Anarchy, Chaos & Trotsky

On the one hand…

Greek student charged over anarchist arsons
AP
November 29, 2007

GREECE – A Thessaloniki prosecutor has charged a 27-year-old student for alleged involvement in a string of recent arson attacks by suspected anarchists, police said. The suspect was charged under strict anti-terrorism laws passed in 2001 to target left-wing extremists and organised crime. He was formally accused of committing acts of terrorism, participation in a criminal group, arson and explosives possession, police said. If convicted, the postgraduate student faces up to 25 years in prison. Police said the suspect allegedly took part in an arson attack Monday on a Thessaloniki back lot belonging to a French car dealership – in an apparent show of solidarity with youths rioting in the suburbs of Paris. At least five cars were damaged. The student is also suspected of involvement in attacks in recent months on a bank ATM and two trucks owned by the state power corporation, police said. An anarchist group claimed responsibility for the ATM attack. Anarchist groups frequently carry out arson attacks on banks, government buildings and vehicles in Athens and Thessaloniki.

And on the other…

Police Chief Quits over Massaging Neo-Nazi Crime Data
Spiegel Online
November 28, 2007

The chief of police in an eastern German state has resigned following criticism of his decision to change how the state’s notoriously high far-right crime statistics are calculated. The new method miraculously halved far-right crimes recorded in the state this year…

And on the third hand…

More melodrama from everybody’s favourite Trotskyist groupuscule, The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), aka the Spartacists. They’re currently engaged in a ding-dong battle with another mob (splitters!) called the International Bolshevik Tendency, at the head of which is The Renegade Logan. As part of their ongoing polemic against Logan’s mob, the Sparts have recently published The Logan Dossier, concerning ‘Documentary Evidence and Testimony in the August 1979 Trial and Expulsion of Bill Logan from the international Spartacist tendency for Crimes Against Communist Morality and Elementary Human Decency’. A sample of their purple prose:

In 1987, we wrote of the BT:

“Ex-members of the socialist movement do sometimes bear malice toward the organizations that ‘failed’ them. But people who voluntarily leave even very bad organizations normally find that their grievances recede as they go on with their lives. Hostility doesn’t make a program and ex-membership in a party doesn’t provide a sufficient reason for publishing a newspaper or crossing North America and Europe year after year seeking others similarly inclined. The BT is manifestly an assemblage of garbage, a heap made up of worse than worn-out people, the worst of those who have departed from the SL, which we think is a pretty good revolutionary organization. But to take that refuse heap and make it move like a loathsome living thing requires something more, an animating principle like the electric charge Dr. Frankenstein used to imbue his monster with life.”

—“Garbage Doesn’t Walk By Itself—What Makes BT Run?” [Workers’ Vanguard] No. 428, 15 May 1987

The IBT, on the other hand, is no slouch at slander itself, as the following reveals:

We stand on the Trotskyist positions defended and elaborated by the revolutionary Spartacist League in the years that followed [the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP]. However, under the pressure of two decades of isolation and frustration, the SL itself has qualitatively degenerated into a grotesquely bureaucratic and overtly cultist group of political bandits which, despite a residual capacity for cynical “orthodox” literary posturing, has shown a consistent impulse to flinch under pressure. The “international Spartacist tendency” today is in no important sense politically superior to any of the dozen or more fake-Trotskyist “internationals” which lay claim to the mantle of the Fourth International.

The splintering of several of the historic pretenders to Trotskyist continuity and the difficulties and generally rightward motion of the rest opens a potentially fertile period for political reassessment and realignment among those who do not believe that the road to socialism lies through the British Labour Party, Lech Walesa’s capitalist-restorationist Solidarnosc or the Chilean popular front. We urgently seek to participate in a process of international regroupment of revolutionary cadres on the basis of the program of authentic Trotskyism, as a step toward the long overdue rebirth of the Fourth International, World Party of Socialist Revolution.

Note that:

The predecessor of the SL/ANZ, the Spartacist League of New Zealand, traced its origins to one Owen Gager, who in 1967 declared his solidarity with the SL/U.S. Declaration of Principles (see “Development of the Spartacist League,” New Zealand Spartacist League Revolutionary Communist Bulletin No. 1, August 1972). Logan was later drawn to Gager, and as Gager spun off in the direction of Pabloism (i.e., political liquidationism), the tiny Spartacist League consolidated in 1972 around Logan and his companion, Adaire Hannah.

Owen has since become an anarchist, and took part, as one of the prosecution, in the conduct of Lenin on Trial in 2001.

See also :

1) Fourth International (International Viewpoint) | United Secretariat of the Fourth International
2) Fourth International (League for the Fourth International) | Internationalist Group
3) Fourth International (International Committee of the Fourth International) | ICFI