First Published: Frontline, Vol. 5, No. 3, July 20, 1987.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Many activists in the people’s movements have suffered the misfortune of an encounter with oneof the tiny ultra-left sects that inhabit the fringes of progressive politics. Among the better known of these sects is the Spartacist League (SL), U.S. representative of the International Spartacist Tendency in world Trotskyism. Beyond its backward political line, the SL is notorious for harassment and abusive behavior – at times to the point of physical disruption – directed against activities sponsored by other forces on the left Most often the SL’s antics are mere annoyances, producing more amusement than anger. But both to appreciate the full amount of humor “the Sparts” can provide – as well as to better understand the political mentality of such disruptive cults – a brief comment on the SL is warranted.
Now is the right moment, because the SL is putting all its ideological synapses on display as it grapples with a period of internal crisis. The group has just released the call for its next national conference, entitled “Toward Revolutionary Conjuncture,” which recites a litany of internal rebellion, demoralization and decay. From the perspective of pure entertainment, the document reads like a brilliant caricature of a left group’s inner workings. On a more serious level, it is a frightening illustration of how individuals with complete contempt for the rest of the human race – including members of their own organization – can come to lead a group which claims to uphold the interests of the working class.
While an extreme case, the SL comes from an ideological tradition which is prone to producing ultra-left splinter groups. The Spartacists are part of the Trotskyist movement, within which even the more sober-minded formations adopt a stance of “revolutionary purism” which puts them in an adversarial relationship to all the socialist countries, most of the world’s leading national liberation movements, and progressive domestic formations such as the Rainbow Coalition. In one sense, the Spartacists are simply to-day’s most consistent practitioners of orthodox Trotskyism.
The Spartacist League was formed in 1963 out of a “Revolutionary Tendency” which had originated within the main U. S. Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The differences crystalized over the attitude to take toward revolutionary Cuba: from the SL’s point of view, the SWP was surrendering Trotskyist principles by not being strident enough in denunciations of the alleged “Stalinism” and “petty-bourgeois nationalism” of Cuba’s revolutionary leadership. Certainly the SL has excelled at denouncing revolutionaries ever since; the organization has no peers when it comes to decrying alleged “betrayals” by the socialist countries, “sellouts” by anti-imperialist movements in the Third World, and “class-collaborationist pop-frontism” on the part of communists in the U.S.
The SL’s mission in life is to pound this message into the heads of the rest of us – and it is a task to which the group brings both dogged determination and seemingly inexhaustible vocal cords. A measure of creativity must be acknowledged as well; having devoted 25 years to a conception of political activity that centers on condemning everyone else as hopelessly opportunist, the SL’s polemical sarcasm is state-of-the-art. Long after the group itself has faded away, copies of its newspaper, humbly named the Workers’ Vanguard, will be preserved for reference by the stand-up comics of the working class movement. Where else can one find such gems as an article denouncing campaigns to end smoking at workplaces as “a wave of ’smoke-out’ moralism ... spearheaded by a new generation of clean-living Yuppies” whose first victories included triumphs “by the beansprout totalitarians of Santa Barbara and Berkeley.” (Workers’ Vanguard, May 1, 1987) Brilliantly, the SL raised the slogan “Yuppie Totalitarians: Butt Out!”
But now the SL is in turmoil – and the leadership is using the same kind of colorful terminology to describe the mess. First the state of the organization is pessimistically surveyed: “Among our locals, with Boston on the rocks, L.A. apparently gone and D.C. weak to the point of subliminal, the threat posed to Chicago could raise the issue of the stability and capacity of the SL/U.S. as a whole.” (For those who follow the obscure jargon of the SL an equally significant if less striking admission of looming disaster is the group’s quiet retreat from calling itself a party to an earlier self-characterization as a mere “fighting propaganda group.”)
The skewer is then turned to the center: “There is a high level of frustration at the top and the center itself is often a seething mass of frictions ... with tendencies toward ’cannibalism.’ Failure to consult among national officers in the center ... produces brain-lobe separation.” Certainly many of us have thought for some time that the SL’s leadership lacked a grip on reality, and we’ve heard the group called crazy by others numerous times. But this is the first time, to our knowledge, that the SL has applied the brain damage metaphor to itself.
Still, whatever the SL center thinks of its own mental health, this is not considered the cause of the organization’s current crisis. In the time-honored tradition of all cult leaderships, the SL core blames the weaknesses of its members for the debacle at hand. According to the SL center, the roof problem is the “social democratic appetites” of the members which have been revealed under the difficult pressures of responding to Reaganism. The membership has an “ignorance problem” and the ranks are filled with “malefactors” who engage in “paralysis, sabotage of work, and cover-up.” The solution is to root out the “flinchers,” the “soft” members who are subject to “popular-frontist blips,” and those who have “worn out.”
(Contempt is also directed toward a group of ex-SL members who – repelled by the ideological (and allegedly material) corruption of the SL leadership – have organized themselves into an even smaller splinter called the Bolshevik Tendency (BT). The SL calls this circle “loathsome,” not recognizing that the BT’s existence actually honors the Spartacists by making them one of the only left groups which has produced a split-off whose sole political activity is trying to destroy its parent organization.)
But who will replace the people the SL must discard? The SL chair himself, Jim Robertson, has provided the clearest example of the world outlook which guides his organization when he discussed the current problems of recruitment “Basically, around here nobody is joining. And rightly so, because we don’t want to recruit stupid people. And only a stupid person would join an organization like ours at the present time.”
Woody Allen once joked that he would never join any club that was willing to have someone like him as a member. Robertson, who has obviously failed in politics, is apparently trying to follow Allen’s footsteps as a comedian. Unfortunately, it’s not all funny – either for a left that must occasionally combat such anti-working class ideology dressed up as revolutionary fervor or, least of all, for the poor souls who remain in the Spartacist League today.