Contribution to a discussion on the implosion of the Spartacist tendency
In January 2021 a former Bolshevik Tendency (BT) member, who now identifies with the “council communist” tradition, posted a short piece on his website commenting on the implosion of the Spartacist tendency following the demise of founder/leader James Robertson in 2019.
A few months later (during July and August) this posting prompted a lively exchange between two former Spartacists, Carl Steele, who was a member of the SL’s British affiliate for a few years in the 1980s and James Creegan, who belonged to the group in New York from 1981 to 1986. Among the various issues raised in their discussion was the attitude of the BT toward the Spartacists’ 1979 expulsion of Bill Logan (who during the 1970s had led both the Australian and British sections). Creegan had been in the BT in 1990 during the pre-fusion discussions with Logan’s New Zealand based Permanent Revolution Group (PRG). Toward the end of the exchange our comrade, Alan Davis, who had been a member of the PRG in 1990 and had participated in the discussions from the other side, made the following contribution:
August 13, 2021
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)