IG Smear Job

The Internationalist Group (IG) recently issued a new, lengthy work of fiction titled “Document of the First National Conference of the Internationalist Group” (The Internationalist, June 2015), tellingly held two decades (!!) after the IG’s founding by former Spartacists who defected from Trotskyism. Buried in the bombast is the smear that the Spartacist League showed “sneering racism” against immigrant members of the IG. No evidence for this complete fabrication could possibly be offered, and none is. It is pure provocation to be peddled among Third World nationalists, reformist leftists and who knows what other opponents of revolutionary Marxism. In short, the big lie provides a cynical justification for our political exclusion and a set-up for violence against us.

It’s not the first time the IG demagogues have attempted this kind of provocation. For example, at immigrant rights demonstrations in New York City in 2002, their members screamed that our comrades were “anti-Latino chauvinists.” The purported “proof” of this slander was our article “South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and Black Life” (WV No. 786, 6 September 2002)—an article devoted to combating anti-black racism among Latino immigrants and anti-immigrant bigotry among black workers. According to the IG, it was “chauvinism” to acknowledge the existence of anti-black racism among Latinos. Now, in the same document that smears us as racist, they brag about their members “working to defuse tensions between Latino and African American workers.” So much for the IG’s empty charges!

It is an illustration of the IG’s political bankruptcy that they resort to demagoguery and outright falsification. And their transparent lie about us poses the question: why should their own members, much less anyone else, believe them about anything?