PTK
Paul Kegan
That you find your own words amusing is no guarantee that others will. You clothe a serous allegation as a jok,e which I call out as being two-faced.
What's the Spartacist League up to these days?
- Thread starter Idris2002
- Start date
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
Carl Steele
Well-Known Member
True enough, they always came up with a reason why someone quit (always a betrayal) ... except when NW committed suicide. Then they said they had no idea why he'd killed himself. It took them six weeks to write an obituary, and in those days they were a functioning organisation with a prolific editorial board. I wasn't a member at the time, but I was in contact with them and sometimes went on demos with them. Given the ferocious internal regime, the routine trashing of those considered to have failed, the abject failure in the DDR where NW played a central role, it seemed to me that they had something to cover up. I never went near them again. They are and were a repellent cult.
likesfish
You can't park here sir
Their was somebody attempting to challenge the prohibition on arming yourself was before soverign citizens
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
wish I’d known!
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
Yes: I was a member from c1979 to the bitter end, even wrote for the paper. Proud to have been a member: too clever for their own good, and not sectarian enough to prosper. Some of their analysis still relevant today.
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
AAAAND THEY'RE BACK!
You can't keep a good Spart down. Or something.
Down With the Lockdowns! - The Working Class Must Defend Itself
The Working Class Must Defend Itself. Break with the Labor Traitors—Reforge the Fourth International!
www.icl-fi.org
You can't keep a good Spart down. Or something.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
No lockdowns in Belarus. Which country is the real dictatorship eh?
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
I liked this bit/thought it could do with a bit of expansion:AAAAND THEY'RE BACK!
Down With the Lockdowns! - The Working Class Must Defend Itself
The Working Class Must Defend Itself. Break with the Labor Traitors—Reforge the Fourth International!www.icl-fi.org
You can't keep a good Spart down. Or something.
Has there been a coup by one section of the ICL against another? Or has the one guy who writes their materials just had a Damascene conversion after watching a particularly convincing youtube video or something? I feel like the international proletariat needs more clarification on this vital point.the ICL said:
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
I think the head guy's daughter was fighting with the rest of them for the right to succession. I presume that's where the change of line comes from, though I don't know if she won or not. Or maybe it's the FBI having a bit of fun?
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
A different bloke has the password to the website this month.
I do like such self awareness though and am glad they got it in before they made their (completely justified) inspired critique of those barely walking lapdogs of imperialism the wsws
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hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
HBO will probably be looking for a new prestige drama, I might pitch Game of Sparts to them.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
The previous article on the website is about the hunger strike of Dimitris Koufontinas, and contains an inspired bit of completely pointless lefty-one-upmanship:
Those reformist bastards! Except:
How dare they, um, support the thing that he's on hunger strike for, and not ask for a completely different demand that Koufontinas does not appear to be raising?
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
Big fight against Skye Williams who, it turns out, was a vacillating non-Trotskyist liquidationist. Or possibly he said she was.
a brilliant analysis in The Internationalist discussing this tragic downfall
Carl Steele
Well-Known Member
How many more of these "we've been completely wrong for the last year but now we've figured it out" articles are the Sparts going to write? The insanity of the internal meetings must be quite intense. And it's interesting how close the new "uniquely correct" analysis comes to Covid denial.
BK_Double_Stack
New Member
Does anyone know more about Skye Williams? Or about the Spart succession and "heir apparents" over the years and how they fell from grace?
For instance, I heard a rumor that Skye's family is very wealthy. I also remember Allison Spencer being called the heir apparent by the BT shortly after they split from the sparts. I have no idea what happened to her. A couple years ago, they seemed to have a fight about repudiating Joseph Seymour's writings. My guess is that Robertson wanted that to happen before he died so Seymour couldn't take over. Any more info? Unsubstantiated gossip? Wild guesses?
For instance, I heard a rumor that Skye's family is very wealthy. I also remember Allison Spencer being called the heir apparent by the BT shortly after they split from the sparts. I have no idea what happened to her. A couple years ago, they seemed to have a fight about repudiating Joseph Seymour's writings. My guess is that Robertson wanted that to happen before he died so Seymour couldn't take over. Any more info? Unsubstantiated gossip? Wild guesses?
Carl Steele
Well-Known Member
Can't help you with the specifics here, but I think Robertson's attention was focused on what happened while he was alive. I don't think he cared too much about his legacy (which he assumed would be no more than a footnote in someone's book and actually it's not even that). The Sparts were Robertson's only means of physical survival, they put a roof over his head and paid the bills and more. He lived a lot longer than he thought he would and had to keep the Sparts functioning (and putting food on his table), otherwise he would have died a pauper. Who he chose to anoint at any one time was a function of how he believed the organisation could be preserved. In the year since his death the Sparts have imploded, because without him they have no reason to exist.
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
Well, if nothing else, we've discovered who has the "Spartacist League" on google alert. 
BK_Double_Stack
New Member
Bruv if it only went that deep, I'd be sane.
Well, if nothing else, we've discovered who has the "Spartacist League" on google alert.
Carl Steele
Well-Known Member
The psychological/emotional impact of a few years in the sparts is not much discussed, or even acknowledged. It was a dark, abusive place which messed with peoples' sanity. Robertson was a serial abuser. There's good reason to believe he covered up his part in driving someone to suicide. He used his unquestioned authority to get or coerce (depending on how you look at it) younger female comrades into his bed. The organisation was an expression of Robertson's warped psyche. The politics - the insane claim of being the last best hope for humanity and the guilt which resulted from failure (or even just misunderstanding) - were his means of manipulation.
Robertson's behaviour was mimicked down through the ranks. Many who left the sparts were unwilling to face what is was that took them into the madhouse in the first place, and unable to acknowlege how they had behaved while inside. Nobody left the sparts with their hands clean. Those who didn't actually dish out the abuse (a fortunate minority) went along with it. This is why the BT concocted a story of a healthy organisation which went wrong shortly before they were kicked out, and the Internationalist group told the same story, but ten years later. It's an alibi for what they did, and what they turned a blind eye to.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
Liked but not liked
Dystopiary
putting up a hook to hang my hopes upon
"For the last year, the position of the ICL was to accept the lockdowns as necessary. We repudiate this position. It was a capitulation to the “national unity” rallying cry that all classes should support the lockdowns because they save lives."
I hate this. Like you're not proper wc if you don't support X, Y or Z, no matter how bullshit. I'm sure it works on some people.
BK_Double_Stack
New Member
I should clarify I wasn't a member of the sparts or even a sympathizer, so fortunately I didn't have to experience the abuse first hand. I was half-joking in my other comment. I went to school where the sparts most prominent author (Jacob Zumoff) was a teacher. Zumoff is a very smart guy, and I'd recommend reading his book. I was in a CWI (now ISA) club at my school, and Zumoff and other sparts disrupted all our meetings. So I read lots of their material and found it funny / interesting. The US left in the late 90s / early 2000s was a small world, so this made a certain impact on me.
Then later an ex-spart (who's been mentioned in this thread) worked closely with me in the CWI / ISA. I still talk with him regularly. So I'll admit to having a weird sectologist leftist trainstpotting thing going on, but sparts are also a personal interest of mine despite never having been through the abuse that Carl talks about and my friend confirms. He doesn't like talking about it, but when he does, he says stuff like "you have no idea how abusive and toxic it was at every level," etc.
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
Wow, I thought I was a proper Left Trainspotter and I've never heard of this guy. Didn't know they had a "prominent author" in their ranks (except an ex-member in Britain who's a well known sci-fi writer). It even turns out that I have his book on my hard drive. Just had a glance at it and noticed that there is only one brief mention of the Proletarian Party, and he actually spells the name of one the members incorrectly. Ouch.
BK_Double_Stack
New Member
I wouldn't exactly call Zumoff prominent in the real world, but having a featured title at Haymarket is a real accomplishment over here, especially if you never spent time in the ISO. Sorta like a step below getting published by Verso but a step up from getting published by AK Press. So definitely the sparts most prominent author. It will likely be the only long book he ever writes because he literally worked on it for twenty years. When I knew him in the late 90s he was working on it and obsessed with the topic, and it didn't get published until like 2015 or something like that. Its worth a read if you're interested at all in the Comintern or the US left. Zumoff wasn't a very effective disrupter of meetings though; he came across as someone you'd never want to talk to afterwards. Arrogant, rude, shouty, annoying, etc. Was actually fun to argue with one-on-one tho.
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
Carl Steele, BK_Double_Stack (and PTK if he ever comes back): Was it common for Spartist families to appear among the rank and file of the sect? And how did they manage the abusive toxicity? (not well, I'd imagine)
BK_Double_Stack
New Member
In Boston, no. No families. Their longest standing member in Boston had a daughter who was active in a teachers union and the very reasonable left group called "Solidarity" which is now part of DSA. Another ex-Spart in Boston had a kid who was an ultra left (IMO) but had no interest in the Sparts and ended up in "Left Voice" a sorta-Morenoite group. I don't think the sparts had a conscious policy of trying to recruit their kids unlike PLP who are just as much a cult though likely not as abusive. I saw a small sample size though because their now-defunct Boston group wasn't very big. Maybe things were different in NYC or the Bay Area.
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
I'm an ex-pat who now lives in the States. I can't remember the exact year (I'd have to look it up) but I remember when the Sparts turned up cough en masse to a Bryan Palmer meeting at the Tamiment Library to heckle him about one of his books about James Cannon. I should have brought popcorn. It was funny.
I probably already mentioned it on this thread but I remember being shocked when I stumbled across a couple of Sparts outside Brooklyn College selling their wares. It must have been about 12 or 13 years. It was funny 'cos they were both German. (Funny 'cos when you stumbled across Sparts in London more often than not, they'd be American.)
Edit:
Apologies to the Sparts. I'd totally misremembered that Bryan Palmer meeting. The acrimony from them to him was after the meeting out of his earshot (I heard it though). They were as good as gold during the meeting itself.
And it turns out the meeting was in 2007. Fuck, where have all the bastard years gone? (Two pain in the arse kids, that's where they've gone). I only knew the year 'cos it turned out I blogged about it at the time. Blogs, now I'm really showing my age.
Cut and pasted below is said blog post. Apologies in advance for the shit jokes and the sawdust prose. I'm not a writer:
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
New York Stories
Bryan Palmer speaks at NYU Louis Proyect carries a report of a meeting that I attended at the Tamiment library a few weeks back. I did take some notes at the meeting but being the lazy bastard that I am, I never got round to writing them up. In truth, the notes were more for my personal use, as it's not a period or political tradition I pretend to know a lot about.
Bryan Palmer, a Canadian Labor Historian, has recently published the first volume in what will be a major biography of James P. Cannon, the father of American Trotskyism. Speaking with ease before an audience of about 160/170 people, Palmer's central point for Trotskyist activists today was that Cannon was at his best when he engaged in broad work and the Leninist left in America that is covered in this volume [the book finishes in 1928 when Cannon was expelled from the American CP and the CI for his siding with Trotsky] was at its most productive when undertaking labor defence work in the mid to late twenties that allowed itself to break out of the self-imposed ghetto that the American Comminust movement had placed itself because of the warring factions disagreeing on the question of an open versus an underground party in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the Palmer raids.
As I say there was an impressive turnout of about 160/170 people at the meeting on what was a cold Friday night. The majority of the audience could be loosely termed as being part of the '68 generation and, believe it or not, I was one of the younger ones in attendance.
Naturally being a meeting on Cannon in the labor history library at NYU it was anything but a dry academic lecture. The meeting had been sponsored by - I think - five different Leninist organizations, ranging from the Sparts to the Freedom Socialist Party to the International Bolshevik Tendency through to Socialist Action (I will have missed someone out), and after Palmer's talk part of the meeting was made up of prepared statements from those groups sponsoring the meeting on why they alone were the true Trotskyist organization in the room cough, I'm saying nothing, and why all the other groups were attending under false pretences. These contributions were quickly followed by prepared speeches from the floor delivered in an equally acerbic fashion from those groups and individuals who hadn't got around to co-sponsoring the event.
It actually didn't get as bitter or as acrimonious as I was expecting [they were pussycats in comparison to the current political punch up between Galloway and the SWP], but that's perhaps because the Sparts were actually the most heavily represented in the audience and were therefore on their best behaviour during the course of the meeting, and because - as Louis mentions - the audience fell in love with the contribution from 91 year old Lillian Pollak.
Pollak joined the Trotskyist movement in the early thirties and worked alongside Cannon, Bert Cochran and other 'names' from the early movement. You just knew that if she had wanted to she could have taken the meeting over with her stories of the movement from that period.
This half-baked Menshevik enjoyed the meeting for all its denunciations and vanguardist verbiage, and it was nice that it ended on the warm fuzzy feeling of the IBT, the Sparts and Jan Norden's Internationalist Group briefly reuniting around the warm glow of the political memories of someone from the thirties, talking of a period untainted by Third Campism and Pabloism.
One final thought, though: what was with the six busts of Eugene Debs in the library? Did the library not get the memo with that quote* from Debs?
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mx wcfc
Well-Known Member
That was certainly my experience in the mid 80s, although they did have Brit members - (was it further up this thread or on PM that an ex-Spart remembered an "encounter" I'd had with them in 1982?)
In those days, ignoring the Sparts (there were none at my Uni), the game was trying to identify which lefties at LSE were either CIA or BOSS.
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