Why the degeneration of the ICL

The defense of Spartacist principles and programs can only be developed by examining not only the errors that have punctuated the history of the IST/ICL, but, above all, by trying to trace back to their causes and how they could -- or should -- have been avoided. Trotsky, in assessing the defeat in China in 1925-27, remarked:

Such a deepening of theoretical roots and critical self-education had been envisioned by the ICL, but they were at best superficial, if not just false. The ICL was already too demoralized to seriously undertake such a task. It is this very task that we now seek to outline.

We consider it our duty to attempt to provide some clues toward understanding the blatant failure of the IST/ICL, while being fully aware that we hold no monopoly on truth and we make no claim to have any definitive answers. If we consider that Spartacism was the continuation of Canonism and Trotskyism, its programmatic disappearance would represent a considerable loss for the international proletariat.

The final turning point of 2017

The ICL's definitive political shift came with the adoption of a nationalist line at the 2017 conference. Our first document, distributed at the LO festival in 2023, exposed all the falsifications, distortions, and other forms of cheating the young Quebec nationalists had engaged in, under the imprimatur of Coelho, the then secretary of the International secretariat (IS). We also briefly explained how these young Quebecers were used by Coelho for his own purposes (which were to get rid of the "Old Ones"), thinking she could then have her hands free. This was a bad plan, since she herself would be abruptly and unceremoniously dismissed from her position a few months later (she has since received a favor in return).

This conference had begun to highlight a key problem for the IST/ICL: its historical US-centricity. But this was deflected by nationalists into "anglo-chauvinism," reducing everything to national issues ("the Hydra"). Now, it is clear that for a very long time, the US section of the IST/ICL dominated the international organization at all levels (starting financially), a domination that could never be challenged and which even grew stronger as demoralization and aging set in.

How could such grotesque and ridiculous events of 2017 have occurred? Because all the cadres of this organization (including us) were (and are, for those who remained) completely demoralized. The 26 years following the destruction of the USSR clearly show the elements of an organization that was thinking less and less and following the line established in the "center" (through the standard-bearer WV), still composed mainly of SLUS leaders and based in the United States, a center that would systematically buckle before its own imperialism.

The most emblematic example is, of course, the capitulation of the SLUS to US imperialism in Haiti in 2010. After arguing in WV that the imperialist army could save the Haitians, all sections of the ICL, without exception, followed suit. Absolutely no one in the entire organization at the international level found anything to complain about. Then, under pressure from external criticism, when after several weeks Robertson indicated that there was "a problem," as one man, the entire organization would do a 180° turn simply by reading the IS text announcing the "error." The International executive committee's Statement repudiating the position simply falls back on the isolation and aging of the SLUS (and the ICL) as an explanation for the capitulation of its flagship section, the section at the heart of US imperialism. And to cross its fingers that it does not happen again. The problem is that 2010 was neither the first time it gave in to US imperialism, nor the last.

We will also return to the early 1980s, "the Reagan years", a Reagan who was considered, and the rereading of the WV of the time is explicit, as relying on the fascists by the SLUS. The capitulations of this era were rightly denounced by the ET, whether regarding the Marines in Lebanon, the proposal for a "security team" for the Democratic convention (yes, the party of the Vietnam War and others), etc. The ET attributed the responsibility essentially to Robertson's bureaucratic regime, a regime that would have begun to degenerate in the 1970s. While there were clearly bureaucratic problems (we have no definitive explanation, for the time being, regarding the settling of scores among the youth or the holding of the Logan trial/spectacle in 1979), we believe there are other explanations, such as the end of the IST's very limited expansion — with the change of period linked to the end of the post-1968 wave or the Vietnam War —, a misunderstanding of US imperialism, or the maintenance of a US-centricity in the IST.

This profound demoralization was compounded by the destruction of the USSR. Re-examining all these periods, critically, is fundamental.

The roots of the demoralization of the IST/ICL

To understand how the destruction of the USSR could have such an impact on the IST/ICL, it will be necessary to revisit the key stages. And while it is clear to us that the IST's positions on the events that unfolded in Poland in 1980-1981 were entirely correct, it is patently obvious that the rise to power of Gorbachev's team in the USSR changed the game for the IST. It slowly slid from acknowledging reality to denying it (in the USSR, the GDR, and the other deformed workers' states of Eastern Europe).

From Solidarność 1981 to Gorbachev

While it had been able to correctly analyze the events in Poland (the reactionary nature of Solidarność, the very low level of consciousness of the Polish working class that led it to follow the reactionary clerical-nationalists, the goals of the polish bureaucracy, etc.), the IST was unable to recognize a situation that was identical in other workers' states (degenerated and deformed). Workers' consciousness and combativeness were at the same disastrous level as in Poland (or even worse), and a rereading of WV's articles from the period (1985-1988) amply demonstrates this. Faced with the dangers that Gorbachevism represented (by opening the door to capitalist restoration), the IST simply tried to reassure itself month after month by pretending that the working class was ready to defend the gains of the degenerated workers' state, which implied a high level of combativeness and consciousness among the working class. But, upon careful rereading of the dozens of published articles, we find only a tiny strike of drivers in a bus depot lost in the Moscow suburbs. The only real movement of the working class was the massive miners' strike in Kuzbass and Donbass in early 1989. As WV has well documented (and as can be found today in all analyses), the Gorbachev bureaucracy immediately complied with the demands of the strike committees (demands that were otherwise purely economic — and justified) — in order to ensure social peace and prevent the situation from leading to a reawakening of the working class throughout the USSR.

Using the Coué method, the IST leadership thus asserted, article after article, that the working class was ready to defend its gains, even ready to move towards political revolution, although providing no evidence to suggest such an outcome. The major difference between Poland in 1981 and the Gorbachev era, which explains this denial of reality, is this: in Poland, it was clear that the Polish bureaucracy, with the full and total support of the Soviet bureaucracy, was not going to let the counter-revolution win and was going to strike hard, whereas under Gorbachev, nothing suggested that he intended to bring the counter-revolution to a brutal halt. On the contrary, the prospect of a counter-revolution in the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries was, unfortunately, becoming a real threat. The IST, instead of recognizing this danger, preparing for it, and preparing the sectors of the working class who, where the IST was present, that is, in the West, were seeking to prevent the catastrophe (essentially the Stalinists), took refuge in its dreams.

The IST confused desire and reality in the DDR…

It should also not be forgotten that throughout the early 1980s and until very late (1987), the SLUS (and therefore the IST) considered that in the arms race with the USSR, the USA would be the one to lose. We will return to this point, which helps explain in part why the IST was caught off guard by the events in Eastern Europe and the DDR in 1989 (for example, the German section of the IST, which had never set foot in the DDR with an international leadership of the IST that had never instructed it to do so). Not only was this an important task (if only to take the pulse of Gorbachevism and, from the outside, get some sense of what was happening), but it was also a relatively easy one to carry out. A reflection of the IST’s view that a crisis was more likely in the West than in the East.

As a result, when events unfolded, completely unexpectedly for the IST, everything was hastily improvised, both politically and organizationally. It was a general mobilization, which was normal given the historical importance of these events. But the main problem was that this general mobilization was based on the confusion between an absolute necessity — the proletarian political revolution — and reality. In the months preceding the events, it was nationalist eruptions or the flight of the petty bourgeoisie that had made the headlines, not strikes, demonstrations, or workers' mobilizations. The IST had absolutely no militants in the DDR. And since Poland in 1981, everything that was happening in Eastern Europe or the USSR in no way heralded political revolutions. Under these conditions, immediately announcing, as the IST did, that the political revolution had begun and acting as if the working class was beginning to build a dual power could only destabilize the IST.

Of course, if the proletarian revolution had been underway, a tiny organization like the ICL could have intersected a part of the workers' vanguard. But the reality was very different. The most striking thing (and a reading of the ICL's propaganda and press from that period amply demonstrates this) is the passivity and lack of mobilization of the working class. Both in the DDR (the height of the ICL's intervention) and in the USSR. However, the transitional program that revolutionaries must advance for a working class building soviets and dual power has nothing to do with the transitional program that addresses a completely passive working class, especially when it faces a historic attack on the world's first workers' state.

Looking at the intervention of the IST/ICL in the DDR as reported in its press, or summarized in anniversary articles, it is clear that the Spartakist workers' groups are extremely small in number, without any real influence, and that the soldiers' councils, which were slightly more numerous, were almost immediately dismantled by the bureaucracy. All that remains is the Treptower Park demonstration for which a part of the working class turned out, but, as the ICL press also shows, the Soviet bureaucracy (since the East German bureaucracy had completely exploded) took care to close the doors to any risk, however minimal, of "slippage" by accelerating the process which would lead to the counter-revolution.

If the East German working class and soldiers had been truly mobilized and politically ready to defend their deformed workers' state, the ICL might have had a somewhat larger impact, but this was not the case. The ICL's program did not allow the few dozen soldiers or workers who listened to it and acted with it to intervene properly among their colleagues. It considered the workers and soldiers as already aware that the DDR had to be defended, whereas the central problem was that they had to be convinced of the vital necessity of this defense of the DDR, and that they alone could do it.

For revolutionaries, confusing desire with reality is fatal.

... as in the USSR

We find exactly the same flaws in the ICL's intervention regarding the USSR. Even worse, since it takes place after the defeat in the DDR. The most staggering from this point of view is probably Seymour's presentation in the 1991 Spartacist, which was, for several years, the spartacist "bible" on the counter-revolution in the USSR and the Eastern bloc. This text is dated October 10, 1990, so after the defeat in the DDR and while events were underway in the USSR. After an overview of the Eastern Workers' Democracies, for which he reviews the various bureaucratic cliques -- because he has absolutely no workers' mobilization to get his teeth into -- Seymour ends with the USSR. It seems that his only objective is to reassure himself and the ICL: "it is difficult to envision the capitalist-restorationist forces achieving governmental power short of civil war, as has occurred in East Europe." A mere assertion to make people hope things will be different from the DDR. Seymour (and the SLUS/ICL leadership) explains that "All evidence indicates that the mass of Soviet workers do not support the establishment of a capitalist market economy as such." Which is probably true. But the real problems, as was the case in the DDR, are the passivity of the working class and its level of consciousness, problems he does not address. Furthermore, to think that the creation of a trotskyist group at the last moment, since it did not exist at the time Seymour wrote his text, could run counter to what he considers a "bipolarization" of Soviet society is preposterous.

The problem is not to consider that intervening would be pointless, of course, but to understand that the role of a mere handful of militants arriving at the very last moment, from the outside, not all of whom speak Russian, facing a completely passive working class (at best), can only be very limited and targeted. As in DDR, if the working class is not convinced of the need to defend the workers' state and aware that it alone has the power to do so (with the intervention of a revolutionary party), there can be no mass mobilizations of the working class. This is what Seymour describes, and what the facts have proven. Faced with a working class that has no clear class consciousness and is not engaged in mass mobilizations, revolutionnaris will not be able to turn the wheel of history in the opposite direction. This simple observation is neither a challenge to the necessity of the party, nor to historical pessimism, nor a rewriting of history after the fact. It is the understanding that the program and tasks of revolutionaries stem from reality as it is, not from a fantasized reality. Otherwise, it is to delude oneself and guaranteeing rude awakenings in the future. This is what happened to the ICL.

The incorrect assessment of the events by the ICL in the DDR and the USSR…

The balance sheet drawn up by the ICL of the destruction of the USSR was disastrous. It never questioned, at any point, the program or form of its intervention. Although they are scattered and spread out, all the arguments mentioned above can nevertheless be found above, which indicate the ICL was rather off the mark. But questioning the content and perspectives of this intervention was subject to an avalanche of insults and tensions (demonstrating that there was indeed a problem).

The texts and discussions following the end of the DDR or the USSR are damning. While it is clearly stated on several occasions that the proletariat, both in the DDR and in the USSR, did not mobilize, and it is recognized (briefly) that the level of consciousness was very low, nothing is said about the programs or actions of the ICL, which were based on a presumed high level of consciousness and a possible worker mobilization. The texts of Seymour and St-John from September-October 1990 lamentably try to explain that the consciousness of soviet workers would not be the same as that of the deformed workers' state in the DDR because there was a proletarian revolution in 1917. "It is difficult to envision the capitalist-restorationist forces achieving governmental power short of civil war, as has occurred in East Europe" asserts Seymour. It is clear that the ICL leadership sought by every means to cling to the hope of a proletarian political revolution. With the consequence that this could only disorient the ICL's meager forces.

…leads to equally incorrect perspectives

A much more serious problem is that for more than 25 years, the ICL never truly grasped the full consequences of what the destruction of the USSR had set in motion.

The texts, whether those from the period leading up to the destruction of the DDR and then that of the USSR, or those assessing the situation, all primarily seek to reassure and ease the minds of the militants of the ICL by promising them that the destruction of the workers' states would open up perspectives. Al Nelson explained in september 1990 that "the present situation opens up unprecedented opportunities for our programmatic tendency." Then the text voted on at the 1992 ICL conference (which briefly acknowledges that the USSR had been destroyed) predicts a favorable situation because the so-called Trotskyist opponents are disoriented and the Stalinist parties are exploding. At no point are the disastrous consequences addressed (massive demoralization of the workers, arrogance of the imperialist bourgeoisies, etc.) that such a defeat was going to bring about.

In 1990, Al Nelson (using Robertson's formulations) reports a debate in which comrades believed that ICL militants were politically disarmed. In his refutation of this point, there is another passage that helps us understand the state of confusion in which the ICL leadership found itself: "This period is not equivalent to, say, 1928 in China, where. Trotsky could find no satisfaction in the fact that his analysis was proven correct. Temporary confusion and demoralization of sections

of the proletariat is not the same thing as being smashed and atomized by bloody defeats." Even though the defeat in China had important consequences for the Chinese proletariat, comparing it with the destruction of the USSR is more than problematic. And the word "temporary" clearly shows that the objective is to make comrades believe that this is just a bad moment that will soon pass. In the years that follow, ICL militants will be desperately searching for these "unprecedented opportunities."

The ICL torn apart

With these opportunities nowhere to be found, the discrepancy and contradictions between the decided perspectives and the reality of the world and of the working class will inevitably lead ICL militants to search for programmatic shortcuts to find these "opportunities." These shortcuts were certainly fought against on a case-by-case basis whenever their disastrous consequences became apparent, but since the causes were not and never had been identified, they were recurrent. And this phenomenon was very rapid, as revealed by the 1996 CEI memorandum. In line with previous conferences, it lists a long series of dazzling openings and recruitment opportunities for the ICL throughout the world. Then it denounces Norden, who, as head of the labor IS in Germany, tried to reconcile former DDR bureaucrats and transformed simple defensive struggles into offensive ones (he thus fabricated opportunities). Norden will persist in and consolidate this line of transforming reality. The IS established at this conference was not able to respond to him. Since the responsibility for these capitulations was not attributed to the contradictions of the ICL's policy, it was shifted onto Norden, whom the IS would eventually exclude bureaucratically.

Two things can be noted about this 1996 plenum. The most important is that the collision between the ICL's policy and the reality of the world is violent enough to be reflected in the memorandum. The IEC quotes, at the beginning, the first paragraph of Trotsky's "Stalinism and Bolshevism," which is the epigraph to "Why this blog". The IEC even feels obliged to recognize a downward shift in consciousness among the working classes. Unfortunately, as we saw above, these statements have no consequences either in terms of central perspectives or in programmatic terms. They are only secondary formulas. The ICL leadership and its militants consider the dazzling perspectives to be much more important. The other point is that in this battle against Norden over the former DDR stalinists, the ICL will solidify itself on the line that "the ICL had given a revolutionary direction in DDR" (we will come back to this). Beyond the ridiculousness of this formulation, this line made it possible to avoid any challenge or questioning of the ICL's policy and intervention in the events in the DDR and the USSR. However, any attempt at political clarification regarding the ICL's drift must inevitably pass through this stage, which is a major turning point for the ICL.

Towards the final degeneration of the ICL

With the working class retreating further and further and the ICL desperately clinging to its perspectives, the contradictions are set to reach a crescendo. As ICL militants saw nothing materialize, year after year, the quest for programmatic shortcuts and the wave of capitulations are also set to reach a crescendo. Just like the slow, creeping, and inexorable demoralization. With the ICL and the IS being under the stranglehold control of the SLUS, US based, it will be above all capitulations to the Democrats that will punctuate the ICL's "debates." The secretaries (all U.S. nationals) will run themselves ragged (and get unceremoniously dumped) until they are completely burned out. The reason the secretary in charge during the crash in Haiti in 2010 managed to escape unscathed (remain in her position) was that there were no longer any volunteers to take her place.

She thought she could put an end to the repeated crises and the widespread demoralization/passivity in the SLUS/ICL by ejecting the entire layer of "Old Guards" when the opportunity arose in 2017 with the battle leading to the ICL's nationalist shift. She thought she could then consolidate a team of loyal (permanent) companions around her and then change the ICL's policy with her own. When the opportunity arose with the COVID crisis, her attempt to implement her (entirely economist) policy within the ICL ran its course. The young wolves she had brought into the international leadership had grown up and disagreed with this shift (or pretended to, when we see today that they are advancing exactly the same kind of program): they brought her down. And it wasn't to question a part of trotskyism, but trotskyism in its entirety (transitional program, permanent revolution, Russian question, communist work in the unions, etc.).

Hence this blog today.

September 2025

[translation done using AI bots]