Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ?
Years ago when I was a member of the Toronto branch of the Bolshevik Tendency, the assignment I hated most was having to go to Trotskyist League forums. We were banned from meetings of the Internationalist Socialists and whatever the Mandelites were calling themselves, but we were allowed into TL meetings. Unfortunately…
We were required to sit at the back of the meeting in designated seats. After the presentation, we got to make one intervention (3 minutes although the time limit only seemed to apply to us), following that numerous TL members and supporters would shriek abuse at us (we were supposedly racists, anglo-chauvinists, cop-lovers, dubious elements, quitters, etc. etc.). Then at the end, we were herded out to prevent us from talking to anyone who was actually crazy enough to have come to this meeting in the first place (I suppose that included us too).
And they were always on a Saturday night.
Sustained by coffee and cigarettes, very energetic were the TL…and the rest of their international tendency. Among the first to arrive at an event, the last to leave. Always the most annoying: New issues of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist Canada, Spartacist, Women and Revolution, Black History and the Class Struggle, a pamphlet or two, and always always on sub-drives or so it seemed.
Workers Vanguard came out every two weeks for as long as I remember, until last year. In April, the ICL posted on its web site that the frequency of WV would be …irregular. That has turned out to be a bit of an understatement; it has been over seven months since an issue of WV has appeared.
On October 30, a new SL item appeared on the site: A perfunctory “Don’t Vote for the Democrats” leaflet which could easily have been written by a new member of the Spartacus Youth League (does that still exist?), but nothing since then to indicate to regular readers that Biden won the election and has since been sworn in as president, or that a motley crew of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6th. Odder too is that the SL does not appear to have written a single word on the uprising that took place after the police murder of George Floyd (or even the murder itself – if I’m wrong, please let me know)
A quick scan through the International Communist League web site and the pattern is the same. Some sections have not had a new item on their pages for almost a year. The Canadian section’s most recent post dates to October, but is a reprint of a leaflet from August about a ten-day strike. It too is of a generic variety of Spart cliches. You can’t help but think, something is going on.
In 2017, the ICL-FI published a long document, “The Chauvinist Hydra” which seemed to consist mostly of a lot of trashing of various sections on the national question. Spartacist leader James Robertson died in 2019. His passing was marking by a brief notice and then months went by before a more substantial obit was published. It’s temping to believe that there’s a power struggle taking place in the group which has paralysed the organization, but that it would have prevented them from publishing across their international tendency to this degree is difficult to accept. The Internationalist Group, led by former WV editor Jan Norden speculates the group is on the verge of collapse, but they wrote that in MAy of 2020. I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash.
But seriously, whatever happened to the Spartacist League?
20 Comments
Comments are closed.
Notes from Underground 
fischerzed said,
February 21, 2021 at 5:12 pm
Well, the homepage has added links to the most recent issue of Spartacist in several language – all from the Spring of 2020, so basically re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic….
James Creegan said,
March 16, 2021 at 8:43 am
A simple explanation suggests itself. The Spartacist League was, at bottom, a personality cult of its founder-leader Jim Robertson. Robertson died in April of 2019. Hence, the Spartacist League ceased to exist.
Karl said,
July 19, 2021 at 2:55 pm
“The Spartacist League was, at bottom, a personality cult of its founder-leader Jim Robertson.” In all sections all of the time? In the 80ies and 90ies in the German section for instance Robertson of course played a role. But not only he and not as a classical cult leader. To me therefore it came as a surprise that the ICL with all its sections collapsed all at once after prolonged troubles for years as could be seen. Now there seems to be no life in its membership anymore. At least one cannot see something like that from the outside.
fischerzed said,
July 19, 2021 at 7:55 pm
It does seem too simple to ascribe this to solely to a cult around Robertson. An interesting comparison can be made to the British Workers Revolutionary Party under Gerry Healy. The WRP had a grotesque cult of personality under Healy, but after he was ousted, numerous political tendencies emerged still wanting to be political. With the SL/ICL nothing. Eventually, something will emerge. Till then we wait and speculate.
James Creegan said,
July 19, 2021 at 10:42 pm
Maybe one difference is that the more political Healyite elements mostly remained in the WRP/Workers League, and eventually ousted Healy. The elements of the SL capable of life after Robertson–the BT and IG-were already on the outside when the Supreme Leader went to his reward.
Carl Steele said,
July 31, 2021 at 1:43 pm
I was a member of the Spartacist League of Britain for a few years in the 1980’s. Most discussions of the Sparts, even from hostile critics, seem to me to dance around the edges of a very unsavoury truth. Robertson built an organisation mired in psychological, emotional and sexual abuse. The BT and IG want to have a political through-line which explains the supposed degeneration because they don’t want to fess up to the part they played in the abuse.
A glaring example is the way the BT hooked up with and alibied Bill Logan. There is no doubt the Logan trial was Robertson’s way of maintaining control and that he and his acolytes were only too well aware of the practices of the Logan regime, and some of the accusations were false. There is also no doubt that the Logan regime was in fact highly abusive. In the years following his “ouster” Logan admitted to abusive behaviour and put it down to “inexperience”.
While a member of the Sparts I did and said things, or went along with things, that I am ashamed of. And that’s the problem. The internal culture was such that everyone got to participate in dishing out the abuse, and so nobody is willing to talk about it, least of all groups who base themselves on the entirely lamentable Spartacist “tradition”.
It was Jim Robertson’s unsavoury appetites which animated the Spartacist League, not politics. And now Robertson is dead the Sparts have literally no reason to exist. On this much I agree with James Creegan.
James Creegan said,
August 2, 2021 at 2:03 am
It seems to me that anyone charging that the Spartacist League was built on sexual and emotional abuse, or that the BT covered up for such things, needs to be specific. I was a member of the SL in New York from 1981 to 1986, and a leading member of the BT, also in New York, from 1987 to 1997. The following is what I know.
It was generally known in the Spartacist League that Robertson regularly presided over orgies. I think just about every female who joined was invited to them at one time or another. But, as far as we were aware in the BT, participation was voluntary. I personally knew female members who declined Robertson’s invitations without any harassment or negative organizational consequences. Because invitees were free not to participate, the BT did not include these orgies in its indictments of the Robertson regime. I consider this decision to have been reasonable, and in no way constituting a cover-up.
As for Bill Logan: We in the BT knew at the time we invited him to join that he and his wife, Adaire Hannah, had been a hyper-Robertsonites when they had earlier headed the Australian and British sections of the iSt. Robertson, however, had not only approved of their organizational methods, but deemed them exemplary. “Do it like Bill and Adaire” was advice commonly given to organizers throughout the organization.
We thought it appropriate that Logan, before joining the BT, should give some accounting of his political past, and the way he viewed it in retrospect. There was, specifically, the case of John Ebel, a member of the Australian section of the iSt when Logan headed it. Logan suspected Ebel of engaging in some kind of proto-factional correspondence with members of other national sections, and broke into his room to riffle through his personal correspondence. We in the BT had documentation of this episode. Upon joining us, Logan acknowledged the abusiveness of his behavior in this instance, and, as far as we could tell–having sent one observer to New Zealand to monitor the workings of the group he had built there at the time of joining us– was not then repeating any of his older, abusive practices.
There was, however, a more serious instance of abuse under Logan’s Australian regime that I, personally, did not know about at the time he joined us. I admit I should have known about it because it was contained in the documents the Spartacists had produced during the Logan trial, and reprinted years after I had left the BT (when I finally got around to reading them).I was remiss for not having taken the trouble to read these documents at the time Logan applied for BT membership. But no one–neither anyone in the BT, not even those reluctant to take him in, nor Logan,nor Hannah, mentioned this episode at the time. Idon’t know whether other leading BTers knew about it.
A young female member of the Australian section in the 70s had become pregnant. Logan and Hannah apparently did everything in their power to prevent her from having her baby; Hannah at one point even urged her to take a pill to induce abortion. For this, they were rebuked by the Spartacist leadership in New York. Logan and Hannah failed in the end, and the woman gave birth. They then apparentl pressured her to put the baby up for adoption, also unsuccessfully.
The behavior of Logan and Hannah was unconscionable. It should, however, be put in context. It was a common belief among the youthful revolutionary left of the 60s and early 70s–not just among Spartacists–that getting married and starting a family was tantamount to selling out. Logan and Hannah probably shared this assumption, and acted in a way they tought would preserve the woman for revolutionary activity. This in no way justifies what they attempted, but it was, IMO, a miitigating factor, and their excess should not be held against them in perpetuity.
The above are the principal instances I am aware of that might be described as sexual abuse (which is not to say that there weren’t other instances I don’t know about) . Robertson’s infamous purges were undoubtedly abusive, but not in a sexual sense.
The above instances do not, IMO, justify Spartacist accusations that Logan was a ruthless manipulator, a sociopath and Svengali-like character. These slanders, based perhaps on wildly exaggerated elements of truth, were levelled by Robertson out of dishonest political motives.They should not be repeated without supporting evidence.
Nor is it accurate to state, as Steele does, that the Spartacist League was founded on personal and sexual abuse. Robertson had a long career in the Marxist movement and was steeped in (especially Russian) revolutionary history. For all his glaring, and ultimately vitiating, faults he initially led the Spartacist Spartacist League in order to to carry out a serious political agenda. He succeeded in assembling around him a core of highly educated and deicated cadres. That he could never distinguish between his political objectives and his personal authority, that he felt compelled to reduce all around him to complete subservience, undermined his own purposes. Whatever cultish features the SL possessed at birth became more exaggerated and grotesque as the organization failed to grow amid the overwhelming tides of neoliberal reaction. The SL now appears unable to have survived the death of its founder-leader. But none of this makes Robertson simply another Jimmy Jones or Jeffrey Epstein. In this time of me-too excesses, we should try to maintain a sense of proportion.
Carl Steele said,
August 4, 2021 at 2:32 pm
James Creegan’s response to my comments is so appalling it’s difficult to know where to start. But I’ll begin with a few general observations about the Spartacist League and so-called revolutionary politics.
Geoff White resigned from the Spartacist League in 1968. White was an ex-Communist Party youth leader who broke to the left in 1956 and joined the SWP. Subsequently he became a founder member and leader of the Spartacist League. In his resignation letter he made the following observation:
“I have come to some tentative conclusions about what has happened to us. … Over the years, certain rules have developed. Originally, most of these were for purposes of survival and quite rational. However, these rules now survive and develop autonomously, regardless of their relevance to the objective world. It is as if we were involved in a great game, the object of which is to make points according to an elaborate and very sophisticated set of evolved rules and stylistic considerations. The analogy to bull-fighting comes inevitably to mind. In short, I question whether our basic orientation is not toward making a good record in some cosmic history book, rather than making history itself.”
He illustrates his point by referencing the Spartacist intervention into a radical group known the Peace and Freedom Party:
”What really bothers me about the PFP is the way in which our comrades discussed it, reacted to the arena, and carried out their withdrawal … the attitude that the group as a whole brought to the intervention is quite clear. Our comrades felt extremely uncomfortable at being involved in a real arena, seemed to fear some sort of contamination. They greeted our ludicrous and futile exit with intense relief. The danger of a blot on our cosmic record had been avoided and we would not have to meet the challenge of actually trying to influence events in even the smallest arena.”
(The resignation letter, Robertson’s response, and a 3 part interview with White can be found in 1917, the BT’s journal)
White is describing an organisation with only a tentative link to reality, an organisation at the mercy of the whims and wishes of the strongest personality. And given what we now know about the Spartacist League maybe he had a point; because in an organisation wedded to definable aims in the real world a fantasist like Robertson would not have survived, let alone become the unassailable leader.
(Parenthetically, I can’t resist pointing out how this distaste for reality was reflected in the bizarre theory which claimed Cuba had no state for two years following the revolution. Robertson and his cadres were unable to square events in Cuba with Lenin and Trotsky’s writings so they disappeared the troublesome state and its transformation from history.)
For Robertson politics was psychological cudgel, it was his way of controlling his followers, not a guide to action. He created a mission which could not be measured against success or failure in the real world – the preservation of a non-existent revolutionary program in literary form. A pristine newspaper article which could be reconciled with the writings of Lenin and Trotsky was of infinitely greater value than a necessarily flawed and messy attempt to affect a real event.
Robertson used politics to regulate the internal life of the organisation and maintain degrees of separation from opponents. And he created a culture in which he could move freely, indulge his unsavoury appetites and never be questioned, let alone challenged.
I joined the Spartacist League of Britain in 1980. At one of my first internal meetings a hapless comrade was set upon by the local branch and a few visiting CC members. I can’t recall what his crime was but I do remember getting to my feet in the febrile atmosphere and yelling something about the comrade’s real program. I think I said he wanted to kill black people. No doubt my accusation was completely deranged, but nobody contradicted me, quite the opposite, I was going with the flow, swept along by a malodorous stream of invective.
And so it went on. Barely a meeting went by without someone being denounced. Dissent was a sign of impurity, votes were unanimous. In Robertson’s words the SLB was a place “where the men cried and the women screamed.” And on this at least, he wasn’t wrong. After all it was his creation.
After a few years in the SLB a dark depression descended on me. My ability to keep to the punishing schedule dropped off, I couldn’t think clearly, felt exhausted most of the time, and was prone to sloppy formulations. The great leader, Eibhlin McDonald, decided I was feigning illness to mask political problems. Meeting after meeting I was screamed at and denounced, my every utterance was dissected for heresy. Eventually the situation became intolerable and I walked away. Of course even in announcing my resignation McDonald couldn’t stop sneering. I’d left “the Party” to pursue my career, she said. Actually I was unemployed. I had nothing, but nothing was preferable to the SLB hellhole.
Ian Donovan, once of the BT, was a member around the the same time. He got involved in a “fight” between the female leader of the comp crew who wanted to step down from her position due to illness and the SLB leadership. McDonald and Len Meyers accused the woman of using illness as an excuse to abandon her revolutionary duties. To his credit Donovan tried to protect her. Consequently he was subjected to an intense and sustained barrage of abuse and ridicule which resulted in him suffering a severe nervous breakdown. Donovan lost his job and his home, and became incapable of looking after himself. Only his parents saved him from a life on the streets.
There are many more specifics I could give because abuse was the norm, but hopefully you get the idea. And please note, during most of this Jim Robertson was nowhere to be seen. He was probably in his New York apartment having his brow mopped by a female volunteer.
Sometimes though Robertson did make his way across the ocean. He normally graced us with his presence at conference time. On one occasion, maybe in 1981, during a break in proceedings, Robertson grabbed hold of a female IEC member. He groped her in front of an appreciative audience and made lewd comments audible to all. A male comrade turned to me, grinned and said, “Robertson’s checking out the women.” Perhaps the female comrade didn’t mind being groped while others looked on. Maybe she enjoyed the experience.
What do you think James?
Which brings me to the “voluntary” orgies. Is it possible James, that some of the women felt pressured to have sex with Robertson? Is it possible some felt intimidated and so accepted the invitation? Or do you think it’s safe to assume that every woman who pandered to Robertson’s sexual demands did so freely and joyfully? You’ve admitted the organisation was (at bottom) a personality cult, and is it not the case that cult leaders exert psychological power over their followers? Outside of the context of the Spartacist League how many women do you imagine would have wanted to have sex with a middle-aged Jim Robertson? An ugly, scrawny, ranting and raving alcoholic.
That some women said no and got away with it does not make what was going on okay. Or is this a rather too #me-too for you, James?
And what about Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah? The Logan regime was abusive, wasn’t it? You say so yourself. Bill and Adaire (aided and abetted by others in the SL/ANZ) tried to force a young woman, Vicky, to abort her baby and when that failed they pressured her to give it up for adoption. And let’s be specific, because I appreciate how much you like specifics: a doctor gave Vicky medication to take to prevent a possible miscarriage. Hannah tried to persuade Vicky not to take the medicine, “to let nature take its course”. Let me spell it out, Hannah wanted Vicky to have a miscarriage.
Following the birth, the continuing campaign to get Vicky to give up the child resulted in her being hospitalised following a suicide attempt.
I don’t know what’s more incredible or repellent: that you look for “mitigating factors” or claim nobody in the BT leadership knew about this at the time the BT fused with Logan and Hannah’s organisation.
You say: “no one – neither anyone in the BT, not even those reluctant to take him in, nor Logan,nor Hannah, mentioned this episode at the time. I don’t know whether other leading BTers knew about it.”
You don’t know whether other leading BTers knew about the “episode”? The vile treatment of Vicky was the centrepiece of Robertson’s charges against Logan. Do you really think Tom Riley didn’t know about this?
But wait, there are mitigating factors: “It was a common belief among the youthful revolutionary left of the 60s and early 70s–not just among Spartacists–that getting married and starting a family was tantamount to selling out. Logan and Hannah probably shared this assumption, and acted in a way they thought would preserve the woman for revolutionary activity.”
Is this how Logan and Hannah explained away their behaviour? They wanted to preserve Vicky for revolutionary activity? What revolutionary activity? Selling a newspaper on a Saturday morning or arguing with other leftists. For this a young woman should give up her baby?
Delusion, grandiosity and cruelty, it’s a toxic mix. And this sums up the Spartacist League. I’m fairly sure Logan and Hannah had a completely delusional view of their place in the world. They thought the proletarian revolution was imminent and their organisation of a few tens of students, office workers and teachers would be crucial to the outcome. And in this insane context, preserving a revolutionary activist by persuading her to lose her baby made some sort of twisted sense.
In your conclusion you claim: “Robertson had a long career in the Marxist movement and was steeped in (especially Russian) revolutionary history. For all his glaring, and ultimately vitiating, faults he initially led the Spartacist League in order to carry out a serious political agenda.”
You try to make him sound like a tragic figure, a character with noble aims brought down by fatal flaws. Shakespearian almost. He was, he once said, trained by people who were trained by Zinoviev. Not much of a claim if you consider he was probably referring to his brief period in the CP USA youth, but he loved to mythologise himself. He didn’t speak a word of Russian or any other foreign language. He’d read the same books you and I have read, nothing more. He was a small time operator who built a small time operation in his own image.
Was Robertson like Jim Jones or Jeffrey Epstein? He wasn’t like Jones. Robertson did his utmost to stay alive, including milking the membership for every cent he could get out of them. But I’d say he had quite a lot in common with Epstein. He was just a lot less successful, and mercifully, a lot less powerful.
James Creegan said,
August 5, 2021 at 5:58 pm
I agree with Carl Steele—as I have said many times—that the Spartacist League is best understood as a personality cult of Jim Robertson. I accept the veracity of the instances of personal victimization and hysterical outpourings of collective venom that he remembers from his years in the iSt British section. I witnessed similar occurrences as a member of the SL in New York (1981-86) , and eventually became the object of such methods myself (Robertson having drunkenly denounced me as a racist at my final Spartacist meeting). But allow me to ask Steele a question: does he know of any left-wing group that did more than the Bolshevik Tendency to expose the dark underside of life in the House of Robertson: the nightmarish group denunciations; the complete disregard of the truth of the accusations levelled; the psychological manipulation; the pathology of the Red Avengers and the Susannah Martin Witches’ Choir; the delusions of grandeur evident in such things as Robertson’s offer to meet with the commander of Russian forces in East Germany to discuss strategy; his milking of the membership to support a self-indulgent lifestyle? Exposing the twisted, cultish side of the Spartacist League was, IMO, the main service the BT performed for the wider left, and for which I think it deserves greater credit than is given it by an ex-member writing about these things—for the first time I know of– several decades after the events.
(Steele also recalls Robertson’s contention that the Sandinista and early Castro regimes, because they were class-ambivalent, were not states “in the Marxists sense”. Having been in the iSt around the same time I was, Carl may have been aware that there was one member of the American SL who wrote an internal document contesting this absurd pronouncement: me.)
But let me ask Steele another question: If there was no more to the SL than Robertson’s depraved appetites, why did Carl join in the first place? Perhaps because he may have thought, like me, that the SL’s response to world events circa 1980—in El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan, Poland—was superior to those of other left-wing groups? Or maybe because he was attracted, again like me, to the fact that its flagship publication, Workers Vanguard, in addition to being highly literate politically, had a witty, trenchant style that made it–in my opinion and that of many other non-Trotskyists–the best paper in the English-speaking far left in those days?
If the SL was a cult of Robertson, Robertson was deeply and compulsively political. He held a definite worldview that can’t simply be dismissed as an egotistical fantasy. It was grounded in a tradition of “orthodox” Trotskyism, with a long history and literary pedigree. With the team he managed to assemble around him, some of whom were highly knowledgrable and talented—Robertson attempted to apply that worldview to the major political realities and events of his time. He also had a thought-out party-building strategy—“regroupment”, which really meant getting other organizations, or splinters thereof, to join the SL– and a membership that tried tirelessly to put it into practice by selling the paper at every possible venue, founding trade-union fractions, and intervening in just about every demonstration and left-wing meeting wherever the Spartacists had a branch. (The quality of those interventions is another matter).
Someone—I forget who—said that the mark of a superior intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. The SL was indeed a personality cult, subject to the caprices, self-aggrandizing fantasies and persecutions of Number One. But it cannot be simplistically reduced to these things. It was also a serious political organization.
*******
Carl Steele asks if his reflections on Roberson’s orgies are excessively me-too-ish for my taste. The answer is yes. Every adult, IMO, has the right to proposition others sexually—even if the proposition is made by someone at the top rung of a hierarchy to someone at the bottom. Sexual abuse can only be said to occur if the propositioned person lacks the right to refuse without adverse consequences (which include being propositioned repeatedly). To my knowledge–and I stress “to my knowledge”–women in the SL had that right. It never seems to occur to Steele that many a younger member may have been genuinely attracted to someone because of his status and personal edge, despite his conspicuous lack of conventional sex appeal. Others have been known to succumb to the lure of authority. And no amount of “psychological pressure”or anxiousness to please can in my view absolve anyone of the responsibility of exercising her right to say no to an unwanted proposition.
*************
In the matter of Bill Logan: The Logan trial took place two years before I joined the SL. I don’t recall the case of Vicky being discussed in my presence or correspondence at the time Logan applied to join the BT. It is fair to say that several BT members could not but have known about the case then. Riley was at Colchester for the Logan trial, and Howard Keylor was even assigned to guard duty during the trial sessions. Why they didn’t make an issue of the case when Logan joined is a question only they can answer. For my part, I should have been more inquisitive. I was too trusting and somewhat lazy on this score.
Carl ridicules the idea that an organization of students, teachers and office workers selling newspapers could conceive of themselves as some kind of revolutionary vanguard. This notion, however unrealistic it may now seem with the advantage of hindsight and intellectual maturity, was hardly limited to the SL amid the tumult of 60s and its early 70s aftermath. Everyone from Maoists to the Weather Underground thought they were on the verge of apocalyptic events, in which they were destined to play a major role. I assume Carl Steele shared these delusions to some extent himself, considering the fact that he joined a group whose principal self-declared aim was to build a proletarian vanguard. What Logan and Hannah did in Vicky’s case is by no means justified by any belief that they were saving her for revolutionary activity. Their hyper-Robertsonist manipulation was ugly, even by the standards of that era.
There is, however, another question : should Logan/Hannah’s malefactions forever disqualify them for left politics and pursue them to the grave, even when they —with some reluctance, I’ll grant –acknowledged their past mistakes and showed evidence of turning over a new leaf?
I was first approached about Logan’s admission to the BT not by any of its members, but by the late Sy Landy, an old Shachtmanite who was then head of the League for the Revolutionary Party. Although he represented an opponent group, Sy enjoyed a reputation for integrity on the wider left. Logan, whom Sy had apparently befriended in the run-up to his 1979 trial, had got word that Sy was planning to visit Australia, and asked him to make a side trip to New Zealand. Logan’s purpose was to showcase the new Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) he and Hannah had put together in Wellington, in hopes that a good report would recommend him to the BT. Landy returned to the US with the report that Logan and Hannah had assembled a healthy group, seemingly free from the Spartacist organizational methods of their past.
Landy’s report was not, however, sufficient for the BT. We also dispatched Howard Keylor to Wellington to observe the workings of the PRG up close. Keylor, with years of political experience behind him at the time, had earlier been the object of a Robertson purge in the SL. He also returned with a favorable impression.
I first met Logan and Hannah, along with several members of the PRG, when they came to the San Francisco Bay Area for fusion negotiations with the BT. I also briefly visited Wellington for conference after they had joined, in 1994. Logan’s recruits were young people, mostly in their 20s, some socially marginal, some not. Being new to politics and isolated on two remote pacific islands, none of these recruits appeared to have developed the capacity to think for themselves about world politics. Nearly all of them followed Logan’s lead in such matters. But the test of internal democracy consisted to my mind of the ability of members to disagree with the leadership without incurring the harassment and denunciation visited on dissidents in the SL. Both at the Wellington conference I attended, and in reports I later received, members disagreed with Logan on a number of issues—most of them organizational rather than world-political– without repercussions. This convinced me that Logan had drawn certain lessons from the past, and that the PRG was not a replica of the Spartacist branches he had headed before.
**************
Carl Steele may have a point that certain leading BT members were too inclined to sweep Logan’s past misdeeds under the rug in their haste to grow the organization. A former BTer, Samuel Trachtenberg, made a similar point during his falling out with the IBT some years back. What irks me, though, is Steele’s placing of the BT and Jan Norden’s Internationalist Group in the same category of not “wanting to fess up to the part they played in [Robertson’s] abuse”. He goes on to cite the BT as the most “glaring example” of this reluctance. Steele forgets that Robertson’s abuses would be little known without the exposures of the BT. Norden, on the other hand, to this day refuses to acknowledge that there was any abuse committed under the Robertson regime, except that to which he and his three faction partners were subjected when they finally fell foul of the Peerless Leader. Until then Norden sat with his mouth tight shut throughout all the National Chairman’s horrendous misdeeds. Moreover, Norden, as editor of Workers Vanguard, functioned as Robertson’s chief anti-BT propaganda flack, spinning one innuendo and and concocting one outright lie after another. Norden and his cohort still refuse to re-examine their Spartacist past, claiming to have been beyond reproach in everything they did and said. Don’t you think, Carl, that the glare of guilt emanating from the IG is somewhat brighter than what are at most the BT’s pale rays? I’m not asking that Steele withhold his criticism, only suggesting that he be a little more discriminating about its objects.
Carl Steele said,
August 6, 2021 at 11:48 am
In no particular order:
James asks: “If there was no more to the SL than Robertson’s depraved appetites, why did Carl join in the first place? Perhaps because he may have thought, like me, that the SL’s response to world events circa 1980—in El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan, Poland—was superior to those of other left-wing groups?”
I can say, hand on heart, that I did not join the Spartacist League because of their political writings. My reasons for becoming a Spartacist were entirely psychological/emotional.
At the time I was considered a highly political person. By SLB standards (a very low bar I admit) I was well-read, and had no difficulty articulating and arguing their political positions. I wrote for the newspaper, often gave educationals or spoke at public meetings, was a CC member and a local organiser for a while. But it was not politics which drew me into the SLB.
I think this was true for a lot of the membership, because those who were principally attracted by the politics didn’t last long. Those who stuck around had their own agendas.
——
James claims, ludicrously: “[Robertson] … had a thought-out party-building strategy—“regroupment”, which really meant getting other organizations, or splinters thereof, to join the SL– and a membership that tried tirelessly to put it into practice by selling the paper at every possible venue, founding trade-union fractions, and intervening in just about every demonstration and left-wing meeting wherever the Spartacists had a branch.”
The “strategy” was to tirelessly denounce and trash other left groups – hostile proselytising.
To make a splits and fusions strategy viable you would have to know how to engage other leftists so they were open to talking to you. And when you won someone you needed to know how to integrate them into your organisation. Plus you’d need some long-term work in campaigns or unions. You are fully aware the Spartacist League did none of this.
There was a brief period (1978-81) in Britain when it looked like regroupment was actually working but it all fell apart and the SLB became a pariah group which couldn’t even get into the meetings of other left groups.
—–
James protests: “Carl ridicules the idea that an organization of students, teachers and office workers selling newspapers could conceive of themselves as some kind of revolutionary vanguard.”
I do ridicule this, because it’s ridiculous. But worse, it’s the kind of delusion which justifies all manner of cruelty and mistreatment, as we saw with Vicky. Did I share this delusion? I’m not at all sure I ever expected the proletarian revolution but I did share the completely misplaced sense of urgency and grandiosity, which I greatly regret because I participated in some very bad stuff.
——
James asks: “ … should Logan/Hannah’s malefactions forever disqualify them for left politics and pursue them to the grave, even when they —with some reluctance, I’ll grant –acknowledged their past mistakes and showed evidence of turning over a new leaf?”
This is not a practical question. Nobody can exclude them from left politics. I don’t suppose anybody will pursue them to their graves.
James says: “I also briefly visited Wellington for conference after they had joined, in 1994. Logan’s recruits were young people, mostly in their 20s … Both at the Wellington conference I attended, and in reports I later received, members disagreed with Logan on a number of issues—most of them organizational rather than world-political– without repercussions.”
Well that’s just great! I met one of these young people in London in the late 80’s. She was certainly incapable of challenging Logan politically. Is that what Logan settled for, surrounding himself with people who couldn’t challenge him? Maybe it’s an improvement, I don’t really know.
——
James complains: “What irks me, though, is Steele’s placing of the BT and Jan Norden’s Internationalist Group in the same category of not “wanting to fess up to the part they played in [Robertson’s] abuse”. He goes on to cite the BT as the most “glaring example” of this reluctance.”
I talk about “a glaring example” of this reluctance being how the BT hooked up with Logan. It’s not the same meaning as you imply here.
James continues: “Norden, on the other hand, to this day refuses to acknowledge that there was any abuse committed under the Robertson regime, except that to which he and his three faction partners were subjected when they finally fell foul of the Peerless Leader. Until then Norden sat with his mouth tight shut throughout all the National Chairman’s horrendous misdeeds.”
I agree with what you say about the IG. But the BT were exactly the same 15 years earlier. Tom Riley claimed the Spartacists were a well-mannered revolutionary organisation guided by fealty to the revolutionary program until they turned on him. The abuse prior to Riley coming under attack was expunged from the record.
This is what I mean by not “wanting to fess up to the part they played in [Robertson’s] abuse.” Both the BT and IG claim to be innocent victims in the drama. Riley was a leader of the Canadian section in Robertson’s organisation. Did he really do no wrong? If he was capable of forgetting about the abuse of Vicky when it suited him, what else did he forget about?
———
James says: “Carl Steele asks if his reflections on Roberson’s orgies are excessively me-too-ish for my taste. The answer is yes. Every adult, IMO, has the right to proposition others sexually—even if the proposition is made by someone at the top rung of a hierarchy to someone at the bottom.”
Using authority to exploit somebody’s vulnerabilities and thereby extract sexual favours is abusive. It’s not rape, but it’s disgusting.
Do you think Robertson had the right to grope a woman comrade in public?
Are you a fan of Jordan Peterson?
——
James claims: “With the team he managed to assemble around him, some of whom were highly knowledgeable and talented—Robertson attempted to apply that worldview to the major political realities and events of his time.”
Robertson assembled a team of sycophants around him. Some of them were talented for sure, but none of them would ever challenge Robertson. And when called upon they assisted Robertson in dishing out the abuse.
The analysis of major political realities was always distant, abstract and highly formulaic. That doesn’t mean the analysis was always wrong but since there was no practical application of the slogans it was often impossible to tell. All roads lead back to the cosmic history book.
——
James asks: “But allow me to ask Steele a question: does he know of any left-wing group that did more than the Bolshevik Tendency to expose the dark underside of life in the House of Robertson … Exposing the twisted, cultish side of the Spartacist League was, IMO, the main service the BT performed for the wider left.”
There is some truth to this but all the abuse you exposed was post Riley-gate, and Riley and his pals were innocent victims.
And what exactly do you mean by “the wide left.” Which groups benefited from your exposure?
Also there was an ulterior motive. In exposing Robertson the BT was claiming the mantle of Trotskyist orthodoxy. The baton was being passed to Tom Riley who was to continue the historic work of the sadly degenerated Jim Robertson. It’s utterly delusional. If the Spartacist League and the BT had never existed would humankind be any worse off?
James says: “I accept the veracity of the instances of personal victimization and hysterical outpourings of collective venom that he remembers from his years in the iSt British section. I witnessed similar occurrences as a member of the SL in New York (1981-86) , and eventually became the object of such methods myself.”
Look at what you say here. You “witnessed” the abuse and eventually became the victim. So you are blameless. You never did anything bad, you never voted for a scurrilous resolution, you never denounced someone unjustly. You “witnessed” it all and then they kicked you out. Hard to believe.
——
James says: “Steele also recalls Robertson’s contention that the Sandinista and early Castro regimes, because they were class-ambivalent, were not states “in the Marxists sense”. Having been in the iSt around the same time I was, Carl may have been aware that there was one member of the American SL who wrote an internal document contesting this absurd pronouncement: me.”
I don’t remember your document so I don’t know what you said. My point is not just that the analysis of Cuba is wrong, it’s symptomatic of an approach which puts theory above reality, an approach which wants to make a good record in Geoff White’s cosmic history book. The Spartacists came up with this theory because they feared an alternative analysis might be construed as reformist. And that would never do. This methodology runs right through the history of the Spartacist League.
James Creegan said,
August 7, 2021 at 3:43 pm
I can’t say I’m surprised to learn that Carl Steele’s reasons for joining the Spartacist League were emotional rather than political, because his retrospective view of the SL is also highly emotional. He paints the group as an unmitigated evil; he leaves no room for nuance or subtlety. The SL, from its beginnings to what now looks like its end, was, by his lights, never anything more than a vehicle for Robertson’s self-aggrandizing fantasies and depraved appetites. Anyone who belonged to it, and does not join Steele in completely and unconditionally renouncing his/her Spartacist past, is morally tainted beyond redemption. His view doesn’t allow for for the evolution of organizations or individuals—either for degeneration or improvement .
Steele mocks the revolutionary aspirations of the SL as delusional. But, as I pointed out, such grand ambitions were hardly limited to the Spartacist League; they permeated the entire far left of the 60s and early 70s. It is true that these high hopes were often divorced from reality. But I also think that a certain element of transcendental thinking—the social imagination required to contemplate a radical break with what most people take to be the unalterable facts of the existing order—is a necessary ingredient of any kind of revolutionary consciousness. Steele also dismisses the SL and BT as having had no effect whatsoever upon the world. I wonder if he would say the same of the entire revolutionary left of that period. If that is his opinion, why bother to write about his Spartacist experience in the first place?
I don’t know what Steele’s politics are today. But I would be surprised if he now considered himself a revolutionary of any persuasion. His appraisal of the SL has the flavor of the confessions of repentant ex-Communists. I believe it was Merleau-Ponty who compared such testimonies to the attitude of a divorced man to his ex-wife: once completely enamored and blind to her faults, he now sees her as entirely without redeeming virtues.
Carl never displays any awareness that the organization we joined around 1980 was already in an advanced stage of degeneration. “Degeneration from what?”, you ask. “Didn’t the life of the group always revolve around Robertson, and wasn’t he always a megalomaniac?” The answers are yes and yes. Like the deformed workers’ states, the SL was defective from the beginning. It was always a more or less personalist organization, but, according to veteran ex-Sparts I’ve spoken with, less in the early days and more as time went by. They said that early on there was greater optimism and a relatively more open and democratic atmosphere. The interventions in left events were not as shrill. The documents on the woman and black questions with which the SL intervened in SDS in 1968 are, IMO, models of socialist propaganda—reasonable and completely free of the rant and venom of later years.
Robertson’s regroupment strategy did meet with some limited success: the SL recruited the Buffalo Marxist Union, part of the Leninist faction of the SWP, the former Maoists around Marv Traeger in the Bay Area, and at least one gay grouping (the name of which I forget). The SL made certain organizational adjustments at the prompting of some of these new entrants. The organization grew from a sect of fewer than a hundred ex-SWPers to a sect of several hundred.
The SL’s degeneration into the more debased personality cult we joined took place, as far as I’m able to reconstruct, beginning in the mid-70s. It was then that the pool from which the SL recruited—radicalized 60s youth—had dried up, and the realization was sinking in that the 60s were not a prologue to a widely anticipated groundswell of worker militancy. By the mid-70s, it was increasingly apparent that, on the contrary, politics were moving to the right, and Western countries were entering a period of reaction. The absence of any possibility of forward momentum caused internal crises not only in the SL, but in other far-left groups. The clone purge and the Logan trial took place in these years. The SL that emerged from the 70s was one in which the cultist deformity the organization was born with became more exaggerated and grotesque. I don’t think Steele sees any of this evolution or political context. For him, the SL was simply the plaything of a morally corrupt leader, equally deplorable throughout its entire existence.
Steele reiterates his refusal to distinguish between the BT and the IG, except to say that the leaders of the two groups were ejected by Robertson at different times, and date the party’s degeneration from their respective exits. This is certainly true of Norden, who claims that everything was peachy-keen in Spartsville until his departure. But if Steele would re-read the BT’s major document, The Road to Jimstown, he would discover a critique that traces the process of degeneration back to the early 70s. It gives a lot of weight to the clone purge, and refers to Robertson’s trashing of Liz Gordon when she dared to criticize an article of his on the Polansky affair as unbalanced. Both events that transpired when Tom Riley, Jimstown’s principal author, still belonged to the SL. He did not claim it only went downhill when he left.
Steele is firmly convinced that anyone who belonged to the SL had to come out covered in filth. No doubt many did, but I don’t count myself among them. Regrets– I have a few– but only two that warrant mention: I declined to raise my voice against the peremptory expulsion by Robertson of a leader of the SL transit fraction and that of an old-time Spartacist for no other reason except that their behavior, which involved no breach of party rules, had displeased him. Both of expulsions were simply announced and approved at local meetings, without the slightest pretense of due process. I went along with the pack because I was already a marked man. I had was already under the suspicion of the leadership, and had figured out by that time that I would be allowed only one fight before leaving. I wanted to choose the hill I would die on. But these were sins of omission rather than commission. I never added my voice to any hysterical chorus of denunciation. When I finally decided I’d had enough, I submitted several sharply-worded documents criticizing a sycophantic and incompetent black cadre in the course of a fight he had picked with me on internal education. Robertson himself denounced me and two comrades who took my side as racists.
The account of this meeting in 1917 No. 4 (which I wrote) is far too discreet. It was a lurid scene. Robertson was deep in his cups, constantly interrupting everyone with words that were increasingly slurred and incoherent. The chairman of the meeting of course refused to call him to order in any way, while one dutiful cultist ripped up the microphone wires from their taped positions on the floor to bring the mic closer to el jefe and catch his every inebriated word of wisdom. Nearly all the assembled members raised their hands instantly and mechanically in favor of every motion he put forward. As one of his wives approached the lectern to denounce me, Robertson smacked her on the rump, shouting, “Give it to ‘em Lizzy!” At the end of the meeting, National Chairman, unable to walk on his own, was escorted from the meeting hall with his arms around two female necks, muttering, “I’m finished!” Yet I didn’t yield an inch to Robertson at this meeting. I stood my ground, and did not come out of the organization with any deep feelings of shame or guilt. Immediately afterwards, I turned in an angry resignation and refused the SLs demand for payment of dues for the month in which my final fight took place.
I think Robertson’s comportment at this meeting at least matched the groping episode Steele describes at an SLB conference. I recount my last fight to show that I too have deep exit wounds, and reasons as good as Steele’s to hate Robertson and his minions. But unlike him, I joined the SL more for political than emotional reasons. And also unlike him, I have not allowed my negative emotions to overpower my ability to reflect.
Carl Steele said,
August 9, 2021 at 6:00 am
There is not much new in the latest Creegan epistle so I suppose the exchange has run its course.
To be clear, I don’t think the Spartacist League “is the embodiment of unmitigated evil”. Nor do I think anyone who doesn’t agree with me “is morally tainted beyond redemption”. These are religious absolutes. I’m talking about something much more tangible.
I’m prepared to accept that things may have gone from bad to worse. But I don’t buy into the BT fantasy that a healthy political organisation, which carried out political work of historical significance, degenerated over the course of a few years into a grossly abusive personality cult.
Does James agree with the BT narrative? Sometimes it seems he does, and other times it seems he doesn’t. I don’t know.
James claims my argument is purely emotional, but when he comes up with excuse after excuse for cruelty and idiocy who is he really defending – Robertson, Riley, or himself? James was a member of the SL for 5 years, and the BT for 10 years. This is a considerable emotional investment, not easy to put aside when looking back.
And here is the giveaway:
“Regrets– I have a few– but only two that warrant mention: I declined to raise my voice against the peremptory expulsion by Robertson of a leader of the SL transit fraction and that of an old-time Spartacist for no other reason except that their behavior, which involved no breach of party rules, had displeased him. Both of expulsions were simply announced and approved at local meetings, without the slightest pretense of due process. I went along with the pack because I was already a marked man. I was already under the suspicion of the leadership, and had figured out by that time that I would be allowed only one fight before leaving. I wanted to choose the hill I would die on. But these were sins of omission rather than commission. I never added my voice to any hysterical chorus of denunciation.”
James spent 5 years in the Spartacist League, an organisation he describes as being in an advanced state of degeneration, and he never put a foot wrong.
In his previous post he says:
“I accept the veracity of the instances of personal victimization and hysterical outpourings of collective venom that he remembers from his years in the iSt British section. I witnessed similar occurrences as a member of the SL in New York (1981-86)”
If James “witnessed” the hysterical outpourings then he was in the room. He wasn’t watching from afar. Perhaps like Norden, “he sat with his mouth tight shut throughout all the National Chairman’s horrendous misdeeds.” Or is he claiming there was only one hysterical outpouring in 5 years, when the Chairman turned on him?
James’ account of his time the Spartacist League is classic. For years, while all the crap is going down, he feels at home, because the crap isn’t going down on him. And then he gets into a dispute about surplus value; he tries to resolve the dispute because he wants to stay in the organisation (according to his own account in the BT journal), but Robertson’s having nothing of it. And suddenly he’s outside the organisation trying to make sense of it all.
As for the repentant, ex-communist stuff – the Spartacist League is not a part of the tradition of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxembourg. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. Am I a revolutionary? No I’m not, because I see no practical route to revolution. And what about James? Is he a revolutionary? In his imagination maybe.
And, as an addendum, after James spent so long explaining how Logan had mended his ways, I did a quick Google search for Samuel Trachtenberg’s resignation letter (2008) from the BT and read the following:
“… the situation of the New Zealand section is most instructive. From being the largest ostensibly Trotskyist group in the country, it has dwindled down to 4 semi-active geriatrics. I suspect the reason for this being that its reputation is such that most NZ activists would not want to touch it with a ten foot pole. Logan’s and Hannah’s past reputation as Spartacist League leaders, combined with their apparent failure to fully break from their past practices (as expressed by the atrocious Comcrit sessions and Peter De Waal purge (see appendixes 1 and 2), are widely known in NZ left circles and discussed in various internet discussion groups.”
So perhaps my my initial observation, that the BT covered up Logan’s abusive behaviour was correct!!
I’ll finish with a question:
Why would a clear-eyed, politically motivated individual who was serious about bringing about social change have chosen to join the Spartacist League, at any point in its history?
James Creegan said,
August 10, 2021 at 4:09 pm
Let me answer Steele’s last question first. I joined the SL in 1981 because I agreed with them on El Salvador, Iran and Afghanistan. I also agreed with the line they adopted shortly after I joined on Poland. I was also, like them, a Soviet defensist. The SL may not have been in the tradition of Lenin, Liebknecht or Luxemburg, but the positions they took on major events circa 1980 were, IMO, more in keeping with this tradition than the politics of other groups. I thought that they had the best and edgiest newspaper on the far left at this time. I also viewed them as more serious and professional than other groups. All of these positions—and appraisals—I l consider valid today.
Do I accept the BT narrative on the SL? Probably not its main assumptions. I doubt that the SL was ever a completely healthy revolutionary organization (at least after the departure of all its founders but Robertson). I think, as I have indicated, that it probably evolved from an organization with cultish characteristics to a pure personality cult. I also reject the BT notion that the pre-degenerated SL was singularly important because it maintained the “continuity” of the Trotskyist program. I no longer believe that there is any such thing as THE Trotskyist program—one that has remained intact for eighty years, and simply needs to be carried forward. I think that Trotsky himself—who was always evaluating his ideas against reality—would have scoffed at such a notion.
I do believe, however, that the BT—particularly but not exclusively in the Road to Jimstown—exposed for the first time how the SL operated internally—the group denunciations, the false accusations, the obedience training, Robertson’s rule by fiat and the privileges he enjoyed at members’ expense.
As for my own Spartacist history, Steele continues to I insist on a rigid binary: since I did not immediately recognize the Robertson regime for what it was and denounce it, I must have been “at home” in the SL and complicit in the “crap that went down”; I only spoke out against the leadership after it targeted me. The problem with such thinking in polar opposites is that it allows for no intermediate degrees: the ambiguities, partial criticisms, half-starts and retreats with which any opposition usually begins. Trotsky’s fight against the Soviet bureaucracy (to compare the great with the minuscule) did not begin with a full-blown critique or a resolute course of action, but was hampered in its early stages by assumptions Trotsky erroneously shared with the ruling triumvirs, by reluctance and political vacillations. These hesitant beginnings do not invalidate the conclusions Trotsky finally arrived at, or the determined political course he took in the end.
I won’t bore anyone still reading this exchange with the details of my tortured history in the Spartacist League. Suffice it to say that I approached the SL even before I joined with a critical attitude that made me an object of suspicion from the start, and insisted throughout my membership on my right to my own opinions, which sometimes conflicted with those of Robertson and his sycophants. I was never “at home” in the Spartacist League. My realization that I belonged to a personality cult grew over time, until I finally mustered the resolve to pull out all stops in my criticism of a cadre I knew to be under Robertson’s protection, undaunted by fear of the probable outcome. I had had enough. I thought at the time that If what I wrote and said meant the end of my membership, so be it.
The bottom line in all this is that I fought back in the end, unlike many who silently “walked away”, only to dilate on the depravity of the Spartacist League years or decades later.
It also took me a while to realize that “orthodox” Trotskyism amounted to the proposition that we are living—at the latest—in 19 38. My conclusions are fully spelled out in copious documents I wrote during the my final fight in the IBT.
revolutionaryprogramme said,
August 13, 2021 at 9:11 pm
I have read with considerable interest this exchange between Carl Steele and James Creegan, over the implosion and virtual disappearance of the Spartacist League (SL). The discussion also touches on the attempt by the External Tendency (ET)/Bolshevik Tendency (BT) to win a section of the SL cadre to oppose the group’s political degeneration, a process the ET/BT identified as beginning in the late 1970s. This effort was of course unsuccessful and the political degeneration of the SL continued for decades; today there is apparently not much left of the Spartacists as an operational political entity. In the January 2021 commentary that launched this exchange, former BT comrade “Fischerzed” asked what is going on in the SL and its satellites in the International Communist League (ICL). It is a good question to which there is at this point, to my knowledge, no definite answer. I think that Fischerzed’s observation that eventually “it’ll all come out in the wash” is about all we can say for sure.
In a commentary on the SL’s 2017 “Hydra” document renouncing much of its historic political legacy, the BT’s Tom Riley speculated:
“It is hard to imagine the ICL finding a viable niche in the already crowded ecosystem of pro-nationalist pseudo-Trotskyist flora and fauna. Presumably, for a period, it will continue to go through the motions of holding meetings and issuing propaganda. But the chief axis of any struggle for supremacy in the post-Robertsonian ICL seems less likely to focus on programmatic issues than gaining control of the group’s accumulated material assets, which are substantial enough to motivate a few rounds of an in-house ‘game of thrones.’
“Such a struggle is not likely to be particularly edifying, nor would we expect a whole lot of ‘Trotskyism’ to remain once the dust settles, outstanding legal challenges are resolved, the real estate portfolio liquidated and final payouts disbursed.” —”From Trotskyism to Neo-Pabloism—ICL Breaks with Leninism on the National Question” (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/04/14/from-trotskyism-to-neo-pabloism-2/)
Having essentially ceased any pretence of “holding meetings and issuing propaganda,” it seems likely that the core of any “game of thrones” currently underway in the SL will largely involve a final disposition of the group’s material assets.
My interest in the question, like that of Steele and Creegan, chiefly centres on evaluating the political legacy of the SL—which I believe has a great deal of importance for the future. I am the only member from Bill Logan’s Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) in New Zealand in 1990 who is currently with the BT (the others who are still active, including Logan, are with the IBT). I joined the PRG in 1989 and participated in the pre-fusion discussions held in Wellington; Fischerzed and Creegan did so as BT members in Toronto and New York.
As Logan’s political record is a central issue in the discussion, I should make clear that there was nothing particularly outrageous that I witnessed during my time in the PRG, nor that I heard of after I moved to Britain in late 1994. I had no real contact with the Spartacists before I arrived in London, although I had heard and read a great deal about them. When I finally encountered the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) in the flesh, it was immediately clear that this was an extremely bizarre outfit. They carried out a lot of public activity, but characteristically intervened with a style that seemed to range from overly aggressive to outright obnoxious—which seemed to me, on the whole, to be rather counterproductive, as it tended to undercut political positions I often viewed as being formally correct. My overall impression was that they seemed to be a strangely insular organisation. Based on their public behaviour, I had no trouble crediting the many accounts of the sometimes weird goings-on in “Jimstown.”
At the time of the 1990 fusion with the PRG, Creegan was leading the BT’s New York branch. He mentions how, in the course of the discussions, Logan produced several candid critical assessments of various abusive incidents he was responsible for in the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) during the 1970s. It was the first time I recall learning anything much about this history and of course I studied each document closely. Creegan and the other former Spartacists in the BT accepted these documents as evidence that Logan recognised and regretted his excesses and would be unlikely to repeat them. To my knowledge he never did. (The documents are appended to “On the Logan Show Trial” on our website – https://bolsheviktendency.org/2021/08/10/on-the-logan-show-trial/.)
Creegan reports that in 1990:
“We thought it appropriate that Logan, before joining the BT, should give some accounting of his political past, and the way he viewed it in retrospect. There was, specifically, the case of John Ebel, a member of the Australian section of the iSt when Logan headed it. Logan suspected Ebel of engaging in some kind of proto-factional correspondence with members of other national sections, and broke into his room to riffle through his personal correspondence. We in the BT had documentation of this episode. Upon joining us, Logan acknowledged the abusiveness of his behavior in this instance, and, as far as we could tell–having sent one observer to New Zealand to monitor the workings of the group he had built there at the time of joining us– was not then repeating any of his older, abusive practices.
“There was, however, a more serious instance of abuse under Logan’s Australian regime that I, personally, did not know about at the time he joined us….
“A young female member of the Australian section in the 70s had become pregnant. Logan and Hannah apparently did everything in their power to prevent her from having her baby; Hannah at one point even urged her to take a pill to induce abortion. For this, they were rebuked by the Spartacist leadership in New York. Logan and Hannah failed in the end, and the woman gave birth. They then apparently pressured her to put the baby up for adoption, also unsuccessfully.
“The behavior of Logan and Hannah was unconscionable. It should, however, be put in context. It was a common belief among the youthful revolutionary left of the 60s and early 70s–not just among Spartacists–that getting married and starting a family was tantamount to selling out.”
Creegan may not have been aware of this episode, which was so central to Logan’s 1979 expulsion from the Spartacist tendency, but Riley and his partner Cathy Nason, two founding members of the External Tendency, had been told about it and other unsavoury aspects of life in the SL/ANZ, by Adaire Hannah (then Logan’s partner) when she visited Toronto in the summer of 1974.
The ET’s October 1982 founding declaration included the following assessment of the Logan regime:
“Logan was undoubtedly guilty of running a grossly abusive regime—but the nature of the abuse in his Australian operation was only a linear extrapolation of the internal regime of [Jim] Robertson’s American section. How else can one explain the fact that none of the SL/US [Spartacist League/U.S.] cadres who lived under the Logan regime blew the whistle?….
“In fact the revelations of life in the SL/ANZ [Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand] came as no surprise to the bulk of the senior cadres of the tendency, as the Logans [sic] had made no particular secret of most of their actions. Foster [Robertson’s deputy] and other leading comrades [including Robertson himself] had visited the Australian section and talked to the members in the midst of these horrors without noticing anything amiss.” —Declaration of an external tendency of the iSt (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/27/declaration-of-an-external-tendency-of-the-ist/)
In 1995 the SL published a wide-ranging critique of our group, characterising us as “a political animal of a truly bizarre and dubious sort.” We responded with Trotskyist Bulletin No. 5 (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/17/tb-5-icl-vs-ibt/), which reprinted the entire text of their pamphlet with a response to every point. Much of the exchange centres on disagreements over the Russian question, trade-union policy and the SL’s various social-patriotic flinches, including the 1983 destruction of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. But the issue that got the most ink was the question of the Logan expulsion (points 46-60). The SL never commented on anything we raised in TB 5, but a few years later, apparently in response to our reference to a chauvinist “joke” Robertson made about Kurdish people in 1979 (see: Kurdistan and the Struggle for National Liberation – https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/30/polemics-with-the-icl-kurdistan-the-struggle-for-national-liberation/) the SL published a two-part compendium of materials from Logan’s 1979 trial entitled “The Logan Dossier.” We responded in 2008 with “On the Logan Show Trial” (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2021/08/10/on-the-logan-show-trial/). This pamphlet contains a section on “The Vicky Question,” documenting that Robertson and other top leaders of the SL had been well aware of what happened to Vicky and her baby many years prior to January 1979 when they claimed to have first learned of it.
One bit we cited from “The Logan Dossier” (volume II, p66) was Robertson’s comment that in the early 1970s, “I was running around saying ‘goddamned babies.’” There is other evidence cited demonstrating the SL leadership’s negative attitude towards members who showed any interest in having children which, as Creegan observed, was not uncommon within the far left at the time.
Among other things discussed in our document is the case of John Ebel who got into hot water for complaining about life under Logan, as Creegan mentions. Under the subhead “1974 Commission on John E.: A Smoking Gun,” we observed:
“The 1974 commission has always been an awkward thing for Robertson et al to explain, as its existence refutes the claim that the international leadership had no knowledge of the nature of the regime in Australia, and of Vicky’s treatment in particular, prior to the anguished outpourings of the membership at the January 1979 SL/ ANZ summer camp.”
Robertson was not on the Ebel commission, which took place in the SL’s New York headquarters, but John Sharpe, who oversaw the overseas activities of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) at the time, was a participant. All significant documents submitted to the commission circulated within the iSt leadership. Of particular interest is Logan’s contribution entitled “The Case of Comrade John E.” in which he explicitly defends his regime’s treatment of Vicky (Appendix Bi in our pamphlet). Ebel, who previously belonged to the Mandelite group in Australia, had cited Vicky’s case as an example of what he thought was wrong with the SL/ANZ. As we noted in “On the Logan Show Trial”:
“It is a matter of fact that John E. had criticized ‘what Logan did to Vicky’ at a Sydney local meeting on 21 July 1974 and that Bill’s written response, dated 4 August 1974, which openly defended his regime’s treatment of Vicky, as well as its policy regarding leadership interference in the personal lives of the members, was circulated [in connection with the Ebel investigation] to leading members of the iSt, including Jim Robertson. Jim’s claim that four years later he had been shocked to find out about Vicky and other abuses in the SL/ANZ is therefore simply not credible.”
Robertson’s claim that he was unaware of the Vicky case prior to 1979 was simply a lie. The attempt to saddle Logan with sole responsibility for her treatment was also bogus. Vicky’s husband at the time, David S., who was a roommate of Robertson’s in a house in North London for several months in 1976, admitted during the 1979 trial that he and Adaire Hannah were chiefly responsible for pressuring Vicky.
David ended up paying for his sins several years later when he became an example of what Steele reports as Robertson’s observation that the SL/B was “a place where the men cried and the women screamed.” In the first issue of 1917 we published an article entitled “The Robertson School of Party Building” (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2020/06/12/the-robertson-school-of-party-building/) which included the following eyewitness account of David’s humiliation at an SL/B London branch meeting in Autumn 1982. Perhaps Carl was in the audience at the time:
‘‘the SL/B, according to the international leadership, ‘was in pretty good shape.’ This characterisation held good right up to the August 1982 national educational. Then a few weeks later all hell let loose. The SL/B leadership it turned out was guilty of racism. From a healthy section to racism in a few weeks—this should make even the most dull-witted observer a little suspicious!
‘‘An enormous international delegation was flown in to ‘find out’ what was going on in Britain….The power structure is to be broken, a new and very different CC [Central Committee] is to be elected. Except that the old leadership is left intact with the addition of a few of the more abusive elements from the lower ranks. And David [the former leader] is reduced to an emotional wreck. I don’t think I will ever forget the IEC [International Executive Committee] meeting that preceded the plenum. David got up to speak on the round. He stood at the front a pathetic figure, his movements strangely mechanical as he desperately tried to get a few words out of his mouth. The eerie silence was only broken by the sound of several leading IEC members swapping jokes and guffawing. When the laughter had subsided and all attention was focused on David, unable to speak he burst into tears and ran back towards his seat. As he passed down the aisle someone shouted out ‘write us a letter.’ ‘David…is in very poor emotional shape’ pronounced Jim Robertson. No doubt indifference to such events is the hallmark of a real SL/B ‘Bolshevik’….Preservation of cadre, don’t make me laugh.’’
Logan and Hannah were expelled in 1979; the founders of the ET were driven out of the iSt in 1980 and 1981. Most of the ET’s founders had joined the SL in the early or mid-1970s and they all agreed that it was rapidly degenerating into a qualitatively different group than they had originally been recruited to. The 1982 Declaration of an external tendency of the iSt (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/27/declaration-of-an-external-tendency-of-the-ist/) contained the following appeal to the SL cadre:
“The practices and policies of the present leadership which are disorienting and destroying the iSt from within must be reversed! To this end, we constitute ourselves as an external tendency of the iSt. We call on those who still wish to fight for the rebirth of the Fourth International not to become demoralized by their experience in the iSt but to join us in this struggle.”
Carl Steele, who says he did not join the SL/B because of its political positions, does not clarify what his motivation was. James Creegan states that he joined in 1981 because he considered that the SL’s “response to world events circa 1980—in El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan, Poland—was superior to those of other left-wing groups.” We agree with that assessment. We also consider that during the 1960s and 70s the SL consistently upheld and, in a few cases, extended the Trotskyist programme. Creegan presents the following sketch of the trajectory of the SL’s degeneration:
“It was always a more or less personalist organization, but, according to veteran ex-Sparts I’ve spoken with, less in the early days and more as time when by They said that early on there was greater optimism and a relatively more open and democratic atmosphere. The interventions in left events were not as shrill. The documents on the woman and black questions with which the SL intervened in SDS in 1968 are, IMO, models of socialist propaganda—reasonable and completely free of the rant and venom of later years.
“Robertson’s regroupment strategy did meet with some limited success: the SL recruited the Buffalo Marxist Union, part of the Leninist faction of the SWP, the former Maoists around Marv [Treiger] in [Los Angeles], and at least one gay grouping [Red Flag Union—formerly Lavender and Red Union]. The SL made certain organizational adjustments at the prompting of some of these new entrants. The organization grew from a sect of fewer than a hundred ex-SWPers to a sect of several hundred.
“The SL’s degeneration into the more debased personality cult we joined took place, as far as I’m able to reconstruct, beginning in the mid-70s.”
James Creegan broke with us politically almost a quarter of a century ago, but despite deep differences with him on a variety of important questions, we consider his description of the SL’s devolution to be roughly accurate. We do not however consider that the SL at its height was merely a “sect,” nor do we think that at that time it was essentially a “personalist” organisation (although Robertson was always the central figure—and without a peer after the departure of Geoff White).
Steele raised the issue of the treatment of women within the SL, citing an episode he witnessed in London. While the ET/BT generally focussed on the provable, overtly programmatic departures of the Robertson leadership, we did touch on some of the seamier elements of life in the degenerating SL. In the ICL’s extended 2007 polemic against us, reprinted and rebutted in TB 5 referred to above, the SL complained:
“In May 1985, the BT published a highly inventive piece of reptile journalism worthy of the anti-communist ravings of Ayn Rand or Reader’s Digest, titled ‘The Road to Jimstown,’ smearing our party as an ‘obedience cult’ and spinning lurid, slanderous tales of political intimidation, ‘sexual groupies’ and internal corruption.”
We responded (point 15, TB 5):
“We published ‘The Road to Jimstown’ (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/04/19/the-road-to-jimstown/) in 1985. It briefly outlines the course of the SL’s degeneration from Trotskyism to political banditry. This is the first time, after ten years, that the SL has commented on it. Attentive readers will note that the ICL pamphlet denounces it as a pack of ravings and smears without citing any specifics. There is a good reason for this: it is all true, and there are lots of people who know it. We admit that some of it is pretty ‘lurid,’ but lurid is as lurid does.
. . .
“It is not entirely clear to us which passages in ‘The Road to Jimstown’ the Robertsonians take umbrage at. We do not imagine, for example, that they would wish to challenge the veracity of the following:
“’For several years Robertson has had his own little coven of sexual groupies with its own bizarre initiation rituals. They made a semi-official debut internally when, dressed in black and carrying candles, they appeared as ‘the Susanna Martin Choir’ at a social held during the 1983 SL National Conference. (Susanna Martin was an early American witch.) In the report of the conference which appeared in WV (No. 342, 18 November 1983), it was noted that the choir’s ‘performance was received with wild and overwhelming acclaim.’ What wasn’t reported is that running such an ‘informal interest association,’ as WV coyly referred to it, is Robertson’s exclusive prerogative in the SL. Nor did WV mention that being one of Jim’s groupies confers great ‘informal’ authority within the group.’”
“The SL leadership complains that telling the unpleasant truth about life in Jimstown ‘feed[s] the anti-communist American political climate which targeted us.’ This recalls Stalinist complaints that Trotsky’s exposure of the corruption and cynicism of the Soviet bureaucracy aided imperialism. Trotsky replied that the job of revolutionaries is to ‘say what is.’”
We believe that the history of the SL is important because it was not merely one left group among many—it was the only serious, consistently revolutionary opposition to the political collapse of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), once the leading section of Trotsky’s Fourth International. When the degenerated SWP leadership proclaimed the petit-bourgeois Cuban guerrilla insurrectionists led by Fidel Castro “unconscious Trotskyists” and credited them with creating the first healthy workers’ state since the October Revolution, James Robertson, Shane Mage, Geoff White and the other members of the Revolutionary Tendency (the SL’s forerunner) stood up and waged a fight against what they correctly characterised as Pabloism—a Trotskyoid version of the liquidationism Lenin combatted in Russia.
This is why the history of the Spartacist tendency is worth studying and discussing, despite the fact that it is clearly finished as a political organisation. It is the position of the BT that the SL, at its apex, not only defended a consistently Trotskyist programme, but that it demonstrated a capacity to intervene effectively in the world, as we outlined in “Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League?” (https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/27/whatever-happened-to-the-spartacist-league/):
“While the revolutionary SL of the 1960s and 70s was rigidly principled, it also worked hard to develop effective tactics to root the program of revolutionary communism within the most advanced sections of the oppressed and exploited. SL cadres participated in all the mass struggles of the day without adapting to the reformist and sectoralist ideologies that predominated in them. In the trade unions, while most of the left sunk into economism or signed up as publicists for left-talking out-of-office hustlers, Spartacist supporters struggled to find ways to make class-struggle politics relevant, and in the process won the respect of many workers as principled militants who walked the walk.’[39]
“The Spartacist League in its best period was easily distinguished from its centrist competitors by its fidelity to revolutionary principle–it put program first. While Gerry Healy and Livio Maitan enthused about Mao’s ‘revolutionary’ Red Guards, the SL correctly described the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ as an intra-bureaucratic power struggle, and observed that Mao’s ‘anti-revisionist’ posturing pointed toward an alliance with American imperialism against the Soviet degenerated workers’ state. Unlike every other ostensibly Trotskyist tendency, the SL also had the distinction of refusing any electoral support (however ‘critical’) to Salvador Allende’s multi-class Unidad Popular in Chile….
“Nine years later the SL again stood alone on the left when it refused to endorse Iran’s ‘Islamic Revolution’ against the hated Shah. The SL’s policy of ‘Down With the Shah! No Support to the Mullahs!’ scandalized all those who hailed Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension as a great revolutionary victory, but was tragically vindicated by subsequent events.
“Unlike almost all the rest of the world’s ostensible Trotskyists, the Spartacist tendency refused to defend pro-imperialist Soviet ‘dissidents’ like Anatoly Shcharansky. Yet it did not shrink from denouncing the crimes of the Stalinists. In 1973, at the height of veneration for Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party, the SL published a valuable, and original, account of the Stalinists’ record of betrayal in Vietnam.”[40]
The SL is not the first Marxist organisation whose core cadre proved unable, under the pressure of isolation and adversity, to retain confidence in the historic possibility of revolutionary transformation. Like Lenin’s Comintern and James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party, the degenerated SL ended up as an organisation of an entirely different character than it had been at its birth. The SL early on had some bitter experiences with Gerry Healy’s group in Britain to which they originally looked for inspiration. After breaking with Healy following his wrecking job at the 1966 London Conference, Robertson and his circle continued to struggle to create a viable nucleus of international cadres as a first step toward reforging the Fourth International. For a time, the iSt made some real, if very limited, progress before turning into just one more fraudulent, pseudo-Trotskyist organisation.
While the BT today is a more marginal formation than the SL was in 1966, we remain committed to carrying forward the programme of authentic Trotskyism once represented by the Robertson group. To that end we consider that a careful evaluation of the SL’s history, including the stages through which it passed as it descended into political oblivion, to be of vital importance. While I have very profound political differences with Fischerzed, Carl Steele and James Creegan, I appreciate the opportunity this discussion has provided to relitigate some of the key moments in the decline and fall of the House of Robertson.
Alan Davis (for the BT)
Claude Horvath said,
August 18, 2021 at 6:14 pm
Today may mark one year since the last regularly released issue of WV. Does the organization still exist?
Claude Horvath said,
August 18, 2021 at 6:21 pm
18 August 2020: Until further notice, Workers Vanguard will have an irregular schedule.
from https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv, perhaps.
Carl Steele said,
August 20, 2021 at 8:24 am
Can Alan Davis please clarify something for me?
Davis says:
“… the founders of the ET were driven out of the iSt in 1980 and 1981. Most of the ET’s founders had joined the SL in the early or mid-1970s and they all agreed that it was rapidly degenerating into a qualitatively different group than they had originally been recruited to.”
But … Vicky became pregnant in 1972. The campaign to prevent her giving birth began shortly thereafter.
Davis argues at length that the “Logan regime” was not an aberration (something I do not dispute). He quotes the ET founding declaration to underline his point:
“Logan was undoubtedly guilty of running a grossly abusive regime—but the nature of the abuse in his Australian operation was only a linear extrapolation of the internal regime of [Jim] Robertson’s American section. How else can one explain the fact that none of the SL/US [Spartacist League/U.S.] cadres who lived under the Logan regime blew the whistle?”
Doesn’t this tell us that the SL of the early or mid-1970’s, when the founders of the ET joined, was just as abusive as the SL of 1980/81 when the founders of the ET were driven out?
Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League? (Final thoughts) | Notes from Underground said,
August 20, 2021 at 12:37 pm
[…] January of this year, I posted a short piece entitled Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League? The piece was intended to a humorous dig (other people can be the judge of that) at the US-based […]
“Jimstown as We Knew It…” | Notes from Underground said,
February 6, 2022 at 8:46 pm
[…] was never a member of the Spartacist League, but that piece I wrote a year back is still generating interest. Given that the Bolshevik Tendency (not the International […]
Happy April Fools Day. | Notes from Underground said,
April 1, 2024 at 12:41 pm
[…] the Worms, a piece on Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, and anything I wrote about the Spartacist League (especially more recent stuff). Still, it’s hard not to notice the decline in traffic (and […]