IG: Norden's Regression of Consciousness

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 845, 1 April 2005.

25 March 2005

Dear Workers Vanguard,

As Lenin said, "A political party's attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfills in practice its obligations towards its class and the working people." This Bolshevik practice guided us in publishing our candid, self-critical accounts of external challenges and internal problems we have faced since the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-1992, most recently in "A Hard Look at Recent Party Work and Current Tasks—Spartacist League 12th National Conference" (WV No. 841, 4 February).

Our earlier article in Spartacist ([English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004) on our last International Communist League conference drew a predictably windy and dishonest response from Jan Norden and his Internationalist Group (IG). Norden's specialty is "squid tactics": squirting large quantities of ink to conceal his own flight from Trotskyism. The article, "Post-Soviet SL/ICL: New Zigzags on the Centrist Road" (Internationalist, Summer 2004), is a textbook example of the IG's method.

A 1994 Spartacist League/U.S. conference document wrongly asserted: "The Chinese Stalinists, with the support of Japanese and significant sections of American imperialism, are moving to attempt a cold restoration of capitalism from above" (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 51, Autumn 1994). This formulation was corrected in our 2003 international conference document, which noted: "The Stalinist bureaucracy is incapable of a cold, gradual restoration of capitalism from above. A capitalist counterrevolution in China would be accompanied by the collapse of Stalinist bonapartism and the political fracturing of the ruling Communist Party. What would emerge from the collapse of a Stalinist bonapartist regime, i.e., capitalist restoration or proletarian political revolution, would depend on the outcome of the struggle of counterposed forces" (quoted in "The Fight for Revolutionary Continuity in the Post-Soviet World," Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004).

In response, the IG blustered that they had always taken "the ICL to task for their anti-Trotskyist line." The IG screams that the 1994 China formulation, among others, is proof of our "creeping Shachtmanism"—i.e., repudiation of the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states, including China. Of course, the IG knows this to be a lie, as the SL (unlike the IG) regularly publishes articles and holds public meetings calling for defense of China. Moreover, Norden, who was then a full member of the SL Central Committee and ICL International Executive Committee, voted for the 1994 formulation—a fact conveniently airbrushed out of the Internationalist diatribe! But honesty matters no more to the IG than political clarification, because they regard political consciousness as irrelevant to revolutionary struggle.

The mass of workers involved in militant class struggles today in defense of their livelihoods, as well as radical youth, no longer identify their struggles with Marxism or the ideals of socialism. The IG is willfully blind to this historic retrogression in political consciousness and shrugs:

"Moreover, the impact on working-class consciousness is quite uneven. In West Europe, workers in the large Communist parties and CP-led unions had reformist consciousness before the demise of the Soviet Union, and by and large they still do today. American workers generally support the capitalist Democratic Party —what would a qualitative step backwards in their consciousness mean. In much of the semi-colonial world, on the other hand, many workers still 'haven't got the news' of the supposed 'death of communism'."

Presumably the IG was napping with Rip van Winkle while, e.g., the French Communist Party lost unquestioned allegiance of the massive CGT unions and slid from winning roughly 25 percent of electoral votes to less than 5 percent, including losing ground and supporters to Le Pen's fascistic National Front. In Italy, Rifondazione Comunista and the historically Communist trade-union federation (CGIL) have hemorrhaged members to anarchists and syndicalists. As for much of the semicolonial world, it is not the radical nationalists or reformist Communist parties but reactionary Islamic fundamentalism and other murderous religious nationalisms that have absorbed social discontent among the poor and oppressed and emerged as dangerous political forces.

The bourgeoisies of the world have learned something from the working-class defeats of recent years, but the world proletariat has not even fully grasped the enormity of the defeat embodied in the destruction of the Soviet Union. The IG denies this reality the better to capitulate to it and ingratiate itself in truly alien milieus. Thus they sneer at the ICL's proud assertion to be among the foremost opponents of Islamic fundamentalism. In a demonstration initiated by the IG at New York's Hunter College at the time of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001, they dared not even mention the role of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in combatting an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in the 1980s, much less that the ICL (which Norden & Co. were members of at the time) hailed the Red Army against the CIA's mujahedin cutthroats (see "IG Disappears Red Army Fight Against Islamic Reaction in Afghanistan," WV No. 772, 11 January 2002).

Rejecting the ABCs of Marxism, the IG equates class struggle with communist class consciousness. Asserting not much has changed since capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union, they state: "A dozen years later, history has not ended, the U.S. empire is bogged down in the aftermath of its second war on Iraq, and the class struggle continues unabated." Class struggle predates capitalist society and will be around for as long as class society continues to exist. If class struggle were simply synonymous with communist consciousness, then every strike and protest would augur a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order. Marx himself pointed out that even some bourgeois ideologues accept the class struggle. What Marxists stand for is the dictatorship of the proletariat to open the road to an international socialist society.

Ignoring the distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself that fights consciously for its own rule, the IG rejects the statement from our "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):

"Trotsky's assertion in the 1938 Transitional Program that ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat' predates the present deep regression of proletarian consciousness. The reality of this post-Soviet period adds a new dimension to Trotsky's observation. The only way in which this regression can be overcome and the working class can become a class for itself, i.e., fighting for socialist revolution, is to reforge an international Leninist-Trotskyist party as the leadership of the working class. Marxism must once again win the allegiance of the proletariat."

If the undoing of the Russian Revolution had no significant impact, then conversely the IG must also believe that the working-class seizure of power in 1917 was no big deal. But Marxism gained hegemony within the left wing of the workers movement internationally particularly under the impact of the victory of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The ICL is dedicated to the purpose of leading new October Revolutions and to that end strives to build parties that Lenin and Trotsky would recognize as their own. We try to be honest in self-examination and public correction of errors, as we are in polemics against political opponents, because that quality is essential to a party that intends to lead a cadre of critically thinking workers to reorganize society on a socialist basis; we know if we fall short in our attempts, the likelihood of failure of proletarian revolution increases. The IG's dishonesty fools only these legends in their own minds.

A.P.