Reply to Spartacist
Slander Against LRP / ISL
[Link to
the Spartacist Article]
By Yossi Schwartz of the
Internationalist Socialist League (ISL)
The latest issue of
Workers' Vanguard, the organ of the American Spartacist
League, carries a report on the joint forum the ISL and US League for the
Revolutionary Party (LRP) recently held in New York City. The report is titled
"LRP State Department Socialists Embrace New Bedfellow", loyal to the
Spartacist tradition of slander and dishonest debate.
The writer of this sham
report claims that SL members were at the forum to defend genuine Trotskyism
from us "State Deparment Socialists." But
this claim does not seem very credible when among the people who were very much
impressed by it are reformists like Uri Weltmann, a
member of the Israeli Communist Party, which supports the Israeli imperialist
state and the so called "two state solution", i.e
a Bantustan Palestinian "state" alongside Israel, as well as other
sterile blabbermouths and gossipers on the Leftist Trainspotters
website. This comes as no surprise to us; we are used to
counter-revolutionaries of all colors uniting in their struggle against us.
They are happy to deal with the fact that Yossi
Schwartz was a member of a few organizations in his 45 years of political
activities, without dealing with the political issues raised in
the forum. How could it be any different? In this reply I will
deal with the poor arguments and falsifications in the Spartacist
article.
The article begins,
unsurprisingly, with slander:
"The vicarious Third World nationalists in the League for
the Revolutionary Party (LRP) sponsored a forum by a former member of our
organization, Israeli pseudo-Marxist Yossi
Schwartz."
Serious people, unlike gossipers,
try to prove their points by quoting statements made by their opponents.
The ICL does not feel the need to do so. There is a very good reason for this.
The ICL has a long documented history of support not only for Soviet
imperialism, but for Western imperialism, and we shall cite some of it in this
article. Little surprise, that those who support imperialism and
revise Marxism to fit the needs of the imperialists call revolutionaries
"third world nationalists" and "pseudo-Marxists."
During the conflict
between Russian and American imperialism in Afghanistan, the Spartacists' main line was "Hail to the Red
Army". They readily admit this:
"Yes, we said 'Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan!' We
proudly stand on that tradition. That was the only force that was bringing
social progress to the Afghan peoples."
While for Trotsky, even in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was still a
deformed workers state, the Stalinists were counter-revolutionaries, unable to
create workers' states, and for this reason a new International was needed, for
the Spartacists, in the best tradition of the Pabloites, the Stalinists became a revolutionary agency
capable of replacing the working class and its revolutionary leadership in
creating workers' states, deformed or not - states that in reality exploit and
oppress the working class. To them Capitalist China, even today, is still
a deformed workers' state. The call "Hail to the Red Army" is a full
political endorsement of Stalinism. No wonder the Stalinists in the Israeli Communist
party, that had the same position in the war in Afghanistan, are happy to hail
the Sparacists!
The other side of the same politics is the Sparacist
position during the Malvinas war between British imperialism and Argentina, a
non-imperialist country. Unlike Lenin and Trotsky, who wrote countless articles
about the need to stand with the non-imperialist side in a war without giving
its bourgeois leadership any political support, the Spartacists
took a neutral position. In both cases the SL stood with the imperialists.
The Spartacists have a long history of supporting
Zionism. Before they met Yossi Schwartz, they had the
position of support for Israel in the war of 1948 - a war in which the
Stalinists provided weapons to the Zionist gangs that in turn used it to expel
the Palestinians. In the 1967 war they took a neutral position.
15 years ago, when I
left the ICL, I refused to call the Communist party a fascist party because of
its alliance with the Browns. I explained that calling the CP fascist is
the same method the Stalinists used in Germany in the early 1930s when they
called the reformist Social Democrats, who helped the far right
murder Rosa Luxemburg, fascists. In the 1960s the CP held a common
demonstration with Herut, Begin's
Party, at that time clearly a fascist organization, against Adenauer's visit. This did not turn the CP into a fascist
party.
Ironically, Stalin
signed a well known treaty with Hitler - the Ribbentrop -Molotov treaty, in
which, among other things, the two monsters agreed to divide Poland amongst
themselves. This treaty was a reflection of the social counter revolution that
was taking place in the USSR. According to the logic of the Sparacists,
the treaty should have turned the Stalinists into fascists. It is very strange
to hear that the Spartacists hailed an army turned
fascist decades earlier!
But obviously, the ICL
does not need logic and one must wonder if anything resembling it still exists
in their minds.
There is another good reason for Uri Weltman to be happy
with the Sparticist argument. The CP gives political
support to the PLO misleadership of the PA. During
the civil war in Gaza the PA, backed by Israel and other imperialists, attacked
the elected government of Hamas. The CP refused to defend the will of the
Palestinian people. The Sparacists have exactly the
same position. This mutual defense of Zionism and hostility to Palestinian
self-determination in a state from the river to the sea creates a very special
bond between these two counter-revolutionary tendencies. Yes, Uri Weltmann is very happy with the Spartacists.
This is just one more proof of the reformist political nature of the Spartacist League.
Finally, the irony of
history is that the sectarian ICL and the opportunist IMT have the same
politics on this issue as well as many others: both refused to defend Argentina
against Britain in the Malvinas War; both claimed that the Russian Stalinist
army in Afghanistan was the army of a workers state; both support the
Zionist right to self determination and both refused to defend the will of the
Palestinians and stand against the attack of Abu Mazen
on the Hamas government, the former being backed by the Zionist state.
It took me many years of
struggle in different organizations claiming to be revolutionary to discover
their common reformist nature, and for this reason, instead of dealing with
their real rotten politics when they argue against me, they prefer to point out
to the fact that I was a member of different organizations. However, if any one
of these fake middle-class reformist groups was a
revolutionary organization I would be still a member of it.