ISO memebers (new accusations of siding with liberals)

[The Douche]

ISOers, can you speak to this article?

http://www.internationalist.org/isoopenletterilwu1202.html

An excerpt:



Socialist Worker makes no mention of the ILWU officials’ disruption of the Portland meeting the night before, although ISOers were there. It makes no mention that the ILWU International pulled Portland and Vancouver pickets out of Longview that morning, and that Local 21 officials were told not to go to the Seattle meeting, or else. It ignores the fact that ILWUer Heyman was prevented from finishing his presentation by the “interruption.” It doesn’t mention that the disrupters drowned out a Latina woman, the last scheduled speaker, who tried to speak about connecting the struggle with that of farm workers and undocumented immigrants but couldn’t be heard over the din.

Certainly anyone who tried such antics at an ILWU meeting would be quickly removed by the sergeant-at-arms. But since it was a bunch of union bureaucrats trying to drown out militant opposition to their back-stabbing sabotage of labor solidarity, the ISO justifies the disruption while tsk-tsking that perhaps it wasn’t done in the proper form.

[Veovis]

This was before my time, but comrades didn't describe the events anything like this. These accusations sound kind of outlandish to me.

[The Douche]

I'll say this:

The members of the ISO, have on numerous occasions in my experience been to the left of the leadership/their printed analysis. A lot of times I find ISO members saying/advocating things at one time, especially early on during struggles, but then when the paper comes out or the party makes an official stance it tends to be more conservative, and the rank and file tone down their rhetoric.

Obviously there were ISO members at this meeting, and I imagine they were outraged at the actions of the labor officials, but it looks like the leadership of the ISO want to be able to maintain a good relationship with the unions, not in the form of working with the rank and file, but by sticking with the leadership.

Obviously, since this text is from a competing organization I'd like to hear some ISO members give their take...

[Dabrowski]

It is a good article. The ISO's reason for existence was to scab on the Russian Revolution so it is only natural that they find themselves in bed with all sorts of reactionary elements, from trade-union bureaucrats to Islamists.

I don't know why Cmoney posted this but he is an enemy of the working class (says he wants to destroy the ILWU!) and has nothing in common with the Internationalist Group that wrote the article.

[The Douche]

It is a good article. The ISO's reason for existence was to scab on the Russian Revolution so it is only natural that they find themselves in bed with all sorts of reactionary elements, from trade-union bureaucrats to Islamists.

I don't know why Cmoney posted this but he is an enemy of the working class (says he wants to destroy the ILWU!) and has nothing in common with the Internationalist Group that wrote the article.

Sweet first post bro, what's your old username?

[Ele'ill]

I don't know why Cmoney posted this but he is an enemy of the working class (says he wants to destroy the ILWU!) and has nothing in common with the Internationalist Group that wrote the article.

What the fuck are you talking about

[The Douche]

What the fuck are you talking about

Obviously, since I oppose the assertion that unionism is revolutionary, I am an enemy of the working class, and I can't be interested in hearing why/if the ISO is siding with union bosses over the rank and file.

[blake 3:17]

Dabrowski is talking shit so wtf.

I'm disappointed in the IG -- did a bunch of work with one of their leaders -- but same old Spart crap. Don't know why he's wasting his time.

[Crux]

It is a good article. The ISO's reason for existence was to scab on the Russian Revolution so it is only natural that they find themselves in bed with all sorts of reactionary elements, from trade-union bureaucrats to Islamists.

I don't know why Cmoney posted this but he is an enemy of the working class (says he wants to destroy the ILWU!) and has nothing in common with the Internationalist Group that wrote the article.
I should hope so.

[Kassad]

Dabrowski is talking shit so wtf.

I'm disappointed in the IG -- did a bunch of work with one of their leaders -- but same old Spart crap. Don't know why he's wasting his time.

I'm pretty sure their United States section is only active in New York. I haven't seen them anywhere else.

[Prometeo liberado]

Am I correct in understanding that SA and FREEDOM SOCIALIST(FREEDOM ROAD?) acquiesced here?

[blake 3:17]

I'm pretty sure their United States section is only active in New York.

There's a member or two in Canada.

[Kassad]

There's a member or two in Canada.

That's what I've heard. That along with groupings in France, Brazil, Mexico and Germany. The IBT and IG appear to have a long-standing pissing match over what day the sun rose and the heavens proclaimed the Spartacist League's degeneration. Hell, if the two would build up fraternal relations, they'd actually give the SL a run for its money internationally. Even though the SL seems to become more alienated all the time, they still manage a pretty effective printing press.

To be honest, Workers Vanguard is the only socialist newspaper I subscribe to. It calls out a lot of groups on their reformist tactics and it is one fuck of an entertaining read.

[blake 3:17]

I'm on friendly terms with the lone IGer and the few folks from the IBT here. Known them 20 years, so wtf? A few months ago a Spart approached me on the Spadina street car and Acted Normally. It was very pleasant.

I used to subscribe to WV and the associated press. Much of it wasn't bad. I look at the site every few months.


Hell, if the two would build up fraternal relations, they'd actually give the SL a run for its money internationally.

The three of them & the CWI all oppose the BDS campaign and Israeli Apartheid Week. The IBT have the most nuanced position, but is in essence abstentionist.

[Kassad]

I'm on friendly terms with the lone IGer and the few folks from the IBT here. Known them 20 years, so wtf? A few months ago a Spart approached me on the Spadina street car and Acted Normally. It was very pleasant.

Interesting. The BT's copy of Trotsky's Transitional Program is one of the best versions out there. It documents a lot of their breaks with the SL over union work and such.

The thing that gives me the shits is that the three groups chose to unite under one banner, they'd be a hell of an international force. However, I just assume they'll keep on fragmenting and splitting until they disintegrate altogether. I don't think the cadres are bad at all, but I think the leadership of all three organizations is definitely... off, to say the least.

[Jimmie Higgins]

ISOers, can you speak to this article?

http://www.internationalist.org/isoopenletterilwu1202.html

An excerpt:It's the Sparts, and they see their role in part as "stopping the ISO's misleadership of the working class" first of all. They don't even link the SW (or the Militant) articles they are criticizing so that readers are entirely dependent on their interpretation of quotes they selected. Frankly they are not interested in the issues here, they are interested in trying to cause doubts in our membership and supporters and to try and poach some members (hence, not "An open letter to S.W. or the ISO" but "an open letter to ISO supporters").

Here's the thing, the article they quoted from (while not linking) is here:

SW: The Solidarity We Need (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/19/the-solidarity-we-need)
It was written by ISO Seattle members and they wrote basically a criticism against the BOC's argument that occupy can replace existing unions and that the focus should be only on the unorganized, not all workers. As the subheading shows: "Seattle activists Sam Bernstein, Darrin Hoop and Dan Trocolli look at a controversy over the Occupy movement's role in building support for longshore workers." they were more interested in talking about this debate rather than the ILWU international's shit or this meeting - that was considered background to them, many of us thought this was a wrong approach.

In SW, members of my branch wrote a rebuttal because we felt like the political argument they were having in Seattle about what the relationship of Occupy should be towards organized labor buried the lead in a major fucking way. We were not in ongoing debates with the BOC, so the significant thing to us about everything going on was the ILWU's leadership's attempts to pull away from occupy and to pressure the rank and file.

SW: ILWU officials shouldn't get a pass (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/23/ilwu-officials-shouldnt-get-a-pass)


I believe the article--which takes up a controversy over the Occupy movement's role in building support for the struggle of longshore workers in Longview, Wash., and a solidarity meeting in Seattle where this controversy came to a head in a physical conflict--misses the mark in terms of its tone.
The article is not critical enough of what the ILWU International is doing right now with regards to the struggle in Longview. It points out that the union's International president participated in a blockade of train tracks in Longview in September. But it doesn't address the fact that in the past few weeks since issuing a letter of support for a caravan to Longview when the multinational EGT Development attempts to load its first scab grain ship, ILWU officials have been organizing to limit action in Longview.
I think we need to have a much more dynamic look at the role of union leadership in this struggle and how it can change, depending on the pressures of the rank and file and the outside movement.
The claim that this is the ISO "leadership" toning down the rank and file ISOers is actually reversed in this situation. The local Seattle comrades wrote the first article (as it says on the article, and it's also their perspective, not an editorial - but you know, the critics would actually have to make it easy for people to link to the paper to find that out) so it was the people on the ground who wrote it, while it was other people from around the country nationally that argued with them and against the way they formulated their report. They had been having an ongoing debate with BOC and I think that caused them to overemphasize that side of the article while neglecting the bigger national picture of what the International was doing.

Internally we had been discussing this meeting - especially here in Oakland where Jack H and another ally we're working through Occupy Oakland with went up for that meeting and there was no question of the shit that the ILWU international were pulling. The political background is that in Labor Solidarity work we've come up against two divergent views of the role of occupy in relation to specific working class struggles. On the one hand are people who basically want occupy to be a "rent-a-picket" for unions and on the other are people who see occupy itself as being able to replace the labor movement and jump over the question of existing trade-unions altogether (the BOC's 89% formulation) or at least that occupy can jump over the question of the labor burocracy by going around the union leadership. The ISO sees the potential role of occupy in helping unorganized workers on the one hand get together, but also in creating a space for rank and file workers to organize and build community solidarity which can in turn force the bureaucrats to bend to this pressure from below or will cause them to be left in the dust.

As the SW letter from Oakland members says:


We want to strengthen the work of rank-and-file activists within the ILWU to organize and make links with the Occupy movement whenever possible, but especially when it relates directly to the fight with EGT. It is important that we figure out how our strategies and tactics in Occupy show real solidarity with the union movement.
This is the reason why we need to address the tactics of the left in Seattle at the same time as we criticize the conservative tactics of the International. The behavior of a minority of activists, described in the article as the Black Orchid Collective, is being used by the ILWU International as a cover for its retreat and its clampdown on Local 21's work with Occupy.
We need to be able to talk about tactics that are detrimental to building solidarity between labor and Occupy. The Occupy movement will not build relationships with labor by announcing that we are the replacement for the union movement or that we are the "89 percent" that represents unorganized workers, as one leaflet in Seattle put it.
This puts up a false divide between rank-and-file union members and the Occupy movement at a time when there are real opportunities for us to work together. Many rank-and-file union members are active organizers in Occupy. Also, this kind of rhetoric gives an excuse to the leaders of unions who don't want to work with Occupy to cut ties, by claiming we are all anti-union.
I believe the union movement is contested political space, and those of us who are union members need to bring the Occupy struggle into our workplaces, and bring our labor work into Occupy. This organizing is very new and is going to be tricky and challenging. Around the December 12 port action in Oakland, some elements of organized labor tried to stop the action, while other union members, including ILWU members and Teamsters, played a significant role in making the action successful.
The payoff in all of this is that if we do our work right, we have a real chance to rebuild a fighting union movement in this country.

[blake 3:17]

thread drift...

I've already told my favourite Spart story on this board, but I guess this is my second bestest. During the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, he group I was in, the New Socialist Group, put on a talk with East Timor Alert Network, featuring a speaker from a new Left party in Indonesia, primarily student based but with some workers and independents. The Sparts picketed the talk due to our class collaboration. We told them the main entrance was at the back of the building and had a few comrades there, while the rest of society was able to go in the front doors.

So stupid. Waster timers.

[Dabrowski]

Obviously, since I oppose the assertion that unionism is revolutionary, I am an enemy of the working class

Who asserted that unionism is revolutionary? In fact, the Internationalist article that is being discussed here cites Lenin in What is to be Done? (1903) that "simple trade-unionism is a bourgeois program."

When I warn that cmoney wants to destroy the ILWU, I am quoting him directly. I'm not allowed to post URL links yet, but you can look up the post he made on 6 November 2011, post number 160 in the discussion thread titled "Occupy Oakland Blocks Port of Oakland!" Cmoney writes "Yes I want to destroy the ILWU, its [sic] a capitalist institution." The Pacific Maritime Association is a capitalist institution, and it, like our rev-left administrator cmoney, wants to destroy the ILWU, because the ILWU is the most potentially powerful and strategically placed workers organization in the U.S. Destroy the ILWU, over my dead body!

Speaking of quotes, Jimmie Higgins says that the IG is "the Sparts" (news to me!) and writes,


they see their role in part as "stopping the ISO's misleadership of the working class" first of all.

Now usually, when you put something in quotation marks, it means you are, you know, quoting. Is that a quote, and if so, from where? Personally I don't think we have to stop the ISO from misleading the working class because the ISO doesn't lead the working class or any significant sector of it -- it's just another relatively marginal left group with ambitions to lead the working class. The problem is that the ISO's program (not the "tone" of its articles) leads to betrayals, crossing the class line.

It isn't because of "tone" that the ISO capitulates to labor bureaucrats, and to their masters the U.S. imperialists. It's because of program -- when the program is pushing the labor bureaucrats, or the Democrats, to the "left," instead of irreconcilably opposing them, you're the one who's gonna get pushed.

[Lucretia]

Can we really say that these are "new" accusations?

[workersadvocate]

How are today's unions "contested political space"?
I really want this explained. Their structures. Their leaders. Their fulltime staff.
Their meeting space. THEIR BUSINESS!
What the hell do today's unions have that is benefiting workers which we could really pry from the hands of union leaders with less force then it would take to physically occupy and seize control of any small business shop? Oh, and it is very much a question of force when we're talking about rank-and-file militants trying to change anything with unions from the inside. If their thugs can't drive us off, they call the cops to protect their business operations and its private property. So how the hell can these unuins still be workers organizations? Oh, of course, we have to change them from above by getting left sect leaders to BE union bureaucrats...out with the old union bosses (who won't go quietly anyway), in with some new middle class bureaucrats to take reins and do the same shafting sellouts as usual with no fucking workers' decisive democracy at all...except these new union bosses come with more "left" credentials to fool us for a while ( "I was part of Wannabe Union Bureaucrats for a Democratic [party] Union and the Coalition of Uppity Middle Class College Left-liberal Professional Posers, and the League of Peace Police and Legalist Police-Lovers and Progressive Preachers, I read a couple pages of Marx even because my professors made me or back when I was naive about 'reality', blah blah blah".)
If workers have to go through this bullshit, facing harassment and violence and termination thanks to union bosses, their narcs and thugs, and their speed-dialling the cops just because worker members try to change ANYTHING...it ain't really our union, is it? We'd be treated better if we tried armed robbery at a local donut shop while half the local police force was dining there. In unions, you got no "rights" except to accept what the union bureaucrats choose and to keep your mouth shut and keep shelling out dyes from your paycheck. Most of the time, unions do not want worker members at the union meetings at all, we're to come only upon their request or we must be there to start trouble. Oh, they don't really care about about the lone old leftie crank burnout fool who raises resolutions that of course get dismissed or maybe get amended and passed because they have no fucking teeth and the general union membership won't see or hear any of this shit. Union Bosses 1 Workers 0. As usual.

Why should what remains of working class involvement in Occupy be directed to providing "rent-a-mobs" for union bosses? I can't think of a single reason any workers should continue to recognize today's existing business unions as our organizations and bargaining agents...we have as much control over them as we would at the local for-profit temporary labor agencies. We workers need our own organizations, truly independent, exclusively made up of workers themselves, totally under workers' control, and operating on the basis of real mass workers' democracy. And if the existing union apparatus gets in our way, we need to expropriate them and drive them out ( that's the workers dues money). If they bring force (and they will), we should smash them like petty bourgeois fascist assailants threatening us. Thankfully, we only have to deal with private cappie security and cops or maybe Army when fighting for control in non-union workplaces. With today's existing business unions in our workplaces, we face another layer of managers, and another body of armed force to contend against.

[black magick hustla]

The Pacific Maritime Association is a capitalist institution, and it, like our rev-left administrator cmoney, wants to destroy the ILWU, because the ILWU is the most potentially powerful and strategically placed workers organization in the U.S. Destroy the ILWU, over my dead body!

god don't you have anything wortwhile to do in valentines day

[Jimmie Higgins]

How are today's unions "contested political space"?
I really want this explained. Their structures. Their leaders. Their fulltime staff.


They are contested spaces because unions play a unique role in capitalism: in order for unions to function they have to at some level respond to the reason for the union's existence - workers collectively defending their interests on the job. At the same time, because unions also need capitalism for their existence, there is a regular concertizing pressure on the labor bureaucrats. The bureaucracy doesn't want to loose it's ability to function and sees itself as the main line of defense (negotiation not class struggle) and so that results in the tendency of unions to act conservatively in periods with low struggle and consciousness. If you theoretically got rid of the old unions and created new ones, unless there was a strong revolutionary movement, over a generation or so, the new unions would be just as conservative and probably as top-down as the old ones. Their business-unionsims and the lack of democracy come from their strange position in class society, not personal defects, personal politics etc.

Unlike the Democrats, however, who are a capitalist party that sometimes tries to appeal to the oppressed and to workers, unions are not "bourgeois" institutions or organizations, as I see it, unions can be made (with pressure from below either the rank and file themselves - or hopefully more with occupy through the rank and file getting support and inspiration form community solidarity which could exert a general class pressure on the unions to force them) to shift to more militant tactics. Any general rise in struggle will probably not be either unorganized organizing or increased militancy and rank and file action within unions - it will probably include both.

The union bureaucracy has been so dominant for so long, so tied to the Democrats for so long, so bent on undemocratic measures, so bent on business-unionism, that I think a straw-man of unions in capitalism has formed among some revolutionary leftists. Some people argue that unions are inherently conservative and they give various explainations for why this is. While there's no question that the union movement is currently top-down and has a pretty bad past in many ways, I think it's incorrect to argue this and it shoots us in the foot in the long-term for two important reasons in my view:

1. To say that union leaderships are always going to act conservatively and will never engage in more militant or more democratic ways of doing things is impressionistic. Yes that's how they have acted in 30 years of retreat and even in the post-war years of low class struggle in the US. But in periods of sharp class struggle, history suggests this will change and some union leaders will either move towards more militancy in order to keep up and stay relevant, or they will be forced by the rank and file to change. If this happens and radicals have been arguing a mechanical argument about inherent conservatism in unions, then if the unions do engage in militant actions, it will be harder for us to make a case for why unions alone are not enough for workers to defend themselves in the long run.

2. For radicals, to write off unions altogether means loosing potential ties to existing militant rank and file unionists, it also makes us irrelevant to the large percentage of the non-unionized young workforce who respond in polls that they wish they had unions. For this reason I think we need to orient towards the rank and file, not discount unions outright and we should also struggle inside unions where we have the opportunity to try and organize the rank and file. If the leadership opens up an inch, radicals should argue for rank and filers to take a mile.

What does this mean concretely? In Occupy Oakland, part of the reason the port shut-downs were so successful is because of the work of rank and file unionists who are also occupy activists in going to their labor meetings and getting resolutions of support passed; occupy activists going down and doing outreach with port drivers and ILWU workers. By publicly putting the labor leaders on the spot, occupy Oakland had a much better shot at organizing workers and successfully shutting down the port. Occupy worked best when there was a combined effort of both the largely unorganized and youthful activists with the rank and file union activists. The city has been working really hard to drive a wedge in that coalition and without larger support, with some of the anti-union sentiments among occupy activists, it has given the union leadership some room to try and distance themselves from the occupy movement and withdraw their support.

[Q]

Jimmie Higgins says that the IG is "the Sparts" (news to me!)
Well, you are. That you splitted from them isn't relevant. You're still "the sparts" for everyone on the left (John Sullivan does a grand job describing it (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/pub-5sparts.html)) as you have the exact same methodology and only marginally different political positions.


Now usually, when you put something in quotation marks, it means you are, you know, quoting.
Paraphrasing (often in a somewhat sarcastic context) is also a rather common use of quotation as I'm sure you know. I bet JH was paraphrasing rather than quoting.


god don't you have anything wortwhile to do in valentines day

What are you talking about? This is Spart porn.

[The Douche]

Who asserted that unionism is revolutionary? In fact, the Internationalist article that is being discussed here cites Lenin in What is to be Done? (1903) that "simple trade-unionism is a bourgeois program."

When I warn that cmoney wants to destroy the ILWU, I am quoting him directly. I'm not allowed to post URL links yet, but you can look up the post he made on 6 November 2011, post number 160 in the discussion thread titled "Occupy Oakland Blocks Port of Oakland!" Cmoney writes "Yes I want to destroy the ILWU, its [sic] a capitalist institution." The Pacific Maritime Association is a capitalist institution, and it, like our rev-left administrator cmoney, wants to destroy the ILWU, because the ILWU is the most potentially powerful and strategically placed workers organization in the U.S. Destroy the ILWU, over my dead body!

What you're saying here, isn't news to anybody on this board (except some new memebers, who would undoubtedly encounter me saying something like this again), because my position is not anti-working class, it is opposed to organizations of representation and mediation.

I do no support an institution whose social role is dependent on capitalism (as the leadership of such an institution would have a vested interest in sustaining capitalism). Union exist to represent workers in their negotiations with the bosses, we don't want a world of negotiations, we want a world without bosses, so people who make their living by mediating our struggle, telling us whats "realistic" and whats not, and generally controlling what we fight for and how we fight for it, are not my allies.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The thing that gives me the shits is that the three groups chose to unite under one banner, they'd be a hell of an international force. However, I just assume they'll keep on fragmenting and splitting until they disintegrate altogether. I don't think the cadres are bad at all, but I think the leadership of all three organizations is definitely... off, to say the least.

I think that is a reasonable way to look at it. Really the differences in program are minimal, definitely not the kind that justify separate organizations. Part of my issue with the BT, is that all of their founding members quit the SL. They never formed an internal faction, never criticized the leadership, nothing. One comrade wrote about being called a racist in some branch meeting. He was pissed and appalled, but he never fought against the characterization. If these comrades had stayed and fought, it would have been better for all concerned. They protest that life in the SL for an oppositionist is hell -- well, too bad. Nobody gets beat up. You get yelled at and called bad things in meetings. The SL didn't break with Healy and the IC until they HAD to, or become politically marginal. There's also the issue of Bill Logan, who is one of the two main leaders of the IBT -- although I think the SL's characterization of him as a sociopath is probably overblown, he is a very manipulative and destructive guy -- a real operator -- not somebody you would want at the head of a revolutionary organization.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Jimmie Higgins wrote:

It's the Sparts first of all and they see their role in part as "stopping the ISO's misleadership of the working class" first of all.

No it's the Internationalist Group. And any good Trotskyist group would want to stop a reformist group such as yours from becoming influential. I know Jim, you guys don't think you pander to, or support, liberal, procapitalist bureaucrats, movements, etc. Here you go again getting upset because the IG quoted from SW. As I said in an earlier thread, it is easy to get quotes from SW that clearly pander to liberals. But when I presented quotes, you said the same thing, that I was "misrepresenting" them. Well how much context do these kind of statements need? Don't you think that is part of the problem?

[Dabrowski]

I think that is a reasonable way to look at it. Really the differences in program are minimal, definitely not the kind that justify separate organizations.

I would have to disagree with that.

Contrary to the oft-repeated epithets in the new Workers Vanguard, the founders of the IG were bureaucratically expelled in 1996 to forestall a faction fight that would have clarified the political differences. So on paper, at first, it may have been difficult to sort out the real programmatic differences between the two groups.

But the difference was quickly marked by the gross betrayal committed by the ICL in Brazil, where they fled from the struggle that they had initiated, to remove police from the membership of the municipal workers union in Volta Redonda, Brazil's Steel City, the day before a membership meeting that was to vote the disaffiliation was attacked by police.

The post-Trotskyist ICL has since revised the central thesis of the Transitional Program. It has abandoned the struggle against the popular front in a whole range of countries -- a question which Trotsky called "the main question of proletarian class strategy for this [imperialist] epoch." Now, according to the ICL's new revisionist doctrine that a popular front requires a mass workers party, and that the workers of Mexico are too befuddled by nationalism to have a popular front, there could not have been a popular front in El Salvador, for example.

During Bush I's Iraq War, when the SL/ICL were still Trotskyist, Workers Vanguard repeatedly headlined "Defend Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism!" and called for workers strikes against the war. But after "9/11" the ICL dropped the revolutionary defeatist slogan and accused the IG, which upheld it, of "playing the counterfeit card of anti-Americanism," of playing to an audience of "'Third World' nationalists for whom the 'only good American is a dead American.'" (WV No. 767, 26 October 2001). Was David Horowitz ghostwriting for WV?

To those, like some commentators here (Kassad, etc.), who have spent their whole political lives on the reformist left, and have acquired the requisite matching careless attitude to detail, the SL and IG may appear similar. But the programmatic differences between the two organizations are orders of magnitude greater than the differences were between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903. The ICL's monstrous betrayal over Haiti last year, which put the last nail in its coffin as a formerly revolutionary organization, was not an aberration, but the necessary development of the post-Trotskyist ICL's previous capitulations to imperialism.

[Kassad]

I think that is a reasonable way to look at it. Really the differences in program are minimal, definitely not the kind that justify separate organizations. Part of my issue with the BT, is that all of their founding members quit the SL. They never formed an internal faction, never criticized the leadership, nothing. One comrade wrote about being called a racist in some branch meeting. He was pissed and appalled, but he never fought against the characterization. If these comrades had stayed and fought, it would have been better for all concerned. They protest that life in the SL for an oppositionist is hell -- well, too bad. Nobody gets beat up. You get yelled at and called bad things in meetings. The SL didn't break with Healy and the IC until they HAD to, or become politically marginal. There's also the issue of Bill Logan, who is one of the two main leaders of the IBT -- although I think the SL's characterization of him as a sociopath is probably overblown, he is a very manipulative and destructive guy -- a real operator -- not somebody you would want at the head of a revolutionary organization.

I thought those who went on to form the BT formed the External Tendency first. I could be wrong here though, so feel free to fill in the holes there. Logan has always struck me as odd, especially after his "chastity belt" letter to Robertson, which is one of the prefaces to The Logan Dossier, I believe.

I do think the IBT is orienting itself for a merger with the IG, but I don't see it happening really. I do think the IBT has taken some more conservative positions, but I do think their characterization of the ICL's social-patriotism regarding the "Marines Out of Lebanon Now, Alive!" issue is pretty spot on. The ICL seems to have trouble with consistency at times.

In regards to you Dabrowsi, say hello to Fredbergen for me. Oh wait, that's you. Welcome back. I've spent a decent amount of time, especially recently, looking into the political differences between groups like the ICL, LRP, IBT, IG etc. Literally all of them are outlined here: http://lrp-cofi.org/pamphlets/debate2003_i.html

The above link was provided to me recently and it's worth a read. The Spartacist League has upheld revolutionary positions on and off for a long time. The problem with groups like the IG and IBT is that they, much like Cliffites, think that political changes just happen overnight. Cliffites think the Soviet Union just turned from socialist to state capitalist overnight, which from a Leninist perspective is inanely unscientific. However, the IG is convinced that the SL magically became apologists to imperialism after expelling Norden and Co., whereas the IBT thinks it happen many years earlier.

The real fundamental question here is do you honestly think political degeneration happens at the flick of a wrist? It is a long process that begins well before the noticeable capitulations to imperialism, degeneration or whatever. Until you wrap your head around it, your fights over whether we should "hail the Red Army in Afghanistan!" or give "support to the Soviet Military, while critiquing its political development" are worth about as much as a piss off a roof. It stings if it hits you in the head, but most of us in the real world don't really notice.

[Jimmie Higgins]

As I said in an earlier thread, it is easy to get quotes from SW that clearly pander to liberals.Just as easy as it is for right-wingers to find quotes and accuse us of supporting "Islamic Terrorism" and just as incorrect.


But when I presented quotes, you said the same thing, that I was "misrepresenting" them. Well how much context do these kind of statements need? Don't you think that is part of the problem?They don't need much context if you aren't someone writing an article for a paper that sees discrediting "bad trotskyists" as more important than a truthful debate.

The subheading of the article was "debates about the role of unions in our movement" - the article was soft on the shit done by the international and I think that was a mistake, but talking about what the international was doing is clearly NOT THE ARGUMENT OF THIS ARTICLE. The authors wanted to carry out the debate they were having about a group who sees occupy as a replacement for the unions, who thinks that activists, not port drivers and longshoremen working together with activists can shut down the ports.

How can quotes be taken out of context you ask... well when most of the quotes are 3 words from the article at a time surrounded by explanatory clauses, it's pretty easy to make any kind of argument you want. Let's compare:


The [ISO] article sides with ILWU officialdom against “some Occupy activists” whose “anti-union politics” are “destructive” and have “undermined the real potential to build greater ties between the Occupy and labor movements.”
And now let's look at the context.

These links between organized labor and the young, usually nonunion workers participating in Occupy highlight the potential to build a fighting working-class movement. The 1 percent has always sought to pit unionized workers against non-unionized workers in a race to the bottom for both. The Occupy movement, along with key struggles like that of Local 21, have brought class politics back into the mainstream political dialogue and motivated both rank-and-file union members and non-union workers to fight back together against the attacks of the 1 percent.

That is why the anti-union politics of some Occupy activists in Seattle is so destructive. It has undermined the real potential to build greater ties between the Occupy and labor movements.

I put what the IG quoted in bold in the above quote, but clearly this is an argument about why building the links between occupy and labor can help build rank and file as well as unorganized worker fight-back.


So at the crucial moment they come out against a general strike. In this editorial cynically titled “Now is the time to fight” (11 March), the ISO suggests “organizing pickets before work” or “noontime marches to other unionized workplaces” – anything to blow off steam, so long as it doesn’t stop work.

In this SW article which argues for a page and a half that the labor bureaucrats are attempting to demobilize the protest in Madison (this is after the protests have ended and Walker has passed the legislation by the way) through an electoral recall campaign, the author says:


But given the low level of strike activity in the last decade, and the overall decline of the labor movement over the past 30 years, there is a gap between the widely felt need for mass action and the organization needed to bring it about. Simply calling for a general strike--no matter how enthusiastically it is received--is unlikely to get very far.


Moreover, the rush by WEAC and AFSCME to conclude separate and largely concessionary contract agreements in advance of Walker's anti-union legislation passing has weakened the solidarity that gave rise to the movement. In that context, pursuing recall elections can seem like the only realistic course of action for labor--even though it will allow Walker's destruction of entire unions to go unchallenged.


The key task for labor activists, then, is to find ways to build union activity in the workplaces that can both put pressure on management while drawing upon the size and energy of the new workers' movement. This can mean, for example, organizing pickets before work or noontime marches to other unionized workplaces. An active, organized and fighting rank and file can compel management to bargain with their union on key issues, despite Walker's laws.
....
Thousands of union militants didn't wait for directions from labor leaders when they mobilized to protest or carried out job actions. They simply did it--and they created new activist networks, such as the Madison-based Kill the Whole Bill Coalition and the no cuts/no concessions campaign initiated by National Nurses United. These efforts are modest in size, but are nevertheless crucial in taking the movement forward.


The pace and scale of the next phase of resistance to Walker's laws is impossible to predict. But the potential to organize is clear--and the need to do so is urgent.
So while the non-Spart Sparts argue that the ISO was telling workers to "go back to work" (paraphrase - they literally say, we are telling workers to do "anything to blow off steam, so long as it doesn’t stop work"), while they argue that we orient towards the union bureaucracy and not the rank and file and then use quotes from articles like this to prove it... this article is clearly making the exact opposite case. The suggestions this article is making is for workers to reject the recall focus of their union leaders, reject electoralism, and build rank and file networks on their own!

The irony of this whole thing is while the ISO and I personally worked with occupy allies to build the Oakland port shut-downs; while our members helped set-up the Labor Solidarity group in Occupy Oakland; while our members in unions are challenging their leaderships who want to distance themselves from occupy or blame the movement for "violence in Oakland" and forcing the bureaucrats to pass resolutions in support which makes it easier to bring rank and file members into the movement; what are the sectarians doing? Writing articles about how evil the ISO is. It's easy to call for a general strike and sound really revolutionary when you are more interested in revolutionary posturing than actual revolution.

[Kassad]

Also, to kind of jump in on the discussion regarding the ISO, since that's what the topic is about, what Socialist Worker says in print really doesn't matter to me. There's a series of editing processes that go through the print process for all socialist groups. Hell, when I used to write for Liberation Newspaper, I can't even tell you how many times the words "revolution" and "communism" were taken out of my articles before print.

The thing that gets me about the ISO is that they will pander to the union bureaucracy and liberal anti-war sentimentalism in the interests of maintaining contacts with as many organizations as it can. This is seen in their participation with United For Peace and Justice which was so fucking reformist that I can't even stand it. This was seen again with the Nader campaign and it's glaringly apparent with the whole ILWU situation going on. I don't necessarily view this as a reflection of all ISO members, but definitely the leading members like Wolf, D'Amato and Chretien. The leaders of the ISO dish out their interpretation of Marx and Lenin, with many ISO branches choosing to have classes on those books, as opposed to Marx and Lenin themselves. Don't try to refute that, by the way, since I doubt every ISO branch in Ohio is estranged from the main organization.

Hell, Chretien ran as a Green Party candidate for office. His rallies didn't have signs talking about socialism. They built support for the Green Party! And I don't fucking care how hotly debated this was internally. When you see this shit going on day in and day out, it's time to pack up and get to real revolutionary work. That doesn't mean join the Spartacists and spend every day trying to discredit the ISO, but it means that there is a fundamental failure to lead cadre within the ISO towards any real ends. If you're going to side with union leaders and the bureaucracy, at least admit it and move on. And if you don't want to publicly get into it with labor leaders, in print and in action, then drop any revolutionary title you claim to uphold. Because it's bullshit.

It isn't just the ISO. It's a lot of the revolutionary left in general that thing the same "money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation" sloganeering are really putting a dent in the ruling class' armor. It isn't, and not only that, it is leading people on to think that capitalism in any way can meet the needs of the people. Provide communist solutions or stop trying to defend against the fact that you've capitulated to the bourgeoisie in your home country, because a lot of the revolutionary left already has.

Trotsky puts it better than I could when he says "The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat." So when these unions literally curbstomp the rank and file members, are we going to expose them for it or write an article about how we hope things get better next time?

The tactics that didn't work in the 60's aren't going to magically work today. Sorry I'm not sorry.

[o well this is ok I guess]

god don't you have anything wortwhile to do in valentines day Do any of us?
;_;

[chegitz guevara]

Does anyone really care what the Sparts/Spart-wannabes have to say?

[Kassad]

Does anyone really care what the Sparts/Spart-wannabes have to say?

Eh, I do. They make legitimate points relatively often about much of the reformist left and if our ideological go-to is just to write them off, that gives those being criticized a get out of jail free card when they expose themselves as less than revolutionary.

[Crux]

Eh, I do. They make legitimate points relatively often about much of the reformist left and if our ideological go-to is just to write them off, that gives those being criticized a get out of jail free card when they expose themselves as less than revolutionary.
But do we really need the Sparts and their split-offs to make such criticism? I certainly don't. I mean we can write our own. While I must admit finding their criticism of CWI's position, or rather debate on china, nothing short of hilarious. Comedic gold, but of little political value IMO.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Eh, I do. They make legitimate points relatively often about much of the reformist left and if our ideological go-to is just to write them off, that gives those being criticized a get out of jail free card when they expose themselves as less than revolutionary.But didn't that other poster who supports IG just call you a reformist above?


To those, like some commentators here (Kassad, etc.), who have spent their whole political lives on the reformist left,

I think we can write-off groups who cry "reformist" wolf at every oppotunity.

[Kassad]

But didn't that other poster who supports IG just call you a reformist above?

I'm pretty confident that I know exactly who he is, and if I'm correct, he joined the IG after being a supporter of a two-member (yes, that's two people) Trotskyist group in New York City until the group split (yes, the two people had a split). Thus, I just kind of brush it off at this point. It's FredBergen, if you remember. There's no way he would already have opinions of myself and cmoney's "reformism" if he wasn't aware of us already.

[The Douche]

Also, to kind of jump in on the discussion regarding the ISO, since that's what the topic is about, what Socialist Worker says in print really doesn't matter to me. There's a series of editing processes that go through the print process for all socialist groups. Hell, when I used to write for Liberation Newspaper, I can't even tell you how many times the words "revolution" and "communism" were taken out of my articles before print.

The thing that gets me about the ISO is that they will pander to the union bureaucracy and liberal anti-war sentimentalism in the interests of maintaining contacts with as many organizations as it can. This is seen in their participation with United For Peace and Justice which was so fucking reformist that I can't even stand it. This was seen again with the Nader campaign and it's glaringly apparent with the whole ILWU situation going on. I don't necessarily view this as a reflection of all ISO members, but definitely the leading members like Wolf, D'Amato and Chretien. The leaders of the ISO dish out their interpretation of Marx and Lenin, with many ISO branches choosing to have classes on those books, as opposed to Marx and Lenin themselves. Don't try to refute that, by the way, since I doubt every ISO branch in Ohio is estranged from the main organization.

Hell, Chretien ran as a Green Party candidate for office. His rallies didn't have signs talking about socialism. They built support for the Green Party! And I don't fucking care how hotly debated this was internally. When you see this shit going on day in and day out, it's time to pack up and get to real revolutionary work. That doesn't mean join the Spartacists and spend every day trying to discredit the ISO, but it means that there is a fundamental failure to lead cadre within the ISO towards any real ends. If you're going to side with union leaders and the bureaucracy, at least admit it and move on. And if you don't want to publicly get into it with labor leaders, in print and in action, then drop any revolutionary title you claim to uphold. Because it's bullshit.

It isn't just the ISO. It's a lot of the revolutionary left in general that thing the same "money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation" sloganeering are really putting a dent in the ruling class' armor. It isn't, and not only that, it is leading people on to think that capitalism in any way can meet the needs of the people. Provide communist solutions or stop trying to defend against the fact that you've capitulated to the bourgeoisie in your home country, because a lot of the revolutionary left already has.

Trotsky puts it better than I could when he says "The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat." So when these unions literally curbstomp the rank and file members, are we going to expose them for it or write an article about how we hope things get better next time?

The tactics that didn't work in the 60's aren't going to magically work today. Sorry I'm not sorry.

This is a good post. Sounds like you'll be reading Nihilist Communism in no time.;)


But in all fairness, I worked with UFPJ at times, back when I was in the SP, and I ended up working with ANSWER one time for M26 in DC (I think it was 05 or 06), and ANSWER was just as frustrating to me as UFPJ was, but in different ways. While I think ANSWER did tend to have slightly better politics than UFPJ, they didn't have revolutionary politics, and they were only slightly easier to work with than UFPJ or MGJ.

[The Douche]

I'm pretty confident that I know exactly who he is, and if I'm correct, he joined the IG after being a supporter of a two-member (yes, that's two people) Trotskyist group in New York City until the group split (yes, the two people had a split). Thus, I just kind of brush it off at this point. It's FredBergen, if you remember. There's no way he would already have opinions of myself and cmoney's "reformism" if he wasn't aware of us already.

Nah bro, you're just a reformist, I'm a full blown enemy of the working class.:cool:

[Kassad]

But do we really need the Sparts and their split-offs to make such criticism? I certainly don't. I mean we can write our own. While I must admit finding their criticism of CWI's position, or rather debate on china, nothing short of hilarious. Comedic gold, but of little political value IMO.

You guys put out ChinaWorker, right? I've really enjoyed reading that. It really helped me formulate a more informed position on China as of late. If you have a second to specify, do you and the IMT differ on the issue of China? I know the Sparts view it as a deformed workers state that needs a political revolution to oust the "Stalinist bureaucracy" etc., but I'm not fully informed regarding the differences between CWI and IMT on the issue.

[Kassad]

But in all fairness, I worked with UFPJ at times, back when I was in the SP, and I ended up working with ANSWER one time for M26 in DC (I think it was 05 or 06), and ANSWER was just as frustrating to me as UFPJ was, but in different ways. While I think ANSWER did tend to have slightly better politics than UFPJ, they didn't have revolutionary politics, and they were only slightly easier to work with than UFPJ or MGJ.

Working with ANSWER is insufferable. I organized with them for three years and they're incredibly resourceful, but fuck if they know how to operate a demonstration. I almost asked the leadership once if they intentionally wanted to bore protesters to death with hours of speakers to demoralize them for some odd, twisted reason. They're a part of the "we came, we marched, we went home" tactics, which though I disagree with her on a lot of issues, Cindy Sheehan criticizes correctly.

[The Douche]

Working with ANSWER is insufferable. I organized with them for three years and they're incredibly resourceful, but fuck if they know how to operate a demonstration. I almost asked the leadership once if they intentionally wanted to bore protesters to death with hours of speakers to demoralize them for some odd, twisted reason. They're a part of the "we came, we marched, we went home" tactics, which though I disagree with her on a lot of issues, Cindy Sheehan criticizes correctly.

On M26, which I helped organize for, when the black bloc crossed back through the march route which ANSWER had just moved through, the ANSWER marshals were still there, with their trashcans full of money.

When they saw us, they moved into the bloc with their trash cans and asked people to donate. Obviously, the response they got was pretty negative. Some of them just shrugged it off, unsurprised by the fact that anarchists didn't want to donate to them. Others got really aggressive with us and started shouting at us, one of them (who, of course, I never saw at an organizing meeting) shouted in my face that we were being "ungrateful assholes" and that we "wouldn't even be able to march if it wasn't for ANSWER".

I told him to go fuck himself, that I helped to organize his march, and mine, and I reached into the trashcan, grabbed a handful of bills, and ripped the can out of his hand, a couple other anarchists did the same, and whatever marshal was in charge managed to calm his people down and get them out.

[Kassad]

On M26, which I helped organize for, when the black bloc crossed back through the march route which ANSWER had just moved through, the ANSWER marshals were still there, with their trashcans full of money.

When they saw us, they moved into the bloc with their trash cans and asked people to donate. Obviously, the response they got was pretty negative. Some of them just shrugged it off, unsurprised by the fact that anarchists didn't want to donate to them. Others got really aggressive with us and started shouting at us, one of them (who, of course, I never saw at an organizing meeting) shouted in my face that we were being "ungrateful assholes" and that we "wouldn't even be able to march if it wasn't for ANSWER".

I told him to go fuck himself, that I helped to organize his march, and mine, and I reached into the trashcan, grabbed a handful of bills, and ripped the can out of his hand, a couple other anarchists did the same, and whatever marshal was in charge managed to calm his people down and get them out.

I'm not surprised to see them call you ungrateful. Marcy-esque politics literally indoctrinates people with the notion that the masses can't take the future into their own hands, thus why things like Tiananmen in 1989 and the suppression of protesters in Iran in 2009 are justified in regards to keeping the masses in line and "socialist construction."

On another note, I didn't really mind ANSWER asking for donations. Trust me, shit got really expensive at times and that money was incredibly helpful. However, it's obnoxious when you're asked for donations at the ANSWER table, volunteers go around collecting donations right before the march and then you often go through 2-3 tiers of volunteers with trash cans, as you said, collecting money, before the march is over.

Trust me, it angers groups like ANSWER when shit like Occupy Wall Street happens. They've been leafleting, postering and promoting their demonstrations for years (decades if you want to go back before ANSWER to other WWP fronts) and they've only pulled large turnouts a few times, which were in the height of anti-Bush fervor. It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the masses operate and how spontaneity comes in to play. They didn't get that in 1959 and they won't get it any time soon.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

But the programmatic differences between the two organizations are orders of magnitude greater than the differences were between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903That's a pretty weird quote. The programmatic differences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were not that clear in 1903. Lenin drew a hard line in "What is to Be Done?" but really, the Leninist concept of a Vanguard Party was by no means fully formed at that time. And Lenin didn't come over to the concept of Permanent Revolution until 1917. So maybe they are similar in scope. To say they are magnitudes greater is hyperbole, comrade.

In fact, the IG and SL have programmatic agreement about 90 percent of the time. If you read their basic documents, they read almost the same. Their press is also similar, although WV is usually a better read. Norden and Stamberg were forced out in a very heavy handed manner, from what I can tell. However, I also believe that for quite a while people within the SL were strongly urging Norden to put into writing his differences with the rest of the leadership -- something he never did.

I don't agree that the SL has abandoned the Transitional Program. I have no idea about what happened in Brazil. The IG says one thing the SL says another. I've read the documents on both sides. Both cannot be true -- but it really is not possible, from where I stand to know who did what. And frankly, there is no programmatic difference here, only a fight over who did what.

And yes, Haiti. That was horrible. But it was repudiated in the unequivocal terms by the SL.

The real ire between your groups is that you are too close, in terms of program, for comfort.

[Kassad]

That's a pretty weird quote. The programmatic differences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were not that clear in 1903. Lenin drew a hard line in "What is to Be Done?" but really, the Leninist concept of a Vanguard Party was by no means fully formed at that time. And Lenin didn't come over to the concept of Permanent Revolution until 1917. So maybe they are similar in scope. To say they are magnitudes greater is hyperbole, comrade.

In fact, the IG and SL have programmatic agreement about 90 percent of the time. If you read their basic documents, they read almost the same. Their press is also similar, although WV is usually a better read. Norden and Stamberg were forced out in a very heavy handed manner, from what I can tell. However, I also believe that for quite a while people within the SL were strongly urging Norden to put into writing his differences with the rest of the leadership -- something he never did.

I don't agree that the SL has abandoned the Transitional Program. I have no idea about what happened in Brazil. The IG says one thing the SL says another. I've read the documents on both sides. Both cannot be true -- but it really is not possible, from where I stand to know who did what. And frankly, there is no programmatic difference here, only a fight over who did what.

And yes, Haiti. That was horrible. But it was repudiated in the unequivocal terms by the SL.

The real ire between your groups is that you are too close, in terms of program, for comfort.

Reminds me of some issues close to home. I was in the PSL for a few years and I honestly couldn't point out a political difference between them and WWP. It was literally just two of the same people trying to shit in the same toilet.

[Renegade Saint]

The leaders of the ISO dish out their interpretation of Marx and Lenin, with many ISO branches choosing to have classes on those books, as opposed to Marx and Lenin themselves. Don't try to refute that, by the way, since I doubt every ISO branch in Ohio is estranged from the main organization.

Well, I know why my branch in Ohio has been reading and discussing. hint: nearly all of it (with the exception of 'The Two Souls of Socialism') was written before the ISO leadership was born.

[Kassad]

Well, I know why my branch in Ohio has been reading and discussing. hint: nearly all of it (with the exception of 'The Two Souls of Socialism') was written before the ISO leadership was born.

There's a good chance you know me then, actually. Shoot me a private message if you're comfortable telling me what city you're from. Anyway, my comments are from a broad few years of experience which has included 1) ISO meetings consisting of trying to peddle the works of Maass, D'Amato etc. and 2) a very noticeable revolving door regarding ISO membership. Just a personal note, honestly.

[DaringMehring]

The problem with the SL and its splits is that it lost the working class a long time ago. It basically doesn't matter what it thinks, because it has no base in the working class. It's cadres are oriented to "ORGs" ostensibly revolutionary groups, and their skills are in writing and thinking and expressing themselves in a way that appeals to and makes sense to people in those groups. Not the working class. They think two people with leaflets at a socialist gathering or union march constitutes revolutionary activity. They don't really connect to the working class.

The SWP split that actually does this is The Spark, the US affiliate of the French LO.

The ISO also is not based in the working class, its leadership basically admits they're based on students. Shawki has said it point blank. However, ISO is way better than the SL in connecting to workers because they at least try and a lot of their members, at least to me, seem like "real people" rather than sweater-vest wearing former students who are skilled at arguing with the bourgeoisie that they have renounced but can't really hack it with low wage workers.

Hopefully revolutionary developments will change right now's sorry state. I think there's hope. Even messed up socialist groups will have some good cadres and the seeds of a winning movement. I defend all of them against the bourgeoisie.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The problem with the SL and its splits is that it lost the working class a long time ago. It basically doesn't matter what it thinks, because it has no base in the working class. It's cadres are oriented to "ORGs" ostensibly revolutionary groups, and their skills are in writing and thinking and expressing themselves in a way that appeals to and makes sense to people in those groups. Not the working class. They think two people with leaflets at a socialist gathering or union march constitutes revolutionary activity. They don't really connect to the working class.

The SWP split that actually does this is The Spark, the US affiliate of the French LO.

The ISO also is not based in the working class, its leadership basically admits they're based on students. Shawki has said it point blank. However, ISO is way better than the SL in connecting to workers because they at least try and a lot of their members, at least to me, seem like "real people" rather than sweater-vest wearing former students who are skilled at arguing with the bourgeoisie that they have renounced but can't really hack it with low wage workers.

Hopefully revolutionary developments will change right now's sorry state. I think there's hope. Even messed up socialist groups will have some good cadres and the seeds of a winning movement. I defend all of them against the bourgeoisie.

After the first paragraph I was about to defend the SL by saying no revolutionary group really has a working class base in the US. That's the problem and I think that's where a lot of the worst aspects of the contemporary left stem from.

So the question is how do we build a base and those are the arguments I wish we could have rather than labeling revolutionaries as "enemies of the working class" or "reformists" over disagreements about how best to build towards revolution! There are real reformists and enemies of the working class out there in force everyday and while I may have disagreements with, for example, some of cmoney's positions, he aint one by a long shot.

[A Marxist Historian]

In the interests of accuracy if nothing else, be it noted that this piece was from the IG, and not the Sparts. The Spartacists apparently have a different position on what went down in Seattle from that of the IG, judging by the letter exchange between them that the IG just published.

What exactly is that position? Well, I find out on Thursday, when the new Workers Vanguard comes out, which I definitely want to see.

The obvious difference is on former Spartacist supporter Jack Heyman, whom the IG is very close to and whom the SL have sharply criticized in the past as in their opinion just another union bureaucrat these days. And he chaired the Seattle meeting after all.

The crack about cmoney being anti working class from our new IG supporter here I was a bit surprised at, being as the IG, like Heyman, is on the same side in this affair with the Black Orchid collective, who have attitudes toward the ILWU somewhat similar to cmoney's.

In fact, I recall making some comments along those lines when arguing with cm a few month ago, when he made some really anti-union comments here. The sort of comments, be it noted, I haven't heard him make lately.

-M.H.-


It's the Sparts, and they see their role in part as "stopping the ISO's misleadership of the working class" first of all. They don't even link the SW (or the Militant) articles they are criticizing so that readers are entirely dependent on their interpretation of quotes they selected. Frankly they are not interested in the issues here, they are interested in trying to cause doubts in our membership and supporters and to try and poach some members (hence, not "An open letter to S.W. or the ISO" but "an open letter to ISO supporters").

Here's the thing, the article they quoted from (while not linking) is here:

SW: The Solidarity We Need (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/19/the-solidarity-we-need)
It was written by ISO Seattle members and they wrote basically a criticism against the BOC's argument that occupy can replace existing unions and that the focus should be only on the unorganized, not all workers. As the subheading shows: "Seattle activists Sam Bernstein, Darrin Hoop and Dan Trocolli look at a controversy over the Occupy movement's role in building support for longshore workers." they were more interested in talking about this debate rather than the ILWU international's shit or this meeting - that was considered background to them, many of us thought this was a wrong approach.

In SW, members of my branch wrote a rebuttal because we felt like the political argument they were having in Seattle about what the relationship of Occupy should be towards organized labor buried the lead in a major fucking way. We were not in ongoing debates with the BOC, so the significant thing to us about everything going on was the ILWU's leadership's attempts to pull away from occupy and to pressure the rank and file.

SW: ILWU officials shouldn't get a pass (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/23/ilwu-officials-shouldnt-get-a-pass)

The claim that this is the ISO "leadership" toning down the rank and file ISOers is actually reversed in this situation. The local Seattle comrades wrote the first article (as it says on the article, and it's also their perspective, not an editorial - but you know, the critics would actually have to make it easy for people to link to the paper to find that out) so it was the people on the ground who wrote it, while it was other people from around the country nationally that argued with them and against the way they formulated their report. They had been having an ongoing debate with BOC and I think that caused them to overemphasize that side of the article while neglecting the bigger national picture of what the International was doing.

Internally we had been discussing this meeting - especially here in Oakland where Jack H and another ally we're working through Occupy Oakland with went up for that meeting and there was no question of the shit that the ILWU international were pulling. The political background is that in Labor Solidarity work we've come up against two divergent views of the role of occupy in relation to specific working class struggles. On the one hand are people who basically want occupy to be a "rent-a-picket" for unions and on the other are people who see occupy itself as being able to replace the labor movement and jump over the question of existing trade-unions altogether (the BOC's 89% formulation) or at least that occupy can jump over the question of the labor burocracy by going around the union leadership. The ISO sees the potential role of occupy in helping unorganized workers on the one hand get together, but also in creating a space for rank and file workers to organize and build community solidarity which can in turn force the bureaucrats to bend to this pressure from below or will cause them to be left in the dust.

As the SW letter from Oakland members says:

[A Marxist Historian]

What you're saying here, isn't news to anybody on this board (except some new memebers, who would undoubtedly encounter me saying something like this again), because my position is not anti-working class, it is opposed to organizations of representation and mediation.

I do no support an institution whose social role is dependent on capitalism (as the leadership of such an institution would have a vested interest in sustaining capitalism). Union exist to represent workers in their negotiations with the bosses, we don't want a world of negotiations, we want a world without bosses, so people who make their living by mediating our struggle, telling us whats "realistic" and whats not, and generally controlling what we fight for and how we fight for it, are not my allies.

And here I'd hoped you'd learned something in the last couple months. I guess all you learned was not to use the word "destroy" 'cuz it turns people off.

Oh well.

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

And here I'd hoped you'd learned something in the last couple months. I guess all you learned was not to use the word "destroy" 'cuz it turns people off.

Oh well.

-M.H.-This is actually a real debate within the occupy movement and cmoney's view shouldn't just be written off - there's a whole section of radicalizing people who see the way to deal with the issue of labor bureaucracy and conservatism in the unions as a closed door and so they want to try and leap over the issue of the trade unions. That people are trying to figure out how to rebuild a fighting working class (at least more than in the past thanks to the radicalization of a core of people in the occupy movement) is a positive development relatively. However, I disagree with and think it's a big potential mistake that these rank and file union workers should be written off or that unions are now incapable of ever being militant like they were in the past (militant, not revolutionary), or that a rather small revolutionary core of activists can replace the trade unions and shut down ports or workplaces on their own... but I think this is an important debate to be had. Maybe folks could start a thread about it if we could try and keep it political and civil (ok, I'm an optimist:lol:).

[A Marxist Historian]

I would have to disagree with that.

Contrary to the oft-repeated epithets in the new Workers Vanguard, the founders of the IG were bureaucratically expelled in 1996 to forestall a faction fight that would have clarified the political differences. So on paper, at first, it may have been difficult to sort out the real programmatic differences between the two groups.

But the difference was quickly marked by the gross betrayal committed by the ICL in Brazil, where they fled from the struggle that they had initiated, to remove police from the membership of the municipal workers union in Volta Redonda, Brazil's Steel City, the day before a membership meeting that was to vote the disaffiliation was attacked by police.

The post-Trotskyist ICL has since revised the central thesis of the Transitional Program. It has abandoned the struggle against the popular front in a whole range of countries -- a question which Trotsky called "the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch." Now, according to the ICL's new revisionist doctrine that a popular front requires a mass workers party, and that the workers of Mexico are too befuddled by nationalism to have a popular front, there could not have been a popular front in El Salvador, for example.

During Bush I's Iraq War, when the SL/ICL were still Trotskyist, Workers Vanguard repeatedly headlined "Defend Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism!" and called for workers strikes against the war. But after "9/11" the ICL dropped the revolutionary defeatist slogan and accused the IG, which upheld it, of "playing the counterfeit card of anti-Americanism," of playing to an audience of "'Third World' nationalists for whom the 'only good American is a dead American.'" ([I]WV No. 767, 26 October 2001). Was David Horowitz ghostwriting for WV?

To those, like some commentators here (Kassad, etc.), who have spent their whole political lives on the reformist left, and have acquired the requisite matching careless attitude to detail, the SL and IG may appear similar. But the programmatic differences between the two organizations are orders of magnitude greater than the differences were between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903. The ICL's monstrous betrayal over Haiti last year, which put the last nail in its coffin as a formerly revolutionary organization, was not an aberration, but the necessary development of the post-Trotskyist ICL's previous capitulations to imperialism.

I have to agree with Dabrowski that the differences are indeed major, but I evaluate what went down very differently.

Firstly, the IG'ers weren't bureaucratically expelled. Charges were made against them for suspicious behavior, and when a trial body was convened, the IG leader said "fuck you, I ain't going," so he was expelled. In fact, what I hear is that he deliberately did some suspicious-looking things around phone usage (him then being the editor of the Workers Vanguard) so that he'd get brought up on charges so he could later claim he was bureaucratically expelled.

But what was really going on indeed relates to Brazil, the place all those phone calls were made to, and Dabrowski's version of what happened is totally misleading.

What became the Brazilian IG group, then with fraternal ties to the Spartacists, was running the municipal trade union in Volta Redonda, an important suburb of Rio I think it is, because they'd run a former cop for president, and all the cops in the union naturally voted for him.

So when it got explained to them (and to the former cop) that that situation was unacceptable, and the Brazilian group, quite properly, followed the Spartacist advice and tried to run the cops that had voted for them out of the union, a really bad situation developed, which the Spartacists and the future IG'ers had different advice about how to deal with. And the Brazilians liked the future IG'ers advice better than that of the Spartacists.

And later, when they lost control of the union to the cops and their also-Trotskyist-allegedly left wing allies, who as it happens had ties with a group that split from the BT, i.e. more semi-hemi-demi Spartacists, what did they do? They tried to sue the union in court!

Now that was a real class betrayal!

As for the rest, I don't want to divert this thread into an SL vs. IG polemic to any greater degree than I already have, so I'll leave it at that for the moment.

Both the Spartacists and the IG are both on line, and publish polemics against each other frequently, folk interested can judge for themselves.

But if nothing else, what went down in Brazil proves that unite-for-unity doesn't work, even between organizations that to a casual viewer from the outside seem similar.

In the course of actual class struggle, where we're not chatting on Revleft but in the streets, differences that seem tiny on Revleft almost always turn out to be huge in real life.

An SL-IG-IBT lashup sure as hell wouldn't have worked too well in Volta Redonda!

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Just as easy as it is for right-wingers to find quotes and accuse us of supporting "Islamic Terrorism" and just as incorrect.

They don't need much context if you aren't someone writing an article for a paper that sees discrediting "bad trotskyists" as more important than a truthful debate.

The subheading of the article was "debates about the role of unions in our movement" - the article was soft on the shit done by the international and I think that was a mistake, but talking about what the international was doing is clearly NOT THE ARGUMENT OF THIS ARTICLE. The authors wanted to carry out the debate they were having about a group who sees occupy as a replacement for the unions, who thinks that activists, not port drivers and longshoremen working together with activists can shut down the ports.

How can quotes be taken out of context you ask... well when most of the quotes are 3 words from the article at a time surrounded by explanatory clauses, it's pretty easy to make any kind of argument you want. Let's compare:


And now let's look at the context.


I put what the IG quoted in bold in the above quote, but clearly this is an argument about why building the links between occupy and labor can help build rank and file as well as unorganized worker fight-back.



In this SW article which argues for a page and a half that the labor bureaucrats are attempting to demobilize the protest in Madison (this is after the protests have ended and Walker has passed the legislation by the way) through an electoral recall campaign, the author says:

So while the non-Spart Sparts argue that the ISO was telling workers to "go back to work" (paraphrase - they literally say, we are telling workers to do "anything to blow off steam, so long as it doesn’t stop work"), while they argue that we orient towards the union bureaucracy and not the rank and file and then use quotes from articles like this to prove it... this article is clearly making the exact opposite case. The suggestions this article is making is for workers to reject the recall focus of their union leaders, reject electoralism, and build rank and file networks on their own!

The irony of this whole thing is while the ISO and I personally worked with occupy allies to build the Oakland port shut-downs; while our members helped set-up the Labor Solidarity group in Occupy Oakland; while our members in unions are challenging their leaderships who want to distance themselves from occupy or blame the movement for "violence in Oakland" and forcing the bureaucrats to pass resolutions in support which makes it easier to bring rank and file members into the movement; what are the sectarians doing? Writing articles about how evil the ISO is. It's easy to call for a general strike and sound really revolutionary when you are more interested in revolutionary posturing than actual revolution.

On Wisconsin, I agree with Dabrowski 100%. There was real motion around Wisconsin towards a general strike, it wasn't just the usual hot air from ultralefts with powerful imaginations. Workers were really, really interested in the idea, and not just in Wisconsin.

I attended the union-sponsored Wisconsin support rally in downtown Oakland. Spoke at it in fact (there was an open mike), got a lot of applause. People were hot for action.

So the wet blanket role played by the ISO in Wisconsin, perfectly well described in the IG polemic, was extremely negative to say the least.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The problem with the SL and its splits is that it lost the working class a long time ago. It basically doesn't matter what it thinks, because it has no base in the working class. It's cadres are oriented to "ORGs" ostensibly revolutionary groups, and their skills are in writing and thinking and expressing themselves in a way that appeals to and makes sense to people in those groups. Not the working class. They think two people with leaflets at a socialist gathering or union march constitutes revolutionary activity. They don't really connect to the working class.

The SWP split that actually does this is The Spark, the US affiliate of the French LO.

The ISO also is not based in the working class, its leadership basically admits they're based on students. Shawki has said it point blank. However, ISO is way better than the SL in connecting to workers because they at least try and a lot of their members, at least to me, seem like "real people" rather than sweater-vest wearing former students who are skilled at arguing with the bourgeoisie that they have renounced but can't really hack it with low wage workers.

Hopefully revolutionary developments will change right now's sorry state. I think there's hope. Even messed up socialist groups will have some good cadres and the seeds of a winning movement. I defend all of them against the bourgeoisie.

No doubt just a typo, but Spark in Detroit is a split from the SL not the SWP, either SWP, English or American.

Sad fact is that the Spartacists never had the working class in the first place, and Spark certainly doesn't either. The American working class is not terribly socialist, in case you hadn't noticed.

IMHO, the Spartacists in fact understand where workers are coming from and can relate to them better than the ISO or Spark or for that matter the French LO, who are pure "workerists," who think that all workers care about is a few bucks more. I've seen their factory flyers in the US, and seen descriptions of the French ones. Low level stuff about dollars and cents and factory conditions.

What the Spartacists get that the ISO doesn't and that the LO and Spark perceive only pretty dimly is that workers these days aren't too interested in communism, because after the collapse of the Soviet Union the general attitude in the world is that communism is something that has been tried and didn't work. That's only beginning to shift now, with people noticiing that capitalism doesn't work either.

The ISO, as state caps, are constitutionally incapable of understanding that.

Workers seriously interested in the Left want to know one thing before anything else. What happened in the Soviet Union, and why? And how do we know you guys won't turn out to be just like Stalin in Russia?

Without a serious answer to that question that they can actually believe, workers who are not already leftists, and quite a few that are, won't give a leftist organization the time of day.

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

On Wisconsin, I agree with Dabrowski 100%. There was real motion around Wisconsin towards a general strike, it wasn't just the usual hot air from ultralefts with powerful imaginations. Workers were really, really interested in the idea, and not just in Wisconsin.

I attended the union-sponsored Wisconsin support rally in downtown Oakland. Spoke at it in fact (there was an open mike), got a lot of applause. People were hot for action.

So the wet blanket role played by the ISO in Wisconsin, perfectly well described in the IG polemic, was extremely negative to say the least.

-M.H.-

So the ISO has the power to call a general strike? I mean if the ISO was so wrong and a general strike at that point so possible, why didn't a general strike happen anyway?

Like I said before it's one thing to call for a general strike and it's another to have the ability to pull one off. Oakland this year was as close as we've gotten in the US for a long time (which by the way our members here supported and helped build along with other activists, unionists, and revolutionaries) and it took Occupy Oakland at its height, with support from rank and file workers (and too quickly for the union leadership to demobilize) and broad community support, and a near-dead vet who was shot in the face by the pigs, organizing at full tilt to accomplish what happened here - which was impressive but not a city-wide shut-down. In Wisco, people called for it, it sounds great, but they didn't have the organization to pull it off - that's not opinion at this point, that's just what happened.

Shutting down the port was great, but the only stakes in it was a test of our unity and strength - we passed and sent the city reeling and caused open arguments between the mayor and police:D. In Wisconsin what would have happened if they called a general strike, it happened, but it was a one day thing and Walker said, "I don't give into economic threats by union thugs". The result would have been that the whole working class would see the biggest labor action in over a generation be ignored by the ruling class which would have probably caused retreat and people to think that electoralism is the only way for workers to defend themselves politically. I think we were right to empasize the need for rank and file workers to develop networks and organize themselves for actions to oppose anti-worker measures because these are the things the working class, after a generation of losses and a generation before that of inertia and business-unionism, needs to begin to fight effectively.

Maybe it could have been pulled off with a lot of spontaneous momentum if people began organizing for it while the capital occupation was just gaining attention. We could have argued for a general strike to protect America's Tarhir Square and the unions would be caught flat-footed which would allow for rank and file workers to put their leaders on the spot. But trying to organize this after the bill passed, after people demobilized, and after the unions demobilized their rank and file behind an electoral recall, I'm doubtful such a thing could have been pulled off let alone would have been successful.

[A Marxist Historian]

So the ISO has the power to call a general strike? I mean if the ISO was so wrong and a general strike at that point so possible, why didn't a general strike happen anyway?

Like I said before it's one thing to call for a general strike and it's another to have the ability to pull one off. Oakland this year was as close as we've gotten in the US for a long time (which by the way our members here supported and helped build along with other activists, unionists, and revolutionaries) and it took Occupy Oakland at its height, with support from rank and file workers (and too quickly for the union leadership to demobilize) and broad community support, and a near-dead vet who was shot in the face by the pigs, organizing at full tilt to accomplish what happened here - which was impressive but not a city-wide shut-down. In Wisco, people called for it, it sounds great, but they didn't have the organization to pull it off - that's not opinion at this point, that's just what happened.

Shutting down the port was great, but the only stakes in it was a test of our unity and strength - we passed and sent the city reeling and caused open arguments between the mayor and police:D. In Wisconsin what would have happened if they called a general strike, it happened, but it was a one day thing and Walker said, "I don't give into economic threats by union thugs". The result would have been that the whole working class would see the biggest labor action in over a generation be ignored by the ruling class which would have probably caused retreat and people to think that electoralism is the only way for workers to defend themselves politically. I think we were right to empasize the need for rank and file workers to develop networks and organize themselves for actions to oppose anti-worker measures because these are the things the working class, after a generation of losses and a generation before that of inertia and business-unionism, needs to begin to fight effectively.

Maybe it could have been pulled off with a lot of spontaneous momentum if people began organizing for it while the capital occupation was just gaining attention. We could have argued for a general strike to protect America's Tarhir Square and the unions would be caught flat-footed which would allow for rank and file workers to put their leaders on the spot. But trying to organize this after the bill passed, after people demobilized, and after the unions demobilized their rank and file behind an electoral recall, I'm doubtful such a thing could have been pulled off let alone would have been successful.

First the general consideration.

You ask, what would have happened if there had been a general strike, and it lost. Wouldn't that demoralize the workers?

Well, that's true. When workers fight and they lose, they get demoralized for a while.

But when they surrender without a fight, which is what happened in Wisconsin, they get five, ten, twenty times as demoralized.

Old rule: it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Now for the Wisconsin particulars. But actually, I think the IG piece summarized the scene in Wisconsin tersely and accurately.

Did the ISO have the power to call a general strike? No, but the working class of Wisconsin did, and that was what most of them, for a brief moment, wanted and were up for. At that critical moment, the leftish leaders of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, aligned with Solidarity according to the IG, called the whole thing off, diverting it all into the recall campaign, which failed.

If the ISO had called for a general strike, did the ISO have enough force to carry the day? Probably not. But they would have been remembered by the most militant workers as a revolutionary force, and you guys would probably have recruited a good number. And that is exactly how a radical group *does* acquire a base in the working class.

But if you had done that, well then you wouldn't be the ISO. Instead, the political climate in America being what it is, you'd be a much smaller group, an less able to be effective in a sitution like Wisconsin. When the ISO first came into existence, for its first decade or so it was smaller than the SL, but in a right wing period, it's a lot easier to get people to sign up for reform politics than for revolutionary politics.

But you know what? To quote Bob Dylan, the times, they are a'changein...

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

We'll have to agree to disagree MH, but damn if that wasn't a nice political exchange of disagreements.

[Crux]

You guys put out ChinaWorker, right? I've really enjoyed reading that. It really helped me formulate a more informed position on China as of late. If you have a second to specify, do you and the IMT differ on the issue of China? I know the Sparts view it as a deformed workers state that needs a political revolution to oust the "Stalinist bureaucracy" etc., but I'm not fully informed regarding the differences between CWI and IMT on the issue.
I wrote a longer text but the computer ate it. Here's the basics:
The China Debate (http://www.socialistworld.net/print/2970)
China’s capitalist counter-revolution (http://www.socialistworld.net/print/2970)


Which would be the view of the swedish section, or at least a majority thereof, as well as arguably the position of chinaworker.info

The character of the Chinese state (http://www.socialistworld.net/mob/doc/3299)
would be the view of the IS and arguably majority view within the CWI as a whole.

A more recent article from Peter Taffee: China Half-way house (http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/5169) also denotes a certain convergence of views although differences still remain.

As for the IMT we, as in the swedish section, would be close to their analysis, or what I have read of it at least. Conversely the majority of the swedish IMT, which split off from the IMT, would be closer to the IS of the CWI. :laugh: Although they (the IMT split) seem, if we go by what Heiko Khoo writes, to be almost of the opinion that China is a deformed worker's state, something which the CWI majority does not argue any longer.

[The Douche]

This is actually a real debate within the occupy movement and cmoney's view shouldn't just be written off - there's a whole section of radicalizing people who see the way to deal with the issue of labor bureaucracy and conservatism in the unions as a closed door and so they want to try and leap over the issue of the trade unions. That people are trying to figure out how to rebuild a fighting working class (at least more than in the past thanks to the radicalization of a core of people in the occupy movement) is a positive development relatively. However, I disagree with and think it's a big potential mistake that these rank and file union workers should be written off or that unions are now incapable of ever being militant like they were in the past (militant, not revolutionary), or that a rather small revolutionary core of activists can replace the trade unions and shut down ports or workplaces on their own... but I think this is an important debate to be had. Maybe folks could start a thread about it if we could try and keep it political and civil (ok, I'm an optimist:lol:).


Thats not my position. I'm not a Blanquist or an anarcho-focoist. (though I've heard that some bay area insurrectos are starting to talk about/get interested in Blanqui, which I think is fucking stupid/un-anarchist)

I don't think, and would never say that we should write off rank and file union members (what I usually call the "essential proletariat"). If we (as pro-revolutionaries) wrote them off then we'd essentially be ensuring that revolution doesn't happen. What we need to to do is engage with them in their struggles where we can, always present the communist idea, and always try to widen whatever cracks and fissures exist that have created their struggle. At the same time, we need to highlight the inability of their union bosses to deliver communism, and the fact that their union bosses ultimately depend on continued labor disputes of a non-revolutionary character (so, they depend on capitalism) in order to make money. Our goal is to help those essential proletarians destroy the organizations which mediate their struggle and replace with organic forms of expression.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Thats not my position. I'm not a Blanquist or an anarcho-focoist. (though I've heard that some bay area insurrectos are starting to talk about/get interested in Blanqui, which I think is fucking stupid/un-anarchist)

I don't think, and would never say that we should write off rank and file union members (what I usually call the "essential proletariat"). If we (as pro-revolutionaries) wrote them off then we'd essentially be ensuring that revolution doesn't happen. What we need to to do is engage with them in their struggles where we can, always present the communist idea, and always try to widen whatever cracks and fissures exist that have created their struggle. At the same time, we need to highlight the inability of their union bosses to deliver communism, and the fact that their union bosses ultimately depend on continued labor disputes of a non-revolutionary character (so, they depend on capitalism) in order to make money. Our goal is to help those essential proletarians destroy the organizations which mediate their struggle and replace with organic forms of expression.Ok, sorry about that mistaken assumption - I was going off of what some of the posts others made earlier in this thread suggested. That, and I'm interested in hearing a thoughtful debate back and forth on this.

[A Marxist Historian]

We'll have to agree to disagree MH, but damn if that wasn't a nice political exchange of disagreements.

Theway I feel about it too.

-M.H.-

[DaringMehring]

No doubt just a typo, but Spark in Detroit is a split from the SL not the SWP, either SWP, English or American.


I knew it split from the SL, but wasn't the SL itself a SWP split and wasn't The Spark only in the SL for basically no time anyway (quickly going its own way in the 60s).



Sad fact is that the Spartacists never had the working class in the first place, and Spark certainly doesn't either. The American working class is not terribly socialist, in case you hadn't noticed.


The question isn't who has two millionths of the US working class versus who has three millionths of it. It is what is the composition and orientation of the organization. The Spark is all workers and professional revolutionaries who are oriented to the workers, like Trotsky said in his documents on SWP policy.



IMHO, the Spartacists in fact understand where workers are coming from and can relate to them better than the ISO or Spark or for that matter the French LO, who are pure "workerists," who think that all workers care about is a few bucks more. I've seen their factory flyers in the US, and seen descriptions of the French ones. Low level stuff about dollars and cents and factory conditions.


I have always found the fact that "workerist" is used as an insult for a purportedly Marxist group by another purportedly Marxist group bizarre.



What the Spartacists get that the ISO doesn't and that the LO and Spark perceive only pretty dimly is that workers these days aren't too interested in communism, because after the collapse of the Soviet Union the general attitude in the world is that communism is something that has been tried and didn't work. That's only beginning to shift now, with people noticiing that capitalism doesn't work either.


In one sentence you say The Spark's main error is focusing on bread and butter issues, in the next you say the workers "aren't too interested in communism." Self-contradictory?

In fact The Spark always draws the conclusion from the bread and butter stuff that "the bourgeoisie are crooks and liars and the power has to be taken from that class." Classic communism and they don't have to talk about the Soviet Union.



Workers seriously interested in the Left want to know one thing before anything else. What happened in the Soviet Union, and why? And how do we know you guys won't turn out to be just like Stalin in Russia?

Without a serious answer to that question that they can actually believe, workers who are not already leftists, and quite a few that are, won't give a leftist organization the time of day.

-M.H.-

True.

[eyeheartlenin]

I'm pretty confident that I know exactly who he is, and if I'm correct, he joined the IG after being a supporter of a two-member (yes, that's two people) Trotskyist group in New York City until the group split (yes, the two people had a split). Thus, I just kind of brush it off at this point. It's FredBergen, if you remember. There's no way he would already have opinions of myself and cmoney's "reformism" if he wasn't aware of us already.

The two-person group that split (and that really happened) was located elsewhere, in a nice southern New England college town, not in NYC. Our goal was to build a group to the left of the local talent at the time, namely, the ISO, Workers World and the Quakers. That attempt was aborted by the IG's recruiting Fred and then splitting the group. I worked with cde Fred politically, and I'm in a position to know. Fred is an earnest, subjectively revolutionary guy, facing some personal challenges. I don't agree with his choice of tendency, but there is no doubt of his allegiance to the working class.

[workersadvocate]

Thanks for the replies and discussion on unions.
We really should have that discussion split from this thread, and continue it.

I agree that rank and file union members are important. But is the best way to reach them through traditional "trade union work" the way leftists have usually done?
Some leftists get into unions and set up some kind of alternative caucus inside. Okay, but then the real debate begins about what is that caucus supposed to be and be doing.
Should it basically act in its own name independently and provide worker-ccommunist class strugglist leadership...the union bureaucrats be damned? Basically like a "union within a union", which takes it upon itself to help educate and organize and mobilize currently non-union working people as well, regardless of permission granted by the bureaucrats? That sort of thing would be a great development, I think. Sure, that might force bureaucrats to enforce or come up with rules letting them oust the caucus membetd...but then, you already would have the groundwork in place to replace their shell "union" with the caucus-transformed-into-new-union, and the work that was done which provoked the bureaucrats to break out the expulsion-hammer will not be uninfluential among working people involved and affected. So if union caucus people get the boot, strike back to decertify the current "shell" union bureaucrat representation and demand the new union is recognized as sole bargaining agent instead...and that includes all the workers who were not covered by the old union which now seek the new union's representation. Of course, then there is the question of money. People paid dues into the old union for a long time, ain't gotten shit for it, and I think it is time for a refund.
Say, 50% dues refund to the workers themselves and 50% if each refund deposited to the new union's fund ( obviously, a STRIKE FUND). Old union will freak and react by bring lawyers and generally exposing itself...we win, they're done, whether we actually get the dues money back or not! Time to put the days of lazy dues-extorting parasite undemocratic unaccountable sellout union bureaucrats behind us...not one more penny for them and their pathetic behind-closed-doors class collaboration "negotiations".
Workers negotiate by means of wider class organization, mass mobilization and strikes...not begging, not obedience, not looking out for what's good for the bosses.
We come to kick ass until the bourgeois owners give in to our demands because we have defeated them or shown them-and us workers ourselves-that we really could do so right here and now, and we don't stop until the workers' movement has democratically decided to make a TACTICAL halt while we expand workers' control of our workplaces and ensure compliance with our demands, further organize the unorganized, intervene in the interests of working people and the oppressed as ought to be done by the workers' movement, and prepare for further wider advancement in the next round of class struggle when working people feel it is time to make a fight once more. I think that's the kind of "unions" workimg people wished we had and wished we could belong to. Just think of how such new unions would be involved with an Occupy-like movement, and how movements like Occupy would affect these new unions.

[Kassad]

The two-person group that split (and that really happened) was located elsewhere, in a nice southern New England college town, not in NYC. Our goal was to build a group to the left of the local talent at the time, namely, the ISO, Workers World and the Quakers. That attempt was aborted by the IG's recruiting Fred and then splitting the group. I worked with cde Fred politically, and I'm in a position to know. Fred is an earnest, subjectively revolutionary guy, facing some personal challenges. I don't agree with his choice of tendency, but there is no doubt of his allegiance to the working class.

Thanks for the clarification. The IG and BT seem so minute in the United States that it honestly baffles me that they consider themselves propaganda groups. Hell, if they managed to make amends with the SL, they'd actually have a relatively sizable international.

[chegitz guevara]

I knew it split from the SL, but wasn't the SL itself a SWP split and wasn't The Spark only in the SL for basically no time anyway (quickly going its own way in the 60s).

When the SL left the SWP in the 60s, they hooked up with Voix Ouvrière (which latter became Lutte Ouvrière to get around a DeGaullist law aimed at revenge against those who supported Mai '68). When SL decided to end the relationship, and handful of comrades decided they liked LO better. That small group became Spark.

For all of Spark's orientation to the workers, it has made little inroads. Where they are, they tend to have a good reputation. A factory went out on wildcat to get a Spark comrade his/her job back, after the comrade was fired for leading a previous wildcat because the air conditioning in the plant had gone out. But it's still a tiny, insignificant sect ... like much of the rest of the left.

I was in Spark for 6 months back in 1990. I don't know about now, but the intensity of the study ultimately caused me to leave the organization. But, I'm still better educated from that 6 month period than many comrades I've met who've been in the movement for years. The group of us that split from Spark shared the same LO orientation for a number of years, before we went our separate ways.

[blake 3:17]

The IG and BT seem so minute in the United States that it honestly baffles me that they consider themselves propaganda groups.

The WHOLE of the Marxist left in English North America can barely be considered a propaganda group.

We generally have nothing meaningful and effective on any major issue these days.

There are a few factors involved -- the general decline of Broad Socialism which included Marxism, the generational lapse which happened with the Cold War ending when most maturish radicals were born, and the changes in communications and education.

Bright working class people don't waste their time reading shitty past date left papers. I didn't buy Socialist Worker for years because I was a Marxist who read the Globe & Mail every day.

I think What is to be done? is one of the best of Lenin's writings & raises issues very relevant to socialist activists -- I do believe in the Kautsky/Lenin formula that socialist consciousness needs to come from theory and needs to be generalized to link seemingly disparate struggles together. Reproducing Lenin's activities of 1902 don't makes no senses.

[eyeheartlenin]

Thanks for the clarification. The IG and BT seem so minute in the United States that it honestly baffles me that they consider themselves propaganda groups. Hell, if they managed to make amends with the SL, they'd actually have a relatively sizable international.

In response to cde Kassad's remark above, I thought I had read or heard, possibly from a polemic by the IG, that the foreign sections of the Spartacist League's ICL were very small.

As a complete outsider to the SL, my impression is that we will see Spartacism disappear in the US within two decades, if not in the next ten years. They no longer even have a presence in Boston/Cambridge. Some decades ago, when I lived in Maine, I used to visit the Boston SL; they actually had a public office. I believe they had been in Boston/Cambridge since some point in the sixties, though I could be mistaken.

And I cannot decide whether the disappearance of the SL will be a gain or loss. No one does a better job of uncovering tendencies' caving into the Democrats than Workers Vanguard; I used to wait for each new WV edition to arrive, with real anticipation, but their approach, of attacking everyone else on the left as the first order of business, seems immensely destructive. There is a logical possibility that people, indeed entire groups, outside the SL, are not sellouts.

That, precisely, was one of the biggest problems faced by the gang of two; cde Fred, schooled in Spartacism/IG-ism, produced and circulated a document aggressively criticizing every other local group. As I remember, that was the first thing circulated by the gang of two, and the only practical effect was that it became impossible to do any political work in the town where the two-person group was.

That everyone outside of Spartacism has sold out, seems to be an essential part of the SL's world view, and the corollary, of course, is that to be a Trotskyist, you have to live in an SL communal apartment and hand over most of what you make to the SL. That the SL is disappearing in front of our eyes, after having never led a strike AFAIK, seems to me to be history's judgment on that approach, which would, I am sure, be utterly incomprehensible to most workers in the US.

[blake 3:17]

As a complete outsider to the SL, my impression is that we will see Spartacism disappear in the US within two decades, if not in the next ten years.

Trotskyism will be gone in two decades.


That everyone outside of Spartacism has sold out, seems to be an essential part of the SL's world view, and the corollary, of course, is that to be a Trotskyist, you have to live in an SL communal apartment and hand over most of what you make to the SL. That the SL is disappearing in front of our eyes, after having never led a strike AFAIK, seems to me to be history's judgment on that approach, which would, I am sure, be utterly incomprehensible to most workers in the US.

Sane people don't join weird cults.

[Sakura]

Interesting discussion so far. I think the rhetoric used by IG is mostly hyperbole and it's no wonder they have no real support among the segment of society they claim to represent. However, the ISO's positions are a real problem...

I saw what the ISO did in Wisconsin last year, and it was quite a weak strategy for a self-described revolutionary organisation. Actual workers were definitely interested in the general strike, but most had no idea how to organize something like that and were looking to the union bureaucracy to guide them, which of course went to the elections instead. ISO's strategy was somewhat complicit with this, since it wasn't informative on how to win a victory.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say they "side with liberals", but they are taking too much of a cautious approach. The fact is, strikes and the like don't happen unless people actually advocate for it and educate others on how to make it happen. Maybe if it was more than just IWW doing the majority of that work, it could have become reality.

I get the sense that ISO, like many Trotskyist groups, takes the position that they need to obtain some control over the union bureaucracy, so that they can lead the working class organisations, because of the thinking that says to do otherwise is "ultra-leftism". Of course, many in the Occupy movement don't feel the need to obtain top-down legitimacy first, so this results in a conflict, but it's not because Occupiers are against the workers!

That position of focusing on trade union work is disempowering to the majority of people who aren't in those unions, yet have realised they have collective power. Radicals inside of trade unions often find themselves stabbed in the back by the conservative bureaucracy. The unions are not inherently revolutionary, and trying to make them so by building a faction inside of them, to eventually take control, almost always fails for so many obvious reasons. If they are obstacles, then it is entirely reasonable to try to bypass or replace them, and the Occupiers seem to have picked up on that.

[A Marxist Historian]

I knew it split from the SL, but wasn't the SL itself a SWP split and wasn't The Spark only in the SL for basically no time anyway (quickly going its own way in the 60s).

Kay Ellens, the founder of Spark, was a prominent leader of the Spartacists for some 4-5 years till she formed an opposition faction that split out and then became Spark. "Spark," as such, was never in the SL.


The question isn't who has two millionths of the US working class versus who has three millionths of it. It is what is the composition and orientation of the organization. The Spark is all workers and professional revolutionaries who are oriented to the workers, like Trotsky said in his documents on SWP policy.

I have always found the fact that "workerist" is used as an insult for a purportedly Marxist group by another purportedly Marxist group bizarre.


In one sentence you say The Spark's main error is focusing on bread and butter issues, in the next you say the workers "aren't too interested in communism." Self-contradictory?

No, not contradictory. As Marx explained in the Manifesto, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains. As Lenin explained in "What Is To Be Done," the kind of trade unionist economism that Spark advocates is actually a bourgeois ideology, profoundly contrary to the objective class interests of the working class.

This is particularly true in the US, with the classic apolitical trade unionism of Sam Gompers, for whom the slogan of the working class should be simply "more."

The basis of this, of course, is that the US capitalist class is the strongest in the world (even now), in a better position than any other to hand out a bit of "more" now and then to narrow segments of the working class.

So the job of communists is to get the backward American workers interested in communism. Given that they aren't right now, they need to have an attitude of patience. And if that means, as say in the late 1960s with SDS, that it happens to be a lot easier to recruit students at a particular moment to the vanguard party of the working class than factory workers, then that should be the focus.

Which is what that 1968-69 faction fight between Ellens and the Spartacist majority was all about.


In fact The Spark always draws the conclusion from the bread and butter stuff that "the bourgeoisie are crooks and liars and the power has to be taken from that class." Classic communism and they don't have to talk about the Soviet Union...

I'm with Lenin on this. The job of a communist is to be a tribune of the people not a trade union secretary. The working class doesn't just need butten on their bread, they need to play their objective role that Marx explained, as the liberators of the human race, taking up every form of oppression inflicted by capitalism, racism, imperialism, etc. etc., and leading everybody in struggle vs. the capitalists. Not just worrying about themselves!

This doesn't mean that the practical day to day class struggle should be ignored, far from it. But you don't need Spark style purely economic agitation to get workers mad about how they are treated on the shop floor, they are plenty aware of that already, better than the leaflet writers themselves nine times out of ten.

When the class struggle breaks out between labor and management, as it always will, as it did in Longview for example, the communists want to be the best fighters. But when we are talking to the workers, being that peoples tribune and fighting against racism, against the oppression of immigrants, against all the ways that the working class is divided by the rulers giving some privileges and others the shaft, is more important.

Something Lutte Ouvriere in France is notorious for falling down on the job about, even supporting throwing Muslim girls out of schools if they want to wear the veil! Capitulating to anti-Muslim French chauvinism, which is so rampant among French workers these days, with many even voting for the fascistic Muslim-hating National Front.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Thanks for the replies and discussion on unions.
We really should have that discussion split from this thread, and continue it.

I agree that rank and file union members are important. But is the best way to reach them through traditional "trade union work" the way leftists have usually done?
Some leftists get into unions and set up some kind of alternative caucus inside. Okay, but then the real debate begins about what is that caucus supposed to be and be doing.
Should it basically act in its own name independently and provide worker-ccommunist class strugglist leadership...the union bureaucrats be damned? Basically like a "union within a union", which takes it upon itself to help educate and organize and mobilize currently non-union working people as well, regardless of permission granted by the bureaucrats? That sort of thing would be a great development, I think. Sure, that might force bureaucrats to enforce or come up with rules letting them oust the caucus membetd...but then, you already would have the groundwork in place to replace their shell "union" with the caucus-transformed-into-new-union, and the work that was done which provoked the bureaucrats to break out the expulsion-hammer will not be uninfluential among working people involved and affected. So if union caucus people get the boot, strike back to decertify the current "shell" union bureaucrat representation and demand the new union is recognized as sole bargaining agent instead...and that includes all the workers who were not covered by the old union which now seek the new union's representation. Of course, then there is the question of money. People paid dues into the old union for a long time, ain't gotten shit for it, and I think it is time for a refund.
Say, 50% dues refund to the workers themselves and 50% if each refund deposited to the new union's fund ( obviously, a STRIKE FUND). Old union will freak and react by bring lawyers and generally exposing itself...we win, they're done, whether we actually get the dues money back or not! Time to put the days of lazy dues-extorting parasite undemocratic unaccountable sellout union bureaucrats behind us...not one more penny for them and their pathetic behind-closed-doors class collaboration "negotiations".
Workers negotiate by means of wider class organization, mass mobilization and strikes...not begging, not obedience, not looking out for what's good for the bosses.
We come to kick ass until the bourgeois owners give in to our demands because we have defeated them or shown them-and us workers ourselves-that we really could do so right here and now, and we don't stop until the workers' movement has democratically decided to make a TACTICAL halt while we expand workers' control of our workplaces and ensure compliance with our demands, further organize the unorganized, intervene in the interests of working people and the oppressed as ought to be done by the workers' movement, and prepare for further wider advancement in the next round of class struggle when working people feel it is time to make a fight once more. I think that's the kind of "unions" workimg people wished we had and wished we could belong to. Just think of how such new unions would be involved with an Occupy-like movement, and how movements like Occupy would affect these new unions.

Back in the '70s and into the '80s, the Spartacists had an orientation to building oppositional caucuses to fight it out with the union leaders for control over the unions, on the basis of Trotsky's Transitional Program. And had various successes, electing people to union office here and there, etc.

But that was a different period. Unions were a lot stronger, and union caucuses of various sorts to fight over union office were very common.

In retrospect, I think the strategy, which the SL never actually repudiated and which the BT, at least in theory, follows to this day, was problematic. It was a kind of trade union electoralism, appropriate to a period of great union strength combined with general political apathy and cynicism, in which workers were not so much anti-communist as politically indifferent.

So workers were perfectly willing to vote for oppositionists who seemed like they were good fighters and honest, even if they were blazing red radicals with programs workers basically weren't that interested in.

Now, with unions under major attack and fighting for their survival, it's a different period, things are more serious.

Forming a left wing oppositional caucus, which is a direct challenge to the union officers maintaining themselves in office and collecting their salaries, is only appropriate now when and where workers are moving to the left and getting seriously interested in revolutionary ideas. Otherwise, you'll just get your ass kicked in to no real purpose.

Unless of course it isn't really a left wing caucus, but just another caucus saying vote for me 'cuz I'm honest and won't sell out. Plenty of those, and regardless of whether the caucusers are leftists or whatever, when they get elected, maybe they don't take graft, but they do sell out.

Union bureaucrats don't sell out 'cuz they are evil, but because of their narrow horizons, solely focused on immediate day to day issues, with the inevitable temptation to take the best deal you can get when under pressure.

As for "Occupy," it is not a movement of the working class but of the "99%," a populist movement. You can't organize the working class on that basis, and you shouldn't if you could.

There are of course a lot of leftists and pro working class people within Occupy. They need to fight for Occupy to drop the "99%" crap and become a working class movement for socialism, which means that they have to be willing to split from Occupy when the time comes.

-M.H.-

[workersadvocate]

I am still trying to wrap my head around this idea that today's unions somehow still belong to the members, rather than having become a kind of niche speciality management business.
In competitions between exploiting classes (bourgeois vs bourgeois, bourgeois vs petty bourgeois), why should working people take either side or any other side but our own?

Sure, there are working people who belong to today's unions and still believe in them. There are also many more working people who don't belong to today's unions and do not have remaining faith in today's union labor-management schemes. So how should we relate?

I'm not sure that I understand AMH's current stance. Does that last post mean that we must support the union bureaucracies, right or wrong, because the union business is under attack by some of the bourgeois class they partnered up with?
And is this Jimmie's stance also?
And the others here?

[Kassad]

I suppose the thing that gets me about the IBT and the IG is that they are convinced that the SL leadership woke up one day with a stick in their ass and the decision to deform Trotskyism. Political degeneration is a process. It doesn't happen overnight and it certainly doesn't happen with the decision to expel a certain faction. I don't see why this is so difficult to grasp. Along those lines, if a group's political line is degenerating, as the IG says starting with some union issue in Brazil, work to change it and get it back on the revolutionary road. Nothing suggests Norden did this before his expulsion. Hell, at least the BT formed the External Tendency first. Maybe I'm missing something here.

[A Marxist Historian]

I am still trying to wrap my head around this idea that today's unions somehow still belong to the members, rather than having become a kind of niche speciality management business.
In competitions between exploiting classes (bourgeois vs bourgeois, bourgeois vs petty bourgeois), why should working people take either side or any other side but our own?

Sure, there are working people who belong to today's unions and still believe in them. There are also many more working people who don't belong to today's unions and do not have remaining faith in today's union labor-management schemes. So how should we relate?

I'm not sure that I understand AMH's current stance. Does that last post mean that we must support the union bureaucracies, right or wrong, because the union business is under attack by some of the bourgeois class they partnered up with?
And is this Jimmie's stance also?
And the others here?

Support the union bureaucracy right or wrong? Hell no, don't support them at all.

Support the union itself right or wrong vs. the employers? Hell yes.

Do the unions "belong to," by which you mean I think are they run by, the membership? Well, no. But in the broader sense, yes, the unions belong to the workers, and they need to take them back from the bureaucrats who have stolen their unions from them.

But most workers in the US still basically believe that socialism is at best impossible and at worst a bad thing, and therefore basically just want the unions to defend their day to day interests within capitalism. Therefore they vote for the bureaucrats in union elections, because they think the current bureaucrats are the best folk around to do that, they got the experience, the training, etc. etc.

They are wrong. Ultimately, the only way you can defend the day to day interests of the workers is if you are fighting to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, because capitalism is simply no longer capable of providing a decent life for ordinary working people.

But that's something workers can only learn in struggle, which most certainly means their day to day economic struggle inside their unions.

What about all those workers who aren't in unions? Well, they need to join unions, and until they do so, they are, quite simply, fucked. So organizing the unorganized is a major, major part of what unions need to be doing that they aren't doing now.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I suppose the thing that gets me about the IBT and the IG is that they are convinced that the SL leadership woke up one day with a stick in their ass and the decision to deform Trotskyism. Political degeneration is a process. It doesn't happen overnight and it certainly doesn't happen with the decision to expel a certain faction. I don't see why this is so difficult to grasp. Along those lines, if a group's political line is degenerating, as the IG says starting with some union issue in Brazil, work to change it and get it back on the revolutionary road. Nothing suggests Norden did this before his expulsion. Hell, at least the BT formed the External Tendency first. Maybe I'm missing something here.

Actually, you are missing something here. It was called the "External Tendency" for a reason. It was formed after the people in it had all quit the SL, or gotten expelled, over nonpolitical issues (and some of the expulsions were for pretty grotesque stuff) without arguing for any different political ideas.

The only exception was BT guru Howard Keylor. But even he only argued for his support of the labor-bureaucrat-organized consumer boycott of plane flights during the PATCO strike pretty briefly, and when he resigned, if I remember right, he didn't even claim he was right about that in his resignation statement.

-M.H.-

[Kassad]

Actually, you are missing something here. It was called the "External Tendency" for a reason. It was formed after the people in it had all quit the SL, or gotten expelled, over nonpolitical issues (and some of the expulsions were for pretty grotesque stuff) without arguing for any different political ideas.

The only exception was BT guru Howard Keylor. But even he only argued for his support of the labor-bureaucrat-organized consumer boycott of plane flights during the PATCO strike pretty briefly, and when he resigned, if I remember right, he didn't even claim he was right about that in his resignation statement.

-M.H.-

Thanks for clearing that up. Frankly, it's a good thirty years later and the IBT has absolutely no presence in the United States other than the Bay Area, if I remember correctly. Then again, the Spartacist presence has significantly declined as well, but I still enjoy their publications.

[DaringMehring]

No, not contradictory. As Marx explained in the Manifesto, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains. As Lenin explained in "What Is To Be Done," the kind of trade unionist economism that Spark advocates is actually a bourgeois ideology, profoundly contrary to the objective class interests of the working class.

This is particularly true in the US, with the classic apolitical trade unionism of Sam Gompers, for whom the slogan of the working class should be simply "more."


Absurd accusation. Spark is completely political. Not "apolitical trade unionism." They hate Gompers. Hell they hate John L. Lewis. You can find chock-a-block articles on their website against sell-out union bureaucrats, and in fact generally tracing the evolution of unions from workers' organizations to bourgeoisie's puppets. Eg:
The Unions: Creations of the Workers, Tools of the Bourgeoisie
http://the-spark.net/o_unionsbt.html



The basis of this, of course, is that the US capitalist class is the strongest in the world (even now), in a better position than any other to hand out a bit of "more" now and then to narrow segments of the working class.

So the job of communists is to get the backward American workers interested in communism. Given that they aren't right now, they need to have an attitude of patience. And if that means, as say in the late 1960s with SDS, that it happens to be a lot easier to recruit students at a particular moment to the vanguard party of the working class than factory workers, then that should be the focus.

Which is what that 1968-69 faction fight between Ellens and the Spartacist majority was all about.


So you're basically saying the SL and the ISO are united in "student vanguardism." How terrible. The workers not only do not need outside-class forces to lead them, it hurts them. People disconnected from the workers telling them what to do based on their interpretation of history and politics -- that does remind me of the SL and their endless theoretical stuff and obsession with keeping "the sacred texts" and "one true interpretation."

As the Spark says in their founding statement:


For several decades, revolutionary ideology has been able to survive only among petty bourgeois intellectuals. It is from this milieu that the Trotskyist organizations have drawn their cadres and in which they have their influence. Throughout their histories, these organizations have been unable to leave this milieu and function in the working class.

Trotsky himself many times stressed the necessity of organizational measures which would force militants of petty bourgeois origin to break with their native milieu, in order to put themselves at the service of the working class. Most of the Trotskyist organizations simply did not realize the absolute necessity of these measures and as a result were incapable of implementing them. Others openly rejected Trotsky’s position.

As a result, these groups either ceased to, or never did participate in the daily struggles of the working class. And now most of them abandon the working class in their theoretical positions. The majority hold that the industrial proletariat can be replaced in its historical role by other social forces in the economically underdeveloped countries, e.g. the peasantry or nationalist intellectuals. They also exaggerate the role that non-proletarian social categories, particularly students and intellectuals, can play in the advanced capitalist countries.

....

This is what happened to the majority of Trotskyist organizations. Work in the petty bourgeois arenas, which they formerly accepted as a necessity, they now proclaim as a virtue. They pretend that students, petty bourgeois intellectuals, and nationalist leaders are the vanguard which by its action will catalyze the working class into revolutionary consciousness. The myth of exemplary action was long ago expounded by the anarchists. It is revealing of the social composition of the Trotskyist organizations that they have taken up this myth today. It is also tragic.




I'm with Lenin on this. The job of a communist is to be a tribune of the people not a trade union secretary. The working class doesn't just need butten on their bread, they need to play their objective role that Marx explained, as the liberators of the human race, taking up every form of oppression inflicted by capitalism, racism, imperialism, etc. etc., and leading everybody in struggle vs. the capitalists. Not just worrying about themselves!

This doesn't mean that the practical day to day class struggle should be ignored, far from it. But you don't need Spark style purely economic agitation to get workers mad about how they are treated on the shop floor, they are plenty aware of that already, better than the leaflet writers themselves nine times out of ten.


Spark again and again agitates for revolution. It is not "purely economic agitation" it is the golden formula of tying concrete economic fights to the need for revolution, by showing that the bourgeoisie is the enemy and society is ruled by that class and structured by that class's interests.

You seem obsessed with the idea that they're some kind of Bernsteins or Martinovskys but it's really far from the mark.

I guess when you're disconnected from the working class those working class struggles do look like "mere bread and butter" though. And someone who stoops to engage in them rather than agitating for "Defend NK deformed workers' state" or "we were right about Afghanistan 30 years ago!" must surely be some kind of apolitical trade unionist.



When the class struggle breaks out between labor and management, as it always will, as it did in Longview for example, the communists want to be the best fighters. But when we are talking to the workers, being that peoples tribune and fighting against racism, against the oppression of immigrants, against all the ways that the working class is divided by the rulers giving some privileges and others the shaft, is more important.


That is one of the main merits of Spark's strategy. Communists have to be workers. Their group may be small -- they often lament how small it is -- but it is filled with working class people with rock solid politics. Not here-today gone-tomorrow non-proletarian students or creepy old cultists.



Something Lutte Ouvriere in France is notorious for falling down on the job about, even supporting throwing Muslim girls out of schools if they want to wear the veil! Capitulating to anti-Muslim French chauvinism, which is so rampant among French workers these days, with many even voting for the fascistic Muslim-hating National Front.


What a silly attempt at defamation. The LO hates the NF and attacks them all the time. The LO generally supported the ban not out of anti-Muslim chauvinism but against male chauvinism and in favor of secularism. You know in the USSR, back in the early days when Trotsky still had some power, they burned down churches and got rid of the Orthodox Church. It was only later that Stalin brought it back to help develop nationalism.

Basically, your whole post is a weird fantasy where The Spark is some kind of Economist trade union bureaucrat booster club. But read any issue of their newspaper and you can see how false that is.

Or check their website's info-page, eg:



We want revolution made by the working class
The working class has the capacity to replace capitalism with a free, humane and harmonious society: communist society. The workers do the work to make society run, they can use their power to run the whole society and begin the work of organizing socialist society. They are the only ones who can.

[Crux]

What a silly attempt at defamation. The LO hates the NF and attacks them all the time. The LO generally supported the ban not out of anti-Muslim chauvinism but against male chauvinism and in favor of secularism. You know in the USSR, back in the early days when Trotsky still had some power, they burned down churches and got rid of the Orthodox Church. It was only later that Stalin brought it back to help develop nationalism.
Which of course is nowhere near comparable to what LO, PCF and significant parts of the ex-LCR supporting what is essentially isalmophobe legislation under the guise of doing it for feminism (or "secularism"). One has to be extremely naive not to see the intentions of the lawmakers, or as is probably more likely, having opportunistically given in to islamophobe tendencies in society, using "secularist" arguments as a fig leaf.

[A Marxist Historian]

Absurd accusation. Spark is completely political. Not "apolitical trade unionism." They hate Gompers. Hell they hate John L. Lewis. You can find chock-a-block articles on their website against sell-out union bureaucrats, and in fact generally tracing the evolution of unions from workers' organizations to bourgeoisie's puppets. Eg:
The Unions: Creations of the Workers, Tools of the Bourgeoisie
http://the-spark.net/o_unionsbt.html

No, I'm not saying that you guys are Gompersites fer chrissake, but that you are economists. The Russian economists whom Lenin criticized often had flaming red revolutionary rhetoric in their newspapers, much more radical than anything in Spark.

But in their factory flyers, it was all dollars and cents (or rubles and kopecks) and bad working conditions, just like you guys with yours.

Martynov called that "tactics as process," a much more sophisticated justification than anything you guys have.



So you're basically saying the SL and the ISO are united in "student vanguardism." How terrible. The workers not only do not need outside-class forces to lead them, it hurts them. People disconnected from the workers telling them what to do based on their interpretation of history and politics -- that does remind me of the SL and their endless theoretical stuff and obsession with keeping "the sacred texts" and "one true interpretation."

Student vanguardism shmanguardism. Now the ISO, unlike the Spartacists, really do put all their effort into college campuses, but even they hardly claim that students are the vanguard like some late '60s New Leftists.

The Spartacist majority wanted to go into SDS in 1968 to fight against student vanguardism and win over the rapidly radicalising students to the working class cause. But because Kay Ellens tied them up in a stupid year-long faction fight, by the time she and her followers left it was largely too late, and the Progressive Labor Stalinists with their Worker Student Alliance won the majority of SDS in 1969 with its hundred thousand members, instead of the Spartacists. This was not exactly because your average SDS member had a burning admiration for Joe Stalin, but only because PL was the only really pro-working-class force within SDS.

And I am all too familiar with this because I was one of the relatively small number of Worker Student Alliance people who the Spartacists managed to win over to their "Revolutionary Marxist Caucus" in PL-SDS in the aftermath. At my campus, when I showed up there as a freshman, PL-WSA had a hundred members and everybody was complaining about how badly the membership had dropped off from the previous year...

A workers party is made up of both workers and intellectuals, both components breaking their ties to bourgeois society, class privilege for the intellectuals and trade union economism and other forms of bourgeois-inflicted backwardness for the workers, and becoming professional revolutionaries.

You should read Lenin's book What Is To Be Done some time. It may not convince you, but then at least you'd realize that you aren't a Leninist, and have much more in common with the economists he was criticizing.



As the Spark says in their founding statement:

Spark again and again agitates for revolution. It is not "purely economic agitation" it is the golden formula of tying concrete economic fights to the need for revolution, by showing that the bourgeoisie is the enemy and society is ruled by that class and structured by that class's interests.

You seem obsessed with the idea that they're some kind of Bernsteins or Martinovskys but it's really far from the mark.

Not Bernstein, but Martynov. Except that Martynov was much more sophisticated and much more revolutionary in his rhetoric.

In fact, he ended up joining the Bolsheviks after the Revolution--and, predictably, becoming a loyal Stalinist.


I guess when you're disconnected from the working class those working class struggles do look like "mere bread and butter" though. And someone who stoops to engage in them rather than agitating for "Defend NK deformed workers' state" or "we were right about Afghanistan 30 years ago!" must surely be some kind of apolitical trade unionist.

Oh please. Of course those Spartacists on the job, and most of them are on the job, the Spartacists no longer even have a national youth organization, they could use more students not less, participate in working class struggles where they work. They simply don't see purely economic agitation Spark style as the way to win over workers to revolutionary politics.

They try to provide revolutionary guidance for working class struggles when they break out, such as in Longview for example, and also follow Lenin's advice and try to be "tribunes of the people," agitating among the workers in defense of blacks and women and immigrants and gays.

Dollars and cents economic agitation Spark style is simply unnecessary. The workers already know they are being exploited, on shop floor issues it is usually them who can teach the would-be revolutionaries, whether from Spartacist or Spark or whatever, rather than the other way around.



That is one of the main merits of Spark's strategy. Communists have to be workers. Their group may be small -- they often lament how small it is -- but it is filled with working class people with rock solid politics. Not here-today gone-tomorrow non-proletarian students or creepy old cultists.

LIke Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg? None of whom ever worked a day in their life in a factory? Hell, Engels was a capitalist for godsake!



What a silly attempt at defamation. The LO hates the NF and attacks them all the time. The LO generally supported the ban not out of anti-Muslim chauvinism but against male chauvinism and in favor of secularism. You know in the USSR, back in the early days when Trotsky still had some power, they burned down churches and got rid of the Orthodox Church. It was only later that Stalin brought it back to help develop nationalism.

That's almost funny. So you support throwing immigrant Muslim school girls out of school not 'cuz you are immigrant bashers, but because you are ... feminists. That kind of French imperialist feminism, Algerian colonist style, Muslim women can do very nicely without.

As for the Bolsheviks, no as a matter of fact they were not into burning down churches, and the Orthodox Church was not disbanded. Instead, they had an organization for anti-religious propaganda, which fought against the noxious influence of religion through argument, not force and violence against believers. It was under Stalin, in the early '30s, that you did actually have church burnings, briefly, till he changed his line.

What did the Bolsheviks do when Lenin was alive and Trotsky was a leader, about the veil in the Muslim areas in Soviet Russia? Ban it?

Hell, no!

Instead, the Bolshevik womens' organization sent women into Soviet Central Asia, from the outside by the way, first teaching them the local languages, and they donned the veil so as better to be able to reach out to and organize the Muslim women!

-M.H.-



Basically, your whole post is a weird fantasy where The Spark is some kind of Economist trade union bureaucrat booster club. But read any issue of their newspaper and you can see how false that is.

Or check their website's info-page, eg:

[DaringMehring]

Which of course is nowhere near comparable to what LO, PCF and significant parts of the ex-LCR supporting what is essentially isalmophobe legislation under the guise of doing it for feminism (or "secularism"). One has to be extremely naive not to see the intentions of the lawmakers, or as is probably more likely, having opportunistically given in to islamophobe tendencies in society, using "secularist" arguments as a fig leaf.

Why is it a fig leaf? Jewish kids aren't allowed to wear Star of Davids in school there. Why should Muslim girls get to wear the veil? You know the French revolution did some things... like giving France a strong secularist tradition. Why should they go backwards historically?

That you automatically assume it is some kind of sell-out to Islamophobia, when LO constantly agitates against Islamophobia and anti-immigrantism. This is clearly a reflection of your own sniping leftist ghetto politics.

The position on women/religion can be seen for instance in this very issue of the Spark newspaper.

Iran: Horror and Barbarism against Women http://the-spark.net/np909402.html
Israel: Religious Fanaticism against Women http://the-spark.net/np909403.html
Catholic Church Wants to Impose Its Will on Women http://the-spark.net/np909404.html

Consistent. True. Progressive. Stop apologizing for these wackos under the guise of "religious freedom" or "not siding with religious-phobia." That is the real opportunism.

[DaringMehring]

Disclaimer: I am not a member of The Spark. I am a sympathizer but I am not part of the organization. They probably think my politics are flabby.



Student vanguardism shmanguardism. Now the ISO, unlike the Spartacists, really do put all their effort into college campuses, but even they hardly claim that students are the vanguard like some late '60s New Leftists.


It's amazing to me, that a group practicing "X", and a group practicing "not X," and Spartacists will still come in and say they're both wrong. I think the basic premise of the Spartacists is that all other groups are just wrong, and they then spend all their time coming up with ex post facto rationalizations for that.



The Spartacist majority wanted to go into SDS in 1968 to fight against student vanguardism and win over the rapidly radicalising students to the working class cause. But because Kay Ellens tied them up in a stupid year-long faction fight, by the time she and her followers left it was largely too late, and the Progressive Labor Stalinists with their Worker Student Alliance won the majority of SDS in 1969 with its hundred thousand members, instead of the Spartacists. This was not exactly because your average SDS member had a burning admiration for Joe Stalin, but only because PL was the only really pro-working-class force within SDS.

And I am all too familiar with this because I was one of the relatively small number of Worker Student Alliance people who the Spartacists managed to win over to their "Revolutionary Marxist Caucus" in PL-SDS in the aftermath. At my campus, when I showed up there as a freshman, PL-WSA had a hundred members and everybody was complaining about how badly the membership had dropped off from the previous year...


That's rich. The Spartacists would have succeeded, if only that nasty Spark lady hadn't sabotaged them.

Ridiculous enough on the face of it, but super laughable considering the consistent and ongoing destruction wreaked by their alcoholic high cultist Jim Robertson.



A workers party is made up of both workers and intellectuals, both components breaking their ties to bourgeois society, class privilege for the intellectuals and trade union economism and other forms of bourgeois-inflicted backwardness for the workers, and becoming professional revolutionaries.

You should read Lenin's book What Is To Be Done some time. It may not convince you, but then at least you'd realize that you aren't a Leninist, and have much more in common with the economists he was criticizing.


I've read it.
You are misrepresenting the Spark to fit it into the critique the SL has apparently decided on for them.
And secondly, basic dialectics is that everything changes, Lenin in 1901 is not Lenin for all time. It is the place of Stalinist zombies to proclaim every quote of Lenin an eternal wisdom for all time, whether it was made in 1895, 1905, 1917, 1922 or contradicts other things he wrote or did.



Not Bernstein, but Martynov. Except that Martynov was much more sophisticated and much more revolutionary in his rhetoric.

In fact, he ended up joining the Bolsheviks after the Revolution--and, predictably, becoming a loyal Stalinist.


I know about that guy. He was shit. More proof of how Stalinism/Maoism basically equals Menshevism when it comes to the big questions of stagism and class collaboration.



Oh please. Of course those Spartacists on the job, and most of them are on the job, the Spartacists no longer even have a national youth organization, they could use more students not less, participate in working class struggles where they work. They simply don't see purely economic agitation Spark style as the way to win over workers to revolutionary politics.


You act like if you keep repeating "purely economic" it will make it true.



They try to provide revolutionary guidance for working class struggles when they break out, such as in Longview for example, and also follow Lenin's advice and try to be "tribunes of the people," agitating among the workers in defense of blacks and women and immigrants and gays.


Read: they have no connection to the working class, so when something goes down, they have no organic link, and have to jump in from outside.



Dollars and cents economic agitation Spark style is simply unnecessary. The workers already know they are being exploited, on shop floor issues it is usually them who can teach the would-be revolutionaries, whether from Spartacist or Spark or whatever, rather than the other way around.


You know what workers like to talk about? Their fights with the boss and all the shit they get put through. That's the best part of the Spark newspaper and the LO newspaper. Party member militants making reports from their workplace fights.



LIke Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg? None of whom ever worked a day in their life in a factory? Hell, Engels was a capitalist for godsake!


The Spark allows for people in the category of essentially professional revolutionary. Such category would qualify those people. However, it follows the directive of Trotsky that those professionals should prove their ability to recruit & interact with workers. Remember, Trotsky said to the SWP, that they should expel any petit-bourgeois member who could not recruit one worker in a period of 6 months or a year.



That's almost funny. So you support throwing immigrant Muslim school girls out of school not 'cuz you are immigrant bashers, but because you are ... feminists. That kind of French imperialist feminism, Algerian colonist style, Muslim women can do very nicely without.

As for the Bolsheviks, no as a matter of fact they were not into burning down churches, and the Orthodox Church was not disbanded. Instead, they had an organization for anti-religious propaganda, which fought against the noxious influence of religion through argument, not force and violence against believers. It was under Stalin, in the early '30s, that you did actually have church burnings, briefly, till he changed his line.


Dealt with that in re: Majakovsky.

Second, you are wrong about getting rid of the church. They found a bit more clever means of doing it than just illegalizing and attacking it, causing a split within, expropriating during the famine, etc. But the political will was to get rid of it among the cadres.

Ever heard the song "White Army Black Baron?"

"We are fomenting world fire / We will burn to the ground all churches and prisons" -- this was a popular Red Army song. By the way, the chorus specifically mentioned Trotsky, until it was of course changed during Stalin times.

Check the video at about 2:35 by the way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRfYh_0mEdM

Remember the Church was the pillar of support for the Tsar and had protected the Tsar as divine. The revolutionaries were ready to say fuck them.



What did the Bolsheviks do when Lenin was alive and Trotsky was a leader, about the veil in the Muslim areas in Soviet Russia? Ban it?

Hell, no!

Instead, the Bolshevik womens' organization sent women into Soviet Central Asia, from the outside by the way, first teaching them the local languages, and they donned the veil so as better to be able to reach out to and organize the Muslim women!


As if the tactics in a backward colonized Muslim country and a secularist capitalist country should be the same.

[A Marxist Historian]

Why is it a fig leaf? Jewish kids aren't allowed to wear Star of Davids in school there. Why should Muslim girls get to wear the veil? You know the French revolution did some things... like giving France a strong secularist tradition. Why should they go backwards historically?

That you automatically assume it is some kind of sell-out to Islamophobia, when LO constantly agitates against Islamophobia and anti-immigrantism. This is clearly a reflection of your own sniping leftist ghetto politics.

The position on women/religion can be seen for instance in this very issue of the Spark newspaper.

Iran: Horror and Barbarism against Women http://the-spark.net/np909402.html
Israel: Religious Fanaticism against Women http://the-spark.net/np909403.html
Catholic Church Wants to Impose Its Will on Women http://the-spark.net/np909404.html

Consistent. True. Progressive. Stop apologizing for these wackos under the guise of "religious freedom" or "not siding with religious-phobia." That is the real opportunism.

What wackos are we talking about? High school girls who want to wear veils? I don't know about you, but I meet veil-wearing high school and college students here in the US all the time. Quite a few of them think of themselves as feminists. They wear the veil mostly out of a misguided sense of Muslim pride, Muslims being just as viciously oppressed after 9/11 in the US as in France.

That Jewish kids aren't allowed to wear the Star of David in French high schools is not surprising to me. The French are a logical people, they know that both Jews and Arabs are Semites, so French anti-Semites hate them both.

But are Catholic kids kicked out of school if they wear crosses? Not according to what I've heard.

As for the LO constantly agitating vs. anti-immigrant prejudice, well, that ain't what I've heard either.

Rather, I've heard that in best economist style, the LO tries to avoid the whole issue and stick to bread-and-butter unionism, even at times when the whole country is convulsed over the immigrant question. With of course the occasional pious article in the paper saying that bashing immigrants is bad bad bad.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Disclaimer: I am not a member of The Spark. I am a sympathizer but I am not part of the organization. They probably think my politics are flabby.

It's amazing to me, that a group practicing "X", and a group practicing "not X," and Spartacists will still come in and say they're both wrong. I think the basic premise of the Spartacists is that all other groups are just wrong, and they then spend all their time coming up with ex post facto rationalizations for that.

Hey, it's not the fault of the Spartacists if all the other groups are wrong. Just the way life is.



That's rich. The Spartacists would have succeeded, if only that nasty Spark lady hadn't sabotaged them.

Ridiculous enough on the face of it, but super laughable considering the consistent and ongoing destruction wreaked by their alcoholic high cultist Jim Robertson...

Actually yes, that's my opinion and I was there. If Kay Ellens hadn't started her faction fight for LO politics, yes, the Spartacists would have made a much bigger impact on me and my fellow SDS members, and probably would be a lot bigger now. Instead of shooting up from 40 to some 300, while Spark remained isolated in Detroit recruiting almost nobody, they might have gotten into the thousands. That's my assessment.

But that's life in the political world, and most certainly not what I have against LO or Spark. If their politics were correct and the Spartacists wrong, then that would be the natural order of things. Unfortunately that is far from the case.

And all you come up with in answer to that is crap about how Robertson drinks too much! So what if he does, who cares?



...
You know what workers like to talk about? Their fights with the boss and all the shit they get put through. That's the best part of the Spark newspaper and the LO newspaper. Party member militants making reports from their workplace fights.

Hey look, buddy, I spent over twenty years as a union activist in a blue collar trade after I got out of college, and served as shop steward, on union picket committees, elected low level union rep, etc. etc. So I think I maybe know better than you what workers like to talk about.

What do we like to talk about? A lot of things. Baseball and football for example. And our fights with our bosses. But, you know what, we like to talk about bigger issues too. And we don't need some left group trying to tell us about how to deal with the bad conditions in our bathrooms or whatever, we usually have ideas about that on our own.[/QUOTE]



The Spark allows for people in the category of essentially professional revolutionary. Such category would qualify those people. However, it follows the directive of Trotsky that those professionals should prove their ability to recruit & interact with workers. Remember, Trotsky said to the SWP, that they should expel any petit-bourgeois member who could not recruit one worker in a period of 6 months or a year.

That was right at the tail end of labor's giant step, the Great Revolt of the CIO, and the tail end of the Great Depression. Yeah, not a good time for young socialists to hang around the college campuses and pass out anti-war petitions, like Shachtman's boys wanted! Especially being as it was downright easy for student radicals to get into a vibrant, bubbling labor movement wide open for labor militancy and socialist ideas.

This has not been that kind of a period.

Fact is, most of the hundred and fifty or so student radicals the Spartacists recruited from SDS and other student radical organizations went out and got factory jobs, mostly in auto and steel. (And lost them in the '80s during the deindustrialization, but that is another story.)

How many workers did they recruit to the SL? Not a lot, but more than Spark I suspect.




Dealt with that in re: Majakovsky.

Second, you are wrong about getting rid of the church. They found a bit more clever means of doing it than just illegalizing and attacking it, causing a split within, expropriating during the famine, etc. But the political will was to get rid of it among the cadres.

Ever heard the song "White Army Black Baron?"

"We are fomenting world fire / We will burn to the ground all churches and prisons" -- this was a popular Red Army song. By the way, the chorus specifically mentioned Trotsky, until it was of course changed during Stalin times.

Check the video at about 2:35 by the way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRfYh_0mEdM

Remember the Church was the pillar of support for the Tsar and had protected the Tsar as divine. The revolutionaries were ready to say fuck them.

As if the tactics in a backward colonized Muslim country and a secularist capitalist country should be the same.

To hell with the churches? Of course. Though the churches were never banned as you suggested, not even under Stalin at the height of the "Third Period."

But Trotsky was against jamming atheism down the throats of backward resistant workers, Stalin fashion. Or LO fashion with the veil.

A least Stalin wasn't doing it on behalf of French imperialist chauvinism!

-M.H.-

[DaringMehring]

Since the veil issue seems to be such a big deal, here are some articles dealing with it:
The condition of immigrant women in France http://the-spark.net/np715404.html
France: Religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women http://the-spark.net/np714402.html
The veil in Turkey: Maintaining women as slaves http://the-spark.net/np816402.html

It seems weird that this issue would be singled out, since it is not in relation to worker-boss, or to the class composition of the group. But I guess it's a combination of two things.

First, what it said in the Spark founding document, about how degenerating Trotskyist groups lost the proletariat and instead turned to non-proletarian groupings, eg nationalist, minority, or immigrant groups. Oh yeah if we pander to religious backwardness we might get a few of these Muslim men exploited on national origin and religious grounds to join us.

Second, leftist ghetto games.

Also, quite strange that MH criticizes Spark/LO again and again for being "purely economist" but when he wants to bring up an issue to attack them on he chooses... a cultural issue. On which they write: "Workers have nothing to gain by accepting the oppression of women. The emancipation of women is an integral part of the program of socialist revolutionaries. The fraternal society that we seek to build will be a society of liberty, that is to say, freed of all forms of exploitation and oppression."

Yes, "purely economic" indeed.

[Crux]

Since the veil issue seems to be such a big deal, here are some articles dealing with it:
The condition of immigrant women in France http://the-spark.net/np715404.html
France: Religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women http://the-spark.net/np714402.html
The veil in Turkey: Maintaining women as slaves http://the-spark.net/np816402.html

It seems weird that this issue would be singled out, since it is not in relation to worker-boss, or to the class composition of the group. But I guess it's a combination of two things.

First, what it said in the Spark founding document, about how degenerating Trotskyist groups lost the proletariat and instead turned to non-proletarian groupings, eg nationalist, minority, or immigrant groups. Oh yeah if we pander to religious backwardness we might get a few of these Muslim men exploited on national origin and religious grounds to join us.
What is amazing to me is that the first two articles, I haven't read the third, completely and utterly ignores the most important dynamic of the discussion of banning the niqab, in france and elsewhere, that is racism and islamophobia. It flat out ignores it...which is interesting. What is it that causes LO to be so completely ignorant in this regard?

[DaringMehring]

What is amazing to me is that the first two articles, I haven't read the third, completely and utterly ignores the most important dynamic of the discussion of banning the niqab, in france and elsewhere, that is racism and islamophobia. It flat out ignores it...which is interesting. What is it that causes LO to be so completely ignorant in this regard?

Your opinion is duly noted comrade but again we come back to the issue of who is determining the politics of the working class Party, what social class is playing the leading role. I don't know your background, but you aren't from France nor an immigrant, whereas in LO there are numerous of such people and in fact the first article was written by Trotskyist worker militants of African origin. They live in the communities every day. It is their struggle. They must have the final word.

And really, are they being racist and Islamophobic against themselves? Or is that just a liberal sensibility?

Since when is it racist anyway to ban religion. I don't think the USSR was racist when they were dismantling the Orthodox Church.

[Lucretia]

To hell with the churches? Of course. Though the churches were never banned as you suggested, not even under Stalin at the height of the "Third Period."

But Trotsky was against jamming atheism down the throats of backward resistant workers, Stalin fashion. Or LO fashion with the veil.


I would like to point out that this is correct. As strongly atheist as the leadership of the Bolshevik party was, in the pre-Stalin period they had a consistent policy of not persecuting people for their religious beliefs, and not preventing workers from expressing their religious views, even on the shop floor. The approach that Lenin et al took to this issue was the one they took so many issues during the period of the DoP: educate and persuade the workers, not coerce them -- otherwise they will never be fit to manage their own destinies under socialism.

[DaringMehring]

I would like to point out that this is correct. As strongly atheist as the leadership of the Bolshevik party was, in the pre-Stalin period they had a consistent policy of not persecuting people for their religious beliefs, and not preventing workers from expressing their religious views, even on the shop floor. The approach that Lenin et al took to this issue was the one they took so many issues during the period of the DoP: educate and persuade the workers, not coerce them -- otherwise they will never be fit to manage their own destinies under socialism.

There is a big difference between persecuting people for their religious beliefs, and dismantling organized religion.

They weren't in the business of rounding up some random Orthodox person -- which would be wrong, stupid, and impossible. They broke the church power which was another thing altogether. The church was a giant bureaucratic apparatus, with property, a hierarchical staff, symbols and a tradition. That is what they attacked.

And well done. They turned those churches in Moscow into public swimming pools and replaced the crosses with red stars. Of course since 1991, they've been mostly changed back...

[A Marxist Historian]

Since the veil issue seems to be such a big deal, here are some articles dealing with it:
The condition of immigrant women in France http://the-spark.net/np715404.html
France: Religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women http://the-spark.net/np714402.html
The veil in Turkey: Maintaining women as slaves http://the-spark.net/np816402.html

It seems weird that this issue would be singled out, since it is not in relation to worker-boss, or to the class composition of the group. But I guess it's a combination of two things.

First, what it said in the Spark founding document, about how degenerating Trotskyist groups lost the proletariat and instead turned to non-proletarian groupings, eg nationalist, minority, or immigrant groups. Oh yeah if we pander to religious backwardness we might get a few of these Muslim men exploited on national origin and religious grounds to join us.

Second, leftist ghetto games.

Also, quite strange that MH criticizes Spark/LO again and again for being "purely economist" but when he wants to bring up an issue to attack them on he chooses... a cultural issue. On which they write: "Workers have nothing to gain by accepting the oppression of women. The emancipation of women is an integral part of the program of socialist revolutionaries. The fraternal society that we seek to build will be a society of liberty, that is to say, freed of all forms of exploitation and oppression."

Yes, "purely economic" indeed.

Here we have immigrant schoolgilrs being tossed out of school by the French capitalists, on a paper-thin "feminist" imperialist pretext, and for Daring Mehring, this is just a "cultural" issue.

Indeed, this is the perfect example of economism at its absolute worst. Essentially, the position of the LO is that the oppression of immigrants as immigrants is unimportant.

I'm not familiar enough with Spark to know if they similarly think the oppression of black people as blacks, and not just particularly badly paid workers, is unimportant too, but I have my suspicions. Certainly Daring Mehring clearly has no interest in "ghetto games" with respect to "non-proletarian groups" like, say, black people.

The tradition of American Social Democracy, like even Debs's infamous line, "we have nothing special to offer the Negro people."

But at least Debs opposed lynching. The position of LO on French Muslim schoolgirls wearing veils is that they are defying French cultural norms, so throw them out of school. Softcover lynching. That's more like Samuel Gompers than like any kind of socialist position. Economism at its absolute worst.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Your opinion is duly noted comrade but again we come back to the issue of who is determining the politics of the working class Party, what social class is playing the leading role. I don't know your background, but you aren't from France nor an immigrant, whereas in LO there are numerous of such people and in fact the first article was written by Trotskyist worker militants of African origin. They live in the communities every day. It is their struggle. They must have the final word.

And really, are they being racist and Islamophobic against themselves? Or is that just a liberal sensibility?

Since when is it racist anyway to ban religion. I don't think the USSR was racist when they were dismantling the Orthodox Church.

Who is Europe's leading Islamophobe? A Somalian woman currently married to the world's leading propagandist for imperialism (in so many words in his case) Niall Ferguson.

I have no idea what is going on with those "African Trotskyist worker militants" who allegedly wrote one of your articles. Perhaps they have had particularly bitter experiences with Islam, just as Ferguson's wife did.

Hopefully they will realize in time that by supporting LO, they have hopped on the bandwagon of a party with very little interest in fighting the oppression of immigrants in France. But that is a personal issue, and proves absolutely nothing one way or another about the correctness or lack thereof of the LO position.

Hell, here in America the Republican Party is headed by a black man. Does that mean it's not a racist party? The vast majority of black people in America would beg to differ.

And then of course we have Obama. Since he's the Prez, there must be no racism in America, right?

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

There is a big difference between persecuting people for their religious beliefs, and dismantling organized religion.

They weren't in the business of rounding up some random Orthodox person -- which would be wrong, stupid, and impossible. They broke the church power which was another thing altogether. The church was a giant bureaucratic apparatus, with property, a hierarchical staff, symbols and a tradition. That is what they attacked.

And well done. They turned those churches in Moscow into public swimming pools and replaced the crosses with red stars. Of course since 1991, they've been mostly changed back...

I think you should remember that the Russian Orthodox church was basically a state institution before the revolution. When you say "dismantling organized religion" you make it sound like Bolsheviks were running around burning down privately owned and operated churches. What in fact happened was the withdrawal of state privileges after the October Revolution. There was some church "dismantling" and the like, but this tended to happen during the period of the civil war, when said churches were literally being used for military purposes by the whites. It was not a campaign for dismantling churches as such. There are actually a good number of fascinating histories about this topic.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Your opinion is duly noted comrade but again we come back to the issue of who is determining the politics of the working class Party, what social class is playing the leading role. I don't know your background, but you aren't from France nor an immigrant, whereas in LO there are numerous of such people and in fact the first article was written by Trotskyist worker militants of African origin. They live in the communities every day. It is their struggle. They must have the final word.

And really, are they being racist and Islamophobic against themselves? Or is that just a liberal sensibility?

Since when is it racist anyway to ban religion. I don't think the USSR was racist when they were dismantling the Orthodox Church.

But it seems you miss the entire point, comrade. In France, the persecution of women for wearing the veil, is driven by anti-immigrant racism. Of course as Marxists, we have no affection for the veil -- it is an instrument used to oppress women. But we defend women's right to wear it if it is part of their faith. That seems elementary, irrespective of who is writing the LO articles. Shame on you for applauding this.

And I think that MH has a point about Ellens fight in the SL. It came at a critical juncture and paralyzed the group. By the time the SL emerged (quite a bit smaller) PL had won over the pro-working class wing of SDS. Sure the SL grew very quickly as PL disintegrated and people started to look for alternatives to their Stalinist perspective, but it was a matter of too little too late. And by now, perhaps, too little for too long.

[DaringMehring]

But it seems you miss the entire point, comrade. In France, the persecution of women for wearing the veil, is driven by anti-immigrant racism.

If you read the article written by the French African Trotskyists, you will see, that they mention persecution of women for not wearing the veil by people within the immigrant community. Gangs of thugs produced by the desperate exploitation, who turn to Islam and get violent toward women who don't follow the traditions.



Of course as Marxists, we have no affection for the veil -- it is an instrument used to oppress women. But we defend women's right to wear it if it is part of their faith. That seems elementary, irrespective of who is writing the LO articles. Shame on you for applauding this.

I don't understand what you see as elementary. You say the veil is a symbol of oppression. So you defend people's right to deploy symbols of oppression in public schools? Like swastikas or KKK shit? I don't believe that at all.

[DaringMehring]

I think you should remember that the Russian Orthodox church was basically a state institution before the revolution. When you say "dismantling organized religion" you make it sound like Bolsheviks were running around burning down privately owned and operated churches.

"Privately owned and operated" church? Weren't all the churches owned and operated by the Orthodox church? And besides what does it matter who owned it, we don't believe in the "sanctity of private property" anyway, right?

[DaringMehring]

Who is Europe's leading Islamophobe? A Somalian woman currently married to the world's leading propagandist for imperialism (in so many words in his case) Niall Ferguson.


Yeah I hate her. But a Trotskyist worker militant of African origin she ain't.



I have no idea what is going on with those "African Trotskyist worker militants" who allegedly wrote one of your articles. Perhaps they have had particularly bitter experiences with Islam, just as Ferguson's wife did.


There are a lot of them in LO's International (ICU). There's nothing "alleged" about their existence as I'm sure the Spartacists who get sent to disrupt LO meetings can tell you.

Are they "bitter at Islam," well... am I "bitter at Christianity" because of all the harm it wreaks on a daily basis in our society? And what does it matter what personal emotion we call it? We all know religion is outdated and reactionary and secularism is progressive.

[DaringMehring]

for Daring Mehring, this is just a "cultural" issue.


I was pointing out how you said LO is nothing but bread & butter factory agitation as your canned Spartacist attack line, but then ran to something clearly not a bread & butter issue where LO/Spark/ICU had taken a clear and aggressive stand, as your first concrete criticism.



Indeed, this is the perfect example of economism at its absolute worst. Essentially, the position of the LO is that the oppression of immigrants as immigrants is unimportant.


Not true at all.

Whose oppression are we fighting? Muslim women, and immigrants.

You, the self-styled god-like Spartacist descending from outside to enlighten these people, are neither a woman nor a Muslim woman nor an immigrant to France. So you are not in the oppressed category.

How easy for you to say the oppression of the veil is not really meaningful.

Instead, as it properly should be, the worker militants, including women, who live in that milieu, have made their statement and that is what the LO follows. This demonstrates a fundamental difference between the petit-bourgeois Spartacists and the proletarian LO.

[Crux]

I don't understand what you see as elementary. You say the veil is a symbol of oppression. So you defend people's right to deploy symbols of oppression in public schools? Like swastikas or KKK shit? I don't believe that at all.
So a niqab is basically a swastika? The fuck...? Again how is it that you and the article writers are completly avoiding the issue of islamophobia? It's not like it's not a big deal in europe at present.

[A Marxist Historian]

I was pointing out how you said LO is nothing but bread & butter factory agitation as your canned Spartacist attack line, but then ran to something clearly not a bread & butter issue where LO/Spark/ICU had taken a clear and aggressive stand, as your first concrete criticism.

Yeah, a clear and aggressive stand for ... French imperialist chauvinism.

Better you guys should stick to bread and butter factory agitation, at least that doesn't do any harm.



Not true at all.

Whose oppression are we fighting? Muslim women, and immigrants.

You, the self-styled god-like Spartacist descending from outside to enlighten these people, are neither a woman nor a Muslim woman nor an immigrant to France. So you are not in the oppressed category.

How easy for you to say the oppression of the veil is not really meaningful.

Instead, as it properly should be, the worker militants, including women, who live in that milieu, have made their statement and that is what the LO follows. This demonstrates a fundamental difference between the petit-bourgeois Spartacists and the proletarian LO.

So what are you? Are you a female Muslim immigrant to France? I don't think so, or you'd have boasted about it already.

So some African worker militants, following the LO, are supporting the French state's persecution of their own people, likely hoping to gain acceptance from their Christian co-workers. This kind of thing has happened before in history, all too many times in fact.

Anybody who thinks that *most* female Muslim immigrants in France feel this way is seriously delusional. I don't think you'll have much luck feeding that weird fantasy to too many other people here on Revleft.

-M.H.-

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

See Lenin's writings on the vanguard party as being a "tribune of the people." When you find yourself in agreement with Le Pen in France, it should make you very nervous. There is a difference for opposing the veil and lining up with the French bourgeoisie to persecute Muslims. These laws are not progressive. I am very surprised that LO and Spark are doing this.

[DaringMehring]

So a niqab is basically a swastika? The fuck...? Again how is it that you and the article writers are completly avoiding the issue of islamophobia? It's not like it's not a big deal in europe at present.

I said it was a symbol of oppression which is what Lev Bronsteinvich said. And it is. The veil is a symbol of the brutal subjugation of women by Islam for over a thousand years.

When you talk about Islamophobia... well... I have all-religions-a-phobia. I don't support destruction of secular tradition to accommodate the superstructure of slave and feudal societies being reintroduced to some country that has managed to progress past that point.




So what are you? Are you a female Muslim immigrant to France? I don't think so, or you'd have boasted about it already.


Anybody who thinks that *most* female Muslim immigrants in France feel this way is seriously delusional. I don't think you'll have much luck feeding that weird fantasy to too many other people here on Revleft.


The difference is, I have the good sense to listen to and follow the politically advanced cadres from that background, who have the daily experience in those milieus.

And it's not about "most." "Most" people always believe bullshit, as Marx said "the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." It is about what the politically advanced proletarian militants believe and in this case that is who made the analysis and I follow their lead.



See Lenin's writings on the vanguard party as being a "tribune of the people." When you find yourself in agreement with Le Pen in France, it should make you very nervous. There is a difference for opposing the veil and lining up with the French bourgeoisie to persecute Muslims. These laws are not progressive. I am very surprised that LO and Spark are doing this.


The line about "agreement with Le Pen" is simply stupid. So, if you oppose US wars you should be "very nervous" because "you find yourself in agreement with" the crazy capitalist Ron Paul? Or if you believe in gay marriage you should be nervous because you agree with jackass Republican mayor of SD Jerry Sanders? Come on. That is the oldest tactic in the book and one any Trotskyist should specially be able to see through, given how many times it was used against us by Stalinists.

Second, the bit about "tribune of the people." Well this seems to be the heart of it. Spartacists apparently see this as meaning you tell the proletarians what the correct line is, and then they follow it. LO instead defends what the advanced workers decide.

And of course LO is right. "The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class" -- which means they have to take their destiny in their own hands not have some Spartacist tell them what to do.

In case that wasn't obvious, how about the lyrics to the Internationale:

"Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun"

There are no supreme saviours
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
Producers, let us save ourselves
Decree the common salvation

I believe the English version references "condescending saviors," and the Russian version "heroes."

The saddest part here is, in this thread, "accusations of siding with liberals" made against Trotskyist group, we have here only a confirmation of this accusation for these MH/LB/Mayakovsky/etcs.


They admit they aren't proletarians or in the oppressed category in question.
Still they want to tell people who are what to think.
And, their "solution" is to respect the liberal values of "freedom of religion" and "respect of religious minorities."

And one other gem MH thinks Trotsky's intense insistence that the 4th Internationale/SWP put requirements on proletarian recruitment for members in order to build a proletarian party, was only a "contextual" "historically specific" idea -- nevermind what Marx said about the proletariat...

[Kassad]

Frankly, there doesn't seem to be any group out there that can lay claim to the mantle of the Fourth International. CWI and IMT both have sections across the world, but I don't really see any significant differences between them that make it necessary for them to exist separately. They'd make a hell of an international if they'd get over petty shit. On that note, I think groups like the SL/IG/IBT could make up a real revolutionary opposition to Cliffite reformism and the like, but they're stuck in a pissing match as well. It's a shame, frankly. It's why I never wasted my time by joining any Trotskyist groups.

[A Marxist Historian]

I said it was a symbol of oppression which is what Lev Bronsteinvich said. And it is. The veil is a symbol of the brutal subjugation of women by Islam for over a thousand years.

When you talk about Islamophobia... well... I have all-religions-a-phobia. I don't support destruction of secular tradition to accommodate the superstructure of slave and feudal societies being reintroduced to some country that has managed to progress past that point.



The difference is, I have the good sense to listen to and follow the politically advanced cadres from that background, who have the daily experience in those milieus.

And it's not about "most." "Most" people always believe bullshit, as Marx said "the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." It is about what the politically advanced proletarian militants believe and in this case that is who made the analysis and I follow their lead.



The line about "agreement with Le Pen" is simply stupid. So, if you oppose US wars you should be "very nervous" because "you find yourself in agreement with" the crazy capitalist Ron Paul? Or if you believe in gay marriage you should be nervous because you agree with jackass Republican mayor of SD Jerry Sanders? Come on. That is the oldest tactic in the book and one any Trotskyist should specially be able to see through, given how many times it was used against us by Stalinists.

Second, the bit about "tribune of the people." Well this seems to be the heart of it. Spartacists apparently see this as meaning you tell the proletarians what the correct line is, and then they follow it. LO instead defends what the advanced workers decide.

And of course LO is right. "The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class" -- which means they have to take their destiny in their own hands not have some Spartacist tell them what to do.

In case that wasn't obvious, how about the lyrics to the Internationale:

"Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun"

There are no supreme saviours
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
Producers, let us save ourselves
Decree the common salvation

I believe the English version references "condescending saviors," and the Russian version "heroes."

The saddest part here is, in this thread, "accusations of siding with liberals" made against Trotskyist group, we have here only a confirmation of this accusation for these MH/LB/Mayakovsky/etcs.


They admit they aren't proletarians or in the oppressed category in question.
Still they want to tell people who are what to think.
And, their "solution" is to respect the liberal values of "freedom of religion" and "respect of religious minorities."

And one other gem MH thinks Trotsky's intense insistence that the 4th Internationale/SWP put requirements on proletarian recruitment for members in order to build a proletarian party, was only a "contextual" "historically specific" idea -- nevermind what Marx said about the proletariat...

In DM's opinion, workers who follow LO are automatically "the advanced workers," because LO says so. Me, I think they're backward workers, though not as backward as, say, the much larger number of workers following Le Pen. Whom LO is sucking up to with this crap about the veil.

One other thing that has occurred to me. It'd be interesting to find out just how many of these African workers of LO have Christian and not Muslim backgrounds. It's no secret that the former French colonies in Africa are wracked by hatred and mutual massacres between Christians and Muslims.

-M.H.-

[Dabrowski]

In a February 15 post on this topic, A Marxist Historian simply regurgitates the crude lies the SL resorts to when it finds it necessary to cover up the often glaring contradiction between its words and its deeds. The facts are that the comrades of what is now the Brazilian section of the League for the Fourth International, the LQB, were elected to the leadership of the municipal workers union in the city of Volta Redonda (SFPMVR) on a program which called the police “the armed fist of the bourgeoisie” and said “no alliance with them is possible since they bring men armed and trained by the bourgeois state into the unions.” (That’s a direct quote, by the way, not a “paraphrase” in quotation marks as some on this list are wont to do.)

Upon taking office, and with the encouragement of the SL/ICL, they undertook a campaign to separate the municipal guards from the union. When the police didn't take kindly to this and made threatening moves, the ICL leadership suddenly got cold feet and “advised” the Brazilian comrades that they should quit their (elected) positions in the union, quit the union and leave town. Because of the danger, an ICL rep told them, it was necessary to “pull our hands out of the boiling water.” (Another direct quote.) When the Brazilians rightly refused this shameful “advice,” noting that nobody would ever follow a leadership that in the heat of struggle abandoned a fight they had begun, and when they also refused the ICL demand that they denounce comrades who had just been expelled in New York without being shown their documents, the ICL abruptly broke off relations.

This took place the day before the union meeting called to remove the police from the SFPMVR, on 19 June 1996. That meeting was shut down by military police wielding automatic rifles who were enforcing a court order saying that the purpose of the assembly was in violation of the Brazilian constitution. This was the first of no less than nine legal actions against the Brazilian Trotskyists over the next two years in retaliation for throwing the cops out of the union. The LQB never sued the union. In fact, its supporters were the union leadership which was sued and ousted by court order at the behest of the pro-police elements whose slanders the SL/ICL has repeated ever since.

Lurid tales of non-existent phone calls to Brazil, hand-wringing about a bogus "trial" and the like are simply attempts to cover up the ICL's betrayal, deserting in the heat of battle. Note that this was the first time in Brazilian history, and quite likely in the history of the Western Hemisphere, that any labor group threw the cops out of the unions, or even tried to. The SL has long claimed to stand for that, but nowhere have they sought to actually do it, including in unions such as AFSCME and the TWU where they had supporters. Words, and deeds.

And no, this is not just a dispute about who said and did what when, important as that is. Behind the ICL’s ignominious desertion was a broader retreat from the class struggle, a central theme in the year-long fight in the ICL over Germany which preceded the expulsions. It subsequently theorized this by saying the key thesis of Trotsky’s Transitional Program, that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of proletarian leadership, was outdated and the backwardness of the working class itself was now the main problem. The ICL is not alone in this: revisionists from Ernest Mandel to Peter Taaffe and Alan Woods (not to mention the ISO) all explicitly reject that fundamental tenet of Trotskyism.

Like others on the left, but in its own peculiar fashion, the ICL translated the tremendous defeat for the world working class represented by the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe into a defeatist program. With this justification the ICL has proceeded to abandon one key Spartacist position after another, notably burying the call for the defeat of one’s “own” imperialism, and denouncing the IG as “playing the counterfeit card of anti-Americanism” for continuing to uphold that Leninist program.

All this is amply documented in a number of detailed articles. On the expulsions you can read From a Drift Toward Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle (July 1996). On the persecution of the LQB and the ICL's sabotage of defense efforts, there are two dossiers, the first on Class Struggle and Repression in Volta Redonda, Brazil (February 1997) and the second Responses to ICL Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Trotskyists (May 2010). All three are available from the Internationalist Group. The last compilation was issued in response to the SL/ICL's revival of these slanders in order to excuse its support for U.S. imperialism's 2010 invasion of Haiti in the guise of providing earthquake relief aid. Anyone interested can consult articles available on the Internationalist Group website (Revleft does not allow me to post hyperlinks):

"ICL Leaders Escalate Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Militants" (June 1997)

"Why They Lie: WV's Frenzied Slanders Can't Hide ICL Leaders' Brazil Betrayal" (July 1997)

[Crux]

I said it was a symbol of oppression which is what Lev Bronsteinvich said. And it is. The veil is a symbol of the brutal subjugation of women by Islam for over a thousand years.

When you talk about Islamophobia... well... I have all-religions-a-phobia. I don't support destruction of secular tradition to accommodate the superstructure of slave and feudal societies being reintroduced to some country that has managed to progress past that point.
Why single out the niqab? Now I hardly "support" the niqab, I am neither religious nor do I appreciate it's history. But you singling out the niqab makes it sound like you think it is somehow unique and that somehow automatically anyone who wears one is oppressed. And you singling out Islam is even more interesting, especially considering Islam was comparatively more progressive than other religions in the area. Women has the right to divorce if their husband is away too much, for example.
But I digress, of course there was and is also strong patriarchal structures in the arabian peninsula.

Ah, which excellently shows your absolute blindness. As has been noted, flat out ignoring racism from the left is nothing new. Except in your case you openly admit to islamophobia and indeed uses arguments reminiscent of the far right.


The saddest part here is, in this thread, "accusations of siding with liberals" made against Trotskyist group, we have here only a confirmation of this accusation for these MH/LB/Mayakovsky/etcs.


They admit they aren't proletarians or in the oppressed category in question.
Still they want to tell people who are what to think.
And, their "solution" is to respect the liberal values of "freedom of religion" and "respect of religious minorities."
Is not appeals to "secularism" when defending discrimination the most "liberal" of any argument?
And where have I admitted to any such thing that you claim?
My solution is to take the struggle in the communities themselves, not to back up state-sanctioned discrimination and racism.

[A Marxist Historian]

In a February 15 post on this topic, A Marxist Historian simply regurgitates the crude lies the SL resorts to when it finds it necessary to cover up the often glaring contradiction between its words and its deeds. The facts are that the comrades of what is now the Brazilian section of the League for the Fourth International, the LQB, were elected to the leadership of the municipal workers union in the city of Volta Redonda (SFPMVR) on a program which called the police “the armed fist of the bourgeoisie” and said “no alliance with them is possible since they bring men armed and trained by the bourgeois state into the unions.” (That’s a direct quote, by the way, not a “paraphrase” in quotation marks as some on this list are wont to do.)

Upon taking office, and with the encouragement of the SL/ICL, they undertook a campaign to separate the municipal guards from the union. When the police didn't take kindly to this and made threatening moves, the ICL leadership suddenly got cold feet and “advised” the Brazilian comrades that they should quit their (elected) positions in the union, quit the union and leave town. Because of the danger, an ICL rep told them, it was necessary to “pull our hands out of the boiling water.” (Another direct quote.) When the Brazilians rightly refused this shameful “advice,” noting that nobody would ever follow a leadership that in the heat of struggle abandoned a fight they had begun, and when they also refused the ICL demand that they denounce comrades who had just been expelled in New York without being shown their documents, the ICL abruptly broke off relations.

This took place the day before the union meeting called to remove the police from the SFPMVR, on 19 June 1996. That meeting was shut down by military police wielding automatic rifles who were enforcing a court order saying that the purpose of the assembly was in violation of the Brazilian constitution. This was the first of no less than nine legal actions against the Brazilian Trotskyists over the next two years in retaliation for throwing the cops out of the union. The LQB never sued the union. In fact, its supporters were the union leadership which was sued and ousted by court order at the behest of the pro-police elements whose slanders the SL/ICL has repeated ever since.

Lurid tales of non-existent phone calls to Brazil, hand-wringing about a bogus "trial" and the like are simply attempts to cover up the ICL's betrayal, deserting in the heat of battle. Note that this was the first time in Brazilian history, and quite likely in the history of the Western Hemisphere, that any labor group threw the cops out of the unions, or even tried to. The SL has long claimed to stand for that, but nowhere have they sought to actually do it, including in unions such as AFSCME and the TWU where they had supporters. Words, and deeds.

And no, this is not just a dispute about who said and did what when, important as that is. Behind the ICL’s ignominious desertion was a broader retreat from the class struggle, a central theme in the year-long fight in the ICL over Germany which preceded the expulsions. It subsequently theorized this by saying the key thesis of Trotsky’s Transitional Program, that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of proletarian leadership, was outdated and the backwardness of the working class itself was now the main problem. The ICL is not alone in this: revisionists from Ernest Mandel to Peter Taaffe and Alan Woods (not to mention the ISO) all explicitly reject that fundamental tenet of Trotskyism.

Like others on the left, but in its own peculiar fashion, the ICL translated the tremendous defeat for the world working class represented by the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe into a defeatist program. With this justification the ICL has proceeded to abandon one key Spartacist position after another, notably burying the call for the defeat of one’s “own” imperialism, and denouncing the IG as “playing the counterfeit card of anti-Americanism” for continuing to uphold that Leninist program.

All this is amply documented in a number of detailed articles. On the expulsions you can read From a Drift Toward Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle (July 1996). On the persecution of the LQB and the ICL's sabotage of defense efforts, there are two dossiers, the first on Class Struggle and Repression in Volta Redonda, Brazil (February 1997) and the second Responses to ICL Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Trotskyists (May 2010). All three are available from the Internationalist Group. The last compilation was issued in response to the SL/ICL's revival of these slanders in order to excuse its support for U.S. imperialism's 2010 invasion of Haiti in the guise of providing earthquake relief aid. Anyone interested can consult articles available on the Internationalist Group website (Revleft does not allow me to post hyperlinks):

"ICL Leaders Escalate Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Militants" (June 1997)

"Why They Lie: WV's Frenzied Slanders Can't Hide ICL Leaders' Brazil Betrayal" (July 1997)

Dabrowski's purple rhetoric is contradicted by the facts.

Fact 1: the candidate who was elected to be the president of the union was a former cop. Never denied by IG.

Fact 2: in the election, most cops in the union voted for him. Also never denied by IG.

As to how this squared with the lines in the program about cops being the armed fist of the bourgeois state, presumably the cops figured that was just words on paper and didn't matter--until the new union leaders decided to actually do something about it.

Also, it helped that the new LQB union leaders were elected in a bloc with the pseudo-trots, indeed even pseudo-Sparts at some remove, who later led the cops in the assault on the LQB union leadership. So likely the cops thought the new leadership was "safe."

Under the circumstances, the LQB had gotten themselves into a very difficult position, and I think the advice to "pull their hands out of the boiling water" was sensible. Though that bit about them leaving town strikes me as probably a fantasy.

Fact 3: that the LQB leadership sued the union after they were removed from office. This is established, as the ICL managed to send somebody to Volta Redonda who went to the courthouse and had a look at the relevant legal documents. I think they may even have gotten xeroxes.

All the rest is just words.

-M.H.-

[Imposter Marxist]

How could anyone think the ISO "Sides" with liberals.

How can someone not side with themselves?

[Kassad]

How could anyone think the ISO "Sides" with liberals.

How can someone not side with themselves?

Not too much room for you to talk there. WWP/PSL are very fond of having Democrats like Dennis Kucinich and liberals like Ralph Nader (who's not in favor of amnesty for immigrants, by the way) speak at their anti-war "coalition" rallies. It isn't like WWP isn't fond of using reformist slogans like "money for jobs, not war!", as if the ruling class could just up and decide to put a gentler face on capitalism. Your tactics didn't work in the 60's. They aren't going to work today.

[DaringMehring]

In DM's opinion, workers who follow LO are automatically "the advanced workers," because LO says so. Me, I think they're backward workers, though not as backward as, say, the much larger number of workers following Le Pen. Whom LO is sucking up to with this crap about the veil.


This is your bizarre fantasy.

From recent issues of their journal:
Les «valeurs» de Sarkozy-Le Pen : Anti-immigrés, antichômeurs, antipauvres et antiouvriers: http://www.lutte-ouvriere-journal.org/?act=artl&num=2273&id=8
La droite et l'extrême droite draguent les nostalgiques de la colonisation: http://www.lutte-ouvriere-journal.org/?act=artl&num=2270&id=18

I could post a lot more.



One other thing that has occurred to me. It'd be interesting to find out just how many of these African workers of LO have Christian and not Muslim backgrounds. It's no secret that the former French colonies in Africa are wracked by hatred and mutual massacres between Christians and Muslims.


You're just mad because Spartacists could never dream of anything like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jViV8GRjlnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV9JrQ2L_Tc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8AdL-xlEP4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMsfQ01P9k

[Comrade Jandar]

I cannot think of one "marxist" political party in the states that doesn't occasionally give into reformism or bourgeois liberalism. If you read any of their websites or papers it's chock full of idealism.

[Dabrowski]

In response to the purported facts and parlor pink prose from M.H.:

1) Once, more than a quarter century ago, the candidate who was elected president of the Volta Redonda, Brazil municipal workers union SFPMVR (Geraldo Ribeiro) was for several months a municipal garda. He then became a printer and as a union militant for more than a decade before the 1995 union election he was involved in numerous labor actions that were regularly attacked by the police. I also have it on good authority that the brilliant Soviet marshall Tukhachevsky was a former tsarist military officer.

2) I am curious on what basis MH claims to know that most cops in the union voted for Ribeiro, since this would seem inherently difficult to prove or disprove. Did the SL/ICL conduct exit poll interviews? I wonder if the origin of this supposed "fact" isn't an assertion by the same pro-cop element who is the source of the other smears by the ICL.

MH then goes into great contortions to get around the fact that Ribeiro ran on a program denouncing the police as the armed fist of the bourgeoisie and saying that no alliance with them was permissible.

3) For the umpteenth time, the claim that the LQB leadership sued the union is pure slander, coming from the same pro-cop element who in fact sued the LQB supporters when they were the leaders of the union. The Internationalist Group has refuted this lie in great detail, which anyone can read in the IG dossier "Responses to ICL Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Trotskyists."

Those documents include a statement from Geraldo Ribeiro's lawyer who resigned when Ribeiro turned down the judge's offer to confirm his election as president of the union after the court threw out the charges against him. Given a chance to sue the union and get himself reinstated, Ribeiro flatly refused on the principle that the workers, not the bosses' courts, should control the unions.

The position the LQB "had gotten themselves into" (with the encouragement of the ICL) was due to the fact that in contrast to the rest of the Brazilian left at the time, which loudly supported cop "unions" in a 1997 police "strike," the LQB not only opposed police in the unions but actually undertook to remove the municipal guards from the SFPMVR, something that no one else on the left had ever done, including the SL/ICL, despite its paper positions.

The SL then washed its hands of the situation just as the repression was coming down, in a struggle it had helped start, claiming that the "risks for the vanguard" (meaning itself) were too great. In fact, with its ignominious flight, the ICL showed that they were not even a rearguard, but deserters.

[Kassad]

In response to the purported facts and parlor pink prose from M.H.:

1) Once, more than a quarter century ago, the candidate who was elected president of the Volta Redonda, Brazil municipal workers union SFPMVR (Geraldo Ribeiro) was for several months a municipal garda. He then became a printer and as a union militant for more than a decade before the 1995 union election he was involved in numerous labor actions that were regularly attacked by the police. I also have it on good authority that the brilliant Soviet marshall Tukhachevsky was a former tsarist military officer.

2) I am curious on what basis MH claims to know that most cops in the union voted for Ribeiro, since this would seem inherently difficult to prove or disprove. Did the SL/ICL conduct exit poll interviews? I wonder if the origin of this supposed "fact" isn't an assertion by the same pro-cop element who is the source of the other smears by the ICL.

MH then goes into great contortions to get around the fact that Ribeiro ran on a program denouncing the police as the armed fist of the bourgeoisie and saying that no alliance with them was permissible.

3) For the umpteenth time, the claim that the LQB leadership sued the union is pure slander, coming from the same pro-cop element who in fact sued the LQB supporters when they were the leaders of the union. The Internationalist Group has refuted this lie in great detail, which anyone can read in the IG dossier "Responses to ICL Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Trotskyists."

Those documents include a statement from Geraldo Ribeiro's lawyer who resigned when Ribeiro turned down the judge's offer to confirm his election as president of the union after the court threw out the charges against him. Given a chance to sue the union and get himself reinstated, Ribeiro flatly refused on the principle that the workers, not the bosses' courts, should control the unions.

The position the LQB "had gotten themselves into" (with the encouragement of the ICL) was due to the fact that in contrast to the rest of the Brazilian left at the time, which loudly supported cop "unions" in a 1997 police "strike," the LQB not only opposed police in the unions but actually undertook to remove the municipal guards from the SFPMVR, something that no one else on the left had ever done, including the SL/ICL, despite its paper positions.

The SL then washed its hands of the situation just as the repression was coming down, in a struggle it had helped start, claiming that the "risks for the vanguard" (meaning itself) were too great. In fact, with its ignominious flight, the ICL showed that they were not even a rearguard, but deserters.

Fuck off, Fred. If we want to know about your little sects and their pissing matches (in countries where I'm sure you've got a whopping four supporters, as compared to New York where the number crosses double digits into the 17 region), we can read the publications you put out. If there's one thing the Spartacists and their splinters know how to do, it's put out an extensive detail of different sides of an issue.

You folks do a great job calling out the reformist left on a regular basis and truly, that's why I keep reading your shit. But if you sincerely think that the international working class gives a shit about the dick waving competition between the Spartacist League and the Internationalist Group, you're more deranged than I thought.

There isn't a single group on the left right now that is any closer to maintaining a base in the working class than it was back in the 60's and 70's in the United States. Groups like the SL and Progressive Labor Party had a nice following a long time ago, but now the entire left is marginalized and you're pissed because your 30 person sect thinks their 100 member sect fucked up on a union issue. Is it important to know for future reference? Sure. Doesn't mean you're the ones upholding the banner of the "fourth international" because of it.

[A Marxist Historian]

1) Yes, Tukhachevsky was a former Tsarist officer, one reason that Trotsky was always a bit suspicious of him, speculating on one occasion in the 1920s that Tukhachevsky might be the ideal person to lead a capitalist counterrevolution. Which does not justify Stalin's purge of him a decade later on a purely frameup basis in any way, shape or form.

2) This assertion about Ribeiro's election was made more than a decade ago, and not at all disputed by the IG at the time, as far as I recall. I am unfamiliar with the dossier on all this by the IG published in 2010, so many many years later after the events, and I will have a look at it.

I always assumed that the SL source for this particular bit of information was the LQB itself, with whom, as you know, the Spartacists had a fraternal relationship with for a good while.

3) I will have a look at your dossier, and see what it says to account for the contradiction between your assertions and the court papers the ICL researcher in Volta Redona found.

So until I have done that, I'll refrain from further comments on this here.

-M.H.-


In response to the purported facts and parlor pink prose from M.H.:

1) Once, more than a quarter century ago, the candidate who was elected president of the Volta Redonda, Brazil municipal workers union SFPMVR (Geraldo Ribeiro) was for several months a municipal garda. He then became a printer and as a union militant for more than a decade before the 1995 union election he was involved in numerous labor actions that were regularly attacked by the police. I also have it on good authority that the brilliant Soviet marshall Tukhachevsky was a former tsarist military officer.

2) I am curious on what basis MH claims to know that most cops in the union voted for Ribeiro, since this would seem inherently difficult to prove or disprove. Did the SL/ICL conduct exit poll interviews? I wonder if the origin of this supposed "fact" isn't an assertion by the same pro-cop element who is the source of the other smears by the ICL.

MH then goes into great contortions to get around the fact that Ribeiro ran on a program denouncing the police as the armed fist of the bourgeoisie and saying that no alliance with them was permissible.

3) For the umpteenth time, the claim that the LQB leadership sued the union is pure slander, coming from the same pro-cop element who in fact sued the LQB supporters when they were the leaders of the union. The Internationalist Group has refuted this lie in great detail, which anyone can read in the IG dossier "Responses to ICL Smear Campaign Against Brazilian Trotskyists."

Those documents include a statement from Geraldo Ribeiro's lawyer who resigned when Ribeiro turned down the judge's offer to confirm his election as president of the union after the court threw out the charges against him. Given a chance to sue the union and get himself reinstated, Ribeiro flatly refused on the principle that the workers, not the bosses' courts, should control the unions.

The position the LQB "had gotten themselves into" (with the encouragement of the ICL) was due to the fact that in contrast to the rest of the Brazilian left at the time, which loudly supported cop "unions" in a 1997 police "strike," the LQB not only opposed police in the unions but actually undertook to remove the municipal guards from the SFPMVR, something that no one else on the left had ever done, including the SL/ICL, despite its paper positions.

The SL then washed its hands of the situation just as the repression was coming down, in a struggle it had helped start, claiming that the "risks for the vanguard" (meaning itself) were too great. In fact, with its ignominious flight, the ICL showed that they were not even a rearguard, but deserters.

[DaringMehring]

Ah, which excellently shows your absolute blindness. As has been noted, flat out ignoring racism from the left is nothing new. Except in your case you openly admit to islamophobia and indeed uses arguments reminiscent of the far right.

not to back up state-sanctioned discrimination and racism.

Comrade look at the language you are using. Hopefully that will make you think twice about what you are saying.

I might call the CWI/IMT/Grant tendency opportunist entryists, or reformists, or petit-bourgeois... but I would not call them racist or far-right, basically those words are extreme hyperbole to apply to any socialist group as all of us reject racism. The fact that this is what your argument is reduced to, in the case of there being not only a strong prima facie reason not to believe it, but also numerous evidence like the links I provided against it, should make you wonder... about why you are saying what you are saying...

You could try to make your argument in a lot of different ways but leaping to accusations of racism and siding with the far right, are not signs of a healthy or rational process.

[Crux]

Comrade look at the language you are deploying. Hopefully that will make you think twice about what you are saying.

I might call the CWI/IMT/Grant tendency opportunist entryists, or reformists, or petit-bourgeois... but I would not call them racist or far-right, basically those words are extreme hyperbole to apply to any socialist group as all of us reject racism. The fact that this is what your argument is reduced to, in the case of there being not only a strong prima facie reason not to believe it, but also numerous evidence like the links I furnished against it, should make you wonder... about why you are saying what you are saying...

You could try to make your argument in a lot of different ways but leaping to accusations of racism and siding with the far right, are not signs of a healthy or rational process.
I am not accusing you of siding with the far right, intentionally anyhow, just ignorance and opportunism. I am sorry if I come off a bit harsh, but it seems you're just not getting it. The far right in europe right now lives on islamophobia. And they are more than happy to use "secularist" arguments, with the obvious implication, in fact the same implication you made, of the superiority of "western culture" or the given country they are in. "We are so tolerant and progressive but look at these savages" kind of tripe. The LO's position IMHO is feeding into this. And again Islamophobia is not even adressed. Not at all. But I have already said this. And then you said you were an islamophobe. So eh.

[Dabrowski]

I don't support destruction of secular tradition to accommodate the superstructure of slave and feudal societies being reintroduced to some country that has managed to progress past that point.

Wow, you really do sound like Le Pen!

Now, if this was about "secularism," then any reasonable person would agree that the one thing that's guaranteed to push Muslim women and girls back into the patriarchal family, back into the religious schools, back under the veil, etc., is chasing them out of them from public schools, etc.

But this isn't about secularism! It's 100% white imperialist French anti-immigrant chauvinism, and everybody -- except the "socialists" who capitulate to it -- knows it!

[DaringMehring]

And then you said you were an islamophobe. So eh.

I am an all-religions-"phobe", which is different. Islamophobe would mean I would single out Muslims. And if you're calling secularism "western culture" then yes... I think it is superior. If however you're saying I think Christianity is superior to Islam some how, then you are dead wrong.

And from what I know of the French law, it forbids not only Islamic symbols but things like the Jewish yarmulke.

[A Marxist Historian]

I am an all-religions-"phobe", which is different. Islamophobe would mean I would single out Muslims. And if you're calling secularism "western culture" then yes... I think it is superior. If however you're saying I think Christianity is superior to Islam some how, then you are dead wrong.

And from what I know of the French law, it forbids not only Islamic symbols but things like the Jewish yarmulke.

I pointed out that the Catholic cross, unlike the veil or the yarmulka, is A-OK in France by French law, including in the French schools, and our not so daring Mehring's response was ... nothing, tacit admission that this is true.

And now he just repeats that they ban the yarmulka in school in France, and claims he doesn't think Christianity is superior to Islam or Judaism. Well if it isn't, then why is the cross OK in school according to all those wonderful secular French laws he likes so much?

I don't think the original Mehring felt that way.

-M.H.-

[Imposter Marxist]

kassad is a paper tiger

[DaringMehring]

I pointed out that the Catholic cross, unlike the veil or the yarmulka, is A-OK in France by French law, including in the French schools, and our not so daring Mehring's response was ... nothing, tacit admission that this is true.

And now he just repeats that they ban the yarmulka in school in France, and claims he doesn't think Christianity is superior to Islam or Judaism. Well if it isn't, then why is the cross OK in school according to all those wonderful secular French laws he likes so much?

I don't think the original Mehring felt that way.

-M.H.-



Wow, you really do sound like Le Pen!

Now, if this was about "secularism," then any reasonable person would agree that the one thing that's guaranteed to push Muslim women and girls back into the patriarchal family, back into the religious schools, back under the veil, etc., is chasing them out of them from public schools, etc.

But this isn't about secularism! It's 100% white imperialist French anti-immigrant chauvinism, and everybody -- except the "socialists" who capitulate to it -- knows it!

So here we have it, the guy with -42 rep off 13 posts, who was part of a 3 person group... that split, is coming in to tell it like it really is. "This isn't about secularism!" He comes in to back up the PhD Spartacist "students substitute for the working class" warrior.


At some point all the religious symbols were illegal in public schools, but it wasn't well enforced. But "On 2 November 1992, the Conseil ruled that a school regulation prohibiting all religious, philosophical or religious signs, including in wearing, was excessively sweeping and against the principle of laïcité." (Wiki)

So what is the great Spartacist/Spartacoid Party line on this question? All religious symbols. That includes Christian ones.

Religion having made this inroad on the secular state, the next move was in 2003. "In July 2003, French President Jacques Chirac set up an investigative committee to examine how the principle of laïcité should apply in practice...i Commission published its report on 11 December 2003, considering that ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system. The report recommended a law against pupils wearing "conspicuous" signs of belonging to a religion, meaning any visible symbol meant to be easily noticed by others. Prohibited items would include headscarves for Muslim girls, yarmulkes for Jewish boys, and turbans for Sikh boys. The Commission recommended allowing the wearing of discreet symbols of faith such as small crosses, Stars of David or Fatima's hands." (Wiki)

Now the further delineation comes, highly visible versus discreet. So a giant cross t-shirt would not be allowed. Still better than nothing, but no longer as strong secularity. Should we applaud this inroad? I don't.

But I guess the pro-religion types won't be happy until all symbols are legal, bar none. What a liberal sensibility. They want to talk about "freedom of religion" and "Islamophobia" but not the oppression of women or the barbarity of these religions, their crusades and jihads.

And if you think being secular/atheist/militant is "Le Pen" talk... well I guess Karl Marx sounded like Le Pen as well.

But the real question is, why do these isolated non-proletarian individuals think they have the right to dictate line to a Party that has taken its line from the revolutionary proletarian militants within it. Mayakovsky says quite rightly to "take the struggle to the communities," well those are the militants who are actually there, bringing the socialist revolutionary fight. LO is the largest and really the only significant revolutionary socialist party in France. Its militants lead real fights on the shop floor or in the streets. I'm not their dictator. I follow their lead.

And it's also comically insulting that MH speculates that those African origin militants might be Christians with a religious grudge against Muslims. You know what I'd wager... that they're athiests. Like most revolutionary socialists.

[A Marxist Historian]

So here we have it, the guy with -42 rep off 13 posts, who was part of a 3 person group... that split, is coming in to tell it like it really is. "This isn't about secularism!" He comes in to back up the PhD Spartacist "students substitute for the working class" warrior.

At some point all the religious symbols were illegal in public schools, but it wasn't well enforced. But "On 2 November 1992, the Conseil ruled that a school regulation prohibiting all religious, philosophical or religious signs, including in wearing, was excessively sweeping and against the principle of laïcité." (Wiki)

So what is the great Spartacist/Spartacoid Party line on this question? All religious symbols. That includes Christian ones.

Religion having made this inroad on the secular state, the next move was in 2003. "In July 2003, French President Jacques Chirac set up an investigative committee to examine how the principle of laïcité should apply in practice...i Commission published its report on 11 December 2003, considering that ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system. The report recommended a law against pupils wearing "conspicuous" signs of belonging to a religion, meaning any visible symbol meant to be easily noticed by others. Prohibited items would include headscarves for Muslim girls, yarmulkes for Jewish boys, and turbans for Sikh boys. The Commission recommended allowing the wearing of discreet symbols of faith such as small crosses, Stars of David or Fatima's hands." (Wiki)

Now the further delineation comes, highly visible versus discreet. So a giant cross t-shirt would not be allowed. Still better than nothing, but no longer as strong secularity. Should we applaud this inroad? I don't.

But I guess the pro-religion types won't be happy until all symbols are legal, bar none. What a liberal sensibility. They want to talk about "freedom of religion" and "Islamophobia" but not the oppression of women or the barbarity of these religions, their crusades and jihads...


So there you have it. Crosses are OK as long as they are "discreet." The French, as we all know, are a terribly discreet and cultured people. And stylish, very stylish.

Headscarves and yarmulkas are so, so offensive, in such poor taste. One wants something a true Frenchwoman like Coco Chanel would be proud of. Perhaps something made in an Aryan country like Germany...

-M.H.-

[DaringMehring]

To everyone who says LO is chauvinist and racists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCc82y0zYuA

put that in your pipe and smoke it.

[DaringMehring]

"All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction" -- Lenin

(Mayakovsky would be dismayed at Lenin's Islamophobia)

"The highest expression of serfdom's ideology is religion" -- Trotsky

(I guess Trotsky and Le Pen sound a lot alike to Dabrowski)

Or let us take the line from Trotsky's will: "I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist."

Why did he say "consequently?" He did not say "and also, incidently." He is saying that to be a proletarian revolutionist etc. you MUST be an irreconcilable atheist.

And he uses the word "irreconcilable." Not "tolerant" not "in my private life," -- irreconcilable.

In fact during his time in the USSR he wrote on the subject of developing beyond religiousness and helped develop those cultural campaigns.

It seems that, along with the need for a proletarian Party, the subject of the last break in the SWP with the petit-bourgeois faction of Schachtman/Burnham/Abern, atheism is another subject on which the so-called Trotskyists have sided with liberal values rather than revolutionary Marxism.

[Kassad]

kassad is a paper tiger

...Right.

[RedTrackWorker]

I completely missed out on this thread, which has turned into an important debate on the veil in France. I strongly agree with the basic position MH & M are arguing here and think it's a terrible position the LO took and that DaringMehring is defending. People may be interested in the League pamphlet Religion, the veil and the workers' movement (http://lrp-cofi.org/pdf/religion_the_veil_and_the_workers_movement.pdf) from 1992.

[blake 3:17]

"All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction" -- Lenin

(Mayakovsky would be dismayed at Lenin's Islamophobia)

"The highest expression of serfdom's ideology is religion" -- Trotsky

(I guess Trotsky and Le Pen sound a lot alike to Dabrowski)

Or let us take the line from Trotsky's will: "I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist."

Why did he say "consequently?" He did not say "and also, incidently." He is saying that to be a proletarian revolutionist etc. you MUST be an irreconcilable atheist.

And he uses the word "irreconcilable." Not "tolerant" not "in my private life," -- irreconcilable.

This is just another form of fundamentalism. Just because a great revolutionary said or wrote something that doesn't make it so.

[A Marxist Historian]

This is just another form of fundamentalism. Just because a great revolutionary said or wrote something that doesn't make it so.

Absolutely true, and even truer when you are talking about single sentences dragged out of context.

-M.H.-

[Dabrowski]

DM quotes some Marxists opposing religion.

What does that have to do with "Marxists" supporting the imperialist bourgeois state kicking girls out of public school because they are black African immigrants wear a religious veil?

Show me where Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky supported the racist persecution of immigrants by the capitalist state.

[DaringMehring]

Here is a translation of LO on this issue:



"Neither father nor brother nor husband, it's we who have chosen the veil"; "Veiled or unveiled, the freedom to choose". Such were among the most common slogans on Saturday 17 January at the Paris demonstration against the planned law banning religious signs in school.

But what liberty were the four or five thousand young women talking about who gathered in Paris on the initiative of the Muslim Party of France?

To go by the energy with which they proclaimed it, the majority had in fact decided to be there to demand the right to be veiled. If they had freely chosen to veil themselves, that is their business, but one is tempted to say, so much the worse for them.

These activists of Islamist organisations are demanding the chains which will subjugate them tomorrow if they keep to their choice. But they are demanding them not only for themselves.

They are campaigning for the subjugation of thousands of women who, for their part, have not chosen it, who are not asked for their opinion and who have to fight to give an opinion. Fortunately, there are some who do that, and it is those whom we support.

School must remain a place when Muslim girls can escape from the pressures of those - fathers, brothers, or lads from their suburbs - who make them veil themselves when they go out. Those girls do not get a voice in the media because for them the veil comes with a ban or a limitation on going out and a confinement to their homes.

The reality is about some tens of thousands of girls who are forced to veil themselves and in some cases pushed into forced marriages. Their only future is as women morally and physically imprisoned by men who have claimed full power over them. And not only in Iran, in Afghanistan, and in countries where Islamic law prevails, but also here, on the housing estates.


If the veil was simply a religious symbol worn by men and women, wearing it or not would be one's private business. But the veil under discussion today is not a religious symbol. It is the concrete token of the oppression of women, of a whole conditioning to facilitate the production of wives and mothers with no rights other than to obey their lord and master, kept shut up in their homes, as were, not so long ago, those sent as nuns, with their consent or otherwise, to convents.

This fate for women is not special to the Muslim religion. It is the place reserved for women whenever the churches gain power - official, or imposed by custom - over a human community.

Religious hierarchies have always opposed women's rights. Jewish fundamentalists - the men, of course - recite each morning a prayer in which they thank their god for not having been born female.

As for the Pope and the whole hierarchy of the Catholic Church, women have had to fight them to gain their rights. When in the early 1950s techniques for childbirth without pain were developed, the Pope and his representatives banned them on the pretext that the Bible said "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children".

In the same way, they opposed - and still oppose - divorce on the grounds that "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder"; contraception in the name of "Be fruitful, and multiply"; abortion on the pretext that the embryo is a person from the moment of conception; and even the use of condoms, including when they know about the ravages of AIDS.

As for the law being prepared against the wearing of religious symbols in school, whatever the mental reservations of the government and the right-wing majority in the National Assembly - will it be a point of leverage for those who, by opposing the veil, combat the oppression of women?

That remains to be seen, depending on the many amendments which will no doubt be attached to the law.

What is certain is that the fight against religious fundamentalisms is far from over. And when those reactionary ideas pull society backwards, it is our duty to go into battle against them with the greatest energy.


1st bold: the point is, you have these girls like the Levys, who aren't even Islamic, "demanding the right to wear the veil" -- who make a mockery of the people who are oppressed by the veil; who have no choice. Yet these non-oppressed liberal heroines become the face of the veil question.

The multitudes of really oppressed people cannot speak on this issue. They are kept like chattel by reactionary males. The silent and oppressed masses is who a Marxist should be with; not the vocal and celebrated non-oppressed liberals.

2nd bold: The veil is not just any symbol. It is a particular symbol representing woman's submission and inferiority to man, their seclusion and status as property. As the article says --- like in every religion. This isn't about a "generic" religious symbol it is a particular symbol of woman's secondary status, woman's oppression.

[DaringMehring]

This is just another form of fundamentalism. Just because a great revolutionary said or wrote something that doesn't make it so.

Let's look at it theoretically, because you might want to consider, that if you think something that is the opposite of the great Marxist revolutionists of history, then maybe it is you who got it wrong not them.

Theoretically, was Trotsky justified in saying that "religion is the highest form of serfdom's ideology?" What is serfdom's ideology? What is serfdom? Serfdom is the relations of production of feudalism, characterized by a hierarchy of lords. Production is organized by feudal estates and the property rights are based on inheritance and conquest.

Serfdom's ideology which grows from these relations of production, is blind and absolute rights, which in the end must trace back to God; "divine right." The King owns everything because God says so; the Lords because the King says so and so by proxy God says so; etc. That is why religion is the highest form of serfdom's ideology. The Church itself demands blind obedience to higher powers, and justifies blind obedience to the property relations of feudalism.

Therefore, Trotsky was right.

Religion as we know it is the product of lower modes of production; slave and feudal. In as much as capitalism abolishes this outdated and destructive ideological superstructure, all the better. That is part of how capitalism is historically progressive over the lower modes. In as much as capitalism relies on it; its organized churches and blind prejudices and way of thinking, it must be opposed. In short, socialist revolutionaries should always fight against this outdated "opiate of the masses." Therefore, Lenin was right when he said: "All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction."

And the thing about Marxism being a religion or repeating quotes from famous revolutionaries being fundamentalism, is just one of those smears that bitter religious people or eclectic "free thinkers" make against the scientific rigor and coherence of Marxism. Science is not a religion and Marxism is a science, and quoting a Marxist is more like quoting a scientist than a Saint or Prophet.

[Dabrowski]

So DM thinks that the imperialist French state is championing the cause of women's emancipation, by banning girls from public school if they won't remove the Muslim veil (tasteful crucifixes are o.k.)

If this is about defending the secularism of our dear French bourgeois republic, then so was "secular" France bombing "Islamic" Libya.

No wonder some Muslim women look to the clerical reactionaries to defend them against the french government's persecution, when the "socialists" won't. As bad as the mullahs are, it's not them who are jailing and deporting immigrant men and women. It's not the clerics who are the heirs of the fortunes bled out of the backs of Haitian slaves, who continue to rule colonies from the Caribbean to Africa. The butchers of Algeria prate about their "civilization" and DM the "socialist" believes them! What a disgrace.

Does Lutte Ouvrière demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants to France? Does LO demand immediate, unconditional independence for Guadeloupe and Martinique?

[DaringMehring]

So DM thinks that the imperialist French state is championing the cause of women's emancipation, by banning girls from public school if they won't remove the Muslim veil (tasteful crucifixes are o.k.)

If this is about defending the secularism of our dear French bourgeois republic, then so was "secular" France bombing "Islamic" Libya.

No wonder some Muslim women look to the clerical reactionaries to defend them against the french government's persecution, when the "socialists" won't. As bad as the mullahs are, it's not them who are jailing and deporting immigrant men and women. It's not the clerics who are the heirs of the fortunes bled out of the backs of Haitian slaves, who continue to rule colonies from the Caribbean to Africa. The butchers of Algeria prate about their "civilization" and DM the "socialist" believes them! What a disgrace.

Does Lutte Ouvrière demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants to France? Does LO demand immediate, unconditional independence for Guadeloupe and Martinique?

You can try to make apologies for the mullahs as "lesser evils" (what a sad thing to be reduced to) and to say it is all about the French state. That completely misses what LO has said all along, which is that this problem cannot be solved by state decree, but rather, that the ban on religious symbols provides a concrete power point for people in the communities who fight against this kind of oppression.

You, in your infinite wisdom, want to take that power point away. You, who have lived how long in the shoes of a French working class militant or French-Muslim woman?

It comes down once again to the "one man internationale" types like Dabrowski, trying to substitute their great genius for the demands of actual working class militants in the struggle.

As for LO re: immigration, the video I previously posted of Nathalie Arthaud should leave no doubt. She says the poor of the colonial countries and the world in general are their brothers and sisters, and when the guy asks "so you would open the borders completely??" she says "the rich and capital can cross borders as they want, why do you deny this to the poor?" (rough translation on my part).

And in Guadeloupe & Martinique, so typical this Spartacoid asks what LO "calls for" -- the impotent calls of the fringe Spartacist sect are meaningless. On the other hand LO, which patiently builds its base in the working class, had their militants leading the successful G+M general strikes of a few years ago, by the end. That strike developed consciousness and organization, and built toward the real emancipation of Guadeloupe, Martinique, all of France, and the world, in a way unlike could ever be hoped to be Spartacoid proclamations.

[A Marxist Historian]

Here is a translation of LO on this issue:



1st bold: the point is, you have these girls like the Levys, who aren't even Islamic, "demanding the right to wear the veil" -- who make a mockery of the people who are oppressed by the veil; who have no choice. Yet these non-oppressed liberal heroines become the face of the veil question.

The multitudes of really oppressed people cannot speak on this issue. They are kept like chattel by reactionary males. The silent and oppressed masses is who a Marxist should be with; not the vocal and celebrated non-oppressed liberals.

2nd bold: The veil is not just any symbol. It is a particular symbol representing woman's submission and inferiority to man, their seclusion and status as property. As the article says --- like in every religion. This isn't about a "generic" religious symbol it is a particular symbol of woman's secondary status, woman's oppression.

The Levys. A Jewish name. I'm starting to wonder if DaringMehring really does have something against Jews.

If you have Muslim, or for that matter Jewish, schoolgirls carrying signs saying it's not the men forcing us to wear the veils, and LO's response is "so much the worse for them," this is a clear case of imperialist paternalism on the part of LO and LO's attorney here.

France is not Saudi Arabia, and the assertion that Muslim schoolgirls are always "kept like chattel" by their menfolk is racist paternalism in France.

Not only can the schoolgirls speak, they are speaking, and LO doesn't like what they are saying and wants to shut them up.

Obviously, these schoolgirls don't see the veil as a symbol of oppression. They probably should, but the fact is they don't. But rather than talking with them about this, LO prefers to -- call the cops.

-M.H.-

[Kassad]

I heard from someone once that they bought some old bound volumes of Workers Vanguard and some folks from the Spartacist League came over to their house and brought beer to have a discussion on Trotskyism. The real question here is... if I buy some issues of Workers Vanguard, can I have some beer?

[blake 3:17]

Science is not a religion and Marxism is a science, and quoting a Marxist is more like quoting a scientist than a Saint or Prophet.

Then why are you treating Marxist thought as religious dogma?

The most creative practical Marxist on the question of religion has been Fidel Castro, who engaged in, and encouraged, dialogue between Marxists and Christians.

[DaringMehring]

Then why are you treating Marxist thought as religious dogma?

The most creative practical Marxist on the question of religion has been Fidel Castro, who engaged in, and encouraged, dialogue between Marxists and Christians.

In post #130 I explain what I see as the rationale behind those quotes. You cannot say that is the same as "religious dogma" -- what a hackneyed attack -- when I've given that level of explanation.

Rather you are the one being "dogmatic" by attacking others for being "dogmatic" while not engaging with their argument or theoretical understanding of Marxism. And you also seem to believe, as a matter of (liberal) "dogma" that "dialogue" and "creativity" as per (questionable whether he's Marxist at all) Castro is the best solution. For which you offered no basis in Marxist theory.