Sparts slam Afghan people

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The ultra-left sectarians of the International Sparta.

cist Tendency have always combined their adventurist ultimatums to the working class with gross opportunist deviations.

But they have taken a sharp downhill plunge with the publication of a lead article in the latest issue of their American fortnightly paper Workers Vanguard.

The article sets out to uphold the Spartacists' Pabloite line on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan-which attributes a progressive role to the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy under the opportunist slogan "Hail the Red Army!"

Avoiding any attempt to politically analyse the latest switch of strategy by US imperialism in its fight to contain the liberation struggles and revolutionary: aspirations of the world's working class, the Spartacists profoundly proclaim that:

"The people running this country are insane' And in what no doubt passes for a Marxist analysis in Spartacist circles, Workers Vanguard goes on to announce that:

"New York, entrepreneur Crazy Eddie would be better in the White House' than Jimmy Carter Bút from this initiat premise the tone actually degenerates, to the level of outright racialism. The Stalinist leaders were entirely right to violate the national rights of the Afghans, argues Workers Vanguard; because of the backwardness of the country and its predominantly peasant and nomadic population.

The lead article in this "Trotskyist paper" actually includes the following passage:

"Somebody had to clean up Afghanistan and try to drag it toward the 17th century. Discounting his liberal hauteur, Alexander Cockburn, writing in the Village Voice (21 January) caught the flavour of the place:

"We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world.

ian yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as mediaeval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel, too.""

Such a position Is, of course, an affront to any internationalist or socialist. It is not however out of character for the Spartacists, and bears all the hallmarks of, having been written, or inspired by IST leader James Robertson, who not long ago included a string of similarly sweeping and reactionary assertions on various nations and peoples in a barely coherent world report which singled out Albania as "a nation of goat fuckers"

Pronouncements like this are no accident. Nor are they simply the drunken or ill-considered outpourings of a deeply degenerate cult.

Rather, as statements more reactionary than those that could be expected from any but outright fascist elements in the working class, they reflect the way in which all the worst arrogance and national chauvinIsm isntured in she petty bourgeois ranks and leadership of the Spartacists-a sect wholly divorced from the American labour movement.

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• SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday February 20, 1980 age 10