***Engels quote on rebellion vs. revolution, socialism, scientific

The SEP suddenly find its “democratic centralist” principles when the IMT faces a rebellion of its members, at least 61 of them on one Discord server. It defends the IMT leadership, proving they care more about suppressing their own members’ aspirations than taking the power in the capital and forming a new government. If the SEP cared about organizing the working class for a revolution, the 21 and the many others would have received invitations from the SEP and printed revelatory interviews on its website, as #Democratic_Power has done.

February 2022 letter from Fight Back “21,” the 21 members who left the Canadian section of the IMT.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJveznJpdC10C6dnSLXtEuvbLwOdKnSYbDabYsr4HeE/edit

“Reports of sexual harassment, abuse and assault to be directed to a small standing committee composed of EC & CC members, including women drawn from those bodies.”

“We believe that comrades would feel more comfortable approaching a small, mixed-gender group of comrades who have a dedicated role to play in addressing misconduct, rather than directly approaching the highest body of the organization, which is an intimidating prospect for many rank & file comrades.”

“This letter comes from a place of deep respect, commitment, and care for this organization. We are entirely willing to meet with the EC to discuss the issues and ideas outlined here.”

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14cwlROexnfsv7vlhXmKbDMlojh7mvFxxo0RRiij8V70/edit

Public letter from 21 former Fightback comrades: The IMT needs a wake-up call

“Unfortunately, the EC once again prioritized the smooth continuation of public political work over comrades’ safety. Needless to say, we cannot build an organization that fights all forms of oppression with a rapist in our midst.”

This view contradicts the Trotskyist view which saw Stalinism as an agent of imperialism within the revolutionary movement. The rapist is obviously more than just a rapist, which is something they will not say. They defend the rapist within the party so as to defend the counterrevolution within the party. This is like a defense tower on our territory from which they have a vantage point to attack the rising masses as they awaken. Their vantage point is the list of members, the emails, and the writing of all potential new leaders. The “culture” of drinking, of everyone being drunk, makes drugging and poisoning far easier, as the effects of the drug are masked by the effects of the alcohol. Some drinking may be fair play, but that should not be the public image of the organization. That would only help the capitalist class, as they have their drunks and their bourgeois scholars working together as a team.

So we must say these accidental difficulties within the revolution can only arise from conscious acts of the counterrevolution, just as Stalin brought the counterrevolution with him into the Bolshevik Party. That is not a small difference. The leadership will not take a Marxist position even if guided by this new faction in exile. Only an open confrontation with the counterrevolution and their removal from power by force can convince the ruling class that their ruling days are over. We cannot seek the counterrevolution in details and documentary evidence but in groups organized for the specific purpose. Since the CC and EC stand in direct opposition to the revolutionary movement, only a confrontation with the entire CC, removing them from power and replacing them with defenders of revolution can end the counterrevolutionary rape scheme. This also, would be temporary, since the Stalinists can regroup and attack again. Only a revolution can end the widespread problem uncovered by the #MeToo movement.

This has definite implications for the establishment of a revolutionary faction. The faction cannot just bring cases against the CC before the CC itself. At the same time, these crimes have a political dimension in that they attack gathering crowds who want to associate with the socialist revolution. Their entire defense, not only their legal defense, their entire political, cultural, and military defense must come down in order to create a clear victory for the organizations of the revolution. The revolutionary faction must occupy a majority of the CC and EC before we see any progress on this or the many other issues. We can safely condemn the Nanobureaucracy as unfit to rule and punishable by political castration. A new leadership is as inevitable as the coming recession.

When we say the only way to create meaningful, lasting political change is through revolution, we do not say the government has banned reforms but allowed revolutionary change. On the contrary, the government first banned revolutionary change, and once they blocked that road, reformism easily fell as well.

“Unlike Corbyn, we’re not in the midst of among the worst media witch-hunts in modern history; we’re in the humble beginning stages of building a revolutionary organization. We need to be able to admit when we’re wrong and make the necessary adjustments if we want to build an apparatus fit for the working class.”

In fact, the witch-hunt began long ago, even before McCarthyism. In fact, the Salem witch trials established a legal principle worth consideration. The use of “spectral evidence” characterized the witch-hunt courts. To relate this to the current conflict: the slightest shadow of a doubt has crossed over to the point where evidence and testimony goes missing to protect the rapist. Conversely, anything a party owner or Nanobureaucrat thinks or feels or hallucinates, regardless of the total lack of physical evidence, is sufficient cause for dismissal and worse.

“Furthermore, we should be clear that the leadership’s actions have encouraged and exacerbated the clique characteristics of the opposition. Attempts to circulate model resolutions for branches to consider via internal social media have been censored, leaving comrades to message other members they believe to be sympathetic in an ad hoc manner.”

This entire quote needs to be stressed in italics. Since the party does not provide for factional media rights, communication comes to a standstill. We can restart communication based on a monthly theoretical journal. Chats and Tweets alone cannot unravel the entanglements between members, long and short term, ex-members, recruits or full members, and the ownership and Nanobureaucracy. All these interpersonal relations in fact have a theoretical and political basis that we need to bring out with cooled emotions.

“Unsurprisingly, the leadership’s response to Jamie’s letter sparked outrage across the IMT. Quickly upwards of 60 comrades congregated on a Discord server, spread in an ad hoc way and largely through personal channels.”

A meeting of 60 comrades alone would hold significance, but we should value each comrade on the Discord server as if each one were 60 different comrades. They rose together against the owners and made possible the creation of a new CC to transfer power and members from the old to the new or to turn to the workers to create a better party people actually want to join. This would involve returning to the basics of Marxism as students and teachers who can also work together for the new party.

“In the most recent CC meeting, Marco proclaimed that losing 25 comrades isn’t enough, and in fact we must lose many more to ensure there aren’t ‘latent political weaknesses’ in the organization. He also mentioned that he’d rather lose half of our organization than ‘bend to identity politics’.”

“The dynamics of a minority of 2 against a majority of 18 are very different from a minority of 10 against a majority of 90.” This coming from a supposed Marxist who could reference Marx and Engels, the struggle of the two, or

“Explaining the reporting that the EC had provided on the allegations rather glibly, they move to a critique of reformist organizations and their surrender to what they call identity politics and blame the various rampant forms of abuse found in those organizations on that particularly insidious form of postmodern thought. While this is undoubtedly true, we must ask how an organization with this awareness is so blind to the realities of abuse.”

You can see from the above how they weaken their own arguments by failing to challenge the #Nanobureaucracy over philosophy. Rather than turn to the workers, as Lenin prescribed, they follow their own home-made remedy, leaving their health to chance. Workers trained by “the academy” or the university to argue more efficiently, along the lines and within the networks of the dominant culture, have much more to offer the revolutionary leadership than the old bureaucracy. Having no personal interest in philosophy, the IMT rebellion leaves that vital work to someone else. That creates a gap in their theory, which the #Nanobureaucracy will use to bleed them of members and their unifying political energy, their feeling and striving for unity.

They use that feeling of defeat to then steer former members into reformism and plain and simple trade unionism. From the point of view of bourgeois society, they only became a revolutionary so they can become a better reformer, to keep the ruling class in power while they plan their next offensive.

The IS intervened to save the failing EC and CC as Biden did the commercial banks. They refused to “…look inwards in order to police the conduct of comrades in their personal relations…” As if crimes against the membership are simply personal relations!

In response to the IS, the IMT rebellion wrote:

“Our own behaviour was policed when we attempted to hold conversations without leadership present. Why are rape and domestic violence the exceptions to this ‘policing?’… Such a stance is neither revolutionary, nor disciplined.”

If, as you say the EC and CC cannot take a revolutionary or disciplined stance, and all they do is police the conversations of revolutionary working class, then we have a situation where the party does more to harm than help the situation. They only enforce rules that benefit them, but the working class can enforce a war on their leadership, especially their power over the advanced workers and intellectuals. This power derives mostly from their permanent occupation (which they see as their divine right!) of the executive offices of the Fourth International.

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From IS letter in response to Fight Back controversy.

“…look inwards in order to police the conduct of comrades in their personal relations…”

2 final points:

“Explaining the reporting that the EC had provided on the allegations rather glibly, they move to a critique of reformist organizations and their surrender to what they call identity politics and blame the various rampant forms of abuse found in those organizations on that particularly insidious form of postmodern thought. While this is undoubtedly true, we must ask how an organization with this awareness is so blind to the realities of abuse.”

1. “Trotsky was the first postmodernist.” -Anonymous
   • A defensible stance. In the interwar years as much as during the cold war, unstable structures towered over society. The Stalinist bloc and NATO-capitalism. Postmodernism, like futurism which Trotsky did argue for in his time, freed political thought from these oppressive structures. A university system without freedom of thought cannot produce ideas at the rate necessary to fuel the expansion of the economy. By offering an alternative to the existing structures, he also created freedom for artists in his time rebelling against Stalinist inner-party tyranny and Western cross-party conformity.
   • The reaction against the enlightenment does not seek to diminish it except by contextualizing it and relating it to philosophy outside European borders. Furthermore, Marxists should try to diminish the enlightenment because of its close association with capitalist rule. However, this led to a contradiction because Stalinist bureaucracy, claiming to represent Marxism, held back philosophy and free thought in general, including the development of arts and sciences, through arbitrary demands for intellectual agreement. Without its Trotskyist Left Faction, the Communist Party left behind by Lenin lost all of its revolutionary content.
   • The idea of postmodernism has such a broad definition that denying it to Marxists simply cuts them off from the wider intellectual discussion. Banning books for the general public causes too great a backlash, so they effectively ban those books just for Marxists. Something so vague cannot hurt Marxism but can only further reveal its greatness. After all, Marx and Engels could have found some point on which to disagree with Hegel, but they did not because they did not want to cut the German working class off from dominant trends in German philosophy.
   • We should not confuse postmodernism with the early 20th century ideas that arose as intellectual trends within the Bolshevik Party, or those that Marx and Engels contended with as intellectual trends within the First and Second Internationals. Without that important distinction, the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie becomes almost formless and party ownership can now have any intellectual chase their own tails for humor, the interchangeable CC, EC, or IS or IC laughing derisively. In treating intellectuals like enemies, the Nanobureaucracy seeks to make a fool of the entire revolutionary working class. How silly a game to play!
2. Is the Nanobureaucracy simply a closed door or does it have a shooting hole (a loophole) to point its weapons at those outside?
   • If the latter is true, then it is a fortress and not just a closed door. We have a right to use political bombs in the form of members who suddenly see the light and turn on their leaders from inside the party. Whether or not they had the plan when they entered, we may never know, or we must never tell.
   • We can also break down the door in the form of an open rebellion and a new committee based on the revolutionary faction recruiting freely for the first time. The new majority should consist of proletarians and must have an entirely working class leadership. Furthermore, we can assume they have hostages, which are the advanced workers and honest revolutionaries they use as political shields. In order to rescue the hostages, we should favor the second more conscious plan while encouraging a rebellion from within. We can give that rebellion organizational stability, something capitalism denies to its nano-bureaucratic servants.

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