06.05.1999

Sordid sectarianism

The final report of the London Socialist Alliance-initiated commission into the violent clash between Ian Donovan (editor of Revolution and Truth) and Eibhlin McDonald of the Spartacist League/Britain is now complete and available for inspection on a dedicated website. The site also contains other documents used by the commission, including a useful summary of the background to this unfortunate incident and extracts from letters and publications that set the attack in its proper context.

The Weekly Worker will be reprinting extensive excerpts from the material submitted to the commission as well as the full text of its conclusion. I will provide a commentary on this. It provides some very stark lessons on the sectarian state of the revolutionary movement in general.

We welcome the commission’s report (see Weekly Worker April 8 for a summary of its initial findings). The report underlines that the attack on comrade McDonald was a gross transgression against principle. However, it is right to place this very uncharacteristic action in the context of comrade Donovan’s fraught relationship with the SL/B, and with comrade McDonald in particular.

Two groups denounced the very idea of having a commission on such an “open and shut” case - the SL/B and its estranged child, the International Bolshevik Tendency. The SL/B wrote to the commission refusing any cooperation, stating “There is clearly nothing into which to ‘enquire’. The straightforward duty of any organisation claiming to stand for workers’ democracy is to condemn this grotesque act of violence against an Irish woman communist … you are engaged in a wilful cover-up for Donovan’s cowardly act of thuggery.” Moreover, the request from the commission for background documents was “incredible”. These were “internal materials dating back some 13 years” (Letter to commission, March 12).

Characteristically, the spineless IBT agreed.

Of course, the evidence submitted to the commission indicates the real reason why the SL/B was so hostile to the body. It is the SL/B that has been engaged in an embarrassed cover-up of its real relations with comrade Donovan and what they reveal about the type of squalid, exploitative internal regimes it runs. And the same evidence - now openly available to the wider political public via the net - illustrates why comrade McDonald would have felt particularly vulnerable.

Even in the delirious world of international Spartacism, she has had a peculiarly savage reputation. She was summarily removed from the leadership of the British group in the mid-1980s for jointly running a regime characterised by the cultish SL/United States as “malign”. The brutalising effects of this form the background to the assault on the comrade. A number of SL/Bers - Ian Donovan in particular - left this nightmare organisation with some deep scars.

Finally, there is something amusingly appropriate that the commission’s material should appear first on the web. Comrades looking for refutation of the commission’s conclusions on the website of the SL/B, or even of the International Communist League (its parent international body), will be disappointed. Apart from a rogue site put together by one Bob Malecki - a foam-flecked Spart sympathiser in exile in Europe - there is nothing.

Again, this is tangential evidence of the nature of this international sect. The communications revolution presents organisations such as the Sparts with some major problems. This is an organisation that demands a “monopoly” over what it deems the public “actions” of its members. In other words, comrades are not allowed to speak to, write or communicate with any other political activist without the express permission of the organisation.

Therefore, like the Socialist Workers Party, the Sparts have a problem with the net. Here is a medium with an almost limitless capacity for anonymous, worldwide political communication with thousands, even millions of other human beings. It must give the internal policemen of the ICL nightmares. Short of compounding every member’s computer, what can they do?

Perhaps the ‘compounding’ option is not such a bad idea, though. When the hapless Jan Norden - long-term editor of the SL/US’s publication Workers Vanguard - fell foul of the regime he had helped create, the organisation insisted that he submit itemised phone bills to the treasurer for recompense. In other words, they wanted to go ‘fishing’ to pick up other dissidents.

When the boil popped and Norden was expelled, a Spart ‘repossession team’ appeared at his door late at night demanding his computer and fax. Some pretty grandiose conspiracy theories were subsequently made out of the numbers the poor man had programmed in on the one-touch-dial button on his fax.

The sooner the revolutionary left ceases to expend so much energy in policing its own members, the better for the workers’ movement as a whole. The Ian Donovan commission - both in its open methods of work and its principled conclusions - has made a small, but important contribution to the task of raising the culture of our movement above the sordid sectarianism that unfortunately still characterises it.

Mark Fischer