Oscar Jr. Was Here

International Bolshevik Tendency vs. Spartacist League/U.S.

I stumbled across this interesting debate between International Bolshevik Tendency ("IBT") and Spartacist League/U.S. ("SL") that took place in the days after September 11.

On September 18, 2001, IBT published this lovely essay, "World Trade Center Terror Bombing, U.S. Imperialist Rule: An Endless Horror." Excerpts:

The destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September is a horrific act which the International Bolshevik Tendency unequivocally condemns. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers had friends or family members who lived, shopped or worked in the area. Unlike the personnel in the Pentagon (the command center of the U.S. military), the thousands of victims trapped in the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the hundreds of passengers and crew on board the four hijacked airliners were civilians whose deaths we mourn. As revolutionary socialists we abhor terrorist attacks that identify ordinary citizens with their imperialist rulers.

Well, at least they're unhappy about the WTC attack.

The record of the U.S. ruling class includes many instances of mass murder, including the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg, the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the massacre of over a million Vietnamese civilians in the 1960s and 70s. The current U.S. embargo on Iraq has resulted in the death of at least a million Iraqi children. However, the destruction of the World Trade Center is being treated by the imperialist media as an “attack on civilization” because this time American lives were lost.

Ah, good old moral equivalence.

The real enemy of workers, blacks and other minorities in the U.S. is not some shadowy Islamic fanatic in Afghanistan, but their own ruling class. Though U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been supported passively (and sometimes actively) by a majority of the population, the objective interests of ordinary working people in the U.S. are counterposed to Bush & Co. This may come into focus more clearly as the implications of looting the Social Security and Medicare “lock box” to finance the upcoming military expedition (and bail out airline and insurance company shareholders) become apparent.

Stupid American voters. And aren't "blacks and other minorities" workers?

A class-conscious union leadership would be making preparations to launch political strikes in response to military aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq or any other neo-colony. As a step in the struggle to break the grip of the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy on the unions, revolutionaries must win the advanced elements of the American working class to the recognition that their interests lie in opposing the bloodthirsty military adventures of their rulers.

Stupid union voters.

A revolutionary socialist perspective for the Middle East must combine implacable struggle against Zionist oppression with exposure of the “anti-imperialist” pretensions of the petty-bourgeois leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and flat opposition to the reactionary, misogynist Islamicist fanatics. If the oppressed Arab masses equate American workers with America’s rulers (or Jewish workers with their Zionist bosses), this only helps bind American and Hebrew workers more closely to their masters. Conversely, to the extent that Israeli and American workers identify with their “own” exploiters, they help cement the control of the sheiks, generals and mullahs over the Muslim masses.

Ick. And "Hebrew workers"?

Marxists oppose terrorism as a strategy for the liberation of the oppressed because, even in the best case, it substitutes the acts of a tiny handful for the conscious activity of the working class. But revolutionary Marxists differentiate between acts aimed at imperialist military targets and those aimed at innocent civilians. For example, we recognize that the demolition of the U.S. and French garrisons in Lebanon in 1983 by “Islamic Jihad” were defensible blows against imperialist attempts to establish a military beachhead in the Middle East. Some supposed Marxist organizations flinched, including the left-posturing Spartacist League/U.S., which issued a social-patriotic call for saving the surviving U.S. Marines.

Ah, that's why Marxists oppose terrorism ("it substitutes the acts of a tiny handful for the conscious activity of the working class"). No moral qualms, though.

And we can't be "saving the surviving U.S. Marines." But aren't Marines workers?

Revolutionaries must take a position of unconditional military defense of any neo-colony targeted for imperialist attack. It is the duty of class-conscious American workers to stand fast against the tidal wave of chauvinist filth and not lose sight of the historic interests of U.S. working people. The real threat to workers in the imperialist West does not come from bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, but rather from the cynical, racist imperialists whose global economic order created and nurtured them.

As Bolsheviks, we are committed to the struggle to create an internationalist world party capable of organizing the working class to overthrow the entire system of organized imperialist piracy. The only road to a future in which every member of humanity can enjoy a secure, peaceful and productive life lies through replacing the rapacious dog-eat-dog capitalist system with a planned socialist economy in which production is geared to human need.

Do your duty, revolutionaries and class-conscious American workers. But I think that "planned socialist economy" thing has already been tried.

Unsurprising, Spartacist League/U.S. took umbrage at being called "social-patriotic," and published this response in Workers Vanguard on October 12, 2001, "The Bolshevik Tendency and the Pathology of Renegades, On the Pentagon Attack."

The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) responded to the attack on the World Trade Center with a supplement to its journal 1917, titled, “U.S. Imperialist Rule: An Endless Horror.” Notably, if not the least surprisingly, the IBT says not a word in opposition to the red-white-and blue social-patriotism of the liberals and reformists whose “antiwar” coalitions are defined by bleating appeals to the imperialist rulers that “war is not the answer.” On the contrary, they reserve what polemical fire they have to attack the Spartacist League/U.S. as “social-patriotic,” citing our refusal to hail the attack on Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 as “defensible blows against imperialism.” In verbal exchanges, particularly with our younger members at recent protests, the IBT has demanded to know “our position” on the attack on the Pentagon which took place coincident with the destruction of the World Trade Center. Youth comrades in our Canadian section,, the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, report this went so far as having IBT members pressing them to agree that all those killed in the attack on the Pentagon “deserved to die.”

Hey, we're not as bad as the "liberals and reformers."

Unlike the World Trade Center, which was simply a complex of buildings housing various businesses employing tens of thousands of working people, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and rather quintessentially represents the military might of U.S. imperialism, the main enemy Of the working people and oppressed of the world. That recognition does not translate this attack into an “anti-imperialist” act, nor do we think the planeload of innocent passengers which was used as the massive bomb "deserved to die["] (or the janitors and secretaries who were employed at the Pentagon).

I guess that's more reasonable.

"[T]he Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and rather quintessentially represents the military might of U.S. imperialism, the main enemy Of the working people and oppressed of the world."

Oppressed Afghans?

Oppressed Iraqis?

Oppressed Zimbabweans? ("On the eve of the strike workers at the firm had been seething. 'If only George Bush would come here and Saddam us,' said one. 'But he won't and so we will have to strike, and be arrested and beaten. We have no choice. The ministers break the cars that we pay for and get new ones and we pay for those too. We have no fuel, no food, no medicines at the hospitals, and Mugabe doesn't care.'")

Marxists we oppose terrorism as a strategy, even that which derives from real, if misguided, anti-imperialist impulses. It is counterposed to mobilizing the proletariat in class struggle against the imperialist rulers. The fact that innocent civilians are often killed in terror attacks, and that the end result only serves to bring down the jackboot Of the capitalist state on the necks of the working class and oppressed, underline the futility, and stupidity, of terrorism as a strategy for the liberation of the masses. Moreover such acts merely serve to provide the bourgeoisie a bloody shirt to wave in order to cement the workers to capitalist class rule.

Oh, that's why Marxists oppose terrorism ("such acts merely serve to provide the bourgeoisie a bloody shirt to wave in order to cement the workers to capitalist class rule"). Again, no moral qualms, though.

When over 240 U.S. Marines were blown to pieces in the bombing of a compound in Lebanon in October 1983, it provoked widespread outrage within the American population against the Reagan administration which had sent these troops to Lebanon. Seeking to intersect and direct this outrage into conscious opposition to the U.S. imperialist rulers for whom the lives of working-class troops are considered expendable, we raised the slogan; “Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive!” The IBT’s predecessors in the “External Tendency" denounced us as “social patriotic” and solidarized with whatever forces blew up the Marines as “anti-imperialist.” But at the time, no side in the squalid inter-communal conflict in Lebanon was fighting imperialism! And to this day it is by no means clear who undertook this attack.

Ah, that's why SL supported "saving the surviving U.S. Marines." If they had been attacked for imperialism, it would have been another story entirely.

Our purpose is to bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class—the understanding that the “main enemy” is their “own” capitalist class rulers—in order to build the revolutionary workers party that can realize Lenin’s profoundly humanist view of the “socialist system of society, which, by abolishing the division of mankind into classes, by abolishing all exploitation of man by man, and of one nation by other nations, will inevitably abolish all possibility of war.” In contrast, the IBT’s vicarious bloodthirstiness and conspicuous silence on the social patriotism of the reformist left merely serve the interests of the class enemy, insofar as their insignificant forces are capable of serving any cause.

"Lenin's profoundly humanist view..."

I wonder why these articles now exist only in Google's wonderful cache.

Posted by oscarjr at April 26, 2003 02:15 PM | TrackBack