Response to Offer to Join the Spartacists

Letter to ICL & ISA–R

31 August 2026

Dear comrades,

Thank you again for inviting us to the ICL's Ninth International Conference. We found the exchanges we had with attendees to be politically substantive and thought-provoking. We appreciated the opportunity to express our views freely and in a comradely manner with your members and other guests.

At the conference, you formally invited the IBT to join the ICL as a faction. You will understand that we have deliberated on your offer from the standpoint of how best to advance the program we defend. You are a much larger organization than we are, and you have successfully set in motion a fusion with the ISA–R, which will bring a fresh layer of young militants into your ranks. As comrade Elizabeth put it to us, we are each an obstacle to the other. We do seek to remove the ICL as an obstacle, which for us means persuading as many comrades as possible that the path you are on leads not to revolution but to Pabloite liquidation.

It was apparent at the conference that, apart from the rightward-moving (or perhaps simply eclectic) GEM minority, the ICL membership is convinced of the new orientation you codified at your previous international conference in 2023. Moreover, the entire membership, or at least the large chunk of it present at the conference, appears willing to follow the leadership as it stumbles blindly to the right, casting off fundamental Marxist principles as "sterile" abstractions as it politically adapts to the bourgeois nationalists it seeks to dethrone.

Our conclusion is that whatever increased access and internal influence we would gain by joining the ICL would be more than offset by the damage that would be done by us publicly defending the ICL's program and perspective, which now includes voting for and joining bourgeois parties as well as promoting the idea that the "main enemy" of workers in Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia and other imperialist countries is not their own ruling class but the American bourgeoisie. We therefore decline your invitation to join the ICL.

We will very shortly be publishing our review of the conference, explaining in greater depth our analysis of the ICL's political trajectory. We encourage you to read it carefully and with an open mind, as we will any reply you see fit to publish. We continue to be open to political dialogue with you, and of course we are happy to engage in common, united-front practical work where possible.

Communist greetings,
Josh Decker
for the IEC of the IBT