Truth or consequences

"1917" is the journal of the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), later renamed the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT). The group claims to be Trotskyist, but has more pro-Stalinist political positions than most other Trotskyist organizations. This is no doubt connected to BT's origins in the Spartacist League, a "Trotskyist" group notorious for supporting Jaruzelski's military coup in Poland in 1981.

This issue of BT's journal is dated Summer 1990. The Communist bloc had begun to unravel, and the lead article is illustrated with a photo of Czech democracy protesters carrying an effigy of Stalin with the inscription "Nothing lasts forever". There are several articles about the events in the DDR, and various polemics against other Trotskyists, including the ever-erratic Spartacist League. One of BT's anti-Spartacist articles bears the title "Truth or Consequences".

On the surface, the BT calls for a "political revolution" in the Eastern bloc countries, to remove the bankrupt Stalinist bureaucracy (using the term "Stalinist" in BT's broad sense). In reality, however, the BT shared the pro-Stalinist positions of the Spartacist League.

This was dramatically demonstrated in August 1991, when the BT, almost uniquely on the ostensibly non-Stalinist left, supported the coup of Yanayev and the Emergency Committee against Gorbachev. This was in keeping with their earlier support for General Jaruzelski against Solidarnosc back in 1981. Thus, if the Communist regimes in "Eastern" Europe had been stronger in 1989, smashing the democracy protests, the BT would presumably have sided with the repressive apparatuses of the regimes!

The BT may sound less overtly blood-thirsty, cranky and Stalinophile than the Spartacist League, even criticizing the Spartacists for having a portrait of Jaruzelski at their main office, but it's difficult to see any *real* difference between the two groups. In 1991, the Spartacists actually abstained (!) from supporting Yanayev, leaving the supposedly more humane BT alone on the Stalinist barricades...

Truth or consequences? Indeed.

This issue of "1917" also contains a theoretical article on "Black Liberation and the Class Struggle", and the second part of an interview with Geoff White, a founding member of the Spartacist League in 1966.

On a more sympathetic note, BT's journal has a union bug. Not the Polish Solidarnosc union, though, but the GCIU Local 280. ;-)