ICL Admits “Frame-Up,” Purge, Lies

In June 2025, the International Communist League (whose U.S. section is the Spartacist League) issued a public bulletin with the results of an internal ICL investigation on what it accurately calls the ICL’s “bureaucratic purge” and “frame-up” of Internationalist Group founders in 1996 and its “completely unprincipled” breaking of fraternal relations with Trotskyist workers in Brazil’s “Steel City,” for refusing to call off their struggle to oust police from the municipal workers union. Retrospectively denouncing these betrayals, which it calls “the very antithesis of revolutionary leadership,” the bulletin also repudiates the torrent of lies and slanders the ICL pumped out for decades to justify them.

These developments are significant for Marxists today, as the programmatic legacy of the Spartacist tendency during the years when it fought for genuine Trotskyism continues to be key to revolutionary struggle. It is a good thing that the SL/ICL has now – three decades after the fact – made these self-damning admissions about the events its bulletin describes. Yet the political degeneration manifested starkly by the ICL’s 1996 crises has moved it now qualitatively to the right of the revolutionary program it used to uphold. Here we reprint “A Brief Postcript” (July 2025) from the new Internationalist pamphlet Trotskyism’s Legacy Today (see ad below), describing the context of the ICL’s investigation and its results.

In “Just Asking…” [reprinted in Trotsky­ism’s Legacy Today], comrades from the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth posed a series of pointed and specific questions to the ICL regarding its 1996 purge of long-time cadres who went on to found the International­ist Group, and its break with Luta Metalúrgica (now Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil [LQB], section of the LFI) amidst the struggle to oust police from the municipal workers union in Brazil’s “Steel City,” Volta Redonda. Those events were among the many political issues raised at the January 2024 LFI-ICL debate, at which the ICL’s leader Perrault reiterated that it was carrying out an internal investigation on this subject.

Last month (June 2025), the ICL came out with a public bulletin on the results of that investi­gation. It is a damning document, in which the ICL today declares, unequivocally, that everything we said about the purge and the ICL’s betrayal of the LQB comrades and the struggle in Brazil was true, and everything the ICL said about it was a lie. The mountain of accusations spewed out against us and hurled hysterically by the ICL’s press and members for almost 30 years were exactly what we said they were from the beginning: willful falsehoods designed to cover up the bureaucratic purge and ignominious betrayal carried out by the ICL in 1996.

Here we will comment on the ICL bulletin only briefly, as we intend to respond further in the LFI press.

The ICL bulletin is titled Report on the Bureaucratic Purge of IG Founders and the Break in Relations with Luta Metalúrgica. The report itself (dated 28 March 2025), by the ICL’s Interna­tional Control Commission (ICC), takes up a little over 7 of the bulletin’s 71 pages. Preceded by a short editorial note, it is followed by 57 pages of appended documents. Striking is the fact that all but a half page of these were already published, almost three decades ago.¹ Nor do the report and editorial note provide any new information. The bulletin leaves unanswered many of the factual questions posed in “Just Asking...” and in the LFI letters from September-October 2023 reprinted in this Internationalist pamphlet.

What the ICL’s June 2025 bulletin does do is state:

“The ICC investigation concluded that the comrades who went on to found the LFI were driven out of our organization through frame-up internal trials, demagogic fights and multiple breaches of the party’s internal democratic norms. The investigation also concluded that the break in fraternal relations with LM/LQB was completely unprincipled and destructive.”

The report of the ICL’s internal investigation declares, “From beginning to end, the 1996 fight against Norden, Negrete, Stamberg and Socorro was an exercise in bureaucratic abuse”; it recommends that the ICL “renounce” the “corrosive” and “bureaucratic” maneuver it carried out by breaking, on false pretenses, with LM/LQB in 1996; and calls for “the repudiation of the slander of LM/LQB as union-suers.”

The report also repeatedly “concurs” with characterizations of the ICL’s actions that we made in our July 1996 pamphlet on the purge. It admits, for example, that we “correctly accused the ICL of ‘pulling its hands out of the boiling water’” of the struggle to expel cops from the municipal workers union, and it characterizes the ICL’s “abandonment of LM/LQB” as “ignominious” – “the very antithesis of revolutionary leadership.”² The bulletin notes that the report’s recommendations were adopted by the ICL’s international executive committee.

So yes, it is a good thing that the ICL now admits these facts, as circumscribed as these admissions are. But what, then, do the facts they now admit to say about an organization that with apparent unanimity persisted in these lies and slanders for three decades? Meanwhile, the ICL bulletin repeats the self-justifying mantra that the ICL and LFI were supposedly political twins (“two satellites orbiting around American liberalism”) for decades after the 1996 purge.

What does genuine Trotskyism mean today – and why is the genuine “Spartacist programmatic legacy” crucial for revolutionary struggle? This 62-page pamphlet contains a talk on Trotskyist history addressing these issues, together with key League for the Fourth International materials from the January 2024 debate between the LFI and the International Communist League.
To read PDF online click here or on image.
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No, there was a fight, on issue after issue, over the continuity of the program of Lenin and Trotsky, which the ICL abandoned and the LFI upheld. The born-again ICL’s “plague on both your houses” position is aimed at justifying the new management’s throwing overboard just about everything the SL/ICL stood for when it was the champion of revolutionary Trotskyism.

Meanwhile, the programmatic counterposition between the two organizations kept growing wider over the years, and has become an even bigger gulf with the ICL’s explicit disavowal of the Spartacist political tradition.

The damage the ICL’s actions did to the struggle for revolutionary Trotskyism cannot be undone by proclamations reminiscent of a “truth and reconciliation commission” that admits what is already known in a quest to “let bygones be bygones.” Meanwhile, key individuals who carried out these deeply unprincipled actions continue to speak authoritatively for the ICL. Entirely left out from the ICL bulletin is their deliberate and declared drive to “humiliate” the North African comrades of the Permanent Revolution Faction in the French section of the ICL, repeated attempts at physical intimidation of our comrades and so much more. 

Yet the ICL’s cynical attempt to break revolutionary cadres failed. What it did “achieve” was the irreparable squandering of its political capital and the politically terminal demoralization of its own membership. ■