Wag the dog

This is a "review", or rather an ironic comment, originally posted at another site, since removed. It deals with one of my fortes: small sectarian left-wing groups, more specifically the "Marlenites", which are occasionally mentioned in footnotes in Trotskyist books. I actually encountered a guy who claimed to have met them, back in the 1940´s, since virtually every member of this small group worked at the same printing shop in New York City. According to other sources, they were blood relations, too! Marlen apparently broke with Communism in favor of Zionism after the war (or non-war), but that´s another story as they say!

This is a fascinating publication (after a fashion). “The Bulletin” was published in New York during the 1940´s by the obscure, small leftist group Workers´ League for a Revolutionary Party, not to be confused with the (contemporary) Revolutionary Workers´ League, nor with the (later) Workers´ League (which also published a magazine called “The Bulletin”) or the League for the Revolutionary Party (also based in New York). 

Are you with me so far? ;-)

The Workers´ League for a Revolutionary Party was led by one George Spiro, who wrote under the nom-de-plume George Marlen. For this reason, his paltry few followers are usually just called the Marlenites. Most people never heard about them, but those who have, often consider them to have been the crankiest ultra-left sect around. After reading “The Bulletin” and some other material, I beg to differ. Yes, the Marlenites were super-sectarian and had a few pretty strange ideas, but they were neither better nor worse than any other small, super-sectarian group. I can understand why Joseph Hansen´s SWP would laugh at the Marlenites, but with what right do the sectarians of today complain about Comrade Spiro and his supposed madness? Projection, much?

This issue of “The Bulletin” contains one article that really is barking mad. The Marlenites claim that World War II was a bluff. Yes, really! Apparently, the Nazis and the Western powers had a secret understanding to occasionally bomb each other for show, but in reality, very few buildings or industries were destroyed. A number of peculiar news telegrams published in New York dailies are harnessed as “evidence”. The point of the conspiracy? To fool the workers and, at a later date, unite Nazi and Western forces against the Soviet Union. Even the Hitler-Stalin pact is part of the plot to attack the Soviets. Stalin has been temporarily allowed to occupy some small, neighboring nations to the USSR, which will then be used against him at a later date as a casus belli. Marlen´s analysis of the war may have looked interesting during the “Phoney War” or even after the fall of France, when a large portion of the French establishment decided to collaborate with the Nazis rather than resisting them. However, the Marlenites insisted on their analysis even during the Blitz!

Another staple of this group (the one it´s mostly known for among the cognoscenti) is the claim that Trotsky was really a Stalinist. This issue of “The Bulletin” contains an article called “The Trotsky School of Falsification”, dealing with discrepancies in Trotsky´s published statements about Lenin´s testament. The Marlenites also published a number of pamphlets, in which they accused Trotsky of being a co-conspirator with Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev against Lenin and Lenin´s true legacy. Once again, we are dealing with an idea which makes sense on *some* level, but which Marlen turns into a fully-hatched conspiracy theory. It´s a fact that Trotsky didn´t immediately see the danger coming from Stalin, that he (at first) didn´t fight him hard enough when he *did* realize the danger, and that he eventually united with (and compromised with) Zinoviev and Kamenev. It´s probably also true that Trotsky´s writings contain some discrepancies – I haven´t bothered checking. From this, Marlen derives the somewhat hasty conclusion that Trotsky was a “Stalinist”. He even claims that Stalin may have poisoned Lenin, and that Trotsky knew about it! 

While attacking The Old Man in this manner, the Marlenites nevertheless had essentially the same analysis of the Soviet Union as – wait for it – Trotsky. This raises the question why a “Stalinist” and traitor like Trotsky could possibly have developed a correct analysis of the Soviet Union and its degeneration? No answer is forthcoming. In a very real sense, Marlen wanted to be “more Trotskyist than Trotsky”! 

The rest of “The Bulletin” contains polemics against competing anti-Stalinist Marxist groups, both those that mattered (the Trotskyist SWP and Schachtman´s Workers Party) and those that didn´t (the Oehlerite RWL and the Stammite RWL). The polemics are often based on a few sloppy formulations in the magazines of the competitors, which to the Marlenites prove their “opportunism”. The only polemic that makes any kind of sense is the one directed at SWP´s so-called proletarian military policy (it was controversial even within the Fourth International).

If all this sounds familiar to seasoned left-watchers, it should. This is how *all* sectarian groups argue! Long-winding polemics, pages on end, based on nothing more than a sloppy sentence or a sentence taken out of context. Complicated scenarios turned into simple conspiracy theories (Churchill didn´t *always* bomb Vichy French troops, therefore…). But, above all, the inferiority complex towards the great leader (in this case, Leon Trotsky), whose analyses the sectarian group steals, all the while attacking him and his movement.

We´ve seen it countless of times since the demise of the Marlenites. What about the “polemics” in Workers´ Vanguard, magazine of the Spartacist League? What about Enver Hoxha´s followers, who attack Maoism while calling the Soviet Union “state capitalist” (the Maoist position)? What about the bizarre groups who stole dissident Trotskyist Sam Marcy´s analyses of the “global class war”, all the while attacking Marcy´s own party? What about the ICC and their conspiracy theory about “the Machiavellism of the bourgeoisie”?

In what sense, pray tell, is this *less* insane than the strange gyrations of George Spiro a.k.a. Marlen and his small band of faithful?

I´d say it´s all the same crap. Entertaining crap, of course. Otherwise I wouldn´t be musing about it at 3 AM local time…