'vanguard in Retreat

Scan page 8

Vanguard is to retreat to fortnightly publication.

The paper itself had never really gone beyond the tasks of a theoretical magazine.

Huge, rambling and undisciplined articles combined banal truisms with abstract propaganda for the maximum programme of socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In anxiety to stand distInguished from all other groups calling themselves Trotskyist, the Spartacists have filled the columns of Workers Vanguard with open falsification of the Trotskyist position on voting for workers parties in Popular Fronts.

Pro-imperialist

And in their efforts to avoid capitulation to bourgeois nationalism: they have espoused objectively pro-imperialist positions on Ireland and the . But while these positions have been revealed, the IST's empirical, sectarian leadership has until now concealed its inability to conduct the daily work of their own movement.

Now the announcement of fortnightly publication, which is signed by the Workers Vanguard editorial board, the Political Bureau of the US Spartacist League, and the 'Interim Secretariat| of the International Spartacist Tendency, gives an insight into the complete irresponsibility and incompetence of these 'leaders' who have posed as the world's only authentic Trotskyists.

And it also reveals the huge material investment piled in by the International Spartacist Tendency into financing and propping up the 20 strong pro-Spartacist faction that split from ! he Workers Socialist League at its second annual conference in February.

"Quiescent"

The Spartacists rationalise this decision to drop the weekly paper, by pointing to the failure of the working class in the USA and internationally to live up to their requirements:

The problem is not some absolute overextension of our capacities, but rather one relative to the quiescent period through which we are passing.' This 'quiescent period' (elsewhere described as 'current North American political, social and financial realities' | is of course the period in which the historic US miners strike has given an impetus to the wages struggle throughout the US labour movement; in which New York City is once again on the brink of a major financial catastrophe; and the period in which the Carter regime faces a worldwide dilemma in its bid to prop up tottering bonapartist regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But for the sectarians of the Spartacist League the period is assessed not on the basis of an objective analysis of the movement of class forces, but on their subjective requirements as a movement.

Incapacity

The statement reveals the complete incapacity of the IST leaders to relate to the actual §truggle of the working-class:

..as the weekly WV it did not and couid not serve its central intended purpose-as an agitational organ of intervention into major and continuing social upheavals in America in order to help shape and direct elemental and partial class struggles in accordance with the historic aims and possibilities of the working class' This chronic political failure to present a living programme, or conduct any serious intervention into workers daily struggles led inevitably to a political crisis even in the hardened sectarian circles of the IST:

'the continuing discrepancy between intention and realisation brought the few hundreds of the SL/US right to the brink of a major breakdown!

The statement details the appalling shambles of the IST's organisation-which was being hailed by their British agents as a paragon of a Marxist vanguard Though centred and most grinding on the press, the excessive pressures have been across the board in the organisation.

'It has been felt in all the undermanned Central Office departments, not just the press. Our cadres-typified: by the executive committees of, too small local committees, the !! trying to forge a black cadre component, the incomplete leadership of the Spartacus Youth League-have been repetitively faced with urgent tasks hopelessly beyond the means and forces available!

Holding forth-Green All this confusion and chaos, combined with a static ('stable') membership, and inereasing bills for leaders' extravagant programmes of international travel, would obviously disorient any movement.

But the IST points out that the leadership compounded the problem simpiy standing by, bemused by the whole situation:

'The central party leadership and senior cadre generally were hardly immune to these component disintegrative processes.

'For a couple of years I!! as first human resources then financial ones were exhausted, it had to: impotently witness Weaknesses af, the organisation slowly ulcerated.

"Individual responses drifted towards frenzy or passivity, depending' Far from this being a temporary financial crisis, then, the IST statemènt reveals a longstanding political paralysis which has dogged every part of their organisation in the US This culminated in a 'precipitous break in the WV Editorial Board' , followed by 'several months of discussion' as to whether and how the mess could be cleaned up.

In the middle of all this muddle and worry and 'even sinister threats to our organised existence', the Spartacists discovered the beginnings of a sectarian clique in the Workers Socialist League, and began an enormously expensive campaign to build the basis of a faction prior to the WSL conference.

Key figure in this classic exercise in political dishonesty was WSL Birmingham branch member Alastair Green.

According to WV of April 7 Green wrote secretly to Birmingham branch secretary Alan Holford # in July 1977 declaring his intention to 'fight for the politics of the Spartacists inside the WSL'.

Holford, a National Committee member of the WSL, took no steps. to inform the national leadership of this move by Green.

He was himself looking for a way out of the inevitable problems of fighting to build a branch of the WSL based on the working class in Birmingham.

Rather than fight Green's lurch to sectarianism, he joined him.

They began to gather around TAN them circle of critics, defeatists, debaters and dabblers as the basis for a faction.

Green, with subsidies from the IST, began making extensive and repeated factional trips secretly visiting members in various branches of the movement, and meeting with the London Spartacists.

The Spartacists began to step up this British intervention. And the costs escalated.

• Miserable "But the fruits of these mighty labours were miserable. A mere 22 members were persuaded to split from the WSL at the February conference, despite the investment of hundreds of pounds and months of patient and clandestine factional work.

Among those 22 were all the least reliable and non contributing members of the movement: only the cynics, sceptics, dilettantes and incurable wooden propagandists had rallied to the Spartacist banner of abstention from the living struggle, leaving the proletarian revolutionary core of the WSL intact.

The cost of this adventure to the IST is only now being counted. In April their leaders launched a fund drive, in which they characteristically once again abstained from giving the slightest direction:

'Since we have never undertaken such an emergency (or any) fund drive before, we do not know how much to expect from it [!]. Five thousand dollars would be poor; twenty thousand dollars would be good. Your leadership has let us drift into this mess; maybe the membership can help us out.' But even though Spartacists rallied round with some €28,000, this was not enough to refloat the leaking Workers Vanguard tub.

This gives some measure of the rate of overspending carried out by. IST leaders with their jet-setting "international consultations"

Conned

The message, for those who have been naive enough to fall for the lies, the postering and the pretensions of the Spartaçists during the very period in which this financial disaster was occurring, is simple: You have been conned, by some of the most cynical tricksters in the labpur movement !

A leadership which for years on end is incapable of administering the day-to-day political and financial workings of the movement is self-evidently an incompetent and irresponsible such a leading cideriod riat. There is no likelihood that such a on its own admission, cannot even function the SL's much-vaunted trade union fractions -LUMW Incompetent-IST leader Robertson can arrive at a correct political analysis of the much more complicated problems of the international class struggle.

Unfortunately there is equalty little chance that the seasoned sectarians in the IST ranks will draw the obvious pol¡tical conclusions from this state of affairs,.

----- pull-quotes -----

heads of inadequate trade union fractions, those going in spirals

DEOP POP ERONE HOLESCENE