
Originally Posted by
A Marxist Historian
Hostile indeed, and much of it I know is false, as I was a member of the organization back in the '70s. There were no 70 hour work weeks. That is only possible if you are a Wall Street trader or a Silicon Valley cubicle geek, living off the fat of the land to maintain your sanity. Except during an actual revolution or something, that is unsustainable unless you are rich.
That is why the Healyites, the largest English Trotskyist organization back in the '70, who really did exactly that pretty much, exploded into a score of pieces which all disappeared. The only survivors, the SEP and WSWS of David North, don't even publish a newspaper, much less hawk it on street corners. And that is why the Spartacists are still around, as they just don't do that kind of thing.
It's quite true, when I was a member there was a lot of work and a serious pledge schedule, demonstrating to me that they were actually the real thing not phonies. But nothing like what this guy describes. He really gives the game away when he describes the truly excellent internal education programs (confession, in the '70s I was the education director of my local for a couple years) as political "education." I suppose he's trying to imply they were some sort of Mao style brainwashings, instead they were serious continual study of the Marxist classics and basic documents of the Trotskyist movement-including basic Spartacist documents of course.
That Robertson had to approve every word is beyond ridiculous. Would have paralyzed the organization and made a biweekly newspaper impossible. For 30 years the WV editor was Jan Norden, who had had disagreements on various minor issues with other leaders from time to time almost from the beginning--which only turned major in the aftermath of the demoralizing Soviet collapse. And so did other "top leaders" have disagreements with Robertson and each other, almost all still with the SL to this day.
That the death of Martha Phillips was an "inside job" is totally insane. She was very well loved in and around the organization, and highly respected in her union in the Bay Area in the '80s, which I as it happened was also a member of. When she went to Russia, she carried with her a recommendation letter from her union local president to Russian unionists. Her Russian boyfriend was indeed reviewed by the authorities and dismissed as a suspect, and none of her comrades could imagine that he secretly hated her.
At least, the guy gives links to the articles about her and the assassination in the Spartacist press, which really have all the information ever found out about who killed her. It did have all the earmarks of a professional assassination, no money taken, a neatly arranged corpse, etc. etc. The first of many political assassinations that have happened in Russia since. And in Ukraine, and other ex-Soviet countries...
-AMH-
PS: Be it noted that the 1992 Mayday edition of Workers Vanguard, which the slanderer helpfully provided a link for, included on page 11 a speech by Trotsky's grandson Esteban Volkov, which says everything really needing to be said about the assassination.
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