Defense and critique of the ICFI's practice. Jan 29,2021

 My Defense and Critique of the ICFI’s Practice 

Comrade Daniel, 

Thank you for your letter. 

I will begin my response by recalling the events of the last two weeks. As a member of the  New York branch committee, I had requested the document submitted by former SEP  provisional member C detailing his critique of the party line on the trade unions. I requested  this document three times, to no avail, after which I felt compelled to reach out to C myself.  After reading the document, and expressing my agreement with its conclusions, I emailed the branch declaring my intention to share the document with the entire membership of the ICFI. 

In response, you have issued a letter accusing me of “violations of party discipline, disloyalty and actions aimed at disrupting the work of the party in the working class.” A basic examination of the facts demonstrates that these accusations are not only false, but patently absurd. 

Your letter accuses me of “disloyalty” and describes me as an “enemy” for attempting to  engage in political discussion with other comrades. As I stated in my initial letter,  requesting and internally sharing a document which critiques our party line is not a breach  of democratic centralism, nor can it possibly be interpreted as a sign of “disloyalty.” You  have, like a lawyer, carefully avoided even addressing these points. 

If my actions were a breach of party discipline, the logical conclusion is that members cannot be allowed to share critiques of our party line with other comrades, unless approved by some—yet unidentified—leadership. 

Furthermore, if disagreement with the Statement of Principles on any political question disqualifies one from membership, as you seem to imply, it follows that this document is to be treated as inviolable, not subject to critical examination or revision. 

You twice refer in your letter to the branch committee as “the basic unit of the revolutionary  party,” as if this were some sort of sacred principle of the Trotskyist movement. My attempts  to engage in discussion with party members outside of the branch committee are referred to  as “unprincipled use of contact information” and acting “outside of the organizational  structure of the party.” This has nothing to do with democratic centralism. 

The reason I believe that C’s document has been suppressed is because it thoroughly  dismantles our sterile and impotent practice and calls into question decades of our history. 

You write: “Within hours of receiving this document, you declared your complete  agreement with it. You have not offered any explanation of what it was you agreed with.” 

Thank you, sir! I will happily oblige. 

The Objectivism behind our practice 

Comrade Dan concludes his letter with a quote from, In Defense of Marxism, a collection of  correspondences by Trotsky, in which he attempts to defend the dialectical method within 

the Socialist Workers Party against petty-bourgeois opportunism. As a leader of the Russian Revolution and the RedArmy, Trotsky knew well that without the assimilation of dialectical  thinking, revolutionaries could not effectively perform their duties to the working class. 

Trotsky’s discussion of dialectics in these letters was motivated by a debate on the  character of the USSR. Was it a worker’s state or not a worker’s state? The answer, as  Trotsky masterfully outlined, was that it both was and was not, hence the designation,  degenerated worker’s state. It was a worker’s state insofar as property relations were based on proletarian foundations, but it was not insofar as the political machinery was controlled by an alien, petty-bourgeois caste. This analysis was not conjured out of thin air, but was the  result of a concrete assessment of the state. Trotsky’s analysis in The Revolution Betrayed  recognized the totality of the state in all of its contradictions, particularly the contradiction  between the bureaucracy and the working class. 

The reason I so quickly declared my political agreement with C’s document was that I was  making a development from the utilization of primarily formal logic to that of dialectical logic,  aided by my review of the Transitional Program and some of Trotsky’s writings on fascism.  Furthermore, my own practical experience within the party, with a significant role in logistics,  and my personal experience as an Amazon warehouse worker led me to the conclusion that  our stance on the trade unions was utterly impotent and infantile. 

In practice, what we are telling workers is to make the jump from A to Z, from trade union to independent rank-and-file committee, without developing any of the transitional steps and  the experience within the working class necessary to wage an effective struggle. Our  practice in regard to the eruption of mass struggles boils down to the following: 

1. Gain interviews and contacts 

2. Develop an article 

3. Share the article through on-the-ground contacts or social media 

4. Call for a break with the union to form rank-and-file committees 

5. Reach out to the handful of contacts we made 

6. Hope for a result and pat ourselves on the back for making a “big impact.” 

We have essentially followed this same line for decades — decades of capitalist decline  which have provided fertile ground for the resurgence of a mass socialist movement. What  result has this achieved? If one looks concretely at the interviews and contacts we gain from  our interventions, they are primarily older, demoralized workers conditioned by decades of  betrayal by the union bureaucracies. We rarely, if at all, gain agreement from militant young  workers. In our further outreach to these workers, we may initially get a response, but few  follow up. Even fewer decide to try our rank-and-file committee experiment. 

As C notes in his critique, under the weight of an immense crisis of world capitalism, we  have gained experience with rank-and-file committees among teachers, a very militant  group within the working class. What has been the result of our experience? 

In practice, the R&F committees are not at all democratic organs of workers. The meetings  are called by us, the resolutions are introduced and created by us, and the workers, while  thankful for the political education, are not very enthusiastic in actually further developing the 

work. What they take from our education is the need to bring these ideas back to the mass of  workers within the union, which is itself areflection of their class instinct for unity. A vulgar  critique launched at C’s document by Comrade Dan during a branch discussion, attempting  to cursorily explain his resignation, was that he was attempting to direct the party’s efforts  toward the unions entirely, while completely ignoring the fact that in his critique he notes: 

“However, our Party’s primary strategic objective remains focused on bringing all of  the most militant rank-and-file workers already organized in these organizations under our influence and with this human element continue building and strengthening the  coordinated network of rank-and-file committees and all other similar bodies  necessary to form organs of dual power based on the working class.” 

A truism, known by most workers but ignored by our party, is that the critical mass, of workers in the most powerful sections of industry (dockworkers, transit workers, teachers, etc.) are organized within the trade unions. The contradictory nature of the union is ignored, in that at present the union is a form which the bourgeoisie is forced to utilize, and within this form is contained the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the working class. 

In our mechanical analysis of the betrayals of union workers, we constantly note that we  “support the strike” but not the union, thereby making an abstract argument divorced from  reality. Do tell, using the recent example of Hunts Point, how the strike took place if not  initiated within the framework of trade-unionism? How can you both “support the strike” while  ignoring the concrete form under which it takes place? Furthermore, in our analysis we  ignore the role of the revolutionary party beyond that of purely journalistic activity. How did  the party intervene? Was it able to influence the class and expand the strike? 

The reality of the situation is that within the bounds of the union, the bureaucracy is forced to  call a strike in response to the uncontrollable energy of the working class. Without the active  intervention of the party within the union, constantly injecting revolutionary consciousness,  constantly exposing the degenerate bureaucrats, the working class will not have the  revolutionary leaders it requires to break from trade union consciousness, expand the strike,  grow their class unity, and make the move en- masse to form rank-and-file committees. The  reason why the role of the party is generally missing from our analysis is because the party  had virtually no role. At best, it played the role of a journalist, passively spectating and  encouraging workers to immediately form adventurist organizations. 

The ICFI often discusses the trade union question from the perspective of its polemics with  the Spartacist League, which, pursuing the formulaic approach that characterizes all of its  politics, defines the unions as “defense organizations of the working class.” Fetishizing the  unions by arguing that they can be turned into organs of revolutionary struggle, the  Spartacists refuse to acknowledge the role of globalization in changing the character of the  unions and attribute everything to the subjective decisions of the union “misleaders.” While  rightly characterizing this line as stemming from an orientation to the trade union  bureaucracies, the ICFI proceeds to advance its own set of mechanical theses. 

Just as the Spartacists formulaically define the unions as “defense organizations of the  working class,” we have used the betrayals of the trade union bureaucracies as further  justification for a bankrupt theory which characterizes the whole of the unions as “anti-worker 

organizations,” despite their contradictory parts. Just as the Spartacists tear quotes by Lenin  and Trotsky out of context like passages of scripture to “prove” that their line is correct, so the SEP uncritically cites Trotsky to conclude that the unions are “an organization of scabs,” as if  that settled the matter.  

If the workers are in an organization of scabs, then we must go to the organization of scabs. It is not a matter of subordinating ourselves to the union bureaucrats, but of fighting, using  transitional demands, to raise the consciousness of the working class. 

When noting these truths, one is labeled within the party as a “pragmatist,” but this label  is coming from the standpoint of its equally degenerate opposite, that of an objectivist. 

The objectivist sees no need to issue transitional demands to workers and provide a  bridge from trade-union to revolutionary consciousness. The objectivist believes that  simply the strength of his “perspective” is enough to reel workers in, provided sufficient  suffering and attacks from the bourgeoisie. The objectivist denies the active and human  element necessary to raise class consciousness, instead believing that it is enough to  focus his work on propaganda, refining his “objective analysis” while denying the day-to day leadership required, with the workers where the workers are. 

The objectivist, while noting it in words, denies the role of the subjective element, the  communist cadre, in deed. In essence, the objectivist clearly understands and describes the  objective world in its continuous development, in often vivid detail, but in almost limitless  impotence is incapable of rallying its forces to change the course of history. 

In our own particular form of objectivist practice, we have confined our cadre to propaganda  activity. 

The practice of the rank-and-file cadre consists of the following: 

1. Writing and editing of articles 

2. Distribution of articles and conversation through social media and newsletters 3. Participation in numerous “political meetings:” essentially a regurgitation of the day’s  WSWS page 

4. Calls to petty bourgeois elements and workers asking them to donate and join the party. 5. Weekly educationals, which in essence consist of rote memorization through repetition of  passages 

As objectivists, we have denied that the worker learns through his own subjective experience, through a series of successive approximations, and furthermore that it is the role of the  communist to enrich these collective, practical experiences with scientific theory, by walking  hand-in-hand with the worker, ruthlessly exposing the treachery of his so-called leaders,  proposing concrete forms of struggle within the union such as strike committees and winning  the worker’s respect as his real leader, a respect that can only be gained through constant  practical activity with the worker. 

By denying this education to workers, our practice has become fully divorced from the day to-day struggles of the working class. The closest we have come to workers is in our rank and-file committee meetings, more accurately termed Socialist Equality Party lectures and  Q&As, which as noted above, are severely limited.

Our adoption of objectivism is a result of our degeneration into sectarianism, features of  which Trotsky described in Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International: 

The sectarian looks upon the life of society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there. In his  opinion the working class should put aside its less important matters, and assemble in solid rank around  his rostrum: then the task would be solved. 

A sectarian does not understand the dialectic action and reaction between a finished  program and a living, that is to say, imperfect and unfinished mass struggle. The sectarian’s  method of thinking is that of rationalist, a formalist, and an enlightener. During a certain  stage of development, rationalism is progressive, being directed critically against blind  beliefs and superstitions (the Eighteenth century!). The progressive stage of rationalism is  repeated in every great emancipatory movement. But rationalism (abstract propagandism)  becomes a reactionary factor the moment it is directed against the dialectic. Sectarianism is  hostile to dialectics (not in words but in action) in the sense that it turns its back upon the  actual development of the working class. 

The sectarian lives in a sphere of ready-made formulas. As a rule, life passes him by without noticing him; but now and then he receives in passing such a fillip as makes him turn 180 degrees around his axis, and often makes him continue on his straight path, only ... in the opposite direction. Discord with reality engenders in the sectarian the need to constantly render his formulas more precise. This goes under the name of discussion. To a Marxist, discussion is an important but a functional instrument of the class struggle. To the sectarian, discussion is a goal in itself. However, the more that he discusses, all the more do the actual tasks escape him. He is like a man who satisfies his thirst with salt water; the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes. 

Our weekly aggregates, which more closely resemble religious sermons than critical  assessments of our practice, exemplify exactly what Trotsky is talking about above. Almost every  contribution is dedicated to the invincibility of our perspective, each attempting to outdo the other. Our consistent assertion in these meetings is that the pandemic has proven the correctness of  our line, despite the slow growth of the party, proven ineffectiveness of the rank-and-file  committee, general inability to recruit the heroic elements of the youth (including those that  participated in the George Floyd protests), and a lack of influence within the working class. 

Trotsky wrote in, Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, that “The first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is—to be able to look reality in its face.” 

It is one thing to see the punch clearly flying towards you. It’s another thing entirely to  dodge and launch a counterattack. Contemplating the quote by Trotsky, can we honestly  say that we have been able to look reality, in all of its contradictions, in its face? 

The Dialectic and the ICFI 

The evident problems with our party raise the need for a critical examination of its history,  especially in the period leading up to and following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when  the party began to advance an abstentionist and anti-Marxist political line. That the party has  pursued these policies for 30 years, apparently with little opposition, raises serious questions  about the growth of opportunism within the International Committee, including how the  finances of the party are generated and to what ends they are utilized.

From my roughly two and a half years in the party, including half a year as an IYSSE  member and two as an SEP member, my suspicion is that party funds are generated  primarily through donations to the WSWS, which we have no way of knowing has a primarily working-class readership, and is more likely than not read diligently in large part by  members of the intelligentsia and professional layers. 

It is also a very concerning fact that the rank and file has essentially no knowledge of basic  facts about the party’s numbers, class composition, and the growth of our forces over time. I  am not even sure whether these questions can be answered by most of the branch  secretaries of this party. 

We do, however, get regular updates on the growth of the readership of the WSWS, which if  statements from the leadership are to be believed, has experienced massive growth over the  past year, although Alexa.com records a steady decline over the past 90 days, with an  average reading time of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. 

My estimate, as a member of the second largest branch in the US SEP, with roughly 25  members, is that we have perhaps 300 members worldwide, or not much more. A significant portion of this number is not active, aside from participation in political discussion and  payment of monthly dues/book orders from Mehring books. 

For our party, which claims to be the vanguard of the world working class, this is pitiful.  Thirty-five years have passed since the split with the WRP, through successive periods of  economic crises and the resurgence of strike activity within the working class. We cannot  pass off our slow growth merely to the unfavorable objective situation. The objective  situation has been extremely favorable; we have no legitimate excuse! 

In order to defend my revolutionary integrity and further develop C’s critique, I am  researching our history—in all of its concreteness—over the past several decades, in  order to draw the correct conclusions. 

Despite the limited information that I have access to at present, broad conclusions can  already be drawn. For the past several decades, we have focused the bulk of our activity  towards the development of the World Socialist Web Site, while abandoning the work within  the trade unions, instead replacing this essential practical work with developing the  readership of the website through various methods: social media work, IYSSE club meetings and public lectures discussing articles, etc. This has placed the party in a contradiction. 

As the literary output of the WSWS increased and its readership grew, the party drew in  layers primarily from the intelligentsia, the professionals, and middle-class youth: those who were scouring the internet to find the answers to the social questions that plagued them  and could afford the time to read through the often-dense material. At the same time, the  distancing from work within the trade unions alienated the party from the working class,  rendering it for the most part unable to both recruit workers and gain influence within the  working class as a whole, despite our self-proclamation as the “leadership of the working  class.”

Over the past few years, given the election of the fascist Donald Trump, and particularly this  year with the COVID-19 pandemic, the weight of the objective crisis has pulled in a new  layer of revolutionary youth and workers to the party who, despite our distance from trade  union work, have been drawn to our rhetoric of opposition to the capitalist system. We have  gained experience with rank-and-file committees, despite their extremely limited nature. 

However, the internal balance of forces is still decisively in the favor of the petty-bourgeoisie,  and as long as we do not correct our course, this is the layer from which we will gain the most recruits. Unable to influence the working class in any significant way, our primary influence  has been polemical, most prominently against the historical falsification of the New York  Times thus drawing a layer of the intelligentsia towards us, with a significant product being  our new recruit, Comrade Victoria Bynum. 

Our literary activity opposing internet censorship has drawn the attention of the Rolling Stone, the journalist Matt Taibi and a brief and sour encounter with Jimmy Dore  due to our reporting on Hunts Point. 

Unless our course is corrected, the ICFI will be forced to rely more and more on the petty  bourgeoise for the continued expansion of the party, and thereby fall deeper and deeper into the depths of political degeneracy due to the lack of a proletarian counterweight. The very  fact that Fox News, a far-right outlet, reported favorably on our anti-union stance with regard  to New York teachers should ring alarm bells. Far from being a vanguard of the working  class, on our current trajectory, we will end up becoming its steadfast opponents—whether  individual members realize it or not—injecting confusion rather than class unity and playing  an important role in its division. 

Our inability to cognize reality dialectically has placed us in an ultra-left position, with a  concrete (and ossified) recipe for revolution, although comrades will, of course, not admit to  this. Our recipe for revolution, in practice, is as follows: 

(Break workers from the trade unions and the pseudo-left  

parties +Build rank-and-file committees 

+Recruit workers and youth into the Party) 

= 

Revolution 

Decades of dedication to this dogma, in hysterical fear of liquidationism, has led to a party  that is tiny and unable to influence the working class. In virtually every meeting, one is  subjected to hearing the “correctness of our political line,” with the dominant opinion being  that our line is infallible and what is needed, in the words of a leading comrade is “inner party  clarification because inner party struggle would indicate the presence of factional conflict and  major political differences.” 

Trotsky described the ultra-left as follows in Ultralefts in General and Incurable Ultralefts in Particular: 

The “ultralefts” conclude their analysis just where it should really begin. They counterpose a  ready-made schema to reality. But since the masses live in the sphere of reality, the sectarian  schema does not make the slightest impression on the mentality of the workers. By its very  essence, sectarianism is doomed to sterility.

According to Natalia Sedova, Trotsky’s wife, one of the primary works that the “Old Man”  wanted to complete above all was “a study of the relationship between Anglo-American  thought and the development of the dialectic method.” The dialectic was so important to  Trotsky because he understood that dialectics is “as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as  finger exercises to a pianist.” 

As a youth within the party, I have had to learn the basics of dialectics on my own, with my first real introduction of an application of dialectics to the contemporary world being that of  C’s document, which had an almost immediate and revolutionizing impact. The education  that one is subjected to within the party is one of rote memorization, that of memorizing the daily WSWS, the SEP Historical Foundations document, and, The Heritage We Defend. 

What about the most important training, the training of not what to think but how? On the  WSWS, we have very few articles devoted to dialectics and even these approach the issue  from a very superficial level. Our refusal to teach our members the dialectic has led to a  party that is in effect unable to practically fight for the immediate interests of the working  class while taking care of its ultimate historical mission: Conquering political power and  effecting the socialist transformation of society. 

My history and demands 

In his letter Comrade Dan calls me a “petty-bourgeois anarchist”, referencing Trotsky’s response to Shachtman and Burnham as evidence: 

“a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the  tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of  anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one  position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility towards it;  and, finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.” 

I would like to point out, first of all, that the “inclination to substitute clique ties and personal  relationships for party discipline” applies above all to the leadership of the ICFI. A result of  our party congress last July was the promise of a thorough social media guide, after  repeated demands by the rank-and-file. It has been more than half a year. Where is this  document? Why is the leadership acting outside of party discipline? 

The refusal of the New York branch secretary to share C’s critique of our stance on the trade  unions to a member of the leadership of the New York branch is another example. After I  requested the release of C’s document three times over the span of a week, I was rejected,  leaving me no choice but to reach out to C to request the document. Cde. Dan’s letter states  that “It was explained to you that this document would be circulated, along with other  materials, for the discussion within the branch.” If not the branch committee, the formal  leadership of the branch, with whom did Dan feel the need to discuss how to circulate the 

document and the other materials? This indicates that within the branch, there is a leadership behind the formal leadership, that is to say, “clique ties.” This needs to be investigated. 

Dan makes the mistake, in line with our party’s objectivism, of formally using Trotsky’s  quote to criticize my actions without analyzing the concrete and contradictory conditions  at play. I will thus provide an account of my political history. 

I made contact with the party roughly two and a half years ago in New York. I was a middle-class  college student attending UCLA and back home on my summer break. The two years since the  election of Donald Trump, surrounded by the dizzying effects of inequality and homelessness in  LA and the growth of political violence, made me very disoriented, looking for answers. 

Originally a “libertarian” in high school due to Ron Paul’s supposed opposition to imperialist  war, the Trump election shifted me to brief support for Sanders because he spoke of an end to inequality andwar, then support for the worker-cooperatives model of Richard Wolff as  they seemed like a means to control the negative effects of capitalism. After use of online  “left forums,” I came to the conclusion that it was the socio-economic system of capitalism  that needed a violent overthrow through revolution, leading me to Lenin. It was the WSWS  that led me to Trotsky, through its review of the Russian Revolution and the Old Man’s  world-historic role, particularly his elaboration of the Permanent Revolution, the strategy for  the conquest of power on a world scale. 

After a brief stint in the DSA, I left due to their uncritical support of Sanders, and made the decision to reach out to the WSWS and join the party, because it seemed at the time that the WSWS told the whole truth, which I fully appreciated. 

After making initial contact, I was instructed to join the IYSSE and assist with youth work,  which in practice consisted of setting up a table, handing out fliers, and attending  educationals. 

I aided the development of a club on campus for the remainder of my time at college. I left  campus with almost $180K in student loans, a full SEP member, and worked at the NY  branch thereafter. I contributed to the work to the best of my ability, performing “interventions” several times a week and contact work, despite deteriorating finances and an inability to gain  steady employment. 

The onset of the pandemic accelerated these tendencies. I worked harder than before in  party work, writing as much as I could despite lack of ability, and contacting workers and  youth despite little result. 

Through all my time in the NY branch, my objective position in class society sharply  deteriorated as my debts came due, unemployment ran out and furthermore was  considered additional debt by the state. My extended family cut off contact with me,  alongside some of my friends, and all of them, including my nuclear family, viewed me as  a dogmatic freak to be pitied.

It was only through a concerted study of My Life, Problems of Everyday Life, The Young  Lenin and other Marxist literature, alongside an enforced regimen of exercise and  meditation, that I was able to steel my mind to face the tasks that confront me. 

In order to pay the monthly demands of my debts, I had to enter and become part of the  proletariat, as a warehouse worker in an Amazon Fresh facility. Living as a worker myself, in  a COVID-infested facility, living with elderly family with pre-existing conditions, reality became a lot easier to cognize and things became a lot clearer. The lashes of injustice abstractly  displayed on the WSWS were in my daily life made material reality. 

As an atomized member of the workforce, I found myself even thinking whether I would vote  ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to unionization should it occur in my facility. Due to years of party propaganda, I  initially thought ‘no’ but the answer ‘yes’ lingered in my mind because unionization would  mean that the workers within the facility would be organized under a common banner,  providing the battleground for a communist to conduct political work within the organization  and among his class brothers and sisters. 

As an active member of our logistics work, I witnessed for myself how consistent, practical  work with Amazon workers is generally unfeasible within the bounds of social media, for the  simple reason that young militant workers do not know who is behind the keyboard and at  best respond to us to give an account of their experiences at Amazon for the sake of  publishing an article. Even the two workers in our R&F committee are generally older and  not strong supporters, listening to us primarily for the purpose of education, not action, and  as an outlet to let out their frustrations.During the past month of my proletarianization,  concerted study of Trotsky’s writings on fascism, in which he encouraged communists to  work in even fascist trade unions, even encouraging entryism as part of the United Front  tactic into the bourgeois-led SPD, countered the line of the party, a line which views itself  arrogantly as a “pole of attraction,” a line thoroughly critiqued by C’s document, which the  party still refuses to discuss, pushing it off for the distant future if at all. The Transitional  Program , calling for a bridging of consciousness, also countered our line of immediate  formation of rank-and-file committees. 

The most damning evidence was my own practical experience as a worker, which in turn  set up the ideal conditions for C’s document to make such a powerful impact. 

I have been accused of a lack of discipline. If one were to objectively look through the full  content of my work within the party, in its various areas, one would find this to be false. In  regard to the Hunts Point intervention, I should indeed have had a much more active role,  despite the overwhelming disgust and rage I was feeling for the realization that my practice  

was that of abstentionism: rage which boiled over after the realization that for all my hot air of  revolution to workers, I was not at all fighting with them, but instead telling them what to do  from the outside, with the arrogance of an intellectual, not a vanguard fighter. I was leaving  the worker defenseless against the bureaucratic wolves within their unions. 

Inactivity, in accordance with established norms, should not be grounds for expulsion. If this were  the case, the party would have to eliminate from its ranks a significant number of members.

As I am now placed in a position in which I will have to mount a defense against the NC,  composed in part of a small battalion of trained and accomplished lawyers, I must be given  the appropriate time to prepare my defense, which as indicated in the section above,  requires a thorough evaluation of the ICFI’s history. 

If documentation is needed to substantiate my claims, I will provide them. 

As this initial defense is a critique of our party line, I will share this to the rank-and-file  membership, who have every right to question the abstentionist position which we have  taken, a position which turns its back on the working class. 

I would like to once again state, as I did in my initial letter, that “My intention is to fully clarify  all of the political issues that are currently latent within the entire membership, particularly its  vacillating and disaffected elements, and out of the blazing fires of the inner party struggle  forge a true combat party, ready to not only critique the bourgeoisie, but to physically lead  the proletariat in the revolutionary conquest of power.” 

In order to prepare for my defense against the NC, I demand the following 1. Temporary suspension from all party duties 

 2. Documentation of the party’s history, especially it’s practice, since the split   with the WRP 

 3. Disclosure of the details of total party membership, its composition, and   its growth over time to the entire rank and file 

 4. One month’s time to prepare my case 

I have not forgotten all that the party has done for me, in that it introduced me to revolutionary politics. The leadership of the ICFI, unlike the demoralized peers of their generation, continue to fight valiantly. However, their fight is running up against clear limitations, limitations which  must be shattered through a change in orientation. The upsurge of working-class struggle,  and the changing composition of the ICFI, provide the objective basis for a reorientation of  the party and a return to a genuinely Marxist political perspective. It is for this reason and this  reason alone that I am waging this struggle, for we are above all servants to the historical  mission of the working class and we must do what we can to fulfill that obligation.