What's the Spartacist League up to these days?

[Carl Steele]

See a fairly recent photograph down loaded from the Web that I'll try to append. She is one of the four and I'm sure you will recognise her as I did

I don't recognise anyone in the photo. But then I haven't seen Marie for about 40 years so she will have changed somewhat. And I notice you called the photo Maria.

Where did you get the photo and why do you think one of them is Marie H? ETA see my next post!!

It could be you are an ex-Spart behaving like someone who's pretending to be an ex-Spart, but if you want to be believed (by me at least) you need to say a little more about an event such as the Logan trial than stuff you can find in a Bolshevik Tendency article. Supposedly you were in the SL/B throughout the whole process - installation of the Logan leadership in Britain, removal of the Logan leadership, revelations from Australia, trial and expulsion of Logan. So what do you think was going on? You say you came from the SL/ANZ so you knew Bill and Adaire for 7 or 8 years. What did you think of them? What made them tick?

And here's something else very odd. We just had Doug Hainline on the thread talking quite extensively about Bill. While this was going on there was not so much as a peep from you, despite the fact that (according to your story) you knew Doug and Doug knew you. The two of you would have been at the Logan trial, maybe you sat next to each other. Then as soon as Doug disappears up you pop. I am sure Doug would know whether your claims about sterilisation/vasectomy are true.

Why didn't you engage with Doug?

 

[Carl Steele]

Kevin's photo is here: creative caring

This is Marie. I didn't recognise her forty years on. But the photo gives her name, so does the plot thicken or not? If kenny g is right getting her full name is not a problem. But otherwise it would be difficult to get her name.

btw how do you get the effect with the user name where it's highlighted and the user gets a notification?

 

[Idris2002]

Kevin's photo is here: creative caring

This is Marie. I didn't recognise her forty years on. But the photo gives her name, so does the plot thicken or not? If kenny g is right getting her full name is not a problem. But otherwise it would be difficult to get her name.

btw how do you get the effect with the user name where it's highlighted and the user gets a notification?

Put an @ symbol directly in front (no space) of the username.

 

[kenny g]

Kevin's photo is here: creative caring

If kenny g is right getting her full name is not a problem

Wonder what Kevin Oakleigh 's game is then? Feel a bit bad that the Doug H has left in a flounce but perhaps he has come back?

 

[Dom Traynor]

Wonder what Kevin Oakleigh 's game is then? Feel a bit bad that the Doug H has left in a flounce but perhaps he has come back?

Nah its not VNC, completely different style.

 

[Kevin Oakleigh]

Kevin's photo is here: creative caring

This is Marie. I didn't recognise her forty years on. But the photo gives her name, so does the plot thicken or not? If kenny g is right getting her full name is not a problem. But otherwise it would be difficult to get her name.

btw how do you get the effect with the user name where it's highlighted and the user gets a notification?

I’ve expressed concern about privacy a couple of times and wrote in my last post:

“ I’m not going to mention names, real or party names unless they are publicly known and perhaps not even then.”

So you somehow traced back the source of the photograph I uploaded and linked the article to this thread complete with the full name of M.H. Well done. I’m VERY upset about this.

 

[Idris2002]

It's child's play to identify the source of a photo like that.

 

[Dom Traynor]

Ok I thought Carl was being a bit paranoid but that last post makes it obvious that Kevin is indeed a weird thing.

 

[Carl Steele]

So you somehow traced back the source of the photograph I uploaded and linked the article to this thread complete with the full name of M.H. Well done. I’m VERY upset about this.

You posted the photo. And when you did you made Marie's full name public. It took me 5 minutes to trace it. Anyone who's interested could do it in a few minutes. Besides which Marie's full name linked to the Spartacist League is around on the internet. And I don't think it matters much.

Do you have anything else to say?

 

[Carl Steele]

Ok I thought Carl was being a bit paranoid but that last post makes it obvious that Kevin is indeed a weird thing.

To be honest I'm in two or three minds about this, Kevin's posts are continually disconcerting in different ways. Let's see.

 

[Carl Steele]

To draw a line under Kevin's main claim to fame it seems sterilisation was rewarded financially under the Logan regime. This is from the preface to the Logan Dossier:

"The corresponding clause crafted in the 1973 “Memorandum from the [SL/ANZ] Central Committee on Finance” (18 June, 13 August, 26 August 1973 [Document 6]) stated the opposite: “No member shall be able to claim as a dependent for financial purposes any child conceived after joining the organisation. (This rule will not apply retroactively.)” Another provision in the Memorandum stipulated: “The organisation will pay comrades reasonable expenses for sterilisation.” When Karen W. arrived in 1976, she was horrified to learn that such rules had existed; new rules were adopted after her arrival ..."

And this is from a letter by Len Meyers (ex-editor of Spartacist Britain):

"The most intimate details of comrades’ personal lives were manipulated, with couples broken up or sexual relations manufactured by Logan in the guise of “building the party.” Children were verboten, and sterilization and abortion were upheld as a party duty by Logan. He sadistically pressured a young woman comrade to have an abortion and, when that failed, to give up her child for adoption, driving her to attempt suicide."

As so often with Kevin, what he writes is somewhere in the public domain. There is no evidence I can find of anyone actually being sterilised or having a vasectomy but I assume the claims made here by the Sparts are true.

 

[RebelSpart]

That was the impression I got from neo-con.
We needed his guidance to bring about world peace, or something along those lines.

The idea that only a given revolutionary group could lead a revolution or, as in the case of the Sparts, form the nucleus of a future revolutionary leadership, is common to almost all leninist groups. After all, if they did not think they had very strong differences with rival leftist groups, they would seek a merger.

 

[A380]

Gosh, every time I think that my reformist wanker-ism isn't the best way to deliver a fairer more equitable society and I should return to my childhood / teenage revolutionary ideals I read this thread, and similar resources, and think:

Nope.

 

[hitmouse]

 

[Carl Steele]

The Sparts were not looking to lead the revolution at some indefinite point in the future. Here's what Bill Logan had to say in 1971

"One of my most profound memories was Nixon’s new economic policy, announced in 1971 on the same day Adaire and I arrived in the United States. It was discussed at the expanded Central Committee Plenum which took place shortly afterwards, the biggest gathering of the Spartacist tendency which had ever taken place up to that point, and, of course the biggest communist meeting I had ever been at. This was the Plenum at which the Communist Workers Collective fused with the SL/U.S., and at which the transformation of the Spartacist League was initiated, with the institution of a monthly Workers Vanguard and the implementation of a serious plan of industrialisation.

Nixon’s new economic policy marked, and we knew it marked, the beginning of the end of American hegemony over the capitalist world. It laid the basis for a drift into trade war and posed the spectre of inter-imperialist world war. We knew this, and we were in a world where over the last few years most events had moved very rapidly. We expected the events foreshadowed by Nixon’s new policy to unfold with great rapidity. I remember Jim Robertson and Marv Treiger winding the organisation up for the transformation with talk about how we didn’t have much time—a few years and we’d have our final shot at it.

The expectation was that huge class battles were looming, battles in which we would have our last chance."

The analysis was completely wrong, but that didn't really matter because it was never intended as a guide to action in the real world. The imminence of the coming revolution was an ideological cudgel used for internal control. Did Robertson believe any of this? It's hard to say though I think he probably didn't. As for Marv Treiger, well he was out of the Sparts a year or so after this meeting so it seems he didn't take it too seriously.

And it may have been that in 1973 Bill and Adaire really believed that the coming revolution could be derailed if a young woman was allowed to give birth to a child, but if they did they were both suffering from a borderline psychotic disconnect from reality.

 

[JeffTipps4]

Long article by Tom Riley on this subject.

Jimstown as we knew it - Bolshevik Tendency

Last August a debate over the history of the moribund Spartacist tendency took place on the website of former Bolshevik Tendency (BT) member Fischerzed. The exchange, which included a post by our…

bolsheviktendency.org

 

[DaveCinzano]

Moribund, you say..?

 

[planetgeli]

The analysis was completely wrong, but that didn't really matter because it was never intended as a guide to action in the real world. The imminence of the coming revolution was an ideological cudgel used for internal control. Did Robertson believe any of this? It's hard to say though I think he probably didn't.

"What was it Jim that first attracted you to the idea of a revolutionary money-making machine?"

 

[Carl Steele]

Long article by Tom Riley on this subject.

Jimstown as we knew it - Bolshevik Tendency

Last August a debate over the history of the moribund Spartacist tendency took place on the website of former Bolshevik Tendency (BT) member Fischerzed. The exchange, which included a post by our…

bolsheviktendency.org

I've looked at this article, read a few passages and skimmed the rest. I don't think I'll get around to reading the whole thing. Maybe I'll drop Tom a line.

I would say though, Tom's way of looking at the world makes him incapable of understanding the very simple and (what should be) rather obvious points I'm making.

And, to write at this length (!!) does he have nothing better to do? Or did I write something which got under his skin?

 

[kenny g]

I've looked at this article, read a few passages and skimmed the rest. I don't think I'll get around to reading the whole thing. Maybe I'll drop Tom a line.

I would say though, Tom's way of looking at the world makes him incapable of understanding the very simple and (what should be) rather obvious points I'm making.

And, to write at this length (!!) does he have nothing better to do? Or did I write something which got under his skin?

Fuck me, even my rapid reading skills have hit a blank with that one. It is as dense as lard and as easy to digest as rusk. Can well understand your willingness to forgo.

 

[hitmouse]

I suppose it's an interesting test of the human tendency to narcissism - can you read the world's longest and dullest article if it's about you? Although that's only an interesting test if you're Carl, for the rest of us the answer is just "no, can't read that".

 

[Carl Steele]

I suppose it's an interesting test of the human tendency to narcissism - can you read the world's longest and dullest article if it's about you? Although that's only an interesting test if you're Carl, for the rest of us the answer is just "no, can't read that".

To be fair, it's not really about me, it's about Tom Riley. Though I think it's something of an achievement to be the catalyst for the "world's longest and dullest article", which this surely is. And by the look of it, it was a lot of work. He's quoting hand-written letters from 1984. Who keeps that stuff? It does amuse me, I have to confess, to think of Tom late at night, fishing through the filing cabinet, pacing the floor and grinding his teeth, tapping away on his keyboard, refuting the renegade Steele.

As I've had cause to say before, you couldn't make this stuff up.

 

[belboid]

I didn’t realise that SL were another group (the original?) to completely disdain the use of editors. My god, the awful punctuation and sentence structure in there!

 

[JeffTipps4]

Yes it was very very long! If you are a trainspotter like me with a fascination for the Spartacists and their split offs / Trotskyist history then it is also pretty entertaining.

Riley does hit on some interesting questions but without necessarily answering them - how did the SL put out 'technically' correct propaganda on a whole number of issues whilst clearly being a clearly troubling organisation? There are also docs circulating around saying the BT / IBT was as bad as the Sparts - the Road out of Rileyville.

 

[Carl Steele]

Riley does hit on some interesting questions but without necessarily answering them - how did the SL put out 'technically' correct propaganda on a whole number of issues whilst clearly being a clearly troubling organisation? There are also docs circulating around saying the BT / IBT was as bad as the Sparts - the Road out of Rileyville.

What do you mean by correct propaganda?

 

[JeffTipps4]

What do you mean by correct propaganda?

Their pamphlet Genesis of Pabloism for example (written by Jan Norden) for example, looking at the political degeneration of the FI / analysis of Eastern Europe.

 

[Carl Steele]

Their pamphlet Genesis of Pabloism for example (written by Jan Norden) for example, looking at the political degeneration of the FI / analysis of Eastern Europe.

It's a long time since I read this but from what I can recall it's gibberish. I know the Sparts are especially proud of this article but in the post war period Trotskyist organisations were incapable of affecting the world. Recognising that other organisations (like the Sandinistas, for example) were the agents of real but "imperfect" social change was not a bad idea. Was this degeneration or just a recognition of an uncomfortable reality?

 

[JeffTipps4]

I actually liked that pamphlet and the subsequent PRL document expanding on it. They almost admit Ted Grant was right as well (almost!). That's the point I am getting at - very good analysis of Russia, SWP, Pabloism etc but actually very unstable.

 

[Carl Steele]

I actually liked that pamphlet and the subsequent PRL document expanding on it. They almost admit Ted Grant was right as well (almost!). That's the point I am getting at - very good analysis of Russia, SWP, Pabloism etc but actually very unstable.

I'm not being sarcastic, but I have no idea what this means. Why do you think the analysis of Pabloism was very good?

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

All you old farts need to move on