Crisis in the Ukraine

[C. Flower]

@amh - the fall of the USSR and Trotskyism - interesting topic perhaps worth its own thread. So much discussion of Eurocommunism and the collapse of the CPS but I don't recall reading anything substantial about the consequences in the various Trotskyist strands.

This is a very hostile account of the Spartacist involvement in Russia but I'm sure has a dose of truth in it (leaving aside the murder of Martha Phillips, about which I haven't a clue). Trotskyism was and is beset with various forms of cultism and by sectarianism behind which the most outrageous political compromises were made in many of said sects. The reasons for this need to be explored.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedM...t_murdered_in/

[A Marxist Historian]

@amh - the fall of the USSR and Trotskyism - interesting topic perhaps worth its own thread. So much discussion of Eurocommunism and the collapse of the CPS but I don't recall reading anything substantial about the consequences in the various Trotskyist strands.

This is a very hostile account of the Spartacist involvement in Russia but I'm sure has a dose of truth in it (leaving aside the murder of Martha Phillips, about which I haven't a clue). Trotskyism was and is beset with various forms of cultism and by sectarianism behind which the most outrageous political compromises were made in many of said sects. The reasons for this need to be explored.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedM...t_murdered_in/

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.

[C. Flower]

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.

The suggestion that it might have been an 'inside' assault came from a then leader of the Spartacists. The hostile view of the organisation and yours differ in emphasis, detail and tone, but not in substance. I've heard very similar from the SWP (UK) people who've jumped ship, from ex-Healyites, from the SP and many other Trotskyist groups. Some of it can be put down to moaning by middle class hobby activists who don't want serious demands put on them (this would be the standard response), but the pattern is consistent (as is the knee jerk to point the finger at another Trotskyist sect/s rather than to deal with the issues). It hasn't worked. Trotsyism has not succeeded in building mass parties in the last 80 years, or in leading a social revolution anywhere. Time to ask a few serious questions about the movement and what is wrong.

[A Marxist Historian]

The suggestion that it might have been an 'inside' assault came from a then leader of the Spartacists. The hostile view of the organisation and yours differ in emphasis, detail and tone, but not in substance. I've heard very similar from the SWP (UK) people who've jumped ship, from ex-Healyites, from the SP and many other Trotskyist groups. Some of it can be put down to moaning by middle class hobby activists who don't want serious demands put on them (this would be the standard response), but the pattern is consistent (as is the knee jerk to point the finger at another Trotskyist sect/s rather than to deal with the issues). It hasn't worked. Trotsyism has not succeeded in building mass parties in the last 80 years, or in leading a social revolution anywhere. Time to ask a few serious questions about the movement and what is wrong.

So why have so many ostensibly Trotskyist organizations gone so wrong and done so poorly? Robertson had a fine line about that which I remember well.

"Lack of power corrupts, absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely."

Up until the collapse of the USSR, the seeming prosperity of American and European capitalism after WWII in the West and the aureole around "official" communism of Stalin, Khruschchev, Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh in the East and the Global South, created by the world-historic Soviet victory over Hitler, isolated authentic communism. And the collapse of the USSR made that worse, discrediting all forms of communism in the eyes of the workers of the world on the grounds that "socialism has been tried and it hasn't worked."

You've had steady rightward motion and the decline of pretty much all left organizations worldwide ever since, something only slowly beginning to reverse here and there. As and when political recovery begins and workers begin to think in terms of workers revolution, if Trotskyism is not in good shape, Stalinism in all its forms is pretty much on the dustbin of history.

And the attempts to create something new on revolutionary lines so far have been tragicomic failures, as Occupy illustrated. The only serious thing one sees out of attempts to revive anarchism has been .. the black blocs?

Trotskyism and Stalinism are not just ideological variants, they represent really the two possible fundamental political interpretations from a revolutionary perspective of the experience of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, the only successful model for a workers revolution in history, inevitably the touchstone for future workers revolutions. Ecclesiastes: "there is nothing new under the sun."

As for inside job, I don't know who or what you are referring to. Yossi Schwartz, then the lawyer for Martha Phillips in the legal issues after her death?

By "inside job," do you mean the suggestion in one of the pieces that it could have been, not a Spartacist but a "Trotskyist" inside job? Namely involvement by the only other Trotskyist organization with a meaningful presence in the USSR during the Soviet collapse, the Northites? They had recruited a prominent dissident Soviet intellectual, Vadim Rogovin, which automatically gave them some impact.

Hostility between the Spartacists and the Healyites/Northites, to try to be objective, was indeed extreme and very longstanding, and for both organizations there was nothing more important than the fate of Trotskyist intervention into the USSR, and their efforts were certainly counterposed (as my postings show, I share that hostility, so the effort is difficult).

-AMH-

[Sam Lord]

Joke:

Q: What do you do if an attractive young spart tries to "horizontally recruit" you?

A: Go along for the ride.



http://www.revleft.com/vb/threads/13...al-recruitment

[A Marxist Historian]

Joke:

Q: What do you do if an attractive young spart tries to "horizontally recruit" you?

A: Go along for the ride.



http://www.revleft.com/vb/threads/13...al-recruitment

"Horizontal recruitment" was a favorite subject of humor within the Spartacist League in the 1970s, but I've never heard of anyone in the SL actually trying it.

But, 'way back in 1972, I remember a woman then in the SL telling me of a former housemate of hers in the American SWP doing exactly that.

She walked by a closed door in the commune she was in, and she heard a female voice she knew saying "permanent revolution," (pant, pant) "the transitional program" (pant, pant), etc.

-AMH-

[TotalMayhem]

Ukrainians are celebrating the first day of visa-free travel to most EU countries, which President Petro Poroshenko has welcomed as a "a final 'goodbye' to the Russian Empire."

Radio Free Europe

[C. Flower]

Joke:

Q: What do you do if an attractive young spart tries to "horizontally recruit" you?

A: Go along for the ride.



http://www.revleft.com/vb/threads/13...al-recruitment

HISTORICAL FACTS FOLLOW (THE AUTHOR WAS THERE) :

The only "grain of truth in it" is that young people in left-wing groups, Trots, Stalinists, Maoists, etc., tend and tended in the past to be horny as hell and couple off, long-term, short-term, overnight, etc. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the Stalinists in the US were into "New Soviet Man" and all that ****, there was a certain amount of frowning on sexual behavior among the CP youth by the Party leadership. And there was an accusation that Trots engaged in "horizontal recruitment."

Truth is, young CPers ***d as much as anyone else on the Left (which was a haven for sex in the 50s and early 60s), but they tended to keep it a little more quiet. And the charge against the Trots was a slander.

RED DAVE

...

[C. Flower]

"Horizontal recruitment" was a favorite subject of humor within the Spartacist League in the 1970s, but I've never heard of anyone in the SL actually trying it.

But, 'way back in 1972, I remember a woman then in the SL telling me of a former housemate of hers in the American SWP doing exactly that.

She walked by a closed door in the commune she was in, and she heard a female voice she knew saying "permanent revolution," (pant, pant) "the transitional program" (pant, pant), etc.
??
-AMH-

People have sex ? Well, that is news. Heavens, what next ?
There was also a history of US agents/ assets using sex to disrupt parties on the left.
Harassment of women, blackmail, stirring up personal disputes etc. to generate disruption in left organisations of all kinds. Related to Cointelpro. I guess you may have heard/ read similar.
Although of course, any opportunist roosting in any party, left or right, is liable to abuse their position.

[C. Flower]

Ha - just noticed. EVERYONE who posted on that RevLeft trolling thread was BANNED.

[Count Bobulescu]

Specific Russian General identified as "person of interest" in downing of Malaysian airliner over Ukraine.


https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russ.../28904893.html



https://themoscowtimes.com/news/repo...ght-mh17-59877

[C. Flower]

If your want to read some journalism in the Irish Times it seems the place to look in the sports section. Last Friday's paper had a long article by Ken Early (link below seems readable) which mentions football once in the subhead and then plunges into an interesting review of the Maidan events and in particular the Maidan sniping.

I'll return to this when I've had time to read the cited research which concluded the sniping and the protestor/police confrontations were orchestrated by Svoboda and the Right Sector, and that most of the snipers were agents of those groups. Early ends the piece with quotations from a Maidan bracelet seller, who suggested that the Berkut was bribed, and whose friend said it was members of the current regime "They needed blood, they got blood. Yanukovych gone. New government."

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soc...tion-1.3507716

It would be interesting to go back to the Irish Times headlines on the shootings at the time they happened.

[C. Flower]

More embarrassment for the Kiev government. Yesterday, a fake news story went badly wrong for them.

Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor was just interviewed on RTE news about this - his report in full linked below. He and the CSM have broken the silence in the western media on the chaotic right wing regime in Kiev - where numbers of pro Russian journalists and activists have been assassinated.

When a Russian journalist critical of the Kremlin is seemingly gunned down in Kiev – and then is revealed to have been faking his death as part of a geopolitical sting – it is quite rightly headline news in the West.
But a state-supported campaign to silence media critics in pro-Europe Ukraine isn’t getting much notice at all. And human rights monitors say that needs to change.
While many of those targeted have been Russian – and thus claimed by Kiev as legitimate casualties of Ukraine's “information war” with Russia – an increasing number are Ukrainian, and whose offenses appear solely to have been criticism of the government’s policies. More disturbing, analysts say, is the role of ultra-nationalist street gangs, who have besieged the offices of critical news outlets, threatened journalists, harassed LGBT activists, and dispersed meetings with seeming impunity, while police stood by and watched

.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Euro...down-grinds-on

[eamo]

Looks like Ukraine, egged on by the EU is going to re-ignite the war of aggression against the Donbass (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

They may consider the World cup in Russia as an opportune time to attack the Donbass in the same way as Georgia used the Beijing Olympics of 2008 as (what they thought would be) cover to invade South Ossetia.

According to the report Ukraine are ignoring the Minsk Protocol which brought an end to the last war and have amassed 30 battalions, 200 tanks, 380 artillery peaces and 90 multiple rocket launchers on the borders of the Donbass. The EU seem hell bent on conflict with Russia.