The Inedible in Defense of the Unspeakable

(Letter)

11 April 2008

Dear Comrades,

Evidently the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT) couldn’t find sufficient ammunition in its well-stocked arsenal of lies against our organization to answer The Logan Dossier, which thoroughly documents the only-too-true and proven crimes of the BT’s international leader, Bill Logan. Logan was expelled from our international tendency by the unanimous vote of the delegates at our first international conference in 1979 as a “proven, massive liar and a sexual sociopath who manipulated the private lives of comrades for reasons of power politics and his own aberrant appetites and compulsions in the guise of Marxism.” Thirty years after the fact, the BT now charges that there was “a definite whiff of homophobia in the motion motivating Bill’s expulsion”! This all-new malicious invention introduces the BT’s “On the Logan Show Trial.” Its not-so-subtle purpose is to distract from their studious evasion of the mass of factual evidence of Logan’s cruel, sadistic and cult-like practices in his capacity as National Chairman of our Australian section in the mid-1970s, compiled in the nearly 200 pages of The Logan Dossier.

The charge that we are “homophobic” will surely shock the sensibilities of those leftists, feminists and others who have slandered us as “child molesters” and worse for our forthright, and rather elementary, opposition to the intervention of the capitalist state into consensual sexual relations of whatever type. It is a telling indictment of the BT’s own attitude toward homosexuality that they associate “aberrant appetites and compulsions” with homosexuality. Such is in keeping with the contemptuous indifference of this outfit to the fight against special oppression, from their sneering denunciation of a memorial meeting we organized in 1985 for the survivors of the police/FBI’s bombing of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia—in which eleven black people, including five children, were killed—to their Maple Leaf, Canadian-chauvinist opposition to independence for Quebec.

Our defense of those persecuted by the bourgeois state, which has included the North American Man/Boy Love Association, is an expression of our communist purpose. In 1977, the Spartacist League/U.S. carried out a unique fusion with the Red Flag Union, a collective that developed out of the New Leftist gay liberation milieu, and in the early ’70s, a number of activists from the East Oakland Women as well as others in the left wing of the feminist women’s movement were won to our communist program for women’s liberation.

Bill Logan was expelled because he was the antithesis of the very essence of the liberating goals of communism. As we wrote in the Preface to The Logan Dossier (reprinted in WV No. 900, 12 October 2007):

“We strive for a society in which all forms of social oppression, exploitation and degradation—the warped byproducts of material scarcity—will be things of the past. To this end, we seek to make the proletariat—though shaped by the deformities of capitalist class rule—conscious of its historic role as the gravedigger of the capitalist system, and of class society as a whole. Power politics, lying and sexual manipulation are antithetical to this purpose. The Leninist party demands a monopoly on the political activities of those who join our movement. All the more so do we draw a hard line against interference in comrades’ personal lives. Driven by considerations of power and control, Logan was a malicious puppet-master who was sadistically destructive of people’s personal lives—making people live together who did not want to do so, causing people who did want to live together to break up. There is no place for the likes of a William King Logan in our movement.”

At the time of Logan’s trial, no one, including Logan himself, had or had given any intimation that he was gay. On the contrary, he and his companion Adaire were in appearance and attitude the epitome of straight-laced, uptight Presbyterian missionaries, something straight out of the painting “American Gothic.” In practice, Logan’s twisted and perverse anti-sexual pathology was expressed in his “slogan” for the membership, “Sew up their c--ts, cut off their balls!” Hardly the words of a sexual libertarian! On the contrary, for Logan sex was power, to be wielded for his own control. The most intimate details of comrades’ personal lives were manipulated, with couples broken up or sexual relations manufactured by Logan in the guise of “building the party.” Children were verboten, and sterilization and abortion were upheld as a party duty by Logan. He sadistically pressured a young woman comrade to have an abortion and, when that failed, to give up her child for adoption, driving her to attempt suicide.

While allowing that perhaps Logan was brutal and even grossly abusive, the BT continues to try to pass off his unspeakable crimes as merely an extension of our organizational practices. In fact, we have drawn a hard line against party interference in comrades’ personal lives since the earliest days of our organization, following a dispute with some comrades in our local in the Bay Area, where New Left-derived notions of the “personal is political” were rife on the left. Our policy was codified in our 1969 document, “Development and Tactics of the Spartacist League,” which, under the section “SL Functioning,” states: “The SL seeks to regulate personal aspects of comrades’ lives only where those aspects themselves intrude decisively in the political or organizational life of the members, particularly in security matters” (reprinted in “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League,” Marxist Bulletin No. 9).

Logan willfully flouted our organizational practices. One need look no further than the fact that the malicious manipulation of the personal lives of comrades in our Australian section ended when Logan left. Chris Korwin, who took over as National Chairman of the section after Logan, attested to this in his greetings to our 1979 international conference. Noting that the section had recruited two gay men, including a prominent leader of the fight for gay rights in Australia, he remarked that this represented “a humanization of the organization that would have been impossible under Logan.”

We only learned that Logan was gay from his memoir, “Never Exactly One of the Lads…,” published in One of the Boys? in 1988, nine years after he was expelled. Here, Logan himself allowed that he only began to come to terms with his homosexuality some years after he was expelled. This essay, with its saccharine accounts of his happy childhood and no mention of his ever having been a member of a Leninist organization, was all in the service of promoting himself as coming out of the closet as a “new” all-round sensitive man. Caveat emptor (buyer beware). Even in this memoir it is notable that Logan’s sexual orientation continues to run a distant third to considerations of power, a word that appears 12 times in some 20 pages. Since then, Logan has moved on to advertise his services as a “celebrant”—a New Age equivalent of a spiritual faith healer—with funeral services for dead babies, a “secular grace” and other ceremonies derived from the “Anglican and Presbyterian influences of my childhood.” Hannibal Lecter reinvented as the soul of human kindness. As we wrote in “Bill Logan: From Krafft-Ebing to Mother Teresa? BT: Renegades for Hire” (WV No. 807, 1 August 2003), “This is one sick puppy.”

That Logan is the leader of the self-proclaimed “International Bolshevik Tendency” should also tell you just about all you need to know about them.

Comradely,
Len Meyers

P.S. Remarkably, the BT’s Web site features a letter to Logan from one Steve H. with his “Thoughts on the Spartacists’ ‘Logan Dossier’.” The BT opines that Steve H.’s “rather different lens tends to confirm the most important parts of our analysis” of the supposed “degeneration” of our organization. A rather different lens indeed! When Steve H. quit our Australian section in 1986, admitting to “alien faddist pursuits,” he was searching for the solace of the lord through spiritual “rebirthing.” A fitting new addition to the defense team for the BT’s own sordid spiritual leader.