Error-Prone WV Paints Chegitz as ISO Pink

[David Stevens]

[posted & e-mailed]

An otherwise excellent issue of "Workers Vanguard,"
(No. 686, 13 March 1998) makes what I believe to
be a factual error in its partisan attempt to
selectively quote from our recent multilogues
in news:alt.politics.socialism.trotsky .

In the 'Young Spartacus' section on page 3,
there's an article, "Goons for Liberalism:
ISO Threatens SYCer at S.F. State," which
includes in its text the entire Spartacus
Youth Club leaflet I quoted from last month.

But WV also says:
+
+ After this leaflet was released, there was
+ a flurry of traffic on the Internet about the
+ ISO's legacy of violence in the left. This
+ included one former ISOer in Chicago who wrote
+ that during the Gulf War seven years ago,
+ "I aided the ISO in keeping the SL out of
+ the NCCAW (National Coalition of Campuses
+ Against the War) planning conference,
+ something which I am ashamed of now." He
+ also reported that prior to that, an ISO
+ leader "told us that he had physically
+ thrown Sparts down a flight of stairs to
+ keep them from one of their educations." [1]

Clearly, WV is quoting our Comrade Chegitz, in
<Pine.SOL.3.95.980302143904.27292A-100000@hawk>.
That article [2] concluded with Marc saying
>
> Down with ISO and SL goons!

and one can perhaps understand why WV wanted to
skip that part of the proceedings. Nevertheless,
I know of no basis for the WV claim that Chegitz
is "a former ISOer." To the contrary, I believe
<Pine.SOL.3.95.980302143904.27292A-100000@hawk>
to provide a full and honest account by Marc of
his relationship and history relative to the ISO.
It is careless error, as well as political libel,
for WV to make Cde Chegitz into "a former ISOer."

It looks like maybe WV got John Holmes to be their
fact-checker for this article. ;-)

- David Stevens

[1] _Workers Vanguard_, No. 686 (13 March 1998),
p. 3, p. 9 [Young Spartacus], "Goons for
Liberalism: ISO Threatens SYCer at S.F. State."

[2] <Pine.SOL.3.95.980302143904.27292A-100000@hawk>,
"Re: More ISO thuggery reported by Spartacists,"
2 March 1998, Marc Luzietti <mluz...@hawk.depaul.edu>.

[James Hurd]

David Stevens <phyls...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

I now that Marc was in Spark. I believe he was aslo briefly
in the ISO.

: [posted & e-mailed]

: - David Stevens

--
_______________________Jim Hurd__________________________
When one hears galloping hoofbeats, one should initially
think about horses _then_ thinks about zebras.
---------------------------------------------------------

[David Stevens]

[posted & e-mailed]

Comrade St. James Hurd forgot to think of horses before
he started issuing diagnoses about zebras:

>
> I now that Marc was in Spark. I believe he
> was aslo briefly in the ISO.

Workers Vanguard apparently shares Cde Hurd's belief,
but they are both mistaken.

Marc made his political views clear, I thought, in
his <Pine.SOL.3.95.980302143904.27292A-100000@hawk>
of 2 March 1998. In challenging me, he even said,
"I do not support the ISO, I don't even particularly
like them. I would even go so far as to say the
organization is a cult." I have 'way too much
respect for Marc to believe that he would say this
and leave it at that, if he had been a member of
the ISO. Later in that same message, Marc details
his cooperation with the ISO -- (that was the part
that was quoted in Workers Vanguard) -- but there
was nothing to suggest that Marc had been a member.
That part, it seems, was just added by WV in order
to make the paragraph seem more authoritative ...
or in the words of a 'John Holmes historian', to
ensure that the "definitive evidence" was seen
as "extremely important." ;-)

As Marc said in the cited message, we need to be
clear on the historical record, and not make up lies
about the ISO; their reality is bad enough. And I
think it should be clear that, for all the challenges
Chegitz and I have issued to each other, I esteem and
respect his political consistency in a way that I
could never respect the reformist thugs from ISO.
In that sense, I think that calling Marc a former
ISOer is a horrible political libel.

First, the Spartacists call me a DuhLeonist; then,
they call Jan Norden a Pabloite and lie about Brazil;
next, ICL symps read a reformist snitch completely out
of the workers movement and threaten him with physical
violence in this public forum; finally, those same
political impressionists publish a report that Chegitz
is "a former ISOer." Will the SL libels ever end?

Against Violence in the Workers' Movement!
Stop Physical Threats by ISO Goons and Spart Symps!
Down with Cliffite Thugs and Spartadoody Slanders!

- David Stevens

[Ben Burgis]

While we're on the subject of ISO gansterism and Workers Vanguard
coverage of, and because the Sparts are reading this thread, I think
it might be worthwhile to get back to something:

A few years ago when I was "in" the ISO(more like a sympathizer with
a little red membership card) the physical altercation took place
between ISOers and Sparts in Chicago. I was not there, and I never
claimed to be there. I did, however, get both reports on the incident:
the Spartacist one and the ISO's. I posted up the ISO report on this
newsgroup, and (again without claiming to have personally witnessed it)
I said that I believed it.

Two years later at the national labor march on Detroit the Marxist
Workers Group(Lansing--no relationship to the rightist split from WoVo
in Detroit that is now called the MWG) was the subject of a phyiscal
assault by the degenerate gangsterite Socialist Equality Party. Although
he apperantly later claimed that he had not seen the incident(every one
who was on the scene thought that he did) a Workers Vanguard
photographer snapped pictures of the MWG comrade with a trickle of blood
running down his leg and of Detroit's Finest questioning people.
The Sparts then refused to write up the incident in their paper and run
the photographs on the basis of the fact that I was the one from whose
e-mail account the MWG's statement on the incident was e-mailed, and
I could not be trusted on the basis of the fact that I had (without
having claimed to have witnessed it personally) said that I BELIEVED
the ISO's account of the incident in Chicago in 1995. Never mind the
fact that I had defended the right of Spartacists to come to meetings
and co-sponsor events and the right of ISOers to talk to them and
buy their shitty paper within the ISO, and that because of this
and related stands I never got my re-registration materials for 1996
(I was unofficially de-facto kicked out.) The Sparts knew this--shortly
after all of this had happened, I called up their national office in
New York to discuss with them and they got my name and address and
everything. Never mind the fact that I *was not the comrade who was
attacked*--apperantly, that comrade's word was not to be trusted because
he was in the same organization as me and I had once been in the ISO
and held to democratic centralism. Never mind the fact that a member
of a Maoist cell in Detroit who had no connection with *EITHER* of the
two sets of "trots" had issued to all the same e-mail sources a public
statement verifying that he had witnessed the attack. Never mind the
fact that Workers Voice members witnessed it, and WoVo issued there
own statement on the matter.

Nope. None of that counts. I had publically told the truth about the
fact that, perhaps naively, I believed the ISO's account of the incident
in Chicago. That meant that I was an am a "proven liar." Anyway, why
print articles in Workers Vanguard about other obstentibly trotksyist
organizations that don't print blood-curdling denounciations of them--
wouldn't that undermine the Fortress Spartacist mentality(all of our
enemies are really just a "World Wide Anti-Spartacist League"/the
Bolshevik Tendency is an arm of the Mossad/just about every other
Obstentibly Revolutionary Organization is "scab socialist" and therefor
the lowest form of human life/centrism has ceased to exist and other
groups, even groups like the BT with politics almost completely
identical to theirs are simply "reformis"/etc.) that keeps the outfit
going?

"Non-sectarian defense?" Bullshit.

Ben

[David Stevens]

Ben Burgis wrote:
>
> While we're on the subject of ISO gansterism and Workers Vanguard
> coverage of, and because the Sparts are reading this thread

More than just the Spartacists, I trust. :-D :-D

It's ironic as hell that the Spartacists claimed to be
unable to "verify" Ben's account. We've seen the sort
of "extremely important" and "definitive evidence" they
require before their own symps threaten physical violence
and accuse Chegitz of being a former ISO pink. Indeed,
it is only because the ISO here on Usenet -- with their
vehement Spart-baiting from Canada to Carolina -- lent
credence to those reports that I can believe the Spartacus
Youth Club's report of last month's gangster threats by
the ISO at the campus of San Francisco State University.

> "Non-sectarian defense?" Bullshit.

Yup. I must retract what I said last year to another
Detroit comrade, that the Spartacists' Partisan Defense
Committee has "no ideological litmus" test for defense
of embattled workingclass militants. The Class Struggle
Caucus (CLC) of the Brazilian municipal workers in Volta
Redonda, are under state repression for demanding the
independence of their union from the state.

Yet not only does the Online Spartadoody Laager, from
Bob Malecki to John Holmes, criminally misrepresent the
Brazilian Trotskyists' position on state intervention
[cops in the union, the union tax]; even as the ICL
criminally abstains from defense of the CLC militants,
ICL symp Malecki now claims [*] that they _initiated_
the same defense efforts they've failed even to offer
paper support for.

For the SL, violence is bad -- if initiated by ISO.
A threat (by a Spart symp) against a pink snitch like
Louis Proyect is deemed politically justifiable, and
they couldn't be bothered to defend Ben's young comrade
against the SEP because they needed to "verify" reports
with John Holmesian rigor. This shows the kind of "truth"
laid bare by Spartacist Laager's treatment of opponents
from Brazil to Chicago and Detroit.

I used to think of Bob Malecki as the tail of the ICL.
Instead, it turns out that Bob is part of their vanguard,
politically and methodologically, as well as technically
and technologically.

- David Stevens

[*] "Re: Bill Logan, Spartacist Schoolboy - Spartacoid
Brains Held Hostage: , Day 4," 25 March 1998,
From: mal...@algonet.se (Bob Malecki),
Message-ID: <35198ebe...@news.algonet.se>:
"You are also lying about the ICL when it comes to the
defnse of those people in Brazil. In fact it was the ICL
that iniated the defense campaign!"