SL/ICL on Puerto Rico:
Annexationist “Socialists”

When the Communist International was founded after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, one of its first acts was to require, in its famous “21 conditions” for membership, that any party joining the Comintern would have to come out unconditionally, in word and deed, for independence of the colonies. From the start, the Trotskyist movement in the United States called for independence for Puerto Rico. This was the position of the Spartacist League (SL) when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism. But in 1998 the SL suddenly “corrected” itself, declaring, “We do not currently advocate independence for Puerto Rico.” Its argument was that “the vast majority of the population there is not in favor of it at this time” (Workers Vanguard, 11 September 1998). This was a huge betrayal of communist principle.

Now the SL has gone a step farther, declaring it would support statehood – that is, the colonialist annexation of Puerto Rico.

The SL’s 1998 “correction” was to an article on the general strike against the privatization of the Puerto Rican phone company, which the Internationalist Group actively supported. The IG leaflet, distributed on the picket lines in San Juan, included a headline, “Yankee Imperialism Out – For Puerto Rico's Right to Independence! For a Socialist Federation of the Caribbean!” (see The Internationalist No. 6, November-December 1998). The leaflet declared that the IG and the League for the Fourth International “advocate independence for Puerto Rico, in order to strike a blow against U.S. imperialism and because only by breaking out of the national subjugation of colonial rule can the international class struggle come to the fore.” A key event in the strike was a march on Fort Buchanan in San Juan demanding that the U.S. get out of Puerto Rico.

The IG exposed the SL’s shameful revision of revolutionary Marxism on colonies, noting that these ex-Trotskyists would never have been accepted in Lenin and Trotsky’s Comintern (see “ICL Renounces Fight for Puerto Rican Independence,” in The Internationalist No. 6, November-December 1998). In response, WV (8 January 1999) declared that “we favor the independence of Puerto Rico,” but do not “advocate” it and only “champion” the right to independence and self-determination. Some “champions”! Ever since, the SL has been dancing around the question, sometimes saying it “favored” independence and sometimes that it “would favor,” but never “advocating” it. In fact, every U.S. president from Jimmy Carter on (including both Bushes) has claimed to support Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination and independence!

Then in late August a new issue of Spartacist appeared, the first in three years, reprinting the edited document of the conference of the SL’s International Communist League (ICL), titled “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra.” This is one strange document. It asserts that many ICL leaders have been characterized by Anglo chauvinism (true enough), but also that the SL/ICL’s former Leninist position on the national question going back to 1975 was “chauvinist,” and combines this with a purge of a whole layer of longtime cadres from the top leadership. In fact, the “Hydra” document embraces bourgeois nationalism, and repeatedly tries to “extend” Lenin by claiming he said the opposite of what he wrote. On Puerto Rico, we now read, lo and behold, that SL/ICL chairman (consultative) Jim Robertson argued back in 1998 that “we strongly advocate independence” for Puerto Rico, even though WV repeatedly wrote the opposite.

Has the SL/ICL finally seen the light? Hardly. The “Hydra” document did admit to the SL’s shilly-shallying on Puerto Rican independence. But then it throws in the zinger that, “even though the sentiment for statehood is the result of economic blackmail by the U.S.,” it now defends “the right of Puerto Ricans to choose statehood” as a supposed expression of self-determination! And just as in the past it cynically claimed that calling for independence meant forcing it on the Puerto Rican people, the SL now pretends that opposing calls for statehood equals preventing Puerto Ricans from choosing it. Moreover, the SL now declares that it would support statehood – “should Puerto Ricans decide they want statehood, we would support the will of the population” (Workers Vanguard, 1 December). But how would that collective will be determined? In another rigged colonial referendum?

In reality, becoming a state would be a colonial annexation. It would inevitably mean the destruction of the Puerto Rican nation, which is what advocates of statehood, namely the far right wing of Puerto Rican bourgeois politicians, intend. In 2012 the pro-statehood PNP (New Progressive Party) governor Luis Fortuño called for instruction in the public schools on all subjects to switch over to English by 2022. This is on an island where 94% of the population speaks Spanish at home! As recently as two years ago, the SL could still see what was at stake, correctly stating that “statehood, or direct annexation” would “accelerate the tendency of English to replace Spanish on this island, ultimately threatening the national identity of the Puerto Rican people” (Workers Vanguard, 2 October 2015). That is no less true today, but now they’re for it.

So the ex-Trotskyist anti-Leninists of the Spartacist League/ICL are explicitly supporting colonial annexation.¹ Naturally, they still refuse to call unambiguously for independence for colonies (and not just on Puerto Rico, also for the U.S. Virgin Islands and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe). This is a direct continuation of their vociferous support for the 2010 U.S. invasion of Haiti (in the guise of earthquake relief), which they later had to admit was a social-imperialist betrayal. Their new annexationist line on Puerto Rico is another pro-imperialist betrayal. And the attempt to somehow marry this to their claim that in the abstract they “advocate,” “favor” or “would favor” independence reeks of a rotten compromise. The SL/ICL is spinning like a top on the national question.

In 1998, the SL/ICL gave a left cover to colonialism, abandoning the call for independence for Puerto Rico. In 2010, they gave a left cover to Yankee imperialist occupation of Haiti, buying the story of the Democratic Obama administration that this was humanitarian aid. Now in 2017, in supporting statehood for Puerto Rico they put a “left” gloss on a step that they earlier admitted would obliterate the Puerto Rican nation. Amid a blowout over imperialist chauvinism, the SL/ICL’s annexationist position is the quintessence of that. Recall how an earlier pro-statehood “socialist,” Santiago Yglesias, supported repression of independentistas in the 1930s. And don’t forget how President Ulysses Grant sought to annex the Dominican Republic after the U.S. Civil War, or how the slavocracy sought to annex Cuba after the 1848 war that stole half of Mexico.

Back in 1998 when the SL announced it did not “advocate” Puerto Rican independence, it argued that most Puerto Ricans are “loath to relinquish the benefits of U.S. citizenship.” Let’s see. Would those “benefits” include the fact that Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland have an 80% higher poverty rate than the overall population, a 60% higher unemployment rate and a 28% lower median family income?² At this moment, the fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens means that they can escape the hellish conditions on the island by purchasing an airline ticket to Florida (if they can get a seat). But that desperation measure is hardly a yardstick of support for annexation. The PNP government trumpets that 97% voted for statehood in the phony referendum it staged in June, yet less than a quarter of the voters participated.

In any case, this is a bogus argument. If Puerto Rico becomes independent, that doesn’t mean Puerto Ricans automatically lose U.S. citizenship: witness the large numbers of U.S./Israeli dual citizens. At present it is extremely difficult to strip someone born in the U.S. of their citizenship, although the racists may certainly try. Virulent immigrant-bashers are demanding an overturn of the 14th Amendment, won on the battlefields of the Civil War, which declared that everyone born on the territory of the U.S. is a citizen, including former slaves and children of immigrants, documented or undocumented alike. This underscores the fact that the struggle against the colonial subjugation of Puerto Rico is a battle against racist reaction across the board, and that fight can only be definitively won through socialist revolution.

The latter-day Spartacist League grotesquely claims (in “Hydra”) that “for the IG, imperialist white Americans can decide the fate of Puerto Ricans without any concern for their national will.” This race-baiting slander, which is particularly stupid coming from them and directed against us, is a total invention by admitted imperialist chauvinists. It is contradicted by everything the IG has written on Puerto Rico. The IG leaflet on the 1998 general strike stressed the right to independence, as “an overwhelming majority of the Puerto Rican population does not presently favor independence” and “the working class has no interest in forcing independence against the will of the Puerto Rican population.” Yet, as the IG insisted, in calling for independence, “Our program is not governed by what is currently popular but by what is necessary for proletarian revolution and the liberation of the oppressed” (“ICL Renounces Puerto Rican Independence”).

Today’s SL/ICL is turning its back on the three decades when as revolutionary Trotskyists they stood foursquare for independence for Puerto Rico. Now they “champion” bourgeois nationalism from Quebec to Catalonia, and call to break up multinational imperialist states such as Belgium even when the population does not favor that. Simultaneously these annexationist “socialists” refuse to call for asylum for refugees fleeing imperialist-instigated war and terror. As defenders of Lenin and Trotsky and the early Communist International, the League for the Fourth International calls for independence for all colonies even as we fight for workers revolution from the Caribbean to the imperialist heartland. ■