The Sparts- GOP to Anarchy to Socialism

[Dermezel]

I have recently been speaking to members of the Sparticist League and have discovered some disturbing information. Basically what I was told is that they know with their support for NAMBLA and other crazy schemes there is no way the general public will support them....unless they are desperate and confused.

The strategy thus suggested was that they aid Republican victories over Democrats until the system "crashes". This they believe will induce Anarchy, and that will somehow transform into a socialist revolution.

This claim was also used to justify working with the feds to break up other "fake leftist" groups. As it was explained to me, "fake leftists" i.e. "reformists" were the 2nd worst group for a revolution next to the capitalists themselves. Worse then reactionaries and fascists because their positive/progressive reforms stabilize and hence perpetuate the capitalist system.

Of course I have several problems with this idea, the first-most being that it sounds obviously like a bad idea.

The second, being I believe instead of breaking the capitalist system this will entrench it. As Lenin noted, a Class Conscious Proletariat requires a material basis. The Workers require enough free time and resources to learn sophisticated theories, logic, and scientific methodology. Otherwise they can't tell who is correct or incorrect. Without the actual science of Scientific Socialism, the differing viewpoints sound like different versions of Utopias.

The third is that it sounds like the theory of Social Fascism:

Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comintern) (Comintern) during the early 1930s, which believed that social democracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy) was a variant of fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism) because, in addition to a shared corporatist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism) economic model, it stood in the way of a complete and final transition to communism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism). At the time, the leaders of the Comintern, such as Joseph Stalin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin) and Rajani Palme Dutt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajani_Palme_Dutt), argued that capitalist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism) society had entered the "Third Period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Period)" in which a working class revolution was imminent, but could be prevented by social democrats and other "fascist" forces. The term "social fascist" was used pejoratively to describe social democratic parties, anti-Comintern and progressive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#) socialist parties, and dissenters within Comintern affiliates throughout the interwar period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interwar_period).

At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of the "Third Period" was proclaimed. The end of capitalism, accompanied with a working class revolution, was expected, and social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the Communists. This Comintern's theory had roots in Grigory Zinoviev (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Zinoviev)'s argument that international social democracy is a wing of fascism. This view was accepted by Joseph Stalin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin) who described fascism and social democracy as "twin brothers", arguing that fascism depends on the active support of the social democracy and that the social democracy depends on the active support of fascism. After it was declared at the Sixth Congress, the theory of social fascism became accepted by the world Communist movement.[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-0)
At the same time, Social Democratic Party of Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_of_Germany) (SPD), under leadership of German chancellor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor)Hermann Müller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_M%C3%BCller_(politician)), agreed with anti-communist parties that "red equals brown".[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-1) This led to mutual hostility between social democrats and communists, which were additionally intensified in 1929 when Berlin's police, under control of the SPD government, shot down communist workers demonstrating on May Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day) (Berlin's Bloody May). This, and the repressive legislation against the communists that followed, served as further evidence to communists that social democrats were indeed "social fascists".[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-2) In 1931 in Prussia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia), the largest state of Germany, Communist Party of Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany) (KPD), which referred to the Nazis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism) as "working people's comrades", united with them in unsuccessful attempt to bring down the state government of SPD by means of a plebiscite.[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-3) German Communists continued to deny any essential difference between Nazism and Social Democracy even after elections in 1933 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election,_1933). The KPD, under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Th%C3%A4lmann), coined the slogan "After Hitler, our turn!" – strongly believing that united front against Nazis wasn't needed, and that the workers would change their opinion and recognize that Nazism, unlike Communism, didn't offer a true way out of Germany's difficulties. See also: Wilhelm Hoegner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Hoegner) and Walter Kolbenhoff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kolbenhoff).[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-4)



"After Hitler, our turn!"

aka

"After the Republicans, our turn."

Unfortunately this is not a turned based game. They will not be getting a "turn" so much as allowing the most extreme Reactionaries to gain powerful political, economic, legal and social positions. These positions can be used to repress future Communist movements. Likewise, with control of the media they can just forth scapegoats for their failed policies- Immigrants, Muslims, Liberals, Communists, etc.

Simply put, I find it hard to believe a group claiming to be revolutionary would betray other Revolutionaries just because it increases their chance of getting power in their mind. I'm also amazed at how callous their attitude is to the actual welfare of the Workers (Their POV is that the Workers' are "failing them" and hence deserve some sort of punishment for not obeying the Sparts).

[Lenina Rosenweg]

The Sparts have very little political relevance. Their idea is to preserve their form of "revolutionary purity" and, when conditions get bad, the working class will see them as the true revolutionaries and flock to them.They do not engage in left activism towards the working class and fight for their ideas but rather orient towards the left and try to recruit people people from other organizations in "ones and twos".Their tactic is to orient towards what they see as "ostensibly revolutionary organisations" and pick off newer or unexperienced members and try to recruit them.They've approached me a number of times.

The rest of the left regards them with a mixture of extreme annoyance and humor. Their extreme sectarianism is always good for a few laughs. I've seen them try to disrupt anti-war meetings and activist gatherings by heckling whatever group sponsored the event.A few years ago I went to an anti-war regroupment meeting sponsored by Socialist Action. On that week the Sparts chose to have the entuire page of their paper, Worker's Vanguard, dedicated to a fierce denouncement of Socialist Action as "pseudo-socialists", "class collaborationists". etc. It was funny.

The Sparts support for NAMBLA comes from their sexual libertarianism. Supposedly the leftist porn star Nina Hartley is a Spart sympathizer. I support "sexlib" but this doesn't have to mean support for NAMBLA and other icky issues.

The Sparts (I think they prefer the term ICL) did have some good labor activists but they pulled the plug on this.

There was a great article on line, "The Road To Jim's House" but it seems to have been taken down. It describes how the Sparts have turned into a bizarre cult around their leader, Jim Robertson. He has been known to go on drunken, racist rants in public and throws orgies with select members.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I could be wrong but I'm not sure if the Sparts follow the "social fascist" or "after Hitler, our turn" line although their "activism" and positions might seem to implicitly point in this direction.

I have subscribed to Worker's Vanguard twice. Their history articles are interesting. Long time readers of WV have said its gone downhill after Jan Norden left. Their website is dull as dishwater boilerplate.
The Sparts famously got egg all over their face when they supported US intervention in Haiti, for some odd reason a year or so again and then backtracked.Reading the obits in WV was like Kremlinogy, there were subtle hints about who was in and who was out within Chairman Robertson's inner circle.

The Sparts have (according to them anyway) led the defense of Mumia and have sponsored the research of Brian Palmer, the Canadian labor historian, when he did research for his bio of James Cannon. As I understand he Sparts weren't too happy with Palmer's conclusiuons that Cannon wanted to build an open ended Trotskyist organisation in the US SWP.

[Smyg]

This is incredibly amusing.

[Dermezel]

The article is still online: The Road to Jimstown (http://www.bolshevik.org/ETB/Rtj.html).



In November 1984, cadres of the Spartacist League/U.S. (SL) donned witches' hats, false noses, pigs' faces (http://www.bolshevik.org/ETB/Rtj.html#) and Nazi regalia and paraded around San Francisco State University (S.F. State) as the "Red Avengers of the Underground SYL." With this the SL leadership announced to the left, to their own ranks and to whoever else was interested that the gradual molecular transformation of their organization into an obedience cult (a process which had been underway for some years) had reached the point of no return. Meanwhile, on the docks on the other side of town, the Spartacist League was doing its best to wreck an 11-day boycott of South African cargo--the most important political strike by any section of the American proletariat in decades (see articles elsewhere in this issue.) These two events came as the culmination of a long series of political departures from Trotskyism. Taken together they demonstrate that, while remaining formally "orthodox" on a wide range of historically derived political questions, in the real world the SL's break from its revolutionary past is qualitatively complete.

[Dermezel]

Anyone see any Sparts at the Occupy? I hear they are pretty against it. I hope they are not spying/snitching. Also I should note IBT (The Road to Jim'stown writers) still give money to the Sparts, and the Sparts accept it, despite the fact that the two groups supposedly hate each other. (Jim Robertson was apparently too poor to afford a plane ticket to a speech on the East Coast, and the IBT gave them some money to take the trip. ) Just letting everyone know, in case they think that going with the IBT is somehow anti-spart (I see it as pretty dishonest to claim you oppose the group, then donate money to it. ) I wonder if the two operate sort of like our own Dems/Repubs, pretending to hate each other, but reinforcing each other at various times.

[RGacky3]

They are as relevant as the MIM, i.e. they are not at all. trots, maoists, and so on are over.