Prometheus Research Series 6
Selected Speeches and Writings
in Honor of Three Women Leaders
OF THE
International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist)
Martha Phillips
Susan Adams
Elizabeth King Robertson
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Selected Speeches and Writings
in Honor of Three Women Leaders
OF THE
International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist)
Martha Phillips
Susan Adams
Elizabeth King Robertson
Prometheus Research Library
New York, New York
March 2007
Cover: Prometheus graphic
from a woodcut by Fritz Brosius
ISBN 0-9633828-9-6
Prometheus Research Series is published by
Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116
Second Printing, July 2007
Dedicated to the Comrades of the
International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist)
Farewell speech by James P. Cannon on 26 December 1943
before beginning prison term on charges of "seditious conspiracy"
for his opposition to U.S. imperialism in World War II.
"Our party is built on correct ideas and is therefore indestructible.
But, in addition to that, I believe there is in this party of ours an
intangible power which reinforces the power of its ideas. That is
the spirit of the party — its comradeship, its solidarity. You know
the word comrade has been so long abused and so badly defiled
by self-seekers and pretenders that honest people sometimes
shrink from using the word any more. But in the movement that
has been created under the inspiration of Trotsky, with his
example always before us, the word comrade has acquired a new,
fresh meaning that animates the members of our movement not
only in their political work in the class struggle, but also in all
their daily lives and associations with each other. It is not
anymore, not with us, a formal and conventional word, but a
bond of unity and solidarity. Our comrades are devoted to each
other and trust each other. That is an intangible source of power
that will yield great results in the days to come."
— The Militant, 8 January 1944
Graphic from /;/ Memoriam to the Fighters of the Proletarian Revolution. Who Died in 1917-1921
RKP(b) CC Department for the Study of the History of the October Revolution and the RKP(b) (Moscow- Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925)
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Martha Phillips
In Honor of Our Slain Comrade Martha Phillips (Workers Vanguard No. 546, 6 March 1992) 8
Remarks by Jim Robertson at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 22 February 1992 8
Letter by Moscow Station of International Communist League, 22 February 1992 9
Remarks by George Foster at New York Memorial Meeting, 23 February 1992 11
Letter by Sam Hunt, 14 February 1992 13
A Personal Appreciation of Martha by Liz Gordon, 15 February 1992 16
Remarks by Alison Spencer at New York Memorial Meeting, 23 February 1992 19
Remarks by Gene Herson at New York Memorial Meeting, 23 February 1992 21
Remarks by Al Nelson at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 22 February 1992 22
Remarks by Diana Coleman at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 22 February 1992 25
Remarks by Jon Branche at Highgate Cemetery Memorial for Martha Phillips, 15 February 1992 27
Remarks by Max Schiitz at Friedrichsfelde Monument Memorial for Martha Phillips,
Berlin, 16 February 1992 29
Tidewater Labor Black League Member's Message to New York Memorial for Martha Phillips,
23 February 1992 29
Some Memories of Martha by Ann Pearson [undated] 30
Statement by Esteban Volkov, Grandson of Leon Trotsky: "Martha Phillips, a Revolutionary Hero,"
27 April 1992 32
Statement of Split from Leninist Faction, 13 August 1972 33
Susan Adams
Susan Adams, 1948-2001 (Workers Vanguard No. 752, 16 February 2001) 40
Remarks by Helene Brosius at New York Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 41
Remarks by Bruce Anwar at New York Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 45
Remarks by Tom Adams at New York Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 46
Remarks by Francois Diacono at New York Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 47
Remarks by Paul Costan at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 48
Remarks by Jan Blok at Berlin Memorial Meeting, 24 February 2001 49
Remarks by Eibhlin McDonald at Paris Memorial for Susan, 3 March 2001 53
Lega Trotskista d'ltalia Letter on Susan [undated] 54
Letter by Herbert, Berlin, 24 February 2001 55
Letter by Jeanne, Tokyo, 7 February 2001 57
Remarks by Sam Kaehler at New York Memorial Meeting, 3 March 2001 58
Application for Membership in the Spartacist League by Susan Adams, 15 December 1971 59
Elizabeth King Robertson
Elizabeth King Robertson, 1951-2005 (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006) ... 66
Remarks by George Foster at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 20 November 2005 68
Remarks by Amy Rath at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 20 November 2005 71
Remarks by Joseph Seymour at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 20 November 2005 73
Remarks by Emily Turnbull at Bay Area Memorial Meeting, 20 November 2005 75
Remarks by Amanda Cross at New York Memorial Meeting, 12 November 2005 77
Letter by G. Bogle, 22 October 2005 78
Letter to Lizzy by Laura, 10 October 2005 79
Remarks by Lital Singer at New York Memorial Meeting, 12 November 2005 79
Letter by Janis Gerrard, Berlin, 19 October 2005 80
Letter from Sri Lankan Comrades, 9 November 2005 81
Lizzy's Impact on Los Angeles by Kathy Finnegan on Behalf of the L.A. Local, 5 November 2005 81
Tribute to Comrade Lizzy by Tokyo Comrades, 14 October 2005 82
Application for Membership in the Spartacist League by Elizabeth King, 19 July 1974 83
Appendlx
A Guide to Further Reading 88
Introduction
Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, and Elizabeth King
Robertson were cherished comrades whose lives
were tragically cut short when they were in their
prime as revolutionary communist leaders. We remem-
ber them in this Prometheus Research Series bul-
letin because there is a great deal to be learned from
their purposeful lives. Here, memory is a political
act. Too often, eulogies tilt toward hagiographies,
smoothing out foibles to elevate mortals to mytho-
logical stature. Saints don't lead proletarian social-
ist revolutions. Exceptional people dedicated to a
political purpose do: people like Martha Phillips,
Susan Adams, and Elizabeth King Robertson.
This bulletin includes only a selection from the
international outpouring of speeches and letters
about Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, and Elizabeth
Robertson. A guide to further reading about them,
and to articles written by them, is included as an
appendix.
These three women were top cadre of the Inter-
national Communist League (Fourth International-
ist), i.e., the ICL. That they awakened to political
consciousness through struggles against the Ameri-
can imperialist war in Vietnam, the struggle for
black freedom, and for women's rights is not in
itself so unusual for women of their generation.
What is remarkable and atypical of their generation,
however, is that they remained steadfast in their
commitment to proletarian revolution, long after
most radicals of that era made peace with the capi-
talist order and wrote off revolutionary politics as
indiscretions of youth in heady times.
What Friedrich Engels said at the funeral of
his comrade Karl Marx ably describes what ani-
mated Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, and Elizabeth
Robertson:
"For Marx was above all else a revolutionist. His real mis-
sion in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to
the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state insti-
tutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to
the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was
the first to make conscious of its own positions and its
needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.
Fighting was his element. "
The chronicle presented here of the lives of
these women, as told through tributes by their
closest comrades, is also a powerful and anecdotal
narrative of the political history of the Spartacist
League/ICL at crucial turning points in world his-
tory. All three women gave their utmost to build
the Leninist-Trotskyist party necessary to lead the
proletariat to victory. Our party's establishment of
trade-union fractions, our international extension,
founding of a youth organization, codifying Lenin-
ist organizational norms, training new cadre,
selecting and testing a leadership were in no small
measure the work of these three women.
The interrelation of the individual with objective
forces in history is highlighted in the role these
women played in the ICL's fight to defend and
extend the October Revolution. Martha Phillips was
a leader in the ICL's fight to reimplant the authen-
tic history and program of Lenin and Trotsky's
Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union. Martha was
murdered at her post in Moscow in February 1992.
The ICL waged an international campaign to press
for an investigation into this heinous crime, but it
remains unsolved.
Susan Adams, who played a leading role in the
ICL's American section and then the French sec-
tion, picked up the banner and continued the fight
to build the nucleus of a Trotskyist party in Russia,
after the capitalist counterrevolution had rolled
back the gains of the October 1917 Russian Revo-
lution. Trotsky described the Soviet Union under
Stalinist rule as a degenerated workers state —
despite the usurpation of political power by a
bureaucracy, the economic benefits of collectiviza-
tion of industry remained. The destruction of the
Soviet Union was a huge blow to the international
working class. Political consciousness was hurled
back, while triumphant capitalist rulers push the lie
that "communism is dead." Susan Adams' work is
an affirmation that communism lives in the prole-
tarian struggle against racist, capitalist exploitation
around the world.
Our own party was not immune to the reac-
tionary pressures of the political period. Elizabeth
Robertson played a leading role in our struggle
to reconstruct a badly damaged party, including
through extraordinary, unsparing examination of
her own role — a capacity rarely seen in any walk
of life. In pushing herself, when she was already
very ill, Lizzy set an example for political account-
ability of every party cadre. Her careful, thought-
ful, well-researched work, codified in the ICL's
international organizational rules and guidelines, is
vital in the continual struggle to build a democratic-
centralist international that Lenin and Trotsky
would recognize as their own.
An examination of the lives and work of Martha
Phillips, Susan Adams, and Elizabeth Robertson is
rich in political lessons for all our comrades, and
especially the youth, who carry a special responsi-
bility in the party-wide struggle for revolutionary
continuity. Trotsky addressed his remarks to the
youth when assessing the meaning of the loss of his
comrade Kote Tsintsadze:
"The Communist parties in the West have not yet
brought up fighters of Tsintsadze's type. This is their
besetting weakness, determined by historical reasons
but nonetheless a weakness. The Left Opposition in the
Western countries is not an exception in this respect and
it must well take note of it.
"Especially for the Opposition youth, the example of
Tsintsadze can and should serve as a lesson. Tsintsadze
was the living negation of any kind of political
careerism, that is, the inclination to sacrifice principles,
ideas, and tasks of the cause for personal ends. This
does not in the least rule out justified revolutionary
ambition. No, political ambition plays a very important
part in the struggle. But the revolutionary begins where
personal ambition is fully and wholly subordinated to
the service of a great idea, voluntarily submitting to and
merging with it. Flirtation with ideas or dilettante dab-
bling with them for personal advantage is what
Tsintsadze pitilessly condemned both through his life
and his death. His was the ambition of unshakable revo-
lutionary loyalty. It should serve as a lesson to the prole-
tarian youth."
— "At the Fresh Grave of Kote Tsintsadze,"
7 January 1931
We believe Trotsky would have recognized these
three women as comrades of the caliber of Kote
Tsintsadze.
— Prometheus Research Library Staff
Workers Vanguard
Martha Phillips
1948-1992
In Honor of Our
Slain Comrade Martha Phillips
Our comrade Martha Phillips was murdered at her
post in Moscow on February 9. A lifelong communist
and senior cadre of the Spartacist League, Martha
was only 43 years old at the time of her death.
As a college student in Madison, Wisconsin,
Martha was radicalized by the Vietnam War. She be-
came a leader of a left opposition in the Socialist
Workers Party and was instrumental in leading sev-
eral of her comrades to fuse with the SL in Novem-
ber 1972.
Martha spent the bulk of her political life in the
Bay Area. A single mother of a handicapped child
whom she dearly loved, Martha overcame pressing
personal problems to give her best as an outstand-
ing professional revolutionist. Her personal compas-
sion, rigorous intellect, and power as a party fight-
er and public spokesman shaped our lives and work.
An effective recruiter and party educator, Martha
took a special interest in youth work. A lifelong
fighter for women's liberation, she was passionate
and thoughtful on all questions of special oppres-
sion. Martha was a founder of the Bay Area Labor
Black League and an active campaigner for the Par-
tisan Defense Committee. She was our candidate in
the 1983 elections for the Oakland City Council.
Through enormous effort, Martha learned Rus-
sian and got a job in Moscow teaching English. She
led the International Communist League's fight to
reimplant the revolutionary program of Lenin and
Trotsky in the land of its birth. Standing on the front
lines of the urgent fight against counterrevolution,
Martha fought with confidence and courage to bring
to the Soviet working people the internationalist
program of the October Revolution of 1917.
— reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 546,
6 March 1992
Remarks by Jim Robertson
at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
22 February 1992
I'm speaking because I'm going to be dealing
with some hard matters. Somebody murdered her.
And other comrades will fill out her qualities of
personality and comradeship.
When she first died, I reacted, I think like all of us,
in thinking about her over the many years that I'd
known her, and worked with her and cared for her.
And then because I'm a consultant on our Russian
work, and there was a problem even about getting
an autopsy to prove that she was murdered, I got
involved in the aftermath of Martha's death. And that
did something to me that doesn't usually happen.
When comrades die, I've got this uncontrollable feel-
ing that they've just gone away and I won't see them
anymore. But I've been made to realize that Martha
not only died but was murdered. And one cannot do
much from 7,000 miles away, but I've been attempt-
ing to discharge my responsibilities in this regard. So
this is the heavy stuff.
Well, by way of background, after we sued the FBI
in 1983 they swore that they were going to stay off
our backs. Around 1981 the Wall Street Journal
carried an editorial that said "We're going to get
you" for objecting to Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc.
Around the same time the leader of our German sec-
tion was stabbed in the back with the intent to kill
him by kill-crazed Afghan rightists in Frankfurt am
Main. And nothing much else happened. But it
appears that the American bourgeoisie is very tender
toward the East, although I believe they're mainly in
competition with the German capitalist class.
Now this is just background. I have no links
between what I've just said and the murder of Mar-
tha Phillips. And I would remind everyone that,
while history is not a conspiracy the way Henry
Ford and the fascists think, that there are conspira-
cies in history. So naturally in a very tender area of
work, working not only in Moscow but in six other
Soviet cities, she was in an exposed position.
The personal appreciations that I have read that
«S
I thought best caught and covered the qualities of
Martha Ann Phillips as a human being, a family
member, a friend, a lover and a comrade, are con-
tained in the appreciations that were written by
Sam and by Liz, and I certainly recommend those.
It was along those lines that I had intended to
speak, rather than on these other subjects.
Now, we have a small headquarters in Moscow
station, and the person who lived there left the
country for a while, and Martha who'd been quite
ill had moved in there, and she was on the road to
recovery, both according to her medical tests and
her own subjective feelings. And it is only for that
reason that when we heard that she was found
peacefully dead we asked for an autopsy, simply
because we did not understand if she was getting
well why she might have died. We repeated that
request, while the State Department told her family
that Russians do messy autopsies and advised
against it. However, the Moscow militia, the local
police force, ultimately did perform an autopsy,
which is normally a matter of routine, and found
out that Martha had both been strangled and
stabbed. It was murder. When it first became
known that Martha had been murdered, the militia
began, rather late, a criminal investigation — sealing
the apartment, interrogating witnesses, etc. And
the circumstances are really quite obscure to us.
Comrades had been with her until 11 o'clock the
night before. In the apartment, which had a room
with an office in it, there was an unopened bot-
tle of vodka. Comrades went back at 8 o'clock in
the morning because there was a demonstration of
some kind. Martha was still supposed to be too sick
to participate in it, even though she very badly
wanted to because she was feeling better. This bot-
tle of vodka had been ripped open in an unusual
way, unlike the way that you usually go about it.
She was lying in bed apparently peacefully dead.
And I do not have any basis now to speculate.
It could have been somebody within our milieu
for personal or provocateur reasons. We've had
altercations with Pamyat. The Kuzbass region inde-
pendent mine workers union is run straight out of
Washington by a Russian fascist and the CIA; we
intervened and got in their way [see "Soviet Min-
ers Strike Amid Perestroika Turmoil," WV No. 522,
15 March 1991]. There are many other possibilities.
Moscow is hardly New York — that is, you don't get
knifed in the street in Moscow, although increas-
ingly with impoverishment you can get robbed. But
this was not that kind of murder at all. And the
plain truth is, we do not know.
But we are pursuing this. Things like lawyers and
private investigators are fairly anomalous in the
past 40 or 50 years in the Soviet Union, but they do
exist and we are employing them. We are seeking to
work with the militia, on the assumption that they
are not simply interested in a witchhunt against
our organization. We've been politically extremely
obtrusive because we are the Trotskyists, the peo-
ple who are against Yeltsin and capitalist restora-
tion. So this naturally makes one suspicious. But I
urge the comrades not to drift over into paranoia.
Let's get some more evidence first if we can.
But I do know one thing, that is that Martha Phil-
lips died at her post, doing what she wanted to do
and what she was supposed to do in the effort to
liberate the Russian and international working
class. And that's the truth.
Letter by Moscow Station
of International Communist League
Moscow, 22 February 1992
Dear Comrades,
On Wednesday 19 February, we went to the grave
of Adolf Joffe at Novodevichy cemetery to hold a
brief private memorial for Martha. We badly needed
time together to say our goodbyes away from the
incessant tension of the investigation and the persis-
tent, necessary press of picking up the pieces of the
work here and going forward. With us were Ludmilla
who was interviewed in W&R and had been very spe-
cial to Martha, and Ludmilla's husband.
We had already tried to do this earlier in the
week, immediately after the Sunday Lenin Museum
demonstration, our first public intervention after
Martha's death. We had to abort this when we came
face to face with a demonstration, at the gates of
Novodevichy, of the core of the Anpilov group with
the fascists and monarchists of Nevzorov. We re-
fused to enter Novodevichy to remember and honor
Martha at a time that the hammer and sickle was fly-
ing side by side with fascist flags.
In the freezing cold we placed 20 red carnations
at the base of Joffe's snow-covered headstone, one
for each year Martha was a member of the iSt/ICL.
10
Rachel then read from Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet
Unarmed the description of 19 November 1927
when, in his last public appearance in the Soviet
Union, Trotsky led the funeral procession to bury his
comrade. Joffe's grave site was a meaningful place to
Martha. We reaffirmed by this action our apprecia-
tion for Joffe's admonishment in his farewell let-
ter to Trotsky, that he must never again waver or
compromise, that he must stand "unbending and
unyielding" for the rest of his life. And Trotsky did.
We read the words Trotsky spoke then, that
Joffe's life "should serve as a model to those who
are left behind. The struggle goes on. Everyone
remains at his post. Let nobody leave."
Comrades spoke in turn of their memories of
Martha, of working with her and learning, tremen-
dously, from her, and emphasized what has been
recognized throughout our International: that Mar-
tha was out front running point in the struggle to
forge the party to lead the Soviet workers political
revolution which every day becomes more urgently
necessary.
Saying goodbye to Martha and her daily dose of
difficulties, the absurd and the sublime, will be a
longtime thing. Thinking of Martha's work here
evokes many memories. Various types of people are
drawn to our internationalism, but to put it into
action, as Martha did, demanded very special
qualities. She had a special combination of political
sharpness and hardness along with a unique per-
sonal "sympatichnaya" quality.
She learned a new, hellishly difficult language.
Among other things, Martha was responsible for
our maintaining connections with contacts and cor-
respondence with readers. There is little romanti-
cism in a woman in her forties mailing out a dozen
boxes in a Soviet post office — putting that Russian
language to use — in order to threaten, plead and
exhort the recalcitrant machine to distribute Trot-
skyist literature across the Soviet Union. You really
have to picture Hieronymus Bosch's panel of Hell
to capture the bizarre absurdities Martha tangled
with in carrying out such daily party tasks amid the
ruins of Stalinism. As was often the case, by the
time Martha got through cajoling and prodding,
someone had become a friend, and was now some-
how recruited to somehow helping the ICL send
out a mailing, get a room, etc. That was a real tal-
ent she had. No matter how much hell Martha went
through to get things done, she always knew how
to revel in laughter at the end of the day.
That's one memory that's hard to accept as a
memory and not a daily reality. But far more pre-
cious a memory is her trembling indignation, her
intolerance for blurring of political principle, and
her ability to seize initiative when an opening
showed itself. When Martha spoke to the Moscow
Workers Congress, she had only begun to show
what kind of a role she could have played further
down the road. Maybe that was noticed by enemies
too.
To our contacts and recruits, Martha was not
simply a representative of our program, she was an
example of what a professional revolutionary is.
After so many years of plodding in a Stalinist swamp
of liars and political horsetraders, our contacts
came closer to us because they wanted to be a little
more like what they saw in Martha. Martha over-
came many obstacles, personal as well, to be here,
she was and now will always be a model for youth
who want to take on the world.
Martha sacrificed a lot to be here, and she felt it
acutely. Comrades should know that she drew a
great deal of joy in receiving your letters.
It's a small example of the discrepancy between
the means at our disposal and the tasks before us,
but it's still felt: Martha, the communist fighter,
really should have been buried with full military
honors. Our comrade Martha was never one to
bend or back down in the face of danger. We will
not, we cannot, dishonor the example of Martha
and do less. The cause that Martha led here will go
forward: the comrades of Moscow Station are com-
mitted that the Soviet section of the ICL will be
forged. When the Soviet proletariat rises to its full
height, they will remember Martha Phillips who
came in the hour of danger and died at her post.
Moscow Station, ICL
11
Remarks by George Foster at New York Memorial Meeting
23 February 1992
We are here to honor our comrade and dear
friend Martha Phillips who fell at her post in Moscow
on 9 February 1992 fighting for the program of Lenin
and Trotsky. This is a very heavy blow for the Inter-
national Communist League, and her death is a very
bitter one for our cadre. Martha was foully murdered
under suspicious circumstances and there is, in addi-
tion to our keenly felt grief, a deep anger in the party
against whoever did this cowardly and dirty deed.
Martha was a Trotskyist to the marrow of her
bones and saw herself, very rightly, as standing in
the tradition of pioneer American Trotskyist James
P Cannon. She more than anyone was responsible
for the efforts of the ICL to forge an embryonic
Soviet section. That was her greatest contribution
to the proletarian struggle, and one we are deter-
mined to see through to its successful conclusion.
The figure of Martha will live in the memory of the
workers and youth who will take up the banner of
proletarian emancipation, of revolutionary Marxist
internationalism, and she will be remembered by
future generations as one of those who reforged
the party of Lenin and Trotsky in the land of its
birth. That is her real legacy, and we will do her
honor by carrying this task forward.
I first met Martha in the fall of 1971 when I and
two other comrades contacted her and her husband
David following an antiwar demonstration in Wash-
ington, D.C. They lived in a very poor area of the city
near the Capitol building. Martha in particular cor-
nered me and spent hours asking questions about
the Near East, the 67 Arab-Israeli war and our attitude
toward Israel and the Palestinians. She and David had
been to Israel in 1969 and were repelled by the
realities of the Zionist state, with its rampant anti-
Arab racism and its deep-rooted male chauvinism.
By the time I met her again, in February in Bos-
ton, she and David were already firmly committed
to the Spartacist League. As most of you know, the
left wing of the Leninist Faction resigned from
the SWP/YSA [Socialist Workers Party/Young Social-
ist Alliance] in August 1972 and fused with the SL
shortly afterwards. From that point onward Martha
was one of the key cadres of the Spartacist League.
I didn't see much of Martha over the next few
years — she was in California and I was in Boston
and New York. But somehow we became friends.
Martha had a knack for making friends very quickly
and rewarded her friends with a deep loyalty and
warm and unselfish affection.
Martha did a tour of duty in Los Angeles as a local
organizer. As many of you are aware, organization was
not her strong point, but she carried off the assign-
ment with good humor and dedication. She certain-
ly kept the branch active! In the summer of 1974
she took a leave from the L.A. local to attend a Euro-
pean summer camp organized by the international
Spartacist tendency and played an important role in
the discussions held there. It was at this camp that
we presented and endorsed the "Declaration for the
Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency."
I moved to the Bay Area in May 1975 and over
the next 16 years Martha became a truly close
friend and one of the four comrades that were the
core of our district leadership.
How do you encapsulate this experience and con-
vey a sense of this truly exceptional woman? I don't
find it easy. I suppose what stands out most in
my mind is Martha's passionate commitment to
proletarian revolution, which was modulated and
informed by a very fine intellect, and an absolutely
infectious, acute and broad-gauged sense of humor.
Martha cared. She hated all oppression and back-
wardness, but especially racism in any manifestation.
I think this shines through in her work in the Bay
Area, in contacting and training youth, in her tire-
less work in the PDC and her key role in the Bay
Area LBL [Labor Black League for Social Defense].
In every area of party work she made her presence
felt — and her energy was truly amazing for some-
one not possessed of a robust constitution. The
woman often ran on sheer willpower and had to be
protected from herself. Through that sheer power
of her will and her wholehearted commitment,
Martha was, by no intent of her own, a role model
for the younger comrades and especially women in
the party.
Other traits stand out. She was an avid student
and teacher of Marxism. When she would get a day
off, which wasn't often, she would frequently go to
one of the local libraries or the Hoover Institution
at Stanford, to prowl through the stacks looking for
archival material on the history of the communist
movement. She pushed very hard for educational
work, internally as well as externally. Some of the
classes she gave were very powerful and I hope that
these can find their way into print. Martha was one
of the most compulsively political people I've
known — but she had not a shred of pedantry or
snobbery about her. She hated the cant and hypoc-
risy of academia with a passion.
Certainly her early factional experience fighting
12
for Trotskyism in the reformist SWP gave her an
unerring ability to spot and skewer all the myriad
varieties of reformist and centrist phonies pretend-
ing to be Trotskyists. Martha excelled at "oppo-
nents work" and just got better as time went by.
Martha was also a very powerful public speaker
and agitator, one of the few comrades who had the
flair to be a real mass leader. And she put this talent
to use whenever she could.
In fact, especially in the early days, her appetite
to launch a campaign at the drop of a hat over
some incident that outraged her keen sense of jus-
tice led her to a lot of sharp conflicts with the rest
of us. I can still see her coming into the office fum-
ing over some new reactionary atrocity, and launch-
ing into a breathless 20-minute exposition laying
out how we had to go on a full mobilization to
combat this outrage. Trembling with anger, her fists
clenched, she would brook no opposition. Usually
it took a while to sort out, but she was right often
enough that comrades listened carefully.
Along with this fierce determination went an
equally remarkable sense of humor. Martha had a
knack for getting into and surviving more unlikely
and madcap misadventures and escapades in a year
than most people would in a decade. Martha was a
very adventurous person. I remember strongly advis-
ing her not to go camping on Mount St. Helens just
a few days before it erupted.
But episodes of humor aside, she did not have
an easy life. From an early age she was a real rebel
who scoffed at the reactionary conventions of bour-
geois society, rejecting a comfortable middle-class
existence to throw her lot in with the working class.
She turned her back on acting though she was
extremely talented and had every chance of pursu-
ing a serious career in the theater. She was the
mother of a handicapped child, often having to
cope alone with the enormous difficulties of seeing
that he had the best care she could obtain. She
loved her son Lael very deeply, and shared in his
triumphs and also suffered his pains.
In her thirties she entered a difficult apprentice-
ship in the printing trades. She became a journey-
man, but only by fighting tooth and nail against
squeezing bosses and also a goodly number of back-
ward male-chauvinist coworkers who resented
a woman working in a "man's trade." In the end Mar-
tha not only persevered, but came to be a respected
worker, indispensable because she alone was able to
master some of the very complex computer codes
used by the newest machines in her shop.
In September of 1987 she began studying Rus-
sian. Some of us were not sanguine about her
chances to make significant progress. But she sur-
prised everyone. Through sheer will she mastered
enough Russian to study in the USSR. There,
despite very difficult conditions and a heavy sched-
ule of political activity, she passed her courses bril-
liantly and was able to obtain a job as a teacher.
Martha certainly had her foibles as we all do, but
they were the matrix called personality that high-
lighted her very real and rare talents as a pro-
fessional revolutionary. I really hope we made her
life a little easier with our company and friendship.
She certainly brought a lot of light and laughter
into ours.
She went into her assignment in the USSR with
her eyes wide open and at great personal sacrifice,
because she knew it was important to the workers
of the world. It was very clear to her and to all of us
that the homeland of the October Revolution is in
mortal danger. I remember the two of us bitterly
joking that maybe she could sell her story to the
bourgeois press — the only Jew on the entire planet
emigrating to the USSR in 1991.
But I also remember an account of how her inter-
vention wrecked a Grantite meeting in Moscow. Here
was Moscow, in the grip of a galloping attempt to
consolidate a counterrevolutionary capitalist regime.
And here were these trade-union cretins blathering
along in a sub-economist vein, when Martha gets up
and directly counterposes the need to smash the
Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution, pointing out that
these selfsame economists stood with Yeltsin on
the August barricades. It brought the house down.
Things look different from Moscow than from a
Labour Party constituency club in London.
Martha was well aware of the dangers she faced.
But I think she would feel a bit like Martin Luther,
who said: "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise."
More dialectically, Engels remarked, "Freedom is
the recognition of necessity."
As L. D. Trotsky noted in "At the Fresh Grave of
Kote Tsintsadze," 7 January 1931:
"It took altogether extraordinary conditions like czar-
ism, illegality, prison, and deportation, many years of
struggle against the Mensheviks, and especially the expe-
rience of three revolutions to produce fighters like Kote
Tsintsadze...
"The Communist parties in the West have not yet
brought up fighters of Tsintsadze's type. This is their
besetting weakness, determined by historical reasons
but nonetheless a weakness. The Left Opposition in the
Western countries is not an exception in this respect and
it must well take note of it."
Over two decades of experience has indeed revealed
no lack of weak or accidental elements drawn tem-
porarily to our tendency. But Martha Phillips was
not one of these. I believe she was made of the
same red cloth as Kote Tsintsadze.
L3
Letter by Sam Hunt
14 February 1992
A comrade of the International Communist
League for many years, in the U.S., Japan, and
South Africa. Sam Hunt died on 2 June 2006. An
obituary is printed in Workers Vanguard No. 873,
7 July 2006.
Dear Comrades,
Once again we are faced with the heart-wrenching
experience of losing a comrade, in this case Martha,
my oldest political and personal friend and someone
who was irreplaceably near and dear to me. As
painful as this must be we need to remember our
comrades' lives and work; both personally and
politically Martha was one of a kind, and I still find
it hard to believe that she is gone. Life has its cruel
moments, and this is one of them, excruciatingly so.
If I had to put a title on this letter I would call it
"From Madison to Moscow" because that would
politically encapsulate Martha's all too short life.
I first met Martha in the spring of 1970 when we
both joined the YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] in
Madison, Wisconsin. The central issue of the day, but
by no means the only one, was the Vietnam War.
Martha was a student at the University of Wisconsin,
21 or 22 years old, and just as beautiful and vivacious
as we all knew her, but even more so in her youth.
I was told that she was an aspiring actress, was quite
good, but gave this up to be a communist, and hav-
ing made this decision I don't think she ever looked
back. I've always remembered her as very serious,
dedicated and an extremely hard worker. I believe
that Martha, and a few others like myself, took the
SWP of 1970 as good coin, i.e., this was still the party
of Cannon and the Russian Revolution. Well, we
were in for a rude awakening, but threw ourselves
into the work. Madison was a political hot spot at the
time and there were countless rallies, marches, sit-
ins, leafleting of induction centers and zillions of
organizing meetings to attend. The internal life of
the YSA was just as fast-paced and Martha, to no
one's surprise, was in the thick of all this activity.
At first we believed our party elders (not so old —
the Barnes generation). And the reformist, social-
patriotic line of the "peaceful/legal" SWP was given
a leftist veneer by the cynical Mandelite types that led
the local organization in Madison. Our party head-
quarters, the Che Guevara Movement Center on
Gilman Street, was certainly a radical-looking place.
Pictures of Fidel and Che and posters on the Mid-
dle East, with slogans something like "Revolution
until Death," were far more prominent than por-
traits of Lenin and Trotsky. But there was an excel-
lent selection of basic Marxist works available.
Believing this was a proletarian revolutionary party,
the more serious younger members set about the
task of educating ourselves in the Marxist classics.
Martha was devouring Lenin and Trotsky at the time
and 1 remember the first educational I heard her give
was on Lenin's 1916 work Imperialism, and she had
been a member probably not much more than six
months. She was a very smart woman!
The outpouring of opposition to U.S. imperial-
ism's dirty, genocidal war against the Vietnamese
was quite massive, as older comrades know. In the
student enclave of Madison, the SWP-led pop-front
demos would draw 20,000, 30,000 or even 50,000
people on occasion. The leftist youth, like Martha,
would argue that these demonstrations must be
"peaceful and legal" because we were for prole-
tarian revolution and the job of the antiwar move-
ment was not to trash parking meters, but rather to
organize the social power of the proletariat that
could shut down the war machine. This was the
theme of public speeches we gave at the time. We
were enmeshed in the popular front, for sure, but
we were trying to give a Mandelite left face to this
work. OK — the Red University — well, we took a
building on the Madison campus after Nixon began
bombing North Vietnam again — our tactics were
based on the Flint sit-down strike. A diversion was
created to draw the cops away from our main tar-
get and then we moved in.
Another example: the feminist movement was in
full swing and a group called "Women's Action
Movement" (WAM) was organized. It was male-
exclusionist, as the SWP was capitulating all the way
to bourgeois feminism (and so was Mandel), but the
leftists in the branch tried once again to push as radi-
cal a line as possible. The SWP's line at that time was
for the "right to choose" but this WAM group had
regular educationals where YSA speakers gave pres-
entations on topics such as Engels' The Origin of the
Family, Private Property, and the State and we
fought for free 24-hour child care and free abortion
on demand. The YSA were central leaders in the
Madison women's movement, and I believe the two
main leaders of this work were Martha Q., the wife
of the major Madison SWP leader Pat Q., and the
young firebrand, Martha Phillips.
By this time (and we're talking here about
months, not years) Martha was on the local execu-
tive committee. David, Martha's husband at the time,
14
and Ruth (my first wife) and Martha and I were part
of the younger members coming forward, and the
four of us became close friends, and at various times,
served on the Madison YSA exec. The internal politi-
cal life was tumultuous, numerous fights broke out
but politically, few were clarifying. That's not to say
there were not some principled positions taken. I
remember one fight in particular that Martha played
a strong role in. In one of the feminist demonstra-
tions at that time a number of YSA women were glee-
fully chanting, along with the pro-NOW types,
"Power to the Sisters, Take It from the Misters!" and
we had a no-holds-barred fight about this inside
the Madison YSA. Martha, along with others, fought
tooth and nail that this chant was a fundamental
departure from the Marxist understanding that the
divisions in capitalist society are along class, not
sex lines.
We worked our asses off, but it was for the wrong
program; the Mandelite left veneer was not the road
to revolution. At first we were drawn to the Prole-
tarian Orientation Tendency (POT), which simply
said we should take the SWP's reformist program
and take it to the workers. And we first thought:
"Well, that sounds good. If we're a party of the
American proletariat how come there's no workers
in the party? How come we don't do factory sales?"
But that wasn't the point. The problem with the
SWP was its program, not its orientation. The SWP
would later bring its reformist program into the
unions under the guise of "talking socialism." The
POT not only refused to fight the pop-front line
on the Vietnam War, but also agreed with the SWP
majority on the question of black nationalism and
feminism.
I think the Vietnam War was the issue that we had
to break through on — fighting for a class line on the
Vietnam War — how "our boys" were the Vietnamese.
One of the greatest moments of my life, and I'm sure
for Martha, was to see the CIA clinging to the chop-
pers being airlifted out of Saigon.
We came to the understanding that it was the
program of the SWP that was wrong. We were in the
wrong organization. We wanted to fight; these peo-
ple were in the way
It was this emerging fight, against the reformist
program of the SWP, where Martha really came for-
ward as a political leader. The Madison YSA was
never allowed to become an SWP party branch (we
were always in hot water with the N.O.) and to con-
tinue the internal fight we had to move to cities with
a party organization. So we packed up and went;
Martha and Dave moved to D.C. and I wound up
in Milwaukee. She became a central leader of this
faction from its inception, and along with David
at that time, became the hard Leninist pole.
The Leninist Faction was a clear line of demarca-
tion between the Mandelites (Martha was always
fond of calling them pint-sized Kautskyites) and
those elements that were looking for a genuine Len-
inist/Trotskyist program. Having broken from the
Mandelite "orientation" line we realized the entire
SWP program, not just on the Vietnam War line, but
the entire range of Pabloite capitulations, had to be
fought. The LF was far from being a homogeneous
political tendency, but its declaration statement was
a fine document. But getting the faction to live up to
this document was another fight. Barbara G. was seen
as one of the central leaders of the faction within
the SWP, but she soon pulled back from the revolu-
tionary implications of our founding statement. Mar-
tha quickly surpassed her as a political leader in the
fight she led to get the LF to fuse with the SL. About
one-third of the faction eventually did. Martha
understood what the fight of the [1963] Revolution-
ary Tendency meant. We were not the first opposi-
tionists in the SWP to come down the road. It was
really important to understand history. So in the
middle of a raging faction fight in the middle of a
war, Martha was hitting the books. Because she
understood, I think David did too, that the real fight
was that the Leninist Faction had to fuse with the
Spartacist League, because the Spartacist League was
the fight of '63, and we basically stood on the docu-
ments of the RT
The faction wavered — but Martha never did, and
she provided a lot of leadership to a lot of comrades
from the Leninist Faction. This shaped Martha and
steeled her. So when Martha came into this party, she
was not a new member. She was a cadre.
I want to stress the political impact the Vietnam
War had on Martha, and why it was no accident that
she went to Moscow. She was a central component
of a faction fight where one of the most important
issues was defense of the Vietnamese deformed
workers state in the North and the fight for a social
revolution in the South. The popular front at that
time was trying to prevent a defeat of U.S. imperi-
alism— they were trying to bail out U.S. imperialism.
The SWP at that time was tailing the defeatist wing
of the bourgeoisie. It was the Russian question
posed in a very different way, in a different histori-
cal period. That's what we were won to.
The Vietnamese were the underdogs, and their
heroism and tenacity gained a lot of respect among
the newly radicalized leftists the 1960s produced
internationally. But for the bourgeoisie it was a war
against Communism, and our state-capitalist and
social-democratic opponents hated the Vietnamese
as much as the Russians. The problem was the Viet
15
Cong were popular (like Che and Fidel were), as
opposed to the staid Stalinists in the Kremlin. So
the state-eapitalist social democrats, not wanting to
be left out in the cold and leave the field open to
the reds, declared the Vietnam War to be one of
national liberation. Stalinists echoed this same line
in their own "peaceful coexistence" style, or gave
uncritical political support to the Hanoi Stalinists.
Your Heinz 57-variety liberals were into pacifism
(to be turned against the Vietnamese later a la Jane
Fonda). A liberal section of the bourgeoisie, breath-
ing a sigh of relief after the crushing of the Indone-
sian CP on the one hand, but cowering after the
Viet Cong's impressive Tet Offensive on the other,
took a defeatist position on the war, worried about
the social explosions at home. This all spelled Pop
Front and a big one — the social pressure against
taking a class line on the Vietnam War was quite
strong. The fake left were wrapping themselves in
all kinds of radical phraseology, but "Military Vic-
tory to the NLF"; and "All Indochina Must Go Com-
munist"— never! And in the fight against this crap
Martha never flinched. Martha died in Moscow
fighting for the same program she was won to, the
program she defended against the renegades and
fake-leftists in the 1960s who refused to stand with
the Vietnamese workers and peasants against their
own bourgeoisie.
So many comrades are familiar with Marthas
work in the SL/U.S. The tremendous will, indefati-
gable spirit, personal dedication and unbelievable
enthusiasm for the work that I saw from the time I
first met her only deepened as the years went by.
She was vintage wine who got better with age. I
don't know how many locals she was in, but I think
Martha was virtually everywhere and knew every-
body. Martha was the kind of comrade who, despite
personal hardships, would pull up stakes and go
anywhere the party needed her. She was not a com-
plainer. Her style was to motivate and inspire and
made the people around her better for having
known and worked with her. For the comrades
who knew and loved her, her loss is a devastating
blow that words cannot convey. For the younger or
newer comrades who didn't know her, they've
been brutally cheated.
I'm sure there are endless and wonderful stories
about her. She would go anywhere or do anything
to build this party — she was intensely party-loyal. I
remember we had an outside shot at a few YSAers
in Seattle and it was Martha, along with Jeff, who
up and went. When this situation fizzled (they
turned out to be creeps) she came back to the Bay
Area and just picked up where she left off. I felt
pretty bad about this because I had met them pre-
viously and was wondering if I'd really been off the
mark. But Martha just laughed that idea off and said
you can't win them all and sometimes, as Cannon
would say, we have to crawl on our bellies through
the mud to build the Fourth International. She was
deeply committed to the revolutionary heritage of
Cannon's SWP and would have gone anywhere to
thwart those usurpers who today trample on that
once-proud tradition.
Martha was not superwoman; she had her
human frailties, and like all of us had her ups and
downs. Yet she always possessed that inner courage
to pick her herself up, dust herself off and jump
back into the fray. Her years in the SL sharpened
her political acumen and she did aggressive public-
work (her election campaign for Oakland City
Council) and also made important literary contri-
butions to our work. One of my favorites was the
work she did, forum and article, on Harriet Tub-
man. On the Russian question Martha was very
strong. She was a leader of a faction fight on this
question and she always knew the stakes. So after
fighting many years to build the party in the belly of
the imperialist monster when duty called to go to
the Soviet Union, she volunteered after seriously
preparing herself for this work. But "volunteer" is
to put it mildly. She was bound and determined to
go and help rebuild Lenin's party, and we would
have had to chain her down to stop her.
So Martha's political career began in Madison
and ended much too soon and tragically in Mos-
cow. But this is where Martha wanted to be. We
were very close friends for 22 years but lived in the
same city (Madison and the Bay Area) for only
about six or seven of them. But that never bothered
us. We were very happy to be in the same party
fighting for the same program. I remember many
times we would go drinking together in a bar in
Japan Town in San Francisco. She was working her
tail off learning Russian and Jeanne and I had
started Japanese classes. On bar napkins we would
try to write the Russian and Japanese alphabets,
while sharing our hopes to do political work in
new countries. And we were plotting to some day
go drinking together in Vladivostok. After she went
to Moscow to live, Jeanne talked to her one time
over a really crazy phone connection, but around
New Year's we both got to talk to her on a decent
phone connection and she was her usual bubbly,
warm and enthusiastic self. And this was in the
middle of a harsh Russian winter, made unbear-
able by the ravages of counterrevolutionary forces
that are immiserating the Soviet people. Did
Martha complain? Hell no! Yeah, times are tough —
but we're meeting interesting people, recruiting,
16
working with Victor, thrilled to have Rachel when
she can come, and eagerly waiting for Kate and
George C.'s visit.
There are many, many things I haven't said and a
single person couldn't remember all there is to.
We'll have to do that collectively because that's how
we operate. This world is a much darker, cruder,
and certainly more lonely place without her. She
was an immensely warm-hearted and generous
woman with a hilarious sense of humor. She deeply
loved her son Lael and she was powerfully loyal to
this party and her comrades. Martha was high on
life and lived it fully — it should have gone on a lot
longer. The proletariat has a long memory and Mar-
tha, along with our other fallen comrades, will not
be forgotten. I understand that her body will be
sent back to Denver — well, her family loved her
too. But I believe her heart and spirit will remain in
Moscow, somewhere near the Kremlin Wall with
Big Bill Haywood and John Reed.
Martha was very generous, warm-hearted. She
knew how to be a friend. And through all her per-
sonal problems, she always struggled and fought
back and always came forward when it was needed.
See, I think with Martha there was really no separa-
tion, personal from political life; it was inter-
meshed. And she represented a lot about what it
means to be a communist.
A Personal Appreciation of Martha by Liz Gordon
15 February 1992
I first met Martha when some Spartacist comrades
from New York went down to meet several contacts
who were leftist members of the SWP in Washington,
D.C. Jim R. at least was involved in this meeting and
possibly Reuben or someone else as well. We met
David and Martha Phillips and Paul K, as far as I can
remember, who were involved in the Proletarian
Orientation/Leninist Faction oppositional activity
inside the SWP In the course of our subsequent
work together, conducted mostly at least on my part
through written correspondence, the SL won several
additional comrades from the LF.
Like other groupings won out of the heterogene-
ous New Left radical upsurge, these comrades were
part of the regroupments and recruitment which
made possible the founding of serious youth work
and the associated tasks of the "transformation" of
the party in this period. In addition, the LF regroup-
ment was a breakthrough particularly in regard to
becoming a pole of attraction for dissidents in the
SWP/YSA and in challenging the claims still made
by the SWP at the time to represent Trotskyism in
this country. The SWP, as leader of the right wing of
the antiwar movement in this turbulent period,
generated a series of left-wing oppositions during
this period, opening with the initial coalescence
around the document "For a Proletarian Orienta-
tion" (1971) and effectively ending with the mass
expulsion of the IT [Internationalist Tendency].
While the bulk of these layers were eventually cap-
tured and frittered away by Ernest Mandel, we also
got our piece. The LF regroupment was our first
significant accretion of cadres from the SWP/USec,
and laid a basis for future regroupments.
What I remember from that trip to Washington is
the strong impression Martha made on me. She
talked to me about everything from having once
lived in New York seeking a career on the stage
to being in Madison and joining the SWP I liked
her enormously for her honesty and openness as
well as her intelligence. I was especially moved by
her calmly indignant account of her struggles as
the mother of a handicapped child to wrest from
the various heartless bureaucracies a recognition of
Lael's problems and to get help for him.
Martha and I were friends from our first meeting,
though mostly by long distance. She was tremen-
dously warm-hearted and made friends throughout
the party at all times in her life. She was very senti-
mental about comrades she had known for a long
time but was also very interested in and supportive
of younger comrades, and she took a constant
interest in the party's youth work. Spending an
evening with Martha was always a warm experience
and also an exciting political time. Martha was
political down to her fingertips, and though her
convictions were deeply, passionately held she was
usually very clear in her thinking and articulate in
expression. I especially valued her insights into the
question of women's oppression and her interest
in and knowledge of the history of the Trotskyist
movement. As a party leader, educator and spokes-
man, and as a thoughtful partisan of women's lib-
eration, Martha was a role model for many female
comrades, but she also numbered many senior
comrades of the male persuasion among her most
17
cherished friends and drinking buddies.
Martha was probably the only person to spill
orange juice all over Jim's carpet and live to tell
the tale. 1 wasn't present when it happened but I
remember the story the way she told it. Martha was
always somewhat intimidated by Jim's passion for
cleanliness and order. She always tried to be spe-
cially careful in Jim's home because she knew she
was clumsy when she wasn't paying attention. One
day the unthinkable happened, a whole glass of
stickiness all over. She was aghast. But Jim just said,
"Oh Martha, now look what you've done." She took
this unexpectedly restrained response as a demon-
stration of his love, which of course it was.
Martha may have had more friends in the party
than anyone else. The comrades in the center
responsible for making up the weekly courier pack-
age for Moscow were sometimes embarrassed on
behalf of other comrades there at the number of
letters being forwarded to Martha from all points
on the globe. Typically there would be personal
mail for Martha from the Bay Area and New York
and maybe from Tokyo or Paris, and also from her
family in Denver, and we would mutter to each
other, "We've got to get Irene to write to her
brother...."
Martha loved California though like most com-
rades there she didn't get to partake very often of
the scenery. Many of my own memories of Martha
are of an afternoon spent together at some scenic
spot she thought I would like. Driving some of the
world's worst cars (and being always one of the
world's worst drivers), we would go off with Jeff to
a piece of beach or to Golden Gate Park or the Cliff
House for drinks with a few comrades.
Warm heart notwithstanding, Martha was tough,
as legions of our opponents well know to their
discomfort. One of my favorite stories about her
is unfortunately very third-hand and involves our
intervention into the Leninist Faction convention
held in the Midwest. Martha was the one on the
phones. At one point she called Jim and said they
were getting a lot of Spart-baiting and demands to
know if they had carnal knowledge of the SL. Jim
gave her some good advice and she gulped and
agreed. Then she got up at the meeting and pro-
posed: "If you want to know about the Spartacist
League, by all means, but why take my word for
it, let's get it from the horse's mouth. I move that
we invite Jim Robertson to this convention to
answer all our questions about the politics of the
SL!" The motion did not carry but the proposal
must have impressed some elements, and we did
finally win over several additional supporters. I hope
Jim remembers this story too.
I also recall that when Martha sent the telegram
conveying the resignation of our supporters to the
SWP/YSA, she ended up having a nice political dis-
cussion with the Western Union operator who took
the statement down over the telephone.
I also remember Martha at the November 27
Labor/Black Mobilization in 1982. She was on the
front lines. Comrades will recall how the individual
initiative of comrades was key to taking advantage of
the situation we had created, which had brought out
so many black unionists and youth who really
wanted to stop the KJan and were prepared to try to
do it. Having prepared as best we could by arrang-
ing for marshals in advance and pulling in a lot
more on the spot, especially groups of experienced
union guys who had worked together in a disci-
plined fashion in their own struggles, there was still
a big role for spontaneity. As the mass of people
spread out behind the barricades many-deep behind
the line of marshals, there was one section of the line
where a lot of big and determined-looking guys had
congregated, by people looking around them and
just finding that section of the line that really looked
like the participants meant business. Martha, a small
woman, was not a marshal but she looked at the
demo and saw where the hot spot was shaping up
to be. She asked for and got permission from some
appropriate party authority on the spot to get her-
self a piece of the action. Looking at the line of pro-
testers, and maybe especially at that part of it, some-
one in authority decided it would not be the better
part of valor to try and march the Klansmen past the
reception that was waiting for them. The rest is his-
tory, and Martha was right there.
Martha made mistakes in the party sometimes,
and she had been likened to Rosa Luxemburg in
that "An eagle may fly as low as a chicken, but a
chicken can never fly as high as an eagle." Many
comrades have written movingly about their own
intersections with some of Martha's many achieve-
ments as a party leader and a very effective commu-
nist activist, how she inspired and taught others.
But it also says a lot about her that among her
dearest companions in the Bay Area, where she
spent most of her political life, were senior cadres
like Al, George and Joan, and JR and the gang —
people who she particularly valued for helping her
by fighting with her when she needed it. Her
friendships were very important to her and she
missed many comrades acutely when she left the
Bay Area.
Martha worked in a printshop for many years.
She was well aware that if she let the bosses take
advantage of her this would be used to attack the
conditions of other workers as well. She left her
18
last job in the Bay Area after an altercation with
management in which she acquitted herself ad-
mirably and which she wrote up amusingly for com-
rades to read.
That she left the Bay Area and went off to take up
the challenge of fighting to reimplant Trotskyism in
the Soviet Union was typical of Martha's courage.
With the determination that had led her to follow
her allegiance to Trotskyism through a factional
struggle inside the SWP and inside the Leninist Fac-
tion, Martha chose to rip up her personal life by
volunteering to move thousands of miles away to a
foreign city facing hard times and possible big
struggles. She was not daunted by the huge obsta-
cles of finding work to support herself while mas-
tering a foreign language, the loneliness and isola-
tion, the magnitude of the political tasks at hand.
She was not starry-eyed about it. During an after-
noon we spent together when she passed through
New York on her way there the last time, she was
eloquent about the pervasive social backwardness
on the woman question in the SU, about the con-
stant slights and the incomprehension of the idea
of a woman being a political leader. This had to be
fought against constantly even among our own
contacts; one means the comrades had devised was
to introduce Martha as "the representative of the
ICL." She also spoke about her uneasiness as a Jew-
ish woman at a time of rising anti-Semitism in the
Soviet Union.
Martha's stories of some of the practical obstacles
to functioning in Moscow were quite entertaining.
One I recall in particular from her first trip was
how we needed to do a modest mailing to contacts
in the middle of one of the incomprehensible
shortages which mark daily life there. Martha goes
into a store. "Do you have any envelopes?" "No,
don't you know there are no envelopes in Moscow?"
Finally, she finds a store with envelopes. "Yes, we
have envelopes!" "Great, may I have fifty envelopes
please?" "Fifty envelopes? What could you possibly
need fifty envelopes for? Don't you know there's
an envelope shortage?" "Well may I have twenty?"
"Twenty? What do you want with twenty?" Eventu-
ally you get five, then you start over.
Martha confronted the obstacles and did brilli-
antly. During her first trip there, she lived in a small
dormitory room and studied Russian at a challeng-
ingly advanced level. Despite her political activities
and despite being twice the age of the other stu-
dents, she aced the course and came away with
high recommendations. She went back as a teacher
of English and I have no doubt she was a good
one. She enjoyed her students and wrote about
them in her letters home, that they were bright and
well-educated to start out with and highly moti-
vated to learn.
In a letter written January 22, Martha described
discussions in her classes: "Today at school talked
to two classes about what their impressions were of
life here now. It was interesting to see the shift in
opinions. These are the kids at the special school
who are pretty privileged. There were a couple of
hard anti-communists but the bulk of kids (they're
15) thought things were getting worse and several
thought there would be big demonstrations here
soon. Several told stories of people protesting in
their neighborhoods at milk stores or bakeries and
how it forced the stores on the spot to lower prices
or how they hauled out the bread that was being
hoarded in the back and put it on sale."
I very much appreciated the comments Martha
sent in for the discussion at the last party plenum,
which centered on "revolutionary optimism" and
the need to combine a clear-eyed view of all the bad
things going on with the understanding that the
counterrevolutionaries had not yet had the confi-
dence to directly confront the working class and
push through the consequences of their unchal-
lenged victory over the half-hearted "coup." Her
observations have had a real impact on our discus-
sions, and we have also been inspired by her exam-
ple, along with that of the other comrades who
have faced the hardships and the dangers none of
us fully realized of conducting this crucial work in
the Soviet Union. As our senior cadre in Moscow
Martha was functioning as our organizer there
although everyone knew that organizing was not
her strong suit. She also took real pride in having
managed to master enough Russian to be a trans-
lator in a pinch, like when Victor was out of town.
In her January 22 letter to me she said, "The main
thing here is endurance — or as Trotsky put it —
tenacity."
Martha's warm relationship with Lael was a con-
stant in her life despite all the geographical vicissi-
tudes. From the time that he was very small, she
always thought he was a sweet child who would
grow up to be a good person. I was always afraid
that, out of the enormous frustration he visibly felt
as a small boy when he so obviously wanted to
express himself and couldn't do it, he could turn
out a very angry young man, but Martha was sure
he would come through it all. She missed him very
much during the years he lived with her parents,
where he benefited enormously from the time
Martha's mother took with him and her expertise in
the field of special education, and she agonized
over her parents' charge of not being a "good
mother" to him because of her constant political
19
involvement, but there was always a tremendously
warm relationship between Martha and Lael. Her
pride in his achievements, in his having learned to
read and being able to get a job, was enormous and
she thought he had grown up to be a very sweet
and very together person. I hope that he is able to
share our pride in her achievements which have so
greatly enriched our party and our lives.
Remarks by Alison Spencer at New York
Memorial Meeting
23 February 1992
Comrades, we've lost one of our best. Martha
Phillips, a senior cadre of our International, a
woman remarkable for her personal compassion,
friendship, intelligence, and utter devotion to what
we are about — the triumph of the working class
internationally — has been ripped away from us,
and the life she lived so fully, through a brutal act
of murder. On top of our grief and shock — and
rage — we face the agony of not knowing who killed
Martha or why. A huge political blow to us and the
fledgling, critical new Moscow station of the ICL
she forged. The murder of Martha Phillips is a big
chill that can't but remind our Soviet audience of
the bloody repression faced by a previous genera-
tion of Trotskyists. But Martha saw a situation ripe
with opportunity to build an authentic Leninist-
Trotskyist party, an opportunity to bring the Soviet
working people back to political power.
Martha was radicalized in the New Left — in strug-
gle against the Vietnam War and in the women's
movement. Looking for a way to radically change
this society, she rapidly made her way to the Old
Left, joining what she thought was Cannons party
when she signed up with the SWP's youth group in
the spring of 1970 in Madison. As Martha discov-
ered, the SWP was no longer a revolutionary party,
its appetite and eventually its program was refor-
mist— building liberal pop-front coalitions and sup-
pressing revolutionary politics to woo Democratic
Party "doves."
Martha and her then-companion David Phillips
actively began seeking out alternatives. They were
already to the left of the Proletarian Orientation
Tendency in the SWP, which rejected program as
primary and saw the problems with the SWP as
reducible to the absence of a working-class concen-
tration. They were at the time the most left-wing
members of a new opposition called the Leninist
Faction.
A central issue in the split within the Leninist
Faction was a roaring fight over the Leninist princi-
ple of democratic centralism, and I think that gives
a glimpse into how Martha was steeled. Many com-
rades have likened Martha to Rosa Luxemburg —
not only for the obvious similarities that they were
both women, communists, and Jewish, but also for
Martha's intelligence and devotion. Like Rosa she
soared with the eagles... and, rarely, flew low with
the chickens. Like most of us, Martha learned from
the school of hard knocks. Unlike most, she was
unusually good-natured about subordinating her
ego to a communist collective and corrective, and I
think it comes in part from fighting her way to the
SL over the principle of democratic centralism.
Here's a very small but revealing example, not of
a programmatic difference but simply how Martha
handled criticism. Among the party work Martha
enjoyed most was her careful and valuable archival
research as the West Coast representative of the
Prometheus Research Library. She made many trips
to Hoover and was assisting in gathering material
on the early CLA. She gave a class in the Bay Area
in 1988 — her information was partial, her assess-
ments somewhat off — and she was heckled by Jim
most of the way through it. She wrote a letter to
Emily explaining, "Actually Jim's heckling was the
best (and funniest) pan of the class. The worst was
that I barely mentioned the key fights of the period
or J.P Cannon. Not good. Pat Quinn, much to his
chagrin, trained David, Sam, and me as Cannonites
in 1970-71, which is why we were able to find the
way to the SL. If you lose the centrality of Cannon
as the leading revolutionary figure in the maze of
the cast of characters in the history of American
Trotskyism, for sure you come to a bad end. Any-
way, one of these days, having better digested and
organized the material, I'll give the class again."
That's how she was — she'd just pick herself up and
dust herself off and go on.
The recruitment of cadres like Martha through
revolutionary regroupments — splits and fusions
with leftward-moving tendencies — enabled the SL
20
to carry out a transformation to a stable propa-
ganda group with a consistent presence in a few
key industries and intervening among students.
From the start, Martha led our youth work, directly
as one of our best campus activists and public
spokesmen, and as party rep to many youth locals
and campus fractions. She also made herself the
unofficial party rep to a lot of youth around the
country who were lucky enough to be politically
adopted by her. She took an interest in us, and
her patience, prodding, pedagogy, and sometimes
pummeling is a big part of why many of us are still
in this room today.
One of her first political battles for the youth —
and within the youth — was fighting a witchhunt of
the RCY [Revolutionary Communist Youth] at SF
City College in 1972. For her success in winning a
fight for our legality through building a genuine
united-front committee that included the YSA and
even liberals like the ACLU, Martha was trashed at
the RCY's Second National Conference in 1972 for
"opportunism."
This fight took place just two days before the
party National Conference where Martha and the
other LF comrades formally fused with the Sparta-
cist League. Until the interventions of the party
delegation, the whole conference was against
Martha — and Martha held her own. On the scale of
her accomplishments this may seem like small
potatoes, but it was a seminal fight for the youth
org and Martha led it, correcting a left-sectarian
bulge on the united front and defense work. Out of
this fight came Young Communist Bulletin No. 3,
still our main programmatic document on the
united-front tactic. Also, out of this fight Martha
won her first seat on the party's Central Committee
as a representative from the youth org. Two years
later she was elected to the Central Committee in
her own right.
Martha's strength of character and political integ-
rity were among the reasons she was appointed
the convener of the Logan trial body at our first
International Conference in 1979. A comrade from
Dublin, who did not know Martha personally, wrote
a moving testimonial based on what he saw at that
conference.
Martha had quite a bit to do with our 1977
fusion with the Red Flag Union, the most left-wing
expression of the gay liberation movement on the
West Coast. Martha's experience as a faction fighter
was instrumental in forcing the RFU to debate the
central programmatic question, the class nature of
the Soviet state — resulting in a sharp political split
within that organization and a fusion between the
RFU majority and the Spartacist League.
Martha first visited the Soviet Union in the spring
of 1987. Later that fall we toured the Chicago
branch together and Martha gave a forum com-
memorating the 70th anniversary of the Russian
Revolution. After years of confronting base bigotry
in this country, she was in high spirits and filled her
talk with tales of how she and her companion Jeff,
a black American, were welcomed in the Soviet
Union. It was like a chapter from Claude McKay's
book come to life. Martha said it was painful for
them to get back on the plane and return to this
racist hellhole.
Over drinks after the forum she told me in all
seriousness that she was going to move to the
Soviet Union. My pragmatic objections — "Martha,
you're broke... what will you do for a job... you
don't even speak the language" — could not and did
not dampen her enthusiasm. She began intensive
study of the Russian language that fall and in Sep-
tember of 1990 she moved to the Soviet Union for
three months, enrolling in an intensive language
course, which she aced. In May of 1991 she found
work as a teacher and moved to Moscow. Her let-
ters home informed us of what six years of
Gorbachev's perestroika had wrought — not least
for women, Jews, and other minorities.
Martha's favorite political book was Lenin's The
State and Revolution, a manual for the working-
class seizure of power. She always wanted to be
able to read it in the original Russian. She did. And
her first public presentation in Russian was a con-
tact class on The State and Revolution — an accom-
plishment Martha was most proud of.
Here are some excerpts from her letters from the
Soviet Union:
14 September 1990: "[Trotsky's] point that the
bureaucracy's international betrayals are matched
by their (even worse?) humiliating treatment of
their 'own' people has a daily reality here.... The
constant, unpredictable shortages create constant
tension: will there be meat or tobacco or milk
or eggs or bread? Maybe yes, maybe no.... The
uncertainty keeps people constantly off balance;
everyone becomes a rude, pushing scavenger....
The only thing I could compare it to was the physi-
cal nervousness after an earthquake — waiting for
the aftershocks."
5 June 1991: "Even when we tell politicos here
on what passes for the left that a healthy majority of
our leadership in the SL/U.S. and International are
women, these guys think it's some kind of joke or
tokenism... Lenin said on the second anniversary
of the Russian Revolution that if the revolution had
done nothing more than improve the status of
working women it was proven worthwhile. Well, to
21
put that in reverse, if Stalinism had done nothing
more than to turn women, homosexuals, Jews,
national minorities, back into less than human
beings — how deeply it deserves to be 'superseded.'
It makes you burn with anger at what they've
done!"
I'd like to give Martha the last word here, con-
cluding with her words from a letter in January
1991. With crystal clarity of thought and iron deter-
mination, Martha spelled out the opportunities and
tasks which she dedicated herself to. We will honor
her by persisting and furthering the work she
started:
"The truth is that my stay [in the Soviet Union] gave me
more confidence not in the veracity of our program
(which I've agreed with for a lot of years) but in our
ability to win. In a society in severe crisis as the SU is
today, all political tendencies will get their cut — includ-
ing Bolshevism/Spartacism. With a consistent presence
to talk to the people who like our journal, we will gel .1
certain number of people. How many depends on how
smart or stupid we play it and how much of a time
period we have to work in.
"There is no middle road. When the main ideological
cohesion has cracked, simple repression is not a solu-
tion. It's either bloody counterrevolution (how else will
they get the workers to work?) or Trotskyism.
"Our problem is to win Soviet working people (and the
small layer of the intelligentsia who will come over) to
genuine internationalism (which means Soviet defens-
ism at the highest level). That means breaking through
the ideological defeatism that is at the core of Stalinism.
Leninist norms of functioning, the tribune of the
people' conception, democratic centralism — all of these
are now and will be in the future critical and difficult
fights. In a society built on lies it will be no small thing
to build a party where comrades can fearlessly and
simply tell the truth, internally and to the world."
Remarks by Gene Herson at New York Memorial Meeting
23 February 1992
I worked with Martha briefly in the Soviet Union.
She struggled, often in isolation, under some of the
worst physical, social and political conditions any
member of our International, with the exception of
probably the Sri Lanka comrades, had ever had to
put up with. She lived in a tiny squalid dorm room
with terrible lighting, a desk that was too low to be
able to sit at with a chair, and too high to be able to
sit and work at with a pillow. A toilet bowl that was
cracked and stained and continuously flowing with
water. A bed that was already uncomfortably lumpy,
which she added to with huge boxes of litera-
ture that kept arriving mysteriously in the middle
of the night. And the lights, the elevators, the hot
water, the heating, were constantly failing. Then
there were the long food lines and the pre-dawn
and late-night trips to the central telegraph office
to wait for six hours, very often with a total fail-
ure of communications, to make urgent commu-
nications about political developments that were
taking place.
In the meantime she was surrounded by her fel-
low students who she described as George Bush
clones, Ivy League snobs, joint-venture aspirants,
spooks in training, and anti-communist creeps. And
yet at the same time, she wrote in one of her letters,
life is hard but I'd stay longer if I could. At the same
time, with all of her political activity, she ended up
getting top grades, so that she could come back
and continue under those conditions to fight for
our program.
And she was at the same time constantly abused
and frustrated in her social and political interac-
tions. Because she was a communist, Trotskyist, a
woman, and a Jew. And she worked under these
conditions. And it was bad, but it was not surpris-
ing that she had to deal with these problems with
non-political people, but she even had to deal with
these things with people who were supposed to
be political, and who were supposed to be our con-
tacts. People who would just mumble things,
because she was "just" a woman, right, she was
supposed to be stupid. You don't know how enrag-
ing that is. And even sympathetic friends, people
who cared for her, were patronizing when she
started to talk politics.
So she was a woman and she was not to be taken
seriously and that's a hard fact of life politically
in the Soviet Union. And yet when she got on the
podium in front of the Moscow Workers Conference,
they listened.
While some of us were at the independent min-
ers conference in Donetsk, Martha was trying to
single-handedly get into the Kremlin, where there
was a Russian trade-union conference going on.
She showed up the first day. This is just typical of
Martha. She shows up the first day, so some soldier
guard shows up and says, "What do you want, you
22
can't go in." So she says, "special circumstances."
She held out her publication, the first Spartacist
Bulletin in Russian. "Oh, Spartacist, yes, well, come
back tomorrow." So she came back the next day,
there was a plainclothes guy, "Oh yes, Spartacist,
you still can't come in. But I'll take one of those."
She says, "That'll be 50 kopeks." So the guy reaches
in his pocket to take out 50 kopeks. Next thing
there's a line of the trade unionists arriving and
she's selling on the Troitsky Bridge, entering the
Kremlin, she's selling our Russian Spartacist Bulle-
tin to the trade unionists as they arrive.
Remarks by Al Nelson at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
22 February 1992
Martha Phillips has been one of my closest and
dearest friends for almost 20 years. The awful news
of her death was staggering and unbearably pain-
ful. It still is. Then we learned that she died not of
some medical anomaly but as a result of a bru-
tal and hideous murder, and then our pain was
infused with rage and bitterness. Her life was stolen
from her and from her comrades and friends and
family. We know not by whom. But now our Martha
is no more.
Despite our pain and our anger it is our duty
today to honor the life of our fallen comrade, a life
Martha singlemindedly devoted to the goal of inter-
national socialist revolution.
Since her death there has been an outpouring of
letters and statements from all over the world by
comrades who knew her as a friend or for whom
Martha was a teacher and role model.
She was a highly respected senior cadre of our
party and probably our most prominent woman
spokesman.
Martha was a remarkable woman who rebelled
against all aspects of bourgeois society and became
a communist. Her convictions were deep and pow-
erful, and she possessed a keen intelligence com-
bined with a tremendous strength of character and
an iron determination to do with her life what she
wanted to do, no matter what obstacles were
placed in her way. But she was also a very warm,
sensitive, loving and generous person, with a quick
and often wicked sense of humor, who tried her
best to live life to the fullest. For her, a day off was
not to be wasted cleaning house or doing the
laundry, but was a time to enjoy life a little at a
museum or picnic on the beach or a drive up to the
Russian River in one of her terrible cars. And
through all the vicissitudes of her personal life —
and there were plenty — the one constant was her
son Lael, whom she dearly loved.
Her convictions and determination became
apparent in the political course she followed. She
was a woman and a Jew and part of that generation
that was outraged by the imperialist slaughter in
Vietnam. Having experienced anti-Semitism even as
a young girl, she was briefly drawn to left Zionism.
In 1969, she and her former husband David spent
some time on a kibbutz in Israel, but soon left dis-
illusioned and repelled by the treatment of women.
In April of 1970, at the age of 22, Martha had her
son Lael. That was also the period of the U.S. inva-
sion of Cambodia and the shooting down of stu-
dents at Kent State by the National Guard, events
that electrified the whole country. Seeking a revo-
lutionary solution to imperialist war, women's
oppression, racism, and anti-Semitism, Martha and
David joined the youth organization of the Socialist
Workers Party in Madison, Wisconsin in the spring
of 1970 where Martha became heavily involved and
prominent in the antiwar and women's move-
ments. Here is where she also met her old friend
Sam Hunt.
This was the once-Trotskyist SWP that the Revo-
lutionary Tendency, the forebear of the Spartacist
League, had been expelled from in 1963-64. By the
time Martha, Dave, and Sam became members it
had become thoroughly reformist, with a strategy
of cross-class popular-front coalitions with liberal
Democrats in all aspects of its work. A pseudo-left-
wing local leadership tried to paper over differ-
ences, but by a year later Martha and Dave were
consciously seeking out other left oppositionists
within the SWP in order to wage a struggle against
its reformist politics. As best as we can reconstruct,
our paths first crossed politically in late 1971 in
Cleveland at an antiwar conference. I recall a clan-
destine meeting on the upper floor of a bus termi-
nal where comrade Seymour and I first met Martha
and Dave. They were then the most left-wing mem-
bers of an opposition group just forming called the
Leninist Faction, and had sought us out to discuss
politics and buy literature. Through examining the
documents of our faction fight in the SWP nearly
23
ten years before, they found the theoretical and
programmatic explanations of the origins of the
SWF's reformism, and by January 1972 they were
working as Spartacist supporters within their fac-
tion, seeking to win other left-wingers from the
SWP to our revolutionary Trotskyist program. For
the next nine months they led a political fight cul-
minating in a very clear political split that brought
six comrades into a fusion with the Spartacist
League. Two months later, four more comrades
came over, including Sam Hunt. Still more came
over later as the Leninist Faction spun out of the
SWP This was our first big breakthrough in the SWP
and very important internationally. For it was our
goal to recruit the best elements out of the SWP
and their cothinkers internationally and to seize
the banner of Trotskyism from them.
In June 1972 there was a quintessential commu-
nication from Martha to the SL Political Bureau.
They had been sent the minutes of the PB meet-
ing of 9 January 1972, which stated, point 4: "SWP
Left Opposition: Dave P. of the Washington, D.C.
PO wants to work closely with us in a disciplined
way. His wife is close to us...." Martha proceeded to
sharply call us to order, saying that in the Bolshevik
movement "we refer to people by their names, not
some title dictated by bourgeois legality!" Ouch!
Boy, was she pissed off. Needless to say the minutes
were corrected, and so were we.
The acquisition of politically experienced cadre
from this fusion and an earlier fusion with the [ex-
Stalinist] Communist Working Collective, plus the
recruitment of the East Oakland Women in the Bay
Area, gave us the opportunity to greatly expand
our West Coast organization. I transferred out here
then in 1972, and so did Martha and Dave. In a let-
ter to Sam she said, "Shortly after Ashtabula and
resigning from the SWP, we gave away the bulk of
our possessions, packed our books, documents
and clothes, and flew to San Francisco, landing in
the SF airport with $3.00."
Thus began for me a political collaboration and
personal friendship that was to last until her death
two weeks ago. Along with comrades George Foster,
Joan Parker, and myself, Martha soon became one of
the central political leaders of our work on the West
Coast of North America, which historically ranges
from San Diego to Vancouver, Canada. She was party
organizer of the Bay Area and Los Angeles locals, the
head of our work in the women's movement, the
organizer of numerous political, defense, and elec-
tion campaigns, a candidate herself for city coun-
cil in Oakland, and a founding leader of the Labor
Black League. In various capacities she has been
a part of our youth work throughout this entire
18-year period, typically in later years as the senior
party member in charge of politically supervising,
educating, and training the new youth recruits. In
this youth work she was exceedingly patient and
thorough, but she also taught them how to fight. She-
was an excellent public speaker and agitator. She
went on to become a member of the Central Com-
mittee of the SL/U.S. and of the International Execu-
tive Committee.
But the work she got the most satisfaction from
was Marxist education and studying the history
of the American Trotskyist movement. She really
enjoyed doing local archival work for the Pro-
metheus Research Library, for example doing
research on the history of the Cannon-Foster fac-
tion in the CPUSA of the 1920s. She understood
that the greater our knowledge of past struggles,
the more prepared we were for new ones.
This reflected Marthas unusual appreciation for
political continuity, and she liked the idea that she
was one of the links in an unbroken chain that goes
back through the Socialist Workers Party of James P
Cannon to the early Communist Party and the
Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky, back through the
Bolshevik Party of Lenin and then through Plekha-
nov to Marx and Engels and the Communist Mani-
festo of 1848.
When we spoke of the revolutionary party as the
memory of the working class, it was this program-
matic continuity that was the link. But the ideas
and program of Marxism are carried by individuals
organized in a political party.
So when Cannon said in 1939, "We are the party
of the Russian Revolution," Martha Phillips knew
exactly what that meant. Injury 1973, while she was
at her parents' home in Denver recovering from a
very serious illness, she wrote a letter to a comrade
in which she said, "I have been having a wonderful
time reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revo-
lution— literally savoring every page. In my half-
feverish state I felt almost as if I am living it again."
And further, "But most of all I feel recharged with the
incredible energy of the revolutionary Russian pro-
letariat and the Bolsheviks' struggle to lead. And I
feel very proud too, reading that book, to see how
clearly the SL is the continuation of that history."
But like all of us Martha had her foibles and
insecurities as well, and her ability to summon up
the will to keep going in spite of life's many difficul-
ties testified to the strength of her character. While
reading over some of her letters to Liz Gordon I
came across a passage that gives some insight into
the origins of that strong character. A little back-
ground is required to place her letter in context.
Between August 1973 and September 1974 Martha
24
was organizer of the newly founded L.A. local. Hav-
ing separated earlier from her husband David she
moved to L.A. with her son Lael, who was handi-
capped. She was anxious but looking forward to her
first independent command. It was a difficult and
lonely year, living poorly on welfare, while learning
the ropes of assembling a local leadership and build-
ing a functional party local. Yet in spite of every-
thing she did a fine job and was feeling justifiably
proud when she went to a National Conference in
August 1974. So she was stunned and hurt when the
rest of the L.A. leadership suddenly turned on her
and opposed her nomination as a full member of the
Central Committee. It was pretty nasty, but typically
Martha struggled to get by the hurt and draw politi-
cal lessons from the experience. But the experience
had shaken her and she wrote Liz:
"Then back in L.A. I spent a day feeling somewhat
overwhelmed and also feeling personally hurt by the
events. It was pretty similar to how I felt when I was a
child and we moved so many times, and each time we
moved, I'd always be the new kid,' younger and smaller
and, until I learned better, would use too many big
words, and sometimes there'd be real anti-Semitism, as
I'd be the only Jewish kid, but mainly I studied and read
too much, and was awfully easy to tease. I would be in a
new school, and would think that I had finally been
accepted' and then something would happen, and I
would know that they still thought I was weird.' And
after a while I decided I was different' and maybe that
wasn't so bad. Maybe I told you this, but in the yearbook
in '65 when I graduated from Scarsdale High School
there are pages and pages of girls with fancy smooth
flips, and then you get to this rather funny picture of me,
absolutely serious, looking straight at the camera rather
defiantly — with long curly hair that had not been
combed in days. I refused to list my activities' so they
just put my name, and they couldn't think of anything
else so they put as a quote, As for me I go my own way.'
I wasn't political for several years after that, but even as
a small child I can remember hating and despising bour-
geois society.
"I can't tell you what all that really has to do with the
slate fight, nothing on a rational level, but I felt like that
same vulnerable little girl."
I thought the whole section was very revealing.
The loneliness and bigotry did not break the spirit
of this little girl who "studied and read too much,"
but instead toughened her and made her defiant
and proud of her heritage and intellectual capac-
ities, producing an intelligent and independent-
minded young woman capable of going her own
way. And if, in her own words, she tended to ago-
nize over her mistakes, it was not in an egotistical
or self-indulgent manner. Rather she wanted to
learn from her mistakes in order to become more
competent as a party leader, to strengthen the party
and make it more effective in the fight against all
forms of oppression.
Martha was certainly a fighter, but in spite of
her strong will the realities of her material and
social existence sometimes were overwhelming. In
another letter she wrote, "From the time he was
born I always told myself, it's not going to stop me
from doing the things I want to do, I'll just keep
going. So we dragged Lael across country in endless
Greyhound buses, and I marched in so many dem-
onstrations with a child on one hip and leaflets in
the other hand. But it is very wearing and sometimes
I feel all my energy drained out of me." I remember
her fighting like a tiger with various school adminis-
trations and petty bureaucrats to get Lael into the
right schools with the special programs he needed.
She was always proud of Lael's accomplishments.
So Martha's life was seldom easy and she was
often unhappy. But like Rosa Luxemburg, Martha
Phillips was above all a revolutionist, and no matter
what "banalities of daily life" were dragging her
down at some particular moment, when she was
required to act politically to be a fighter and a lead-
er, then it was as though some inner switch was
turned on and she could become entirely focused
politically, bringing to bear that keen intelligence
and iron determination. This was the real Martha
Phillips, who like Rosa Luxemburg was an eagle.
25
Remarks by Diana Coleman at Bay Area
Memorial Meeting
22 February 1992
Martha was my friend, comrade, and mentor for
20 years. I first met Martha in 1972. I had just
joined the Spartacist League with my gang, the East
Oakland Women, and within a month or so Martha
came to the Bay Area to be the youth organizer. I
liked Martha from the first. I was impressed with
the depth of her Marxist education, something
which I certainly hadn't gotten in the New Left
circles in which I hung out. And I admired her as
a speaker and an activist and a communist woman
leader.
To Martha, the revolutionary continuity really was
important, you know, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon.
She was a real Cannonite. I always think of Cannon's
speeches on the Russian question, where he says,
"The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once
and for all, took the question of the workers' revo-
lution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it
flesh and blood reality. ... 'Who touches the Russian
question touches a revolution.' Therefore, be seri-
ous about it. Don't play with it."
Well, it was a flesh and blood reality to Martha,
all the way down to her bones. No one who knew
her was surprised that she learned Russian or
went to the Soviet Union to build the party and
be on the front lines in the fight against capitalist
counterrevolution.
Like Cannon, she hated the people who Cannon
called the waverers, backsliders, capitulators to the
pressure of the world bourgeoisie, who had given
up on the Soviet Union before the decisive battles
had been fought.
It's very difficult for me to say what Martha
meant to me. She was a constant in my life for two
decades. She was a harsh critic and a good friend. I
remember she called me up after some fight in the
union work we were doing, and said, "Diana, you
must read this section from The Struggle for a Pro-
letarian Party." Well, I could find it for you today
in a minute.
So you read what she recommended. And you
remembered her criticisms.
And all of these criticisms were delivered with
such an evident concern that you learn something
from it. I remember she used to tell me, she must
have told me this about 20 times, she said, "You
have to put your political mistakes in perspective.
After all, what you have done is not as bad as what
the Communists did in Germany in 1923"
And Martha agonized a lot over her own failures
and mistakes, over many glasses of wine. But what
I admired was that she picked herself up, read
some books, and moved on. And 1 would say the
mistakes grew less frequent over time, actually. She
tried, with some success I think, to put into prac-
tice a recommendation that Jim had given her,
which was that she should worry less about the
mistakes she'd already made and more about the
mistakes she was going to make. She tried to do
that. She succeeded at that.
Besides her passion for education, knowledge,
internal education, she had a revolutionary audacity
which I admired. I think if you look at the dis-
play back there, "Martha vs. the Mayor" [WNo. 327,
8 April 1983], you will see Lionel Wilson, who had
the podium, the gavel, was the mayor of Oakland,
trying to shut Martha up. But he just had no chance.
I mean, he lost it. Martha was going to say what
she was going to say about the interests of the work-
ing class.
I know I was impressed, it must have been right
in 1972, when I first met Martha. We went to San
Francisco State to set up a lit table and she had
Lael. Lael was a baby, he was with us, and we had
the requisite 50 pounds of lit for any campus lit
table, the banner, the table, and being San Fran-
cisco State of course, we were parked about a mile
from where we were going to set up. I was some-
what daunted by all of this, so Martha said, "Well,
we'll leave everything here, we'll just take Lael and
go on campus and scope it out." So we do this, and
I was trying to figure out how we were going to do
this, and she goes up to the woman at the SWP
table and smiles her very charming and beautiful
smile and says, "You wouldn't mind holding my
baby for a moment, would you?" So the woman
says, "No, honey, no problem." So we leave Lael
with this SWPer, go and get all of the lit, the table,
set up right next to the SWR Martha gives her a lec-
ture on Pabloism. She was so mad. It's lucky she
didn't throw Lael at us. But I was impressed. I
thought, boy, this is the way to operate.
Martha was an intensely focused person. She
had a tight list of priorities in her life. Number one
was politics. And that was always first and foremost,
number one: politics in command. Number two
was a joy in life in the here and now with the peo-
ple she cared about. And everything else, really, far,
far distant third. All those things that people worry
about: money, things, paying the rent, doing the
26
laundry, all of this mundane stuff, she didn't think
too much about it really.
And she had a lot of day-to-day troubles. There
are endless Martha stories. The apartments she was
thrown out of, the jobs she was fired from. Muni
buses were always bumping into her car. Getting
through the apprenticeship and keeping these
printing jobs. That was a constant struggle, in a
situation where the workforce really was under
attack. And, as comrades have mentioned, Martha
had a fine talent, also, for getting into trouble. I
remember sitting around with Kathy and George
Foster and Martha, and Martha's explaining to us
about the job she's just been fired from. She said,
"Well, you know, the boss wanted me to do some-
thing. It was against the union contract, you know,
I read him a few relevant sections from the union
contract, and then I got fired." So there's like dead
silence, and Martha says, "I don't know why you're
all looking at me like this. 1 don't think I did any-
thing provocative. I read him some passages from
the union contract." So finally Foster says, "Well,
Martha, I mean, you'd only been working there
three days. I mean, you could have kept your mouth
shut for a week." But that was not Martha's forte,
keeping her mouth shut.
But she managed to rise above all these troubles
with a sense of political purpose, commitment, and
a sense of humor which never ceased to amaze me.
I think a lesser mortal would have been daunted by
the things she faced in her life. And Martha loved
life. She was a vibrant, alive person. One of the
most alive people I've ever met. That's why it's so
hard to believe that she's dead. And that she's not
coming back. And I would like to say that all those
things that the Moral Majority tells us that we're not
supposed to do, and not supposed to enjoy, Martha
did all of them, as much as possible. She packed as
much living into her life as she could. And a good
thing too. I can only hope for a suitable retribution
against those who cut her life so short.
Martha told me, and a couple of other people as
well, before she went to the Soviet Union the last
time, a story about one of her trips back to Denver.
She said that all her family, for some reason, were
going around the room talking about what they
should have done in their life or what regrets they
had and so on. And people said various things. And
then they got to Martha and someone turned to her
and said, "Well, I suppose you've done exactly what
you wanted with your life." And she said, "That's
right, I have." She said, "It would have been nice if
I had a little more money, it would have made life a
little easier, but that's right, I have done what I
wanted with my life." And you know, I think of that
with some satisfaction.
I'd like to read a quote. Martha loved quotes
from Trotsky. No important meeting was done with-
out an appropriate quote from Trotsky. Actually I
recommend this to comrades; it's Trotsky's speech
on the founding of the Fourth International, where
he talks very powerfully about the revolutionary
martyrs, but also about the determination and
revolutionary optimism necessary to go on:
"Our party demands each of us totally and completely.
Let the philistines hunt their own individuality in empty
space. For a revolutionary to give himself entirely to the
party signifies finding himself. Yes, our party takes each
one of us wholly. But in return it gives to every one of us
the highest happiness: the consciousness that one par-
ticipates in the building of a better future, that one car-
ries on his shoulders a particle of the fate of mankind,
and that one's life will not have been lived in vain."
Well, Martha's life was not lived in vain. She lived
a life that she wanted in the service of the interna-
tional proletarian revolution. She knew she faced
dangers in the Soviet Union. She spoke about it to
several comrades before she left. But she went
ahead anyhow. And, you know, that's what we have
to do. Although made poorer by the loss of Martha,
we have to go forward as well. And as Trotsky says
in this same article, "The program of the Fourth
International will become the guide of millions and
those revolutionary millions will know how to
storm earth and heaven."
27
Remarks by Jon Branche at Highgate Cemetery Memorial
for Martha Phillips
15 February 1992
Comrades and friends:
We are gathered here today to honor Martha Phil-
lips, who died in Moscow on the front lines in the
urgent fight against counterrevolution in the Soviet
Union. In her work there, on the numerous occa-
sions she was asked why the International Commu-
nist League was in the USSR, Martha explained that
the Soviet Union was the birthplace of our commu-
nist program, that the Russian Revolution in fact
belonged to the workers of the whole world, and
that we were coming home to fight to defend the
gains of the October Revolution. For us Trotskyists
the Soviet Union has never been a foreign country
and we can say truthfully that Martha died in her
homeland.
As a young woman 20 years ago Martha joined
the Spartacist League of the U.S. She had previously
been a member of the SWP, which at one time had
been a revolutionary Trotskyist party but had aban-
doned its Leninist principles. Martha was a passion-
ate enthusiast for the great leader of American Trot-
skyism, James Cannon, and no matter where she
was — whether training youth in San Francisco or
fighting for our program in the Soviet Union —
Martha sought to impart Cannon's heritage. She
quickly learned what Cannon meant when he said
we were the party of the Russian Revolution. Many
years before she set foot in the USSR, Martha was
advising fellow comrades transferring to Detroit
that they were moving to the American Vyborg,
referring to the section of Petrograd where the
most class-conscious proletariat was concentrated!
It was Cannon who fought to preserve our pro-
gram of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union
against the waverers and backsliders of his time.
For Cannon the Russian question was the question
of revolution, and the attitude taken towards the
Soviet state was the decisive criterion separating the
genuine revolutionary tendency from all shades of
Menshevism, social democracy, centrism, and Stalin-
ism. As he noted, all those groups that turned their
backs on the first workers state became reconciled
in one form or another to bourgeois democracy.
Cannon said: "We are not disinterested observers
and commentators. We do not examine the Russian
revolution and what remains of its great conquests
as though it were a bug under a glass. We have an
interest! We take part in the fight! At each stage
in the development of the Soviet Union, its advances
and its degeneration, we seek the basis for revolu-
tionary action. We want to advance the world revo-
lution, overthrow capitalism, establish socialism."
Martha was such a proletarian fighter, who
understood that you had to struggle in order to
change the world. It is such a person who always has
formed the backbone of a revolutionary organiza-
tion. Martha had nothing but contempt for those
who bought the bourgeoisie's line that "communism
is dead" — she mocked not only our open social-
democratic opponents but all those who prema-
turely wanted to bury the Soviet Union. She believed
passionately with Cannon that the worst kind of
capitulator was the one who surrendered a position
before it was lost or who capitulated before the deci-
sive battle. In a letter she wrote from Moscow last
October she referred to Cannon's fight against the
Goldman-Morrow fainthearts, who in the context of
the American imperialist victory in World War II
became reconciled to bourgeois democracy. Martha
wrote: "Perhaps one could make an empirical argu-
ment that Morrow and Goldman's pessimistic analy-
sis was closer to what became the reality; neverthe-
less we proudly endorse the revolutionary optimism
and working-class centrality of Cannon's theses.
Goldman/Morrow's prognosis was liquidationist, as
they went on to demonstrate. It is similarly danger-
ous to view the Soviet Union through the lens of the
bitter defeat in East Germany."
Trotsky once said that all genuine revolutionar-
ies live for the future; that is, they refuse to sacrifice
principle for temporary expedient. Martha refused
to allow herself to be daunted by the temporary set-
backs of today or yesterday. When asked by skeptics
how many members we had, she always replied: "A
few less than Lenin had at the time of Zimmer-
wald." She often made the point that at the time of
the February Revolution in Russia the Mensheviks
had larger numbers, more writers, etc. But Lenin
had a hard cadre trained in a revolutionary pro-
gram. This is what made the difference. For her
entire political life Martha was first and foremost a
party person from head to toe, understanding that
it was the subjective element that was indis-
pensable to proletarian victory. Thus, she was par-
ticularly contemptuous of political cowards and
quitters.
Martha did not have an easy personal life, and was
charged with bringing up a handicapped son. But
she never allowed personal difficulties to destroy
her political work. Entering her middle age, Martha
28
began the difficult task of learning Russian from
scratch. She regarded developments in the Soviet
Union as "our chance" and wanted to be on the front
lines. To come to Moscow she endured a painful
separation from her son and family, and at times
she was acutely lonely in the Soviet Union. She
got a job in a Soviet school as a teacher and was
assigned an apartment on the outskirts of the city.
Her Soviet friends were often astounded that any
foreigner would live like that. Undoubtedly Martha
could have found an easier way to survive there,
but she wanted to get a better sense of how the
Soviets lived.
Martha was a powerful speaker with multiple
talents. She could inspire a large crowd with a vision
of proletarian internationalism, as she did last
summer at a meeting of several hundred worker
communists in Moscow reported by Workers Van-
guard. She was equally devastating as a polemicist
when she went up against some social traitor; it was
her intervention against the Militant Tendency that
Workers Hammer covered in our current issue. And
the interview with Soviet women in Women and
Revolution is testimony to Martha's conviction that
a Leninist party must be a tribune of the people. Mar-
tha was the antithesis of the stuffed shirt, tea-sipping
teetotalers, chauvinists and Methodist moralists that
dominate the British Labour Party. Martha was
among a layer of women leaders in our party, a
member of the Central Committee of the SL/U.S. for
many years. When I worked with her in Moscow,
almost every day she attracted one or two women
contacts who saw her as an authoritative spokesman
for our politics.
It is fitting today to recall the other comrades
who gave their lives to fight for the program of
Trotskyism in the Soviet Union, from the Ameri-
can seamen in WWII who volunteered for the Mur-
mansk run so they could achieve contact with
Soviet workers and soldiers, to the Left Opposition
in the Soviet Union who maintained the continuity
of Bolshevism-Leninism under the most arduous
circumstances. We recall the example of the Trot-
skyists in the prison camps of frozen Vorkuta, who
at the time of Hitler's invasion volunteered to fight
in the Red Army. When this was refused, these revo-
lutionaries did what they could for the Soviet war
effort, relinquishing certain of their rights and
agreeing to the extension of the working day to 12
hours. Despite the hideous atrocities of Stalin,
these Trotskyists were not demoralized. They never
gave up on the Soviet Union.
We remain the party of the Russian Revolution.
That was the banner that Martha Phillips fought
under, and that is the banner that we will continue
to fight under. Forward to a Soviet section of the
reforged Fourth International! Forward to a world
socialist order!
29
Remarks by Max Schutz at Friedrichsfelde Monument
Memorial for Martha Phillips, Berlin
16 February 1992
Here before the monuments to Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht, it is indeed fitting that we
honor our comrade Martha Phillips. With Lenin,
when we honor the Three L's, we honor all com-
rades who died at their posts fighting for a commu-
nist future. Here I must add that had she known
last week that these monuments had been dese-
crated she would have shared our outrage. She
would have wanted to be in the forefront to clean
away not only that Nazi filth but its perpetrators.
I was fortunate to know Martha as she fought her
way to Spartacism in the SWP In so many ways her
own political struggle replicated the origins of our
own tendency. Like the Revolutionary7 Tendency of
the previous decade, Martha fought for a prole-
tarian, revolutionary perspective, but in a party
which as it entered the 1970s had degenerated
much further. Nevertheless there still existed in the
SWP a generation of Cannon's collaborators who
had not forgotten everything. She returned to the
James R Cannon who was Trotsky's closest collabo-
rator, the author of The Struggle for a Proletarian
Party.
With her intellectual tenacity and honesty all
along the line, she soon went beyond the partial
approximation to that school of Cannon repre-
sented by the Proletarian Orientation Tendency
and rejected the impressionistic and fleeting left
posturing of the Mandelites. Further, she had
another quality which was foreign to these cur-
rents: a profound class hatred of all forms of social
oppression and a sense of the party as a Leninist
tribune of the people.
Through her study of the Marxist classics, careful
study and documentation of the disputes within
the Marxist movement, Martha enriched not only
the PRL but many areas of our work. This helped
deepen her firm theoretical and programmatic
anchoring. Her whole political life could be said to
be preparation for her last assignment and a repu-
diation of impressionism and defeatism in the face
of recent developments in East Europe and the
Soviet Union. She saw not only the dangers but a
powerful confirmation of the Trotskyist program.
She saw challenge and opportunity to rebuild the
party of the Russian Revolution in the land of Octo-
ber. She became part of that unbroken chain, the
continuity with the Three L's.
One cannot help but remember with bitterness,
especially here, that like Liebknecht and like Lux-
emburg, a Jewish woman communist, Martha was
murdered at the height of her political effective-
ness. We have been robbed of a valued comrade
and warm friend. That deepens our determination
to honor her by carrying forward the work to which
she dedicated her life.
Tidewater Labor Black League Member's Message to
New York Memorial for Martha Phillips
23 February 1992
Concerning the death and tremendous loss of
Martha Phillips. Takes me back to the time I was
alone and no body or an organization to function
with in a way to benefit the working people of
the world. I am with all of you, but at this one
moment I am alone with myself for Martha will no
longer be among us.
Staying home could have been her choice, but
she was needed in Moscow.
A professional revolutionary is like an artist; has
to do what must be done.
Words spoken never die, but it is the person who
speaks the words and Martha is no longer with us.
Her words and work must not die....
Tidewater
Martha's work must continue us on the road of
Lenin and Trotsky and against counterrevolution.
30
Some Memories of Martha by Ann Pearson
[undated]
It's so hard to reckon with Martha being dead
that I'm hoping putting some things on paper will
help. It was only reading the chronology of
Martha's life that I realized I must have been the
first SLer to meet her. It was May 1971, when
Reuben and I were touring the Midwest. We arrived
in Madison on a Sunday afternoon, and discovered
the SWP was holding a regional educational on
campus. We were just in time for the afternoon
"workshops," one on the antiwar movement which
Reuben went to intervene in, and one on the
woman question which I went to. Martha was chair-
ing the woman question workshop, with a panel
of herself, another local comrade, and national
honcho Hedda Garza. Martha and the other local
comrade each gave short presentations, and Hedda
the main one. It was quite a shock to hear the SWP
sound both as impassioned and as orthodox as
they did at this workshop. Despite the SWP's
capitulation to feminism and pop frontism, there
was very little to argue with in the presentations, a
most unusual occurrence. There were a couple of
Workers Leaguers, a few ISers, and a smattering
of other OROs [Ostensibly Revolutionary Organiza-
tions] in the crowd of about 40 at this workshop,
and I decided to hold my fire till some of them had
spoken. But when Martha opened the floor for dis-
cussion, no hands went up. After a minute or two
of Martha's cajoling everyone to speak, there were
still no takers. So I got to say, "Well, since no one
else has anything to say, I have a few notes here,"
and launch into a ten-minute intervention. A lot of
my examples of the SWP's betrayals were what I
knew best, things they'd done in Texas, like lead-
ing a march to the capitol for the express purpose
of lobbying legislators in their offices. Martha was
shocked to hear her organization accused of such
things, which were obviously very distressing news
to her. She didn't try any of the usual bureaucratic
methods of controlling the discussion, so I had a
great time being the focus of the whole discussion.
Hedda Garza finally had to pull their chestnuts out
of the fire by saying they'd repudiate such things if
their organization ever did them. I even made her
say they'd repudiate them in print. For Hedda, it
was covering ass, but with Martha it was clear she
was really taken aback and actually didn't know the
kinds of things the SWP was doing around the
country. Pat Quinn had really recruited a lot of peo-
ple there to something far to the SWP's left. A few
years later, I asked her if she remembered this
workshop, and she said that she had really not
believed most of what I'd said, and it wasn't till
much later she recognized it must have been true.
It had been the first time she'd heard anyone criti-
cize the SWP from the left. When I asked her about
it, she'd been in the SL for a couple of years already,
but she was very apologetic, as if she somehow
should have reacted quicker to chuck the SWP It
was really kind of a typical Martha response, funny
and ironic because of all those who did chuck the
SWP, Martha always reacted the fastest, hardest and
most thoroughly. It took her own fight to lead a lot
of other comrades out of the SWP She always did
set impossibly high standards for herself!
For those who're trying to piece it all together, I
don't recall all the ins and outs of our encounter-
ing Martha again, but Reuben and I had already met
Paul K. in Tampa in March 1971, long before the LF
fight began, when there was a much more tepid
fight that had resulted in the Tampa local being
broken up and sent to farflung points. We knew he
was going to Washington, and met some more peo-
ple in and around the YSA in Washington in April
1971 on the D.C. stop of our southern tour. After a
week in New York, we went back to visit them
before resuming going through the South and Mid-
west. Peggy W knew them, a guy from France and
his wife, and another guy who eventually became
Paul K.'s roommate, I think. We still had something
going with these guys in July 1971. I remember
sitting in the NPAC conference session on Satur-
day morning after our comrades were viciously
attacked the night before. Most of the comrades
were still being excluded by the SWP's huge goon
squad, only a few of us allowed inside who they
couldn't pinpoint as having been there the night
before. They could hardly keep order inside the
conference and had the stage ringed with goons,
including Paul and the other guys we were talking
with; I kept glancing at these guys, occasionally
catching their eyes, and wondering how weird
and uncomfortable they must feel. It must have
been partly through these connections that we
met up with Martha again, and the spectacle of
that NPAC conference would certainly have had an
impact on her.
I still feel very bad about the hard time I and the
L.A. leadership gave Martha. It really was an impos-
sible situation for her. It was a very competitive,
almost all-female leadership, in a local where
except for two established couples, all the women
31
were quite a bit older than the men. Although it's
true that her forte was not organizing, she had so
much operating against her that it wasn't a fair test.
She was alone, very broke, living in horrible condi-
tions with too many other comrades, and didn't
have enough childcare. To top it all off, there was
the office move, where the L.A. local was evicted
from its office, which was also her own home. We
had to get the landlord to consent to us staying a
few extra days, so Martha was supposed to tactfully
negotiate it with him. When he refused, it all finally
got to Martha, and she completely lost it, screaming
at him that he was a cockroach capitalist, a lowlife
moneygrubber, etc. She was very articulate on the
subject! But it was for sure the least tactful
approach you could ever make to a landlord. Look-
ing back at it, I think the landlord could tell she was
really at the end of her rope, as he backed off and
didn't bug her anymore. In the final analysis, she
got more sympathy from him than from us. I always
assumed that someday as old ladies we'd sit around
drinking and reminiscing, and I'd be able to tell her
how sorry I am. Never put off till tomorrow...
I appreciated Sue and William's letter very much,
and I hope Sue won't mind my telling something
about her and Martha that somehow captures Mar-
tha for me, and what a collaborative relationship is
supposed to be. During the RCY conference in fall
of 1972, Sue stayed at my apartment. One morning
she was telling a close friend that it had been a
really tough time for her learning to be B.A. organ-
izer. Every morning she woke up and started think-
ing about what to do, and burst into tears. Then
she'd call Martha, and Martha would talk with her
about priorities, and pretty soon everything would
be all laid out for her, she'd know what to do
and it wouldn't seem so overwhelming. So that
was the kind of training that Martha gave, even as a
pretty new comrade herself, and it had pretty good
results.
It's hard to stem the flow of recollections — tiny
Martha wearing awful, gigantic platform shoes,
marching up to Bert Corona and every CP bigwig
she could find, baiting them and teasing them like
a terrier until they'd lose it and spill some info
we wanted in the process — how many times that
happened I lost count of. Martha making an impas-
sioned speech to the British miners strike support
demo we'd called, then out of the blue saying
And now we'll sing the Internationale"... and hand-
ing the bullhorn to me to lead it. We laughed for
hours at how our voices all cracked, and mine was
amplified. Martha at the beach laughing. Martha
interrupting a discussion to exclaim "Oh, Laelly" and
him rushing into her arms giggling. Martha at a con-
ference, her glasses slipping down her nose, so mad
her voice wavers and crackles, hammering away.
We have been robbed.
Ann P
Cleveland
32
Statement by Esteban Volkov, Grandson of Leon Trotsky
"Martha Phillips, a Revolutionary Hero"
27 April 1992
On Monday, 27 April 1992, the International
Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
held a press conference at the Leon Trotsky
Museum in Coyoacdn, Mexico City. The confer-
ence was called to announce the international
campaign of demonstrations by the ICI demand-
ing a serious investigation of the murder of our
comrade Martha Phillips in Moscow on Febru-
ary 9, and opposing the Yeltsin/Bush drive to
restore capitalism to the Soviet Union, homeland
of the Bolshevik October Revolution. The Trotsky
Museum is at the house where Lenin's comrade
in arms spent the last years of his exile, and
where he was cut down in August 1940 by a Sta-
linist assassin. Speaking at the press conference
was Esteban (Seva) Volkov, Trotsky's grandson.
We print here excerpts from his statement.
In meeting in this place, we do so precisely to
add the name of Martha Phillips to the long list of
Trotskyist revolutionaries who have fallen in the
struggle to defend the working class, at the hands
both of their enemies of the Stalinist bureaucracy
and of the reactionary capitalist groups. We wish to
add the name of Martha Phillips to the long list of
fallen revolutionary heroes, a list that is headed by
the great revolutionary and Marxist Leon Trotsky,
who initiated this struggle in 1923 when the whole
process began of betrayal and moving away from
the October Revolution which today is reaching its
final stage, that of the return to capitalism.
It is worth mentioning that more than half a cen-
tury ago, Leon Trotsky, with startling clarity, pre-
dicted the historical course which the Russian
bureaucracy would follow and whose final stage
would be precisely the return to private property.
What we are witnessing is the attempt by the
bureaucracy, a bureaucracy descended from that of
Stalin, neo-Stalinist so to speak, which now wants to
give the coup de grace to what was socialism and
write the final chapter of this betrayal of the October
Revolution. Trotsky, in The Crimes of Stalin, which
was written more or less at the same time as The
Revolution Betrayed, predicted that the new sectors
of the bureaucracy would renounce Stalin, would go
so far as to accuse Stalin and Trotsky of having the
same ideology and political culture and of using the
same methods. All that has come true to the letter.
He saw the regression to the capitalist system, to pri-
vate property, as the alternative in case the masses,
the Soviet working class, were not able to reconquer
power, to carry out the political revolution.
Thus he posed it not as a predetermined end but
as an alternative. Either the working class recon-
quers power and returns to the road of the October
Revolution, of Marxism, or else the bureaucracy
would end up totally burying what was the October
Revolution and re-establishing the capitalist system.
And that is what we are seeing.
I want to reiterate again our admiration for this
revolutionary who fell in the struggle. We still can-
not say clearly the circumstances in which she was
murdered, but from what it appears, there are
many elements which suggest that it was a political
crime of reprisal against the Spartacist group,
which only days before carried out a demonstration
against Yeltsin. And the actions of the Russian mili-
tia, of the police, leave a lot to be desired and raise
many doubts.
33
Statement of Split from Leninist Faction
[Declaration of the pro-Spartacist League fusion caucus, read by Martha Phillips to the
closing session of the Leninist Faction Convention, Ashtabula, Sunday, 13 August 1972]
Comrades:
In Comrade Barbara G.'s document on Demo-
cratic Centralism, she correctly presents Lenin's
position that "A faction, if it is a principled faction,
cannot contain in itself diametrically opposite
views on the most important questions facing the
class."
Comrades, this Ashtabula Conference has only
been the culmination of long, hard months of strug-
gle. We have consistently fought for a fusion course
with the Spartacist League. The very first time that
Paul and myself met with the Boston comrades we
asserted that we had a fusion perspective with the
Spartacist League. It has become clear that the lead-
ership of the Leninist Faction has now made a con-
scious choice for a de facto independent existence,
that is in reality a course counterposed to a fusion
with the Spartacist League.
It is usual that organizations do not recognize
their own degeneration. Certainly the majority of
the Socialist Workers Party could not imagine that
their decision that Cuba was a (healthy) workers'
state signified their degeneration. But it is not just
that a party makes a theoretical or organizational
error, but justifies it. With the decision against the
Trotskyist position on democratic centralism the
faction has embarked on a course that will lead to
the rapid degeneration of the grouping.
This conference marks a crossroads between
those that will go forward with a revolutionary pro-
gram with an unambiguous fusion perspective with
the Spartacist League on the basis of the politics of
the Statement of Faction, and those that will vacil-
late, flounder, and go down in the current.
Comrades, we are living in serious times. The
political future of thirty would-be revolutionaries
is an extremely serious matter. For this reason,
we feel that the only principled thing to do is to
pose a clear alternative: either a direct fusion per-
spective with the Spartacist League or what will
be an independent existence with no regroupment
perspective.
On the basis of fundamental political differences,
we announce our separation from the Leninist
Faction and state our intention to pursue a fusion
perspective with the Spartacist League — the only
revolutionary organization in the United States. Such
a course must follow from the politics presented in
the Declaration of Faction of May 15, 1972.
Comrades, many harsh words have been stated
here today. We remind you that such matters were
concerned with political, not personal characteriza-
tions. Because of this, despite our disputes, differ-
ences, and polemics, we hope to be able to reunify
with you in the future on a higher plane to resume
a common struggle for the international socialist
revolution.
We call on all of the comrades of the Leninist Fac-
tion who agree with us on this course to meet in
caucus with us at this time in order to discuss our
future perspectives.
Paul A.
JeffB.
David P
Martha R
Ron R
Our Comrade
Martha Phillips
Young Spartacus
STC OFF C0&I
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K
Workers Vanguard
Workers Vanguard
Spartacist-initiated anti-ROTC campaign
at UC Berkeley, May 1975.
Martha speaking at Red Flag Union
conference, Los Angeles, June 1977.
34
You Can't Fight
Reagan with
Democrats —
For Mass Strike
Action to Bring
Down Reagan!
Build a Workers Party
w
Campaigning for Oakland City Council, April 1983.
Workers Vanguard
Women and Revolution
i the Revolutionary vanguard
of the Civil War
J V
3
Harriet Tubman:
Fighter for Black Freedom
29
Soviet Women Combat Pilots
Fought Nazi Germany
The Story of the
Night Witches
Interview with Soviet Women
Martha frequently wrote for and contributed to Women and Revolution. She conducted "Interview
with Soviet Women" in Russian.
35
Spartacist
! $&•• #■& :;
Martha at the grave of Adolf
Joffe, a leader of 1917
Russian Revolution and a
Trotskyist Left Oppositionist.
Martha with her son Lael.
Workers Vanguard
Martha addressing 700 delegates and distributing
ICL literature at July 1991 Moscow Workers
Conference.
Spartacist photos
36
Memorial tribute to Martha in
Russian-language Spartacist Bulletin.
Worldwide ICL protests demanded a serious
investigation into murder of Martha Phillips.
Belowr London, 30 April 1992.
MapTa (pMMiimc
■SPARTAC)5t||
I"— "^ ■ TgBTIJ' -■■I
Workers Hammer photos
Highgate Cemetery, London, 15 February 1992: Comrades and friends laid wreath in memory of
Martha Phillips at grave of Karl Marx.
37
Susan Adams
1948-2001
Susan Adams
1948-2001
Our comrade Susan Adams died at home on the
morning of February 6 after a two-year struggle with
cancer. In her 30 years as a communist cadre, Susan
served on many of the battle fronts of our interna-
tional party. There is hardly a section of the Inter-
national Communist League or an area of our work
which did not benefit directly from her politi-
cal counsel and from her exceptional talents as a
teacher and trainer of a new generation of proletar-
ian leaders. She continued to carry out vital work
as a member of the leading committees of the Spar-
tacist League/U.S. and the ICL until her death. We
salute her memory and share in the pain and loss of
her longtime companion and comrade, Francois, her
family and her many comrades and friends around
the world.
Like thousands of youth, Susan was propelled into
political activism in the mid-1960s by the civil rights
movement, the growing opposition to the Vietnam
War and the near-revolutionary upheaval in France in
May 1968. She vehemently rejected the mysticism and
hypocritical moralism of her Catholic background
and struggled against the internalized oppression that
it caused. While at the University of California in San
Diego, she joined Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) and was drawn to the pro-working-class wing
led by the left-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party. Susan
was won to Trotskyism as she began working with the
SL-led Revolutionary Marxist Caucus of SDS in 1970
after moving to the State University of New York in
Stony Brook. Having moved back to California,
she became a member of the Spartacist League in
December 1971. Within months, she was elected
organizer of our rapidly growing Bay Area local com-
mittee, helping to integrate new recruits from a vari-
ety of political tendencies.
When we moved to set up a branch in the "Motor
City," Detroit, in early 1973, Susan was chosen to
lead it. She proudly described this center of the
black industrial working class as the Vyborg of the
American proletariat, in reference to the militant
proletarian stronghold of Bolshevism in Petrograd
on the eve of the Russian Revolution. She was
aggressive in ensuring that our Trotskyist propagan-
da penetrated the combative proletariat in the auto
plants, often taking a direct hand in writing, mimeo-
graphing and distributing our first leaflets. Susan
saw to it that the local carried out a program of
intensive Marxist internal education and that the
industrial comrades, who were working 50 hours or
more on swing shift on the assembly lines, got their
share of polemical combat doing campus work.
After little more than a year in Detroit, Susan
moved to New York to be the central leader of our
national youth organization, the Spartacus Youth
League. As always, she took on this task with energy
and political determination, frequently touring the
locals, initiating or directing local and national
SYL campaigns, overseeing the publication of a
high-level monthly press, Young Spartacus, with an
emphasis on Marxist education and polemics.
In 1976, as the Spartacist tendency began to gain
small footholds in Europe, Susan took on another
crucial area of party work, this time for our Interna-
tional Secretariat. Stationed mainly in Paris, she
became the central leader of our work in Europe, and
Paris became one of three main political centers of
our International. Until 1992, Susan was the principal
leader of the Ligue Trotskyste de France. She was cen-
trally involved in the debates and discussions under-
taken in the LTF and the International to hammer out
our strategy and tactics in this international center of
ostensible Trotskyism, particularly in response to the
resurgence of the popular front in the form of the
"Union of the Left" in the late 1970s and early '80s.
Determined to implant the Cannonist understanding
of party building and Bolshevik norms of function-
ing which were largely alien to European cadre, she
worked closely with often inexperienced leaderships
in the European sections, getting them to seize on
opportunities for building the party, to carry through
regroupments with leftward-moving elements of op-
ponent organizations and to combat the incessant
pressures of French parochialism, British Labourism,
resurgent German nationalism, and so on.
In July 1994, helping to redirect the work of the
ICL in a genuinely new and difficult period signaled
by capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union,
Susan wrote a letter to the International Secretariat:
"The main task of the IS. is the production of the appro-
priate, necessary and urgent literary propaganda,
quadrilingually and in part pentalingually i.e., also in
Russian, mainly in the Spartacists.... Publishing propa-
ganda presumably gives political direction; it creates the
scaffolding inside which the sections construct their
work, in the spirit that Lenin developed in What Is To
Be Done?"
»()
41
When the incipient proletarian political revolu-
tion erupted in East Germany in the fall of 1989,
Susan of course threw herself into guiding and push-
ing forward our Trotskyist intervention, playing a
major role in building the united-front mobilization
we initiated to protest the fascist desecration of a
Soviet war memorial, which drew 250,000 people to
East Berlin's Treptow Park on 3.|anuary 1990.
In 1992, when the LTF leadership itself suc-
cumbed to the same pressures Susan had seen so
clearly and fought so well elsewhere, there was
a sharp political fight at an ICL conference. Susan
sought to assimilate the political lessons of the fight
and only a few months later accepted the difficult
assignment of heading up our small ICL station in
Moscow, taking up the work of our comrade Martha
Phillips who had been murdered at her post there
earlier that year. Working in a situation where there
was little room for mistakes, our Moscow group
fought to reimplant Bolshevism in the face of the
devastation of capitalist counterrevolution and of
the retrograde Stalinist-derived chauvinists of the
"red-brown" coalition.
Although foreign languages did not come easily,
Susan embarked on learning Russian with the same
discipline and resolution that she had applied to
studying French. The combination of limited party
resources and the overwhelmingly negative objec-
tive situation in the former Soviet Union ultimately
forced us to abandon an organized presence in
Moscow. To her last days, Susan would speak fondly
of her "Moscow boys," as she called the young mem-
bers from various countries, among them recent
recruits from the former DDR, who had volunteered
for this arduous and dangerous assignment and
who received their shaping as Leninist cadre under
Susan's tutelage.
After nearly 20 years of overseas assignments,
Susan returned to the U.S. to work in the central
party administration, directing her energies partic-
ularly on working with a new layer of youth recruits
in New York and nationally. Seeking to capitalize on
our very successful anti-Klan mobilization in Octo-
ber 1999, Susan addressed the New York Spartacist
branch, of which she was political chairman:
This demonstration really does put into context the last
decade, when there wasn't very much going on. In the
last couple of years, there have been many struggles in
the party. We have sought to grind off the rust in the
party and prepare ourselves for exactly the kind of situ-
ation that I think our party responded to very well this
month. And now the question is the follow-up. In short,
the whole point here is: this is what we live for, this is
what we prepare for, and now we're in it and we must
take advantage of it in the maximum political way."
During this period she also devoted much of her
waning energy to preparing her public presenta-
tion on "Women and the French Revolution" and
expanding it for publication. Even while home-
bound in her last few days, she was involved in
helping select graphics for the layout. Several of
her other projects remain to be completed, includ-
ing an index for the first bound volume of French-
language Spartacist.
Susan's beauty and graciousness struck all who
met her. She solicited and listened intently to the
opinions of the newest youth member no less than
those of the most senior party cadre, arguing with
them openly when she disagreed. Her intellectual
curiosity was intense and many of us fondly remem-
ber sharing a book-shopping expedition, a novel, a
Shostakovich symphony, an art exhibit or a play with
Susan in whatever city of the world we found our-
selves. Her critical-mindedness, integrity and revolu-
tionary determination serve as an inspiration to us
all as we go forward to realize the task to which
she dedicated her life, the reforging of a Trotskyist
Fourth International and the achievement of com-
munism worldwide.
— reprinted from Workers Vanguard
No. 752, 16 February 2001
Remarks by Helene Brosius at New York Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
A few weeks ago, at the end of a tough day of
doctors and decisions, Susan looked up and said to
me: "After all, I've done everything I wanted to do in
my life." And as much as it made me want to hold her
and not let her go, I also knew that what she said had
truth to it. Susan was a Marxist revolutionary to her
bones, single-mindedly driven to build a revolution-
ary proletarian party, to reforge the Fourth Interna-
tional. She wanted simply to be a communist. And
that she was — until her last breath.
She was born in Chicago but she was a California
girl. When she was 28 and stayed in Europe as an
international rep for the party for the first time, she
wrote to me:
"We just got back from Arcachon this afternoon. It's
lovely there. So much like the Pacific coast I could hardly
42
believe it. But it made me feel at home. We had some
sun, though not enough, and ocean waves and a huge
dune and we ate and slept like it was our last week."
Susan's father, Angelo Adams — Ange — came from
Greece at age four and made a good life here. He
wanted to have the best for his family — Betty and the
five kids. Sue was the oldest, then Mark, Joni, Tom,
and Marian, who have all come today The break
with her family was difficult all the way around and
it didn't even begin to heal until much later.
Sue's rejection of Catholicism was conscious,
vehement, and finally political. She wrote an excep-
tional article for our journal Women and Revolu-
tion called "The Cult of the Virgin Mary'' in 1977, at
the time of "born again" president Jimmy Carter's
election victory. "Marxists find contemporary relig-
ion," she wrote, "an odious thing."
"We understand, however, that what sustains religious
affiliation in the scientific age is not so much intellectual
conviction as social oppression. Thus, while the anti-
clerical spirit which animates Voltaire's earnest wish that
the last king... be strangled with the entrails of the last
priest' may be sincere and even justified, such a 'war
against god' does not transcend petty-bourgeois ideal-
ism. Religion will disappear only when the society which
creates the need for it is destroyed."
To her chagrin, her understanding did not — all at
once — release the grip that a Catholic upbringing
had on her own psychology. This was a lifelong effort.
Sue well understood that religion also served as
an instrument for the oppression of women. She
was a thoughtful, fervent partisan of women's liber-
ation, understanding that it will come about only
as a result of socialist revolution. It is fitting that a
last contribution of hers is the wonderful talk on
"Women and the French Revolution." This was a
several years' labor of love for Sue. In 1994, she
wrote of this work to a fellow member of the W&R
editorial board: "At a time when the bourgeoisies of
the world attack the Enlightenment, it has been
quite literally a real pleasure to read of the hope in
rationality and human progress of this period."
Susan's liberal arts education actually did include
a good dose of science and math, but in these and
technical matters in general she always seemed at a
bit of a loss. What did stick was an appetite for and
range of knowledge of literature — especially Euro-
pean literature — which was wonderfully intertwined
with her understanding of European history. This
was the foundation upon which she developed as an
exceptional Marxist intellectual.
It was the '60s, and like thousands of kids she
was turning hard against the manifest injustices of
racist American imperialism. At UC San Diego she
threw herself into New Left politics and the new
SDS chapter. But unlike many New Leftists, she
started to study. She devoured Marx and Lenin and
was drawn to the pro-working-class wing of SDS
led by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. She actu-
ally managed to graduate, despite an arrest that
year for sitting in at the chancellor's office — and
she went off to Stony Brook on Long Island for
graduate school. It seems that no sooner had she
arrived there than she broke from PL and started
working with Spartacist in the Revolutionary Marx-
ist Caucus of SDS.
I wouldn't say she was too smart for PL — because
they had some intelligent people. Nor is it exactly
true, as her mentor in PL evidently told her when she
was leaving, that she "always read too many books."
I think it was that she really considered and
absorbed what she read. In her application for SL
membership she wrote that she was drawn to our
"consistency with the principles of Marx, Lenin and
Trotsky" as opposed to the "at times reactionary Sta-
linoid politics of PL."
Her New Left origins poked through from time to
time. Her father, Ange, the successful banker, was
being prosecuted in the early '70s. Sue was in a real
quandary — support her father, the class enemy? As
she put it, Jim "kicked my ass, so to speak." Her
memory was that he said something like: "What's
wrong with you, girl? That's your father. Can't you
see he's being prosecuted for things that everyone
does and probably because he's Greek. Get yourself
out there to his trial before it's over." She did. She
was always grateful for Jim's advice.
Only three months after joining the Spartacist
youth group in 1971, Susan had a chance to display
the courage which turned out to be so characteris-
tic of her. We had been bloodily ejected from an anti-
Vietnam War conference of NPAC, led by the Social-
ist Workers Party. As comrade Al Nelson described it
recently, "It was the most protracted violence I have
ever witnessed in the workers movement. Seymour
had his nose broken; I had bald spots on my head
where tufts of hair had been torn out." The next day,
Susan volunteered to be a mole, to elude the mas-
sive SWP goon squad stationed there to exclude
known or suspected "disrupters" and to report back
what was being said in the aftermath of this sav-
age exclusion. Al wrote: "We met a couple of blocks
away and discussed her assignment and its dangers.
I remember being extremely impressed with how
calm and determined and brave she was."
The summer of '71 Susan moved to the Bay Area,
which is where I first met her. I was pleased to
endorse her application for membership in the SL
in December 1971. And when I left for New York
the following summer there was no question in
my mind that Susan was the comrade to take over
as Bay Area organizer, though there were other
43
comrades who had more experience than she did.
In the next years, as new opportunities arose for
the party, Susan was the clear choice for one difficult
and critical assignment after another. She taught,
expected, and inspired the utmost professional-
ism. She was uncommonly able at locating and
resisting the poison of subjectivity in herself and
other comrades. But perhaps most valuable was her
unbending drive for programmatic clarity. Not that
she was immune to the ambient pressures in her
political work, but she was fearless in her determi-
nation to arrive at and deepen the party's under-
standing of them. Even when — and maybe espe-
cially when — there was a disaster that she'd been
party to.
Thus, more often than not, Sue was sent to the
front lines of our party work. After just over a year
in the party, in February 1973, she was picked to be
founding organizer of the Detroit branch. Unfortu-
nately, it was the eve of an economic downturn and
the collapse of the auto industry in Detroit. But
that local was a major step for our organization. In
summer '74, she came to New York to head up the
national youth organization, the Spartacus Youth
League, which was growing rapidly and, with many
difficulties, taking on independent organizational
reality for the first time.
In 1976, she was off to Europe as an interna-
tional rep. France, the world center of the ostensibly
Trotskyist organizations, was the jumping-off point
for our European work and, other than Australia,
our first international foothold. The job required
constant travel around Europe, wide knowledge of
the left and workers movement throughout the area,
vigilance for opportunities, patience and care in
cadre development.
After spending a year in New York in '78-79 as
our international secretary, it was off to Europe
again, this time as a central leader of the French
section (to the surprise of our French comrades,
a few of whom would have preferred to eat in
McDonald's every night rather than have an Ameri-
can woman leading their section) . For the next ten
years, she was our central cadre in Europe. In 1989-
90, she played a leading role when the Interna-
tional poured its energies and resources into the
potential political revolution in East Germany
In 1992, just weeks after a gut-wrenching fight
with the French leadership, which of course
included her, at an international conference, Susan
took on one of the most important and difficult
assignments there has ever been in our organiza-
tion— the work of reimplanting Bolshevism in the
land of October, our Moscow Station. Our comrade
Martha Phillips had been murdered in Moscow ear-
lier that year. Moscow was a dizzying whirlwind of
archival, opponents, campus, labor, and educational
work. A prime achievement of Moscow Station was
the publication of Trotsky's The Third International
After Lenin in Russian and its distribution. In 1995,
she returned to the center in New York after a 20-
year absence from the country, and took on a full
range of duties in the leading committees of the
International and the American section.
Sue's life is a thread running through the history
of our party. In the mid '70s, Sue forged a powerful
national youth leadership. But after the heady days
of the New Left, the mid '70s slumped pretty fast
into quiescence. Coming out of the '60s, Sue had
an appreciation, at times surely tinged with moral-
ism, for the value of that kind of struggle. In a 1975
national report, she deplored the callowness of the
recruits, their
"lack of depth which comes from the binocular vision of
having once been Maoists or Stalinists or even New Left-
ists. Trotskyism seems self-evident to too many of our
young comrades and commitment to being a revolutionary
has meant for them commitment to going to meetings,
reading books, debating opponents and giving up dope. As
wretched as the New Left was, one understood that becom-
ing a radical meant risking jail, fights with the cops, etc. (or
at least risking suspension from school!). And as rotten
and misleading as were the ideologies of Che, Cleaver and
Malcolm X, becoming part of a movement of which they
were the heroes involved a level of commitment which our
young comrades have not had to consider."
A good dose of political education was needed, she
concluded, and "some good and hard political fights
this year."
In this period, Susan worked on the article "Rape
and Bourgeois Justice," a polemic against the liberal,
New Left, and feminist views of capitalist class injus-
tice. "Rape and Bourgeois Justice" still stands as a guid-
ing statement for us on the intersection of sex, race,
and class in this capitalist society. Collaboration on this
article further cemented a lifelong working relation-
ship with Jim Robertson, a personal and political tie as
formative and consequential as any in her life.
Sue found her assignment to international work
in Europe in 1976 a tremendous challenge — terrify-
ing and exhilarating at the same time. From a '76
letter to me:
"France is very exciting and interesting these days. I
can't help it, I like it when the whole world seems polit-
ical and the issues are urgently enough felt by people
that they stand around in knots and argue and scream at
each other into the night."
It was, as she wrote, "the classical time of swim-
ming against the stream.... The popular front is on
the road to power through the elections, drawing
everyone else in its wake."
Susan was of course a bit of a workaholic, diligent
44
and sometimes earnest to a fault, though she
learned to measure that a bit. Languages really did
not come easily to her. She developed a fine com-
mand of French. But her ear wasn't very good so
her pronunciation was poor, which was an obstacle
when dealing with snobs. She started intensive
study as soon as she got there, and ten years later
she was still working on her French. Later she stud-
ied German and, when she went to Moscow, she
studied Russian four to five hours a day at the
beginning despite the manic pace of the political
work there.
Sue had an impressive mastery of the basic Marx-
ist texts — Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon —
and a prodigious memory for what she read. She
also knew our press and internal documents thor-
oughly. She used the literature like a precision
instrument, pulling out exactly the right tool for
the job. When she ran into French parochialism,
an enduring weakness of the French left, including
the so-called Trotskyists, she wielded the weapon
of founding American Trotskyist leader James P.
Cannon.
In 1983, she was delighted to succeed in bring-
ing out a speech by Cannon upon his return from
a quite unrewarding assignment in France in 1939.
This was a two-edged sword in the struggle against
our political opponents and for our French sec-
tion. The fact alone of publishing Cannon was a
polemic against the deeply held belief on the French
left that nothing useful could derive from America.
Susan wrote in the introduction to the Cannon
pamphlet:
"Given the program, the construction of the leading
cadres is the key to the construction of revolutionary
parties; and the former requires an even higher degree
of consciousness and a more deliberate design than the
latter."
Cadre development and particular attention to
the youth was a hallmark of her work, on which she
brought to bear her wide-ranging intellectual store-
house. You'd often find her using lessons she'd
learned — or wrestled with — when she gave advice
to others.
She went as our rep to a five-day academic con-
ference on Trotsky in Wuppertal, Germany, just
after the disastrous 1990 East German elections
which ushered in counterrevolution there. All the
big-shot Trotskyist pretenders were there — from
Mandel and Broue to Michel Pablo. To their horror,
she always introduced herself as a professional rev-
olutionary. There was a group of Gorbachevite
Soviet academics who were poking their heads up
out of the glasnost opening. Everyone worth any-
thing was talking about the 1923-24 period of the
Soviet Union, which we also were critically examin-
ing in light of some new documentation that had
emerged from the Soviet archives. Broue had just
published his Trotsky biography, which we were
reviewing.
She wrote a wonderful report, and you could tell
how charmingly and fruitfully she worked over the
lot of them. Some of those pretentious academics
must have walked away from a nice lunch only to
look down and see the knife in their stomachs. She
drove Mandel into a sputtering frenzy, at a lunch
in front of a bevy of fawning young social demo-
crats, over his uncritical printing of an article in
praise of the Estonian Forest Brothers, Baltic fas-
cists who fought with the Nazi Wehrmacht against
the Red Army.
She was also our reporter at the trial of Nazi SS
butcher Klaus Barbie in Lyon in 1987. We printed
her reporter's notebook in WV and Le Bolchevik.
In one sentence, Sue summed up the politics of
the trial:
"Barbie's smiling grimace is a smile of contempt: he can
beat the French state court simply by following its own
rules, since he is willing to say the equivalent of what
French rulers have believed for more than a century:
better Hitler than a workers commune (soviet) in Paris."
Susan is rightly widely admired for her persis-
tence in fighting for programmatic precision. The
purpose was always to get it right — not to win an
argument — because the parly's line really matters.
She sparked a rich internal discussion in late '96
about the slogan "U.S. Bases Out of Japan," which
was raised in our Japanese propaganda protesting
the U.S. bombing of Iraq. After a couple of months
of political exchanges internationally, we arrived at
a much more nuanced and precise appreciation of
how most effectively to express our opposition to
the U.S. imperialist military in various contexts in
this post-Soviet world.
After the French section succumbed to multiple
pressures in '92, especially the collapse of Stalin-
ism, she never stopped trying to sort out what
had gone wrong. When she returned to France in
'95 to help get the section straight around the big
strikes there, she was able to lead again, having her-
self worked through a lot of the prior history and
gained a measure of understanding.
Susan and Frangois were a remarkable love
match. When she got ill, Susan called him her
"great hero." He treated her with unfailing tender-
ness. In '95 she wrote to her cousin Cathy about
her coming marriage: "Who knows what the future
holds, or how long we'll be together, but I wouldn't
have traded this for anything."
I have to add one story here from a long-
time sympathizer in Germany because it so captures
a part of Sue. This was in the mid '70s: "She also had
45
a fine low-key sense of humor: I remember a female
comrade asking Susan where she got her clothes
(since Susan could be elegant in anything), and
Susan answered Salvation Army' When the comrade
expressed surprise, Susan shrugged and smiled and
said, "Wfell, Parisian Salvation Army'."
Susan wished to be cremated. Trotsky wrote in
Problems of Everyday Life, cremation is "a power-
ful weapon. ..for anti-church and anti-religious
propaganda." So it was, as Francois pointed out,
her last act of propaganda. Personally, I find a
fitting conclusion in Trotsky's description of his
friend and comrade-in-arms Adolf Joffe:
"Joffe was a man of great intellectual ardor, very genial
in all personal relations, and unswervingly loyal to the
cause.... The personal bravery of this very sick man was
really magnificent... He was a good speaker, thoughtful
and earnest in appeal, and he showed the same qualities
as a writer. In everything he did, he paid the most exact-
ing attention to detail — a quality that not many revolu-
tionaries have... For a great many years I was bound to
him more closely than any one else. His loyalty to friend-
ship as well as to principle was unequaled."
Remarks by Bruce Anwar at New York Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
Susan introduced Cannonism in France. There
are so many ways to show what that means, I can
only scratch the surface. One thing was her meticu-
lous attention to organizing down to the slightest
detail, which was such a break with the organ-
izational sloppiness that's rampant in the French
left, going all the way back to Trotsky's time. Just
one example: the contingent we formed in the dem-
onstration that took place when Reagan came to
Europe in 1982. Mitterrand had been in power for
one year, acting as the spearhead in Europe of the
anti-Soviet Cold War hysteria. The French left called
a demonstration against Reagan, but they were
wallowing in anti-American chauvinism as a way
of prettifying French imperialism and the popular
front in power.
The LTF carried a banner: "Reagan and Mitter-
rand: Anti-Soviet Warmongers." To prepare the con-
tingent, Susan took the entire party out to a field
near Rouen where we practiced marching in mili-
tary formation so that every comrade would know
his place in the contingent. That was one very
impressive contingent and it greatly increased our
impact on the left.
It also illustrated another point: Susan fought
constantly to break out of what we called the
"historical impasse": the fact that we were never
more than a few dozen in a country of three self-
proclaimed Trotskyist groups, each with several thou-
sand members. In demonstrations, it was accepted
practice — enforced by the Stalinist goons — that
their contingent marched in the front — it was
supposed to be "their" demonstration — the mass of
workers would march behind them, and the
smaller left groups would bring up the rear. And
the LCR goons copied the Stalinists, trying to make
sure that the smaller groups marched behind them,
way at the back. But not us, at least not when we
could help it. I generally headed up our security
team, and Susan would invariably be at my side —
you know, roughly half my size — pushing me on to
be more aggressive at opening a road to get our
contingent into the demonstration.
Susan had a very special tactical sense, an intuitive
feel for seizing opportunities to extend the LTF's
influence and weight. There are so many examples.
One of the best is the December 11, 1980 anti-fascist
demonstration in Rouen that really put us on the
map in that city.
The fascists had been staging a series of provoca-
tions against our comrades, who were doing a
weekly sale of Le Bolchevik at the train station.
Susan proposed that we try to organize a worker-
centered demonstration against the fascists. (This
was well before the 1982 labor/black mobilization
against the Klan in Washington, DC.) That dem-
onstration in Rouen was spectacularly successful,
about 400 people, heavily working-class, which in
that city was comparable in size to the annual May
Day demonstration. But the demonstration only
happened because of about three weeks of con-
stant political struggle, that Susan orchestrated,
against our political opponents on the left, espe-
cially the LCR, who used every maneuver in the
book to try to sabotage the demonstration in the
name of "free speech for the fascists." In the up-
shot, two days after the demonstration, Jaruzelski
staged a countercoup in Poland to spike the pro-
capitalist power drive by Solidarnos'c, and some of
the same groups that had marched with us against
the fascists were now marching with the far right in
solidarity with Solidarnos'c and capitalist counter-
revolution in Poland. But many of those who had
worked with us to build that demonstration joined
the party, and that surge of recruitment led to the
establishment of the Rouen local.
46
Finally, I want to mention the fight that Susan
carried out from the start against this "star con-
ception" of leaders that is so prevalent on the
French left. She fought against the prima donnas
who thought that they alone embodied the leader-
ship, but also against those who stepped back from
taking responsibility and saw her as the "star"
who should do it all. Susan didn't pretend that she
was developing something new and original, just
applying the experience of Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon,
and the founding cadres of our tendency, "just"
doing that.
Remarks by Tom Adams at New York Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
Calm, determined and brave. I like those words,
that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. When
Susan called around to the family late, late one
night last January to tell us that the cancer was back
and she wasn't going to make it after all, she said
something to me that I admit at the time I pretty
much dismissed as false bravado. But now we've all
gone through these last 12 months with her and
watched her die and now I know it was far from
false bravado when she said, "Ah hell, dying young
isn't the worst thing in the world." I think that all
of us unite today under the, I guess revolutionary,
slogan, "We love Susan!"
Ever since I sat there on that snowy February 6th
and held her hand and shared some of her brave
final breaths, I've been pondering those words,
"dying young isn't the worst thing in the world."
Over the last four weeks of grieving, I think I've fig-
ured out some of what she meant anyway. What
would Sue consider the worst thing in the world?
Well, it started becoming obvious to her family, I
think, late in the '60s when we lived across the
street from the University of California in San
Diego. Perhaps a location decision that my parents
regretted eventually. It made it awfully easy to get
to SDS chapter meetings, and I think the cigarette
vending machines were how I learned to smoke.
She headed off to demonstrations up and down the
state and got herself jailed for occupying an admin-
istration building to protest the war — a very earth-
shaking event in our family, of course, where the
Greek immigrant father had to go face his daughter
on the other side of the bars and bail her out.
And it got even more intense the week before
graduation when George Winne self-immolated in
the quad to protest the war. Susan at that point
refused to take part in the graduation ceremony, or
at least she did until her mother Betty took her
aside and gently explained to her, "Your father has
been working his fanny off for twenty years in order
to see his oldest daughter graduate from college, so
I think that you better show up." So she graduated.
And I'll never forget the defiant look on her face
as she strode across, grabbed her diploma quickly,
and sailed across the stage with her head in the air
and refused to shake the bloodstained hands of the
board of regents representatives there that day. I'm
sure some of you remember the despicable Rea-
ganaut Clark Kerr; he looked shocked.
Around the family dinner table in those days Sue
was doing a lot of what I'm sure you were doing in
those days, which was serving notice to your fami-
lies that times were very definitely changing. Her
father, as many of you know, was an immigrant
from a tiny village in Greece, a World War II vet,
product of the GI Bill. Her mother was an immi-
grant too in a sense, who with her single mother in
the 1920s moved north from Arkansas to Missouri
to Chicago to follow the American Dream, as many
people did. Mom of course was in many ways a role
model, especially for the girls in the family. And she
went charging over the years through basically
every door of opportunity that the sexist society of
the time was slowly opening and taught her daugh-
ters to enjoy themselves kicking open more doors.
Although Ange would always claim to be descend-
ed from Alexander the Great, Socrates was more of
his spiritual ancestor. They wanted to raise a bunch
of kids, strangely enough, who would think for
themselves and challenge assumptions and distrust
the common wisdom. They certainly convinced
Susan, I think, that one of the worst things in life
would be to ever take anything on faith. I think
another thing worse than dying young for Susan
would have been to ever violate Socrates' famous
dictum, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
The unexamined life, of course, would be that of the
distracted conventional life that most people lead
without thinking about it.
So all those things would be bad — the unexamined
life, blind faith. But what would Sue consider the
worst thing in the world? I think it's pretty obvious
to everybody in this room. To know that the world
needed to change but not do anything about it.
47
Remarks by Francois Diacono
at New York Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
Susan went as peacefully as she could. She was
very afraid of the suffering that she might endure,
and she did not go through the worst of her fears.
She passed her last day listening to some beautiful
Mozart arias. And she was also so happy to have so
many people, comrades and family, visit her.
I really wanted to mention her sense of beauty.
She was always saying that when she became politi-
cal many things came together — politics, sex, music,
painting. She said there was Catholicism and religion
one way, and sex and many other things including
politics the other — and she knew exactly where she
was going. Part of her becoming political and becom-
ing a political leader was struggling against all these
conservative psychological things. She used to tell
me a lot, "There's no way that you can approach
political problems and think about them if you let
your psyche intervene."
She was always finding projects. She always
amazed me with the energy that she had. When
we'd come back home at 11 o'clock after a full day
at work, she would say, "Well, why don't we do the
three following things next?" She wrote in her
diary, "I feel like I must finish my projects and then
have more.'"
One that we completed and WV put so much
work into was "Women and the French Revolution."
I want to try to explain where that came from. That
was part of her attachment to fighting for women's
liberation. Throughout her years in France, she did
a tremendous job at training especially young
women cadres in fighting against the political prev-
alence of society which says that they are maybe
good for this and that but not good for thinking
because that's a man's thing. She was always ham-
mering Spartacism against parochialism and male
piggishness. When we expelled a comrade in the
early '80s because he was beating his wife, none
of the political opponents in France could believe
that. They were saying, "Well, all right, he was beat-
ing his wife. But what was the real reason he was
expelled, what's the political reason?" That's how
piggish they were.
Another project that she had is the indexing of
the first volume of French Spartacist, which was
very important to her. It's part of the training of a
new generation of communist cadre and also part
of our continuity. One thing that she was very
proud of was being part of a generation of cadre
that was trained in direct collaboration with com-
rade Jim, who himself was trained in the SWP and
by James Cannon, and this is our continuity with
Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. She was very proud
and always very conscious of passing this experi-
ence to a younger generation.
That also goes with her way of doing politics.
Politics is nothing spontaneous. It's hard work, it's
conscious, it requires thought and thoroughness in
everything. I found a nice quote in her diary where
she says, "An insight must have words and that is
where the time comes in. So, it's just not: voilar It
was part of her training and also her inspiration of
young communists. A small story that for me illus-
trates that: When I was a young member in the
Paris office and was putting a glass in the sink, she
was passing through the kitchen and she said, "I'm
glad. I see that you're going to wash this glass."
Being a young male, I'm not sure I would have.
Anyway, the point is that I don't think I ever left a
mess in any office that I worked in after that.
The last thing that I wanted to mention is how
much she loved her father. One story that she
told me about him which she was very proud
of: it was the beginning of the '60s and they were
watching TY watching a civil rights protest. Her
dad was a really conservative guy, I think. Never-
theless, he turned to say, "If my kids were pre-
vented from going to school because of their ethnic-
ity or color, I'd be out there with those guys in the
streets."
Finally, I just wanted to let everybody know that
we had a little ceremony to disperse Susan's ashes.
She wanted it to be done facing Ellis Island, which
was the symbol for her of coming from a family of
Greek immigrants from her dad's side. And it also
faces the ocean; she said it's between Europe and
America, the two places where she spent the two
parts of her life.
She wrote, "If you are a revolutionary you really
do spend all your life preparing to make a revolu-
tion." That's just what you do, and that's just what
she did.
48
Remarks by Paul Costan at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
I was fortunate to know and work with Susan
Adams in that relatively brief but intense period
when she was the founding organizer of the Detroit
local. We were a couple of dozen, enthusiastic but
overwhelmingly new to the party, drawn from
many points on the political map, but primarily the
New Left. We were from all over the country, and I
don't think there was a single comrade who had
even visited Detroit previously.
Within a week or two of arriving in town, half of
us were working 50, 60, even more hours a week
in the plants — and there are few jobs as successful
as auto assembly in isolating some major muscle
groups and making them scream. The city was still
a seething cauldron in the aftermath of the '67
ghetto rebellion. The current racist outrage was a
cop unit that specialized in street executions of
dozens of black youth. Their commanding officer
was running for mayor against a black ex-Stalinist
Democrat while the bourgeoisie nervously debated
this emerging strategy for political control of the
northern industrial centers. And the city and plants
were crawling with ostensible revolutionaries,
almost all of whom had been there longer than
we, many of whose organizations — two brands of
Shachtmanites, Spark, CLP — had made the city
their national center, not to mention the half dozen
or so decomposition products of earlier Trotskyist
work that existed solely in the Motor City.
It was Sue A. who organized and led our inter-
vention into this tempest. I was astounded to read
in the WV memorial that she had barely a year
in the party herself. Of course she didn't do it
alone — yet she was the organizational glue, and for
at least a year the senior political leader. Susan was
a rock — amidst the seemingly daily turmoil that was
the Detroit local, I never once saw her get flus-
tered. She had a unique ability to combine a sense
of perspective and political focus with a seemingly
infinite capacity for detail — her reports are a won-
derful testament in this regard. I remember her
"Greetings from the Vyborg of the North American
proletariat" salutation referred to in WV — I believe
at the first national conference, or perhaps active
workers conference, following the formation of
the local. Vyborg, and the River Rouge complex as
our Putilov — these were among the regular and
purposeful reminders that Susan used to keep us
focused on our immediate goal, the formation of
Bolshevik fractions in a critical industry.
Detroit exerted powerful deforming pressures
on young communists — the depoliticizing tedium
and exhaustion of factory labor, a truly ubiquitous
and heavily social-democratic labor bureaucracy
that had its fingers in everything, and a plethora of
reformist, centrist, and nationalist opponents.
Susan led the local in fashioning an educational
program centered on the Russian Revolution and
party history as a corrective to these pressures, and
implemented a program of regular campus work in
Ann Arbor for the industrialized youth, and yet
more educationals on the OROs. She also sought to
raise our level of literacy and culture, not an easy
task in a city that, for example, has a beautiful
library with original Rivera murals — but no books.
I think it was Susan who added some Brecht works
to the local reading list; I know she certainly took
great pleasure in the discussions about them. She
led our trips to the Detroit Institute of Art for the
rare decent cinema in town, and made sure to
inject readings from Their Morals and Ours into
our frequent discussions of issues of communist
morality in everyday life.
Susan was a fundamentally compassionate per-
son. Living as we did, in closer proximity than
you will normally experience short of barracks
life, knowing no one in the city other than our-
selves, and depending on each other for virtu-
ally everything, our personal lives were far more
intertwined than the norm. Even though she was
barely a few years older than the youngest of
us, her maturity and stability were such that she
was frequently sought out for personal solace,
which she gave freely to all who were at least
half-deserving. She sought the best from people
politically, encouraged the shy and prodded the
tardy — to improve them, and to strengthen the
party. And she imbued daily work with a sense of
revolutionary optimism that was infectious. She has
died far too young.
49
Remarks by Jan Blok at Berlin Memorial Meeting
24 February 2001
Comrades,
It was already reported how Susan took a special
interest in training young members to become
party leaders. I hope to be able to inspire comrades
here, especially the younger ones, to live and fight
like Susan. For the benefit of the younger com-
rades, I expand a little bit to give you a sense of the
situation in the former Soviet Union after capitalist
counterrevolution.
Susan came to Moscow in December 1992 to
lead the work of ICL comrades who were stationed
there. This was a few months after our comrade
Martha Phillips, who led Moscow Station before,
was cold-bloodedly murdered. We have a picture
here of Martha, standing at the grave of Adolf Joffe,
a close comrade of Trotsky who managed to con-
vince Trotsky to stand hard and fight for his beliefs,
like Lenin did. The dangerous work in the former
Soviet Union gave little room for mistakes and
Susan was keenly aware of this. For her, the best
way of avoiding mistakes and learning from them
was to forge the Moscow comrades into a closely
collaborating collective and to make sure that com-
rades had a strong understanding of our program.
When Susan arrived she threw herself into an
intensive study of the Russian language, which was
difficult for her. Before she came to Moscow she
led the work of our French section. At our Second
International Conference in 1992, there was a
sharp political fight with the leadership of the LTF
Unlike some comrades who withdrew or even quit
our party, Sue did everything to assimilate the les-
sons of this fight. Next to her studies of Russian
history, she intensively occupied herself with the
revolutionary history of France. Her educational on
women in the French Revolution which is printed
in the current Workers Vanguard is but one result
of her thorough work.
When you read about events in the past, you
tend to accept that this and that happened, history
took one or the other course, and we intervened
in a certain way If you live through these events
yourself, this is very different. The facts are not as
obvious as in hindsight. As Trotskyists we always
defended the Soviet Union and the deformed work-
ers states against counterrevolution from within or
without. When there was an opportunity to fight
for political proletarian revolution, we did that with
all the forces at our disposal in the DDR. And Susan
was in the front lines of this battle. But none of us
had lived through a counterrevolution before 1990.
And the problems we were confronted with were
manifold.
In Russia, between April and October 1993,
there was a heavy crisis between the parliament,
that still called itself Supreme Soviet, and President
Yeltsin, that puppet of the imperialists who bru-
tally tried to implement the austerity measures dic-
tated by the IMF against the Soviet working class. In
October 1993 Yeltsin moved with tanks against the
Moscow White House, which was the seat of the
parliament. There sat the same bandits who fought
together with Yeltsin for the destruction of the
Soviet Union — the first workers state in the world.
They wanted to maintain some of the state industry
of the former Soviet Union in order to become
themselves the owners of it, while Yeltsin wanted to
destroy this industry.
The initial impulse of several Moscow comrades
— myself included — was to stand beside the events.
We thought that in a fight between two factions of
the Russian capitalist class we don't take a side and
that's it. But Susan kept underscoring: "Comrades,
how often do you see a situation where two fac-
tions of the bourgeoisie shoot at each other? The
Russian bourgeoisie is extremely unstable. This is a
good situation for the working class. We have an
interest in maintaining the Soviet industry. The
workers must be mobilized in their own interests
to defeat Yeltsin. Once they do that, they will easily
clean up the rabble at the White House!" In the hot
October days of 1993 we had a public forum. I
think that the subject we wanted to discuss was
some event during the Cold War. Susan gave the
presentation that day and she started: "It would be
the antithesis to Marxism if we were not to address
today's situation. Marxism is first and foremost a
guide to action. Today's situation in Russia provides
plenty of opportunity for the action of the working
class. We must discuss how to get there."
Yeltsin won the fight and for months the Moscow
White House was a bombed and burnt-out ruin.
Many Moscow workers were shocked at what the
capitalist Yeltsin regime was capable of. Yeltsin's
journalists lied that just a few people got killed. We
saw it ourselves on TV, heaps of corpses piled up at
the White House. I had known pictures like that
only from documentaries about the crimes of the
Nazi Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union. Then Yeltsin
claimed that the Chechen mafia is responsible for
the public disorder. There were massive police
pogroms in Moscow in October 1993. If you were
50
darker-skinned or had dark hair you would get
stopped by cops with automatic rifles who would
check your identity. If one couldn't provide papers
to stay legally in Moscow, these poor people were
kept hostage in stadiums and later deported to the
Caucasus. Many got their gold teeth kicked out. I
once saw that only 300 meters away from our
public office. We were all very nervous in those
days. One of the things Susan made sure is that we
all have our papers on us, call each other in the
evenings and mornings, and make sure that noth-
ing happened to us.
No doubt that the working class of the ex-Soviet
Union was extremely intimidated. Our sales at the
huge Moscow factories dropped from up to 400
pieces of literature to a dozen papers. One day a
comrade and I went to one of our regular sales.
There was a note at the gate: "The factory is closed
until further notice." So the working class became
very passive in 1993. Huge parts didn't even exist
anymore because they were robbed of their cohe-
sion in industrial enterprises. Our own perspec-
tives in the former Soviet Union became more lim-
ited. We could not hope for many new members in
the wake of the counterrevolution and the recent
defeat. Sue told us then: "Nobody promised that
we would make the revolution. But there's a lot of
things for us to do in order to prepare for new rev-
olutions and lay the basis for the next generation of
revolutionary leaders so that they can draw the
lessons of the class struggle."
Susan urged us to read Rakovsky's letter to
Valentinov which is also known under the title "The
Professional Dangers' of Power." It's here on dis-
play. Rakovsky was next to Trotsky the main leader
of the Left Opposition in the USSR, and he wrote
said letter in 1928, four years after the Soviet Ther-
midor and just after the defeat of the Chinese Rev-
olution in 1927 which was prepared by Stalin.
Rakovsky pointed out that the working class goes
through difficult times, but the Left Opposition
won't stop fighting for the mobilization of the
working class to achieve communism. For this, the
lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolu-
tion must be drawn to train future generations of
proletarian leaders. Rakovsky's letter was the basis
of Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed, which
to this day is still the best analysis of the Stalinist
betrayal of the October Revolution.
Susan never gave up seeing in the working class
the key instrument to fight for a socialist society in
the epoch of imperialism. In 1994 she led the two
handfuls of Moscow comrades to work with elan
on the publication of The Third International
After Lenin. The cadre of the international Trotsky-
ist movement in the late '20s and '30s based them-
selves programmatically on this key document.
Before 1994 it was not available in the Soviet
Union. So, we made this text available all over the
former Soviet Union. We distributed 25,000 copies
to bookstores, newspaper kiosks, and libraries
from Vladivostok and Irkutsk in Siberia, over the
miners' towns Vorkuta in the north of Russia and
Rostov in the south, but also to the Ukraine,
Byelorussia, and the former Baltic republics.
Susan also urged us to publish our position on
Afghanistan in Russian. In 1994 we recruited a new
member. He told Susan that he volunteered for the
Soviet Army to go to Afghanistan. This was in the late
'80s when he was 16 years old. Comrades here know
that we said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" when
it intervened on the right side of a civil war on
the woman question — between a petty-bourgeois
regime that wanted to bring progress to a feudal
society and the Islamic mujahedin, the murderers of
women, that were backed by the CIA. We wanted
to extend the gains of the October Revolution to
the peoples of Afghanistan. One night I went home
by cab. I asked the driver what he thought of the
changes in the former Soviet Union. He told me:
"Leave me alone with politics. I went to Afghanistan
in 1986 to fight for internationalism, the Soviet
Union, and all those things. When I came back I had
to watch Ramho and was called a rapist by the same
people who sent me there. Now I'm 26, and all I can
do is drive a cab." Susan realized that Gorbachev's
treacherous pullout of Afghanistan burnt a whole
generation of subjectively revolutionary youth in the
Soviet Union. This was an important, if not final
stroke against proletarian revolutionary internation-
alism by the Stalinist bureaucracy. All the more,
Susan wanted to publish our key articles on this
question in Russian.
An important part of our work in Moscow was
research in the archives of the Communist Interna-
tional. We wanted to find documents by James R
Cannon between 1922 and 1928. He was the leader
of the American Trotskyist movement. In 1928 he led
a fight within the American Communist Party for
Trotskyism, i.e., the Bolshevik struggle for interna-
tional revolution. Cannon's fight was based on The
Third International After Lenin. One day a com-
rade and I went into the archive and we ran into
Pierre Broue, who was for years a leading member
of the French fake-Trotskyist OCI. We told Susan
about this and she insisted that we read our article
in Spartacist with a criticism of Broue's Trotsky
biography in which he portrays Trotsky as a pere-
stroika politician. Susan wanted to make sure that
Sam and I knew who we were dealing with. She also
51
wanted to meet this Broue, and Sam arranged this.
The French social-democratic left is absolutely male-
dominated. So when Broue saw this little charming
and attractive woman who led our work in Moscow,
he was shocked! Furthermore, Susan was the same
person who was responsible for all the polemical
attacks on the so-called fake-Trotskyists in France
who did everything to get Mitterrand's social demo-
crats elected for running the business of French
imperialism. Sam told me over the phone that you
could clearly see that all the polemical attacks and
stings on the OCI still hurt him.
Susan received her training from comrades who
were trained by Jim Cannon in the SWP before it had
renounced Trotskyism. Cannon himself was trained
by Trotsky. Sue was always very proud of the train-
ing that she had received together with a whole gen-
eration of revolutionary youth in the early '70s. In
a very real way she represented the revolutionary
continuity of our international parry that goes back
to the Russian Revolution. A couple of years back
I prepared myself for a presentation on the fight
of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union. Com-
rades from the U.S. sent me a tape of an education-
al given by comrade Jim Robertson in 1973- Jim
stood in front of a hundred young revolutionaries
who he wanted to train into revolutionary cadre. In
the discussion period a number of comrades spoke
who today lead the work of the ICL all over the
world. Susan was one of them. When she was in
Moscow you could feel how everything that she
learned in the early '70s was her daily bread and
butter in the former Soviet Union. She did every-
thing to pass on her knowledge and experience to
the younger comrades in Moscow Station. I was one
of them.
We had several comrades in Moscow who grew
up in deformed or degenerated workers states. Ralf,
who can't be here today, and I were recruited to
Trotskyism in 1990 when the ICL fought against Ger-
man capitalist reunification. After almost a year in
the party we went to Moscow. Susan was very inter-
ested in the experiences of the Soviet and East Ger-
man comrades. With her, there was never the type of
teacher-student relationship where the teacher
knows everything and the student just repeats what
the teacher says. Susan always wanted to learn from
us, too. This made discussions with her so pleasant
and refreshing. She wanted us to read, even if it's
one page before going to bed. She knew that we
would only survive as revolutionaries in the post-
counterrevolution period if we tried to assimilate the
lessons of the many class struggles in history.
In 1994 and 1995 I went to the Ukraine on a reg-
ular basis. The trip took 17 hours. Susan said to me:
"Now, since you have a lot of time to read, why don't
you try your hand at Cannon. This would be very
useful to you." In these six months I read all the Can-
non books that we had in Moscow. Usually I would
come back from the Ukraine and report on what
happened there. Then Sue and I would sit down
in the kitchen and she asked me what I had learned
from the reading. Initially I thought that she wanted
to run down a checklist to see whether I actu-
ally read. But what made her curious was how
I received these books, which questions I had,
and which lessons I drew from the reading. It was
important for her to understand how someone
who grew up in Eastern Europe with a Stalinist
conception of party organization would understand
Cannon. She tried to compare this to her own
reading of Cannon after she was influenced by New
Leftism and Maoism, or the understanding of Can-
non by French comrades who came to us from
fake-Trotskyist organizations.
In 1994 Susan convinced the Moscow comrades
to undertake an intensive study of the struggle of
the Left Opposition against the degeneration of the
Soviet workers state between 1922 and 1928. Every
two weeks a comrade would give a class on a year
or two of this period. Then we discussed these
events. Apart from the many Trotsky texts and his-
tory books that Susan gave to us, she also insisted
on reading E. H. Carr's What Is History? One day a
comrade presented a series of mistakes that Trotsky
made in 1923. Susan said to him: "I'm glad that
you managed the reading well and that you agree
with our criticism of Trotsky in this period. How-
ever, what was lacking in your presentation was an
understanding of the conditions at the time and
why Trotsky came to his conclusions. See, history is
not only reading one or two books but an attempt
to understand the conditions of the class struggle
in the period you're studying. Only when you do
this, can you draw the lessons for today." A couple
of years later, the same comrade wrote an excellent
article for our Spartacist journal on Trotsky's fight
against the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party.
The ICL is known for putting special emphasis
on the training of women comrades to become
revolutionary leaders. Susan was a good trainer. I
remember the time when comrade Linda came to
Moscow. Unfortunately she can't be here today.
Linda came from Australia, an imperialist country
where not too long ago there were still signs on
pub doors which read "Dogs and women are not
allowed in." Linda was an experienced comrade
with some 15 years in our tendency. When she
came to Moscow she had to fight with the chaotic
circumstances in the country, the difficult Russian
52
language, and she was surrounded by comrades
who knew Russian society and the language better
than she did. So she felt somewhat intimidated and
she was initially very shy. Susan early on recognized
Linda's qualities as a leader of our organization.
When Linda raised criticism about the functioning
in Moscow Station, Susan backed her vehemently.
After a short period Linda was elected Moscow
organizer and became the glue that kept the very
different comrades in Moscow Station together.
Today Linda leads the ICL work in Poland.
Moscow was a very rough place socially. The
culture of Russian society went rapidly downhill.
There were also big income differences in Moscow
between our Russian comrades, who at best made
the equivalent of 50 U.S. dollars a month, and for-
eign comrades who made a thousand or more. Once
a month all comrades would go to a nice restaurant
together with the Russian comrades so that the
income difference would not prevent the comrades
who made less from having a social life. We threw
the best parties in Moscow. Quite often we would
cook in the office, and comrades came and we spent
nice evenings cracking jokes and telling each other
our stories, which helped a lot to overcome the hard-
ships in Moscow. And then Susan was an admirer of
arts. Wed go to a Matisse exhibition or to the bril-
liant Mayakovsky museum or a B.B. King concert or
we would just sit in the office and watch the latest
movie from a movie store.
1 want to share a last anecdote with you and this
is about Susan as a fighter. In the end of March of
1995 the Ukrainian government banned the work of
the ICL there. Four comrades were declared to be
persona non grata. Our entry to the Ukraine was
banned. A special unit of the Ukrainian secret service
stormed our apartment in which we stored our lit-
erature. The papers reported that 50 kilograms of
subversive literature was secured, as if it were explo-
sives. The capitalist rulers of the Ukraine did every-
thing to criminalize Trotskyism. What still hurt them
was the warm welcome that ICL comrades received
in the spring of 1993 by striking Russian, Ukrainian,
Armenian, Georgian and Tatar miners in the Ukrain-
ian coal mining area around Donetsk. The remnants
of the Russian-chauvinist Stalinists denounced that
strike. The Ukrainian "left" did the same. The min-
ers had a banner "Nationalism will not pass" and
when our American, German, and Russian comrades
arrived, the miners were very pleased. Susan helped
prepare that intervention and was crucial in ham-
mering out the article with the lessons of this
strike. When we were banned in the Ukraine in
1995, the then government claimed arrogantly that
only they could lift the ban of Trotskyists in the
Ukraine, as if they would survive our party. I'm all the
more happy today to hear that President Kuchma
won't last for long.
But in April 1995 the story of our ban was broad-
cast on the main Russian TV news at prime time.
Our comrades sat in the office, and we saw our pic-
tures on the TV screen. We were quite shocked. At
the end of the TV report there was a moment of
silence and comrades thought: "Damn, what are we
going to do now?" Susan felt uncomfortable with
this silence. She quickly pulled herself together,
stood up and stomped her foot on the floor: "We
will fight against this! We will organize interna-
tional protests! We will bring the Ukrainian govern-
ment to its knees, so they will lift the ban! They will
never have seen international protests against them
like this! We won against the FBI, we will win
against them!" Then she told comrades to re-read
Victor Serges What Everyone Should Know About
State Repression and we set about organizing our
protests in Moscow, while the ICL sections all over
the world organized protests. This was a very pow-
erful international campaign.
This is what Susan was like. She embodied in
every respect everything that our party fights for.
Many comrades will find solace about this painful
loss by remembering and holding up this brave
fighter and intelligent teacher whose life had only
this one purpose — to lead the working class in the
fight for a socialist world. We who have known
Susan or who will learn about Susan today will
always keep a warm place in our hearts for her and
we will fight like she did. Susan is dead. But the
party that she built all her life is very alive. Let's
fight to reforge the Fourth International!
53
Remarks by Eibhlin McDonald at Paris Memorial for Susan
3 March 2001
My tribute to comrade Susan is based on her role
as representative of the International Secretariat in
Europe, which is how I first knew her. One of her
qualities was her training for combat with oppo-
nents. She made sure our intervention at the Lutte
Ouvriere Fete every year was an international effort
and she helped prepare all of us. She was superb
at finding contradictions of the opponents and
exploiting them and she really hated passivity in
the face of an opportunity to build the party. The
first example I remember was in 1980. I was a new
member of the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B).
Workers Power had moved to the left on the Russ-
ian question as the Soviet troops entered Afghan-
istan. The SL/B dismissed this development, saying
they were "still Third Campists at heart." Susan was
furious. She wrote in block capitals "WHERE IS
THE MAJOR ARTICLE IN SPARTACIST BRITAIN
COMMENTING ON THIS??" and said: "With the im-
portance of the Russian question in the world today,
we have a lot of explaining to do if a group moves
to the left on this question and ends up... some-
place else and not in the SL/B."
She also had guts when confronting the chau-
vinism of the opponents. The most spectacular
example was against LO in 1992 at the fete. They
excluded ACT UP; we defended them and LO
threatened to exclude us. We did a stunning protest
outside the big tent where the annual LO-LCR
debate takes place. We just quietly appeared out of
nowhere and stood there with signs denouncing
LO's homophobia and anti-communism. A comrade
said it was like a protest in a Maoist re-education
camp. We arrived just as an LO speaker was explain-
ing that voting rights for immigrants are not impor-
tant— after all, voting rights for women had not
changed anything! Susan maintained her position
in the leadership of our team as we were physically
pushed back by the entire LO goon squad.
You would always want to have her around dur-
ing major class struggle. She made sure the LTF
played an active part in the British miners strike of
1984-85. Dominique came to London and gave a
great forum (attended by striking miners) on our
struggle against the Mitterrand popular front. Min-
ers came to France to raise money. Paul Brewin, the
striking miner photographed with Susan (in the
display), loves to talk about working with French
comrades during the strike. When I told him about
Susan's death, he recalled his visit here and said
those were "hard times, but good times." He says
he learned for the first time what a Stalinist is when
CGT goons chased him off "their turf" in Rouen
where he was collecting money.
I often thought Susans role here during the big
public sector strikes in December 1995 was typical
of her. She had left France following a political
fight; she came back in the midst of a huge strike
wave and took up the reins of leadership. And she
kicked ass because the section was somewhat ster-
ile and deadheaded at the time, which she couldn't
stand. She wasn't wrong very often, but she had
been at the centre of the leadership collective
which went off the rails in 1992. Susan never gave
up until she figured something out. So in 1998 she
contributed to correcting our line on the national
question in France.
It was never easy for Susan, an American woman,
to be a communist leader in France, given the pig-
gishness of the French and European fake left. But
those who crossed her path often underestimated
what they were dealing with. Susan struggled all
her life to learn, to develop her capacity, driven
by determination to be a good communist. She
believed everyone could do that, if they were given
the necessary help and encouragement. This is key
to understanding her success in training youth; and
her dedication to overcoming women's oppression
(as well as her hatred of religion) .
The best way to pay tribute to Susan is to really
think about how she became a Cannonite. She had
the ability to tackle complex ideas and questions, as
well as intractable problems, and yet she was totally
unpretentious and unegotistical. She made you feel
that the struggle to overcome ignorance is not
something to be frightened of.
My favourite Susan story is one I discovered in
an old bulletin. In 1976, 28-year-old Susan is sent
on assignment in Genoa, Italy for the International
Secretariat. A group of three guys had broken to the
left and professed agreement with the Spartacist
tendency. But things were not moving forward.
Susan wrote a report which said they should get
into one city, write some polemics and do political
work, otherwise they would just spin wheels and
concoct theories about our party's deviations. This
plain speaking offended the leader, I suppose
because it was not "high Trotskyism." Of course,
Susan had to comment on the Catholic church. She
wrote: "Italian society is so odd — so many priests
walking around as if they belonged in public made
me edgy" (As if maybe they should have been
54
locked up!) And she mentioned some other feudal
remnants.
The leader of this group went ballistic. He
described her report as "asinine," "lightminded,"
"coarse," and "insensitive." He even concluded with
the following postscript:
"If comrade Alexandre (Susan) had the patience to
glance at Marx's Capital, (Book 1, Chapter 24) she
would find that Genoa had completely emerged from
feudalism, at least three centuries before that idiot
Columbus discovered America."
He was so retrograde he assumed this young,
beautiful woman, an American to boot, must be an
airhead. She was a cultured communist. His prob-
lem was he wanted to vote for workers parties in the
popular front; like most Pabloites they couldn't
bring themselves to say this honestly. It only became
clear later. .
Comrades George and Kate very much regret
they couldn't be here today. George thought we,
the European cadre and especially the French sec-
tion, should learn something important from
Susan. Susan came to France a young American
straight-shooting woman (of relatively recent Greek
origin). She was also a trained Cannonite. Comrade
Jim Robertson trained people to say what is and
cut the crap, as it says in the Transitional Programme —
to face reality squarely, not to seek the line of least
resistance. The Pabloite tradition is to never say what
is, and the European fake left couldn't stand our
straightforward plain speaking.
I think we ought to make a determined effort to
grasp that mysterious thing called Cannonism. As
Susan wrote in the introduction to the Cannon
brochure which Gerard spoke about, it is about
conscious cadre training. It (Cannonism) is the way
to overcome the historic problem of French Trot-
skyism. The introduction lists all of its historic
weaknesses, but says "it would be false to conclude
that the history of French Trotskyism is nothing but
an unrelieved succession of centrist capitulations
committed by a gang of petty bourgeois." Together
with Susan the comrades of this section made many
achievements. Sometimes it is easier to deny one's
past achievements, but this is a self-justification for
doing badly. But to recognise those achievements
poses a challenge: it means recognising we can do
better today. This can be a bit frightening, but one
must face it.
Susan was one of the finest cadre of our Interna-
tional. The LTF is really privileged to have had her
here for 15 years; the LTF in those days was a vibrant
section, a centre of Spartacism and it was a force to
be reckoned with on the left, as you can see from
the pictures of demonstrations. She left a rich legacy
here in bulletins, including the Cannon brochure. It
is the best summary I know of what one would call
Cannonism, so use it to train young cadre.
I spent some time with Susan and Francois; even
with decreasing energy she was organising and try-
ing to accomplish things until about the day before
she died. Her last project was "Women and the
French Revolution" — she discussed the editing and
helped select the photographs. Although she never
wanted to give up, she was proud of what she
accomplished in her life. The best we can do is
carry on with the most important project in her life,
which was building and strengthening the party.
Lega Trotskista d'Italia Letter on Susan
[undated]
All the LTd'I comrades join together with you,
comrades, to remember Susan.
The LTd'I owes many things to Susan. With her
political depth, her ability to teach and coach, and
personal friendly and warm behaviour she followed
the existence of our group since its inception.
Before the founding of the LTd'I as the Italian
section of the Spartacist Tendency in 1980, Susan
was one of the key international representatives
who followed the political situation in Italy and
intervened to build a Trotskyist nucleus of profes-
sional revolutionists in our country — early on with
the "Nucleo Spartacista d'Italia," and later during
the fights against the GBL d'Italia to win the com-
rades of GBL d'Umbria to Trotskyism.
She was one of the first iSt [international
Spartacist tendency] comrades to visit us in Perugia
back in 1978, and it was her special attention to the
woman question that made possible the crucial
fight waged by the iSt to win the majority of GBL
comrades to the perspective of "women's liberation
through socialist revolution" in the country of the
Vatican.
But this was not the only fight she waged to
build the Italian section.
Throughout the first decade of our existence as
55
a Trotskyist nucleus in Italy we saw her regular
interventions as I.S. rep in Europe, as attested to by-
several letters and faxes that reflect only part of the
very rich exchange that was going on by phone and
meetings.
Amongst several other fights she waged, one
thing the LTd'I and the Italian proletariat really owe
her (and William) is the intervention to make the sec-
tion pay attention to the fight against anti-immigrant
racism at the very beginning, when Italy was begin-
ning to turn from a country of emigrants to a coun-
try of immigration. That fight was mainly against
the top leadership of the LTd'I (Federico) who
shared the popular-front lie that "Italians as a peo-
ple of emigrants can't be racists." Among other
things, this denies the atrocities of the bloody colo-
nialism of the Italian bourgeoisie. Spartaco was lit-
erally the first paper to denounce the racist terror
against the new wave of immigrants and unmask
the "Italiani brava gente" lie. We are still very proud
of that record and most of that merit belongs to
Susan.
Another crucial intervention of Susan in the life
of the LTd'I was when another new phenomenon
arose in Italy: the birth of the COBAS unions. While
the Italian comrades at the time tended to see the
COBAS as merely a cover for political groups of the
ex-New Left, it was Susan who stressed the truly
union content of those formations that formed as
a reaction to the continuous betrayals of the offi-
cial unions. History proved her fully right, when in
1999 the COBAS organized a million-strong work-
ers strike against the NATO bombing of Serbia,
while the political groups of the so-called left stood
aside, following their class-collaborationist policy.
One day, back in 1998 in Paris, commenting on a
newspaper's article on the discovery of a site of
prehistoric art, Susan made a remark on how much
information and knowledge those ancient popula-
tions were passing to us just leaving a sign on a
stone. She made a comparison with our work and
how important it is for future generations, even if
we will not be able to actually live to see a revolu-
tion. Susan didn't have the chance to actually see
the society she was fighting for, but she left an
impressive sign, and we will not forget.
Letter by Herbert
Berlin, 24 February 2001
Dear Francois and comrades.
One of the first times I remember Susan was
after our intervention in the HDW shipyard occupa-
tion in Hamburg in 1983. We had done regular
work for some time there. One of the women who
initiated the occupation, by going on hunger strike
with other women to get their husbands and
friends to do something against losing their jobs,
was a workmate of mine. This occupation itself was
a tremendous experience for the Hamburg local of
the TLD [Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands]. Ship-
building and the harbor were seen by all the work-
ing class as such key industries for Hamburg that
this was not seen as just another plant closure. It
was immensely popular among the working class in
Hamburg and the social-democratic city govern-
ment couldn't use force against the workers who
had ready-made plans to defend themselves if the
cops should attack. The occupation spread in days
to another shipyard in Bremen, and steel workers
in the Ruhr were discussing joining it too. For the
time it lasted, nine days, it was the first thing on TV
news all the time. Everywhere you could hear sym-
pathetic discussions, and workers delegations from
other factories arrived every hour. The canteen was
a big meeting room where workers were resting
and discussing about the Betriebsrat and their non-
support to the occupation, while most workers still
saw them as their leaders. Or about Solidarnos'c. A
USec supporter put up a Solidarnos'c flag at the
gate right beside the big banner "Besetzt!" (Occu-
pied!). So we had arguments with workers that the
Solidarnos'c flag was the flag for the defeat of the
occupation, because Solidarnos'c was counterrevo-
lutionary. The British miners strike took place in
the same period.
So there were plenty of interesting discussions.
We had one big problem, and that was that we didn't
have any propaganda about the shipyard occupa-
tion until the very last day, before the Betriebsrat
and the union sold out, doing the dirty work for
the SPD. I guess that Susan was involved to finally
get the propaganda out, which was produced in
Frankfurt. When we had some informal meeting a
couple of weeks later, Susan came to me and said:
"I've heard that you want to recruit workers. That's
really good." I didn't really understand it at first,
weren't we all communists, we wanted to make a
56
revolution, and therefore it was necessary to recruit
workers? But looking at the trouble the TLD had
later to intervene in class struggle and to see con-
tradictions and get propaganda out, I think she
really had a point that this intervention by the Ham-
burg local was exceptional for the TLD. I see her lit-
tle remark in an informal discussion as her way of
encouraging a younger member to take on more
responsibility. Susan later paid close attention to
our work when we contacted a Yugoslav shipyard
worker whom we had contacted since the occupa-
tion, and gave good and helpful advice.
Susan intervened in the TLD and SpAD [Spartakist-
Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, successor to the TLD]
for a very long time. There was hardly a struggle
where her voice couldn't be heard before she took
up the assignment in Moscow. Outstanding was her
work during the impending political revolution in
the DDR. We had our public office and the center
of our operation in Halkevi, a center of Turkish/
Kurdish leftists. They had two rooms, one was their
cafe and the other one they used occasionally for
theater plays and dance performances. The second
one they rented to us. It was without any heating
and it got cold in the winter. I remember Susan
meeting there as she gave comrades their assign-
ments and political guidance for sales and contact
work. There she was, in thick winter clothes, with
scarf and hat on. She must have been there for
hours and hours in this very cold room, but she
gave everybody coming in a warm smile and hello.
On the day before the founding conference of
the SpAD, we had a common assignment to go to
Leipzig and contact some people there who had
worked with us for some time, help them set up a
Spartakist group, and invite them to participate in
the founding conference of the SpAD. I remember
discussions with one couple. They had participated
in the early demonstrations in Leipzig and had a lot
of illusions in some of the oppositionist groupings.
Susan was really great explaining the centrality of
getting our propaganda to the working class. When
we weren't successful from one angle, she tried
another one, always centered on this one point: the
only way to defend the gains of the working class in
the DDR is through the mobilization of the working
class to fight for political revolution in the East and
socialist revolution in the West. In order to do that and
give leadership to the workers, we have to get Arpre-
korr, our daily newsletter, in the hands of the working
class. We didn't recruit them, but Susan gave an excel-
lent example of how to recruit programmatically
The last time I saw Susan was at the SL/U.S. Con-
ference in 1999 after we had the discussion on the
German Revolution in 1923. She had a big smile on
her face and her eyes were shining like diamonds.
Over a beer or a vodka she told me that this was the
first time ever that something like this presentation
had come out of the German section. The presenta-
tion really was the result of a collective effort of the
German section. It was for this collective that could
fight out differences and come to a conclusion, inter-
vene and critically review what we have done, that
she and many other comrades of the International
had fought for so long with the German section. It
was the first step to really root Trotskyism in the Ger-
man section of the ICL and that made her happy.
We owe a lot to Susan and the best way to honor
her is to continue the fight for Trotskyism that she
carried through till the end.
With warm communist greetings,
Herbert
57
Letter by Jeanne
Tokyo, 7 February 2001
Dear Francois and comrades,
A short note to let you know that comrades here
in Japan are keeping you all in our minds and
hearts, and we wish we could be with you now.
Internationally many comrades have commented
how Susan was an exceptional teacher and trainer
of a new generation of proletarian leaders. None
of us here had the opportunity to learn from her,
or work together with her, in this important area
of our work. Comrades here have different memo-
ries of Susan. Arai has a vivid picture of Susan
approaching him during the most recent SL/U.S.
conference and asking him "How are you?" Tonight
he said that this really confused him, because he
thought he was the one that should be asking that
question. Hirata's most vivid memory is of Susan
taking time out from a local meeting in Paris to
say good-bye to him and Toshie when they were
returning to Japan after the 2nd International Con-
ference. That meant a lot to them. Dan remembers
that Susan always stressed that if you want to
understand party history, you've got to read our
internal documents. All comrades remember that it
was Susan who was dissatisfied with what we had
written on the question of U.S. bases in Japan. Her
initial document then went on to spark an interna-
tional discussion that became an article that today,
four years later, we continue to sell very well on a
regular basis.
I think I will always remember Susan for her
capacity to push herself, no matter how painfully,
to go to the root of mistaken political impulses and
actions and try and figure out what happened and
why. We all make mistakes and are wrong at differ-
ent times in our political life. The point is to learn
from those mistakes. That is what makes a leader.
And that is what Susan was.
Today I took some time out and read what Lenin
and Trotsky wrote about Rosa Luxemburg. The fol-
lowing is something Trotsky wrote that really stuck
with me:
"The crisis of proletarian leadership cannot, of course,
be overcome by means of an abstract formula. It is a
question of an extremely prolonged process. Not of a
purely historical' process, that is, of the objective
premises of conscious activity, but of an uninterrupted
chain of ideological, political, and organizational mea-
sures for the purpose of fusing together the best, most
conscious elements of the world proletariat beneath
a spotless banner, elements whose number and self-
confidence must be constantly strengthened, whose con-
nections with wider sections of the proletariat must be
developed and deepened — in a word, of restoring to the
proletariat, under new and highly difficult and onerous
conditions, its historical leadership."
You are going to ask, how is this related to Susan
in any way. Of course the context and situation that
Trotsky wrote about is different from the situation
that we are faced with today. But I do think Susan's
contributions to international discussion serve as a
useful manual in how to build the party, how to
redirect the party during periods of disorientation,
and how to politically analyze the pressures under
which we operate.
We're going to cherish Susan's memory and it
will serve as an inspiration for us and the many
generations of future communists.
With warm communist greetings
and deepest sympathies,
Jeanne/Tokyo
58
Remarks by Sam Kaehler at New York Memorial Meeting
3 March 2001
There was more than a grain of truth when a
comrade now in Poland made the point that many
of us were recruited somewhere else but trained in
Moscow When I arrived in the summer of 1993,
Susan had already been in place for six months.
Events were going pretty hard in the wrong direc-
tion. The Soviet workers state had been strangled
and civilization as it existed was taking a nosedive.
Before 1990, none of us had lived through a coun-
terrevolution, so we were dealing with new theo-
retical questions. In these conditions, Sue welded
together a group of comrades coming from very dif-
ferent perspectives and backgrounds (from former
East German tank commanders to sons of the mili-
tary elite, Americans, Australians, French, and of
course Russians). She calmed down the hotheads
and brought forward the quieter ones. She taught
us to think and act as Spartacists and to generalize
and understand the events that we were living
through.
Each step of the way we had to grapple with
what would happen if the working class intervened
in events and why hadn't it? Sue pushed hard for
historical, theoretical clarity. I think the most signif-
icant thing that we read during this time, and Susan
pushed this, was a document by the Left Opposi-
tion leader Christian Rakovsky called "Letter to
Valentinov," or "The 'Professional Dangers' of Power."
It was an early attempt to generalize on the defeat
of the Left Opposition and to come to terms with
what was Stalinism and what effect was it having on
working-class consciousness. It was the basis for
what became The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky.
It provided a real theoretical link to the original
Left Opposition and our fight against the final
betrayal of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union.
Sue told us then: "Nobody promised that we
would make the revolution. But there's a lot of
things for us to do in order to prepare for new rev-
olutions and lay the basis for the next generation of
revolutionary leaders so that they can draw the
lessons of the class struggle." This inspired the work
on The Third International After Lenin, which was
distributed in thousands of copies for the first time.
On the plane here I read "The Role of the
Individual in History" by the founder of Russian
Marxism, Plekhanov. It wasn't until I was halfway
through the book that I remembered why. It was
the work that Susan said convinced her to dedicate
her life to revolutionary Marxism way back in San
Diego. In short, the point of the essay is that once
you understand the conditions and social forces
that shape society and you want to change it for the
better, you don't have much choice but to be a
communist revolutionary as it is in the recognition
of such necessity that one finds the greatest satis-
faction and use of one's life. That was Susan to the
hilt, and now she's gone.
59
Application for Membership in the Spartacist League
by Susan Adams
15 December 1971
Bay Area Spartacist League
Berkeley, California
Comrades:
I am applying for membership in the Spartacist
League.
I was initially attracted to the politics of the
Spartacist League because they posed a clear and
viable alternative to the inconsistent, at times reac-
tionary Stalinoid politics of the Progressive Labor
Party. Through work in the RCY (I have been a
member of the RCY approximately since May 1971,
but have worked closely with RCY for over a year)
and contact with other groups it became clear that
what distinguishes the Spartacist League from all
other groups on the left is its consistency with the
principles of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.
The proletariat will establish socialism, but not
because they are the most oppressed people in
this society, but because the social existence of the
proletariat creates in this class the unique con-
sciousness capable of organizing the productive
forces in a socialist fashion. The transitional pro-
gram is directed toward the proletariat in this, their
historical role. It provides workers with the organi-
zational and basic theoretical tools required for
the struggle to eliminate the bourgeois state and
to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, the
preliminary to classless society. This proletarian
revolution will be international in scope if it is to
be irreversible. Internationalism is not an abstract
feeling of solidarity with other workers; crucial to
it are the demands for defense of deformed and
degenerated workers states in the case of impe-
rialist attacks. Crucial also are the efforts of
the Spartacist League to establish international ties
and to rebuild the Fourth International.
The strategy of the Spartacist League is unique
in that, while it is based on a careful analysis of
and is responsive to the circumstances of a given
period, it has not capitulated to pressures, but has
maintained a consistently principled position,
insisting in all its arenas of work on posing a
clearly communist pole to attract serious potential
cadre.
The recent occurrence of a potentially factional
situation in the RCY has been, among other things,
an education in the concept and practice of demo-
cratic centralism. Political and organizational disci-
pline, loyalty to comrades, communist morality,
deciding when the basis for a faction exists and
when to form one, are responsibilities of a com-
munist; understanding of such specifics dispels
the notion that democratic centralism is merely
something to which one submits — rather, one
participates.
I am aware of much of the history and all but
perhaps the very obscure positions that the Spar-
tacist League has taken. I am aware also of a need
for a more thorough familiarity, to the point at
which I can deal critically with all the material at
hand. However, 1 feel that I have enough familiarity
and experience to perform with competence and
discipline as a Spartacist League member.
Susan A
Berkeley
[Handwritten annotation]
Motion: That Sue A.'s application for membership
be accepted. That she be accepted as full member
of SL on basis of participation in RCY.
Accepted by BASL, 15 Dec. 1971
Our Comrade
Susan Adams
Workers Vanguard
Susan giving report at SL/U.S.
National Conference, 1972.
Susan in Spartacist contingent at Arab auto workers
one-day strike protesting union bureaucracy's
purchase of Israeli war bonds, Detroit, 1973-
Family photo
n,crR>nilWlO!\!
Workers Vanguard
60
Le Bolchevik photos
79*<- (3 '"'""IS U S0LF[
«wfee fc,,
Susan at Paris protest against 1991 Gulf War.
LTF banner reads: "Defend Iraq Against the
Imperialists! Sink Mitterrand/Bush in the Gulf!'
LTF sponsored 1984 fund-raising
tour of striking British miner, Paul
Brewin (center).
ANCE
L fa • li^Sfe
1 3&\ ,
* tjiTTtftm)1
— — ^-
Susan led LTF protest
of exclusion of AIDS
activist group ACT UP
from Lutte Ouvriere
fete. LTF was itself then
excluded. LTF sign
reads: "Down With LO
Exclusion of Trotskyists
and Homosexuals!"
61
Spartakist
Spartacist
Among Susans significant literary
contributions to the International
Communist League was publishing American
Trotskyist James E Cannon's 1939 speech
on "The French Question" in French.
East Berlin, 14 January 1990:
Susan (at right) with Spartacist contingent at
demonstration honoring Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg during incipient political revolution.
Rape and Bourgeois Justice
LIGUE TROTSKYSTE DE FRANCE —
^^^^^— tendance spartaciste li
<La question francaise»
Discmirs inedit (avril 1939)
de James P. Cannon
fondateur du trot&ysme americain
Women and Revolution
IS)
Women and the™
French Revolution
V
m
%
62
Spartacist
Susan at ICL public meeting
in Moscow, late 1992,
explaining roots of capitalist
counterrevolution. She was
crucial to publication and
distribution of Trotsky's
Tljird International After
Lenin in Russian.
Comrades and friends honor Susan at Pere
Lachaise cemetery in Paris after laying wreath
at Wall of the Communards, March 2001.
Workers Vanguard
Le Bolchevik
63
Elizabeth King Robertson
1951-2005
Elizabeth King Robertson
1951-2005
Our comrade Elizabeth King Robertson died at
home on October 12 after a six-year battle with can-
cer. Over the course of more than 30 years as a pro-
fessional revolutionist, Lizzy excelled as an organ-
izer, propagandist, and editor. A patient mentor and
inspiration for younger comrades, Lizzy provided a
vital link in the fight to preserve our revolutionary
heritage going back to Lenin and Trotsky's Commu-
nist International. At the time of her death, she was
a full member of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central
Committee and of the International Executive Com-
mittee of the International Communist League. Her
loss is incalculable both to our party internation-
ally and to her family — Jim Robertson, Martha and
Martha's children Rachel, Sarah, and Kenneth — as
well as her father Henry and mother Mary King and
the rest of the King family.
Lizzy grew up in a large family in New York City. Fol-
lowing the death of her mother, Barbara, her father
Henry King, a successful corporate lawyer, remarried.
Mary King raised Lizzy as her own daughter, and for
Lizzy she became "mom." Lizzy attended Brearley pri-
vate school for girls in New York. She always valued
the education she received there and many of the
friendships made at Brearley endured until the end of
her life. As a teenager she was sent to Miss Porter's,
an exclusive finishing school for "old money" society
girls. Her first-hand experience of anti-Semitism and
class snobbery there played a role in her becoming a
passionate fighter against racism and inequality.
Lizzy first encountered the Spartacist League in the
early 1970s while a student at Boston University.
Under the impact of the Vietnam War, Boston cam-
puses were a hotbed of New Left radicalism. Lizzy
was active in the Cambridge Tenants Organizing
Committee, a group trying to defend working-class
families from being pushed out of their homes as the
universities expanded. She was recruited to Trotsky-
ism, joining the Revolutionary Communist Youth, the
SL's youth group, in 1973. For many students, the
brush with radical activism was just an episode of
youthful rebellion on the road to an eventual com-
fortable career. But Lizzy's recruitment to the fight for
international socialist revolution was for keeps.
Lizzy was accepted into party membership in
July 1974. She had by then transferred to Detroit,
where the SL was seeking to intervene among the
largely black proletariat of the auto factories. She
impressed comrades as the youth organizer as well
as by her participation in the lively debates that
took place as the party began to get more experi-
ence in trade-union work. Here she also began the
difficult training to become a legal stenographic
reporter, a profession in which she was active until
her debilitation by cancer.
Around 1976 she transferred to New York in order
to be part of the national leadership of the youth
organization (renamed the Spartacus Youth League) .
Lizzy was elected to the SYL National Bureau in July
1976 and was a member of the editorial board of
the monthly Young Spartacus from October 1976
through September 1978. She served for a year
as the SYL National Organizational Secretary. Her
experience as youth organizer and leader was crucial
to Lizzy's understanding of the importance of a
youth organization in the training of party cadre.
In August 1978, she resigned her leading posi-
tions in the youth organization in order to take on
the job of secretary of the Political Bureau. Not only
did Lizzy fulfill the demanding assignment of getting
out regular and accurate minutes throughout her
years in New York, but she turned the job of PB
secretary into a nexus for organizing political dis-
cussions. Her close personal association with SL
National Chairman James Robertson began at this
time, and she remained his loving companion and
closest party collaborator until her death. After serv-
ing on the party Central Committee as a representa-
tive of the SYL, Lizzy was co-opted in her own right
in 1979 and elected a full CC member at the August
1983 national conference. She also took charge of
the subject indexing for the bound volumes of our
press, which are the documentary record of our politi-
cal line and our work. Lizzy transferred to the San
Francisco Bay Area at the beginning of the 1990s.
She tirelessly guided the local leadership, was secre-
tary of the West Coast CC group and also took con-
tinuous responsibility for our local in Los Angeles.
Lizzy's strength was in tackling the intersection of
political principle with concrete social reality, coming
up with tactics and slogans to express our program.
She closely followed the work of Spartacist support-
ers in the trade unions and her counsel was highly
valued by those involved in such work. She was a
66
67
longtime member of the Bay Area Local executive
committee and fought to remain on this body despite
her many other responsibilities because she under-
stood so well that making political decisions real
means daily choices of "what to betray" in order to
focus on the most important things; it means finding
the right comrades for the concrete tasks and prepar-
ing them politically to carry out those tasks.
Lizzy was unsurpassed as a Leninist political
organizer. After a party gathering, she was inevitably
involved in figuring out how to shift personnel or
assignments to make the political priorities just
established actually happen. She had a profound
understanding of how our organizational function-
ing corresponds to our revolutionary purpose. For
decades, Lizzy was one of a handful of comrades
who took initiative in formulating, refining, and cod-
ifying our internal norms and practices as the party
came across new situations or as problems were
seen with the existing rules.
At the ICL's Third International Conference in
1998, she gave a presentation, "On the Origins and
Development of Leninist Organizational Practices."
Published in Spartacist No. 54 (Spring 1998) along
with our revised "Organizational Rules and Guide-
lines," Lizzy's presentation educated both young
comrades and experienced cadres by providing
the historical background, beginning with the first
Marxist organizations founded by Karl Marx himself,
to enable the conference delegates to consider the
Rules. In this presentation, she explained: "Living
organizational rules are one of perhaps a half-dozen
elements that characterize an organization; in that
sense, they are political. But they are not determi-
nate. A sound set of organizational rules is not a
guard against political departures, although depar-
tures from our organizational norms are generally a
signal of political problems. In the absence of Bol-
shevik practices, an organization is necessarily
amorphous, that is, Menshevik."
Though she rarely raised her voice, Lizzy was a
powerful speaker at party gatherings. Her astute
judgment and forthrightness made her a uniquely
authoritative voice in the deliberations through
which the party selects a leadership. Numerous
times she was chosen to chair the nominating com-
mission charged with recommending a slate of can-
didates to the party conference that elects the lead-
ing body (the CC in the SL or the IEC in the ICL).
Lizzy was clear-eyed in seeing the weaknesses as
well as the strengths of comrades, including her
closest friends, and she was renowned for her fair-
ness. This ability is crucial in a Leninist party, which
aims to build its leadership as a collective that is
stronger than the sum of its individual parts.
Lizzy was also her own harshest critic. Although in
great pain, she authored a document on October 7
addressing her role in a political fight in the Los
Angeles Local that had been marred by extreme char-
acterizations of comrades and bureaucratic prac-
tices. Her purpose was not a mea culpa but a state-
ment of conscientious regard for clarity, drawing the
political lessons necessary to strengthen the party.
Beginning in early 1979, Lizzy was a mainstay of
the editorial board of Women and Revolution,
the journal of the SL CC Commission for Work
Among Women, for which she often wrote under
the last name Kendall. Lizzy particularly enjoyed this
assignment, and she excelled at it, as it brought to
the fore her acute understanding of Marxist materi-
alism. She authored or co-authored articles on the
most sensitive subjects, defending human sexuality
and exposing the barbarous cruelty of the bour-
geois state as it destroys the lives of people whose
only "crime" is that their sexual proclivities and
needs vary from the repressive, religion-based stric-
tures of hypocritical bourgeois moralism. Her area
of expertise was the thorny issue of human sexual-
ity in its diversity, articles like "Something About
Incest," "The Uses of Abuse," and "The 'Date Rape'
Issue." She once explained:
"The reason that we talk about questions of sexuality is
that often these questions are politicized, usually not by
us but by the bourgeoisie, by some element of society,
that takes questions that are normally of a secondary
interest and makes them political questions that we not
only can comment on but, in certain circumstances,
must comment on and must take a position on."
When publication of W&R was suspended after
the Spring 1996 issue, Lizzy continued to contribute
to the articles published under the W&R mast-
head in the press of the national sections of the ICL,
including Workers Vanguard, and in Spartacist. Dur-
ing the last weeks of her life, Lizzy was intensely
involved in editing, in collaboration with W&R pages
editor Amy Rath, "The Russian Revolution and the
Emancipation of Women," which appears in this
issue of Spartacist.
The final undoing of the October Revolution in
1991-92 was a historic defeat for the workers of the
world, ushering in a difficult period for revolution-
ists. Our difficulties in coming to grips with the
new period have been expressed in political disori-
entation and corresponding internal difficulties
(see "Spartacist League 12th National Conference —
A Hard Look at Recent Party Work and Current
Tasks," WV No. 841, 4 February 2005). Nobody
has been immune to these problems, but com-
rade Lizzy played a forward role in trying to get
the party out of this morass. Several times during
the past five or six years, our internal bulletins
68
have featured a document by Lizzy, submitted early
in the discussion, often less than one page in
length, which became a touchstone for subsequent
contributions. Often her document would begin
from a concrete, seemingly tactical question of a
particular projected intervention somewhere, and
would proceed logically to illuminate program-
matic and principled issues.
After Lizzy's cancer was diagnosed, she under-
took surgery, chemotherapy and, finally, radiation.
Her father ensured that she obtained high-quality
care, which was ultimately unavailing. She contin-
ued to do her biweekly sales and other public polit-
ical activity In April 2003, she was wounded by a
"non-lethal projectile" fired from a cop shotgun
during the vicious police attack on antiwar protest-
ers, longshoremen, and port truckers at the Port of
Oakland.
Memorial meetings for comrade Lizzy were held
around the world, including in New York City on
November 12 and Oakland, California, on November
20. The New York meeting was attended by more
than 20 members of her family, as well as former
schoolmates from Brearley. Elsewhere, as is the cus-
tom in the communist movement, comrades gath-
ered at memorials to past revolutionaries — Karl
Marx in London, Rosa Luxemburg in East Berlin,
Leon Trotsky in Coyoacan, heroic Soviet spies
Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi in Tokyo — to lay
wreaths or raise a glass in Lizzy's honor.
Her comrades, family and friends will miss Lizzy's
presence in our lives for as long as we have con-
sciousness. We will miss her fine mind, her humor,
her warmth, and compassion. We will always remem-
ber her beauty and courage. Even in the midst of our
grief, we celebrate her life and find comfort in know-
ing that she lived as she chose to and never wavered
in her belief that fighting for the liberation of all the
exploited and oppressed was the right way for her
to live. For us, she has been a very strong link in the
chain of continuity that goes all the way back to Marx
and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, and Cannon. We
resolve to honor our beloved comrade Lizzy by car-
rying on her struggle.
— reprinted from Spartacist (English-
language edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Remarks by George Foster at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
20 November 2005
Comrades, friends and family members, we are
all gathered here today to honor the memory of
Elizabeth King Robertson, a professional revolu-
tionary and member of our party for over 32 years.
Her death after a six-year battle with cancer is a
keenly felt loss to our close-knit International, and
as well a devastating loss to her family — Jim Robert-
son, Martha and Martha's children Rachel, Sarah,
and Kenneth — and to her parents Henry King and
Mary King and the rest of the King family, whose
participation with us in a memorial meeting held
last week in New York City was greatly appreciated.
As one of the founding members of our Boston
Local, I've known Lizzy since she joined us. So let me
talk a bit of her political life. Thirty-two years ago in
Boston, as a 21-year-old New Left radical activist,
Lizzy decided to join the Spartacist League's youth
group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth. Young
people of that day were radicalized by the Viet-
nam War, the struggle for black freedom and also for
women's liberation. The Roe v. Wade decision was
only a few months old when Lizzy joined. And
throughout her life she remained a dedicated fighter
for women's liberation through socialist revolution.
Prior to joining she had been active in the Cam-
bridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC), a
tenants' rights group trying to defend working-class
and minority families being pushed out of hous-
ing in Cambridge by various university real estate
developers. The CTOC organized sizable demonstra-
tions and rent strikes and mobilized large numbers
of Cambridge residents to intervene in city council
meetings. Lizzy was, I believe, the CTOC's full-timer/
office manager. Was she supposed to be going to
school instead? I don't know. To have such a young
person playing such a large role was typical of the
times, but impressive as well — an early indication of
her capacities.
Around that time, the largest left group in Cam-
bridge was the Progressive Labor Party and they had
been active around the CTOC. But I am sure that
outfit, with their terrible line on the woman ques-
tion, Stalinist bluster and thuggery and, above all,
glorification of ignorance, would not have appealed
to Lizzy. Instead she joined us and committed her-
self to the cause of the revolutionary emancipation
of the working class and the program of Trotskyism.
As Trotskyists, we base ourselves on the experience
of Lenin and Trotsky on the Bolshevik-led Russian
Revolution of October 1917, and as well on the
69
struggle by Leon Trotsky and the International Left
Opposition against the degeneration of that revo-
lution, a degeneration presided over by J. V Sta-
lin with his anti-revolutionary dogma of "socialism
in one country." As Trotskyists, we stood for the
unconditional defense of the gains of the October
Revolution against imperialism and/or capitalist
counterrevolution, while simultaneously seeking to
mobilize a workers political revolution to oust the
anti-revolutionary bureaucracy whose policies en-
dangered those gains and short-circuited revolution
internationally
We recruit to our party based on agreement with
our Marxist principles and acceptance of party
program. So when Lizzy told us of her class back-
ground, which was one of considerable economic
advantage and privilege, it was noteworthy but not
a matter of concern. The Leninist party necessarily
must have elements of both declassed revolution-
ary intelligentsia and the most politically advanced
layers of the working class.
Neither Marx, Engels, Lenin nor Trotsky were
proletarians in origin; all were "traitors," in a sense,
to their class origins. In fact, Lizzy's "advantages," a
good education and a sense of duty responsibil-
ity, and self-confidence instilled by her parents and
teachers, were put to very good use by her. She had
a very keen sense of humor, and also, always, great
poise and seriousness.
As a result of significant recruitment in Boston,
by late 1973 we were able to establish a branch in
Detroit, then the center of the largest and most
militant sector of the U.S. labor movement. Lizzy
was among those who volunteered to transfer, and
when she arrived there, she was elected youth
organizer. Many years later, she told me how much
she enjoyed being Detroit youth organizer, and I
agreed that politically the city and campuses were
really interesting back then, but couldn't resist jok-
ing that it couldn't have hurt that she was one of
the few women in an overwhelmingly male local,
and that most of the comrades were understand-
ably totally infatuated with her. She just started
laughing at me, and said, "So what's wrong with
that?"
Another story: In the summer of 1974, we had a
national meeting on a campus located near Detroit.
Most of the comrades rented rooms at the campus,
but four from California couldn't afford to stay
there. So when they came into town in their car,
they were put up in a large house where a number
of Detroit comrades lived, including Lizzy — some-
thing at the time we used to call a commune. Now,
two of those comrades were, while young, mothers
of young children and rather hard-bitten types.
Well, the commune was in a rough neighborhood,
and when the comrades got inside, the two moms
were appalled. The interior resembled something
out of a bad teen movie. But then they opened
a door and found a neat, clean bedroom com-
plete with a real bed and a nightstand on which
there was a Plexiglas cube in which a comrade had
mounted a lot of photos of a rather large family.
Needless to say it was Lizzy's room, something they
were able to ascertain the next day at the confer-
ence by matching her face to the family snapshots.
It was in Detroit that Lizzy completed her train-
ing to become a legal stenographic reporter. This
stood her in good stead as a way of earning her liv-
ing, and she continued to work as a court reporter
until her debilitation from the cancer surgery made
that impossible. We all have a picture in our heads
of this very well-groomed and tiny woman lugging
a very heavy stenographic machine, which must
have weighed 25 percent of her total body weight,
to and from work. Again, her training and profes-
sionalism in this field was put to good use in the
party — recording meetings and editing and pro-
ducing party bulletins.
Her job as a court reporter gave her a very good
sense of the courts, law and the legal system, which
proved very valuable in legal defense work. Lizzy
had a very keen intelligence, and had she been
so inclined, she would have been a very effective
attorney. And those of us who knew her know one
would not want to be cross-examined as a hostile
witness by Lizzy. As it was, she was a fierce defender
of Marxist principle.
After Lizzy moved to New York around 1976, she
was elected National Organizational Secretary of
the youth. She helped coordinate the activities of
the youth branches and worked on the youth press.
In contrast to a couple of "precious" young male
editors at the time, she did not disdain the tech-
nical side of producing the paper. By the time she
became Political Bureau secretary in the summer
of 1978, she had served her apprenticeship. As a
young organizer and youth activist, she had gained
valuable experience dealing with trade-union ques-
tions in the heavily black city of Detroit, she had
learned an exacting skill, had served as a national
youth leader and learned to issue propaganda, put
out a youth paper and organize its distribution.
A short while after she became PB secretary she
and Jim got together. She was both his loving com-
panion and his closest political collaborator until her
untimely death. Lizzy was clearly the best PB secre-
tary we ever had, both in terms of sheer technical
capacity, organizational skills, and political acumen.
She helped shape and organize political discussion,
70
and she played a central role in facilitating commu-
nications between our center and SL/U.S. local com-
mittees, as well as our International. And this was a
high-stress job — actually having to be ready at any
time, and I do mean any time, to assist in interven-
ing and engaging in struggles, external and internal,
to try to decide what could and should be done with
the often very meager resources at our disposal.
As a lapsed physicist, let me share with you a quip
from Richard Feynman, who let the cat out of
the bag: "Physics," he said, "is what physicists do late
at night." Well, Trotskyism is what Trotskyists do late
at night.
Lizzy's responsibilities entailed a lot of travel, dis-
cussion, inquiry, and explaining points of program
and organization to various comrades, local commit-
tees, and sections. But through this, Lizzy acquired
a very comprehensive understanding of the cadre
and component parts of the ICL and Spartacist
League/U.S., which made her invaluable in deciding
questions of what personnel to allocate to address
what task. It is also why she played a very large role
in a number of nominating commissions, charged
with evaluating the capacities of comrades nominat-
ed to leadership bodies at various of our national
conferences.
Lizzy was, as well, in charge of indexing the
bound volumes of our press and additionally was
editor of internal party discussion bulletins. Min-
utes of meetings, our press, and our discussion bul-
letins— these are the documentary history of our
tendency. And as Leninists, we strive to be the his-
toric memory of the working class, and to distill
from such experiences and struggle the principles
and program to guide us in our activity. There is
no other way to test our understanding and guide
our future actions and intervention as a disciplined
party acting on a clear line, and there must be a
record, so that we can evaluate what we under-
stood and where we went wrong. To do otherwise
is not to be a Marxist, but to repeat empty formulas
as ex post facto justification for whatever activity
you undertake. For us, principles, theory, and pro-
gram, i.e., consciousness, are indispensable.
Lizzy was a very modest comrade. When she
was first proposed to become a full member of
the SL/U.S. Central Committee, she was unsure of
her qualifications — she saw her main talents as lying
on the organizational and administrative side of
things. But the delegates at our 1983 National Con-
ference thought otherwise and did elect her. It was
a very wise choice; she was selected for her sober
political judgment and keen insights as well as her
remarkable organizational capacities.
In the Spartacist League, we understand there is
no such thing as a 100 percent leadership. Jim has
argued that if we can manage to be right 70 percent
of the time, we will be doing very well indeed. And
Lizzy would be the first to admit that she made
her share of errors. But what was truly remarkable
about her was her absolute lack of subjectivity or
personal defensiveness in addressing such errors,
both her own and others. Her concern was to get at
the root of questions, to understand, and based on
that understanding, to move forward.
These qualities of hers were best expressed in a
letter sent to me by a comrade from the Bay Area:
"There are three concrete lessons I am very aware I
learned from Lizzy (though how well or not is of course
not her responsibility). The first two are central to the
building of effective Leninist collectivity and Jim has
demonstrated them to me as well: listen carefully to
every comrade, because reason is not the exclusive
property of anyone; and (relatedly) the conclusions of
properly prepared collective debate of a political ques-
tion are much more likely to approximate right than any
single comrade's opinions (including not least one's
own!). The third lesson is more personal, the result of a
fight Lizzy in particular waged with me over the course
of some years. ..the difference between moral imperative
and dialectical materialism, between moralistic judg-
ment and materialist understanding."
Additionally the comrade closes her letter: "To ease
my conscience in regard to Lizzy's own wishes to
be seen for what she was, I must add that she was
a slow reader and not a good speller."
The last six years of Lizzy's life, after she discov-
ered she had cancer, are both grim and inspiring
and give us a true measure of her character, her
revolutionary will, and her humanity. She under-
went chemotherapy, two extremely difficult and
painful operations, and radiation treatment. I
believe she had the very best medical treatment
available through the intervention of her father. But
ultimately it was to no avail. The hopes of her fam-
ily, friends and comrades were cruelly dashed — the
cancer at some point metastasized and resulted in
a very painful death.
Yet it was in this period that Lizzy struggled with
great will, effectiveness, and determination to defend
the programmatic and organizational integrity of the
party. The October Revolution was the signal politi-
cal event of the 20th century, resulting in the over-
throw of capitalism and creation of the world's first
workers state. The demise of the October Revolution
in 1991-1992 was a historic defeat for the interna-
tional working class, ushering in a period of reaction
and great difficulties for proletarian revolutionists.
Most notably, we have to struggle anew to win the
workers of the world to the banner of Marxism.
Our great difficulties in this period have been
expressed in political disorientation and associated
71
organizational disarray, matters about which we have
written in our press. It was in these circumstances,
on a number of issues of principle, program, and tac-
tics, that comrade Lizzy forcefully intervened to keep
us the party she had originally joined, the party of
the Russian Revolution. She did this with clarity, great
energy, and astounding determination, while suf-
fering both physical disability and great pain, when
much of her decreasing reserves of energy were
spent on frequent visits to doctors and therapy.
Lizzy's obituary published in Workers Vanguard
notes that her strength was in tackling the inter-
section of political principles with concrete social
reality: coming up with tactics and slogans to
express our program. That is very true, but it was an
expression of both a lifetime of experience and very
hard work.
V I. Lenin, the founder of the Bolshevik Party,
noted that it's far more difficult to be a revolution-
ary in periods of reaction than revolution. At a
speech memorializing the Bolshevik organizer Yakov
Sverdlov, he noted that during the difficult period of
preparation for revolution there arises an inevitable
gulf between theory, principle and program, and
practical work, and that the Bolsheviks suffered from
too deep an engrossment in theory abstracted from
direct action. That is why we define ourselves as a
fighting propaganda group, one that struggles to find
opportunities, however modest, to intervene in strug-
gle and test our program, organization, and cadre.
Early on after his return to Russia in 1917, Lenin
cited a line from Goethe's Faust: "Theory, my friend,
is gray, but green is the eternal tree of life." It was a
polemic against those who did not understand that
political theory is an abstraction from experience,
and that such theory, divorced from an analysis of
the actual developments, runs the danger of degen-
erating into empty sloganeering. At issue here was
the decision to struggle to embark on the course
which led to the victory of the October Revolution.
That capacity to grasp the green eternal tree of life
is a rare quality but it's absolutely necessary to trans-
form revolutionary program to living reality. And
that's how Lizzy lived her life, and that, as well as her
friendship, beauty compassion and courage, is what
we shall miss.
In the Transitional Program, Trotsky writes: "To
face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least
resistance; to call things by their right names; to
speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter
it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little
things as in big ones; to base one's program on the
logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the
hour of action arrives — these are the rules of the
Fourth International." That is what Lizzy embodied,
and we honor her best by honoring those rules.
Remarks by Amy Rath at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
20 November 2005
It's an honor and a challenge to address Lizzy's
huge contribution to the party's work around the
woman question, specifically Women and Revolu-
tion, which was very close to her heart.
Lizzy's last contribution to the party's work was
"The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of
Women," in defense of the road of October, for the
Women and Revolution pages in Spartacist. Com-
rades were concerned that the stress of editing this
ambitious article would be too much for her, given
how ill she was. But she insisted on it. Often she
had to work lying on her back to try to manage the
pain. Finishing the article gave her a reason for liv-
ing through those last months. For her the article
was key to getting out the message of the truly rad-
ical vision of human society that the Bolsheviks
fought for, to educating this younger generation in
the road of Lenin and Trotsky. And it was truly excit-
ing even just to do the research, given the very
inspiring material. It was hard for her to let it go.
Lizzy was an exemplary member of the editorial
board of W&R since 1979, concerned about every
aspect of the paper: from editorial policy and broad
political questions, to sales, to the grind of getting
it out. She worried about our long-suffering sub-
scribers who faithfully signed up for their three
issues a year and then... didn't get them. Struggling
with the excruciating gap between perspectives and
capacity, we never were able to produce as much as
we wished. We struggled with a basic contradiction:
the journal began as an instrument of intervention
into an active women's movement. But that move-
ment no longer existed as a target of party work.
Lizzy was good at generating copy ideas out of the
work of the locals on suitable issues. You can bet
that after she started spending a lot of time on the
West Coast, every article in W&R that's datelined
California was there by virtue of her work.
72
Lizzy always had at least a finger if not her whole
arm in each article. The most ambitious were a col-
lective product, sometimes described by our critics
as "editing by mass democracy" While our methods
could certainly have been improved, such articles
require that kind of collaboration and Lizzy was key in
making that work. Sometimes she provided a crucial
insight. Sometimes it was thoughtful advice on unty-
ing some knotty problem of politics or personnel.
Sometimes it was a few well-considered touches on
an almost finished piece. Sometimes it was an in-
depth edit job, taking in the points of our eccentric
editorial body and turning a draft into a cogent polit-
ical statement. But Lizzy was never so dedicated to
editing that she didn't take time off now and then to
take in a Lakers game.
Always, even after the advent of computers, Lizzy's
editing tools were her pencil, eraser, scissors, and
roll of tape. She would begin with an outline, drawn
up on a yellow pad and covered with arrows and
inserts as it was expanded. The draft would then be
cut up and re-pasted following the outline as a sort
of map with additions in pencil. She always insisted,
"I wrote nothing." In fact she wrote almost nothing
from scratch, having a horror of the blank page. But
she was a superb editor — one of the best at keeping
a writer's words and making them work, and with
keen political judgment. Though I wouldn't make any
claims about her spelling, and she was rather strange
about commas.
Lizzy's area of expertise was the thorny issues of
human sexuality in its diversity, articles like "Some-
thing About Incest," "The Uses of Abuse," and "The
Date Rape' Issue." It's fitting that Isaac Deutscher's
famous remark about "hunger, sex, and death," as
the three tragedies besetting man, is on the display.
As Deutscher says, "Hunger is the enemy that Marx-
ism and the modern labor movement have taken
on." But W&R was pitched to cover the human con-
dition writ large. The woman question touches the
human being in all of us — and so Lizzy liked to say
that W&R is the "sex and death" desk.
Acting as the tribune of the people — protesting
every act of oppression, no matter what layer of soci-
ety it hits — can put you in some pretty unpopular
spots in these days of the anti-sex witchhunt. Time
after time, Lizzy had her finger on the hot-button
questions that were socially explosive and about
which we have something unique and powerful
to say. In "The Uses of Abuse," "Something About
Incest," and "Date Rape," as we later summed up:
"We explored some of the ambiguities of sexuality in a
society where the deformities of class inequality and
racial and sexual oppression can lead to a lot of personal
pain and ugliness. We pointed out that while the abuse
of children is a vicious and horrible crime, many illegal'
sexual encounters are entirely consensual and devoid of
harm per se. The willful conflation of everything from
mutual fondling of siblings to the heinous rape of an
infant by an adult caretaker creates a social climate of
anti-sex hysteria in which the perpetrators of real vio-
lence against children often go free. And we insisted that
the sexual proclivities of a group-living mammalian
species such as our own are patently ill-suited to the
rigid heterosexual monogamy which forms the ideolog-
ical foundation of the institution of the family, rein-
forced by organized religion."
— "Satan, the State and Anti-Sex Hysteria,"
W&R No. 45, Winter-Spring 1996
Our position is summed up in the concept of
effective consent as the guide in all sexual matters
and opposition to state interference in private life.
We do not condemn any kind of sexuality or sexual
act per se — what counts is that it is consensual.
After we published "Date Rape" we received let-
ters from a few outraged feminists canceling their
subscriptions. That article lost us more readers than
any other in the history of the tendency! So we knew
that our paper was being read by its intended audi-
ence, and that we had hit our target hard enough to
get an active and angry response. Lizzy was delight-
ed and proud. We also had to have a fight with a few
youth comrades over the question, and Lizzy made
a clarifying political intervention into the discussion
that's printed in a bulletin: "The reason that we talk
about questions of sexuality is that often these ques-
tions are politicized, usually not by us but by the
bourgeoisie, by some element of society, that takes
questions that are normally of a secondary interest
and makes them political questions that we not
only can comment on but, in certain circumstances,
must comment on and must take a position on."
In grappling with the tangled issues of sex and
society we sometimes arrived at a position only
after extensive party debate. The article "The Agony
of AIDS" is one example, and Lizzy played a leading
role in an important party discussion that began in
the PB. It was a challenge to address the emergence
of this deadly disease, which has been politically
charged from the beginning. In this article we took
up the controversy over the closing of the gay bath-
houses at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Our
first response in 1984 had been "a knee-jerk reac-
tion." We wrongly demanded "Government Out of
the Baths!" according to the principle of opposition
to state interference in private life.
But this public health emergency was about life
and death. You don't cite the First Amendment
when the Fire Department is hacking through your
walls to stop a fire. In reconsidering our position we
wrote: "The problem is that there are two principles
73
here which are always in tension: public health vs.
individual rights. Which one has more weight at any
given moment can only be decided by examining the
particular health threat posed." This was a key party
discussion on the nature of the state.
Lizzy also played a key role in the piece on the
traditional practice of female genital mutilation, which
took on the liberal and leftist advocates of cultural
relativism, which rejects and opposes the rational
humanism of the Enlightenment as a form of West-
ern cultural imperialism. At its extreme this doc-
trine leads to rationalizing the most barbaric anti-
woman practices in tradition-bound patriarchal
societies.
This problem came up again in an article in our
Canadian sections press on the sharia courts in
Ontario. Lizzy criticized the draft, which stated: "In
fact, the choices facing Muslim immigrant women
are quite terrible. The capitalist injustice system is
no alternative to traditional law." Lizzy came back:
"But comrades, of course bourgeois democracy is
better than pre-feudal reaction. That's one of the
bases on which we are not cultural relativists. That
does not mean that we consider the capitalist
courts to be a friend of Muslim women — or many
other women, for that matter. You are forgetting
the question of social struggle, so there's no alter-
native to reaction, no matter what the legal system
looks like. But what regime best facilitates struggle
by the working class and oppressed — one based on
European Enlightenment or one based on seventh-
century religious obscurantism?"
Lizzy's critical capacities and her interest in the
woman question and commitment to getting it
right proved invaluable to the work of the Interna-
tional many times. Before W&R was suspended as a
separate publication and incorporated into Sparta-
cist, it was increasingly international in scope, even
though formally it was published by the SL/U.S. The
editorial board expanded to include members from
other sections, while the sectional presses began to
include their own Women and Revolution pages.
Lizzy's vast knowledge of the party was key in mak-
ing this work.
The current W&R article in Spartacist, about the
U.S. government-sponsored "sex slaves" hysteria
about immigrant prostitutes, was the product of
an international discussion on the impact of the
counterrevolution on the status of women. This
discussion — where, again, Lizzy played a leading
role — reconfirmed our opposition to laws against
the "crimes without victims" like prostitution, gam-
bling, and drug use, resulting in an important addi-
tion to the LBL program and the SYC's ten-point
program.
We've recognized that the social questions are if
anything even more fundamental to our political
work in the U.S. today Who knew 20 years ago that
in the 21st century we'd be arguing about religion
and abortion with youth interested in leftist politics?
In my last meeting with her, Lizzy expressed worry
about insufficient resources being given to the work
of the Women's Commission, and stressed that the
party needed to pay more attention to this work,
which is international in scope.
To end, I'd like to quote Plekhanov: "Freedom is
putting all in the service of your aim." That's what
Lizzy did for the party.
Remarks by Joseph Seymour at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
20 November 2005
Many years ago another senior woman comrade
in our tendency quipped that while Marxism is not
merely common sense neither does it conflict with
common sense. Lizzy King Robertson had an excep-
tional ability to combine the principles of revolu-
tionary Marxism, that is, Leninism and Trotskyism,
with common sense. And that's actually a very diffi-
cult thing to do, especially in the United States.
For our understanding of social and political real-
ity and of the interests of the working class and
oppressed is very different from those with whom
we interact and engage in common struggle, those
whom we seek to influence and win to our program:
union-loyal militant workers, black and Latino
activists, left-liberal student youth. For example, they
consider it simply common sense to vote for Demo-
crats, especially liberal Democrats, against Republi-
cans. Our principled opposition to the somewhat
more liberal party of American capitalist imperialism
is not easily comprehensible to those with whom we
constantly interact.
Because we are surrounded by a notion of com-
mon sense so different from our own, we have to
guard against a tendency to flatten out and over-
simplify reality. It's all too easy to paint a situation
in black and white, ignoring various shadings of
74
gray. Sometimes we face situations in which our dif-
ferent principles conflict with one another and we
have to decide which should predominate on the
basis of the concrete circumstances. Lizzy's sound
judgment, her practical sense toward precisely that
kind of situation, was one of her great strengths.
She understood that in working out our line, as
well as explaining and arguing for it, it was neces-
sary to consider the complexities, the contradic-
tions, the ever-shifting factors in the real world. She
often reiterated an important guideline directing
her political thinking. "Can I explain to a close con-
tact or a new youth recruit a line that we've taken
or are considering taking in a way that makes sense
to them so that they are likely to agree with it or
at least consider it reasonable? Because if I can't
do that, if I can't make plausible arguments, then
maybe the position is wrong." Marxism is not an
esoteric doctrine totally divorced from a common-
place understanding of reality and the interests of
working people.
Lizzy expended a great deal of time and energy
studying, learning about cultural, social, and polit-
ical conditions not only in the U.S., where her main
areas of political responsibility were located, but
also in other countries where we intervened politi-
cally. She worked hard to understand the prevailing
attitudes and ideas in the different groups, tenden-
cies, and milieus with which we engaged in politi-
cal combat.
Just after she died I talked about Lizzy with com-
rade Laura, one of our younger cadre. She recalled
a discussion she had with her when she was still a
contact. Lizzy had been informed that Laura came
from a radical feminist background, and so she
asked her about the current thinking in that milieu.
Lizzy had two qualities of mind that often do
not go together. She had strongly held and well
thought-out ideas of her own. At the same time,
she was very open to considering the ideas of other
comrades, sympathizers, also contacts. She was
ever willing to explore new and different ways of
looking at questions within the framework of our
shared understanding and programmatic principles.
She had an intelligence that was simultaneously
receptive and critical with both elements held in a
fine balance.
During the past decade or so I came to use and
regard Lizzy as a kind of intellectual editor. I would
tell my somewhat speculative, not fully thought-out
ideas. What was happening in the world. What was
happening on the left in the U.S. and internation-
ally. How we should respond to these develop-
ments. And if Lizzy didn't understand my ideas or
didn't agree with them, it was back to the drawing
board. I would elaborate or modify my ideas in
light of her response. Sometimes I decided that I
was flat-out wrong.
My close political collaboration and rapport with
Lizzy developed in the early 1990s mainly through
working together on the editorial board of Women
and Revolution. Comrade Amy has spoken about
the importance of this journal and Lizzy's central
role in it. Through W&R we presented a broad
Marxist worldview and our vision of and commit-
ment to all-sided social liberation, the ultimate goal
of our struggle for a future communist civilization.
For the last six years of her life Lizzy battled lung
cancer and related serious and often painful med-
ical infirmities. During the last several months she
faced certain imminent death and experienced con-
stant excruciating pain. Throughout these ordeals
she displayed a strength of character and a commit-
ment to and sheer enjoyment of revolutionary pol-
itics which impressed even those of us who knew
her well and respected her greatly. She remained
the same old Lizzy: smart, witty, sensible in her
judgments, interested in a wide range of activities,
issues and concerns. And this was not willful sto-
icism on her part. This was what she was in her
innermost being.
I remember a conversation with her three or
four months before her death. Her doctor had told
her that now was the time, before it was too late, to
do some things that she had always wanted to but
hadn't gotten around to doing. She said: "I am
doing what I really want to do. What I really want
to do is to play an active and many-sided role in the
leadership of our party." Her death is a very great
loss in our struggle for a communist future.
75
Remarks by Emily Turnbull at Bay Area Memorial Meeting
20 November 2005
Lizzy was beloved in this party, and not simply for
the qualities George talked about: her conscientious-
ness, her judgment, the thoroughness with which
she thought through even' question, the strength of
will with which she pursued political fights.
No. she was loved as well for her beauty, her
warmth, her pertness, her graciousness.
She was a rare bird in the communist movement:
a New York City debutante turned professional rev-
olutionary. (Picture Lizzy in a gown at a coming-out
part)' in the Plaza Hotel.) She was a real class traitor,
as George noted. Such types are not unknown in the
workers movement — the founding American Com-
munist John Reed is the archetype. One thinks also
of Jessica Mitford, the blue-blooded British aristocrat
turned American Communist Party member, whose
memoirs A Fine Old Conflict are so entertaining.
But Mitford joined the CP for its Stalinist policy of
class collaboration, for trans-class "anti-fascist" unity.
Lizzy joined what was then the Revolutionary Com-
munist Youth in 1973 with the commitment to fight
for the complete political independence of the work-
ing class. She joined the party in 1974 in Detroit,
which was then a hotbed of black radical and
working-class struggle. At that time the Spartacist
League's perspective of revolutionary integration-
ism, of fusing the struggle for black liberation with
the proletariat's fight for socialist revolution, was
palpable. Lizzy fought for this perspective for the rest
of her life.
Unlike Jessica Mitford, Lizzy wasn't aristocratic
"old money" Rather she was a Jewish girl from
Queens, transposed to Park Avenue and the Upper
East Side of Manhattan at age ten after the death of
her mother, Barbara. Lizzy always spoke with won-
der and affection of the way her new mother Mary
accepted her and Patty and Matthew and raised
them as her own.
Mary had been raised in the New York society
world and she raised Lizzy to be part of this world.
Lizzy was happy in her new surroundings — she
loved the exclusive, but academically challenging
girls school she attended, Brearley She made great
friends there, as evidenced by the trip she made to
Wyoming this past August, which Amanda spoke to
in the speech which Kathy read. We all thought she
was crazy to even attempt the trip — let alone go
horseback riding. But with her usual iron will, Lizzy
insisted. Not only did she pull it off, she came back
glowing, radiant. Brearley memories and her Brear-
ley friends were very important to Lizzy.
But Lizzy didn't finish high school at Brearley. As
was the custom for upper-class young ladies, she
was sent to a tony boarding school — "Miss Porter's."
Her new roommate made derogatory remarks about
both Jews and Catholics. Her new mother Mary was
Catholic. And Lizzy was acutely aware of her own
Jewish heritage — she loved Barbara's parents — her
grandmother gave her the Jewish name Gittel, a fact
Lizzy bemusedly spoke of from time to time. Gittel?
But she was proud of it too.
At Miss Porter's Lizzy was made to know that she
was an outsider. I don't think she was unhappy,
exactly, but the alienation she felt there certainly
facilitated her becoming a communist.
Lizzy broke decisively with the bourgeois society
world and its values when she joined the party, but
she was still profoundly shaped by her upbring-
ing. Most comrades could see that just in the way
Lizzy carried herself, in the care she took with her
appearance and clothes. When towards the end of
her life she started falling a lot, I beseeched Lizzy
to abandon her leather shoes with short heels and
wear sneakers. She exploded, "Some things are just
important to me! I will not wear sneakers!" That
was Lizzy. Miss Porter's had a special meaning for
those of us who knew Lizzy well. We joked about it
whenever Lizzy made us reset the table because we
had done it wrong the first time, or whenever she
forbade us from putting food cartons on the table
and insisted on serving dishes.
And when Lizzy was annoyed or in a bad mood
she could be quite imperious and short-tempered.
Jane and I called it her "Miss Porter's" mode — we
would warn each other whenever Lizzy was like
this — usually as a prelude to fleeing the house.
But that didn't happen very often, and "Miss
Porter's" certainly never appeared with younger
comrades, or comrades Lizzy was responsible for
working closely with or training. I so admired Lizzy
for the apparently infinite reserves of patience she
exhibited when explaining to a young comrade
what was wrong with a certain position they had
argued, or a draft article they had written. Com-
rades learned so much from her, and that was why
she had such an impact especially on the younger
comrades with whom she worked.
If I had to use one word to describe Lizzy's per-
sonal qualities, it would be graciousness — a great
generosity of spirit. Lizzy decided at an early age that
she did not want children — she had her tubes tied
while she was in her early 20s. She fell in love with
76
Jim and married him with no expectation of children.
Yet she accepted Martha's children into her home
with the same graciousness and love with which
Mary had accepted Lizzy and her siblings. Lizzy
helped raise and nurture Rachel, Sarah, and Ken-
neth. The love and attention that they showered on
Lizzy, especially in the last weeks of her life, are pow-
erful testimony to the place she held in their hearts.
For the last 25 years I worked with Lizzy on a
myriad of political projects for the party; she also
became one of my closest personal friends. George
has already spoken to how central Lizzy was to cre-
ating and maintaining the bulletins and minutes that
are the documentary record of our movement. We
worked together collecting this material so that the
Spartacist League archives would be part of the col-
lection at the Hoover Institution Library, one of the
best archives of communist history in this country.
I almost always sought Lizzy's advice, especially
on editorial questions, even when she was not
technically assigned to work with me. She played
a more important role than most comrades prob-
ably realize in all the various Prometheus Research
Library publishing projects over the years.
It is not easy to balance close friendships with
ongoing working political relationships in a Lenin-
ist organization. For us clarity of political purpose,
the integrity of what we fight for as an organization,
has to come above everything else. The human emo-
tional makeup which is shaped and distorted by the
class inequities and oppression inherent in capital-
ist society does not take easily to this. It takes a very
high level of rationality and political will and some
years of training to be able to subordinate yourself
to a higher goal. Lizzy had that political will.
What I most valued about her was the ability to
have political fights almost completely without per-
sonal rancor or pettiness. That's a very rare quality.
Of course Lizzy and I often agreed; but we often
disagreed as well, sometimes quite vociferously. We
must have been a funny sight, walking the dog
together, or looking at wildflowers, or just sitting
by the pool, yelling at each other. We both valued
the back and forth.
Lizzy played a central role in the national organi-
zation, both initiating and coordinating discussions
in the Central Committee. For the 14 years she spent
in the Bay Area she was also an important compo-
nent of the Bay Area District leadership. Until her ill-
ness prevented it in the last year, she was elected
repeatedly to the local executive committee, and was
for a few years the elected political chairman of the
district. She also insisted on keeping her oar in the
party's external activities, doing a WV sale at least
once a week, talking to contacts, and going to impor-
tant demonstrations — as late as September she was
still trying to go on subscription drive trips to the
Berkeley campus.
Lizzy resisted disengaging from the Bay Area Dis-
trict until the very end. When she was already too ill
to get out of bed, in one of our last conversations
Lizzy told me that, despite all the complaints that
she had made over the years about having to go to
overly long executive committee meetings, about
having to deal with endless phone calls about the
details of local work, she really missed not being on
the exec. She said being a local executive member
was the hardest job in the organization, because you
had to think concretely and daily about how to get
the best out of small forces, about what concretely
we could and could not do in the real world. She
appreciated the discipline that forced on her.
Lizzy's ongoing involvement in local work was
an important factor in the acuity she exhibited in
national discussions and disputes. Lizzy stood at a
central nexus in the organization, where political
program meets everyday reality.
She was a great implementer . Her judgment re-
garding where to put the personnel resources to
obtain the best results was usually superb. In that
sense she played a role in our small propaganda
group — all proportions guarded — not unlike the
role played by the CC secretary Yakov Sverdlov in
the Bolshevik Party. Sverdlov organized the Bol-
shevik Party during and after the October insurrec-
tion, whereas Lizzy acted as an organizer in our
small organization in very non-revolutionary times.
I can't imagine a more stark contrast in personality
and physical type between Sverdlov, a hardened
and bearded underground organizer, who always
swathed himself from head to toe in black leather,
and the petite, pert and immaculately dressed Lizzy.
Different historical epochs throw different per-
sonality types into leading roles in the proletarian
movement. But I was reminded of Lizzy when I
read the following description of Sverdlov in his
wife's biography of him:
"People valued his sincere and passionate conviction,
for he was also sensitive and considerate, and respected
the opinions of others. He was upright and truthful,
never stooped to deceit, and took no pleasure in intrigues
and personal gamesmanship. He never promised any-
thing lightly; his word, once given, was binding."
In his tribute to Sverdlov, who died suddenly and
very conveniently for Stalin in 1919, Trotsky notes
that in making decisions in the early years after the
revolution:
"It was much clearer and easier to approach each
problem from the standpoint of principle and political
expediency than to approach it from the organizational
standpoint."
77
I think this is a general truism in revolutionary
politics, but Trotsky noted that in the early period of
the revolution, "the discrepancy between a clearly
envisaged goal and the lack of material and human
resources" was very acute. It was always Sverdlov
who had the practical solution.
In our tiny organization the discrepancy between
our aims and lack of resources has always been
excruciating. Lizzy played a central role in finding
practical solutions. She made the suggestions on
which comrade to transfer to an underled or under-
staffed local or department. She also led fights about
what not to do when too many tasks were being
demanded of our overstretched local committees.
Lenin, in his tribute to Sverdlov, wrote that "We
shall never be able to replace this man who had
cultivated such an exceptional organizing talent,
if by replacement we mean finding one man, one
comrade, with all these qualities." The work Sverd-
lov had previously done himself would hence-
forth have to be done by many comrades. So too
with Lizzy — it is going to take many comrades
to step forward and help fill the huge gap she has
left.
Remarks by Amanda Cross at New York Memorial Meeting
12 November 2005
This is the story of three girls brought together
so long ago, whose lives wound around each other,
an old girls school in New York, and puzzles, and
Shakespeare. In 1961 I moved to New York City for
the fifth grade. New to this intimidating city and
its school, Brearley I found my first friend. It was
Lizzy. Through Lizzy I met Barbara, as Barbara lived
next door to Lizzy. The King household was like no
other. You could high-jump in the dining room,
with the encouragement and participation of Mrs.
King. We could wheel the family TV into Lizzy's
bedroom to watch old movies on late-night TV and
eat ice cream from the freezer chest. And always
there were jigsaw puzzles, particularly those round
ones. The one with the Shakespearean quotes was
my favorite.
Even when Lizzy went off to boarding school
at Miss Porter's, the three of us still often saw
each other on weekends and during the holidays.
Our closeness, our friendship, seemed to be a con-
stant. But the times, they definitely were a-changing.
This was the '60s. Blue jeans were replacing white
gloves and evening gowns worn to society dances.
The tradition of the daisy chain at Miss Porter's
seemed, all of a sudden, very quaint.
Then in the fall of 1969 the three of us all ended
up in college in Boston — Lizzy at BU, Barbara at
Tufts, and I was at Radcliffe. The feminist move-
ment was exploding. I remember Lizzy dragging
me to a consciousness-raising meeting for women,
and later going to a Cambridge courthouse to see
her being charged in a rent-control demonstration.
Lizzy was always the activist. Lizzy dropped out
of BU to train as a court stenographer to provide a
way to support herself while she worked on the
causes that were so important to her. By then a
confirmed communist, she chose to spend the rest
of her life devoted to this cause with an optimism
that belied the world around her.
The three of us went our own ways and followed
our own paths after that time. We'd occasionally
reconnect via letters, Christmas cards, wedding invi-
tations, and later, e-mails. But Brearley reunions
brought us back together. 1989: The three of us
promised to come; only Lizzy showed. She never for-
gave us! 1994: Barbara and I made it, but Lizzy was
the no-show We forgave her. 1999: The three of us
are determined to get there, but a month before the
reunion Lizzy was diagnosed with lung cancer. In
spite of her ongoing simultaneous chemo and radi-
ation, she flew across the country for that reunion.
2004: only Barbara and I. And I'm a mess, my hus-
band has recently died from that very same insidious
disease, cancer.
This past year, Lizzy agreed to be one of the class
agents whose thankless job is to encourage our
classmates to support Brearley Alumni Fund Drive.
The school also recruited Barbara, so they were
now back in close touch. In July I learned from Bar-
bara that Lizzy's cancer had returned. Lizzy wanted
to see us in Wyoming, so we arranged to spend five
days together at Barbara's family ranch. Lizzy's suit-
case contained a very small amount of clothing,
huge quantities of medications and a jigsaw puzzle.
When we were not driving around the Teton valley,
taking in the spectacular scenery, wildlife, and park
museums (Lizzy loved the Georgia O'Keeffes), or
riding horseback — against her doctor's orders — we
were working on the puzzle. This was a 1500-piece
puzzle of all the characters from Shakespeare. It
78
reminded Lizzy of our time at Brearley, where we
read a Shakespeare play every year. Lizzy did not
look at the picture on the cover, or sort through for
edge pieces. She zeroed in on shades of color and
found pieces with matching colors in the pools of
pieces that spread over three tables. I'd forgotten
how visual Lizzy was. And while we worked on the
puzzle, we talked, reminiscing about our child-
hoods, catching up on our lives since then, resolv-
ing some old issues.
Mainly because of Lizzy's persistence, we finished
the puzzle on the last day. As we were packing up,
Lizzy offered us copies of Workers Vanguard that
she had brought with her, encouraging us to read it
and subscribe. Commitment and perseverance were
Lizzy's hallmarks. As was her humor, her curiosity,
her assertiveness and courage.
My daughter is now a freshman in college; she's
currently working on a paper on the history of the
feminist movement of the 1970s. So I think back to
that time, with Lizzy and Barbara. It's not history to
me; it's our lives. And it was that time in my life
when I was making decisions about where my life
would take me. I'm glad I had those two friends
with me then. I hope that my daughter will find life-
long friends such as these.
Letter by G. Bogle
22 October 2005
Lizzy was a friend and mentor to many younger
comrades, and I feel immensely lucky to have been
among them. When I left the Bay Area, she told me
I could call at any time. For years she put up with
these calls, encouraged them, listened nonjudg-
mentally and offered sound advice. She didn't have
as much time in the recent past, and we didn't
always talk politics. But every time we talked, I felt
it was something to be treasured. The qualities that
describe her best are in some ways minor virtues —
decency, an ability to listen, thoughtfulness, metic-
ulousness. But in her hands, by her single-minded
devotion to them, which went hand in hand with
her understanding that they lay at the political core
of building a Leninist party, these traits became
something truly exceptional.
She subsisted on politics like few others. It
seemed she was so at home in her role as a profes-
sional revolutionary that she couldn't imagine and
wouldn't want to put it out of her mind, even for
an instant.
Lizzy had a giant intellect, but never used it for its
own sake. When she came to the same conclusion as
other comrades, which was often, she usually came
to it more deeply, as a product of more reflec-
tion and understanding. Thus, when she came to a
different conclusion, people listened closely While
devoted to genuine orthodoxy, she was never hide-
bound by the "orthodoxy" or received wisdom of
the moment, and when she challenged it, it never
seemed that she did so with any trepidation or
doubt. She shot straight, and presented to the world
exactly what she thought.
Talking to her and working with her helped me
and many others to see the world more clearly. But
she never claimed to have all the answers. One trait
I especially associate with her is the careful attention
she gave to degrees of knowledge. Whether she sus-
pected something, thought something likely, specu-
lated something, or actually genuinely knew it, she
made sure to convey precisely her level of certainty.
This set a fine example of self-awareness and main-
taining an even keel to young political hotheads like
myself.
The things she taught me and others can't be
crammed into nice aphorisms, because her biggest
lesson was that the genuine practical world of pol-
itics is never simple. But to her, that complexity was
a source of infinite surprise and fascination. While
others could polemicize against a bad position,
Lizzy always sought to come to a genuine under-
standing of why this position would seem sensical
to anyone at all. Thus she was able to see the right
(no matter how small) in any position, as well as
the wrong. I believe she was constantly learning
from everyone she spoke to, constantly seeking to
challenge and broaden her understanding of the
world, and especially of human behavior in all its
manifold quirks.
Lizzy even, and perhaps especially, liked prob-
lems that she couldn't solve easily. Like koans, they
were food for contemplation and reflection, rather
than excuses to lash out in frustration. She embod-
ied so completely what Gramsci termed the "phi-
losophy of praxis" that I think she would resent me
finding traits of a philosopher in her at all. But she
did possess the best of them — a belief in precision
of words, not for their own sake, but as the neces-
79
sary complement to precision in thought; and a
concurrent belief, deeply materialist, that precise
thoughts render the world not in broader strokes,
but in ever sharper and more scintillating detail.
Just knowing she was there and would eventu-
ally get around to thinking about whatever trou-
bled our movement, large or small, made me feel
more secure. In a movement historically composed
of exceptional individuals, she was one of the most
exceptional of all. In comparison to her, all of us, to
one degree or another, leave much to be desired. It
is hard to believe she is gone. She was one of the
great human beings, and I will miss her for a very
long time.
Letter to Lizzy by Laura
10 October 2005
Dearest Lizzy,
I wish I had a chance to sit and tell you stories
from Mexico, some of which I know would make
you laugh, or make you angry, or make you nod
your head in agreement. Stories about political
fights, or being a woman on the streets of Mexico
City, or what people feed you when you get a hang-
over (it's spicy beef tripe stew, in case you're curi-
ous). I won't be able to relay all those stories here.
What I wanted to convey is a memory that sticks
out in my mind after I joined the Bay Area SYC in the
summer of 2000. Maryanne had told me what an
important role you played in the International, how
central you were on the Central Committee, how cru-
cial you were in maintaining the history and program-
matic continuity of the organization. I immediately
found you approachable, interested and incredibly
vivacious. You invited me out and we met in a cafe on
Euclid on the North Side of UC Berkeley's campus so
we could talk about my opinions on feminism.
The memory stands out because it shaped my
early conception of the Party: an organization that
knew how to intervene into the world, with a lead-
ership that was concerned and dedicated. You were
this to me in my subsequent years in the Bay Area.
You fought with me and treated me like a leader
before I ever thought of myself as one. It is hard in
this position: being so young that people don't see
me yet as an organizer, being experienced enough
to not want to be coddled. Having the opportunity
to work closely with you for even a brief period of
time gave me an idea of what people expect from a
young party leader and what I should aspire to be.
Your presence, your stability, your enduring will-
power, and your Marxist insight will remain an ever-
lasting recollection of the immense respect that I,
along with many others, have for you.
Very warm and compassionate
Bolshevik wishes,
Laura
Remarks by Lital Singer at New York Memorial Meeting
12 November 2005
One of Lizzy's great legacies was the political
investment that she made in many youth, in partic-
ular in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, in order to
ensure revolutionary continuity. Lizzy was a remark-
able example and inspiration to young cadre. In the
early 1990s, the party made a decision to reinforce
the Los Angeles local, and Lizzy was assigned to be
the Central Committee's representative to the local.
Thus began a period of close collaboration with Los
Angeles comrades that would span a dozen years.
I was a young and inexperienced organizer of
the Los Angeles Local for two years, starting in 2003.
In this capacity, I benefited from working closely with
Lizzy. Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolis, and dis-
cussions in the local over how to implement our pro-
gram have often centered around the fight against the
oppression of the black population, defense of the
large Latino immigrant population, and the tensions
between blacks and Latinos in the city. Lizzy helped
us understand the need to make immigrant rights
and immigrant workers a key part of the work of the
local, and at the same time, the need to win Latinos
and immigrants to an understanding of the central
importance of the fight for black liberation.
80
During the many class battles in Los Angeles in
the past few years, such as the longshore workers
lockout, the UFCW grocery workers strike and tran-
sit strikes, Lizzy's main intervention was to warn
us against the constant pressure to merely run
from picket to picket. In addition to bringing our
Marxist perspective to the workers, she urged us to
bring those battles to students and youth, building
support for workers' struggles on the campuses,
bringing students to the picket lines, and seeking
to win youth to be lifelong partisans of the working
class.
In a city that can easily lead one to forget about
what's happening elsewhere, comrades treasured
Lizzy for helping us to be better internationalists.
As difficult as it is to be an organizer, consulting
with Lizzy was always my favorite part of the job.
She told me on numerous occasions to keep poli-
tics first. She advised us on how to deal with
our tasks as a small local in a big city with a lot
going on. She wrote: "The answer... is not to decide
nothing and then do everything, necessarily half-
heartedly and badly. You need to figure out what
you must do first and do it, and then see if you can
also tackle some of what you want to do — but that
implies that you agree both on the vital and the
desired. This can only be done through fighting
out your differences which, if guided by a set of
programmatic criteria, you will probably find are
not that far apart."
Letter by Janis Gerrard
Berlin, 19 October 2005
Dear Jim, Martha and family,
The news of our comrade Lizzy's death last week
struck a painful blow to our entire international
organization, and of course we can only imagine
how it affects you who loved her, lived with her, and
collaborated so intensely and productively over dec-
ades. We send you all our most heartfelt sympathy
and are searching for a way to honor Lizzy's life and
contributions appropriately.
On 6 November we are planning to lay a wreath
for her at the Gedenkstatte der Sozialisten (Memo-
rial to the Socialists) where Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht are buried. After which we will go
to Catherine and Herbert's house and warm our-
selves with mulled cider and memories of Lizzy and
her most important interventions into our section.
We are busy searching through internal bulletins.
We will send you photos of this ceremony and write
up interesting contributions as our way of con-
tributing to the public memorial meetings.
It is particularly important for us to communicate
to our youth what Lizzy meant to our party, the
respect she earned and the role she played. Some of
our young members never met Lizzy, or if they did
had little chance to get to know her. We are lucky to
have a young comrade, Tom, who was recruited last
year by Lizzy in the Bay Area. He says he was a "hard
case" and that Lizzy spent many hours over months
to recruit him particularly on the question of the
necessity of a Leninist vanguard party. This is a story
he wants to share and is busy writing up.
As we talk to each other, comrades often make the
same point in various ways. She was the party per-
son. She not only studied and transmitted the Lenin-
ist methods of organization to make revolution but
she applied it effectively. Everyone who was there
remembers her report on the Org Rules to the 1998
International Conference, Renate remembered how
she intervened on questions of membership stan-
dards for seriously ill comrades. I remember that she
consciously sought out comrades who she thought
would disagree with her to test her ideas and have
the fullest discussion and come up with the best
answer to a dispute. Comrade after comrade has
commented on her ability to soberly figure out what
had gone wrong, to cut across confusion and dis-
orientation without an iota of moralism. We are all
stronger for it and we will miss it sorely. As we
remember and honor her qualities, we will seek to
instill the striving for her level of programmatic
depth, integrity, effectiveness, discipline, and hard
work in ourselves and our youth. I only wish we
could find a way to communicate her rare grace and
wit, but that is perhaps too much to aspire to.
With comradely affection
Janis Gerrard for the SpAD
81
Letter from Sri Lankan Comrades
9 November 2005
Workers Vanguard
New York
Dear Comrades,
We write to salute and honour the memory of
our beloved Comrade Lizzy, who spent time with us
in the late '70s. Comrade Lizzy was here with us for
a short period and laid the foundation for building
this propaganda group in this part of the world. We
rededicate ourselves to carry out the work of the
world Trotskyist movement through the ICL in the
manner Comrade Lizzy did.
Please convey our warm feelings to all those who
were near and dear to Lizzy.
Comrades from Colombo, Sri Lanka
Lizzy's Impact on Los Angeles
by Kathy Finnegan on Behalf of the L.A. Local
5 November 2005
In the early 1990s the party made a decision to
reinforce the Los Angeles local, in particular given
the increasing importance of the Pacific Rim in world
politics and trade. It was during this period, in the
wake of the L.A. upheaval, that comrade Lizzy, as
the Central Committee's representative to the local,
began a period of close collaboration with Los Ange-
les comrades that would span a dozen years.
This was quite a challenge given her other major
responsibilities in the party, but also given the nature
of Los Angeles — a small Spartacist local with no res-
ident Central Committee member in a cauldron of
a city which had just had a major social explosion.
The organizer of the local at the time was Jane R,
whose initial memories of Lizzy from that period
capture the quality of her leadership. She started
by visiting the local during the sub drive and work-
ing with comrades both on campus at UCLA and
at UC Santa Barbara, something which became a
yearly ritual. But in addition, Jane remembers that
Lizzy's relation with her was always collaborative,
that she never felt that she was just getting directives
from afar.
The thread that runs through her interventions
into the local over the years centers on, as we said
in her obituary, "tackling the intersection of politi-
cal principle with concrete social reality." If you go
through the files in Los Angeles, those from the
1990s are filled with literally scores of reports and
notes to Lizzy, notably not only from older party
members but also numbers of youth. She went to
great lengths to pedagogically respond to comrades,
particularly youth, who had questions or differences
of opinion about how to express and implement
our program. In Los Angeles this has often centered
around the black question, the large Latino immi-
grant population, and the black/Latino tensions in
the city. One such discussion ten years ago centered
on formulations in a leaflet for a Black History
Month forum, where she took up a youth's ques-
tions on our reference to the "genocidal impulse" of
America's racist rulers against black America. She
wrote an extensive letter to the local on the nature
of black oppression, including the question of spe-
cial oppression stemming from class society. In the
ensuing years she led key political discussions and
fights which enabled the local to intersect and ulti-
mately recruit from the large Latino immigrant pop-
ulation. As part of this she made hard fights against
reflections of chauvinism in our party, and inter-
vened in the party as a whole on the relation of the
black and Hispanic questions in the U.S. The found-
ing of a Labor Black League in L.A. this summer is a
testament to her leadership.
In a metropolis which has been known as "Strike
City" for several years now, Lizzy's interventions
during key class battles such as the UFCW strike
were a struggle against the constant pressure to
merely run from picket to picket. Rather, she point-
ed out the importance of bringing those battles to
the campuses, building support for workers' strug-
gles among the youth, seeking to win them to our
proletarian, internationalist worldview. She wrote to
us at one point of a local bout with what's come to
be known as the "L.A. Disease," i.e., "a small local in
a big city": "The answer to the fact is not to decide
nothing and then do everything, necessarily half-
heartedly and badly. You need to figure out what
you must do first and do it, and then see if you can
also tackle some of what you want to do — but that
82
implies that you agree both on the vital and the
desired. This can only be done through fighting out
your differences which, if guided by a set of pro-
grammatic criteria, you will probably find are not
that far apart."
The past dozen years during which Lizzy was chief
political collaborator with Los Angeles correspond
to the period of deep initial impact of the demise
of the Soviet workers state upon the international
proletariat. The political disorientation and corre-
sponding internal difficulties in this period were
acute in the L.A. local. Despite problems in carrying
out the necessary political fights and discussion in
this period, what was ultimately qualitative in assist-
ing comrades here were comrade Lizzy's combined
attention to the need for programmatic clarity and
constant accessibility to comrades. All comrades
can attest to the fact that even when she called
the office, whoever answered the phone would be
engaged in conversation by her, with questions as to
what was going on in the local and what their opin-
ion was regarding a particular political discussion.
During her frequent visits to the local, she always
pulled out her small notebook with a list of all the
things she wanted to talk with particular comrades
about. We are going to miss the many barbecues and
parties we had when she came down — not least of
all they were opportunities to find out firsthand
what was going on in the ICL, not a small thing in
a historically parochial local. She exemplified the
lesson from Cannon, that the purpose of discussion
in a communist organization is not to discredit one
another, but "to teach the comrades to think and to
fight politically, to grasp the main aspects of a ques-
tion, to go by principle and not to be sidetracked
by incidental matters." That is why even comrades
with whom she had to have some of the most seri-
ous fights considered her their friend and will miss
her so deeply.
Comrade Lizzy could take satisfaction during the
last few months of her life that the local she had
worked so closely with had made some strides
politically, founding a Labor Black League, recruit-
ing a sizable youth club with a vital UCLA frac-
tion, and seeing its way clear to have a rally in
defense of class-war prisoners. Many of us know
we simply could not have done this without her.
We understand that the struggle to forge the party
necessary to lead the proletarian revolution will
continue. But the comrades who had the privilege
of working with Lizzy are better communists for
that experience.
Tribute to Comrade Lizzy by Tokyo Comrades
14 October 2005
Dear Jim, Martha, Kenneth and Jane,
Jan called this morning to tell us that Lizzy had
died. We are having trouble finding the words to
express our sympathies at your deep personal loss
and to express our own grief. What we do know is
that Lizzys contributions to almost every aspect of
party life and work were tremendous. Every com-
rade who had the opportunity to work with her
learned from her, as did the party as a whole. We all
are in her debt. Her life was not in vain.
This evening comrade Arai was telling stories
about his encounters with Lizzy. The first time was
at the iSt-Rekken fusion conference in 1988. He
and the other comrades had been invited to your
house for dinner. He doesn't remember what Lizzy
said or did. He just remembers that he had "never
met a woman like that before." He was impressed.
He also spoke about the times he worked with her
on the nominating commissions for several interna-
tional conferences. Her ability to be objective and
assess a comrade as a whole is something that he
said he is still trying to emulate.
As production manager for the last several issues
of Women and Revolution, Chas was able to work
closely with Lizzy on several occasions. In particular
he appreciated her decisiveness. Not just because it
made his job easier, but because she was a voice of
lucidity. He came to value her opinions and became
very fond of her.
Our strength is in our program and our combina-
tion, i.e., by recognizing the weaknesses and utiliz-
ing the strengths of all comrades. Lizzy understood
very well that our process of selecting and helping
comrades to emerge from the ranks to strengthen
the leadership is a conscious process. Cannon once
said that compared to Lenin and Trotsky, the rest of
us are men made out of common clay. He also said
that the grain of originality in most human beings is
very slight, that the art of independent creation is
limited. Both of these things are true, but within
the "common clay" and limited originality frame-
work, there is a lot of elasticity. What I will always
83
appreciate about Lizzy was that she was an indepen-
dent thinker. She didn't dabble in ideas for the sake
of dabbling, but she was able to concretely think
about a problem, take it apart, argue and discuss
with comrades, and put the problem back together,
many times based just on common sense. She
helped to educate the party in objective, critical
thinking toward everything and everybody, including
other leaders. For some reason currently we do not
have many comrades who are capable of this, and we
will be weaker because she is gone.
We are planning a small memorial out at Tama
Cemetery on the weekend of November 12-13. This
is where Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi are
buried, and we usually go there every year around
the date of their execution, which was November 7,
the anniversary of the October Revolution. I am
sure they would have been honored to join us this
year in raising a cup of sake in honor of comrade
Lizzy.
Warm comradely greetings,
Jeanne for the Spartacist Group Japan,
section of the International Communist
League (Fourth Internationalist)
Application for Membership in the Spartacist League
by Elizabeth King
19 July 1974
SL/Detroit
Comrades:
I would like to be accepted as a member of the
Spartacist League. Through my work in the RCY for
the past year and a half, I have gained an understand-
ing of the program of the SL and feel that I am now
ready and willing to assume the responsibilities and
commitment of party membership. I have read and
agree with the Statement of Purpose and the Decla-
ration of Principles, and I understand and accept the
democratic-centralist organizational form of the SL.
Lizzy
Our Comrade
Elizabeth King Robertson
Lizzy in
New York, 1978.
Robertson Family
Lizzy at Wayne State University protest,
Detroit, 1974.
Young Spartacus photos
Protesting Pinochets bloody Chilean coup,
Boston, 1973.
84
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SPARTACJST
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Third International Conference of the ICL
Declaration of Principles and
Some Elements of Program
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
On the Origins and Development of Leninist
Organizational Practices
Organizational Rules
and Guidelines
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Women and Permanent Revolution in South Africa
Lizzy at February 2003
antiwar demonstration
in San Francisco.
Lizzy's work on ICL's
Organizational Rules and
Guidelines drew on history
and traditions of the
international Marxist
movement.
Above, from left:
Founding of First
International, 1864;
Congress of Second
International's German
section, 1875;
publication of Communist
International, 1919;
Diego Rivera mural depicting
Leon Trotsky, founder of
Fourth International in 1938.
Robertson Family
Workers Vanguard
85
Women and Revolution
Women mid f^
Revolution iTCa
The "Date Rape" Issue:
Feminist Hysteria. Anti-Sex Witchhunt
For Class Struggle Against Clinton's "New World Order'
Children, Family and State
Something About Incest
a
Women and Revolution
The Russian Revolution
and the
Emancipation of Women
A selection of Lizzy's significant contributions
on complex social and historical questions to
ICL publications. Left to right:
"The Date Rape' Issue..."
in W&R No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994;
"Something About Incest"
in W&R No. 28, Spring 1984;
"The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of
Women" in Spartacist (English-language edition)
No. 59, Spring 2006.
Robertson Family
Lizzy with comrades at
the Port of Los Angeles.
no credit
86
Photos displayed at New York
and Oakland memorials show
Lizzy speaking for the ICL in
January 2005 and February 1993.
Spartakist
Comrades in Berlin laid wreath in Lizzy's honor at memorial for Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht, 6 November 2005.
87
Publications of the Prometheus Research Library
Dog Days
James R Cannon vs.
Max Shachtman
in the Communist League
of America. 1931-1933
James P. Cannon
and the Early Years
of American
Communism
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♦> Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman
in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933
• 118 documents including letters by Trotsky on international issues, some published here for the first time.
• Extensively documented introduction and explanatory notes.
• 16 pages of historical photographs and graphics, some previously unavailable or never before published.
• Glossary of more than 175 items; 15-page, fully cross-referenced index.
• 752 pages; smyth-sewn binding in paper and cloth. (2002)
Cloth: $30.00 (ISBN 0-9633828-7-X) Paper: $19.95 (ISBN 0-9633828-8-8) Shipping/Handling: $4(1 book), $6 (2-4 books)
♦♦♦ James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism:
Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928
This volume of Cannon's writings covers the period when he was one of the principal leaders of the American section
of the Communist International. (1992) 624 pages.
Paper: $14.50 (ISBN 0-9633828-1-0) Shipping/Handling: $4 (1 book), $6 (2-4 books)
♦> The Communist International After Lenin
First Russian-language edition. By Leon Trotsky. Includes Trotsky's Critique of the 1928 draft program of the
Communist International. (1993) 309 pages.
Cloth: $12.00 (ISBN 5-900696-01-4) (Includes shipping and handling.)
New York State residents add 8.625% sales tax to book price and S/H. New Jersey residents add 6% sales tax to book price.
Prometheus Research Series
No. 1: Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of
Communist Parties, on the Methods and
Content of Their Work
Complete and accurate English translation of 1921 Comintern
Resolution from final German text. (August 1988) 94 pages $6
No. 2: Documents on the "Proletarian Military Policy"
Includes materials from the Trotskyist movement in the U.S.
and Europe during World War II. (February 1989) 102 pages $9
No. 3: In Memoriam, Richard S. Fraser:
An Appreciation and Selection of His Work
A selection of the writings of comrade Richard S. Fraser
(1913-1988), who pioneered the Trotskyist understanding of black
oppression in the United States. (August 1990) 108 pages $7
No. 4: Yugoslavia, East Europe and the
Fourth International: The Evolution of
Pabloist Liquidationism
By Jan Norden. Covers the internal discussion within the Fourth
International over its flawed response to the Yugoslav Revolution
and the 1948 Tito-Stalin split. (March 1993) 70 pages $7
No. 5: Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?
Internal Problems of the Workers Party
Max Shachtman's document from the 1936 internal bulletin of the
Workers Party of the U.S. Includes introduction and glossary by
PRL and appendices. (September 2000) 88 pages $7
Prometheus Research Series prices include
shipping and handling.
Order from/make checks or money orders payable to: Spartacist Publishing Company, Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116
To order multiple copies and for international prices, write to the above address or send e-mail to prl.ny@verizon.net
Prometheus Research Library
The Prometheus Research Library is a working research
facility for a wide range of Marxist studies and also the
central reference archive of the Spartacist League of the
U.S., section of the International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist). Library holdings include sub-
stantial materials on the organizations inspired and led by
Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, as well as works on relat-
ed topics, sometimes remote.
The purpose of the PRL is to collect, preserve, and
make available the historical record of the international
workers movement and to assist Marxist scholarship. It
is both a strength and weakness of the PRL that it is nec-
essarily centered upon the work and interests of the
American Communist and Trotskyist movement.
The Library's collection, which does not circulate, grew
out of the forty-year accumulated and organized holdings
of James Robertson, both correspondence and printed
materials. The collection now includes over 6,000 books
and periodical volumes, 100 reels of microfilmed docu-
ments and periodicals, and 175 linear feet of archival doc-
uments and bulletins. Particular emphasis is on minutes
of leading committees and internal discussion material.
Approximately three-quarters of the holdings are in Eng-
lish. There are significant materials in Russian: over 300
titles covering much of the record of the Bolshevik Party
in the form of stenographic records of Congresses and
Conferences, early Cheka reports, memoirs, and publi-
cations and exile correspondence of the Left Opposi-
tion. Holdings in German, French, Spanish, Polish, and
other languages are also significant. Books and pamphlets
are catalogued in a card file with 120 subject headings;
periodicals are indexed separately. An extensively cross-
referenced, computerized version of the card file and
document holdings facilitates research.
The Library also contains the published works of many
non-Marxist authors who strike our interest. The PRL cir-
culates lists of recent acquisitions to interested libraries
and individuals. These circulars, which date from March
1979 to the present, are available upon request.
Key Archival Holdings
• Major published documents of the First through
Fourth Internationals.
• Protocols of Executive Committee meetings and World
Congresses of the Communist International. Principal
periodicals, pamphlets and leading body minutes of the
early American Communist Party.
• Central body minutes, internal bulletins and internal
correspondence of the American Trotskyist movement,
plus its public press, pamphlets and theoretical organs.
Materials cover the initial
Trotskyist expulsion in 1928,
the founding of the Com-
munist League of America
and the later Workers Party,
the period of entry into the
780963H3828941 '
ISBN D-^b33flEA-^-b
5 0 600
Socialist Party, and the Socialist Workers Party.
• Substantial collection of works by James P Cannon,
founding American Communist and Trotskyist leader,
including writings and speeches from the 1920s.
• Extensive internal materials from the Workers Party/
Independent Socialist League (led by Max Shachtman)
and its youth affiliates from the 1940s and 1950s.
• Minutes, documents, and bulletins of the Interna-
tional Secretariat of the Fourth International in French
and English.
• Books on general subjects ranging from the history
and struggle of colonial masses to various idiosyncratic
interests of Marxists and others.
Collaborative Work
The Prometheus Research Library evolved over the last
25 years and works under the auspices of the Central
Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S. The PRL has 24
staff and individual associates in the U.S. and 10 other
countries. The PRL is a member of the American Library
Association. The PRL seeks to assist serious efforts to pub-
lish histories of Trotskyist sections around the world,
both by providing documentation and where appropriate
financial support, without regard for our particular agree-
ment with the views of the authors. The PRL occasional-
ly collaborated with Louis Sinclair, the noted bibliogra-
pher of Leon Trotsky's work. George Breitman, editor of
Trotsky's Writings, advised the PRL in the early stages of
the production of our first book, James P. Cannon and
the Early Years of American Communism. The Library
strongly supports the collaboration and exchange of his-
torical material with individuals and libraries of kindred
purpose around the world. It has deposited archival
records of the Spartacist League/U.S. and Spartacus Youth
League in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and
Peace at Stanford University and the International Insti-
tute of Social History in Amsterdam.
To Collect and Preserve...
The Prometheus Research Library seeks to collect,
preserve, and make available the documentary record of
the international communist movement. The Library has
its own publishing program, making available rare mate-
rials that are an indispensable part of the documentary
history of the Trotskyist movement. We are very inter-
ested in obtaining any relevant minutes, bulletins or cor-
respondence both to complete gaps in our collection
and to ensure that such historically valuable documents
are not lost. Please note that for our purposes xerox
copies of originals are nearly as satisfactory as the origi-
nals themselves. Persons who have such archival papers
are encouraged to contact the PRL.
Visit the PRL at www.prl.org
or e-mail us at: prl.nyCgverizon.net
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