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Skewered IG (Letter) We received the following letter from a longtime sympathizer on March 14. Dear Workers Vanguard, In the Internationalist Group’s article “For Revolutionary Workers Action to Smash U.S. Coup in Venezuela!” (February 2019) they draw attention to the fact that “Democrats who have dared to buck the bipartisan consensus on Venezuela have been few and far between. One was Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota...” positively quoting her questions to Elliot Abrams. They then go on to defend her against the unhinged bipartisan witch-hunt that smeared her an anti-Semite for daring to question the U.S.’ “special relationship” with Zionist Israel and criticizing the pro-Zionist lobby. This depiction of Omar by the IG is especially interesting when one recalls the patently false and demagogic “outrage” when WV observed in September 2001 that Representative Barbara Lee of Oakland (“to her credit”) cast the sole dissenting vote in either the House or the Senate against the resolution authorizing Bush’s “War on Terror.” This simple statement sent the IG into repeated conniptions that we were “capitulating” to the Democrats, denouncing our statement as “uncritical lauding” of Barbara Lee. Not just once, but in several articles they kept returning to our comment about Lee as proof of our supposed capitulation. What does that make their comments on Ilhan Omar then? Alas for the IG, for whom political consistency (i.e. a principled Marxist program) is merely a hobgoblin of little minds. In November 2000, Hugo Chávez was dismissed as essentially a tool of the U.S. stock exchange with barely a hint of the danger of U.S. machinations against Venezuela. Then in December 2007, the IG proclaimed that while Chávez had expressed admiration for Leon Trotsky “his actual policies are far more timid,” calling to “Impose Workers Control on the Road to Socialist Revolution” in Venezuela. The IG pointedly refuses to defend the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) (which recently carried out a successful strike) on the grounds of “corporatism” and its historic ties to the bourgeois PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]. But they evidently felt no such issue with defending the Venezuelan CTV labor federation against the Chávez government, even though it was virtually from inception a corporatist union associated with the pro-U.S., right-wing bourgeois party Democratic Action. For years the CTV’s been a conduit for CIA aid through the AIFLD (now “American Center for International Labor Solidarity”). The CTV leadership was heavily involved in U.S. imperialist-backed coup attempts against Chávez, but the IG could not even call the CTV corporatist in its November 2000 article! While correctly defending the CTV against the Venezuelan capitalist state, despite the wretchedness of its pro-capitalist, pro-U.S. imperialist leadership, the IG waffled and quailed before a referendum aimed at granting the Chávez regime more power, which they themselves described in December 2007 as “a program for a bonapartist ‘strong state’ regime.” They called to cast blank ballots or abstain, that is, refused to oppose the strengthening of the capitalist state in Venezuela. Leon Trotsky once referred to centrism as “crystallized confusion.” The misnamed Internationalist Group is an interesting case study for the condition! Comradely Greetings,
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