What's the Spartacist League up to these days?
- Thread starter Idris2002
- Start date
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
PTK
Paul Kegan
If I had had some five year plans, perhaps I would have been in a better position than I am in now.That's 2.6 of your very finest Five Year Plans
PTK
Paul Kegan
The word on the street is that the forthcoming Panorama special is an examination of the Spartacist League. A man called “Ian” will testify that the Spartacist leadership lied about the history of Trotskyism, and the Trotskyists in France in the 1930s did indeed call for a vote for the workers parties in the Popular Front.
PTK
Paul Kegan
In the days following the Panorama special on the Spartacist League, it will come to light that “Ian” was a member of a number of left-wing groups in the years subsequent to his resignation from the Spartacist League, before finally being ostracised for writing anti-Jewish propaganda.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Good news for proletarian students at SOAS
PTK
Paul Kegan
I am impressed. In my day, we were so poor, we could not afford to print things in red. It was all black-and-white. A bit like our politics, in fact.
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
Those are Workers' Calculators, comrade.
PTK
Paul Kegan
Should they not be given back to the workers, then?
JimW
支那暗杀团
I half thought after they look a bit like aircon remotes, which would be even more bizarre.
PTK
Paul Kegan
Could they be debit card/credit card readers?
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
PTK
Paul Kegan
You may think that, but I could not possibly comment.
kenny g
Sheeple Awake!
In SOAS of old they would have been pocket scales
JimW
支那暗杀团
I was also teetotal during my time there so really wasn't fitting in.
PTK
Paul Kegan
On the afternoon of the next big Palestine demo.
Bolshevik Tendency
Saturday, 11 November, 2 p.m.
LONDON
Birkbeck - Malet Street
WC1E 7HX Room MAL 421
(Nearest Tube: Goodge Street or Russell Square)
Tel: 020 7281 5504
Email: workershammer@btconnect.com
Ukraine War Debate
What strategy for Marxists?
Bolshevik Tendency
versus
Spartacist League
Saturday, 11 November, 2 p.m.
LONDON
Birkbeck - Malet Street
WC1E 7HX Room MAL 421
(Nearest Tube: Goodge Street or Russell Square)
Tel: 020 7281 5504
Email: workershammer@btconnect.com
Last edited:
PTK
Paul Kegan
Liberal outrage won’t stop Gaza massacre
Organise the anti-imperialist struggle!
PTK
Paul Kegan
You know how the Spartacist League/Britain has been telling everyone that it was right and they were wrong, since it was founded in 1978? Well, it is now telling us that it was wrong. Here is a critique of the SL’s new line from the International Bolshevik League (the founders of which were once Spartacists).
==
Spartacism Junked
ICL embraces liquidationism
3 October 2023
The latest issue of Spartacist marks a watershed moment in the sad history of the International Communist League (ICL). Formally junking the core of its program and political heritage going back to its founding—a tradition it denounces as “centrist” at best—the ICL now frames its raison d'être as the fight against “liberalism.”
An IBT comrade intervened at a public forum of the Trotskyist League, Canadian section of the ICL, held in Toronto on 30 September to introduce the new approach. He pointed out that this orientation is precisely towards a kind of liberalism: bourgeois nationalism. The ICL claims that it previously opposed “bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity” (“The ICL's Post-Soviet Revisionism,” Spartacist No.68).
What is the “sectarian class purity” that supposedly undermined the ICL's fight for revolution? While the recent issue of Spartacist leaves many questions unanswered, it provides a good sense of where the ICL is heading. Rejecting as “social-democratic” their founder James Robertson's orthodox Trotskyist defense of permanent revolution, the ICL now projects “national liberation as the fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” (“In Defense of the Second and Fourth Comintern Congresses,” Spartacist No.68). Instead of viewing class struggle as the “fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” in the neocolonial world—the central idea of Trotsky's permanent revolution—the ICL resurrects the concept of the “anti-imperialist united front” with the national bourgeoisie of oppressed countries. It goes so far as to suggest that rejecting the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which Lenin himself abandoned as outdated over a century ago, means renouncing “the alliance between workers and peasants” and even the early Soviet government (Ibid.).
To be sure, the ICL still pays lip service to proletarian independence and the struggle against the influence of nationalist ideology—revisionists have always been careful to have “orthodox”-sounding formulations to confuse people. But in promoting the fight against national oppression as the “fundamental” mechanism for revolution; advocating “anti-imperialist” alliances with the national bourgeoisie; and drawing an equals sign between the struggle for a two-class “democratic dictatorship” and permanent revolution, the ICL has finally embraced the Pabloite revisionism that the founders of the Spartacist League fought against. Indeed, according to the ICL, only “sectarians” (or is it “social democrats”?) “denounce bourgeois nationalism in oppressed countries as simply reactionary” (Ibid.). Ernest Mandel would be pleased.
“What was the point of your group for the past half century?” our comrade asked the Trotskyist League. “Was it all a waste of time? Did it ever mean anything?”
The painful truth is that it once meant everything. The Spartacist League was founded to restore the revolutionary Marxist program, to ensure continuity with Trotsky's Fourth International, destroyed by a Pabloite revisionism that sought other “fundamental levers” for socialist transformation, whether in Stalinist, social-democratic or bourgeois-nationalist parties. From its founding until its political degeneration in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the international Spartacist tendency embodied the Trotskyist program. Even after its degeneration, it was able to hold onto its core programmatic ideas at least in a formal sense, despite notable deviations in practice. The SL was distinguished from the Pabloites on a range of important political questions, from Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine, from the Iranian Revolution to the Malvinas/Falklands War, from Mexico to Quebec and beyond. All of that has now been erased.
The chair clearly did not much like this critique and cut our representative off before the allotted time was up. But ICL comrades who are not exhausted, not demoralized, not resigned, not cynical, who are committed to advancing Trotskyism instead of neo-Pabloism must stop and ask themselves: “How did we get here?” Answering that question means taking seriously the IBT's critique of a process of degeneration over the last four decades.
International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT)
PTK
Paul Kegan
This is the admission that the Sparts have been wrong for the past 50 years, from the horse's mouth.
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