The following is a leaflet distributed by MIM's organizational predecessors in 1984. Since that time, the Soviet Union has fallen apart, but the Spartacist League never came to grips with its numerous false predictions about the Soviet Union. The Sparts predicted it would take "a blood civil war" to bring back capitalism in the Soviet Union and they opposed Mao's thesis that the bourgeoisie arises in the party. They were just wrong up and down the line on restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, but proletarian science has never been promoted by those of any Trotskyist ideology.

SPARTACIST LEAGUE WORKING FOR TWO BOURGEOISIES

The Spartacist League (SL) claims that it is "Marxist," but in reality it is merely a louder, more youthful version of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Both parties defend the Soviet Union and both take up the Soviets' reformism. In confusing youth, the Spartacist League renders services to the US bourgeoisie that the aging and ailing CPUSA never could.

SL'S SUBJECTIVE ROLE: MILITANT DEFENSE OF SOVIET REFORMISM

Who says there's no such thing as a two-fisted liberal? When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the SL sloganeered "Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan!" To this day, the SL defends the invasion as raising the literacy rate of the Afghani people. If one shows an SL member an interview with an Afghani woman who was raped by the "Red" Army, SL says the invasion is justified because the Soviet workers' state is against the veil. This kind of shit passes for social revolution in the SL's book because like all Trotskyists they do not know what social revolution is having never led one anywhere in the world. Sorry SL, or not sorry, we will not apologize for what you think is a "Red" Army. Red Armies fight for social revolution, not militarized semi-feudalism.

SL's defense of "reform" in Afghanistan is equalled by the SL's defense of "detente." Of course, the SL would deny that it defends the Soviet Union's form of detente, but this is not because SL has fundamental disagreements with detente-- only the current version officially expressed by the USSR. The proof is the SL's reaction to the showing of "The Day After"--the watered down movie about nuclear war that about 100 million Americans saw. The headline of the SL's newspaper article was "Soviet Nukes Deter Imperialist Holocaust: Nuclear Soap Scares Hell out of America." (Workers Vanguard, 12/2/83, p. 3) Like Kautsky, who saw imperialism as a policy and not a system or the highest stage of capitalism, the SL believes that imperialists merely have to be convinced to stop their behaviour. Moreover, SL distorts Karl Marx "'material force must be overthrown by material force.' And the material force which prevents the Pentagon from unleashing megadeath is, first of all, fear of a Soviet second strike." (Ibid., p. 8) Talk about commodity fetishism! "Love the bomb" and the "bomb keeps the peace" says Reagan and the SL. Marx and Lenin said that only armed revolution could overthrow colonialism, imperialism and imperialist war. They never said that inanimate objects could.

Khruschev and later Soviet revisionists did say that the bomb could keep the peace with the West so they argued for the disarmament of liberation struggles primarily in the Third World. The revisionists claimed that the liberation struggles were a threat to world peace so that they could get various liberation struggles to lay down their arms; sell out and cut a deal with US imperialism--a deal that the Soviets would broker. Of course, the just struggles of revolutionaries in the Third World were termed dangerous by the Soviets, but it was OK for the Soviets to arm parallel to the US; invade Afghanistan; blackmail Poland and bomb the Eritreans on the Horn of Africa, who are fighting for self- determination against both US and Soviet imperialism. To this day, the Soviet CP, the CPUSA and the SL argue that Soviet nukes make "peaceful coexistence" with US imperialism possible. It was left to Mao to defend Leninism and the need for revolutionary war against imperialist war.

It is not surprising that with this revisionist understanding of imperialism, war and peace, the SL goes on to leach off the Democratic Party's charges against Reagan. "Reagan Is War Crazy" screams the front page of the SL paper. (Workers Vanguard, 1/6/84) No, SL, Reagan is not crazy. He is doing precisely what the capitalist class needs. He is preparing for an imperialist war to redivide the world with the Soviet bloc at the cost of holocaust if necessary. Reagan is working in his class interest--something the SL fails to see with its emphasis on imperialism as a policy.

SL like all Trotskyists, pisses on the struggle of oppressed nations for self-determination. Afghanistan is one case, but Trotskyist chauvinism and racism are best epitomized in SL's slogan during the American invasion of Grenada--"Grenada for the Cubans!" When thousands of internationalists took up the urgent cause of exposing the US invasion of Grenada, all SL could do was think of ways to divert the movement into the hands of Soviet social- imperialism or to discredit the movement altogether.

The same is true of the struggle of the people in Central America. While the official pro-Soviet Communist Party of El Salvador is calling for a "negotiated settlement" and the laying down of arms, SL has been sloganeering about "military victory to the leftist insurgents!" who SL never names. Even worse than this attempt to leach off an armed struggle, the SL promotes the slogan that the Salvadoran leftists need Soviet MIGS. Like Trotsky, who called guerrilla warfare "Stalinist adventure," SL has no understanding that the guerrillas' weapons mainly come from the oppressor itself. The guerrillas take the weapons of those imperialist-backed forces they defeat. So SL asks supporters of guerrilla warfare, "what are they going to use, sticks?" Like all revisionists, SL sees things--not people and politics--as decisive. They see Soviet nukes and MIGS as decisive, but then they wonder why the Soviet Union does not give Salvadoran guerrillas MIGS.

SL likes to say what the USSR's policy should be to defend its own workers' state or dictatorship of the proletariat. SL likes to say what the USSR should do to help world revolution. SL is like the liberal-radical who berates the Democratic Party out of the illusion that the Democratic Party will serve the people it claims to. The Kremlin has different ideas. It calls its rule the "dictatorship of the whole people." It does not even call itself the "dictatorship of the proletariat," a "workers' state" or a "deformed workers' state," as SL does. (Question: what is a deformed worker?) All SL can do is whimper about what the USSR should be doing.

Subjectively, SL and SYL (youth group of SL) like to think of themselves as militant hard-liners opposed to the US. They think they know how to defend the Soviet Union better than the current leadership of the Soviet Union, so they put out pro-Soviet slogans that even the Kremlin would denounce-- "Grenada for the Cubans" for example. Another example is the romanticism of the SL's "Yuri Andropov Brigade" that went to an anti-Klan rally. (Workers Vanguard, 2/17/84, p. 2) Not even the CPUSA would name a brigade after Yuri Andropov and the CPUSA is the official US counterpart to the Soviet Communist Party! Many people mistake out-Sovieting the Soviets as ultraleftism, but the truth is that even subjectively, the SL is only militantly defending reform in Afghanistan, deterrence and illusions about the Soviet Union's support of liberation struggles.

OBJECTIVE ROLE OF THE SL: FBI

Objectively, the SL serves much more sinister purposes. As such loud defenders of the Soviet Union, SL discredits all the events it attends. No one benefits from such an outlandish defense of the Soviet Union except the FBI.

The daily practices of the SL are also well-known. SL finds it quite appropriate to heckle Noam Chomsky as he links the US, Israel and the Salvadoran regime. On the other hand, SL does not heckle or even protest an appearance by Jerry Fallwell.

In their love of slogans and demonstrations, the SL takes pictures of each demonstration and placard-holder. Any serious "Marxist" knows that the FBI and police infiltrate left organizations. The co-chair of one Trotskyist group was proved to be FBI. So why does SL take pictures--to let the FBI have them when the FBI can't take the pictures openly themselves? Worse, why does SL publish pictures of people who are not even in their group?

People who do political work have surely been interrupted by SL members. Why does SL harass people who are passing out literature on the streets? Since when do genuine Marxists fear the political activity of the masses? Then why does SL so often tell so many different people "to get out of politics?" Are people not allowed to learn through practice or are all non-SL people supposed to learn politics from SL's briefcase of literature?

The answer is the same as to the question of why SL members threatened one person who had just stopped attending SL meetings. Two SL members said that it's OK that he left the meetings because of disagreements, but the day he called Trotsky a "counterrevolutionary," he would "get a two-by-four over the head." SL violence at demonstrations is well known. Objectively speaking, SL's attacks on the masses and particularly new activists is to serve the US bourgeoisie. SL "Marxism" is service to US imperialism under a subjective cover of support of Soviet revisionism.

Related questions:

See Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Captitalism The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky War and Peace

People's Daily, "Leninism or Social-Imperialism?" People's China eds. David Milton, Nancy Milton, and Franz Schurmann

Kostas Mavrakis, On Trotskyism. "Review of On Trotskyism."

The Political Economy of Counterrevolution in China: 1976- 84, a look at the state capitalist economy that the SL defends.