Declining an offer from the ICL

In February 2025, The International Communist League (ICL) wrote to the Bolshevik Tendency asking if we wanted to join their organisation as a minority faction. We declined. Here is the ICL’s letter and our response.

13 February 2025

To the Bolshevik Tendency

Dear comrades,
Since the reorientation of the ICL in 2022-23, both our organisations have had discussions on several subjects, from the public debate we held in 2023 on the Ukraine war to a recent sit-down with members of your British section centred on the national question. Our discussions have been comradely but neither side has moved closer on any substantial issue.

While we have important differences on the national question and the war in Ukraine, we think that these disagreements are expressions of a more fundamental difference related to the tasks of communists and the role of the revolutionary party. For us, the duty of Marxists is to intervene in the concrete struggles of workers and the oppressed and provide them with a class-struggle strategy for victory, in complete opposition to its current misleaders. That is the fundamental essence of our recent reorientation. For the BT, in our opinion, the role of Marxists consists in maintaining what you consider to be the historical tradition of Spartacism in a manner totally divorced and abstracted from the current struggles. We believe most of our ongoing differences on the national question, the Ukraine war and more stem from the fact that the BT does not see its role as guiding the class struggle and offering answers to the fundamental problems hampering the struggles and unity of the working class.

We understand that you will surely disagree with this assessment. However, we believe the best way to pursue this discussion is by testing our respective conceptions in practice. For this, we propose that the Bolshevik Tendency join the ICL as a tendency. The BT would continue to exist as a faction inside the ICL, with full factional rights to argue their views within our ranks, including at leadership levels. At the same time, this would mean that members of the BT would become members of the ICL and agree to publicly defend its positions and abide by its discipline.

The BT originated in the 1980s after its founding members concluded, in your words, that the “political degeneration of the Spartacist tendency” had reached such a point that there was “no reasonable prospect of reforming the iSt”. Well, the ICL has just undergone a profound and qualitative reorientation directed against deep political problems and degeneration. Surely, not the kind of change you wished for, but a major change nonetheless. The BT has also held that its criticisms were met by slanders on the part of the iSt. This was true in some cases, and we have acknowledged so.

Furthermore, the BT has long held that one of the main signs of our “degeneration” was what you described as the liquidation of trade union work in the 1980s. We are currently pursuing internal discussions about problems in our tendency during this period. Being in our ranks would enable you to take part in those. That said, while this discussion is important, for us it is subordinate to our current work in class and social struggles. Indeed, we can talk endlessly about what exactly took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The reality now is that building class-struggle caucuses in the trade unions is one of the main areas of work of ICL sections.

These developments and more pose serious questions for the BT and, we believe, require that the BT put to the test its long-held conception about our tradition from within the new ICL. If the views of the BT are correct, you should be able to convince our members by engaging in common work and struggle with them. On our end, we think that this experience will demonstrate to you how our reorientation got to the roots of certain problems the BT could observe, but for which it provided the wrong diagnosis and treatment.

You could argue against this proposal by saying that we have now repudiated certain elements of the Spartacist traditions that you still defend—particularly on the question of permanent revolution and national liberation. Again, we believe that it is by joining us and seriously engaging in common work in oppressed countries that you will be able to see how the old Spartacist approach on the national question constitutes an obstacle to advancing the fight against imperialism and, crucially, to defeating bourgeois nationalism. On the other hand, if as you contend our reorientation is an opportunist conciliation of nationalism, then engaging in common work while criticising our new orientation as a tendency in the ICL would give you ideal conditions to demonstrate this in practice.

We believe that the BT is at a crossroads. Your tendency is struggling and isolated from the workers movement and from the debates on the left. While we are small too, we believe that joining us would put you in a better position to influence the development of a revolutionary pole in the left. The world is currently undergoing major changes, and the revolutionary movement is weak and divided. The only way to know who has a revolutionary compass is to test our respective approaches to the struggles of today. This is the aim of our proposal.

We await your response.

Comradely,
Vincent David
For the International Secretariat of the ICL

28 February 2025

Dear comrades,
Thank you for your letter of 13 February 2025. Your proposal that we join the ICL as a minority tendency is not one we can accept at this time. Forty-one years ago, on 15 February 1984, as the External Tendency we applied to rejoin the iSt on the grounds that we “shared a common program,” despite “the real differences we have with the leadership, centrally on the regime question”.

Today we are presented with an entirely different situation—we no longer view the ICL’s internal regime as the major issue between us. Yet, as you must be aware from our published materials and our November 2023 debate in London, the ICL and BT have fundamentally different positions on many critical issues. The programmatic framework for our politics is laid out in our 1987 document “For Trotskyism” and our subsequent exchange with Workers Power contained in Trotskyist Bulletin No. 3. While the SL circa 1988 had little, if any, political difference with us in this debate—as we were largely reiterating positions originally developed by the Spartacist tendency in its revolutionary period—the subsequent evolution of the ICL has seen it adopt several positions closely paralleling those argued by Workers Power at the time.

We take program seriously, and we very much regret that the SL is abandoning its Trotskyist heritage—see for example our article “In Defense of (Seymour’s) Marxism”. In fact, we are surprised that you imagine being in a common organization would lead to a political convergence, when experience so far points in the opposite direction. We liked your comment on the proposal by our former comrades in the International Bolshevik Tendency for a gettogether of the “Spartacist family”:

“So, to paraphrase Trotsky: program first! Online servers for discussions? Joint conference? Practical measures? Very well, very well. But program first! Your political passports, please, gentlemen! And not false ones, if you please—real ones!“

Given the neutrality of both the ICL and the IBT regarding NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine (albeit for different reasons), it would appear that on that issue at least you have somewhat more in common with those comrades than us. At some point we hope you find time to reassess James Robertson’s cynical show trial of Bill Logan, the former international Spartacist tendency leader who currently heads the New Zealand-based IBT (see: “It’s hard to square a circle“).

We appreciated your retraction of both the COINTELPRO/Mossad slanders against us and the smear of our late comrade Howard Keylor. We are happy to work with you on issues where our positions coincide but a successful regroupment, in our view, requires fundamental agreement on program. As James P. Cannon observed:

“The only aim of a unity discussion must be to effect a serious and long-lasting and firmly based unity that leads to the strengthening of the party and the building up of the party. A unity not firmly based, hastily prepared, and then followed by a paralyzing faction fight and another split–that would not help to strengthen and build up the party, and we are not interested in that kind of unity.”
—Struggle for Socialism in the ‘American Century’, 2 September 1945

Without political convergence, any fusion attempt is doomed to fail. We recall Cannon’s remarks to the Sixth Comintern Congress on the Lovestone faction’s attempts to get closer to the Socialist Party (“Against the Opportunism of the Lovestone Majority“). Seven months earlier, on 14 December 1927, Cannon put forward the following motion at a meeting of the Political Committee of the Communist Party:

“1. Under the present circumstances our main tasks with regard to the SP are to establish more clearly and sharply the independent ideology of our party as against the SP, to strengthen the morale and antagonism of our party members in the fight against the SP, and to overcome any tendencies objectively leading towards the recognition of the SP as a bona fide workers organization in which the Communists can play the role of the left wing.
“2. Our tactics should be centered on a frontal attack against the SP all along the line combined with united front maneuvers with left-inclined sections of the SP, that under present conditions it is not tactically correct to send party members into the SP.”
—James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism

Less than a decade later Cannon advocated entry into the Socialist Party, because at that point it was moving to the left and had attracted a layer of subjectively revolutionary militants. If there were indications of resistance to the ICL’s appetite for adaptation to “anti-imperialist” bourgeois nationalism—for example, by upholding Robertson’s uniquely correct position on Iran’s reactionary Islamic Revolution in 1978-79—we might have to reconsider our attitude. We are disappointed that the SL’s shift on this question has, to date, not been accompanied by a public acknowledgement that in 1983, as today, imperialist garrisons should be driven out of oppressed nations by any means necessary.

While we regret that we are only a very small group without serious influence in the workers’ movement, we are not alone in facing this problem. We are quite certain that the solution to this predicament does not lie in junking the Trotskyist program. In this connection we find ourselves in essential agreement with the Internationalist Group’s pithy assessment of your recent political devolution:

“Turning permanent revolution into a stagist program is what it means to embrace, as you do, the ‘anti-imperialist united front,’ which is the long-standing pretext for such a program and ‘theoretical’ justification for political blocs with bourgeois-nationalist forces. That is also what it means to identify, as Spartacist now does, Trotsky’s permanent revolution with Lenin’s pre-1917 formula of ‘democratic dictatorship’ of the proletariat and peasantry, and with the formulation that Marx put forward in 1850. When Lenin stood on that formula, he explicitly stated that it meant a ‘democratic, not a socialist’ regime (Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution [1905]); in April 1917, against those who sought to cling to that slogan, he wrote that ‘things have worked out differently,’ and called instead for ‘all power to the soviet of workers deputies’ (Letters on Tactics [1917]). With regard to the formulation by Marx decades before the imperialist era, Trotsky noted: ‘Marx at that time expected the independent stage of the democratic revolution in Germany…. That, however, is just what did not happen’” (The Permanent Revolution [1930]).

“These kinds of revelations now proclaimed by Spartacist have been made many times in the past by erstwhile Trotskyist tendencies seeking theoretical cover for their rightward motion. They are part of a package including the idea that democratic demands rather than class struggle are the ‘fundamental lever for socialist revolution.’ From China 1927 to Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973 to the Philippines now—and so many other countries—the real-world consequences of a stagist program, tying the proletariat to the ‘democratic’/’anti-imperialist’ bourgeoisie, have been fatal.”
—reprinted in: Workers Vanguard, No. 1180

We have no intention of abandoning the political heritage we have defended since our inception and do not regard the ICL, as currently configured, to be the optimal framework for winning more recruits to the Trotskyist program.

Yours for principled regroupment,
Christoph Lichtenberg
for the Bolshevik Tendency