What on Earth is Going On With The Spartacist League and Workers Vanguard? - 22 Oct 2020

The Spartacist League, which once upheld revolutionary Marxism (and still claims to do so today) but has had nothing to say about the momentous events convulsing U.S. society over the last six months.  The last issue of Workers Vanguard went to press in late May.  No new issues of Workers Vanguard have come out, and the online website simply has a note from August 18 announcing that the paper would appear on an irregular schedule. 

Activists familiar with the U.S. left keep asking us: What on earth is going on with the SL? How is it that their silence continues month after month? There is talk of a faction fight, but that is hardly an excuse for the sepulchral silence from the moribund SL. Politically, their absence from the battlefield destroys any remaining pretense of providing leadership, much less revolutionary leadership.

Back in June the Internationalist Group wrote:

Amid the most massive protest movement in decades, as it has continued week after week, the Spartacist League has not published a paper, put out a leaflet or posted a single statement on its website ....Their silence speaks volumes: the SL’s abject abdication is a declaration of political bankruptcy.”²

That was more than three months ago. Since that time, the SL/U.S. still has not uttered a peep. That certainly takes some doing, given the intensity and importance of political events throughout this period. In rare encounters with downcast SLers who go through the motions of sheepishly peddling months-old issues of their paper, 

 

A few have now ventured a new claim: the Spartacists criticize the Internationalist Group for marching with Black Lives Matter leaders who support Democrats and Antifa anarchists.  The Internationalist Group responds that marching with revolutionary slogans (including, prominently, “Democrats are the bosses of the racist killer cops”) in mass protests against racist police is not being followers of BLM and Antifa.  

Sparticists selling Workers Vanguard are drilled to repeat this cynical sophist blather to justify failing to fight bourgeois politics. So where were you, SL, when Democrats were misleading millions into a dead-end, with a little help from their friends on the opportunist left? Answer: the SL was AWOL.

The SL has been undergoing yet another phase in its endless internal crisis. Is its paralysis partly the result of the downward spiral of its ever more wacked-out internal life? No doubt about it. Does its utter incapacity to respond to what’s happening in the real world outside its endless internal fever dream display stunning incompetence by its leadership, and the emptiness of their claims to be building a revolutionary party? Self-evidently.