Response to ICL retraction of historic slanders

On 12 August we sent the following letter to the International Communist League in response to their recent retraction <https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/bt> of slanders levelled against us several decades ago.

Comrades:

We appreciate your clear and unambiguous response to the challenge posed in the leaflet which we distributed at your 13 January debate with the Internationalist Group [IG]/League for the Fourth International [LFI]. We regard your repudiation of the cop-baiting smears levelled against us in Workers Vanguard during the late 1980s and early 1990s to be a healthy sign. We would like to remind you that we also proposed a formal retraction by the SL of the 2002 characterization of a senior IG cadre as a “provocateur.”

We salute you for having the political courage to acknowledge that the slanders against us “reflected political disorientation and an inability in certain instances to answer the BT’s criticisms.” Prior to the overt cop-baiting in “Garbage Doesn’t Walk By Itself—What Makes BT Run?” (WV 15 May 1987) there had been a string of other bogus allegations, including the description of BT supporter Howard Keylor as an advocate of “union narcs” for the ILWU. When leftist historian Bryan Palmer objected to this outrageous falsification, WV replied: “you serve the interests of your own bourgeoisie, attempting to put a ‘labor face’ on the domestic side of the anti-Soviet war drive” (the entire exchange is reprinted in “Revolution and Truth”).

For Marxists, workers’ democracy is a question of principle: revolutionary class consciousness can neither be taught by rote nor imposed on a passive working class. Lenin demonstrated that the patient and pedagogical exposure of every variant of pseudo-socialist revisionism is an essential element in the creation of a proletarian vanguard party capable of opening the road to socialism.

While, on the one hand, your forthright response to our challenge is a sign of political regeneration, we bitterly regret that on the other you are turning away from key elements of the program that distinguished the Revolutionary Tendency/Spartacist League as the sole defender of authentic Trotskyism in the 1960s and 70s. We reject your notion that by standing on the historic political positions of the Spartacist tendency in its revolutionary period we and “the LFI, are stuck in sterility and dogmatism.” We look forward to future opportunities to explore our programmatic differences through the “necessary debate and discussion” you propose and remain ready to work with you on issues where we agree.

Yours for the rebirth of the Fourth International,

Tom Riley,
for the Bolshevik Tendency