08.07.1999

Robertson’s loyal opposition, part one: Trotsky’s ‘class treason’

Ian Donovan discusses the International Bolshevik Tendency and the ‘Spartacist tradition’

Revolutionary politics, unlike bourgeois politics, should not be, but often in practice is, a dirty business.

One look at the motley elements who demonstrated against Nato’s war over Kosova should be enough to illustrate this. Along with many politically correct left social democratic ‘anti-racist’ types, and revolutionary leftwing groups that claim to be the purest opponents of racism, there marched supporters of ethnic cleansing, of racist massacres of the Albanian people - Chetniks complete with their insignia - more or less happily, side by side. The leftists concerned cannot have been unaware of the paradox of their coexistence with vicious racists in this ‘anti-war’ movement - rather in pursuit of ‘anti-imperialist’ realpolitik, this de facto ‘red-brown’ political alliance was tolerated unprotested by much of the ‘far left’, from the SWP to the Spartacist League, who were more concerned to draw the line against ‘pro-imperialist’ Albanians and their sympathisers.

However, the recent war with Serbia is not the subject here: rather it only serves to illustrate the kind of dirty dealing and compromises with socialist and democratic principle that go on in what passes for ‘the left’ today.

One grouping that often claims to be cleaner than most is the International Bolshevik Tendency. The author of this article was, until a year ago, an active member, but resigned in the spring of 1998 after an attempt to promote discussion of political differences met a response typical of the sectarian left today - an organised boycott of political debate with the apostate member. The IBT’s claim to be fundamentally better and more democratic internally than their political parents in the Spartacist League, not to mention the routine bureaucratic witch-hunting of dissidents that goes on in organisations such as the SWP, were revealed to be hollow.

My political differences, which related to criticisms of key elements of the IBT’s claim to be a ‘unique’ Marxist formation, were argued comprehensively inside the IBT in four substantial documents. The response of the IBT leadership was to issue a memorandum demanding that debate on these questions be postponed for a period of around 18 months, and effectively instructing members loyal to the ‘traditions’ of the organisation that I was disrupting the work of the organisation and therefore should not be debated with.

The IBT leadership told me that: “the comrades who accept the general framework of how we approach politics want to get on with it” (IBT International Secretariat memorandum, April 3 1998).

Given the stated intention of the IBT leadership to “get on with it”, I was eagerly awaiting the next issue of 1917, the IBT journal. But I was in for a long wait. The previous issue (No20) had arrived back from the printers on new year’s day, 1998. It was therefore somewhat surprising to have to wait until June 1999 - ie, around 18 months - for the next issue of this august publication.

In the new 1917 there is (sort of) an attempt at a reply to my criticisms of the Spartacists’ sectarian distortion of the positions of the classical communist movement (of which the Trotskyist movement is part) regarding reformist working class organisations that enter into electoral or governmental agreements with non-working class political groups. Communists have generally condemned those agreements as class collaborationist, and sought to find means to break them, and force the reformists into united action with revolutionaries to defend the interests of the working class. As long as mass parties such as the British Labour Party or the French Communist Party retain the allegiance of substantial numbers of workers who believe that these parties stand for them as a class, revolutionaries have to carefully distinguish between these parties and their bourgeois coalition partners, and seek ways to use electoral tactics to drive a wedge between them.

Such tactics can include the Leninist tactic of ‘critical support’ for the reformist workers’ party, in order to address the working class base of such parties, while for instance standing revolutionary candidates against the bourgeois parties. This is in order to sabotage the coalition and force the reformist leaders of the working class to take power alone and administer capitalism in full view of their socialist-minded working class supporters, thereby helping to dispel illusions in the socialist character of such misleaders.

This was the approach of the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s, during a seminal period when popular frontism was a key tactic of the bourgeoisie to protect itself from a revolutionary-minded working class. In the current period, of course, where social democratic and other reformist parties have themselves generally embraced the market and retreated from the claim to stand for the interests of the working class, this position may seem a little distant. But a sectarian position in a period of a stronger working class movement can only be an indicator of a more general malaise in the politics of an organisation, and it is this malaise that my documents in the IBT were aimed at correcting.

The IBT’s ‘reply’ to me is contained in an article entitled ‘Weathering the storm’, about their 1998 international conference. It is quite remarkable to see an article in a journal that appeared in June 1999, reporting on an event that took place in January 1998: ie, one and a half years earlier. It appears that this ‘storm’ that the IBT has been metaphorically ‘weathering’ must have lasted rather longer than most. Perhaps they are not referring to the unfavourable political situation in the aftermath of capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union (this ‘storm’ has been around for years), but rather their own crisis as an organisation, whose sloth gives new meaning to Bukharin’s injunction to “build socialism at a snail’s pace”.

But what is also remarkable about the IBT’s reply to my criticisms of their political tradition, is that out of four documents that I penned on the popular front question, and one on the question of the Socialist Alliances in Britain, the IBT do not quote one single word of what I wrote. This fact alone shows the real nature of their polemic and the fear of debate. The IBT’s political parents in the Spartacists have a well known record of issuing the most disgusting lies and foul slanders against opponents. But even in their case, it is extremely rare for them to publish a polemic, even against the hated IBT, that does not contain one single word of what their opponents have written. Even the likes of Royston Bull - the SLP’s former vice-president and publisher of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review - have the courage to quote at least fragments of what an opponent has written.

This is especially odd since my critique of Spartacist/IBT sectarianism has been widely circulated, has been favourably received by a number of serious elements on the left, and even elements of the IBT’s own periphery have acknowledged its historical correctness and orthodox politics. Hence their polemic is very strange, and is obviously not concerned with winning a political argument. In reality, the IBT leadership know full well that in a fully-fledged debate on this question, they would lose - after all, that is why they sought to prevent a proper internal discussion on this question in the first place. Their reply has another, very different purpose - it is not to win an argument over revolutionary tactics and strategy within the framework of the broad workers’ movement. Rather, it is to maintain their ‘respectability’ in Spartacist circles, to underline that they too are prepared to engage in apolitical vilification of a political critic in order to defend the ‘conquests’ of their estranged mentor, James Robertson. They are just a bit subtler about it than Robertson’s hacks.

The essence of the IBT’s alibi for their refusal to allow a proper debate on the criticisms I put forward of the Spartacist ‘tradition’ is their statement that “Time spent re-inventing the wheel is time wasted”.

If anyone should be puzzled by what the IBT mean by this statement, which implies that a democratic internal life where differences can be properly debated is a waste of time (presumably while they get down to the much more important business of not publishing a journal for 18 months!), then they might find enlightenment in the following passage:

“The crucial task for Marxists in this period is to carry forward the programmatic acquisitions of the past, which alone provide the basis for recreating a revolutionary, internationalist leadership for the working class. But what steps toward rebuilding such a leadership are open to a small group of revolutionaries today? In our ‘Tasks and perspectives’ resolution we noted that since our inception our primary objective has been ‘to ensure the survival of an anti-revisionist ideological pole within the international Trotskyist “far left”’. The struggle to preserve the thread of revolutionary continuity carried forward by Trotsky’s Fourth International after the Stalinisation of the Comintern remains a vital precondition for the selection and training of the revolutionary cadres of tomorrow.

“Maintaining this perspective is not always easy. Our small organisation has not been immune to the pressures created by the setbacks suffered by the international working class in recent years. When the class is in retreat, few workers are actively seeking a revolutionary alternative. Not all comrades have the fortitude or vision to uphold positions that they may intellectually accept to be historically necessary, if at the moment these views are not met with an enthusiastic response.

“The impulse to attempt to escape political isolation and gain influence within broader social layers is powerful but, in a period when opportunities are few, such appetites frequently lead to jettisoning elements of the revolutionary programme. But an authentically revolutionary leadership for the working class can only be reforged with cadres who are willing to tell the truth to the masses, no matter how unpopular it may be, and who are capable of sustaining themselves by taking a long view of history.”

So here we have their ‘explanation’ of why the IBT went into crisis over the last few years, and why the “authentically revolutionary” majority of their organisation was unable to get a journal out. It was all because of people who had not the “fortitude or vision” to “uphold” views that they “intellectually accept” in “difficult” circumstances. In other words, the IBT are saying that those who like myself left the organisation in disgust at being condemned for attempting to promote political discussion, by a leadership who did not want such political discussion to take place, are moral cowards, who do not have the courage to uphold what they really “intellectually” believe to be true.

What an incredible example of doublethink and intellectual dishonesty! The truth is that the IBT have not succeeded in “intellectually” demonstrating - to me, to others, or even evidently to themselves - that my critique of the Spartacist tradition’s sectarian revisionism on the popular front is wrong. If they had, they would by now have produced a properly researched and documented reply that could at least have some chance of convincing unaffiliated militants and historical scholars (or even myself!) that I am wrong. After all, this is no minor or peripheral question, but “the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch” (Trotsky). The fact that they are not interested in doing that only proves that the IBT is an organisation that is going nowhere, and certainly is in no sense the historical continuity of Bolshevism.

Behind the IBT’s ‘explanation’ of their internal political crisis stands James Robertson’s profoundly anti-Marxist and idealist maxim that “programme generates theory”. This aphorism, which in many ways is Robertson’s equivalent of Gerry Healy’s cracked ‘dialectics’, serves as one of the chief theoretical bases for Robertson’s warped dictatorship in the International Communist League (ie, the Spartacists). It means that, in a Robertsonite or neo-Robertsonite organisation, there can be little or no discussion on fundamental issues that takes as its main point of reference the nature of the external world and the role of material things, people and masses within it. There can be little room for dissension about reality in such a grouping, because reality is what the leader (or at one remove the leader’s ‘tradition’) says it is.

If someone disputes this, the question that immediately arises is not: ‘Is what this person is saying true or false in objective reality?’; but rather: ‘Why is this person saying these things - what deviant programme is he/she fighting for in disputing our interpretation of reality?’ Thus the attribution of sinister motives to dissenters takes the place of political discussion, which rapidly becomes an all-out heresy hunt. This obviously must sooner or later become the case in an organisation that upholds such a discourse as its dominant method, no matter how personally benign the actual protagonists may believe themselves to be.

In philosophical terms, Robertson’s maxim is anti-Marxist. The question arises - if programme generates theory, what generates programme? Largely, programme (defined as the political aims of a current or individual) is generated by two things: firstly, an understanding of one’s own interests and that of one’s fellows (which is itself in large measure a question of one’s understanding of the world - hence one could equally say that theory generates programme); secondly, a more general understanding of the way the world operates.

Of course there is a limited truth to Robertson’s statement, in that one’s class position can (though not necessarily does) determine to a large extent how one sees one’s interests and that of one’s fellows, but even that does not determine directly ‘theory’: ie, how one understands the operation of the external world. It is perfectly possible to have an understanding of one’s interests, and yet at the same time be convinced that the way the world works is contrary to those interests - which is of course the basis for various forms of historical pessimism.

The proletariat, in reality, needs not idealist aphorisms about how allegedly ‘deviant’ “appetites” of individuals determine their understanding of the world, but proper materialist analysis of actual social and political conditions, in which nothing is above examination and criticism. Rather than Robertson’s bizarre cultist maxim that “programme generates theory”, we need to uphold the spirit of Lenin’s famous statement that “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”. In this context, the IBT’s statement that “Time spent reinventing the wheel is time wasted” is both anti-Marxist and philistine.

In reality, the IBT’s reply to me simply repeats old Spartacist quotations on Chile and their position on the Popular Unity (UP) coalition of 1970, which equated the parties of the working class (the Socialist Party, Communist Party, etc) that participated in this coalition government with their coalition partners. The Spartacists stated that any electoral support by leftists to any party that participated in UP was “class treason” and that the bourgeois workers’ parties that participated in UP had ceased to embody a class contradiction, that their working class component had been “suppressed”. Therefore any application of Leninist tactics, such as critical electoral support, or joining such parties in order to fight internally for revolutionary politics and against class collaboration (commonly known as ‘entryism’), was a “betrayal” of revolutionary politics.

In my documents, I produced documentary proof that Trotsky himself had explicitly advocated ‘entryism’ into social democratic parties that were in power as part of a popular front (in Spain), and that Trotsky had approved a policy by his French co-thinkers on the question of electoral support that was identical to the policy I was advocating. This does not, of course, prove that Trotsky was right on any of these questions, but it does put the likes of the IBT in a bind. They do not dare to attack Trotsky as an opportunist and a centrist, and accuse him of advocating “class treason”, but on the other hand they cannot recommend his method of approaching these questions either. You would look in vain at any of the material the IBT has produced for any concrete assessment of the historical issues posed here.

Instead, the IBT’s reply takes a different tack, and simply becomes a thinly disguised personal attack on myself. The IBT state that the real motive for my critique (“programme generates theory” in the classical Robertsonian sense) is that: “Comrade Donovan had been a member of the Spartacist League/Britain in the mid-1980s, after the group had undergone a qualitative degeneration, and he had been a victim of gross abuse at the hands of the SL/B leadership. During his time in the IBT, he periodically displayed a certain subjectivity towards the SL/B.” And the article goes on in the same patronising and personalist vein.

Actually, I suffered a very severe illness, that could easily have resulted in my death, when I was a member of the Spartacist League/Britain, that was directly attributable to crimes committed against me and others by the leadership of that organisation. But that did not stop me from joining the IBT in 1995, because at that point I was ‘intellectually convinced’ of the correctness of much of the historic Spartacist tradition, despite the vile nature of the ‘actually existing’ Spartacist tendency by that time. The change in my ‘intellectual’ convictions did not, obviously, come from my involvement in the SL/B, otherwise I would never have joined the IBT at all. The change in my understanding rather came from two years of entry work in the Socialist Labour Party, and the gaining of more experience in real politics, in political work within a real, if shrinking and stunted, political organisation of the working class.

Personalist attacks, which are in reality, though expressed in an underhand manner, similar to the attacks on me as a “fucking nutter” by the Spartacists’ Eibhlin McDonald, are the expression of the fact that the IBT has not been able to answer and refute my critique politically, by an analysis or negative synthesis of the historical and theoretical material that I wrote.

These issues will not go away and, as soon as there is any renewed leftward movement in society, will rear their heads again, as my material will continue to be available and contradicts in detail the claims of the neo-Robertsonites to represent a ‘uniquely correct’ Leninist tradition. The falsifications and the quotation chopping say otherwise, comrades!

The accusation of my “subjectivity” towards the Spartacists’ abusive and vile treatment of people is not new. Originally, the Spartacists themselves accused me of similar ‘deviations’, when I fought as a principled oppositionist in the British Spartacist League against its abusive internal regime. This coincidence of characterisation says a lot, not about myself, but rather about the similarity between the IBT and the Spartacists. Because one point that the Spartacists have been able to use quite effectively against the IBT in their generally grotesque and slanderous ‘polemics’ is that the founding leaders of the IBT, with the partial exception of comrade Harlan, never fought as oppositionists when they were members. Indeed, they were ardent Robertsonites who were purged despite their loyalty to the Robertson regime.

Leading cadres of national Spartacist sections, such as Tom Riley and Cathy Nason, authored phoney confessions of terrible deviations to prove their ‘loyalty’ to the regime even as they were being purged. Looking back at their purge, they later wrote

“The success of the SL/US leadership in conducting the purge in Canada was aided by the extreme organisational loyalty and consequent disorientation of their victims. Knowing the charges to be false, yet continuing to support the leadership and, most importantly, the programme of the tendency, the targets of the attack responded passively in a futile attempt to remain in the organisation” (‘External Tendency founding declaration’, 1982).

Similarly with the earlier show trial and purge of Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah in 1979. Though they did not sign confessions (the accusations against them were far too serious and terminal for there to be any room for that!), 1917 commented on their purge that:

“During the trial and the process leading up to it, the accused couple’s undiminished loyalty to the Spartacist tendency prevented them from grasping the enormity of the fraud perpetrated against them, and hence from defending themselves as forcefully as they could ...” (1917 No9, first quarter 1991).

One could say perhaps that whereas Riley and Nason behaved like Zinoviev at the Moscow trials, confessing to everything in a vain attempt to be spared the executioner’s bullet, Logan at least behaved more like Bukharin, and sought to mock his accusers a little. But - and here’s the rub - their accusers did not have state power, or any power over them really. These experienced and senior cadre acquiesced in their own purges, essentially from conviction, not compulsion. And they continue to defend their ‘executioners’, to the extent of denouncing me, for having struggled from a far lower level of seniority to produce a much more deep-going and political critique, as being ‘subjective’. Well, if that kind of grovelling, estranged cultism constitutes Marxist ‘objectivity’, then I’ll take ‘subjectivism’ any day. But of course it does not.

The contradictions in the IBT on the question of my critique of Spartacism on the popular front will not go away. Despite the fact that the IBT leadership maintained that the questions I raised were not “current issues” and therefore could not be discussed in their hallowed sect, this issue has produced a howling contradiction in an article in the new 1917 that certainly deals with “current issues”. The ‘Open letter’ from Stephen J, bureaucratically expelled from the Canadian International Socialists, assails the Cliffites for misapplying Lenin’s injunction to support the reformist socialists in elections “like a rope supports a hanged man” when dealing with the social democratic New Democratic Party in Ontario province, Canada:

“[former Ontario NDP premier] Bob Rae’s government was so hated by working class people for acting like Tories that Layton [a reformist ‘left’ bureaucrat] wanted to get some distance from it. But not the IS leadership. Apparently without seeing the obvious contradiction, the leadership document goes on to quote Lenin’s famous comment on critical support:

“‘I want to support [the Labour Party] in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man - that the impending establishment of the government of the [Labour Party] will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will hasten the political death of the [Labour Party]...’

“The NDP in power had hung itself - the best elements in its base were melting away. Yet still the IS supported the social democrats. This is exactly the opposite of what Lenin advocated. Instead of seeking to rally some of the thousands of workers who were deserting the NDP in disgust at its betrayals, and direct them to the left into supporting independent labour candidates against NDPers who backed the hated social contract, Socialist Worker used its credentials to try to corral leftwing voters for Rae.”

This begs the question: if the NDP “hung itself”, would the IBT be there to hand them the rope? Not very likely, since the NDP is a rather small social democratic formation that, though it might sometimes be strong enough to aspire to run a province, on a Canadian level is almost invariably willing to engage in ‘implicit or explicit’ agreements with other, larger and of course bourgeois, parties. This was particularly true in the 1980s, when the NDP was one of the most rightwing ‘labour’ parties, barely identifiable as being social democratic (and not just because of its name), in the international working class movement. Indeed, the 1990 Ontario elections are a case in point of a working class upsurge forcing a wretched reformist party, whose normal practice is to seek to govern in ‘partnership’ with ruling class parties, to take power ‘alone’ (albeit within one large Canadian province).

As the Spartacists’ Workers Vanguard reported at the time,

“In an upset victory that stunned even the winners, the social democrats of Canada’s New Democratic Party were swept to power in Ontario on September 6 [1990] ... the NDP catapulted from 19 to 74 seats in the provincial legislature, leaving the Liberals with 36 seats and the Tories with 20 ...” (October 5 1990).

The Spartacists further observed:

“The union bureaucrats and their fake-left hangers-on have sought to channel labour militancy into votes for the NDP. Now the NDP is the government of Ontario. Even with such a wimpy social democratic outfit, working people have expectations of the NDP government. Even before taking power [ie, formally taking office after winning the election - ID], the social democrats are quickly trying to dash these illusions to prove their responsibility to the capitalist ruling class ...” (ibid).

It is instructive that this Workers Vanguard article on these elections does not even mention the text of any Spartacist intervention in the campaign, which took place in the context of a considerable burst of militancy in the labour movement. Indeed, it does not even mention whether the Spartacists were in favour of a critical vote for the NDP in these elections or not! The reason is quite simple - the Spartacists had a routine ‘No vote to the NDP’ position, based on the NDP’s habitual coalitionism, and were caught on the hop when the working class forced the NDP to take power in Ontario, with an arithmetical majority in the legislature, without any coalition partners.

The Workers Vanguard article was just passive, after-the-fact commentary on an election they had not even bothered to publish any propaganda about, because of their ‘routine’ view of the NDP, derived from the fact that its leaders generally aspire no higher than being junior partners in a coalition. This is quite remarkable passivity from an organisation that in 1990 had had an organised presence in Canada for nearly two decades. And likewise (but even worse), the IBT have never even bothered to write anything substantial on this crucial event in the political life of the proletariat where one of their most important local groups is located (led by cadre with a similar level of experience to that of the Canadian Spartacists), largely again because of their routinist view of Canadian social democracy, derived from Robertson’s position that it is a betrayal to even consider voting for a party that has not repudiated coalitionism in advance.

All proportions guarded, given the more limited nature of the working class upsurge, the electoral policy that revolutionaries should have carried out in this situation echoes that so vividly described by Trotsky during the 1936 French elections, and carried out by the French Trotskyists: “The socialists and the communists worked with all their might to pave the way for the ministry of Herriot - at worst the ministry of Daladier [ie, politicians of openly bourgeois parties]. What did the masses do? They imposed upon the socialists and communists the ministry of [French Socialist Party leader Léon] Blum. Is this not a direct vote against the policy of the People’s Front?” (L Trotsky ‘The decisive stage’ Leon Trotsky on France New York 1979, pp157-8).

But of course, for the IBT, and indeed all those within the Robertsonite tradition, to even consider such a policy is “class treason”. The absurdity of such a position is obvious to any thinking would-be Marxist.