Saturday, September 1, 2018

Logan's run




“The Logan Dossier” is a collection of bizarre documents published by the Spartacist League, a small but notorious far left group in the United States. The Spartacists claim to be Trotskyists, but their politics sound more like a parody of official Soviet Communism. Apart from the main group in the U.S., there are smaller groups of adherents around the world, often with similar-sounding names.

In 1979, the international Spartacist tendency expelled one Bill Logan from its ranks. Logan had been the leader of the bombastically named “Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand” (SLANZ), actually a small group of less than 20 people in Australia. He later became chair of the Spartacist group in Britain. Logan was accused of “crimes against communist morality and elementary human decency”. Are we to believe these documents, the Australian group functioned pretty much as a cult, with all the usual ingredients: hyper-activism, communal living, prohibition against having children, the deliberate breaking up of couples, strange sexual mores, and (of course) authoritarian leadership. The main accusation against Logan was that he had attempted to force a young female member to abort her child, or to foster it out once it was born.

Logan was expelled after a “trial” at an international Spartacist conference. All 393 seated delegates voted for the expulsion. However, the only outside observer of the proceedings, veteran Ceylonese Trotskyist Edmund Samarakkody, refused to participate in the vote. Instead, he submitted a minority report, charging that *both* Logan and the U.S. Spartacist League were equally responsible for the cultic practices in Australia. This seems to be about right. After all, where did Logan learn his practices? During the 1980's, a group of defectors from the Spartacist League, the Bolshevik Tendency, exposed the cultism of the Spartacists themselves. Indeed, it's difficult to see how cultic practices can be avoided in a small, hyper-active group with a hysterical attitude and a completely unworkable sectarian program?

“The Logan Dossier” reprints a letter from an American Spartacist, confirming that the Spartacist League discourages members from having children. While the letter states that such a decision is “ultimately” a personal one, it's difficult to see how this can be the case in a high-demand, authoritarian group where the quasi-official line is that “comrades” shouldn't have babies? Also, frequent transfers of members between cities or even countries were typical of the Spartacist tendency overall, obviously putting strains on members' personal relationships. Several American members were transferred to Australia to aid Logan's operation, while Logan himself was ultimately transferred to London to lead the “Spartacist League of Britain”. My guess is that Samarakkody realized that pretty much everyone in the Spartacist tendency, both accusers and accused, were barking mad and acted accordingly.

The Logan case has an equally strange postscript. After being expelled from the Spartacist movement, Logan returned to his native New Zealand, where he formed a new group around himself. In 1991, this group was allowed to join the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), with Logan quickly being elevated to a leadership position. Yet, the BT had been formed as a reaction *against* the cultic practices of Spartacism, including those of Logan! Soon enough, defectors from the BT began to accuse Logan of cultic manipulations at membership meetings in the form of “communist criticism” sessions (apparently, something like encounter therapy á la Landmark).

Somehow, it feels as if nobody walked away with entirely clean hands in this affair.

4 comments:

  1. Intressant. Du lade ut denna länk(och två andra) i en kommentar på min blogg men jag måste ha lagt in den närmast automatiskt, för jag har inte sett den förrän nu.

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  2. Av de tre så att säga grenarna på det spartacistiska trädet som jag känner till verkar Bolshevik Tendency klart vara den minst osympatiska.

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  3. Det stämmer, LRP kallade skämtsamt deras ideologi för "Spartacism with a human face".

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