The BT on Haiti: Postscript to IGiocy

More Gas from the Swamp

Please see the statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), "Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake: A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism"

A couple of years ago, we were e-mailed a compendium of internal communiqués among adherents of the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT). While these were kind of crackpot, though revealing of what passes for political discussion in the BT, our attention was drawn to the following proclamation by the organization’s supreme leader, Bill Logan: “Our orientation is towards a fusion with the IG [Internationalist Group], a prerequisite to which is obviously some programmatic movement on their part.”

It appears that the BT finds such “movement” in the IG’s recent declaration that the Spartacist League has “gone over from bending under pressure from the ruling class to outright apology for imperialism” (“Spartacist League Backs U.S. Imperialist Invasion of Haiti,” 30 January). A February 9 article posted on the BT’s Web site, “Imperialist Troops Out of Haiti!” concurs with “the IG’s assessment of the SL’s scandalous capitulation over imperialist intervention in Haiti.” We refer readers to our article “Haiti: IG Conjures Up Revolution Amid the Rubble” (WV No. 952, 12 February) for our answer to the IG’s “assessment.” As for the BT, its cynicism is, as always, breathtaking.

The BT’s initial statement on Haiti, dated January 29, two weeks after the quake, did not demand “Imperialist troops out of Haiti!” And when there was a genuine U.S.-led and UN-sponsored invasion of Haiti in 2004, which included a contingent of 500 troops from Canada, where the BT is centered, the BT’s newspaper 1917 did not call for “Imperialist troops out of Haiti!” (In fact, we could find only one passing reference to that invasion on the entirety of the BT’s Web site.)

The BT couldn’t give a damn about imperialist repression of the Haitian masses, an indifference that is matched by their general sneering contempt for special oppression, whether it be the national subjugation of Quebec to the Canadian imperialist state or the vicious segregation and state repression of the black ghetto masses in the U.S. The devastation of Haiti is simply a convenient opportunity for these renegades to practice what has always made them tick: trying to “get” the Spartacist League. This time around they perceive the added advantage of furthering their amorous advances toward the IG.

In some ways the political appetites and sensibilities of the BT and IG are at variance. The IG declared that the earthquake provided an immediate opening for a workers revolt in Haiti, a grotesque fantasy, which, as we pointed out, was animated by their adaptation to Third World nationalism. The BT’s sensibilities are those of First World social democrats who promote illusions in the “humanitarian” pretensions of imperialism. This same outlook was explicitly expressed by the British Workers Power group. In a January 21 Web posting, “Haiti—Aid or Colonisation?” Workers Power raised the utterly delusional demand for the “troops to disarm and be placed at the disposal of civilian agencies—or leave Haiti,” adding that “all military vehicles and equipment that can be of use should be placed under civilian control.”

For its part, the BT points to the Red Cross and Médicins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as the true source of aid for the desperate Haitian people. But these outfits are nothing other than agencies for imperialism. The self-declared purpose of the American Red Cross is to “carry out responsibilities delegated to it by the federal government”—i.e., U.S. imperialism. For its part, Médicins Sans Frontières was initiated as the “humanitarian” arm of French imperialism. One of its founders, Bernard Kouchner, is now the French government’s minister of foreign affairs.

As we noted in “Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation” (WV No. 951, 29 January), the grim reality is:

“There are no good alternatives facing Haiti today. The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”

Devastated by two centuries of colonial and imperialist subjugation, Haiti had virtually no industrial proletariat even before the earthquake hit, and hardly any infrastructure. As our article underlined, “The key to the liberation of Haiti lies in proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere, in which the mobilization of the sizable Haitian proletariat in the diaspora can play a key role.” These workers can be a vital link to class struggle by the powerful North American proletariat. To infuse the multiracial U.S. working class with an understanding of its role as the gravedigger of U.S. imperialism requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist labor misleaders who chain the working class to its capitalist exploiters, centrally through political support to the Democratic Party. Yet the sizable Haitian proletariat in North America goes unmentioned in the IG’s article on the earthquake and in the BT’s polemic against us. This speaks to their mutual ties to “progressive” labor fakers in the U.S. And here, despite their otherwise different appetites, there is some real political “unity” between the IG and BT.

The Ties That Bind

In the BT’s communiqués, the organization’s second-in-command, Tom Riley, points to the enthusing by both the BT and IG over the 2008 antiwar West Coast port shutdown by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) as the potential ticket for regroupment. Riley ridicules the IG’s view of its role in spurring this action, writing, “I think the IG has really convinced themselves that them showing up at that Bay Area conference selling that pamphlet on Labor Strikes Against the War was instrumental. This isn’t just cynicism but actual delusion.” Nonetheless, he argues that the “ICL/IG differences on the ILWU labour action are an opening for us” and counsels “the MAIN thing we want to do however is not ridicule them but start pulling at the threads of the Logan Q and the origins of ILWU action.”

By the “threads of the Logan Q,” Riley means that, for any prospect of unity, the IG will have to embrace BT leader Bill Logan as their own “dear leader.” A proven, massive liar and a sociopath, Logan was expelled from our international tendency in 1979 for crimes “against communist morality and its substrate elementary human decency.” These included Logan using his organizational position as chairman of our Australian section to break up couples and to try to force a young woman to get an abortion and, failing that, to give up her baby. At the time of Logan’s expulsion, IG leader Jan Norden, who was then a leading member of our organization, powerfully and rightly indicted Logan as “a criminally sociopathic individual who should be removed from all working-class organizations” (see “On the Logan Regime Part III,” International Information Bulletin No. 16, November 1983, which is available to the public).

But when Logan grotesquely tried to pass himself off as a workers leader from New Zealand at an October 2007 Bay Area “Labor Conference to Stop the War,” Norden went along for the ride. As a Spartacist spokesman intervened at the event to expose Logan as a revolting and dangerous fraud, the BT’s and IG’s favorite labor bureaucrat, Jack Heyman of ILWU Local 10, tried to interrupt our speaker and defended Logan against what he called “personal slanders.” Norden sat silent through all this and then took the floor, where his only mention of Logan was a brief, oh-so-comradely criticism of Logan’s description of a 1930s Australian labor boycott of pig iron to Japan as an example of working-class struggle against war. In other words, the IG joined Heyman and the BT in legitimizing the twisted Logan as part of the workers movement (see “Labor Opportunists, Renegades Embrace Bill Logan,” WV No. 901, 26 October 2007).

Such is the price for entry into the Bay Area reformist swamp, where the likes of Heyman specialize in providing “militant” working-class cover for politics that have shackled the unions to the class enemy, particularly the Democratic Party. This is what played out on May Day 2008. The West Coast port shutdown that day was a powerful demonstration of the kind of working-class action that needs to be mobilized against the wars and occupations of U.S. imperialism. But the ILWU International tops channeled it into “loyal to America” patriotism and support for Democratic Party contender Barack Obama as the future Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. Any mention of the war in Afghanistan, championed by Obama, was deep-sixed.

Today, the BT begs to differ with the IG that we have undergone a “qualitative degeneration” over Haiti. They gently chide IG leaders for “their willfully blind allegiance to everything the SL did prior to their own departure in 1996.” For the BT, our “qualitative degeneration” took place in 1983, when we raised the conjunctural demand “Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive” to intersect widespread revulsion over the deaths of 240 U.S. Marines and direct it against the U.S. imperialist rulers. The BT charged us with “social-patriotism” because we didn’t cheer the bombing of the Marine barracks as an act of “anti-imperialism.”

On the front page of WV our Lebanon slogan was coupled with the call, “U.S. Out of Grenada, Dead or Alive” (see WV No. 341, 4 November 1983). We did not give military support to any of the contending forces in the bloody civil war in Lebanon, and there was no known force there fighting against the U.S. imperialists. In Grenada, we had a side: with the Cubans and others who were fighting against the U.S. imperialist invaders. During the same period we raised the call “kill the invaders” against CIA counterrevolutionary bands who sought to overthrow the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua; we hailed the Soviet Red Army and called on it to mop up the imperialist-backed Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan; and we supported the suppression of Solidarność imperialist-sponsored counterrevolution in Poland.

None of this was inspired by glorying in dead bodies, but by our proletarian revolutionary internationalist commitment to ending imperialist barbarism. As we wrote in “Marxism and Bloodthirstiness” (WV No. 345, 6 January 1984), “We are for the victory of just causes. Necessarily and above all, the centrality of just causes is the shattering of the exploiting and oppressing classes and the victory of socialism” (emphasis in original). In contrast, as we noted at the time, the BT’s bloodthirstiness was a convenient posture against us and inversely proportional to the distance from where the blood was being shed. The founding members of the BT are, after all, an assortment of embittered ex-members of our organization who got cold feet about our Soviet defensism in the early 1980s when the winds of Cold War II were blowing.

Though the IG has gone some distance down the road to forgiving and forgetting the crimes of BT leader Bill Logan, Logan himself has opined that “some current members of the IG would not manage the personal transformation required by a fusion.” Perhaps Logan could apply his well-documented expertise in sadistic and cult-like practices for such a “personal transformation.” Today, the BT leader advertises himself as a “professional celebrant”—a New Age equivalent of a faith healer—who specializes in “bereavement,” “betrayal,” “partnership break-up,” “sexuality issues” and other ceremonies derived from the “Anglican and Presbyterian influences of my childhood.” If all goes well in the BT’s “regroupment” waltz with the IG, Logan can officiate at the wedding.