Left Turn and the
International Socialist Tendency
18 September, 2003
Dear Comrades,
This letter accompanies some correspondence between the
Socialist
Workers Party in Britain and the comrades of Left Turn in the United
States. As you will see, the bottom line is that the comrades have
decided to dissociate themselves from the IS Tendency and have
therefore asked us to remove them from the list of IST organizations on
our web-sites. We have, of course, complied with this request, and we
must ask you to do the same. In an apparently related move, the
original description of Left Turn on the group's website as 'a network
of anti-capitalists and revolutionary socialists' has been modified by
the removal of 'and revolutionary socialists'.
This is a very unwelcome development, and one that requires
explanation. This is particularly so because the rather curt tone of
the Left Turn communications implies that their decision was the
outcome of a long and acrimonious debate between them and the SWP. This
is not so. As I said in my initial reply, the decision came to us as a
bolt from the blue. To understand what happened some background is
necessary.
Left Turn was formed in the early months of 2001, on the
initiative
of several comrades who had been expelled from the International
Socialist Organization, which had been, till then, the US affiliate of
the IST. This was the result of a debate between the ISO (US) and the
rest of the IST. At the heart of this debate was the ISO leadership's
rejection of two propositions accepted by the rest of the Tendency: (i)
the Seattle protests marked the emergence of a movement against global
capitalism and, more generally, the beginning of a new phase of
radicalization; (ii) revolutionaries should accordingly make themselves
part of the movement, starting not from their disagreements with other
activists, but from the much larger area of agreement that united the
entire movement.
History — particularly the Genoa protests of July 2001 and the
emergence of the anti-war movement after 11 September — has decisively
settled who was right in that debate. The ISO (US) leadership's refusal
to recognize reality reflected a larger sectarian turn by the group.
The founders of Left Turn were expelled because they expressed views
similar to those shared by the rest of the Tendency. Their expulsion
and the ISO (US) leadership's role in helping to engineer a split in
the Greek Socialist Workers Party (SEK) prompted an IST meeting held in
July 2001 to exclude the ISO (US) from the Tendency; that same meeting
invited Left Turn to attend meetings of the Tendency.
Though there had been comparatively little contact between the
SWP
leadership and the founders of Left Turn before the latter's expulsion,
there was some intensive discussion between us as to the nature of the
new group. We encouraged the comrades not simply to form a new
revolutionary socialist organization (a New Model ISO) but rather to
create a looser anti-capitalist network. Our thinking was that through
an organic involvement in the new movements the comrades (who were
already active in different networks) could begin to crystallize around
them a cadre of revolutionary activists unscarred by the sectarianism
of the ISO (US). We took it for granted that building such a network
was a means to developing a much more healthy revolutionary Marxist
organization in the United States.
Initially all seemed to go very well. Very early on Left Turn
comrades based in New York began producing a magazine of the same name.
This made a considerable impact: the group began to attract activists
repelled by the sectarianism of the established left organizations but
wanting more than the cult of spontaneity dominant in the
anti-capitalist networks. Bilal Elamine in particular played a leading
role in organizing a very successful conference on Globalization and
Resistance in New York in November 2001 that helped to rally the local
left after 9/11. This dynamic start did great credit to the comrades
after the bruising experience they had suffered in the ISO; it also
reflected the strong support they received from the IST and its
sympathizers.
Relations with the rest of the Tendency were initially
excellent. A
relatively large number of LT members attended Marxism 2001. Some of
them stayed on to join in the IST intervention at the great Genoa
protests. I spoke at the New York conference and afterwards took part
in an excellent caucus with about 20 LT comrades. We all shared in the
grief when one of the group's founders, Pete Moore, died in a car crash
in September 2001. Anothing founding member, Brian Campbell, wrote to
me after attending the IST meeting in London in January 2002 to 'say
how useful I found the international meeting'.
In the early months of 2002, however, it began to become clear
that
significant disagreements were developing between Bilal, Brian, and
other leading Left Turn activists, on the one hand, and the two IST
organizations in closest contact with them, the British SWP and the
International Socialists in Canada. The comrades were resistant to
public sales of Left Turn (for example, at the anti-WEF demo in
February 2002) and to organizing any forms of Marxist discussion within
the group.
It slowly emerged that the comrades conceived themselves as a
loose
network of experienced activists involved in different single-issue
campaigns (Palestine, Colombia, etc.). Some of these activists had been
in the ISO (US); others were members of orthodox Trotskyist tendencies.
They didn't need Marxist education, it was sometimes argued. At other
times, it was argued that it was too 'early' to start trying to create
a larger core of revolutionary socialists. Like all stages theories
this suffers from the difficulty that if you don't start the way you
mean to carry on, you don't get to where you intended.
Inevitably, practice reshaped theory. Having deferred building
a
revolutionary Marxist organization to the future, the comrades came to
abandon it altogether as an objective (cf. Sasha and Legba: 'the
majority of Left Turn members do not see building the revolutionary
party as the project of our organization.') Logically enough, the idea
of recruiting new members came to seem an unattractive one. Recruiting
young radicalized students became associated with the ISO (US)'s
sectarianism. But what was wrong with the ISO's methods wasn't
recruiting youngsters, but rather trying to enclose them in a
hermetically sealed, intellectually arid organization, instead of
encouraging the new members to develop themselves through actively
participating in the struggles and debates inside the movement.
Clearly one driving force in this process was a perfectly
understandable reaction by the founders of Left Turn to the sectarian
practices of the ISO (US). But in an important sense they are still
accepting the terms of debate set by the ISO. Effectively the ISO
leadership posed a dilemma: either a 'hard' Leninist organization or
the loose, fluffy 'movement of movements'. What the rest of the IST did
was to reject this dilemma. We say that the only way to build serious
Marxist parties today is to be thoroughly in the movement. The SWP, for
example, is being transformed through our role in building the Stop the
War Coalition and other movements such as Globalise Resistance.
What Left Turn has, in effect, done is to accept the dilemma
posed
by the ISO (US) leadership: the difference is that the comrades have
opted, not for a sect isolated from the movement, but for liquidation
into the movement. In a certain sense this too is understandable. The
movement is diverse, lively, dynamic; in the hands of many far left
groups, Marxist theory is dull and dreary. The same temptation to
dissolve ourselves into the movement has been felt elsewhere in the
IST: it was, for example, one factor in the very serious crisis that
afflicted Linksruck in Germany in 2001-2. And in a more mundane level,
most groups, in turning towards the movement, rightly dismantled
existing routines and structures that were an obstacle to this turn but
didn't replace them with new ways of organizing appropriate to the
changed situation — a failure for which we have paid a certain price,
even though we are now trying to correct this mistake.
But simply to become part of the swarm is a form of surrender.
As I
have tried to show in An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, the development of
the anti-capitalist movement has posed a series of tough theoretical
and strategic problems: the state, imperialism, reform and revolution,
party and movement. The revolutionary Marxist tradition — creatively
applied to the present — can help activists to address these questions.
The movement needs Marxism — Marxism of the right kind, a Marxism that
is rooted in an active and organized participation in the movement.
Politics abhors a vacuum. The failure of the leaders of Left
Turn to
address these strategic problems is reflected in a certain decline in
the political quality of their magazine, which has tended to become a
collation of articles on specific issues lacking a coherent focus. Thus
last autumn Left Turn led on Enron rather than the coming war in Iraq
that was evidently becoming the dominant issue in world politics and
subsequently producing a huge anti-war movement in the US. The latest
issue reflects a certain adaptation to the kind of libertarian politics
dominant in many anti-capitalist networks in the Americas — celebrating
the 'horizontalism' of the movement, as if decentralized structures are
sufficient to take on global capital. Rejecting revolutionary Marxism
isn't adopting a neutral stance but opening up to other forms of
politics.
The emergence of these divergences put the SWP leadership in a
quandary. A relatively brief and (for our part) amicable meeting
between Bilal of Left Turn and John Rees and me for the SWP at Marxism
2002 produced such a vehement response from Bilal that we decided to
pursue our disagreements with great caution. Martin Smith's offer of a
speaking tour was turned down by Left Turn, but his visit to the West
Coast last autumn involved friendly and positive contacts with LT
comrades in San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego.
During a visit to New York in March I had a frank but
perfectly
friendly discussion with Bilal, Brian Campbell, and another comrade. I
made clear our desire to pursue the discussion in a constructive and
non-confrontational fashion and within the framework of LT's continued
connection with the IST, despite the ambiguities arising from the
participation of supporters of other currents in Left Turn. The
comrades did not dissent from this approach. Chris Harman on a visit to
New York a few weeks later had similarly friendly contacts with Bilal
and Brian (with whom he stayed), and later pursued the discussion by
e-mail.
So why this sudden and brutal break a few months later? It is
hard
to be sure looking in from the outside, but the driving force seems to
have been tensions within Left Turn itself. A scattering of comrades
around the country expressed two sorts of overlapping concerns. First,
some at least shared our worries about LT's failure to pursue the
project of building revolutionary socialist organization within the
movement. Secondly, there were concerns about the internal democracy of
Left Turn. The main complaint was that control of the magazine and over
broader decisions (or non-decisions) about the development of the group
seemed to be in the hands of a few founding members based mainly in New
York and Washington DC with no way for the other members to hold them
accountable.
Argument over these issues seems to have produced growing
tensions
between the leading comrades and in particular some activists in
Baltimore. The latter successfully pushed for a national meeting in
Washington DC in July. This initiative had nothing to do with the SWP.
When we learned about it we were concerned that, given the defensive
way in which Bilal had responded to John's and my criticisms, such a
meeting would only intensify the tensions within the group and between
LT and the rest of the IST.
We made these concerns clear to the three members of LT who
attended
Marxism 2003 in London this July (none of the leading comrades from New
York or Washington came). At a meeting with them, Martin Smith and I
underlined that focusing on organizational questions is usually not the
best way to pursue an internal argument. We stressed that the broader
debate on the future of Left Turn should be pursued on a long-term and
fraternal basis and that confrontation should be avoided at the meeting
in Washington.
Because two of the Baltimore critics had connections with IS
Canada
(an ex-member of the group and her partner), our Canadian sister
organization had been blamed by Bilal and his co-thinkers for the
confrontation that did develop at the LT national meeting. IS Canada
has an entirely legitimate interest in the fate of the Tendency in the
US, given the very close links between the workers movements and
anti-capitalist networks across North America. Two leading members of
IS Canada, Michelle Robidoux and Paul Kellogg, attended the meeting
with LT comrades at Marxism 2003, and argued along the same lines as
Martin and I did. Michelle put this approach at length on the phone to
the ex-IS member in Baltimore before the national meeting.
Despite all this (what seemed to us) good advice, the meeting
was a
disaster. A bitter confrontation developed between the dominant
comrades in Left Turn and the two Baltimore comrades linked to IS
Canada. It is impossible to say at this distance whose fault this was.
But the LT leaders do have a heavy responsibility for what happened
next. The two Baltimore critics were summarily excluded from the group.
As far as we can tell, there was no vote or other procedure. The
comrades were simply cut off the LT e-mail discussion list.
It has to be said that this has certainly reinforced the
concerns
that had been expressed earlier about the absence of democracy within
the group. It is simply amazing that most of the founder members should
have taken such an arbitrary action in the light of the fact that they
themselves had been expelled from the ISO (US) barely two years earlier
(though it has to be said that the ISO at least paid lip service to the
formalities of constitutional procedure). This episode — and the
subsequent decision to break with the IST — underline that the
decentralized structurelessness characteristic of many anti-capitalist
networks isn't necessarily more democratic than the representative
structures traditional inside the workers' movement.
In any case, it seems to have been the catastrophic meeting in
Washington that decided the leaders of Left Turn to force a break with
the IST. This decision involved no discussion with the SWP or any other
sister organization. Beyond a brief e-mail by Bilal to IS Canada
blaming them for what happened in Washington, the first communication
with the rest of the IST after the meeting was his e-mail of 2
September announcing their decision to break. Sasha and Legba in their
subsequent e-mail say that this was 'a democratic decision of Left Turn
members' taken by 'consensus'. Once again it's hard for an outsider to
be sure, but one is entitled to be dubious about this claim. Mike
Davis, for example, Left Turn's best known member (who shared our
concerns about the group's evolution), only learned about the decision
from me. It seems as if the 'consensus' was one of those in the loop.
Plainly, however arrived at, the decision is one that we can
only
greatly regret. It is natural to ask ourselves whether, in hindsight,
there was anything that we could have done to prevent to this outcome.
It is hard to see what this would have been. Given the hypersensitivity
to criticism that Bilal displayed after Marxism 2002, any attempt to
pursue the argument more vigorously would almost certainly have
precipitated an earlier break. Perhaps we could have tried harder to
persuade the comrades in Baltimore to avoid any confrontation with the
dominant figures in Left Turn. But this would probably have simply
postponed the break.
This would have been a better outcome than the present one,
since it
would have allowed the debate carry on. It wouldn't have changed the
basic fact that Bilal, Brian, and the other leading comrades in Left
Turn have drifted quite a long way politically from the IS tradition.
They have committed the opposite mistake to that made by the ISO (US)
leadership. Rather than build a sect isolated from the movement, they
have liquidated themselves into the movement. This error implies an
assumption as present in that made by the ISO (US) — that revolutionary
Marxist politics necessarily take a sectarian form, so that we have to
choose between this politics and the movement. As I have already
pointed out, this is a false dilemma that we have rejected. To be a
real Marxist today you have to be fully involved in the movement.
Left Turn's departure is certainly a sad loss for the IST, but
Left
Turn will lose out as well. They are cutting themselves off from the
Tendency at one of the most exciting moments in our history, when we
are expanding dynamically thanks to our active involvement in the
movements against global capitalism and war. Having made a significant
impact at last year's European Social Forum and the World Social Forum,
particularly in making them the launching pads for the global day of
anti-war protest on 15 February, we are preparing our interventions at
the forthcoming ESF in Paris and the WSF in Bombay. Many of us will be
involved in further protests against the occupation of Iraq on 27
September. And of course we are in the thick of the struggle in our
different countries. What a pity that Left Turn is opting out of the
Tendency now!
The comrades' regrettable decision doesn't mean that the US is
a
closed country to the IST. We continue to have our supporters there —
most notably Mike Davis. Our Canadian comrades have many connections
with activists in the US, as does the SWP through the international
anti-war movement. And the door is always open to the Left Turn
comrades — individually and collectively — to rejoin us as the
opportunities for revolutionary socialists continue to widen in the new
century.
Yours fraternally,
Alex Callinicos,
for the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party
(Britain)
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