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What's the Spartacist League up to these days?

I watched some people from PDC / SL on some sort of cable TV channel in the US, I think Rachel Wolkenstein was one of them. Quite interesting stuff. Here in the UK Only seen some PDC pamphlets. I gather they did some stuff around Mumia, not sure what else. Has anyone seen the SL or any other ICL section on a protest recently? Saw the Bt at Cop26 and gather they and IBT at the SP event.
 
A good Spart cameo in this article from an ex-WSMer:
They were so inconsequential that they considered even the tiny WSM as being worth the odd polemic. On one of my first political demonstrations, for example, we held a picket outside the US embassy calling for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal from death row. One of the Sparts approached me and harangued me for being a conservative chauvinist, on account of the fact that I was offering copies of Workers Solidarity for sale. I was confused until somebody eventually explained to me that this was in response to an old issue of the paper which had called for “paedophile priests out of the schools”.
 
Robertson's Spartacist League was a piece of poorly produced theatre - a bunch of deluded adults pretending to be revolutionaries much as children play at being action heroes (though the children know it's just a game). Most ex-Sparts remain lost in Narnia.
 
You could argue that small left-wing groups have elements of a cargo cult. They believe that by enacting the outward forms of a revolutionary party, they will actually create a revolutionary party and a revolution. A type of sympathetic magic, perhaps.
 
Judith left in 1981 - you can read her resignation letter here (page 6). Her and Doug's situation worsened when Logan was purged because they had been part of his leadership in Britain. When I joined in early 1981 Doug was a marginal member, floating around in the ranks, Judith was on the Spartacist Britain editorial board and a CC member (alt) but obviously an outsider. I maintained contact with them, and met up with them a few times after I left. Judith had a spell in the Labour Party and worked for a while in the Soviet Union, she was involved in Gorbachev's perestroika reforms. You may be interested in reading a transcript of her remarks to the Platypus Society in 2018.

Edit: also you may be interested to see Judith speaking in 2013 in an intelligence squared debate: Karl Marx was right Judith's first contribution is at the 47 minute mark.
The circumstances of the writing of the resignation letter by Judith are peculiar. She felt obliged to write a resignation letter at a time when she had no intention of resigning. She felt obliged to write a letter that exonerated the Spartacist League/Britain. She was resigning, the letter says, not because there was something amiss with the organisation, but because she was a different person. I wondered at the time why her resignation letter was published, and was told that this was because she was well-known.

I was told on another occasion that in Russia, Bolshevik delegates elected to the Duma were required to write resignation letters that would be released if they acted contrary to party policy. I do not know if this is true, but the case of Judith is not at all comparable.

By the way, members were not described internally as having resigned, but as having “quit”. This is a rather pejorative term, which of course locates the reasons for the resignation of the member in their individual moral failings, rather than in the practice of the organisation.
 
The circumstances of the writing of the resignation letter by Judith are peculiar. She felt obliged to write a resignation letter at a time when she had no intention of resigning. She felt obliged to write a letter that exonerated the Spartacist League/Britain. She was resigning, the letter says, not because there was something amiss with the organisation, but because she was a different person. I wondered at the time why her resignation letter was published, and was told that this was because she was well-known.

I was told on another occasion that in Russia, Bolshevik delegates elected to the Duma were required to write resignation letters that would be released if they acted contrary to party policy. I do not know if this is true, but the case of Judith is not at all comparable.

By the way, members were not described internally as having resigned, but as having “quit”. This is a rather pejorative term, which of course locates the reasons for the resignation of the member in their individual moral failings, rather than in the practice of the organisation.
I have just re-read the resignation letter by Judith published in Spartacist Britain for the first time in about forty years. I realise now that I may have been confusing the letter published in Spartacist Britain with a letter in an internal bulletin. Judith, and I think one or two other members, felt obliged to write letters to be released in the event of their resignation. This/these letters are in an internal bulletin dealing with the “Logan regime”, I believe. Upon leaving the SL/B I think that I returned all my internal bulletins. If I remember correctly, this was in exchange for my collection of vinyl LPs, which was being held hostage.
 

Thanks. I wonder why Red Mole Rising removed this article.

It is interesting that Robertson himself says that: “I sort of have a sense that I’m poured onto an airplane every two years and there’s a national conference and the men are crying and the women are raging and people are purged and everybody swears to do better and then I go away again.”

From the horse’s mouth we have an admission that the internal life of the Spartacist League/Britain was pathological.[/url]
 
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Thanks. I wonder why Red Mole Risi...e Spartacist League/Britain was pathological.
An interesting article. I think that what Robertson says here is very true:

“So you see, we tend to measure by our own lifespan, the expectations of political events. But the political rhythm of the class struggle does not care about an individual’s lifetime. Sometimes, to quote Trotsky in Lessons of October [is that so?], weeks are worth decades and sometimes decades are worth nothing. Shachtman used to say I’m so tired with all these young kids who come in at eighteen and then two years later they say I’ve given it the best two years of my life and still there’s no revolution and now I’m getting my degree and quitting.”
 
An interesting article. I think that what Robertson says here is very true:

“So you see, we tend to measure by our own lifespan, the expectations of political events. But the political rhythm of the class struggle does not care about an individual’s lifetime. Sometimes, to quote Trotsky in Lessons of October [is that so?], weeks are worth decades and sometimes decades are worth nothing. Shachtman used to say I’m so tired with all these young kids who come in at eighteen and then two years later they say I’ve given it the best two years of my life and still there’s no revolution and now I’m getting my degree and quitting.”
“This is the chauvinist climate, fostered by the anti-Soviet war drive, in which the fascists hope to fester and grow. What's needed to stop them, what the Spartacist League (SL) fought for last month, is 'Irish, blacks, Asians, an army of Scottish workers storming out of their Clydeside bastions across the border like Wallace and the Black Douglas did -- all behind the power of organised labour’.” - Spartacist Britain, March 1984.

The Spartacist League had a phase in the mid-1980s of trying to root its narrative in British culture, and an aspect of this was a bit of an obsession with Black Douglas. I think that this explains why Robertson mentions said figure in his remarks, to which a link was posted. I think that this position was a product of the Maoist background of many of the SL cadre.
 


This is the Spycop podcast episode on Barry Tompkins for anyone interested. The stuff about the exam required to join the Sparts is nonsense. Maybe the RCP did something like that, I don't know.

Finally got around to listening to the spycops podcast episode on Tompkins. I loved, and had not seen elsewhere, the detail about the USSR apparently attempting to recruit him, which could be fantasist bullshit, but if we choose to take it at face value would mean that Special Branch had an opportunity to get an informant within the USSR's intelligence apparatus but passed it up so as not to take him away from the valuable work of monitoring the Sparts and the proto-RCP. :D
 
Hello to all.

I'm the Doug Hainline mentioned earlier in this thread ... for those who haven't read the part to which I refer, it was about the Spartacist
League, its internal life, and why intelligent and non-neurotic people might want to join such an organization, and, more interestingly, why they would remain
in it for more than a year or two.

I was a member, with a three-year break after I deserted the Army as an 11B10 on the way to Vietnam (and was expelled for doing so), hid out from the FBI for 18
months, turned myself in, served six months at hard labor in military prison, then was expelled (from the Army, I'd already been expelled from the SL), re-joined (the SL, not the Army),
was sent into the International Socialists to help split them. I finally left the SL in 1980.

I'm happy to answer any questions anyone may have. May I suggest you not use people's real names here? (Unless they've already been used.)

We're probably all now either in our graves or heading there soon, but there just might be someone who is embarrassed, or even worse,
by the revelation that they were a member of a communist group.

I just want to make two points about why people stayed in the SL:

(1) We wanted socialism.=> We thought that socialism was only achiveable via a mass workers' revolution.=> We thought that such a revolution required a revolutionary party to succeed.

"Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer." (Read "=>" as "implies".)

ABC, really.

So why did we think the SL was that party? (Or, to be precise, a propaganda group for the moment, but the nucleus of a revolutionary party, which we did not believe would
come into existence via the recruitment of ones and twos, but mainly by a process of splits and fusions from other leftwing groups -- and we assumed that those groups would grow
as a natural product of capitalist contradictions -- rather like the Bolshevik Party in 1917, which pulled in various subjective revolutionaries from non-Bolshevik groups, like Trotsky's
Mezhraiontsi. [ August 7-13: Mezhraiontsy unite with the Bolsheviks ])

No doubt everyone had their reasons, whether or not they were aware of them.

For some, the SL was just the first radical organization that got to them. For me, it was this: the SL was honest, it told the truth about the world, no matter how unpopular
this was among the radical left, and no other organization did. It didn't suck up to the Black Panthers, it didn't whitewash Stalinism, etc etc etc etc.
It was -- or so I thought and still think -- brutally honest.

Why was this attractive? Perhaps for ''moral' reasons, but it also seemed to be the quality necessary to resist the pressures of bourgeois society, pressures
which in the past had derailed several protential revolutions via corrupting their leadership. So, whatever the" real" reaons for this attractive honesty,
there appeared to be good pragmatic reasons as well.

At the same time, yes, I was one of the SLers who felt that its general style was too angular, too sectarian, too much given to propagating abstract truths as opposed to being
active as the 'best builders' (as the SWP/YSA used to put it) of movements fighting for a supportable goal. I personally put this down to historic/social circumstances:
a bunch of mainly middle-class people, isolated from the labor movement and working class generally ... but something we would overcome in time, as the class struggle
propelled more and more working class people into the organized Left, including us.

(2) I do not agree at all that the SL was a cult,
or that Robertson's motive was just to build a group of personal loyalists so that he could live a posh lifestyle from their dues money.

It was a sect, and it was, increasingly over the years, one that tolerated no one who was not a Robertson loyalist, but I believe Robertson's main motive
was to keep the organization politically pure, and that he was the only one who could guarantee that --- thus all potential rivals who did not demonstrate total loyalty
to him had to be purged.

This was the motive -- the only one -- for purging Bill and Adaire Logan. Whatever they did in Australia, they did it with the full knowledge and approval of the central SL leadership.

Nor was their leadership of the British SL particulary 'bureaucratic' or abusive -- rather more 'liberal' than the practice in the US, in fact.
They are good, decent people -- however misguided their political beliefs.

(One déformation professionnelle of being a hard-line political person, on either side of the barricades, is to believe all your opponents are driven by base motivations.
For a refreshing exception to the rule, see this conservative's appreciation of an old Soviet soldier: [ An Old Soviet Soldier - The Salisbury Review ])

It is probably true, as the 70s waned, that at some level Robertson realized that, for this period anyway, the upsurge we experienced in the 1960s was over,
and that he would not see a large change in the circumstances of the organization in his lifetime. Thus the retirement to California, and not to a modest flat either.

There is no word to describe the SL: not a cult, although partaking of features of a cult.

A sect, but not a sect that wanted to be a sect, so to speak.

Reality is more complex than vocabulary, and, viz Alfred Korzybski, we always have to be careful when using the 'to be ' verb.

Of course, we are still in the Dark Ages so far as a scientific undestanding of human psychology is concerned, but I believe that most of the people who joined and remained in the SL had the
same motives I had.

While the rest of the Left cheered the victory of Islamic reaction in Iran, only the SL -- ONLY the SL -- had the insight and the guts to proclaim what was coming.

Good for them! And shame on all the fools who thought that the mullahs in power would be as opportunist as they were.

All human life was there in the SL, as in any organization, Left or Right, but by and large I recall my former comrades as very decent, well-motivated people.

Terribly misguided, as I now believe, but why they wanted socialism is completely understandable. Their motives were entirely honorable.

It's a cruel world, unbridled capitalism is very ugly, the strong eat the weak, and any decent person must feel revulsion at what he or she sees daily on TV.
(Why don't the civilized powers of the world find a way to accommodate those desperate refugees risking their lives to get away from the horrors of their own horrible countries?)

I don't think goverment ownership of the economy is the right solution, even if you tack the meaningless phrase "under workers control" to it,
although some government ownership and regulatory intervention is a good idea. But that's a different topic: how to keep dragging our nasty species forward.

Anyway, anyone who wants to ask me anything, feel free. If you want to know about my current political beliefs, that's fine. "NeoCon" doesn't cover them, although I think
their motives were good, and much of what they had to say abotu domestic issues was, and still is, on target. My politics now are probably closest to being a 1960 FDR/JFK Democrat,
not that my personal beliefs are of any importance.

My central belief, transcending the transient political beliefs we all have, is that we must always seek disconfirming evidence for any factual belief
(as opposed to 'value belief' -- you can't go from 'ought' to 'is', as the man said) , so I'm always happy -- okay, always willing, even with gritted teeth --
to hear view which contradict what I currently believe. I've been wrong before, and therefore am probably wrong now about some things. Life is complex
and humans are fallible.

I was wrong in the past, more than once, so maybe I'm wrong now. [Nope, the good people of Iraq and Afghanistan do not want Lesbian Outreach Centers in their
coiuntries. Robespierre, of all people, was right when he notied that people do not love missionaries with bayonets. The 82nd Airborne could bring democrfacy to
Arkansas, but not Afghanistan. They'll have to do it on their own, mainly. (Not that we couldn't help a bit, behind the scenes.)

But my 'ought' belliefs haven't change sinced I was a teenager in the late 1950's in Texas, reading The Bending Cross [ The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs: Ginger, Ray, Davis, Mike: 9781931859400: Amazon.com: Books ] and Homage to Catalonia. [ Amazon.com: Homage To Catalonia eBook : George Orwell: Kindle Store ]

The point is to change it. The question is how, and what to.
 
I'm the Doug Hainline mentioned earlier in this thread

Hello Doug, as far as the Sparts go your views are pretty much the same as those of James Creegan with whom I had a lengthy exchange on the Fisherzed blog, although your reference points differ. It's a self-serving rationalisation of the experience, and as such not open to meaningful interrogation, in my opinion. I do though wish you and Judith well.
 
Well, I suppose we all rationalize our experiences to one degree or another. But I think some meaningful interrogation is possible.
Hi Doug, I believe that what my esteemed colleague belboid meant to say was:

:thumbs:
HI ... did he mean to say that? No, he implied something more interesting: that there were other leftist tendencies who did not cheer on the Mullahs. Maybe there were. If so, I'd be interested in finding out who they were.
 
Well, I suppose we all rationalize our experiences to one degree or another.

Of course, but I think you can only make the claims you do if you are very heavily invested in the story (particularly given your current politics). This was certainly the case with Creegan and the discussion went nowhere. I have no interest in repeating the experience.
 
Well, I suppose we all rationalize our experiences to one degree or another. But I think some meaningful interrogation is possible.

HI ... did he mean to say that? No, he implied something more interesting: that there were other leftist tendencies who did not cheer on the Mullahs. Maybe there were. If so, I'd be interested in finding out who they were.
Well, for starters, here's a 79/80 issue of the North American Anarchist, and here's a reprint of a 79 text from Raya Dunayevskaya. Although since belboid is, to my knowledge, neither an anarchist or a Dunayevskayaist, he might well be thinking of someone else entirely?
 
Well, I suppose we all rationalize our experiences to one degree or another. But I think some meaningful interrogation is possible.

HI ... did he mean to say that? No, he implied something more interesting: that there were other leftist tendencies who did not cheer on the Mullahs. Maybe there were. If so, I'd be interested in finding out who they were.
Socialist Organiser, being a bunch of islamophobes, didn't support 'the mullahs'. Not did the Militant (as was).

Meanwhile you bunch of reactionaries were busy supporting Stalinism in Afghanistan.
 
Well, I suppose we all rationalize our experiences to one degree or another.

When Howard Fast quit the CP, after 1956, he wrote a scathingly critical book about the Party:
  • The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (1957)
Over thirty years later, he wrote a book which is almost a repudiation, although not explicitly, of the previous one.
  • Being Red (1990), Boston, Houghton Mifflin
What changed? Well, for one thing, the milieu for whom he was writing: even liberals in 1957 were anti-Communist.

[Quick quiz: The Communist Control Act of 1954 was the most draconian piece of anti-Communist legislation ever passed by the nation's elected representatives. (I say 'the nation' because my home state, Texas, outdid everyone else by proposing -- although I don't think it passed -- a bill to make membership of the Communist Party punishable be death.]

It simply outlawed the Communist Party. To quote from it: "The Communist Party of the United States, or any successors of such party regardless of the assumed name, whose object or purpose is to overthrow the Government of the United States, or the government of any State, Territory, District, or possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein by force and violence, are not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof; and whatever rights, privileges, and immunities which have heretofore been granted to said party or any subsidiary organization by reason of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof, are hereby terminated" --
[ American History Documents II ]

I recalled this, when I saw spoiled brats whining about 'repression' and 'fascism' under Trump., the most incompetent would-be authoritarian ruler in history.

So, now the quiz: who was its author? Hint: a prominent Senator, from a state bordering on Canada and west of the Great Lakes.]

However, I don't think that was the only thing that influenced Fast. When he left the Party, all the indignities that he had suffered at the hands of its leadership -- some of which prefigure our 'Woke' witch-hunters of today -- were still fresh in his mind. Decades later, he could reflect on them, and come to the conclusion that the Stalinist movement drew in large numbers of decent people who wanted to fight for a better world, and corrupted them. Which I think is right.

In his Neo-Conservatism -- the Autobigography of an Idea, Irving Kristol, said that he did not regret a minute that he spent in the Trotskyist movement in his youth. He contrasted the Trotskyists, who told the truth as they saw it, with the deviousness of the Stalinists, who advanced their agenda by pretending to be liberals. (In my first enounter with CP members, the parents of a friend and comrade of mine when I was in high school, I had the strong impression that I was being lied to.)

I think that's the essence of the Spartacists -- and maybe why some people really dislike them -- they abjured the cant which permeates the Left. "Diversity is Strength!" -- Christ, don't these people know anything about the world, and what happens when tribal groups overlap? One thing I learned from Robertson was the reality of national feeling, and the importance of the National Question -- where I think the Spartacists had a decent line, now repudiated as they disintegrate and decay: when the tribes of Lebanon began trying to exterminate each other, the Spartacist line was: "All Sides Are Squalid."

This sort of thing really offended the Left. But as Trotsky said, "The motor force of progress is truth and not lies."

As for everyone in the SL being abusive, two points: the intolerance of disagreement and of disagree-ers was not there from the beginning. It developed over time, accelerating in the mid-70s.
And ... all human life was there, as in any organization: people exhibited the usual distribution of human qualities such as empathy -- on the one hand -- or pleasure in the discomfort of others. There were a few people -- usually of not outstanding intelligence -- who positively exulted in tormenting those who came under the regime's hammer. Others went along with it, and some did their best to moderate it.

And there is another point.

The SL was a 'combat party', as all ostensibly Leninist groups are. It envisioned being in the leadership of a social revolution, necessarily one that could not be carried through wihtout -- let's not flinch from this -- violence, in which many of its members would perish.

It was not a discussion club, because, as Mao said, a revolution is not a tea party.

If you've ever been in, or read about, the initial training that every serious military puts its new recruits through, you will know that there is a lot of shouting, a lot of unpleasantness. This behavior has a purpose -- to purge out the habits of soft civilian life, something that we who have been lucky enough to grow up in liberal democracies with the rule of law take for granted.

As Marshall Suvorov put it two centuries ago, "Difficult in Training, Easy in Battle."

So when someone tells me how terrible life in the SL was, I am willing to agree, having experienced it myself. But I know that there are some people who would not fit into any serious organization with a similar purpose. They're too precious, too full of themselves, unwilling to make serious sacrifices for a cause higher than their own self-gratification.

I'm not saying anyone posting here about their experiences in the SL is such a person, since I don't know you.

But I know such types existed on the Left -- indeed, the contemporary Left seems to consist of nothing but such people.
 
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Socialist Organiser, being a bunch of islamophobes, didn't support 'the mullahs'. Not did the Militant (as was).

Meanwhile you bunch of reactionaries were busy supporting Stalinism in Afghanistan.
No , you are mistaken about Socialist Organizer. [The Matgamna group I'm talking about.]

They were Khomaini apologists -- I recall a p;iece that they wrote about how Khomeini was not prejudiced against women. Later, they changed completely.

The ostensible Trotskyists assimilated the mullahs to socialist centrists, who would eventually betray the revolution, as the momentum of the revolutionary masses pushed
in the direction of complete social revolution, blah blah blah. Fools.
 
Socialist Organiser, being a bunch of islamophobes, didn't support 'the mullahs'. Not did the Militant (as was).

Meanwhile you bunch of reactionaries were busy supporting Stalinism in Afghanistan.
The SL supported the Soviets in Afghanistan against the reactionary Islamists, and good for them. They also supported them against the Nazis. It's not a perfect would, and you sometimes have to choose side.

Had the Soviets managed to exterminate the Islamists and drag Afghanistan into the 20th Century, turning it into a replication of the other 'stans, which, although pretty bad, are not at the level of Afghanistan, that would have been a victory for humanity. They didn't, any more than the Americans could. They really don't want Lesbian Outreach Centers, or even female engineers, in Kandahar.

Too bad.
 
The SL supported the Soviets in Afghanistan against the reactionary Islamists, and good for them. They also supported them against the Nazis. It's not a perfect would, and you sometimes have to choose side.

Had the Soviets managed to exterminate the Islamists and drag Afghanistan into the 20th Century, turning it into a replication of the other 'stans, which, although pretty bad, are not at the level of Afghanistan, that would have been a victory for humanity. They didn't, any more than the Americans could. They really don't want Lesbian Outreach Centers, or even female engineers, in Kandahar.

Too bad.
Thank you for confirming the vile Stalinism of you and your nasty little sect. Thank fuck it’s dead.
 
Well, for starters, here's a 79/80 issue of the North American Anarchist, and here's a reprint of a 79 text from Raya Dunayevskaya. Although since belboid is, to my knowledge, neither an anarchist or a Dunayevskayaist, he might well be thinking of someone else entirely?
Yes, a valid point.

I don't really think of anarchists as "on the Left", or even really political at all (the current so-called 'anarchists') but of course serious anarchists -- people in the FAI/CNT tradition, for example -- would not, I assume, be apologists for the mullahs. (And to tell the truth, I didn't know that the Dunayevskaya tendency was still around by then. And there were probably other small Trotskyoid grouplets that had something parallel to the Spartacist line on the mullahs -- eg the Ellens group, the Lutte Ouviere-ists, perhaps.)

We never saw any of these people in the UK at anti-Shah demonstrations.

Added later: Come to think of it, there was a very interesting Stalinist group then, the British and Irish Communist Organisation, which had positions at least congruent to those of the SL. I don't recall
their saying anything interesting about the Iranian Revolution -- they probably waffled -- but I would be pretty sure they didn't cheer the Mullahs.
 
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Thank you for confirming the vile Stalinism of you and your nasty little sect. Thank fuck it’s dead.
To give our new friend his due, registering a new account under the name of "VirulentNeoCon" and then posting about how invading Afghanistan is great does at least show an admirable self-awareness. I look forward to the posts about how if the invasion of Iraq had gone a bit better then that would also have been a marvellous victory for humanity, hypothetically.
 
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