible. Whatever the appropriate tactics, a struggle for revolutionary leadership would have been based, not on Pablo’s liquidationist perspective, but on the perspective of building an independent proletarian revolutionary party, i.e., the framework defended, in a flawed manner, by the forces of the IC during the 1951–53 split. What was necessary was a non-“sterile” version of the post-war orthodoxy, which is exactly what “Genesis of Pabloism” advocated.
That being the case, what is the point of comrade David’s rejection of both the Pabloite International Secretariat and the anti-Pabloite IC as non-revolutionary equivalents? It is not simply a matter of an idiosyncratic historical analysis of the destruction of the FI. The formal break with anti-Pabloism reflects an impulse to move closer to Pabloism, even as the latter continues to be criticized for objectivism. It is both an attempt to argue that the RT/SL was never revolutionary and a move to facilitate regroupment with non-IC tradition formations through a kind of mutually amnestying, even-handed assessment of all post-war “Trotskyist” currents as having bad qualities but also good qualities upon which an exciting new “revolutionary synthesis” can draw.
Yet comrade David’s thesis, which encountered no challenge whatsoever from ICL members at the conference, is in fact not new. Nearly 40 years ago, our organization published a polemical exchange with Workers Power on this and other questions (see Trotskyist Bulletin No.3). In all of its essentials, David’s arguments against even a critical identification with the anti-Pabloite IC can be found in the writings of Workers Power, with perhaps one important difference: whereas Workers Power dated the break in revolutionary continuity to 1951, comrade David seems to push it back to 1946 or before. Revolutions will not be led by shrinking violets, but the new ICL leaders confidently present an analysis that suggests that they are the first Trotskyists since Trotsky. We find this analysis to be a-historical, but the real problem is the program it is meant to justify, which comes down to pushing non-proletarian movements to the left by exposing the contradictions of their non-revolutionary leaderships.
The notion of a “revolutionary synthesis” of Pabloism and anti-Pabloism leads not to a tactically superior version of anti-Pabloism but to a more leftwing-sounding version of Pabloism. This is particularly clear in the ICL’s new program on the national question, which began to emerge at their 2017 Seventh International Conference, as reported in Spartacist No.65 (see “In Defense of (Seymour’s) Marxism,” 1917 No.40), but made a significant leap in 2023 in the decisions of their Eighth International Conference, published in Spartacist No.68. In July 2025, we debated these questions at length with the ICL leadership at a meeting in London (see “IBT/ICL Discussions on the National Question”).
Given the fundamental change of line at the previous conference, the main document for the Ninth International Conference says surprisingly little about the national question, though the ICL’s new position is briefly articulated:
“The Marxist and anti-imperialist movement is divided into two wrong trends. One rejects national liberation struggles as inherently bourgeois, proclaiming socialist revolution while abandoning the real aspirations of the masses. In so doing, it leaves the masses to the leadership of the nationalists. The other trend tails behind the national bourgeoisie, especially its radical or anti-imperialist wings, likewise tying the masses to nationalist forces and abandoning oppressed groups to manipulation by pro-imperialist forces. Both trends abandon the central task: building proletarian leadership of the struggle for national liberation.”
—“Workers of the World, Unite Against the U.S. Empire!” Spartacist No.71
This is typical of the ICL method: set up a dichotomy of sectarianism vs. opportunism that expresses the “contradictions” of the situation, and then chart a course to the golden mean to exploit those contradictions, which in practice means adaptation to opportunism. Implicitly, the old position of the ICL (and the IBT’s current position) is characterized as rejecting “national liberation struggles as inherently bourgeois, proclaiming socialist revolution while abandoning the real aspirations of the masses.” Yet the “Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League,” adopted unanimously at its founding conference in September 1966, states:
“The partial character of the anti-capitalist revolutions in the colonial world over the past two decades (China, Cuba, North Viet Nam and North Korea) leads us to reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletariat as the key to the socialist revolution. Although existing petty-bourgeois nationalist-led movements against imperialism must be defended, the task of communists is to lead the active intervention of the working class to take hegemony over the national-social struggle. The struggle by the proletarian leadership for self-determination of the oppressed nations is a powerful tool to break the grip of petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders on the masses.”
The new ICL’s critique of this revolutionary perspective is incoherent and ties itself in theoretical knots. To begin with, scientific socialists, from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky, have always viewed the national question as “inherently bourgeois,” and this is true in both imperialist and non-imperialist countries. In “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (April 1916), Lenin argues that “the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation” is “nothing more nor less than the recognition of the right to self-determination.” He continues: “Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession.”
Communists are fierce defenders of bourgeois-democratic rights, including the right to self-determination, and we advocate the political freedom (or “national liberation”) of oppressed peoples colonized by the imperialists. Far from “abandoning the real aspirations of the masses,” this conception provides a clear basis to intervene in mass movements to polarize them along class lines to move beyond their bourgeois-democratic limitations. Communists do not tell the masses that the current form of their struggle is in itself objectively or implicitly socialist in content (if only it was not betrayed by the bourgeois nationalists). Rather, we seek to demonstrate the limits of the current struggle in order to turn it into a “lever” for socialist revolution. As Lenin notes:
“The socialist revolution may break out not only in consequence of a great strike, a street demonstration, a hunger riot, a mutiny in the forces, or a colonial rebellion, but also in consequence of any political crisis, like the Dreyfus affair, the Zabern incident, or in connection with a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc.”
—Ibid.
The point is not to elevate any particular bourgeois-democratic question to the level of proletarian class strategy but to seek any opportunity, from wherever it emerges, to break the masses from the perspective of reforming capitalism and orient their struggle towards the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How can this be done? Lenin wrote about the need to defend democratic rights while stressing their limitations under capitalism, not denying the bourgeois character of those rights. He rejected the deletion of “any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is 'infeasible,’ or that it is 'illusory’ under imperialism.” In a strict sense, “all the fundamental demands of political democracy are 'possible of achievement’ under imperialism, only in an incomplete, in a mutilated form and as a rare exception.” Lenin noted that “it would be ridiculous to deny that, with a slight change in political and strategical relationships, for example, between Germany and England, the formation of new states, Polish, Indian, etc, would be quite 'feasible’ very soon.”
The point is not to refrain from the struggle for democratic rights, including the right to self-determination. The point is to do so:
“in a revolutionary way; not by keeping within the framework of bourgeois legality, but by breaking through it; not by confining oneself to parliamentary speeches and verbal protests, but by drawing the masses into real action, by widening and fomenting the struggle for every kind of fundamental, democratic demand, right up to and including the direct onslaught of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e., to the socialist revolution, which will expropriate the bourgeoisie.”
The fight for national liberation, like the fight for women’s or trans liberation, can be understood either in the strict “political” sense of the term (i.e., the terrain of winning bourgeois-democratic rights like the national right to form an independent state) or in the broader “economic” sense of the term (i.e., the substantive, and not simply legal, freedom of oppressed groups that can only come with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie). This is the point Lenin was making when he wrote:
“[F]inance capital, in its striving towards expansion, will 'freely’ buy and bribe the freest, most democratic and republican government and the elected officials of any country, however 'independent’ it may be. The domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and class struggle. Hence, all arguments about the 'impossibility of achieving’ economically one of the demands of political democracy under capitalism reduce themselves to a theoretically incorrect definition of the general and fundamental relations of capitalism and of political democracy in general.”
In practice, revolutionaries have always used the term in both senses, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Even in formally independent neocolonies, which have essentially achieved “national liberation” in the narrow sense, imperialist domination extremely limits the extent to which the oppressed peoples have been “liberated.” The masses may choose to express these limitations as the need to complete the struggle for “national liberation,” or—depending on a number of factors, e.g., the attraction of supra-national ideologies like pan-Africanism—they may not. Marxists must learn to speak the language of the oppressed, but we must not adapt theoretically or programmatically to it.
Driving a wedge between the oppressed masses and their bourgeois-nationalist leaders cannot be accomplished by conflating the struggle for “national liberation” with the struggle against imperialism and for socialism. Precisely because the masses have not yet been won to a revolutionary-socialist perspective, they will often understand the fight against imperialism as “national liberation” in the strict “political” sense of the term, and they will remain on the terrain of the bourgeois-nationalist movement until that movement is polarized along class lines. Rather than viewing the struggle against imperialism as a class struggle that may at times use bourgeois-democratic demands as a possible “lever” of socialist revolution depending on the circumstances, the ICL advances the slogan of “national liberation” as the “lever” or “motor force” for socialist revolution everywhere in the Global South (and, as we will see, perhaps in imperialist countries, too). This may seem like a subtle point, but its implications are significant, as the ICL’s sweeping, universal campaign for “national liberation” presents the struggle against imperialism as some sort of consistent struggle for the bourgeois-democratic right to self-determination even in independent neocolonies.
The evidence for this is clearest in the case of South Africa. Last year during the IBT/ICL Discussions on the National Question in London, comrade Mansa Kaur of the ICL argued:
“We understand that the task is to champion the national struggle and democratic demands, to be the most vociferous proponents of this just and legitimate cause while putting forward a class-independent perspective for their achievement. In other words, for proletarian leadership of democratic struggles. This approach is the only path that can fuse national and social liberation—the essence of the Trotskyist program.”
Concretely, the ICL fights for the implementation of the Freedom Charter, which comrade Kaur described as “a radical democratic program adopted by the ANC in 1955”:
“The Charter advanced demands such as one person one vote, equality before the law, equal national rights for all groups, abolition of the color bar, an end to restrictions on land ownership on a racial basis, redivision of the land among those who work it, a national minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek, an end to child labor and much more.…
“First, consider what it would take to implement the Freedom Charter: a struggle against the white bourgeoisie and the imperialists, which would itself show the limitations of the radical black nationalists in terms of their willingness and capacity to implement it. For the revolutionaries to refuse to wage this struggle ensured that the black nationalists remained in charge of the national and social aspirations of the black masses. It is this that ensured the political subordination of the proletariat to its bourgeoisie.
“In contrast, if revolutionaries had championed the Freedom Struggle and at every turn pushed forward the struggle for its implementation, this would have shown how the nationalists are an obstacle and would have given the Trotskyists a real basis to fight for leadership of the national struggle on the basis of an independent program.”
Of course, Marxists champion democratic rights, and we point out the hypocrisy of the nationalist bourgeoisie, which can formally agree to those rights but which is incapable of providing them real substance owing to its commitment to capitalism and inability to break with imperialism. But we do not pose the struggle against imperialism in South Africa as the consistent application of the Freedom Charter. As our comrade Barbara Dorn said in reply to comrade Kaur:
“Marxists can and do raise democratic demands that nationalists will also raise. Some of those democratic demands will cut across imperialist oppression. In that sense, we may find ourselves in temporary, shifting blocs with bourgeois-nationalist forces—anti-imperialist 'united fronts,’ if you will. But we do not (as you have done) project some sort of strategic bloc with the bourgeoisie (the anti-imperialist united front) in which we can 'expose’ them by being more consistently 'national liberationist’ than they are. We insist that the real struggle is not national-democratic or even anti-imperialist but anti-capitalist—a class-struggle orientation that targets not just the imperialists but their bourgeois-nationalist lackeys in the non-imperialist countries.”
By contrast, the ICL plants the struggle against imperialism in South Africa in the soil of the bourgeois-nationalist program. In the 2024 South African general election, the ICL voted for the petty-bourgeois Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical left-nationalist party that the ICL acknowledges is outside of the workers’ movement. In London, comrade Kaur argued against the IBT’s supposed “ultra-formalist approach to the question of the class line and the popular front”:
“There was no independent force in the elections, and class struggle was, and remains, at an ebb. The right-wing DA and the radical populist EFF were contenders for an alliance with the ANC. The white bourgeoisie and imperialists had made crystal-clear that they would be against an EFF victory.
“In the minds of workers, the choice was between more austerity in an alliance with the right-wing DA and the EFF’s radical version of the Freedom Charter. Objectively, the class line was between the radical demands of their Freedom Charter on the one hand and the forces that in one way or another promised to uphold or worsen the status quo.…
“So, we said vote EFF, they have supportable demands—for instance, the expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution and use; nationalization of mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy, without compensation; free quality healthcare, education, houses and sanitation, etc. Of course these are supportable! But we lay out exactly why the EFF cannot achieve these demands and why to be successful the struggle needs an alternative strategy, a strategy that we indeed provide! Instead of dealing with the substance of our political arguments, the high and mighty IBT dismisses this by saying 'sure’—hardly an intelligent attempt. For you, the EFF is a bourgeois party, so any vote to it is a crime. Gone are the considerations of where the consciousness of workers is, what it would actually take to achieve those demands—i.e., a struggle against the entire social fabric of South African society. No. What is paramount is the realm of pure principles.”
This echoes the new ICL’s critique of the “sterile orthodoxy” of Cannon’s SWP, putting supposedly clever tactics of the moment on an equal (or perhaps greater) footing with an understanding of the lessons of history and Marxist theory. The transitional program (little mentioned these days by the ICL) does indeed begin “where the consciousness of workers is” but works to change that consciousness to a revolutionary one. Anyone who is familiar with the speeches of ICL leaders will recall their frequent use of the word “concretely,” designed to project their self image as wise tacticians. It is in this regard that they often counterpose their strategy to that of the IBT and others arguing for the principles of Marxism, and it results precisely in dismissing principles as “pure” or “sterile” and unconnected to the fight for leadership. In fact, there is often very little that is “concrete” about the ICL approach, as it applies the same template of national-liberation-as-lever to very different situations, e.g., Quebec, Palestine, Kanaky, Mexico, Greece, Catalonia.
In collapsing the struggle against imperialism and capitalism into the struggle for consistent bourgeois-democratic national liberation, the ICL flips permanent revolution on its head. The point of Trotsky’s theory is not that imperialism and capitalism can only be destroyed via a fight for democratic demands, but that the always-ongoing fight for democratic demands can only be completed in a substantive way with the defeat of the imperialist world order at the hands of the working class. The programmatic upshot of this inversion of permanent revolution is the neo-Pabloite abandonment of the principle of proletarian independence, which is dissolved in a process of tactical consideration. For if the struggle for socialist revolution against imperialism is simply a more consistent fight for “national liberation” (pushed to the left by “communist leadership”), then why not seek to exploit the contradictions of bourgeois nationalism by voting for and even entering bourgeois parties the way revolutionaries might in the case of reformist workers’ parties? At the conference, comrade David had argued in favor of joining not only Stalinist parties in the post-WWII period but also “nationalist” formations. We later asked for clarification on this point and were told that the ICL indeed considers, not simply voting for bourgeois parties, but actually joining them to be mere “tactical” questions.
Given the glaring contradiction with the organizational and programmatic conclusions of Trotsky’s permanent revolution, the ICL leadership has sought to give its abandonment of the class line a Trotskyist veneer by recalling that Trotsky himself argued that joining bourgeois parties was merely a tactic. We heard this argument during the discussions last year in London in relation to China in the 1920s. In “The Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang” (27 September 1926), Trotsky argued: “The participation of the CCP in the Kuomintang was perfectly correct in the period when the CCP was a propaganda society that was only preparing itself for future independent political activity but which, at the same time, sought to take part in the ongoing national liberation struggle.” In a letter to Harold Isaacs, author of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, on 1 November 1937, Trotsky wrote:
“[T]he entering in itself in 1922 was not a crime, possibly not even a mistake, especially in the south, under the assumption that the Kuomintang [Guomindang] at this time had a number of workers and the young Communist party was weak and composed almost entirely of intellectuals.... In this case the entry would have been an episodic step to independency [sic], analogous to a certain degree to your entering the Socialist Party. The question is what was their purpose in entering and what was their subsequent policy?”
—as quoted in Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927
Trotsky argues here that in China in the early 1920s—in a situation shaped by the relative immaturity of the working class and its organizations and by the presence of “a number of workers” in a mass KMT nominally fighting imperialist domination—an “episodic” entry into the KMT might not have been a mistake. Does this not lend Trotskyist credentials to the ICL’s readiness to vote for and actually join bourgeois parties?
It is important to look at the evolution of Trotsky’s views. Elsewhere in “The Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang,” he writes:
“The revolutionary struggle in China has, since 1925 entered a new phase, which is characterized above all by the active intervention of broad layers of the proletariat, by strikes and the formation of trade unions.…
“It is quite clear that in the light of these fundamental facts the question of revising relations between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang must necessarily be raised.…
“This very fact confronts the CCP with the task of graduating from the preparatory class it now finds itself in to a higher grade. Its immediate political task must now be to fight for direct independent leadership of the awakened working class.…”
A few years later, in “The Opposition’s Record on the Kuomintang” (10 December 1930), Trotsky wrote: “I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist Party joining the Kuomintang.”
So, what can we conclude? Although Trotsky opposed the entry of the CP into the KMT, up to 1925 he was at least open to the idea that, in a backward peasant country with little in the way of an organized workers’ movement, it was conceivable that a short-term maneuver to enter a party like the KMT could have produced favorable results. He even says that it was “perfectly correct” to conduct an operation in the KMT in 1922.
In 1922, not even Trotsky had fully generalized the understanding of permanent revolution to all “backward” countries, and it remained an open historical question. Marxism is not a religion, and the principles we defend are simply the distilled lessons of past struggles. But we must actually learn those lessons. Trotsky drew the lessons of the Chinese revolution in The Third International After Lenin, where he argued against Bukharin’s critique of the Left Opposition’s position of “withdrawal of the party from the Kuomintang”:
“Bukharin asks, 'And what about the Kuomintang masses, are they mere cattle?’ Of course they are cattle. The masses of any bourgeois party are always cattle, although in different degrees. But for us, the masses are not cattle, are they? No, that is precisely why we are forbidden to drive them into the arms of the bourgeoisie, camouflaging the latter under the label of a workers’ and peasants’ party. That is precisely why we are forbidden to subordinate the proletarian party to a bourgeois party, but on the contrary, must at every step, oppose the former to the latter.”
In “The Political Situation in China and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition” (June 1929), Trotsky left no room for ambiguity: “Never and under no circumstances may the party of the proletariat enter into a party of another class or merge with it organizationally. An absolutely independent party of the proletariat is a first and decisive condition for communist politics.”
The ICL takes a highly contingent historical possibility that was rather quickly removed from the agenda by the actual development of the class struggle and seeks to apply it today to justify voting for (and even joining) bourgeois parties in countries like South Africa with a well-developed, long-standing militant workers’ movement numbering in the millions—a society very different from China in the early 1920s. For all its talk of the importance of being “concrete” and understanding the particular, real concerns of the masses, the ICL leadership ignores these rather profound differences because its program is to renounce “sterile principles” and reconceptualize the struggle for socialist revolution as a fight to push the democratic movement for “national liberation” to the left. What is this but a variant of Pabloite liquidationism?
In his presentation on the destruction of the FI, comrade David argued: “Fundamentally, the Fourth International disintegrated because it failed to grasp that the central task of the era was the fight against the American empire” The main programmatic document adopted by the ICL conference is entitled, “Workers of the World, Unite Against the U.S. Empire!” (Spartacist No.71). It puts forward the now-familiar neo-Spartacist thesis that struggle against American imperialism is the main political task in literally every country in the world. There is nothing particularly “concrete” about this approach, which attempts to shoe-horn every situation on the planet into the ICL’s essentially left-nationalist understanding of the fight against US imperialism.
Interestingly, the question of the exceptional role of the US came up during the debates within the Fourth International in the immediate post-WWII period. One of the problems with the post-war FI identified in “Genesis of Pabloism” was that “[p]rofound impressionism led the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.” There was a kind of “American exceptionalism,” reflected in the “Theses on the American Revolution” adopted by the SWP’s national convention in November 1946, which implied that socialist revolution in the US would essentially serve the role of global revolution.
While the “American exceptionalism” of the post-war SWP was wrong at the time, it is not difficult to see why genuine revolutionaries would have fallen for it. To begin with, they believed they were rejecting American exceptionalism in the form of a reformist approach that viewed the US as uniquely capable of escaping the contradictions of capitalism. The “Theses on the American Revolution” attempted to combat this conceptual framework by highlighting potential weaknesses in the emerging economic model of a dominant US capitalism. The intention, spelled out clearly in the first paragraph of the Theses, was to show that there was no “American exceptionalism” to the “incurable diseases” of the bourgeois mode of production, i.e., that the “overwhelming preponderance of American imperialism does not exempt it from the decay of world capitalism.”
However, the SWP countered with an argument that, although not fully-formed American exceptionalism, did open a path towards it. The Theses argue: “The issue of socialism or capitalism will not be finally decided until it is decided in the U.S. Another retardation of the proletarian revolution in one country or another, or even one continent or another, will not save American imperialism from its proletarian nemesis at home. The decisive battles for the communist future of mankind will be fought in the U.S.” In his speech to the November 1946 convention, “The Coming American Revolution,” Cannon asked: “What conclusions do we draw from the war and its consequences; from the new power of American imperialism; from the post-war prosperity; and from the retardation of the European revolution?” He argued that it was necessary to offer Marxist conclusions to “the workers of the whole world which lies today under the shadow of American imperialism.” Yet the SWP’s conclusions reflected an overly optimistic view of the prospects for an American socialist revolution, whose importance to the class struggle globally was considered central.
This tendency to identify global socialist revolution with the American revolution finds inverted expression in the ICL’s current struggle against the “U.S. Empire … everywhere.” The SWP’s deviation on this issue was only partial and anticipatory, and its motives were sound, i.e., an attempt to make the case for building a revolutionary party inside the US imperialist behemoth:
“The role of America in the world is decisive. Should the European and colonial revolutions, now on the order of the day, precede in point of time the culmination of the struggle in the U.S., they would immediately be confronted with the necessity of defending their conquests against the economic and military assaults of the American imperialist monster. The ability of the victorious insurgent peoples everywhere to maintain themselves would depend to a high degree on the strength and fighting capacity of the revolutionary labor movement in America.”
The ICL today makes the following argument, not in 1946 (at the dawn of Pax Americana), but 80 years later, in the early stages of renewed inter-imperialist and great-power rivalry:
“U.S. imperialism is the main force dragging the world toward barbarism. Fighting the U.S. empire is thus central for the international proletariat and oppressed everywhere. The working class in the U.S. is made to pay for the global ambitions of its ruling class through militarism, austerity and attacks on its living standards. Across the imperialist countries and in the U.S.-aligned semicolonies, the ruling classes remain deeply tied to the existing order. Whether it is allegiance to NATO and trans-Atlanticism in the West, Japan marching onto the road of rearmament, or the Quad in the Indian Ocean, opposing the alliance with the U.S. forms an integral part of the struggle against the ruling classes in these countries.
“In Ukraine, soldiers are being sent to the slaughter for the interests of the Western imperialists and their Ukrainian puppets. In neocolonial countries and workers states facing sanctions, economic pressure or military threats, the struggle against national and social oppression will bring millions into motion, posing the overthrow of imperialist domination and the national bourgeoisies. Everywhere, the struggle against U.S. imperialism provides a basis for uniting workers across borders and forging an international revolutionary leadership capable of challenging the existing world order.”
—“Workers of the World, Unite Against the U.S. Empire!”
If Cannon was mistaken to offer the one-sided argument that defeating global capitalism required, above all, that American workers fight the American ruling class, the ICL makes a far greater error in arguing that the “absence of an independent proletarian opposition to U.S. imperialism is the single most important factor shaping world developments, whether in the imperialist centers, the semicolonial world or the various movements of resistance.” Cannon’s national narrowness was at least rooted in a material analysis of the dominance of US capitalism and in a desire to foster irreconcilable hostility to the American bourgeoisie within the American working class. The ICL’s inverted American exceptionalism posits the struggle against capitalism in other imperialist countries as the struggle against American imperialism. This not only relies on an outdated analysis of global capitalism, it ultimately reflects a desire to reframe the struggle against capitalism and imperialism outside the United States as a struggle for a kind of national liberation from the United States.
Thus, the ICL’s neo-Pabloite adaptation to bourgeois nationalism has not been confined to their program for the Global South, but has spread to the imperialist centers as well. The ICL has so far not been explicit about the implications of this, but we note that some Spartacist comrades at the conference seemed confused about the extent to which other imperialist countries could be said to be nationally oppressed by the US.
We argued with ICL members over the practical application of this line in imperialist countries like Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. The ICL is of the view that, given the unlikeliness (or perhaps impossibility) of the bourgeoisies of these countries breaking with Washington at least in the short to medium term, revolutionaries can take advantage of the anger the masses feel towards US imperialism by leveraging it into a struggle against American domination—a struggle that these bourgeoisies will not undertake, despite the enormous damage being done to their economies by the US. The idea here is that, like the national bourgeoisie in neocolonies, the bourgeoisie in imperialist countries is too dependent on the US to actually break from it, and that communists should attempt to expose them as lackeys of (American) imperialism, which will somehow produce some sort of revolutionary momentum.
While it is true that the US continues to “dominate” most other imperialist countries (e.g., through its military bases and its economic preponderance), imperialism is an inherently contradictory system that inevitably produces inter-imperialist rivalry. As we explain at length in The Return of Great-Power Rivalry (18 July 2026), the general trend over the last two decades has not only involved the decline of US imperialism but the rise of Russian imperialism and, above all, the Chinese deformed workers’ state, and tensions between the US and its junior imperialist “partners” are growing in that context:
“While the current leaders of America’s imperialist allies do not seek a complete break from the United States, some (perhaps most) of these countries will be forced to take a more independent stance in order to protect their material interests from a flailing and increasingly volatile American imperialism. The era of open inter-imperialist rivalry has returned.”
The French and German ruling classes, in particular, are holding in reserve far-right, nationalist political forces that favor a break with NATO and even the establishment of friendly relations with energy-rich Russia. ICL comrades we spoke with downplayed the role of such far-right, anti-US, pro-imperialist nationalism in these countries by highlighting the continued participation of present governments in the US-led order.
While it is necessary to provide answers to workers fooled by Alternative für Deutschland or Rassemblement National, it is important that those answers don’t reinforce the nationalism such parties are using to channel working-class discontent into support for the more overtly “nationalist” wing of their imperialist bourgeoisies. We believe that Karl Liebknecht was correct when he said that the “main enemy is at home” because, as Lenin also understood, defeatism towards one’s own imperialist ruling class provides the sharpest split from conciliation with the bourgeoisie and facilitates the fight for revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat. However, for the ICL, the “main enemy” is, everywhere, in Washington. The fight for proletarian independence in the “junior” imperialist countries is undermined by the strategy of focusing politically on the domination of US imperialism precisely because that strategy involves driving—not a class wedge between the reformist misleaders and trade-union bureaucracy on the one hand, and the proletarian base on the other—but a nationalist wedge between different wings of the labor bureaucracy. This attempt to push nationalism to the left in the junior imperialist countries rather starkly reveals where the ICL leadership’s neo-Pabloist framework leads.
Our discussions with ICL members began with the example of Canada, where anti-US left-nationalism has been a major ideological prop of trade-union bureaucrats, NDP “socialists” and Stalinists for more than five decades. We also discussed the example of Australia, where the ICL’s adherents have been actively pushing to “Break the U.S. Connection in the Workers Movement” (7 March 2024). The ICL argues: “Australia was born an outpost of Anglo imperialism in Southeast Asia. It was established to function as deputy sheriff of the British Empire. When the baton of world policeman passed to the U.S., from then on orders were handed down from the Oval Office rather than Downing St.” Fighting against imperialism must, according to the ICL, involve fighting “to break this link in the imperialist chain.” Concretely, they argue, advancing a class-struggle approach to defend Gaza requires fighting US domination of Australia “[b]ecause union action to impede Australia’s support of the Israeli offensive would immediately run up against the ALP government and its allegiance to Washington.”
This conceives the strategic axis of struggle against pro-imperialist reformism in the ALP and trade-union movement as “a break with the U.S. alliance which ensures the ALP’s unwavering support to Israel’s slaughter.” While the ICL comrades may believe that this will further the development of “independent” proletarian opposition, in reality it is a position bolstering the “anti-imperialist” credentials of left (or perhaps not-so-left) out-bureaucrats who seek to use Australian (or Canadian, etc.) nationalism to bind workers to their bosses.
In his speech to the Eighth International Conference of the ICL in 2023 (“Why the ICL Collapsed & How We Reforged It,” Spartacist No.68), Gabriel Perrault claimed that “liberalism had brought about the collapse of the party” during the Covid-19 pandemic. He traces the qualitative turn of the ICL to the period of March-August 2021, when the IS/IEC of the ICL worked out their position opposing lockdowns. According to Perrault, it was then that he and his co-thinkers fully realized that the ICL wasn’t really fighting for revolution. The 2023 international conference was the moment when the reorientation was codified by a more-or-less complete overhaul of the ICL’s program. Comrade Perrault explains:
“We were first confronted with the problem in Quebec. To put forward a revolutionary program in the pandemic, we had to expose the illusion that the state is the key instrument for the advancement of the Québécois nation. But to break this illusion we had to recognize that it had a legitimate basis. The development of a proto-state enabled the Québécois nation to push back against anglophone domination and brought significant social progress. It is by looking to Trotsky’s writings on permanent revolution that we were able to crack this problem and understand the role of the Quebec bourgeoisie as a semi-oppressed, semi-ruling class which, while taking the lead of the national struggle, undermines it and betrays it at every turn.
“As we extended this understanding to Greece and then Mexico, it became clear that our party’s whole history on permanent revolution was revisionist.” [emphasis added]
The Eighth International Conference adopted a document, “In Defense of Permanent Revolution—For Communist Leadership of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle!” (Spartacist No.68), which reads:
“The socialist revolution is not a single battle but a series of battles taking place over a multitude of democratic, economic and social questions. In countries under the yoke of foreign domination, to seek to 'remove’ the national question as the precondition for socialist struggle means denying that the imperialist-imposed state of underdevelopment objectively brings to the fore democratic tasks as the fundamental lever for socialist revolution.”
Here is the encapsulation of the neo-Pabloite programmatic revisionism of the new ICL. Socialist revolution is not a temporally limited struggle for power by the working class but “a series of battles taking place over a multitude of democratic, economic and social questions.” Imperialist domination is centrally a question of “national” oppression, and fighting for the democratic right to self-determination is “the fundamental lever for socialist revolution.” The organizational liquidation of Pabloism is not spelled out explicitly, but the blurring of class lines and the strategy of making a revolution by pushing bourgeois-democratic struggles to the left follow logically.
It appears that the vast majority of the current ICL members feel relieved, even liberated, by their organization’s political reorientation. Not only have they been freed from a nasty internal culture of sub-political “fights” (expressed externally in abusive and slanderous conduct towards opponents on the far left), they now have a “key,” as one comrade put it, to unlock the mystery of why the group has been stagnant for nearly 50 years. But the flawed history of the ICL/iSt, which was founded as an anti-Pabloite reassertion of Trotskyist continuity, can only be misunderstood from the standpoint of neo-Pabloism.
Was it sectarianism on the national question that led the iSt’s IEC to present a cynical motion at the national conference of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands in September 1981 to “take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities [the Polish Stalinists] may commit” in the suppression of Solidarnosc? Or to “Hail the Red Army” in Afghanistan, rather than simply extending military support to Soviet forces? Would bringing democratic tasks “to the fore” have prevented the New York SL from naming an anti-fascist contingent in November 1982 the “Yuri Andropov Brigade” after the Stalinist butcher of the Hungarian revolution? Would a focus on national liberation as the lever for revolution have prevented the ICL’s refusal to bloc militarily with Stalinist hardliners against Boris Yeltsin’s successful move for capitalist restoration in August 1991? Perhaps the ICL’s zig-zags from Stalinophilia to Stalinophobia in the DDR and USSR can be put down to its failure to reconceptualize the revolution as “a series of battles taking place over a multitude of democratic, economic and social questions.” Could it somehow be that “liberalism” explains the SL’s initial sectarian abstention from the anti-globalization movement? Maybe if it had rejected “abstract” principles in favor of “concrete” tactics, the ICL would never have condemned the IBT (and IG) for calling for the defeat of US imperialism in Afghanistan in 2001. These and other shameful positions were not expressions of the historic program the ICL is now abandoning with increasing enthusiasm but betrayals of it, as we pointed out at the time.
How could this have happened? How could it be that an organization known for its intransigent defense of neocolonies and opposition to US imperialism in the 1970s could adopt, apparently with no open internal dissent, the call to save the lives of Marines conducting an imperialist operation in Lebanon in 1983? How could it, moreover, support the presence of US troops in Haiti in 2010 only to flip over to the correct position to call for their exit just weeks later—in both cases with the overwhelming support of the membership? The answer is painful for ICL members, particularly older comrades, to confront.
We have documented the process of the ICL’s degeneration extensively, for instance in Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League?:
“By the early 1980s, the SL was an organization with an arid internal life in which petty authority fights and witchhunts (inevitably directed from the top) took the place of substantive political discussion and debate. Many cadres were forced out, others got tired and quit, but enough stayed to maintain the SL as a viable player on the American left. Yet pressures generated inside the group were increasingly manifest in the peculiar and frequently obnoxious behavior of its members in their public political activity.”
But the roots go further back. With the departure of senior cadres in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rapidly growing SL found itself with a leadership overwhelmingly dominated by Jim Robertson. With the downturn in the class struggle by the mid 1970s, Robertson slowly came to view the iSt as a programmatic holding operation, and he began both to enjoy his position of authority and sought to use it to remove, politically or otherwise, even potential oppositionists. As a result, the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a pivotal one that saw the dismantling of the SL’s hard-won trade-union presence, the purge of the “cloned youth,” the show trial of former Spartacist leader Bill Logan, the expulsion or forced resignation of other leading cadre with apolitical loyalty tests and increasingly bizarre public behavior aimed at isolating SL cadre from the workers’ movement and counterposing the organizational prestige of the SL to the interests of the proletariat (e.g., helping to break the 1984 ILWU Local 10 labor action against Apartheid cargo, which was initiated by our supporter Howard Keylor).
In June 2025, the ICL published the findings of an internal investigation of the 1996 purges of Jan Norden and other future founders of the Internationalist Group (IG)/League for the Fourth International (LFI) and the break in relations with a group of trade unionists (Luta Metalúrgica/LM) who went on to become the Brazilian section of the LFI. The report of this investigation described methods almost identical to those we had earlier identified, concluding that “the comrades who went on to found the LFI were driven out of our organization through frame-up internal trials, demagogic fights and multiple breaches of the party’s internal democratic norms. The investigation also concluded that the break in fraternal relations with LM/LQB [Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil] was completely unprincipled and destructive.” The document presents evidence of “how internal disagreement with this purge was treated as disloyalty to the party” by Robertson and others, and pulls no punches in comparing the ICL to the Stalinist Comintern: “Comrades were hounded out of our ranks in a manner similar to how Trotskyists were purged from Stalinized Communist parties in the 1920s.”
All proportions guarded, the comparison of the ICL to the Stalinist Comintern is apt. Yet that poses questions for which the ICL has no good answer. When did the iSt/ICL degenerate from a healthy Leninist organization into a bureaucratic one? Did Robertson play the role of Stalin in this analogy? What does the ICL make of the fight of the IBT and its forerunners against the degeneration of the iSt? Formally, the ICL still holds the slanderous position that our comrade Bill Logan is a “sexual sociopath” who “is unfit to be in the workers movement” (see On the Logan Show Trial). Does Logan’s expulsion, like the earlier trashing of Liz Gordon over the Polanski article or the later purge of the SL/ANZ leadership (see The 1981 Purge of Australian Spartacism), predate the Stalinist practices of “frame-up internal trials, demagogic fights and multiple breaches of the party’s internal democratic norms”? Does the current ICL leadership defend these atrocities? Do they view the many instances of bureaucratism before 1996 as unfortunate but isolated departures from an otherwise healthy Leninist internal functioning?
In a letter to the IG/LQB (15 December 1996), we identified the basic inconsistency in the LFI founders’ account of their own bureaucratic purge:
“If the SL was until very recently characterized by a scrupulous regard for truth in its dealings with internal (as well as external) opponents then why would the cadres so eagerly repeat the lies and the false charges made against you? Why would they be willing to condemn comrades without studying the documents? How could a trial body composed of long-time SL members be willing to stack the deck so blatantly against the defendants? Why would every single ICL section (with the sole exception of the unassimilated LM) immediately support the bogus charges without even asking any questions? And why would the membership of a healthy Trotskyist group, with an experienced cadre, accept, with hardly a murmur of dissent, the rupture of relations with the LM over such a cynical and absurd pretext?”
—“IBT Letter to IG/LQB,” Trotskyist Bulletin No.6
In repudiating the purge of Norden & Co., the current ICL leadership blames its predecessors’ “ever shriller and more brittle internal regime” on … a failure to fight liberalism in the post-Soviet period:
“How was such an obvious bureaucratic frame-up even possible? Why was there not more resistance in the ICL? And why has it taken 30 years to overturn it? The reason the ICL is repudiating this purge decades later is not the result of any moral epiphany. At the root of the events was the ICL’s erroneous political program in the post-Soviet period.”
We find this explanation to be in basic contradiction with the fact that these practices had been widespread in the ICL/iSt for more than a decade before the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. In “Willful Blindness” (1917 No.20), we recalled that our own account of the internal life of the SL in The Road to Jimstown from more than a decade earlier contained obvious parallels with the LFI leaders’ account of their experience:
“The parallels between these accounts leaves two possibilities open: either 1) our accusations were false when we made them in 1985-86, but the SL leadership used our literature as a how-to guide, from which they culled the techniques that were deployed for the first time against Norden, Stamberg, Negrete and Socorro in 1996; or 2) far from being new, these weapons had been part of the leadership’s arsenal long before the ill-fated four took their turn as targets.”
Conveniently, the organizational atrocities of the Spartacist tendency are “explained” by the new ICL leadership with reference to the program from which it is now breaking. This has the benefit of not having to take seriously the IBT’s factual account of the iSt’s degeneration, but it is rooted in a desire to sail the ICL into new, uncharted, political waters. Having refused to investigate the real origins of the SL’s sectarianism and bureaucratism, comrades Perrault, David and Kaur have “solved” the problem by jettisoning even the remnants of the revolutionary Spartacist program. The result? Unmoored, the ICL is drifting rather quickly towards Pabloism.
One of the themes of the ICL conference was the need for revolutionary regroupment. The ICL leadership is clearly eager to grow its forces with fusions, and the announcement at the conference of an agreement with the ISA–R to enter into fusion negotiations was a major coup. At the conference, our own representatives were formally approached by the ICL, who asked the IBT to join their organization as a faction.
At a debate between the LFI and the ICL in New York City in January 2024, we distributed an open letter addressed to all those who claim the heritage of the iSt (“The Baby & the Bathwater,” 1 January 2024). Explaining our provocative call to “Reforge the international Spartacist tendency!”, we wrote:
“A new Leninist-Trotskyist organization is desperately needed to provide leadership and serve as a pole of attraction for the politically advanced layers of workers and youth who could form the nucleus of a Bolshevik-type party. That organization will not simply spring into existence through the frenetic groundwork of an existing group; nor will it emerge from an amalgamation of tendencies in a mutually amnestying merger. Rather, it will be built through the hard work of dedicated communists in different organizations—with a central role played by the anti-Pabloite forces of the revolutionary Spartacist tradition—seeking to effect 'splits and fusions’ in the course of real-world interventions in the class struggle and, most importantly, the defense, development and application of the Marxist program.”
We continued:
“In fighting for the rebirth of the revolutionary iSt, we do not seek a clone of the old, but to reforge an iSt that transcends the flaws of the original—flaws that made it susceptible to degeneration in the way a weak immune system imperils the health of the body. We seek to rebuild an iSt that not only defends its revolutionary origins from the 1970s but extends and applies the Bolshevik program to address the state of the world as it is today, an organization that can become a factor in history, rooting itself in workers’ struggles and building the forces of a much larger Trotskyist international through a broader process of splits and fusions around the Bolshevik program.”
The ICL is moving away from the anti-Pabloite tradition of the revolutionary iSt. There was no evidence at the conference of any leftwing opposition to the current trajectory. We regret that the ISA–R comrades have stepped on the path towards fusion with a rightward-moving ICL. Their split from the ISA represented a positive development in a leftward direction, one which we hope is still in progress. Our view is that the fight to build a revolutionary Trotskyist current is best conducted from outside of the ICL (see “Response to Offer to Join the ICL”).
In “The Coming American Revolution,” Cannon explained the importance of Marxist principles and their relationship to strategy and tactics. Despite the flaws of the SWP’s orientation at the time, we find ourselves in agreement with comrade Cannon’s defense of the “fundamental concepts” of Trotskyism against those who would abandon them in the name of tactics or strategy:
“Of course, a general line, a general perspective, does not guarantee that one will always find the right answer to derivative questions, the secondary issues. But without such a general orientation, without this broad overall ruling conception, it is quite hopeless to expect to find one’s way in tactical and strategical questions.
“The theses have been criticized already by people who deal exclusively in 'the small coin of concrete events.’ We have been criticized because we 'do not mention concrete tasks’ and 'pose no concrete problems.’
“That is true. But what is wrong with that procedure?
“We are Marxists; and therefore we do not begin with the small questions, with the tactics, or even with the strategy. We first lay down the governing line from which the answers to the secondary questions derive.
“Those who preoccupy themselves primarily with tactics reproach us for our procedure, and allege that it reveals the difference between their political method and ours. That is quite correct. We proceed from the fundamental to the secondary; they proceed by nibbling at the secondary questions in order to undermine the fundamental concepts. There is indeed a difference in method.”
Related articles
Response to Offer to Join the Spartacists: Letter to ICL & ISA–R (31 August 2026)
The Return of Great-Power Rivalry (18 July 2026)
IBT/ICL Discussions on the National Question (19 July 2026)
The Baby & the Bathwater (1 January 2024)
Revolutionary Continuity & the Split in the Fourth International (1917 No.8)
Genesis of Pabloism (Spartacist No.21, Fall 1972)