The Sparts

To the Editors of The Crimson:

By telling the truth about the Spartacus Youth League, Michael Anderson invited the predictable, totalitarian wrath of this "workers" vanguard" of spoiled children. In their May 10 offensive, they call Anderson a "cold war liberal," a "take-leftist," a "self-proclaimed Marxist," a "plain hard," an "apologist for the real Stalinists," and most damning of all, a "Friend of the SYL."

These epithets tend to cancel one another out, as they usually do and one's better impulse is not to get into the mud with these guys. But I have watched this band of movement-wrecking, non-sense-spouting dictators disrupt the left at Harvard for four years now, and I know how destructive their infantile disorder is.

In the first place, the Sparts have a strange way of supporting Local 26. They "widely" circulate their own stupid leaflet, tailored to alienate anyone who comes near it, show up for about an hour at the rally, and leave. I saw about four Sparts sitting by themselves in the upper balcony, not participating at all in what was a genuine victory for the genuine working class. This behavior must be part of their "proud history of strike support work at Harvard." In any case, it typifies Spart tactics: opposing authentic democratic movements, exploiting all causes for sectarian purposes.

The Sparts descend on Anderson with all the vitriol of a permanently irrelevant sect. "Some of us, including the Spartacists," writes Tom Cowperthwaite, as if the two were somehow different, "have chosen not to wear every radical-sounding button on our chest (sic)..." But just sentences before, he accuses Anderson of hiding his politics to keep "his radical-chic image intact." Which is it. Tom-of-the-non-radical-chic-image? Alden Cavanagh, displaying the SYL's talent for historical discrimination, subtly equates Anderson's original letter with Hitler's Big Lie, and then oddly smears Anderson for having defended the SYL's right to be on campus. Believe me. Alden, he would much rather not have you here, but unlike your gang of would-be tyrants. Anderson supports freedom of speech.

The tragedy of all this lies in the fact that those people who devote their time and energy to serious progressive organizing must continually contend with this venomous cult which mistakes the sound of its own bullhorns for a mass movement. It's hard to believe that "Spartacists politics are based upon the objective interests of the working class," since the Spartacists oppose the working class in Poland, alienate it in America, and patronize it at Harvard. If the Sparts would step down from Mount Marx for a moment, they would see that all they do is screw things up. Jamin B. Raskin '83