In Honor of Our Comrade Elizabeth King Robertson

1951-2005

Our comrade Elizabeth King Robertson died on October 12. In an obituary published in Workers Vanguard No. 857 (28 October), we wrote: “Over the course of more than 30 years as a professional revolutionist, Lizzy excelled as an organizer, propagandist and editor.” She was a patient mentor and inspiration for younger comrades. At the time of her death a few weeks before she was to turn 54, she was a full member of the Spartacist League Central Committee and of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

Memorial meetings for comrade Lizzy have been held around the world, including in New York City on November 12 and Oakland, California on November 20. Photographs and documents illuminating her life and work were on display on both coasts. As is the custom in the communist movement, comrades gathered at the gravesides of past revolutionaries to lay wreaths or raise a glass in her honor, including at the grave of Karl Marx in London, East Berlin’s memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and other socialists, and at the graves of heroic Soviet spies Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi in Tokyo. Tributes to Lizzy were received from all over the world from present and past members of the ICL, including some politically now very distant, as well as from a former colleague of Lizzy’s in the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee.

More than 20 members of her family, as well as former schoolmates from the Brearley girls school, attended the memorial in New York City. Comrade Emily from the Bay Area, a longtime friend and political collaborator of Lizzy’s, noted that Lizzy was “a Jewish girl from Queens, transposed to Park Avenue and the Upper East Side of Manhattan at age ten after the death of her mother, Barbara.” Lizzy attended the exclusive but academically challenging Brearley. She was a New York City debutante, but one who became a professional revolutionary. In a testament to the deep loyalty Lizzy inspired, Amanda, a friend from those early school days, spoke movingly of their lifelong friendship and of the last gathering of her old friends only months before Lizzy’s death. During that reunion, Lizzy, she said, characteristically insisted on going horseback riding.

Lizzy’s father, Henry King, addressed the New York memorial with great dignity and even a touch of humor. He said he had told Lizzy that “I had not subscribed to the work of this group—and I don’t—but I did feel that Lizzy made a really strong contribution, and that in her own development as a person she had succeeded. And no matter what it is you do in life, if you can succeed the way Lizzy did, as being a contributor, as being loyal, as being smart, that to me was wonderful.”

The outpouring of tributes to Lizzy struck several themes. A major one was her commitment to the struggle for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Lizzy’s ability to thoughtfully apply our Marxist program to the real world with its complexities, contradictions and ever-shifting factors was appreciated by both our newest recruits and the most senior members of our Central Committee. Comrade Seymour wrote that because Lizzy had “an intelligence that was simultaneously receptive and critical,” he regarded her, as did many comrades, “as a kind of intellectual editor.”

Many comrades referred to Lizzy’s painstaking work in developing our democratic-centralist organizational rules and to her presentation “On the Origins and Development of Leninist Organizational Practices” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998). This, combined with her astute assessments of personnel, led some comrades to compare her, with all historical proportions guarded, to the Bolshevik organizer Yakov Sverdlov. As Kathleen, an organizer trained by Lizzy, put it: “In Lizzy there was a perfect amalgamation of simple humanity and humor with hard communist principles.”

We print below the memorial tribute to Lizzy delivered in Oakland by George Foster on behalf of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee, as well as excerpts from speeches by Amy Rath, editor of Women and Revolution, and by Lital Singer and Maryan Thompson, two young women organizers trained by Lizzy.

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George Foster: Comrades, friends and family members, we are all gathered here today to honor the memory of Elizabeth King Robertson, a professional revolutionary and member of our party for over 32 years. Her death after a six-year battle with cancer is a keenly felt loss to our close-knit international, and as well a devastating loss to her family—Jim Robertson, Martha and Martha’s children Rachel, Sarah and Kenneth—and to her parents Henry King and Mary King and the rest of the King family, whose participation with us in a memorial meeting held last week in New York City was greatly appreciated.

As one of the founding members of our Boston Local, I’ve known Lizzy since she joined us. So let me talk a bit of her political life. Thirty-two years ago in Boston, as a 21-year-old New Left radical activist, Lizzy decided to join the Spartacist League’s youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth. Young people of that day were radicalized by the Vietnam War, the struggle for black freedom and also for women’s liberation. The Roe v. Wade decision was only a few months old when Lizzy joined. And throughout her life she remained a dedicated fighter for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.

Prior to joining she had been active in the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC), a tenants’ rights group trying to defend working-class and minority families being pushed out of housing in Cambridge by various university real estate developers. The CTOC organized sizable demonstrations and rent strikes and mobilized large numbers of Cambridge residents to intervene in city council meetings. Lizzy was, I believe, the CTOC’s full-timer/office manager. Was she supposed to be going to school instead? I don’t know. To have such a young person playing such a large role was typical of the times, but impressive as well—an early indication of her capacities.

Around that time, the largest left group in Cambridge was the Progressive Labor Party, and they had been active around the CTOC. But I am sure that outfit, with their terrible line on the woman question, Stalinist bluster and thuggery and, above all, glorification of ignorance, would not have appealed to Lizzy. Instead she joined us and committed herself to the cause of the revolutionary emancipation of the working class and the program of Trotskyism. As Trotskyists, we base ourselves on the experience of Lenin and Trotsky, on the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of October 1917, and as well on the struggle by Leon Trotsky and the international Left Opposition against the degeneration of that revolution, a degeneration presided over by J.V. Stalin with his anti-revolutionary dogma of “socialism in one country.” As Trotskyists, we stood for the unconditional defense of the gains of the October Revolution against imperialism and/or capitalist counterrevolution, while simultaneously seeking to mobilize a workers political revolution to oust the anti-revolutionary bureaucracy whose policies endangered those gains and short-circuited revolution internationally.

We recruit to our party based on agreement with our Marxist principles and acceptance of party program. So when Lizzy told us of her class background, which was one of considerable economic advantage and privilege, it was noteworthy but not a matter of concern. The Leninist party necessarily must have elements of both declassed revolutionary intelligentsia and the most politically advanced layers of the working class. Neither Marx, Engels, Lenin nor Trotsky were proletarians in origin; all were “traitors,” in a sense, to their class origins. In fact, Lizzy’s “advantages,” a good education and a sense of duty, responsibility and self-confidence instilled by her parents and teachers, were put to very good use by her. She had a very keen sense of humor, and also, always, great poise and seriousness.

As a result of significant recruitment in Boston, by late 1973 we were able to establish a branch in Detroit, then the center of the largest and most militant sector of the U.S. labor movement. Lizzy was among those who volunteered to transfer, and when she arrived there, she was elected youth organizer. Many years later, she told me how much she enjoyed being Detroit youth organizer, and I agreed that politically the city and campuses were really interesting back then, but couldn’t resist joking that it couldn’t have hurt that she was one of the few women in an overwhelmingly male local, and that most of the comrades were understandably totally infatuated with her. She just started laughing at me, and said, “So what’s wrong with that?”

Another story: In the summer of 1974, we had a national meeting on a campus located near Detroit. Most of the comrades rented rooms at the campus, but four from California couldn’t afford to stay there. So when they came into town in their car, they were put up in a large house where a number of Detroit comrades lived, including Lizzy—something at the time we used to call a commune. Now, two of those comrades were, while young, mothers of young children and rather hard-bitten types. Well, the commune was in a rough neighborhood, and when the comrades got inside, the two moms were appalled. The interior resembled something out of a bad teen movie. But then they opened a door and found a neat, clean bedroom complete with a real bed and a nightstand on which there was a Plexiglas cube in which a comrade had mounted a lot of photos of a rather large family. Needless to say, it was Lizzy’s room, something they were able to ascertain the next day at the conference by matching her face to the family snapshots.

It was in Detroit that Lizzy completed her training to become a legal stenographic reporter. This stood her in good stead as a way of earning her living, and she continued to work as a court reporter until her debilitation from the cancer surgery made that impossible. We all have a picture in our heads of this very well-groomed and tiny woman lugging a very heavy stenographic machine, which must have weighed 25 percent of her total body weight, to and from work. Again, her training and professionalism in this field was put to good use in the party—recording meetings and editing and producing party bulletins.

Her job as a court reporter gave her a very good sense of the courts, law and the legal system, which proved very valuable in legal defense work. Lizzy had a very keen intelligence, and had she been so inclined, she would have been a very effective attorney. And those of us who knew her know one would not want to be cross-examined as a hostile witness by Lizzy. As it was, she was a fierce defender of Marxist principle.

After Lizzy moved to New York around 1976, she was elected National Organizational Secretary of the youth. She helped coordinate the activities of the youth branches and worked on the youth press. In contrast to a couple of “precious” young male editors at the time, she did not disdain the technical side of producing the paper. By the time she became Political Bureau secretary in the summer of 1978, she had served her apprenticeship. As a young organizer and youth activist, she had gained valuable experience dealing with trade-union questions in the heavily black city of Detroit, she had learned an exacting skill, had served as a national youth leader and learned to issue propaganda, put out a youth paper and organize its distribution.

A short while after she became PB secretary, she and Jim got together. She was both his loving companion and his closest political collaborator until her untimely death. Lizzy was clearly the best PB secretary we ever had, both in terms of sheer technical capacity, organizational skills and political acumen. She helped shape and organize political discussion, and she played a central role in facilitating communications between our center and SL/U.S. local committees, as well as our international. And this was a high-stress job—actually having to be ready at any time, and I do mean any time, to assist in intervening and engaging in struggles, external and internal, to try to decide what could and should be done with the often very meager resources at our disposal. As a lapsed physicist, let me share with you a quip from Richard Feynman, who let the cat out of the bag: “Physics,” he said, “is what physicists do late at night.” Well, Trotskyism is what Trotskyists do late at night.

Lizzy’s responsibilities entailed a lot of travel, discussion, inquiry and explaining points of program and organization to various comrades, local committees and sections. But through this, Lizzy acquired a very comprehensive understanding of the cadre and component parts of the ICL and Spartacist League/U.S., which made her invaluable in deciding questions of what personnel to allocate to address what task. It is also why she played a very large role in a number of nominating commissions, charged with evaluating the capacities of comrades nominated to leadership bodies at various of our national conferences.

Lizzy was, as well, in charge of indexing the bound volumes of our press and additionally was editor of internal party discussion bulletins. Minutes of meetings, our press and our discussion bulletins—these are the documentary history of our tendency. And as Leninists, we strive to be the historic memory of the working class, and to distill from such experiences and struggle the principles and program to guide us in our activity. There is no other way to test our understanding and guide our future actions and intervention as a disciplined party acting on a clear line, and there must be a record, so that we can evaluate what we understood and where we went wrong. To do otherwise is not to be a Marxist, but to repeat empty formulas as ex post facto justification for whatever activity you undertake. For us, principles, theory and program, i.e., consciousness, are indispensable.

Lizzy was a very modest comrade. When she was first proposed to become a full member of the SL/U.S. Central Committee, she was unsure of her qualifications—she saw her main talents as lying on the organizational and administrative side of things. But the delegates at our 1983 National Conference thought otherwise and did elect her. It was a very wise choice; she was selected for her sober political judgment and keen insights as well as her remarkable organizational capacities.

In the Spartacist League, we understand there is no such thing as a 100 percent leadership. Jim has argued that if we can manage to be right 70 percent of the time, we will be doing very well indeed. And Lizzy would be the first to admit that she made her share of errors. But what was truly remarkable about her was her absolute lack of subjectivity or personal defensiveness in addressing such errors, both her own and others. Her concern was to get at the root of questions, to understand, and based on that understanding, to move forward.

These qualities of hers were best expressed in a letter sent to me by a comrade from the Bay Area:

“There are three concrete lessons I am very aware I learned from Lizzy (though how well or not is of course not her responsibility). The first two are central to the building of effective Leninist collectivity and Jim has demonstrated them to me as well: listen carefully to every comrade, because reason is not the exclusive property of anyone; and (relatedly) the conclusions of properly prepared collective debate of a political question are much more likely to approximate right than any single comrade’s opinions (including not least one’s own!). The third lesson is more personal, the result of a fight Lizzy in particular waged with me over the course of some years…the difference between moral imperative and dialectical materialism, between moralistic judgment and materialist understanding.”

Additionally the comrade closes her letter: “To ease my conscience in regard to Lizzy’s own wishes to be seen for what she was, I must add that she was a slow reader and not a good speller.”

The last six years of Lizzy’s life, after she discovered she had cancer, are both grim and inspiring and give us a true measure of her character, her revolutionary will and her humanity. She underwent chemotherapy, two extremely difficult and painful operations and radiation treatment. I believe she had the very best medical treatment available through the intervention of her father. But ultimately it was to no avail. The hopes of her family, friends and comrades were cruelly dashed—the cancer at some point metastasized and resulted in a very painful death.

Yet it was in this period that Lizzy struggled with great will, effectiveness and determination to defend the programmatic and organizational integrity of the party. The October Revolution was the signal political event of the 20th century, resulting in the overthrow of capitalism and creation of the world’s first workers state. The demise of the October Revolution in 1991-1992 was a historic defeat for the international working class, ushering in a period of reaction and great difficulties for proletarian revolutionists. Most notably, we have to struggle anew to win the workers of the world to the banner of Marxism.

Our great difficulties in this period have been expressed in political disorientation and associated organizational disarray, matters about which we have written in our press. It was in these circumstances, on a number of issues of principle, program and tactics, that comrade Lizzy forcefully intervened to keep us the party she had originally joined, the party of the Russian Revolution. She did this with clarity, great energy and astounding determination, while suffering both physical disability and great pain, when much of her decreasing reserves of energy were spent on frequent visits to doctors and therapy.

Lizzy’s obituary published in Workers Vanguard notes that her strength was in tackling the intersection of political principles with concrete social reality: coming up with tactics and slogans to express our program. That is very true, but it was an expression of both a lifetime of experience and very hard work.

V.I. Lenin, the founder of the Bolshevik Party, noted that it’s far more difficult to be a revolutionary in periods of reaction than revolution. At a speech memorializing the Bolshevik organizer Yakov Sverdlov, he noted that during the difficult period of preparation for revolution there arises an inevitable gulf between theory, principle and program, and practical work, and that the Bolsheviks suffered from too deep an engrossment in theory abstracted from direct action. That is why we define ourselves as a fighting propaganda group, one that struggles to find opportunities, however modest, to intervene in struggle and test our program, organization and cadre.

Early on after his return to Russia in 1917, Lenin cited a line from Goethe’s Faust: “Theory, my friend, is gray, but green is the eternal tree of life.” It was a polemic against those who did not understand that political theory is an abstraction from experience, and that such theory, divorced from an analysis of the actual developments, runs the danger of degenerating into empty sloganeering. At issue here was the decision to struggle to embark on the course which led to the victory of the October Revolution. That capacity to grasp the green eternal tree of life is a rare quality, but it’s absolutely necessary to transform revolutionary program to living reality. And that’s how Lizzy lived her life, and that, as well as her friendship, beauty, compassion and courage, is what we shall miss.

In the Transitional Program, Trotsky writes: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour of action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International.” That is what Lizzy embodied, and we honor her best by honoring those rules.

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Amy Rath: Lizzy’s last contribution to the party’s work was “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” in defense of the road of October, for the Women and Revolution pages in the upcoming Spartacist. For her, the article was key to getting out the message of the truly radical vision of human society that the Bolsheviks fought for, to educating this younger generation in the road of Lenin and Trotsky.

Lizzy was an exemplary member of the editorial board of W&R since 1979, concerned about every aspect of the paper: from editorial policy and broad political questions, to sales, to the grind of getting it out. Lizzy always had at least a finger, if not her whole arm, in each article. The most ambitious were a collective product, sometimes described by our critics as “editing by mass democracy.” While our methods could certainly have been improved, such articles require that kind of collaboration and Lizzy was key to making that work. Sometimes she provided a crucial insight. Sometimes it was thoughtful advice on untying some knotty problem of politics or personnel. Sometimes it was a few well-considered touches on an almost finished piece. And sometimes it was an in-depth edit job, taking in the points of our eccentric editorial body and turning a draft into a cogent political statement. But Lizzy was never so dedicated to editing that she didn’t take time off now and then to take in a Lakers game.

Lizzy’s area of expertise was the thorny issue of human sexuality in its diversity, articles like “Something About Incest,” “The Uses of Abuse” and “The ‘Date Rape’ Issue,” which are featured on the display about Women and Revolution. And it’s fitting that Isaac Deutscher’s famous remark about “hunger, sex and death” as the three tragedies besetting man is also featured on the display. As Deutscher says, “Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on.” But W&R was pitched to cover the human condition writ large. The woman question touches the human being in all of us, and so Lizzy liked to say that W&R is the “sex and death” desk.

Acting as the tribune of the people—protesting every act of oppression, no matter what layer of society it hits—can put you in some pretty unpopular spots in these days of the anti-sex witchhunt. Time after time, Lizzy had her finger on the hot-button questions that were socially explosive and about which we have something unique and powerful to say. In “Uses of Abuse,” “Something About Incest” and “Date Rape,” as we later summed up:

“We explored some of the ambiguities of sexuality in a society where the deformities of class inequality and racial and sexual oppression can lead to a lot of personal pain and ugliness. We pointed out that while the abuse of children is a vicious and horrible crime, many ‘illegal’ sexual encounters are entirely consensual and devoid of harm per se. The willful conflation of everything from mutual fondling of siblings to the heinous rape of an infant by an adult caretaker creates a social climate of anti-sex hysteria in which the perpetrators of real violence against children often go free. And we insisted that the sexual proclivities of a group-living mammalian species such as our own are patently ill-suited to the rigid heterosexual monogamy which forms the ideological foundation of the institution of the family, reinforced by organized religion.”

—“Satan, the State and Anti-Sex Hysteria,” W&R No. 45, Winter-Spring 1996

Our position is summed up in the concept of effective consent as the guide in all sexual matters and opposition to state interference in private life. We do not condemn any kind of sexuality or sexual act per se—what counts is that it is consensual.

After we published “Date Rape,” we received letters from a few outraged feminists canceling their subscriptions. I could say that that article lost us more readers than any other in the history of our tendency! So we knew that our paper was being read by its intended audience, and that we had hit our target hard enough to get an active and angry response. And Lizzy personally was quite delighted and proud. We also had to have a fight with a few youth comrades over the question, and Lizzy made a clarifying political intervention into the discussion that’s printed in a bulletin, and this is some of what she said:

“The reason that we talk about questions of sexuality is that often these questions are politicized, usually not by us but by the bourgeoisie, by some element of society, that takes questions that are normally of a secondary interest and makes them political questions that we not only can comment on but, in certain circumstances, must comment on and must take a position on.”

In grappling with the tangled issues of sex and society, we sometimes arrived at a position only after extensive party debate. The article “The Agony of AIDS” (Women and Revolution No. 35, Summer 1988) is one example, and Lizzy played a leading role in an important party discussion that began in the Political Bureau. It was a challenge to address the emergence of this deadly disease, which has been politically charged from the beginning.

In this article, we took up the controversy over the closing of the gay bathhouses in San Francisco at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Our first response in 1984 had been, as we said in our 1988 article, “a knee-jerk reaction.” We wrongly demanded: “Government Out of the Baths!” according to the principle of opposition to state interference in private life. But this public health emergency was about life and death. You don’t cite the First Amendment when the Fire Department is hacking through your walls to stop a fire. In reconsidering our position, we wrote: “The problem is that there are two principles here which are always in tension: public health vs. individual rights. Which one has more weight at any given moment can only be decided by examining the particular health threat posed.” And this was a key party discussion on the nature of the state.

Lizzy also played a key role in the piece on the traditional practice of female genital mutilation which took on the liberal and leftist advocates of cultural relativism, which rejects and opposes the rational humanism of the Enlightenment as a form of Western cultural imperialism. At its extreme, this doctrine leads to rationalizing the most barbaric anti-woman practices in tradition-bound patriarchal societies.

The current W&R article in Spartacist, which is still on the newsstands today, about the U.S. government-sponsored “sex slave” hysteria about immigrant prostitutes, was also the product of an international discussion on the impact of the counterrevolution on the status of women. This discussion—again, where Lizzy played a leading role—reconfirmed our opposition to laws against the “crimes without victims” like prostitution, gambling and drug use, resulting in an important addition to the Labor Black League program and the Spartacus Youth Club’s ten-point program.

To end, I’d like to quote Plekhanov, which to me sums up what Lizzy’s life in the party was all about: “Freedom is giving all in the service of your aim.”

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Lital Singer: One of Lizzy’s great legacies was the political investment that she made in many youth, in particular in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, in order to ensure revolutionary continuity. Lizzy was a remarkable example and inspiration to young cadre. In the early 1990s, the party made a decision to reinforce the Los Angeles Local, and Lizzy was assigned to be the Central Committee’s representative to the local. Thus began a period of close collaboration with Los Angeles comrades that would span a dozen years.

I was a young and inexperienced organizer of the Los Angeles Local for two years, starting in 2003. In this capacity, I benefited from working closely with Lizzy. Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolis, and discussions in the local over how to implement our program have often centered around the fight against the oppression of the black population, defense of the large Latino immigrant population and the tensions between blacks and Latinos in the city. Lizzy helped us understand the need to make immigrant rights and immigrant workers a key part of the work of the local, and at the same time, the need to win Latinos and immigrants to an understanding of the central importance of the fight for black liberation.

During the many class battles in Los Angeles in the past few years, such as the longshore workers lockout, the UFCW grocery workers strike and transit strikes, Lizzy’s main intervention was to warn us against the constant pressure to merely run from picket to picket. In addition to bringing our Marxist perspective to the workers, she urged us to bring those battles to students and youth, building support for workers’ struggles on the campuses, bringing students to the picket lines and seeking to win youth to be lifelong partisans of the working class.

In a city that can easily lead one to forget about what’s happening elsewhere, comrades treasured Lizzy for helping us to be better internationalists. As difficult as it is to be an organizer, consulting with Lizzy was always my favorite part of the job. She told me on numerous occasions to keep politics first. She advised us on how to deal with our tasks as a small local in a big city with a lot going on. She wrote: “The answer…is not to decide nothing and then do everything, necessarily half-heartedly and badly. You need to figure out what you must do first and do it, and then see if you can also tackle some of what you want to do—but that implies that you agree both on the vital and the desired. This can only be done through fighting out your differences which, if guided by a set of programmatic criteria, you will probably find are not that far apart.”

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Maryan Thompson: Lizzy trained me as Bay Area organizer. Lizzy served as the political chair of the Bay Area branch for the last five years. Lizzy greatly appreciated comrades’ political input. Lizzy did a good job of circulating the ideas of members who were less likely to put pen to paper. When Lizzy became increasingly ill, one of the main assignments that she tried to maintain was coming into the Oakland office to talk with comrades and see what was on their minds.

Lizzy sat on the Bay Area executive committee for many years. She would bring in the flats of Workers Vanguard for exec members to review. She thought that a major task of the leadership was to prepare the local on how to discuss the new issue of the newspaper. Lizzy was generally very involved in our sales operation precisely because she understood that a central part of being a fighting propaganda group is getting out your paper. Lizzy strove to do regular sales. I was often on daytime sales with her. Sometimes we sold to sparsely attended union meetings and a couple of trade unionists would buy our paper. Lizzy thought that the sales were worth it because of those individuals and because of the thought and preparation that went into the sales.

She always had at least one youth member that she was meeting with regularly to discuss Marxist texts. She made what started out as a very difficult book, The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov, one of my favorites.