Anti-SEP-tic

Cyber Nuts and Democrats (2001)

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Workers Vanguard No. 754, 16 March 2001

Cyber Nuts and Democrats

Letter

8 December 2000

Dear ICL,

While reading the articles posted on David North’s “World Socialist Web Site,” one can’t help but detect a change in position before and after the U.S. presidential election. Before the election their position seemed to be that both major parties were equally reactionary. Now with all of what’s been happening since, they have stated that the extreme right wing which controls George W. Bush would implement the most sweeping attacks on the working class in history should Bush ultimately prevail. If this is the case why did they not take this position before the election? They seem to think that because the vote was so close, the reactionaries are now seizing the opportunity to steal the election and create a free market police state. If Bush had won decisively I guess he would still be a “compassionate conservative.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republicans used intimidation and fraud to assure a Bush victory in Florida. And the articles on the WSWS have been illuminating in exposing this fact. But consistency in positions seems to be lacking.

I would be interested to know what [you] think, not so much about the Northites but about the whole election circus.

In Struggle, Timothy L.

WV Replies: Timothy L. might have missed it, but we dealt with the election circus in our article “White House Scramble” (WV No. 746, 17 November 2000). As for David North’s Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and World Socialist Web Site, this gang will say anything one day and the opposite the next if it appears to suit their immediate opportunist appetites. The one consistent feature of their pronouncements is that they reflect, albeit often in quite weird ways, mainstream liberal public opinion.

When U.S. imperialism launched a wave of terror bombing against Iraq in December 1998, North echoed the patriotism being whipped up by invoking films like Patton and Saving Private Ryan in order to salute the military commanders of U.S. imperialism in World War ll because “they, at least, led their armies against an enemy fully capable of fighting back” (19 December 1998). Respectfully debating professional anti-Communist Ronald Radosh, who had published an article praising McCarthyism, North sent a letter to the New York Times (22 October 1998) obscenely claiming that the Trotskyists had been there first, writing: “Before the cold war, anti-Stalinism was associated principally with the Socialist left — above all with Trotskyists.”

Before last year’s presidential elections, the SEP bizarrely claimed that both capitalist parties had displayed “populist trappings” (3 October 2000) and wrote that Al Gore had adopted the “posture of a populist opponent of powerful corporate interests.” But their subsequent material is positively surreal, arguing that the Florida ballot flap showed “that the attack on the principle of popular sovereignty raised the specter of authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule” (8 December 2000). In a speech posted a few days later, North talked of “a political crisis so immense, so fundamental” as to “call into question the whole governmental structure.” North took us to task for stating the obvious: “The Gore-Bush feud is at this point more like a tempest in a teapot than a political crisis for the bourgeoisie.” He continued, in truly demented fashion (his italics): “The beginning of a revolutionary crisis in the very bastion of world capitalism — and that is the essential significance of the present developments — has introduced into the world situation a factor of extraordinary and almost incalculable magnitude.”

Cynical crisis-mongering has long been the stock in trade of these political bandits. Like the rest of the fake left, albeit with their own outlandish twist, the Northites used the turmoil around the elections to give backhanded support to the Democrats. The SEP’s Web postings are filled with paeans to the supposed “traditions of American democracy” being trampled underfoot by Bush, the Supreme Court et al. In his speech, North even makes an explicit analogy to the “irrepressible conflict” with the Southern slaveholders on the eve of the Civil War — ironic indeed coming from an outfit which has echoed the racists in opposing defense of affirmative action, among other things.

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As for David North’s Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and World Socialist Web Site, this gang will say anything one day and the opposite the next if it appears to suit their immediate opportunist appetites. The one consistent feature of their pronouncements is that they reflect, albeit often in quite weird ways, mainstream liberal public opinion.
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When North was labor editor of the now-departed and unlamented Bulletin in 1972, he enthused over a “developing break between the labor movement and the Democratic Party” based on his “exclusive interview” with anti- Communist Steelworkers bureaucrat I. W. Abel (Bulletin, 24 July 1972). This was at a time when the Cold War AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy under George Meany stood to the right of significant sections of the ruling class on the burning question of the Vietnam War. North reprinted excerpts from a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in which Abel “broke” with Democratic “peace” candidate George McGovern, meticulously editing out Abel’s endorsement of McGovern’s right-wing Democratic Party rival. North & Co. advanced a “labor party” platform in that period even Meany might have embraced, saying nothing about either the war or the struggle for black rights!

In 1993, the Northites cynically pointed to the pro-capitalist policies of the labor tops in order to write off the trade unions entirely as workers organizations. Today, they chastise the labor tops for not fighting hard enough against the “extreme right-wing elements that control the Republican Party” (“AFL-CIO Rally in Tallahassee: Unions Offer No Strategy to Fight Denial of Voting Rights,” 8 December 2000).

Bush & Co. are plenty right-wing, but stealing an election is as Americas as apple pie — hardly a sign that this imperialist ruling class is about to dispense with the stability of bourgeois democratic rule. As we wrote in response to the bleating of the reformists for “real democracy”: “This is capitalist democracy, which is nothing but a screen for the iron dictatorship of capital.”

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 3 (1999)

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From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 3)

The IMF and World Bank - Brutal Imperialist Debt Collectors

The view that “transnational” corporations transcend the nation-state system leads to the notion that certain international economic agencies, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have now become a kind of world capitalist government. In a 1992 speech IC leader David North contends:

“Not even at the height of its glory did the British Empire possess even a fraction of the power over its colonial subjects that the modern institutions of world imperialism – such as the World Bank, the IMF, GATT and the EC-routinely exercise over the supposedly independent states of Latin America,Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

The idea that the World Bank and IMF exercise greater power over the workers and peasants of India and Pakistan than did the British colonial army and police is pacifistic nonsense.

No less absurd is the idea that these institutions are powers unto themselves, independent of the imperialist nation-states. The IMF and World Bank act in the Third World (and now in the former Soviet bloc) as brutal debt collection agencies, using blackmail to force through the imposition of draconian austerity policies on the working masses and peasants of the semicolonial countries. But these international agencies act at the behest and in the interests of the major capitalist powers, not autonomously of them and certainly not above them.

The policies and, indeed, very existence of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, European Union (formerly the European Community) et al. are based on compromises among rival imperialist bourgeoisies represented by their national capitalist states. Both the IMF and World Bank were conceived at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and, as an article in Monthly Review (September 1995) noted, “ultimately reflected the interests of the world’s overwhelmingly dominant power at that time – the United States.” But that has changed with the waning of U.S. imperialism’s hegemonic position.

For example, last year the U.S. proposed that the IMF and World Bank write off a large part of the money owed them by especially poor countries like Uganda. Washington officials argue that this is necessary to free up government funds for spending on infrastructure, for tax breaks to encourage new private investment, etc. However, Germany and Japan for months blocked the U.S. plan and succeeded in watering down any substantial debt reduction by the IMF/World Bank. As the growing conflicts between the major imperialist powers reach a certain point, institutions like the IMF and World Bank will be reduced to empty shells, stripped of their present financial resources and political influence. A glimpse of this came in 1995, when Tokyo and Berlin openly challenged Washington’s demand that $30 billion in IMF funds be used to bail out (U.S. banks in) Mexico.

“Ultra-Imperialism,” from Kautsky to North

The current authority exercised by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization et al. derives from the power of the imperialist states for which they function as agents. Let us imagine that a left-nationalist government comes to power in Mexico and repudiates that country’s foreign debt. Will the IMF’s army invade Mexico and install a puppet regime? Will the IMF’s navy blockade Mexico’s ports? Will IMF agents confiscate the assets of the Mexican government held in other countries? No, since the IMF has no army, no navy and no agents empowered to confiscate any property anywhere. A Mexican government which repudiated its foreign debt would face economic sanctions and potential military action by the U.S. and other imperialist states.

Basically, the Northites have reinvented the doctrine of “ultra-imperialism” expounded by Karl Kautsky before and during World War I. The core of Kautsky’s theory, quoted by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, went as follows:

“Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the common exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capital? Such a phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable.”

For the International Committee, such a new phase of capitalism is not merely conceivable but is now here. To be sure, North & Co. do not deny a tendency toward imperialist war. But they do so by counterposing “transnational” corporations to reactionary nation-states. Corporations like IBM, Siemens and Toshiba are supposedly striving for a transnational capitalist order but are obstructed by the bad, old, obsolete nation-state system. On the contrary, the root cause of imperialist wars does not lie in the nation-state system as such, much less in nationalist and chauvinist ideology and demagogy. The imperialist nation-state is the fundamental political instrument by which transnational corporations, to use the Northites’ favored term, struggle to expand their markets and spheres of exploitation.

As Lenin wrote in opposition to Kautsky’s theory of “ultraimperialism”:

“The only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism....

“Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German ‘Marxist’ Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars.” [emphasis in original]

Spelling out the reformist implications of Kautsky’s theory, Lenin added: “It is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism.” Not surprisingly, Kautsky was to be a vehement opponent of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat which was erected by it to replace the rule of capital.

No less inherently reformist and anti-revolutionary is the contemporary Northite version of “ultra-imperialism.” If, to believe North, the competition among different imperialist powers has been subsumed by supra-national agencies, then the traditional Marxist position in inter-imperialist conflicts – that the main enemy is at home – is clearly “outmoded.” When it comes to the national and colonial questions, as we will see, North & Co. rival the worst social-chauvinists of Lenin’s day.

The U.S. Imperialist State and the Exploitation of Mexico
The central role of the imperialist state in what is currently termed the “globalization” of world capitalism is especially clear in the case of Mexico, U.S. imperialism’s most important neocolony. One-fifth of all industrial plant and equipment owned by U.S. corporations in Third World countries is now located in Mexico. Over the past 15 years, the actions of the U.S. government have been crucial in promoting and protecting American investment in that country. Among other things; this has meant an increasingly open role by U.S. imperialism in aiding and arming the Mexican government’s bloody repression against combative worker and peasant struggles (see “U.S. Hands Off Mexico!” WV No. 658, 27 December 1996).

Following the frenzied over-borrowing during the oil-price boom of the 1970s, in 1982 the Mexican government announced that it could not meet the scheduled interest payment on its foreign debt. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank immediately took over the “rescheduling” of Mexico's debts and those of other Latin American countries. This entailed the subsidization by the U.S government, via Mexico, of the major Wall Street banks. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, an arch-“free marketeer,” wrote at the time:

“In the past five years the commercial banks have received large net transfers from the debtor countries, while the official creditors, including the creditor governments and the multilateral institutions, have made large net transfers to the debtor. Operationally, it can be argued that the official creditors are indeed ‘bailing out the banks’.”
– Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 4 (1986)

In the early and mid-1980s, American corporate investment in Mexico was effectively zero. In fact, the movement of capital across the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) was in the other direction. Wealthy Mexicans were smuggling out billions and parking their money in Wall Street banks, U.S. corporate stocks and bonds, and Texas and California real estate. The turnaround in the Mexican and, more generally, Latin,American debt crisis came with the 1989 Brady Plan, named after then U.S. treasury secretary Nicholas Brady. This plan transformed the short-term bank debt of Latin American countries into long-term bonds guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury. In return, Washington levered open the Latin American economies to unimpeded exploitation by U.S. finance and industrial capital.

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If, to believe North, the competition among different imperialist powers has been subsumed by supra-national agencies, then the traditional Marxist position in inter-imperialist conflicts – that the main enemy is at home – is clearly “outmoded.”
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The Brady Plan opened the way for a massive American investment boom in Mexico. U.S. banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and corporations which engaged in manufacturing and services assumed that any money they placed south of the border would be fully protected by the fiscal resources and, ultimately, the political/military might of the U.S. capitalist state. The increasing weight of American capital in Mexico laid the basis for and was, in turn, reinforced by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect on New Year’s Day 1994.

Among its other disastrous consequences, NAFTA meant the economic destruction of millions of Mexican peasant smallholders who could not compete with the much cheaper and better-quality produce, centrally corn, imported from the highly mechanized farms of the American Midwest. Thus, the day that NAFTA came into effect saw a major peasant uprising led by the nationalist-populist Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The bloody suppression of this uprising by the Mexican army was actively aided by Washington. In the first months of 1994, the Pentagon provided the Mexican army with an additional 3,000 military vehicles, including armored personnel carriers with water cannon, jeeps, trucks and tanks. At the same time, hundreds of U.S. troops were sent to Guatemala in the region bordering Chiapas (see “Pentagon Beefs Up Mexican Repression,” WV No. 604, 5 August 1994).

The sudden and unexpected Zapatista uprising exposed the fragility of the bourgeois order in Mexico, not least to the ever-wary eyes of foreign investors. Furthermore, the Mexican investment boom had reached a point of speculative frenzy. Prices on the Bolsa (stock exchange) bore no relation to actual or prospective profits. The Mexican government could not service its massively expanded foreign debt without devaluing the peso, which it did in December 1994, thereby precipitating a full-fledged financial panic. By year’s end, foreign, mainly U.S., investors had liquidated and withdrawn $23 billion in Mexican assets, more than twice the total value of U.S. direct manufacturing investment in Mexico at the beginning of 1994.

The financial panic was halted only when the U.S. government came up with a $50 billion “rescue package” – $20 billion directly from the U.S. Treasury, the balance from the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements (known as the central bankers’ central bank). Mexican finance minister Guillermo Ortiz later told American journalist Thomas Friedman that if Washington had not acted when and on the scale it did, “We would have had to declare a moratorium on debt repayments.” German and Japanese capitalists were displeased, to say the least, that no small amount of their money was being used to bail out U.S. banks, mutual funds and insurance companies. The German (and also the British) representative in the IMF took the unprecedented step of abstaining on the vote for the Mexican loan package, while Japan only grudgingly voted in favor. And the next time around, the German and Japanese representatives might vote against.

The Mexican financial crisis totally disproves the Northite theory of a new era of globally integrated capitalist production transcending the nation-state system. At the first sign of political unrest and financial overextension, American “transnationals” dumped every Mexican asset they could and repatriated their money back to their own nation-state, the U.S. of A. The flood of pesos into dollars was stanched only when the U.S. government, acting both directly and indirectly, vastly augmented the short-term financial resources available to the Mexican government. And the Mexican financial crisis both exposed and intensified the conflicts of interest among the major imperialist powers: the U.S., Germany and Japan.

Against Capitalist Imperialism For Permanent Revolution!

From its inception, capitalism has been a global system marked by conflicts among competing nation-states. The rise of the bourgeoisies in West Europe to wealth and power was directly linked to the conquest and colonization of more backward regions of the world – the Spaniards and Portuguese in Central and South America, the French in North America and the Caribbean, the British in North America, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. A central characteristic of mercantile imperialism in the 16th-18th centuries was the attempt by the leading colonial powers to insulate their colonies and themselves from the world market by legal prohibitions and sanctions against trade other than between colony and “mother country.”

Economic development during the era of mercantile capitalism laid the basis for the industrial revolution pioneered by Britain in the early 19th century. Marx and Engels initially believed that industrial capitalism would be extended more or less uniformly on a worldwide basis. The founders of scientific socialism were by no means blind or indifferent to the monumental crimes committed by the Western powers against the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. But they viewed such crimes as a historical overhead cost for the modernization of these backward regions. In an 1853 article, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Marx wrote:

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating-the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia....
“Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary division of labor, upon which rest theIndian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.”

This projection was not borne out by the actual course of development. While the Western bourgeoisies introduced certain elements of modem industrial technology (e.g., railroads) into their colonies and semi-colonies, the overall effect of capitalist imperialism was to arrest the social and economic development of backward countries. Thus, British colonial rule deliberately perpetuated and utilized traditional reactionary institutions such as the caste system in India and tribalism in sub-Saharan Africa.

Moreover, the economic development which was introduced under European colonial rule had a deformed character. Thus, the British built the railways in India only from the hinterland to the ports to facilitate trade with the imperialist metropolis. The rail lines did not connect the different regions of the Indian subcontinent. By contrast, railway construction in the United States during the same period was a prime factor in the economic and social integration of the American nation-state.

By the late 19th century, Marx and Engels had become champions of colonial independence and recognized that the modernization of Asia, Africa and Latin America could take place only within the context of a world socialist order. Thus, Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky in 1882:

“India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation cannot conduct any colonial wars, it would have to be allowed to run its course; it would not pass off without all sorts of destruction, of course, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is reorganized, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilized countries will of themselves follow in their wake; economic needs, if anything, will see to that. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organization, I think we today can advance only rather idle hypotheses.” [emphasis in original]

In the 1880s, at the beginning of the era of modern capitalist imperialism, it was understandable that Marx and Engels assumed that proletarian socialist revolution would first take place in the advanced capitalist countries and that the socialist transformation of the more backward regions would gradually follow in consequence. However, imperialist domination and exploitation strengthened the bourgeois order in West Europe and North America, not least by infecting the working class in these countries with the ideology of national chauvinism and racism. As Lenin pointed out in his 1916 pamphlet, imperialist super-profits derived from the colonial world made it “economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat” in the advanced countries, providing a material basis for opportunism and social-chauvinism.

At the same time, imperialism tended to destabilize the traditional social order in backward countries, generating contradictions which Trotsky termed “combined and uneven development.” A sizable industrial proletariat, working with modern technology, emerged alongside the mass of impoverished peasants still subject to feudal-derived forms of exploitation. The day-to-day struggle against capitalist any pre-capitalist forms of exploitation was organically intertwined with, and reinforced by, the struggle for national independence.

Recognizing the international contradictions brought about by the era of modem imperialism, Leon Trotsky challenged the hitherto accepted sequencing of the world socialist revolution from the advanced to the backward countries. It was now possible that the proletariat of a backward country, leading the peasant masses in the struggle against feudal-derived exploitation and foreign imperialist domination, could come to power in advance of the workers of West Europe and North America. Such revolutions would severely weaken the bourgeois order in the imperialist centers while giving a powerful impetus to the revolutionary consciousness of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries.

Trotsky first developed this concept of “permanent revolution” at the beginning of the century specifically with regard to tsarist Russia, and it was validated by life itself in the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917. In the late 1920s, in light of the experience of the defeated Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Trotsky generalized the theory and program of permanent revolution to what is now called the Third World. Thus the section on “Backward Countries and the Program of Transitional Demands” in the 1938 Transitional Program states:

“The central tasks of the colonial and semicolonial countries are the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the imperialist yoke. Both tasks are closely linked with each other....
“The general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by the three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917).” [emphasis in original]

David North vs. Permanent Revolution

As clearly stated in the Transitional Program, Trotsky and the Fourth International he founded regarded the struggle for national independence in backward countries as an integral and important component of the world socialist revolution. The Northites now maintain that in the supposedly new era of “globalized” capitalist production, national independence has become impossible and, indeed, reactionary. In a 1992 lecture, “Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today,” North pontificated:

“To the extent that Marxists attributed a progressive content to national liberation movements, it was because they were in some way identified with overcoming of imperialist domination and the legacy of backwardness, tribal and caste distinctions....
“That content is hardly to be found in any of the movements which presently claim to champion ‘national liberation.’ At any rate, whatever the subjective aims of different movements, the liberation of mankind cannot be advanced in this era of global economic integration by establishing new national states.”
– Fourth International (Winter-Spring 1994)

We have previously discussed at some length the Northites’ opposition to the democratic right of national self-determination (see “David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination” WV Nos. 626 and 627, 28 July and 25 August 1995). What we want to emphasize here is that their position amounts to passive acceptance of imperialist oppression and exploitation of backward countries.

This can be seen very clearly in the case of Mexico. NAFTA represents a qualitative extension and institutionalization of the exploitation of Mexico by Wall Street. When NAFTA was first proposed in 1991, the Mexican, U.S. and Canadian sections of the International Communist League issued a joint declaration headlined, “Stop U.S. 'Free Trade' Rape of Mexico!” The fight against NAFTA, we maintained, “is a battle against American imperialist domination of Mexico” (WV No. 530, 5 July 1991).

What of the Northites’ attitude toward NAFTA? From a superficial reading of their press, one might assume they are implacably hostile to it. In their International Workers Bulletin (11 April 1994), they stated, quite accurately, that NAFTA “effectively puts the entire Mexican economy at the service of the needs of US transnationals and the Wall Street financial institutions, providing low-wage labor, inexpensive natural resources and vast tracts of land for them to exploit and a huge market for American manufactured goods.” Some months later, they wrote that “NAFTA means nothing more than the economic recolonization of Mexico” (IWB, 16 January 1995). This is actually an overstatement, since Mexico had already been an economic neocolony of U.S. imperialism for decades before NAFTA.

Yet the Northites have never opposed what they themselves call the “economic recolonization” of Mexico, either before NAFTA was implemented or even when its bloody consequences could be seen in the corpses of hundreds of impoverished Indian peasants in Chiapas. A few months before NAFTA came into effect, a political line statement in IWB (20 September 1993) declared: “American workers must not line up behind either side in the capitalist debate over NAFTA,, but must adopt an independent class standpoint which is based on the genuine, i.e., international, interests of the working class.”

What the Northites meant by “an independent class standpoint” was “neutrality” toward the intensified exploitation and domination of Mexico by U.S. imperialism. In fact, there was no debate within the American capitalist class, aside from a few maverick bourgeois pseudo-populists like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan who opposed NAFTA from a chauvinist standpoint, as did the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. The large majority of the American imperialist bourgeoisie supported and still supports NAFTA wholeheartedly. More fundamentally, the Northites treat imperialist subjugation of backward countries as simply a matter of “debate” within the capitalist class. By this logic they should in retrospect not have opposed the Vietnam War, since this generated a real debate – indeed, a sharp division – within the U.S. ruling class. In short, North & Co. did not and do not support the actual struggles of the Mexican working people against NAFTA and its effects.

One has only to look at the Northites’ attitude toward the Chiapas peasant uprising of early 1994. This unexpected leftist-led revolt gripped the world’s attention. But not the Northites’. The self-described “weekly socialist newsjournal” of the American Northites ran one article on the Chiapas uprising during the period when it was convulsing Mexico and causing no small concern to U.S. “transnational” corporations and banks. This article, “Mexican Government Massacres Hundreds” (IWB, 10 January 1994), was simply a piece of descriptive journalism which raised no programmatic demands whatsoever. The Northites did not call for the defense of the peasant uprising against the Mexican neocolonial bourgeois state. They did not call for the withdrawal of the Mexican army from Chiapas. They did not call for the release of Zapatista militants and peasant supporters imprisoned and often tortured by the Mexican army and police. They did not call for a halt to U.S. arms shipments and other aid to the Mexican military. And, of course, they did not call for the abrogation of NAFTA, one of the key demands of the uprising.

In sharpest contrast, our international tendency actively mobilized in defense of the Chiapas uprising from a proletarian socialist standpoint. In the U.S., the Spartacist League joined in solidarity rallies outside the Mexican consulates in New York City and San Francisco. Our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico (GEM) participated in a mammoth anti-government protest in Mexico City. A statement issued by the GEM, and published in the Mexico City daily El Dia, declared:

“As a Marxist revolutionary organization, the GEM emphasizes to those who seek to fight against capitalism and imperialism, that it is the power of the working class, and not rural guerrilla warfare, which if organized behind the program of international socialist revolution can defeat NAFTA and mobilize the dispossessed peasants and all the oppressed against the misery andbarbarity of the capitalist system. In the face of repression in Chiapas, it is an urgent duty for the working class to defend thecourageous Indian insurgents and all the victims of bourgeois repression.”
–translated in WV No. 592 (21 January 1994)

The very different responses of the ICL and North’s IC toward the Chiapas uprising reflected our adherence and their opposition to the perspective of permanent revolution. By the beginning of the 20th century, tsarist Russia had become the weak link in the European imperialist system. In a parallel way, Mexico has now become the weak link in the American imperialist order in its Western hemispheric base.

For World Socialist Revolution - Reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International!

The massive inroads of American capital – at all levels – have fatally undermined the nationalist-corporatist economic structure upon which the political hegemony of the long-ruling Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has rested. A popular upheaval in Mexico, toppling the neocolonial PRI regime, would have a powerful radicalizing effect on the millions of Hispanic workers in the U.S., many of whom retain strong family ties to Mexico or Central America. As we stated in “Mexico and Permanent Revolution,” published in the first issue of Espartaco (Winter 1990-91), journal of the GEM:

“The Mexican workers revolution will succeed where the bourgeois revolutions failed, because it will and must be internationalist from the beginning. It must come to the aid of theheroically struggling working people of Central America andextend to the north, in common struggle with the workers andoppressed in the very entrails of the imperialist monster.... This is the goal toward which the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico is working as part of the International Communist League in the fight to reforge the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.”
– WV No. 518 (18 January 1991)

Whereas we recognize that the Mexican proletariat, leading the rural toilers and urban poor, could strike the first decisive blow against American capitalist imperialism, the Northites maintain that Mexican workers are powerless to move forward unless and until a socialist revolution is on the order of the day in the United States. In a sense, North & Co. have recreated and adopted the Stalinist caricature of Trotskyism, that international socialist revolution means simultaneous revolutions in all major capitalist countries, both advanced and backward. At the time of the Mexican financial crisis in early 1995, the IWB (16 January 1995) wrote: “The events in Mexico demonstrate once again that the only way forward for the working class in the oppressed countries is to unite with their class brothers and sisters in the imperialist centers in a common struggle for the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and the establishment of socialism.” But what do the Northites tell the Mexican workers to do until the mass of workers in the U.S. move to overthrow the capitalist system? The answer is effectively nothing.

By counterposing an abstract conception of socialist internationalism to the actual struggles of the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples, the Northite tendency inexorably puts forward a defeatist line toward those struggles. In practice, the Northites oppose socialist revolution both in the U.S. and Mexico, as elsewhere.

Five years ago, as he announced the death of the Soviet Union and of the trade unions in the West, David North effectively proclaimed himself and his IC to be the leadership of the international proletariat. Yet while declaring themselves to be "clearly recognized as the only Trotskyist tendency," the Northites have transformed themselves into "Socialist Equality" parties whose program even at face value is profoundly reformist. Thus, a central aspect of the U.S. SEP’s election platform last November was the stale, old reformist proposal to promote greater equality by “revising” the bourgeoisie’s tax codes. At the same time, the SEP demonstrated its sneering approach to any struggle for social equality by highlighting its opposition to affirmative action programs for minorities and women.

Indeed, while the Northites’ open rejection of the right to self-determination may be a new innovation, getting there was not a very big step. They have long dismissed racial and other forms of oppression born of capitalism as somehow irrelevant to the “class struggle” – by which they meant the pursuit of a crude workerist adaptation to the Cold War labor bureaucrats. Their call on the AFL-CIO tops to form a "labor party" in the early 1970s – raised at the height of the Vietnam antiwar protests and militant struggles for black freedom – took up neither opposition to the imperialist war nor the fight for black liberation.

As we concluded in our article on the IC’s denial of the right of national self-determination (WV No, 627, 25 August 1995):

“The ICFI’s ‘theories’ are nothing but cowardly rationalizations for sneering at the struggle against chauvinist oppression, and for writing off the economic defense organizations of the working class, in order to boost their own petty advantage. The Northites’ policies are those of poseurs seeking a niche as spoilers. Otherwise, they are utterly devoid of, and antithetical to, a program which can lead the international working class and oppressed to a socialist victory over their exploiters.”

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 2 (1999)

2009-11-22T13:42:00.003-05:00

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 2)

Economic “Globalization”: Myths and Realities

An article in the recent special issue of the Nation (15 July 1996) devoted to the question of “globalization” begins with the portentous statement “Economic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution.” Similarly, Australian Northite leader Nick Beams asserts that “globalization refers to the internationalization of the circuit of productive capital” and that this constitutes a “qualitative transformation” of the world capitalist system (International Workers Bulletin, 15 July 1996).

In fact, the history of industrial capitalism was marked by a previous shift, far more profound than the present one, in the geographical distribution of production. The Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the early 19th century and then spread by mid-century to France and the Low Countries (Belgium and Holland). In the late 19th century, the “New Industrializing Countries” of the day were Germany, the United States and Japan.

Writing in the 1890s, Friedrich Engels noted that Germany, which at the time of the 1848 Revolution was economically dominated by peasant agriculture and small-scale artisan manufacturing, had become “an industrial country of the first rank.” During the same period the United States, too, became an industrial country of the first rank. American industrial development was heavily dependent on investment by British capital, especially in the key sector of railway construction. Following the overthrow of the feudal order with the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, Japan deliberately emulated the advanced capitalist countries of the West, beginning by exporting light manufactures produced by cheap unskilled labor. Tsarist Russia also experienced rapid industrial growth between the 1890s and World War I, largely financed by West European, especially French, capital.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the existing advanced capitalist (i.e., imperialist) countries had achieved such dominance over more backward regions that they were able to arrest the development of new rival industrial powers. Hence the present global division between the so-called First World and the Third World.

Since the Northite International Committee maintains that world capitalism has recently undergone a “qualitative transformation,” one would expect this ostensibly Marxist organization to substantiate their analysis with a comprehensive study of the relevant economic data. For example, Lenin’s 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, contains pages of statistical tables illuminating and substantiating its analysis on all aspects. By contrast, the writings and speeches on “globalization” by North and his henchmen are devoid of even cursory data on trends in global production, investment and trade. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, contains not a single statistical table or graph.

A few basic and easily accessible statistics debunk the notion of a qualitative transformation of world capitalism. Western/Japanese investment in the so-called Newly Industrializing Countries totaled some $100 billion in 1993, a peak year. Yet this record amount was only 3 percent of total capital investment in North America, West Europe and Japan. In other words, the imperialist bourgeoisies still invest more that 30 times as much in their own “First World” as in the Third World. American capitalists invest 9 cents in Canada and West Europe and just 5 cents in the entire rest of the world for every dollar they expend on productive assets in the United States.

Why, then, all the hullabaloo about economic “globalization”? For the past few decades, and especially since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the world capitalist economy has in certain respects been returning to the norms of the pre1914 imperialist order. To maintain a sense of perspective, one should understand that only in the early 1970s did the ratio of world trade to global production once again reach the level it had attained in 1914, on the eve of the first imperialist world war. Yet the current theoreticians of “globalization” rarely if ever mention Lenin’s seminal study of the rise of the imperialist system, to which they add little or nothing, save confusion. As we noted in an earlier article (“David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination,” Part One, WV No. 626, 28 July 1995):

“The idea of an ‘era of global economic integration’ which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique ‘theoretical breakthroughs’ has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!”

The term “globalization” refers to certain significant quantitative changes in the contemporary structure of world production and trade. In 1970, 85 percent of all exports (in value terms) from Africa, Latin America and Asian countries other than Japan consisted of agricultural produce, oil, mineral ores and other primary products. Since then exports of manufactured goods from Third World countries have increased by an average rate of 15 percent a year in real terms and now make up well over half the value of their total exports. Much of this industrial , output is financed and organized by Western/Japanese corporations either directly or through local subcontractors, licensees, etc. However, the growth of internationally competitive manufactures in East Asia and Latin America is reversible and cannot continue at anything close to the rate of increase of the past few decades. That is a political, economic and, indeed, mathematical certainty.

There’s a saying in American business circles: there are liars, damn liars and statisticians. One can always select and present statistics to be deliberately misleading. One of the most common ways of doing this is to show dramatic percentage increases from a low initial base and then to project similar percentage increases into the future. For example, a worker making $5 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received a 20 percent increase while a worker making $13 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received an 8 percent increase. But the second worker is still vastly better off than the first. And the low-wage worker well knows he is not going to keep getting a 20 percent raise every year for the next ten years.

However, much writing and discussion on the world economy – by both bourgeois ideologues and leftist intellectuals – is based on this kind of fallacious methodology. For example, between 1950 and the mid-1970s Japan’s national output grew at an average annual rate two to three times greater than that of the U.S. In the 1970s, big-name American intellectuals wrote well-publicized books – e.g., Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate, Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One – predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s leading capitalist economic power by the end of the century. Not long after these books. came out, the Japanese growth rate sharply decelerated and during the past decade Japan’s economy has been stagnant. Today, Japan’s national output is still less than half that of the U.S.

The current apocalyptic vision of economic “globalization” is based on the same faulty premises as the “Japan will be number one” literature of the 1970s. For example, between 1985 and 1994 China’s share of world exports of footwear went from 1.5 percent to 15.5 percent, an increase of 1,000 percent. If one projects the same increase for the next ten years, China will account for 150 percent of world trade in footwear, a mathematical impossibility. In another example, investment in plant and equipment by Western/Japanese corporations in backward countries, now including East Europe and the ex-USSR, increased last year by 13 percent. But it is wrong to assume this trend will continue indefinitely into the future.

The Development of Modern Imperialism

To understand the actual significance and limits of the recent changes in the world economy, it is necessary to view these changes In a broad historical perspective. In his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin described modern imperialism as that epoch of capitalism marked by the export of capital and the division of the world into “spheres of influence” by a few major advanced capitalist states. The two key institutions of the pre-1914 imperialist order were colonialism and the gold standard.

Particularly Britain and France, but also other West European countries, the United States and Japan exercised direct state power over hundreds of millions of toilers throughout the world. British plantation owners in India did not have to worry that the Indian government would impose high taxes on their property or enact laws favorable to labor since the government in India was their government. Compared to British India, foreign investment in China in the pre-1914 era was relatively slight, because the country was beset by political disorder and was an arena of conflict among a number of rival imperialist powers.

At the same time, the gold standard assured a degree of financial integration among the advanced capitalist countries which has never been matched since. Exchange rates between currencies were fixed, there were few or no restrictions on the international movement of capital, and real interest rates were stable and closely linked in the major financial capitals –London, Paris, New York. British holders of American railway bonds did not have to worry, that their assets would be devalued by hyperinflation or by the depreciation of the dollar against the pound.

Under these conditions the globalization of capital flourished as never before or since, as can be shown with the following few statistics for Britain and France (taken from Herbert Feis, Europe – The World’s Banker 1870-1914 [1964]). The income derived by British capitalists from their foreign assets increased from 4 percent of total British national income in the 1880s to 7 percent by 1903 to almost 10 percent on the eve of World War I in 1914. Foreign investments were concentrated in Britain’s own colonies (especially India, South Africa, Canada and Australia) as well as in the United States and, to a lesser extent; Argentina. By 1914, total productive assets held by British capitalists outside Britain amounted to well over one quarter of the capital stock within Britain itself!

While the globalization of pre-1914 British capitalism was historically unique, the role of foreign investment for French capitalism in this period likewise greatly exceeded that of any present-day imperialist country. Between 1909 and 1913, almost 5 percent of French national income was derived from French investments abroad (mainly in Russia, Turkey; the Balkans and France’s own African and Asian colonies). By 1914, the total value of French long-term foreign investment (45 billion francs) amounted to 15 percent of the productive wealth within France (295 billion francs).

Now let us look at comparable figures for the United States at present. In 1994, total income derived from the foreign assets of American capitalists, both direct investment and stock and bond holdings, was $167 billion. That amounted to slightly less than 2percent of the U.S. gross domestic product of $6.7 trillion. The current total value of American direct foreign investment is about one trillion dollars, slightly less than 10 percent of the $10.5 trillion in privately owned industrial assets (plant and equipment) within the United States. In the case of Japan, the relative weight of foreign investment is even less than it is in the U.S., and in the case of Germany it is substantially less.

World War I and the Russian Revolution

As the above figures indicate, World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought about a profound and long-lasting disruption of the world capitalist economy. To begin with, the war killed off the gold standard. All combatants financed their huge, unprecedented military expenditures by printing money while imposing tight controls over all international transactions. When the war ended in 1918, price levels in the major capitalist countries bore no relation whatsoever to either prewar foreign-exchange parities or real purchasing power.

An attempt to resurrect the gold standard in the mid-1920s was buried under the wreckage of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That decade saw the collapse of world trade, the rise of “beggar thy neighbor” trade protectionism, the widespread use of foreign-exchange controls (especially in Nazi Germany) and the establishment of regional economic blocs dominated by a single imperialist power (e.g., Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”).

Added to the effects of the Great Depression and intensifying interimperialist conflict were the consequences of the Russian Revolution. Not only had a major country been ripped out of the sphere of capitalist exploitation, but the imperialist bourgeoisies were now imbued with a fear of “red revolution” elsewhere; especially in backward countries where social and political conditions were manifestly unstable. The huge losses suffered by French financiers and other holders of Russian tsarist bonds cast a long shadow over world capital markets in the 1920s and ‘30s. Lending to semicolonial countries like China and Mexico was inhibited by the perceived danger of revolutionary turmoil and left-wing governments which would repudiate the country’s foreign debt. The only significant foreign investment in China during the interwar period was undertaken by the Japanese in Manchuria – after they had conquered and occupied this region in 1931.

From World War II to the Cold War

The struggle of the major capitalist powers to redivide markets and spheres of exploitation led in 1939-41, as it had in 1914, to an interimperialist world war, though this time one in which a chief combatant was a (degenerated) workers state, the Soviet Union. (Thus, while taking a defeatist position toward all the imperialist powers in World War II, as in the previous world war, revolutionary Marxists called for unconditional military defense of the USSR.) The outcome of the Second World War perpetuated and deepened the disruption and segmentation of the world economy. By defeating its main imperialist rivals, Germany and Japan, the United States became the hegemonic capitalist power. But the global hegemony of American imperialism was blocked by the Soviet Union, which had emerged from the war as the second-strongest state in the world: From East Asia to West Europe to South America, the course of economic developments between 1945 and 1991 was integrally connected with the Cold War.

In West Europe and also Japan, the devastation of the war combined with the leftward radicalization of the working class militated against a return to the “free trade” and “free market” policies of the pre-1914 era. Except for the U.S., all major advanced capitalist countries engaged in a high degree of state intervention in economic activity during the first phase of the postwar period. Almost all foreign-exchange transactions in West Europe were subject to strict government regulation and bureaucratic approval The pound, franc and deutschmark did not become “freely” convertible until the late 1950s.

Currency convertibility is a basic economic precondition for large-scale foreign investment in manufacturing and services, since the revenue generated from these activities is usually denominated in the currency of the country in which the investments take place. The oil extracted by Exxon in Saudi Arabia is sold on the world market for dollars. But the automobiles produced by General Motors in Germany are sold to Germans for deutschmarks. Thus, it was only in the 1960s – after the introduction of convertibility gave them the option of repatriating their profits – that American corporations bought out or built industrial plants in West Europe on a significant scale. The total value of U.S. direct investment in manufacturing in West Europe went from $3.8 billion in 1960 to $12.3 billion (discounting for inflation) by the end of the decade.

It was, however, in the economically backward regions of the world that the postwar period saw the most radical political changes affecting the international movement of capital. In the course of defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, the Soviet Red Army occupied East Europe. Over the next few years, under the hostile pressure of American imperialism, these countries were transformed, bureaucratically from above, into “people’s democracies” – i.e., deformed workers states structurally similar to the Stalinized Soviet Union, based on planned, collectivized economies, the state monopoly of foreign trade, etc.

Bureaucratically deformed workers states also emerged in China, North Korea and Vietnam, as a result of indigenous, peasant-based social revolutions led by Stalinists. It was above all fear of war with the Soviet Union which prevented Washington from using its nuclear weapons against Mao’s China during the Korean War in the early 1950s and a few years later against the Viet Minh forces which were defeating the French colonial army in Indochina. A large part of the world was thus removed from the sphere of capitalist exploitation, although still subject to the powerful political, economic and military pressures of imperialism.

At the same time, radical political changes also took place in those economically backward countries which remained within the sphere of capitalist exploitation. The weakening of the West European imperialist, states caused by World War II combined with the radicalization of the colonial masses led to the “decolonization” of much of Asia, the Near East and Africa. State power in these regions now passed into the hands of indigenous bourgeoisies, who sought to pursue their own national interests within a global context dominated by international finance capital.

Despite some CIA-organized coups (e.g., against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953), the ability of U.S. imperialism to control the governments of the former colonial and semicolonial countries was. limited by the countervailing power of the. Soviet Union. Moscow’s backing allowed bourgeois-nationalist regimes like Nasser's Egypt, Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s India and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to exercise a degree of political and economic independence of the imperialist powers which they could not have attained on the basis of their own national economic. resources.

During the 1960s, Soviet funds and engineers helped build the Aswan High Dam – one of the largest in the world – in Nasser’s Egypt. By the early ‘70s, the USSR had become the largest market for India's exports, while Moscow provided the New Delhi regime with over 60 percent of its imports of military hardware. At the same time, Western and Japanese corporations were discouraged from investing in countries like Egypt and India for fear of punitive taxation, restrictions on the repatriation of profits and the possibility of nationalization without adequate compensation. The 1960s and ‘70s thus marked the heyday of economic nationalism and statified capitalism in what was then called the “Afro-Asian bloc.” But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer even a partial counterweight to Western/Japanese imperialist domination in the Third World. The 1991 Gulf War signaled that, without the protection of the USSR, those bourgeois-nationalist regimes which flouted the dictates of Washington would be subjected to the devastating power of the Pentagon war machine.

However, even with the relatively greater room for maneuver they had when the Soviet Union still existed, the bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Third World did not and could not chart a course truly independent of imperialism, nor could they bring about the economic and social modernization of their countries. Despite their “non-aligned” posture and even “socialist” rhetoric, the semicolonial bourgeoisies remained tied to the imperialist bourgeoisies by a thousand strings, subordinated and subservient to the power of the imperialist world market. Thus, India’s exports remained concentrated, as in the colonial era, in light manufactures produced by unskilled labor. Egypt remained economically dependent on the export of cotton (as well as tolls from the Suez Canal), Ba'athist Iraq and Qaddafi’s Libya on the vicissitudes of the world oil market controlled by the “Seven Sisters” monopolies. And Algeria under the radical-nationalist FLN regime relied heavily on money sent back by Algerians working in France. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of the local bourgeoisies, as part of a perspective of world socialist revolution reaching into the imperialist centers, can these countries achieve true independence from imperialism.

The End of the “American Century”

What is now termed economic “globalization” was rooted in the recovery of Germany and Japanese capitalism from their devastation and defeat in World War II. By the 1960s, German and Japanese manufactured goods were making huge inroads into world markets, including the American market. The competitive position of U.S. imperialism was further weakened in this period by the inflationary pressures generated by its long, losing colonial war in Vietnam. America's large, permanent balance-of-trade deficits, especially with Japan, fatally undermined the use of the dollar as the global medium of exchange and store of value – the international monetary system, originally set up at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Nixon's August 1971 devaluation of the dollar in terms of gold, and the subsequent recourse to fluctuating exchange rates, signaled the end of the short-lived “American Century” of U.S. imperialist hegemony in the capitalist world.

The weakened competitive position of U.S. capitalism was further exposed by the large losses experienced by corporate. America during the 1974-75 world economic downturn. The American bourgeoisie responded with a concerted drive to increase the rate of exploitation. An anti-labor offensive was marked by “giveback” contracts, two-tier wage systems for younger workers and outright, union-busting. Unionized plants in the Midwest and North, which paid relatively high wages, were shut down as production was shifted to the “open shop” South and Southwest.

At the same time, American industrial capital undertook a major expansion in East Asia and Latin America. Between 1977 and 1994, there was a five-fold increase in manufacturing plant and equipment owned directly by U.S. corporations in Third World countries, from $11 billion to $52 billion (in real terms, discounted for inflation). Japanese industrialists soon followed their American competitors in going offshore. By the mid-1980s, Matsushita was producing many of its TV sets and air conditioners in Malaysia, Yamaha its sporting goods in Taiwan, Minebea its miniature ball bearings in Singapore and Thailand, TDK its magnetic tapes in Taiwan and South Korea, etc.

Nonetheless, investment by Western and Japanese corporations in neocolonial countries was still inhibited by the uncertainties of the Cold War. A popular uprising or even an election or military coup could suddenly bring about a left nationalist regime backed by Moscow. For example, in 1979 a revolution in Nicaragua toppled Washington's puppet dictator Somoza and brought to power the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist Sandinistas. At the same time, a major leftist insurgency was raging in neighboring El Salvador. Thus, even Yankee imperialism's own “backyard” was not secure for Wall Street banks and the Fortune 500 corporations.

Economic “Globalization” and Capitalist Counterrevolution

A fundamental political condition for the present triumph of capitalist “globalization” was the retreat of Soviet global power under Gorbachev, the disintegration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. It was no accident that the electoral overthrow of the Sandinista regime in 1990, capping a contra war armed and organized by Washington, coincided with the beginning of a massive investment boom by U.S. banks and corporations in Mexico. At the same time, capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet sphere has opened up a new, huge sphere for exploitation, especially for German imperialism. A few' years ago, a spokesman for German industry exulted: “Right on our own doorstep in Eastern Europe, we have for the first time a vast pool of cheap and highly trained labor.”

During Cold War II in the 1980s North’s IC joined in the imperialist anti-Soviet chorus along with other pseudo-Trotskyists like the United Secretariat of the late Ernest Mandel, as well as mainstream social democrats and Eurocommunists. Having done all within their means to promote counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the Northites now proclaim that the restoration of capitalism there – a historic defeat for the international proletariat – was objectively determined. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, informs us: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the first major political convulsion produced by the transformation of the forms of production. The qualitative advances ,in the integration of world economy dealt the final blow to the autarchic national policies of the Stalinist regime.”

By their own terms, for the Northites the Soviet working class simply did not exist as even a potential factor in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union. The IC has effectively repudiated the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as even a historical possibility in this supposedly new era of “globalized” capitalism. The 1938 Transitional Program, written when the Soviet Union was relatively far more economically backward and geographically, isolated than in the 1980s, stated, “either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new form of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

What did Trotsky mean here about opening “the way to socialism”? Wouldn't a Russian-centered Soviet workers state, even if administered on the basis of proletarian democracy and governed by a genuinely communist vanguard party, still be surrounded by hostile and economically more advanced capitalist states? Yes, of course. However, the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the Soviet working class, under the banner of proletarian internationalism, would have reawakened and inspired revolutionary fervor among the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples throughout the capitalist world. And a communist government of the USSR would have provided invaluable political, economic and, if necessary, military support for proletarian revolutions in capitalist states, including the imperialist powers.

For Proletarian Political Revolution In China!

As against all the various pretenders to Trotskyism, not least North’s IC, our tendency unambiguously and consistently called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, as we do today in regard to the remaining deformed workers states – Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. The International Communist League mobilized all the limited resources at our command during the political turmoil in the East German (DDR) deformed workers state in 1989-90, fighting for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy which, in league with West German imperialism and its Social Democratic lackeys, pushed for a capitalist reunification of Germany. Uniquely, the ICL opposed capitalist Anschluss (annexation) down the line, calling instead for a “Red Germany of Workers Councils” as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.

And during the terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in the USSR, our tendency actively intervened in the Soviet Union with the program and perspective of proletarian political revolution to “open the way to socialism.” The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union was no more objectively inevitable in 1991-92 than in 1941, when the USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany. The direction taken by Russia, the Ukraine and other Soviet republics when the Kremlin bureaucracy disintegrated under Gorbachev, while conditioned by the pressures of the world capitalist market, was determined by the struggle of living social and political forces. A decisive factor in the outcome was a retrogression in the political consciousness of the Soviet working class brought about by three generations of Stalinism in power. Widespread apathy and cynicism as well as, to a certain degree, illusions in Western-type bourgeois democracy among the masses allowed the ascendancy of the counterrevolutionary forces centered around Boris Yeltsin in Russia and around anti-Soviet nationalists in the non-Russian republics.

In the case of the USSR, the Northites maintain that the capitalist counterrevolution which actually did take place was inevitable. In the case of China, they maintain that a capitalist counterrevolution has already taken place when it has not yet occurred. A major article in their Fourth International (Winter-Spring 1994), titled "The Political Background of the Restoration of Capitalism in China," asserts:

“The state which issued from the Chinese Revolution no longer defends or maintains the limited gains won by the workers and peasants in 1949....
“The Chinese state is not, even in the most distorted sense, an instrument for the defense of the working class.... The state defends the interests of the bureaucracy as a privileged social layer: increasingly linked to the rising capitalist class and, through them, the interests of imperialism itself.”

Despite the significant inroads made by capital, both domestic and foreign, over the past several years, the People's Republic of China remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The author of the article quoted above, one Martin McLaughlin, is here plagiarizing without attribution the Maoist doctrine of “capitalist roadism" and applying it to Mao's one-time chief rival within the Beijing Stalinist regime, Deng Xiaoping. Significantly but predictably, not once is the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution mentioned in this lengthy article, which purports to cover the entire history of China in the 20th century.

In contrast, a “Perspectives and Tasks Memorandum” adopted by our international tendency in January 1996 states:

“The next period is likely to see the breakdown and terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in China as powerful elements in the bureaucracy, directly tied to offshore Chinese capital and actively supported by Western and Japanese imperialism, continue to drive toward capitalist restoration. The Chinese working class, although heretofore limited by police repression to actions at individual workplaces, has in recent years exhibited massive discontent with the social degradation, insecurities and blatant inequalities generated by Deng’s ‘market socialist’ program. The rural economy has experienced the rise of a class of relatively wealthy peasant smallholders while an estimated 100 million landless peasants have flooded into the cities. We can thus foresee monumental class battles leading either to proletarian political revolution or capitalist counterrevolution in the most populous nation on earth.”

“Transnational” Corporations and Imperialist States: Antagonists or Partners?

A central element in the theory of a new “globalized” capitalist economy is that transnational corporations have supplanted nation-states as the dominant institutions in world power politics. In his latest book, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (1994), leading American left-liberal intellectual Richard J. Barnet maintains:

“The architects and managers of these space-age business enterprises understand that the balance of power in world politics has shifted in recent years from territorially bound governments to companies that can roam the world. As the hopes and pretensions of government shrink almost everywhere, these imperial corporations are occupying public space and exerting a more profound influence over the lives of ever larger numbers of people.”

A more extreme version of the same thesis is presented by another American rad-lib intellectual, David Korten, in his 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World. The current view of the International Committee is essentially similar, as North stated in a 1992 speech:

“Under the aegis of imperialism, the globalization of production collides against the nation-state form within which capitalist rule is rooted.... “The web of alliances being formed by various transnational corporations, such as Toshiba, IBM and Siemens, expresses the organic drive of the productive forces to organize themselves on a world scale. But the other side of the same process is the growing antagonism among nation-states and the eruption of various forms of national and communal conflict.”
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

Transnational corporations are here counterposed to imperialist nation-states. Moreover, the former are presented as (relatively) progressive, since they serve as agents of global economic integration, while the latter are viewed as reactionary and obsolete. North’s statement is diametrically counterposed to what Lenin argues in his Imperialism. In particular, North’s view of the capitalists as an international class flies in the face of the Marxist understanding that the bourgeoisie cannot transcend national interests (for further discussion, see “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness,” Spartacist No. 24, Autumn 1977).

In the Barnet/Korten/North view, corporations like IBM, Siemens and Toshiba are devoted solely to maximizing their profits on a global scale; their directors and stockholders supposedly don't care whether their actions strengthen or weaken the American; German and Japanese bourgeois states. This view expresses a liberal idealist outlook since it implicitly assumes that capitalists do not need state power – i.e., armed bodies of men – to protect their property against challenges from both the exploited classes and rival capitalists. in other countries. Wall Street bankers and the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations understand (as Richard Barnet and David North apparently do not) that Mexican and South Korean workers are not devout believers in the sanctity of private property. Replying to similar arguments at the time, notably by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, Lenin in his 1916 study of imperialism quoted the German economist Schulze-Gaevemitz:

“Great Britain grants loans to Egypt, Japan, China and South America. Her navy plays here the part of bailiff in case of necessity. Great Britain’s political power protects her from the indignation of her debtors.”

The same applies to the U.S., Germany and Japan, whose armed forces are prepared to act as “bailiff in case of necessity.” Whether undertaken by corporations, banks or other financial institutions, foreign investment depends on the political, economic and military power of the states controlled by the owners of these capitalist enterprises.

North & Co. have not yet revised or repudiated the position that the Republican and Democratic parties represent the interests of the American bourgeoisie. Why then do the political leaders of these parties continue to expend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the U.S. armed forces? Even an old-fashioned liberal like Russell Baker has observed: “The era of big government is over except for the Pentagon” (New York Times, 24 September 1996). That’s because the Pentagon provides and organizes the security guards, so to speak, to protect the property of American capitalists in other countries. Citibank and Exxon are no more independent of, much less antagonistic to, the American imperialist state than Barings Bank and Royal Dutch Shell were independent of the British imperialist state in the pre-1914 era.

Indeed, if the recent merger announcement by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas demonstrates anything, it is that “multinational” corporations – especially so in strategic industries like electronics and aerospace – are very much rooted in their own nation-states. This monopolistic merger is aimed not only at reinforcing the U.S. aerospace and weapons industry but at increasing its competitive edge against rivals like the West European Airbus conglomerate.

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 1 (1999)

2009-11-21T12:04:00.008-05:00

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 1)

Over the past couple of years, a flood of books and articles have announced or analyzed what a column in the Washington Post (16 February 1996) called “this structurally new and still imperfectly understood creature known as the global economy.” Whether they hail it or condemn it, mainstream bourgeois economists and leftist ideologues alike argue that the transfer of production operations by “multinational“ corporations from North America, West Europe and Japan to the so-called “Third World” in recent years represents a profound, structural change in the world capitalist system. The liberal Nation devoted a special issue to “globalization” last July. The labor reformists who publish Workers' World News (January-February 1996) speak of “a fundamental change as deep as the industrial revolution of the last century.” An essay on the “global economy” by sociologist Ulrich Beck in the principal German news weekly, Der Spiegel (13 May 1996), which reflects the skepticism of a section of the German bourgeoisie toward European “economic integration,” warns that “we are racing toward a capitalism without labor,” claiming, “What is at issue is political freedom and democracy in Europe.”

Though not all of the more cataclysmic predictions associated with “globalization” are universally accepted, a common theme in this literature is that the possibility of successful defensive struggles by the working class against the attacks of a particular capitalist government or employer is becoming a thing of the past. In a remarkable intellectual convergence, spokesmen for Wall Street, liberal and radical ideologues, labor bureaucrats in the U.S. and Europe and a group which claims to be a revolutionary Marxist (i.e., Trotskyist) international organization have all joined together to proclaim that “globalization” has rendered trade unions around the world powerless to affect wages, benefits and working conditions.

“Unions Threatened by Global Economy,” crows the Wall Street Journal (25 March 1996). The editors of the Wall Street Journal also maintain that present-day capitalism has resolved the problem of the trade cycle. Meanwhile, union leaders have seized on “globalization” as the latest alibi for selling out or avoiding struggles that can, in fact, be won. From the American Midwest to the German Ruhr, labor officials are telling their workers: “If you don't accept a freeze or even a cut in wages and benefits, the bosses will close down your plant and shift production to India or Mexico.” Joining in this defeatist refrain is the so-called International Committee of the Fourth International (IC) led by one David North, which not only denies any possibility of successful trade-union struggle but rejects trade unions altogether – except nonexistent unions to be run by North & Co. – as workers organizations of any kind.

The idea that the capitalist market economy is “global,” that banks and corporations seek out those (low wage) countries where they can get the highest return on their investments, that, indeed, the internationalization of finance capital is a dominant feature of the contemporary profit system, is hardly new. Writing just over 80, years ago, Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin noted in his 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that “the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.” In a summary definition, he explained.

“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

Lenin not only analyzed the economic workings of the imperialist system, he exposed the bourgeois economists who served as its apologists and the reformist and centrist pretenders to Marxism who sought to downplay the significance of this new stage of capitalist development in order to deny the urgent need for socialist revolution. Lenin took particular aim at the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, whose hypothesis of a unitary world “ultra-imperialism” sought to mask the growing contradictions of the capitalist system and Kautsky's own role as lawyer for the “social-chauvinist” and “social imperialist” lieutenants of the German bourgeoisie.

For Lenin, imperialism signified the epoch of “wars and revolutions.” Indeed, the pamphlet was written in the midst of the first inter-imperialist world war, as the major capitalist powers sent millions of young men to die in a bloody scramble to redivide markets, spheres of influence and colonial possessions. And little more than a year after his pamphlet was completed, Lenin's Bolsheviks led the workers of Russia to power in the first victorious proletarian revolution in history, smashing the capitalist state, sweeping out the bankers, bosses and landlords and setting an example to workers around the world.

What is striking in surveying the current literature on “globalization” is the extent to which all the liberal and reformist apologetics and nostrums currently being put forward were already taken up, exposed and demolished by Lenin eight decades ago. While certain quantitative changes have taken place in the world capitalist economy in the last decade or so, much of the current hoopla about “globalization” is a reflection not of any profound new economic transformation but rather of a profound political defeat, the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state. In its wake, the reformist and centrist left has bought into imperialist triumphalism over the supposed “death of communism.”

The late Michael Harrington, a leading ideologue of American social democracy, defined his political program as “the left wing of the possible.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union and intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries, the American, West European and Japanese bourgeoisies are engaging in an all-sided offensive against the working class and ethnic minorities. Consequently, the labor bureaucracies in these countries now maintain that the left wing of the possible has moved far to the right. This reformist outlook has been taken to its logical conclusion by the Northites: categorical defeatism toward all working-class struggles in this period.

Not coincidentally, North's obituary on the trade unions came in the same speech in which he proclaimed “The End of the USSR” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992). Though wont to denounce all its political opponents as “petty-bourgeois radicals,” North's IC marches in ideological lockstep not only with the petty-bourgeois left and the labor bureaucracies but with bourgeois liberals and worse. Having for years joined with the ‘AFL-CIA’ tops in promoting every counterrevolutionary force aimed at destroying the Soviet workers state, North's tendency seized on the death of the Soviet Union as a justification to apologize for outright scabbing. At the same time, they have embraced a latter-day variant of Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism, using this as an excuse to spit on the struggles of oppressed nations and the colonial and semicolonial peoples enslaved by the imperialist bourgeoisies. Pointing to “vast changes in world economic and political relations,” the IC today openly rejects the right of national self-determination.

“Globalization” and Northite Defeatism

“Globalization” is but a new variation on an old theme. In the 1950s and early '60s, the term “automation” was invested with the same apocalyptic, earth-shaking consequences. Liberal intellectuals predicted that the industrial working class would in large part be replaced by robots and other machinery. One conclusion was that trade unions were becoming or would become obsolete. After all, you can't unionize industrial robots. At the same time, labor bureaucrats told their ranks that if they pushed the level of wages and benefits too high, they would lose their jobs through automation.

Today, it is intellectually fashionable to explain the sharp deterioration in the living standards of American working people over the past generation as a result of “globalization,” especially the transfer of production by major U.S. corporations (“multinationals” or “transnationals”) to low-wage countries in East Asia and Latin America. Speaking in Rome a few years ago, the dean of liberal American economists, Paul Samuelson, predicted: “As the billions of people who live in East Asia and Latin America qualify for good, modern jobs, the half billion Europeans and North Americans who used to tower over the rest of the world will find their upward progress in living standards encountering tough resistance.” In his 1991 The Work of Nations, former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich wrote that “Americans are becoming part of an international labor market, encompassing Asia, Africa, Latin America, and, increasingly, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.” “Top U.S. Exports Continue to Be Jobs,” moans the AFL-CIO News (5 August 1996), official organ of the American labor bureaucracy.

“Runaway shops,” “outsourcing” and the transfer of production to low-wage areas like the U.S. South and Mexico and other semicolonial countries have indeed led to a sharp decline in unionized manufacturing jobs, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. But instead of seeking to organize international class struggle against attacks on jobs and unions, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy polices the labor movement on behalf of the U.S. capitalist rulers while trying to shift the blame for layoffs here on workers abroad.

The views expressed above by Samuelson, Reich and the pro-capitalist AFL-CIO tops have become the central ideological theme of the Northite tendency. In a speech in Detroit in 1992, North stated:

“The collapse of the old organizations of the working class is, fundamentally, the product of specific historic and economic conditions. Understanding these conditions does not mean that we absolve the leaders of these organizations of responsibility for what has happened. Rather, it enables us to recognize that the rottenness of the leaders is itself only a subjective manifestation of an objective process....
“The global integration of capitalist production under the aegis of massive transnational corporations and the terminal crisis of the nation-state system have shattered the basic geo-economic foundation upon which the activities of the old organizations of the working class have been based. Nationally-based labor organizations are simply incapable of seriously challenging internationally-organized corporations.” [our emphasis]
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

Despite North's disclaimer, his notion of “globalization” and its effects does absolve the labor bureaucracy of responsibility for the decline of the trade-union movement and the degradation of the working class. It is no accident that North's views are also expressed, in almost identical language, by spokesmen for the union bureaucracy. Thus, the general secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Associations, Dan Gallin, argues.

“Nation states are becoming irrelevant.... National governments no longer control the flow of financial capital. So they can no longer control their own economies. This in turn weakens the power of national democratic pressures from labour parties and trade unions.”
– the Workers' World News (January-February 1996)

Gallin, who is at least more intellectually honest than North, openly argues for a popular-frontist perspective of “building a broad-based people's movement” to counter the effects of “globalization.”

But neither does North denounce the union misleaders for not mobilizing the economic power of the workers movement and popular political support against the capitalist offensive. Instead he asserts that the trade unions as such have been made impotent by objective changes in the world economy. This position is stated even more clearly and categorically by Nick Beams, head of the Australian section of North's International Committee: “To the extent that the extraction of surplus value from the working class still took place within the confines of a given state, it was possible to apply pressure to capital via the national state for reforms and concessions to the working class. This was the program of the trade union and labor bureaucracies. That is no longer possible” (International Workers Bulletin [IWB], 15 July 1996). In other words, the Northites maintain it is no longer possible for the working class to defend itself against the predations of capital through strikes or other actions, regardless of the tactics and policies pursued.

This position is radically false and, if accepted, can only foster demoralization and defeatism within the working class. In none of the major strikes which marked the decline and defeat of the American labor movement in the 1980s – the PATCO air traffic controllers, Greyhound bus drivers, Phelps-Dodge copper miners, Eastern Airlines machinists, Hormel meatpackers – did foreign competition or the operations of multinationals abroad play any significant role. Greyhound, Eastern Airlines and Hormel extract almost all of their surplus value from labor within the confines of the American state.
To be sure, there have also been major labor struggles recently against large corporations which are critically dependent on international trade and foreign Outsourcing, notably the two-month-long strike at Boeing aircraft in late 1995. In this case, the strike was actually starting to hurt Boeing when the leaders of the Machinists union called it off for minimal gains while, at the same time, fomenting anti-Asian chauvinism and protectionism.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective!

The decline of the American labor movement is not fundamentally caused by the objective effects of “globalization” but by the defeatist and treacherous policies of the AFL-CIO misleaders. As we wrote right after the defeat of the Greyhound strike.

“No decisive gain of labor was ever won in a courtroom or by an act of Congress. Everything the workers movement has won of value has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in hard-fought struggle, on the picket lines, in plant occupations. What counts is power. The strength of the unions lies in their numbers, their militancy, their organization and discipline and their relation to the decisive means of production in modern capitalist society. The bosses are winning because the power of labor, its strength to decisively cripple the enemy, has not been brought to bear.”
– “Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to Win,” WV supplement (March 1984)

The AFL-CIO bureaucracy plays by the bosses’ rules in all strikes, including in the service sector where foreign competition is nonexistent. Consider the strike by janitors and other building workers in New York City last winter. As usual the union tops insisted on porous picket lines. As a consequence an estimated 15,000 scabs replaced the striking workers and office buildings operated more or less as usual. But let us imagine what would have happened if the organized labor movement had sought to mobilize New York City's working people and appealed to the dispossessed population of the ghettos and barrios to actively support the heavily minority and immigrant building workers.

Dozens and hundreds of strikers and other workers-union and non-union-along with black and Hispanic youth could have surrounded every major office building in the city and prevented anyone from entering. David North to the contrary, the CEOs of American multinationals would not have responded by closing their New York headquarters and running their operations out of New Delhi or Mexico City. Rather the cops would have attacked and tried to break the picket lines, arresting militant workers and their supporters. The outcome would then have been determined by the ability of the New York City labor movement to organize effective actions backed by popular support especially in the black and Hispanic communities. A one-day transit strike, for example, might have convinced the powers that be in the world's financial capital to impose a deal on the real estate barons favorable to the building workers.

To take an international example, the defeat of the 1984-85 British miners strike by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opened the way to a crippling assault on all trade unions in Britain. The year-long miners’ struggle was far and away the most significant class battle in West Europe in the 1980s. While the importation of foreign coal did play a role in that strike, the key factor in its defeat was the refusal of the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress tops to countenance joint strike action by other sectors of the British working class, even as workers from France to South Africa expressed their solidarity with the British miners by halting scab coal shipments and raising financial support.

Seeking to limit union struggle to what is acceptable to the capitalist rulers, the reformist labor misleaders generally eschew any possibility of real international proletarian solidarity. Typical of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), potentially still one of the most powerful industrial unions in the U.S. Instead of promoting organizing efforts in the American South and in the Mexican maquiladora industrial belt south of the U.S. border, the UAW tops respond. to “outsourcing” and “runaway shops” by shoving one concession after another down their members' throats while appealing to Washington for protectionist measures. Far from seeking coordinated strike action with Canadian and Mexican workers during last fall's contract negotiations with the Big Three, whose operations throughout North America are now fully integrated, the UAW bureaucracy openly denounced a strike by GM workers in Canada, seeing that as counterposed to its efforts to get Democrat Clinton re-elected.

The existence of “multinationals” simply underscores the historic need for an internationalist class-struggle perspective that transcends parochial, nationally limited trade unionism. Indeed, one of the reasons for the establishment of the First International founded by Karl Marx was to organize trade-union solidarity between workers in Britain and continental Europe.

There are, of course, limits to what can be gained through trade-union struggle, however militant. As their labor costs rise beyond a certain point, capitalists will respond by retrenching (i.e., shutting down less-profitable operations), introducing new labor-saving technology as well as shifting some operations to low-wage countries. The labor bureaucracy points to the ability of the capitalists to counter union gains by such means in order to argue that the workers must accept existing, or even worse, conditions without a fight, while laying the blame on workers in other countries for “stealing American jobs.” As revolutionary Marxists, we point to the limitations of trade-unionism to argue for the need to overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation. As Marx wrote over a century ago.

“Trade Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital.... They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”
– Value, Price and Profit (1867)

The Northites now openly repudiate this basic Marxist position. They maintain that trade unions can no longer function as centers of resistance to the predations of capital, and they counterpose a socialist transformation to the defense of the workers' interests within capitalism. According to the wisdom of Nick Beams: “In order to defend even the most minimal conditions-the simple and most ordinary demands-the working class is confronted with the necessity of overthrowing the social relations based on capital and wage labor determined by the capitalist market through which the appropriation of surplus value takes place” (IWB, 1 July 1996).

At first glance, this may seem like a terribly revolutionary position. In fact, it indicates a defeatist and abstentionist attitude toward the actual struggles of the working class, without which all talk of overthrowing the social relations based on capital and wage labor is empty rhetoric. As Leon Trotsky wrote: “The triumph of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is the end-product of multiple movements, campaigns and battles, and not at all a ready-made precondition for solving all questions automatically” (“Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 1939).

The mass of workers can achieve socialist consciousness only through the intervention of a revolutionary party in the proletariat's day-to-day struggles. This is a central theme of the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding program of Trotsky's Fourth International.

“The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in the mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy.... Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists....Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small 'revolutionary' unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for the leadership of the working class.”

The Latest Posture of Political Bandits

For years, North’s Workers League agitated for the racist, pro-imperialist, rabidly anti-Communist Meany/Kirkland bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO to form a “labor party.” Now the North gang not only denounces the AFL-CIO tops as reactionary but likens the unions to a “company union or a scab organization.” Having recently rechristened themselves the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Northites now declare.

“Workers must face the fact that the AFL-CIO is a failed organization that will not respond to the workers' demands. Workers need democratically-controlled unions, committed to defending their interests without compromise. Such unions can only be established-as the industrial arms of a mass political party of the working class, and this party can only be built in ruthless struggle against the trade union bureaucracy. This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.”
-IWB (15 July 1996)

The nonexistent “industrial arms” of a nonexistent mass workers party are here supposed to replace the actual mass economic organizations of the U.S. working class.

If North, Beams & Co. were honest and courageous politicians, however misguided, they would call on American workers to leave the AFL-CIO en masse, Australian workers to leave the Australian Council of Trade Unions, British workers to leave the Trades Union Congress, etc. According to the Northites, not only have the unions become reactionary but also strikes: “Even when the bureaucracy calls a strike, it does so for the purpose of more effectively demoralizing and defeating the workers” (The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class [September 1993]). If that is the case, then the Northites should tell the workers never to go out on strike and should give no support to strikes that do occur. Given its line, there is no reason for the Socialist Equality Party to oppose scabbing.

In fact, following the sellout of a 17-month-long UAW strike at Caterpillar in 1995 which saw widespread scabbing, North's International Workers Bulletin (18 December 1995) openly apologized for strikebreaking: putting the word “scabs” in quotation marks, sympathetically “explaining” that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union,” and attacking the union tops from the right for “diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines.” Around the same time, North's British acolytes made themselves notorious among striking Liverpool dockers by denouncing international labor solidarity with their struggle. A scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), attacked as a “fraud” plans by international longshore unions, which were implemented that same month, to refuse to handle ships loaded by scabs in Liverpool (see “David North, ‘Socialist’ Apologist for Scabbing,” WV No. 637, 19 January 1996).

Yet in their platform for a recent parliamentary by-election campaign, the British SEP had the gall to insist that “Workers in Britain must seek the support of workers overseas” (International Worker, 30 November 1996). These are political charlatans who always speak, out of both sides of their mouths. On one side, they denounce the unions as “failed organizations,” thereby seeking to appeal to workers fed up with the bureaucracy’s endless sellouts and angry and frustrated over falling living standards. On the other side, they try to make themselves look good by posing as sympathetic to workers engaged in struggle.

Many years ago, we characterized the tendency led by the late Gerry Healy, North's mentor, as political bandits whose practices stood in flat contradiction to their professed principles, who say and do today the exact opposite of what they said and did yesterday and would say and do tomorrow. Having abjectly tailed the pro-capitalist union misleaders until a few short years ago, the Northites now turn around and repudiate the unions altogether. But the union bureaucracy was no less reactionary then than it is today – and the same can be said of David North & Co.

During Cold War II, the anti-Soviet war hysteria of the 1980s, the Northites marched in ideological lockstep with the AFL-CIO tops in enthusiastically supporting every pro-imperialist, anti-Communist nationalist movement in and around the Soviet bloc – from the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedin to counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarnosc to the Baltic “captive nations” types. In Britain, Healy/North's IC parlayed its support for Solidarnosc into a provocative witchhunt, in league with the most right-wing forces inside and outside the labor movement, against the militant miners union and its leader, Arthur Scargill. In late 1983, the Healyites instigated an anti-Communist furor over Scargill’s description of Solidarnosc as “anti-socialist,” with the aim of isolating the miners from the rest of the British trade-union movement as they prepared for battle against Thatcher and the Coal Board. And in 1991 North & Co. even condemned the Bush administration for not more aggressively backing the fascist-infested Lithuanian Sajudis, which called for secession from the Soviet Union as part of a drive for capitalist restoration.

When the demand for self-determination served as a “democratic” fig leaf for attacks on the Soviet degenerated workers state, the Northites waxed eloquent about their support to “national rights.” Now they denounce the call for self-determination and claim that national independence has become impossible, indeed reactionary, in a “globalized” economy. Having supported the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union – the greatest defeat for the international proletariat in decades – the Northites have adopted a position of defeatism toward all struggles by the working class and oppressed peoples in the post-Soviet world.

Marx vs. the “Iron Law of Wages“

The Northite view of “globalization“ – i.e., the large-scale shift in production by “multinational” corporations to the Third World – and its effect on the relation between labor and capital is a present-day version of what in the 19th century was called the “iron law of wages.” This was a doctrine that wages could not be permanently raised above a fixed level regardless of the actions – economic and/or political – taken by the working class. While initially developed by British bourgeois economists, the “iron law” was adhered to by almost all of the early socialist and anarchist tendencies-British Owenites, French Proudhonists, German Lassalleans.

It is readily understandable why the ideologists of the bourgeoisie maintained that the existing level of wages was determined by the immutable laws of the capitalist market. Why would leftists who opposed the capitalist system also uphold such a position? Because they believed that the workers could be won to the program of socialism (or, in Proudhon's case, to anarchism) only if they were convinced that it was hopeless to attempt to improve their conditions within capitalism.

There were different versions of how the “iron law” was supposed to operate. The originator of the doctrine, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, asserted that if wages rose above subsistence levels workers would have more children, more of whom would live to maturity. The increase in the supply of labor would therefore drive wages back to the subsistence level. The leftist adherents of the “iron law” generally argued that any increase in money wages would be quickly and fully offset by rising prices. Hence they regarded trade unionism as useless or even injurious to the working class.

Proudhon's last work, The Political Capacity of the Working Class (published posthumously in 1865), was a sustained attack on trade unionism, which had just emerged in France on a significant scale.

“While threatening to strike, some of them [trade unionists], indeed the majority, have demanded an increase in wages, others have demanded a reduction in working hours, and still others both at the same time. Surely they have always known that increased wages and reduced working hours can only lead to a general price increase.”

In opposing strikes, Proudhon made the additional argument that the financial resources of the capitalists were so much greater that the workers could never win.

“Let us imagine that an industrial establishment has a capital of three million and that it employs one thousand workers who one day go on strike. The employer rejects their demands.... After a month the workers have exhausted their funds and will have to resort to the pawnshop. The capitalist will have lost merely a twelfth of his interest and his capital will not have been touched. The match is clearly unequal.”
– Stewart Edwards, ed., Selected Writings of Joseph-Pierre Proudhon (1969)

If one substitutes “transnational corporation” for “industrialestablishment" in the above passage, it accurately represents the current Northite line.

Throughout his life as a revolutionary workers leader, Marx opposed all exponents of the “iron law of wages.” His most comprehensive treatment of this question is his 1865 pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, a polemical response to an old Owenite socialist, George Weston, who was then a member of the General Council of the First International. Here Marx scientifically demonstrated that an “immense scale of variations is possible” in the rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus value to the value of wages):

“The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum while the workingman constantly presses in the opposite direction.
“The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.”

Marx's theoretical demolition of the “iron law of wages” was confirmed by the actual experience of the working class as mass trade unions developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, the “iron law” had been generally discredited within the workers movement and left. A notable exception was the American socialist Daniel De Leon, who counterposed the overthrow of the capitalist system to trade-union struggles for higher wages and shorter hours.

In line with pre-1914 Social Democratic orthodoxy, the De Leonists regarded the decisive event of the socialist revolution as the electoral victory of their party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), over the bourgeois parties. Attached to the SLP was an industrial arm called the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance, which over time tended to shrink to an artificial, Potemkin village organization consisting entirely of the SLP’s own supporters. Despite the name, the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance was not a trade union in any sense. It did not advocate, much less engage in, struggles to improve the wages or conditions of the workers. What then was its purpose? Following the expected electoral victory of the SLP, the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance would “seize and hold” the means of production from the capitalists and subsequently administer the socialist economy.

Third World Wages Mean... Third World Economies

The present posture of the North group parallels the old De Leonist program except that the De Leonists were principled, albeit misguided, socialists. A primary activity of North’s Socialist Equality Patty (SEP, formerly the Workers League), and the other SEPs recently set up by IC sections in Britain and Australia, is running for office in bourgeois elections for various levels of government. They have adopted an, at best, abstentionist position in relation to the struggles of the mass trade-union movement. And at least on paper the Northites now project building something akin to the Socialist Labor and Trade Alliance. According to the 1993 Northite pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class:

“Transnational corporations are systematically shifting the most labor intensive aspects of production to impoverished regions, where wages are a fraction of the existing levels in the advanced capitalist countries. Even high-tech and skilled labor can be purchased on the cheap in India, parts of Latin America, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inexorable result is a downward leveling of wages and living standards and a relentless assault on past social reforms and legal limitations on the exploitation of labor by capital in the imperialist centers”

As we have indicated earlier, the Northites are here advancing, with a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric, an argument currently propounded by a wide range of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois liberals. Thus, a recent article in Foreign Affairs (May-June 1996) warns that “inequality, unemployment and endemic poverty” are the “handmaidens” of the “global economy.” And in a special issue of the liberal Nation (15 July 1996), British “Green” spokesmen Colin Hines and Tim Lang assert:

“Globalization unquestionably leads to lower-wage economies. The British economist Adrian Wood has calculated a not insignificant shift of 9 million jobs from North to South [i.e., from the industrialized countries to the Third World] in recent years.... Meanwhile, Britain is advertising itself as a low-wage country to attract industry. The trend is clear.”

The version of the “iron law of wages” pushed by North and others based on the supposed globalization of production is no more valid than the various 19th-century versions. Wages in the advanced capitalist countries are not going to be driven down to anything close to Third World levels for two fundamental reasons: one political, the other economic. As we shall see, increased investment by Western/ Japanese banks and corporations in backward countries, especially in the manufacturing sector, requires the maintenance of strong imperialist states to protect those investments. U.S. capitalists are not going to produce a large part of their steel output in South Korea and Brazil, because they need guaranteed access to this steel in case of war with their imperialist rivals – Germany and Japan – or for military intervention against popular revolutions in former colonial countries, like South Korea and Brazil.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, defines the “executive of the modern State” as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” One of the tasks of that executive committee is to ensure that individual capitalists, seeking to maximize their own profits, do not harm the vital interests of the national bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus, a few years ago Washington prevented the management and stockholders of Continental Oil from investing in the modernization of Iranian oil fields, because building up the Iranian economy went against the currently perceived interests of U.S. imperialism. In the next few years, the U.S., Germany and Japan may well impose – against the immediate interests and desires of sections of their own capitalist classes – high levels of trade protectionism, controls of foreign-exchange transactions and strict limits on the inflow and outflow of capital. There is in addition a fundamental economic limitation to the “globalization” of production. Manufacturing wages in East Asia and Latin America have been a small fraction of those, in the advanced capitalist countries for decades. Why then does Siemens still produce most of its electrical machinery in Germany and General Motors most of its autos in North America? Because 15 unskilled workers in Indonesia (earning well under a dollar an hour) cannot replace a skilled machinist in the U.S. (earning $15 an hour) or Germany (earning $25 an hour) in the process of industrial production. The technical-cultural level of the labor force in Europe, North America and Japan is qualitatively higher than in the Third World. Annual expenditure per student for primary and secondary education is over $5,000 in the US., almost $4,000 in Japan, $600 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and $70 in the Indian subcontinent! These vast differences cannot be appreciably narrowed within the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system. The basic premise of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is that in the imperialist epoch countries of belated capitalist development cannot attain the overall level of economic productivity of the pioneer regions of the bourgeois revolution – West Europe, North America and, later, Japan.

This is the geo-economic basis for the division of the world between imperialist countries and neocolonial countries exploited and oppressed by the former. If India’s labor productivity approximated that of the United States and Japan, India itself would be a major imperialist power, since the numerical size of its industrial labor force (about 30 million workers) is the same as that of the U.S. and 50 percent greater than that of Japan. The Northite notion of “globalization” is in its theoretical essence a repudiation of the Trotskyist understanding of permanent revolution, because it posits a tendency to equalize economic conditions throughout the world by leveling up productivity in the backward capitalist countries and leveling down productivity in the advanced ones. The genuine globalization of production requires an internationally planned socialist economy, which alone can raise the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the technical-cultural level of what is now called the First World.

Northites Salute Generals and Finks (1999)

2009-11-18T22:16:00.007-05:00

Workers Vanguard No. 710, 5 February 1999

Northites Salute Generals and Finks

Longtime political bandits and renegades from Trotskyism, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP, formerly Workers League) has now descended to actively saluting imperialism’s war chiefs. When Clinton carried out his terror bombing of Iraq in December, the Spartacist League forthrightly declared: “Defend Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!” In stark contrast, a “World Socialist Web Site” piece by Martin McLaughlin and SEP national secretary David North, dated 19 December 1998, describes the attack as “a shameful chapter in American history” and explicitly counterposes the supposed glories of yesteryear’s imperialist war-making:

“This much is certain: 50 years from now no one will be making films like Patton, The Longest Day or Saving Pvt. Ryan about their exploits.
“One need not agree with the politics of such World War II-era commanders as
Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Nimitz to acknowledge that they, at least, led
their armies against an enemy fully capable of firing back.”

Like a newsreel from Hollywood’s World War II propaganda mill, North and McLaughlin carefully omit the atrocities committed by the U.S. military in that interimperialist war as they list “searing images that profoundly influenced the political consciences of several generations”:

“Next to those produced by the opening of the Nazi death camps, the most unforgettable images were those of the German Luftwaffe raining bombs on defenseless populations....
“The manner in which Japan initiated hostilities – bombing Pearl Harbor without warning – outraged millions. For decades to come, the phrase ‘sneak attack’ was synonymous with the basest form of treachery.”

What happened to the “searing images” of the nightly pounding of German cities by U.S. and British bombers and the firebombing of Dresden? What about the U.S. government rounding up Japanese Americans into concentration camps for the duration of the war? What about the indelible image of the mushroom clouds produced by American atom bombs dropping on already defeated Japan, incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki? “Down the memory hole,” as another current hero of the Northites, George Orwell, would have said.

If you’re looking for heroes by the criteria of the SEP why not pick Karl Donitz, admiral of the World War II German submarine fleet. In the First World War, he commanded a submarine that sank. In the next, he lost two sons. The U-boat crews under his command were also heroic, because they kept fighting even when 90 percent were gone. The problem here is that bravery is not a social, or class, criterion. This is made very clear in the movie Das Boot.

One would never know from the Northites that the Trotskyists opposed all the imperialist powers in World War II while calling for the unconditional military defense of the degenerated Soviet workers state. In 1939, James P. Cannon, in the course of his great battle to preserve Trotskyism in the U.S. on the eve of the war, summed up the program of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP):

“1. The main enemy is in our own coun try – expose and fight the Roosevelt-Hoover combination.
“2. Defend the Soviet Union in spite of Stalin against Stalin.”
– The Strugglefor a Proletarian Party (1943 edition)

Eighteen leaders of the SWP and Minneapolis Teamsters union were sentenced to Sandstone federal penitentiary for opposition to the imperialist war. In a May Day 1945 speech, his first after serving 13 months in prison, Cannon reiterated the revolutionaries ‘ position:

“We said from the very beginning: It isn't a war for democracy against fascism; it isn’t a war for justice and freedom. That is not true. It is a war of imperialist rivals; it is a war for profits to be coined out of the blood of the people of Europe and Asia, and eventually for the enslavement and degradation of the workers here at home....
“What can they show, the masters of the world, but ruined cities, mounds of corpses, and millions of starving people? That is the auspices under which American imperialism enters its day of glory as the master of the world.”
– “The End of the War in Europe;” The Struggle for Socialism in the 'American Century' (1977)

The obscene, gagging patriotism with which North & Co. embrace the military commanders of U.S. imperialism in WWII finds its reflection in alibis for those who served in the postwar anti- Communist crusade. As we commented in “David North’s ‘Left’ McCarthyism” (WV No. 702, 4 December 1998): “The heritage North defends is not that of Trotskyism, which was embodied through the 1950s in the now-reformist SWP, but of anti-Communist renegades like Irving Howe and George Orwell, who spied for His Majesty’s secret service against ‘Soviet totalitarianism’.” Not Surpris ingly, we also find on the SEP Web site a full-blown apologia for Orwell under the byline of eternal toady Fred Mazelis (“George Orwell and the British Foreign Office,” 9 September 1998).

It came out last summer that Orwell, the British author of Animal Farm and 1984 and coiner of the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” was doing a lit tle watching of his own. In 1949, Orwell turned a list of some 35 people he considered to be in the orbit of the Stalinirds over to a unit of the British Foreign Office set up to disseminate anti-Soviet prop aganda. Rising from Orwell’s snotty comments on “crypto-Communists and fellow travelers” is a nasty whiff of anti- gay and anti-Semitic bigotry. By Charlie Chaplin’s name, Orwell writes “Jewish?” in parentheses. The powerful black American singer and actor Paul Robeson, he charges, is “very anti-white.” Poet Stephen Spender gets the remark, “Very unreliable. Easily influenced. Tendency towards homosexuality.” And on and on.

Yet here Mazelis finds evidence of Orwell’s dignity, opining:

“On one level, Orwell’s action in turning over these comments was not the same as those of the political cowards who sought to save their careers during the McCarthyite witch-hunt by ‘naming names’ of prominent figures who had been in or around the Communist Party years earlier. In Orwell’s case, there was no cowardice or personal opportunism involved. He was never a man to curry favor with the establishment, and the political characterizations on his list were by and large similar to sentiments he had expressed publicly.”

If anything, in Orwell’s case it was worse than “cowardice” and “opportunism” Nobody even had to threaten Orwell. There was no subpoena. There was no wrecking of career, no public humiliation in hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, no prison sentence looming. Unlike those who ratted because they couldn’t stand up to the terrorizing witchhunts, Orwell finked voluntarily. Nevertheless, Mazelis posits that “there is no way of knowing exactly where he would have ended up politically if he had lived another two or three decades.”

Well, we have a pretty good idea. After all, “My country, right or left,” Orwell famously commented, and he meant it. During World War II, Orwell spent time in the British Home Guard and put in a good two years, from 1941 to late 1943, broadcasting for the BBC as part of Britain’s propaganda effort toward its restive colonial possession, India. As Clive James puts ,it in his glorification of Orwell in the New Yorker (18 January), Orwell told his Indian audience “that they had a better chance with the British than with the Japanese.” This from one who was formerly a bitter critic of British imperialism in the East. So it’s not illogical that he went that, next, dirty step, sneaking his vindictive comments to his British imperialist masters.

And where will David North’s SEP end up? It’s hard to predict the exact trajectory of such an unsavory and unstable outfit. But as the author of Animal Farm might have put it, “in the end you couldn’t tell the Northites from the pigs.”

D. North's “Left” McCarthyism (1998)

2009-11-16T22:12:00.011-05:00

Workers Vanguard No. 702, 4 December 1998

David North’s “Left” McCarthyism

It's not often that the New York Times, liberal mouthpiece mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, deems letters from ostensible socialists “fit to print.” But the Times (22 October) clearly saw some value in publishing a missive by David North of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP, formerly Workers League). Having ceased publication of his fake-Marxist International Workers Bulletin last year in favor of a pseudo-academic Web site, the national secretary of the now organless SEP descended from cyberspace to engage in polite “debate” with professional anti-Communist Ronald Radosh. Radosh has made a career out of retrying, reconvicting and re-executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as “Soviet spies” in 1953 in an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic witchhunt.

In commenting on a Times (18 October) “Week in Review” piece titled “Rethinking McCarthyism, if Not McCarthy” which cited Radosh, North whines: “Mr. Radosh’s assertion that the debacle of the American Communist Party has discredited the entire Socialist movement is indefensible.” North begs to set the record straight: “In fact, before the cold war, anti-Stalinism was associated principally with the Socialist left — above all with Trotskyists. Long before anti-Stalinism became fashionable among liberals, who had previously embraced ‘popular front’ alliances with the Communist Party, left-wing anti-Stalinists had insisted that the Kremlin’s policies had nothing in common with Marxism or with the Socialist program.”

And North’s SEP has nothing in common with Trotskyism — the Marxism of our time. “With the approval of North,” the SEP Web site assures us, his letter was abridged by the Times to omit even passing references to anti-Communism or the October Revolution of 1917. But even the unabridged version does not so much as hint at the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union when it existed — nor, to be sure, of the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) today — against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. Nor does North raise a finger in defense of the heroic Rosenbergs in the face of Radosh’s calumnies. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Radosh replied to North in ever so polite terms that McCarthy “gave a bad name to the very legitimate cause of anti-Communism” (New York Times, 24 October). In fact, this aptly captures North’s own view.

North falsely amalgamates revolutionary Trotskyism with that wing of the “socialist movement” which opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and supported its “own” imperialist rulers in World Wars I and II, as well as with the liberals who were the left wing of the post-WWII anti-Communist crusade. He reduces Trotskyism to an anti-Soviet loyalty oath. Polemicizing against North’s forebears in a 1947 article titled “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism,” James P. Cannon, leader of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), wrote at the onset of the Cold War witchhunt:

“We Trotskyists, as everybody knows, are also against Stalinism and have fought it unceasingly and consistently for a very long time. But we have no place in the present ‘all-inclusive’ united front against American Stalinism. The reason for this is that we are anticapitalist. Consequently, we can find no point of agreement with the campaign conducted by the political representative of American capitalism in Washington, with the support of its agents in the labor movement and its lackeys in the literary and academic world. We fight Stalinism from a different standpoint.
“We fight Stalinism not because it is another name for communism, but precisely because of its betrayal of communism and of the interests of the workers in the class struggle.”
— Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century (1977)

As Cannon pointed out, the Stalinists paved the way for their own isolation during the red purge by their class betrayals — in league with the social democrats — in the service of U.S. imperialism, from support to Democrat Roosevelt’s “New Deal” coalition in the 1930s to the wartime no-strike pledge. But while fighting for proletarian political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy and politically combating the Stalinist syphilis in the labor movement, the Trotskyists rallied to the defense of Stalinist and other militants driven out of the trade unions (of which not a word in North’s letter) by “left-wing anti-Stalinists” like Walter Reuther. The SWP denounced the murder of the Rosenbergs as “a bestial act of capitalist class terrorism intended to help intimidate into silence all who would criticize or oppose Wall Street’s policies abroad or at home.”

The heritage North defends is not that of Trotskyism, which was embodied through the 1950s in the now-reformist SWP, but of anti-Communist renegades like Irving Howe and George Orwell, who spied for His Majesty’s secret service against “Soviet totalitarianism.” During the 1980s Cold War against the Soviet Union, North’s outfit was on the same side as social-democratic witch-hunters like Radosh — cheering CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, marching lockstep toward capitalist counterrevolution with clerical-nationalist Solidarność in Poland, enthusiastically promoting the fascist-infested Sajudis in Lithuania and the rest of the reactionary Baltic “captive nations” trash.

________________________________
The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class.
________________________________

North was schooled in the political banditry of Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC). In 1979, North joined Healy in hailing the execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the bourgeois-nationalist Ba’ath regime, while Healy’s outfit spied on Iraqi oppositionists in Britain. When the flow of petrodollars from various Arab regimes for services rendered dried up, Healy’s outfit imploded and North modestly proclaimed himself leader of the international proletariat.

Shortly before that, in 1983, the IC whipped up an anti-Communist furor against British miners leader Arthur Scargill over his correct denunciation of Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” This crusade, picked up by the capitalist media and right-wing labor misleaders, was aimed at isolating the miners union on the eve of a bitter strike against the Coal Board and the government of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, North & Co. wrote off the trade-union movement as a whole as a tool of bourgeois rule, while extolling scabs as those who have the insight to recognize the “futility” of union struggles.

North’s own witchhunting credentials are impeccable. Beginning in the mid1970s, he devoted over a decade to the crazed “Security and the Fourth International” campaign launched by the corrupt, thuggish and megalomaniacal Healy with the aim of smearing the SWP leadership (primarily Joseph Hansen) with supposed complicity in Trotsky’s assassination by Stalinist agents in 1940. In the 1980s, North’s outfit virtually prepared the prosecution brief which resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of SWP trade unionist Mark Curtis on frame-up rape charges. Meanwhile, the “Socialist Equality” Party spits on the fight against the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals and national minorities.

The McCarthyite witchhunt was aimed at preparing the country for war against the Soviet Union and driving the reds out of the unions. The “anti-Stalinist” social democrats embraced by North shared that aim but opposed McCarthy for going “too far” by targeting Cold War liberals as well… It is notable that Radosh’s hatchet job, The Rosenberg File (co-authored by Joyce Milton), was published in the early 1980s to facilitate a new Red Hunt as U.S. imperialism again geared up for war against the Soviet Union (see “Cold War Rad-Libs Embrace FBI Frame-Up: They’re Trying to Kill the Rosen bergs All Over Again,” WV No. 340, 21 October 1983). It is also notable that North’s Workers League never appeared on the FBI’s ADEX list of organizations — including the SL and a range of other groups — to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.”

The current grotesque “rehabilitation “ of McCarthyism, seizing on CIA “revelations” that those who were witchhunted and murdered got what they deserved because they were indeed “Soviet spies,” is part of an all-sided attempt to again demonize communism. Even as the bourgeoisie and its mouthpieces proclaim that “Marxism is dead,” they seek to warn off militant workers and radicalized youth from revolutionary politics, aware that the growing gap between the rich and poor and the other enormous contradictions in this society have created seething discontents and are leading to a revival of labor militancy.

The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class. As Leninists, one of our primary responsibilities is to expose especially the “left” (should North remain so positioned) opponents of proletarian revolution, who today join in seeking to bury the legacy of the October Resolution under a mountain of lies while rehabilitating the bloodsoaked imperialist world order. Indeed, a rapprochement between North and Radosh might well be possible — perhaps even a new joint Web site, “godthatfailed.anticom”.

“ICFI”/Northites: Counterfeit Trotskyists (1997)

2009-11-09T11:08:00.008-05:00

From Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League No. 11 (October 1997):

David North's ICFI: From Support to Capitalist Counterrevolution in the USSR to Great Russian Chauvinism

Introduction [excerpt]

The “ICFI,” headed by U.S. Workers League lider maximo David North, is one of the decomposition products of the now-infamous Gerry Healy's “international” organization of the same name. We have characterized charlatans like North and the late Healy as political bandits because of their manifest willingness to say literally anything, taking widely divergent political positions to serve their own convenient and grotesque opportunist appetites. For example, in 1979 their international tendency extolled the murder of 21 Iraqi CPers by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime as a blow against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism.” Heralding the murder of Communist worker-militants paid big dividends for the Healyites, who raked in millions in pounds sterling for their services on behalf of various oil-rich Middle Easter dictators.

Consummate hatred for the Soviet Union has been one political constant in Healy/North's “ICFI." They supported every imperialist-inspired “movement” that aimed at destroying the remaining gains of the 1917 October Revolution, from Khomeini's viciously anti-communist “Islamic Revolution” to the barbarous CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan, to Lech Walesa's company “union” Solidarnosc in Poland. But after the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state through capitalist counterrevolution, the “ICFI” refused to call for the military defense of Chechnya and the defeat of the Russian army in that neocolonial war. Thus, for the first time in their history, the Northites came out for the Russian army – now that it is the army of capitalist Russia!

Afghanistan, Poland, Chechnya

Northites: Counterfeit Trotskyists

As Trotskyists, the International Communist League stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, while fighting for proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy that undermined the October Revolution. The erosion of the revolutionary internationalist consciousness of the Soviet proletariat, as a result of decades of Stalinist misrule, ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR and the consolidation of new capitalist states in the area. This was a historic defeat for the proletariat, ushering in catastrophic declines in the living standards of the peoples of the former Soviet bloc, while freeing up the imperialists to unleash renewed attacks on the working masses in the West and the already savagely oppressed peoples of the semi-colonial world.

With the restoration of capitalism, the tasks for Marxists changed: we do not defend the Russian state, which is a capitalist state with resurgent imperialist ambitions. We fight for socialist revolutions throughout the lands of the former Soviet Union. As we have noted, aggressive nationalism was both the driving force for capitalist restoration in East Europe and the Soviet Union, and a product of the counterrevolutionary drive. From Milosevic's Serbia to Tudjman's Croatia and Yeltsin's Russia, nationalist demagogy is being used to turn working-class anger over economic immiseration against neighboring peoples and minority communities.

The decomposition of the USSR resulted in bloody nationalist conflicts in every republic of the former Soviet Union, with nationalist wars in the Caucasus and a sharp increase in Great Russian chauvinism. As we noted in our article, “Why Marxists Do Not Raise the Call 'Restore the Soviet Union'”:

“Today bourgeois Russia aspires to the role of a regional imperialist power. Its bloody handiwork is evident enough in the brutal colonial-style war against the Chechen people.... To talk of `restoring the USSR' is a nationalist trap. What is necessary is to sweep away the new bourgeois states and replace them with the rule of workers soviets. We know of no other road to this goal but the one pursued by Lenin and the Bolsheviks – a thoroughgoing struggle against all manifestations of nationalism and chauvinism as part of patient but persistent propaganda aimed at winning the proletariat to the program of international socialist revolution.”

In an article by V. Volkov in Rabochii-Internatsionalist (May 1996), the Russian supporters of the so-called "International Committee for the Fourth International” (ICFI) attack us because of our opposition to the slogan of restoring the Soviet Union. The ICFI is a gang of political charlatans who falsely claim the mantle of Trotskyism. Led with an iron hand by Gerry Healy in Britain until it spectacularly imploded in 1985, producing a number of rump organizations, the “ICFI” is currently headed by one David North of the U.S. Workers League.

In his article, Volkov protests our call for the military defense of Chechnya in the war, asserting that this is “anti-communist” and “liberal” The ICFI's refusal to call for the defense of the Chechens in this brutal colonial-style war, and their opposition to the right of Chechen independence, is unvarnished Great Russian chauvinism. The Northites prove our point, that those who today loudly proclaim themselves for the “Soviet Union” are nothing more than Russian nationalists. Their whole history shows them to have been enemies of the defense of the Soviet Union; now, for the first time in their history, they have come out for the Russian army – now that it is the army of a capitalist Russia!

Thus the call to “restore the Soviet Union” in the mouths of the Russian Northites is simultaneously a self-solacing “left”-sounding slogan and a cover for naked chauvinism in a capitalist state. In the wake of the October Revolution's final undoing, which we fought to the best of our ability, we now raise the call for new October Revolutions that go all the way to the destruction of imperialism on a world scale. This was the Bolsheviks' program and it is ours still.

Volkov writes at length, purporting to show “the pro-Stalinist character of the Spartacist tendency” through such examples as our positions on Afghanistan and Polish Solidarnosc. In reality what Volkov, North & Co. have against us is that we are Trotskyists. In his 1933 article, “The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” Trotsky warned of the “tragic possibility” that the Soviet workers state “will fall under the joint blows of its internal and external enemies”:

“But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of the mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade.”

In contradistinction, the ICFI under North and his predecessor Gerry Healy supported every counterrevolutionary movement internal to and on the borders of the Soviet Union. Thus they supported Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalists in Iran; the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan; the Pilsudskiite Polish nationalists of Solidarnosc; and bourgeois-nationalist movements, encouraged by the imperialists, within the USSR. They enthused over all manner of pro-imperialist Soviet “dissidents," publishing for example a glowing obituary for Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was the quintessential pro-capitalist “dissident," winning kudos from the imperialists (and eventually the Nobel "Peace” Prize) for his advocacy of unilateral disarmament of the USSR, while of course opposing disarmament for the bloody-handed U.S. imperialists.

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Today, when the Soviet Union is no more, the Northites are a mouthpiece for Russian chauvinism and defend the territorial integrity of the Russian capitalist state. But earlier the Northites had no problem in supporting all manner of fascist-infested nationalist movements, which the imperialists sponsored as a means of tearing apart the Soviet Union.
_________________________________________

When the hour of decision came, in August 1991, an ICFI statement “welcome[d] the humiliating collapse of the August 19 Stalinist putsch in Moscow.” This was also welcomed by every imperialist power in the world! Yeltsin's countercoup marked the ascendancy of counter-revolutionary forces in the Soviet Union itself, which led ultimately to the consolidation of a Russian capitalist state.

For our part, in August 1991 the ICL - while giving no support to the pro-perestroika coup plotters – called for a workers mobilization to sweep away Yeltsin's counterrevolutionary barricades. We raised the call for the formation of independent workers committees to take over the plants, as the basis for soviets drawing in collective farmers, oppressed minorities, working women, Red Army soldiers and officers, pensioners, etc. We called for workers militias to defend workers, Communist Party members, Jews and other minorities against Yeltsinite reactionaries and racist pogromists. And we wrote:

“The alternatives posed before the Soviet bureaucratically deformed workers state have always been: counterrevolution or Trotskyism. Today Stalinism is dead. The key to frustrating the bloody plans of Bush, Yeltsin and their counterrevolutionary cohorts is the early forging of a Trotskyist nucleus in the Soviet Union, representing those elements in the workers movement, the army and throughout society who would fight for the program of October.”
-“Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” Workers Vanguard No. 533, 30 August 1991

While the Soviet Union existed, we recognized the right of self-determination for the constituent nations of the USSR, as long as this was not a cover for capitalist restoration. As Trotsky explained, the right of self-determination is a general democratic right, subordinate to class considerations:

“We do not only recognize, but we also give full support to the principle of self-determination, wherever it is directed against feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction differently from the other 'principles' of democracy perverted by capitalism.”
- Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention in Russia, 1918-1921 (1922)

Today, when the Soviet Union is no more, the Northites are a mouthpiece for Russian chauvinism and defend the territorial integrity of the Russian capitalist state. But earlier the Northites had no problem in supporting all manner of fascist-infested nationalist movements, which the imperialists sponsored as a means of tearing apart the Soviet Union. An example was the Sajudis – a Lithuanian secessionist movement shot through with outright fascists – which had its own program of "ethnic cleansing” for the non-Lithuanian component of the population. In 1990, North's Workers League denounced U.S. president Bush for not imposing imperialist sanctions against the Soviet workers state on behalf of Lithuanian “independence,” i.e., capitalist restoration. At the same time the ICFI demanded “immediate pullout of all Soviet troops from the Baltics, Moldova and other republics where Moscow's Stalinists are trying to strangle the democratic hopes of the oppressed nationalities. The working class must unconditionally defend the right of these peoples for self-determination including national independence from the USSR” (Russian language Bulletin of FI, February 1995).

Afghanistan: How the Northites Backed the CIA

When all the imperialists raised a hue and cry about “poor little Afghanistan,” the ICFI chimed in, calling the actions of the Soviet Army “a brutal campaign of military and police repression against a semi-colonial people” whose “national rights were being criminally violated” and stated that “the movement of the Red Army into Afghanistan” was “aimed at sealing off the radical impulse of the [Khomeini-led] Iranian Revolution" (Bulletin, 8 July 1986).

Unlike the Northites, who gloried in supporting the counterrevolutionary, CIA-backed Islamic mujahedin, we in the ICL said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples!" We noted that Afghanistan was not a nation but a preindustrial society of different peoples and tribes with little or no indigenous proletariat. Although the Brezhnev bureaucracy certainly did not intervene from the perspective of proletarian internationalism, we pointed out that a prolonged Soviet military occupation would likely mean the integration of Afghanistan with the economy of the USSR, thereby posing social liberation of a society saturated with medieval backwardness.

The Soviet Army intervened in a civil war between the left-nationalist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and Islamic reactionaries. This was the first and only time in modern history that a civil war was ignited centrally by the issue of women's rights. After coming to power in an April 1978 coup, pro-Moscow intellectuals and army officers in the PDPA sought to implement some minimal reforms to bring the country closer to the 20th century: land distribution, freeing women from the burka (the head-to-toe veil), reducing the bride price to a nominal sum and providing education for girls. However, such basic democratic reforms can be explosive in a cruelly backward country like Afghanistan, not least because women's subordination in the family meant that they were considered the “bearers” of the “national culture” to the next generation. Afghan landlords, tribal chiefs and mullahs launched a ferocious jihad (holy war), burning down schools and flaying teachers for the “crime” of teaching girls to read.

The conservative Brezhnev leadership didn't send 100,000 Soviet troops to Afghanistan to make a social revolution. But independently of the motives of the Soviet bureaucracy, the intervention of the Red Army in this civil war on the side of social progress strengthened the position of women, providing the possibility for young Afghanis to learn to read and write, and opened the road to progress through social assimilation by the Soviet Union.

But Islamic reaction, the woman question, and defense of the Soviet Union from imperialism are precisely what the Northites do not mention, in order to portray the Soviet intervention as one continuous brutality. It is no accident that they never say a word about the $2 billion invested by the CIA in the arming of the mujahedin, since for years their goals and the goals of the CIA-backed fundamentalist cutthroats coincided. In 1980, their German newspaper, Neue Arbeiterpresse, headlined: “Pull Soviet Troops Out of Afghanistan! Defend the Iranian Revolution!”

Much of the Soviet and Western “left” compared the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan with the American imperialists' slaughter in Vietnam - a shameful position later echoed by Gorbachev. During the Vietnam War some two million Vietnamese were killed, while Saigon was transformed into a giant bordello. The Soviet military presence in Afghanistan was manifestly different, as aspects of Soviet society began to be reproduced, attracting youth looking for a future and the deeply oppressed women.

Our fight for Red Army victory was counterposed to the halfhearted policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. We fought for a proletarian political revolution in the USSR, pointing out that the Kremlin gang was perfectly capable of selling out the Afghan peoples in order to placate the imperialists. Instead of fighting the war to a victorious finish, Brezhnev sought to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, while at the same time offering concessions to sections of the fundamentalists. Land reform was sharply curtailed, as the government declared a “general amnesty” under which feudal landlords who had defected to Pakistan would be given back their property if they returned, while many categories of landowners were now exempted entirely from the reform. Meanwhile, compulsory education for girls was revoked.

All wings of the Kremlin bureaucracy ultimately agreed to abandon Soviet intervention into Afghanistan. So-called "hardliners” like Yegor Ligachev were crucial in delivering to Gorbachev the necessary support in carrying out the decision to withdraw the troops. None of the Stalin-loving “patriots” (such as Nina Andreyeva and Viktor Anpilov) ever tried to mobilize against withdrawal. Thus all wings of Stalinism were complicit in this outright capitulation to imperialism which emboldened the imperialists, guaranteed a bloody revenge against modernizing nationalists and women in Afghanistan, and brought capitalist counterrevolution much closer to the Soviet Union.

While impudently accusing us of supporting the politics of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the ICFI's Volkov literally repeats the arguments that the defeatist Gorbachev bureaucracy used to justify withdrawal and demobilize and dismiss pro-socialist and would-be internationalist sentiments among Soviet workers and soldiers. Thus Volkov claims:

“The redirection of an enormous quantity of resources was undermining the planned economy. The Afghan proletariat, extremely small in number, was either ignored or suppressed. The position of the USSR in the world had weakened and world imperialism gained invaluable advantages using the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan to escalate the 'Cold War'.”

This is a mixture of factual nonsense, pro-imperialist cant and outright anti-internationalism. The Afghan proletariat could not be an independent factor: in fact there were more mullahs in Afghanistan (more than 250,000 of them) than there were industrial workers, and only two factories in the entire country! At the time the USSR intervened, more than 90 percent of the population of Afghanistan was illiterate; life expectancy was only 40.

The assertion that the Soviets were responsible for escalating the Cold War because of their intervention in Afghanistan is simply a rendition of the line spouted by Ronald Reagan. As far as the imperialists are concerned, the whole world belongs to them to plunder however they see fit, and nobody better get in the way... or else. Gorbachev in effect endorsed this line to justify abandoning Afghan leftists and women to their fate.

Many Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan rightly believed they were doing their internationalist duty. The claim that the money would have been “better spent at home,” which the Gorbachevites argued, was not only anti- internationalist but racist as well, deliberately appealing to sentiments like “why should our boys die in Afghanistan for those blacks?” It is no accident that today as well, the Northites scandalously maintain silence about racism directed against people from the Caucasus.

In Afghanistan, soldiers from Soviet Central Asia were particularly aware that they were fighting against the same kind of benighted social relations that had held their own grandmothers in virtual bondage prior to the victory of the Bolsheviks. A New York Times reporter traveling through Soviet Central Asia in 1980 found absolutely no sympathy for the Afghan “rebels” and broad support for the Soviet Army's intervention. An irrigation engineer in Khiva, near Dushanbe, showed the reporter where the town's slave market had been located before the Soviet authorities deposed the last Khan of Khiva. He added, “The Afghans are our neighbors. Where there is poverty and backwardness it is our duty to help” (New York Times, 11 April 1980).

More generally, the position expressed here by Volkov is an apology for the nationalism of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which viewed “export of revolution” as the original Trotskyist heresy. The conservative bureaucracy's suicidal “theory” of “socialism in one country” was based on the illusory search for peaceful coexistence with capitalist regimes abroad. To be sure, the Bolsheviks did not believe the victory of world socialism would come mainly through military triumph by the Red Army. But they did not reject revolutionary war as an instrument of social liberation. Perhaps the most important example came in the summer of 1920 with the Red Army's counteroffensive in Poland. In a speech at the Ninth Party Conference, Lenin forcefully defended the Polish campaign against conservative critics of this attempt to extend the revolution militarily, pointing out that on the other side of Poland lay Germany, whose powerful proletariat was the key to the European revolution: “Rote Fahne [German Communist Party daily] and others could not accept the idea that we should help with our own hands to sovietise Poland. These people regard themselves as Communists, but some of them are still nationalists and pacifists.” (“Political Report of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to the Ninth Conference of the RCP(B),” printed in In Defence of the Russian Revolution [1995]).

The revolutionary imperative to extend the revolution -- taken for granted by the Bolsheviks until this program was overthrown by Stalin -- flows straight from Marx's elementary observations that capitalism had become a world system, hence it had to be destroyed on a world scale. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels pointed out that the international development of the productive forces made possible by world revolution

“is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and destitution, the struggle for necessities, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced.... Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples `all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and world intercourse bound up with communism.”

In the 1920s, the Red Army's smashing of the reactionary Basmachi in Central Asia propelled the Soviet Central Asian republics on a course of intensive economic growth, significantly raising living standards while achieving an impressive success in the liberation of women. A similar process occurred in Mongolia, a terribly backward country similar to Afghanistan, with little in the way of an indigenous proletariat (and therefore no material basis for proletarian revolution). A Soviet republic was established there in 1921-22 largely through the intervention of the Red Army, leading to the founding of the first city in Mongolia, Ulan Bator (Red Dawn).

The expropriation of capital and elimination of the bourgeois state apparatus through military occupation in the western Ukraine and Byelorussia in 1940, and in the East European countries following World War II, are other examples where the Red Army was an instrument of social liberation, although in a bureaucratically deformed way. The Soviet Army, as an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, reflected both aspects of the bureaucracy's contradictory nature. The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were counterrevolutionary acts of Stalinist repression which we Trotskyists forthrightly opposed. The Afghanistan intervention, though undertaken for defensive geopolitical reasons, opened up the possibility for social liberation and cut against the grain of the Kremlin's “peaceful coexistence.”

Trotsky certainly did not fetishize national borders, and he never placed the “sovereignty” of so-called neutral and buffer countries above the revolutionary obligation to defend the Soviet Union. Indeed, he sharply criticized the Stalinist bureaucracy for fostering the illusion that long-lasting agreements could be negotiated with the imperialists in order to stabilize the world order. Thus in The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky wrote:

“The question of Mongolia is already a question of the strategic positions to be occupied by Japan in a future war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet governmentfound itself this time compelled to announce openly that it would answer the intrusion of Japanese troops into Mongolia with war. Here, however, it is no question of the immediate defense of `our land': Mongolia is an independent state. A passive defense of Soviet boundaries seemed sufficient only when nobody was seriouslythreatening them. The real method of defense of the Soviet Union is to weaken the positions of imperialism, and strengthen the position of the proletariat and the colonial peoples throughout the earth. An unfavorable correlation of forces might compel us to surrender many `inches' of land, as it did at the moment of the Brest-Litovsk peace, the Riga peace, and in the matter of the handing over of the Chinese-Eastern Railroad. At the same time, the struggle for a favorable change in the correlation of world forces puts upon the workers' state acontinual obligation to come to the help of the liberative movements in other countries. But it is just this fundamental task which conflicts absolutely with the conservative policy of the status quo.” [our emphasis]

The betrayal in Afghanistan was a significant milestone in advancing capitalist counterrevolution. The withdrawal of Soviet troops was followed by counter-revolutionary Solidarność taking power in Poland, Gorbachev giving the green light to capitalist reunification of Germany, and Yeltsin's pro-imperialist countercoup in Moscow in August 1991. And in Afghanistan the military defeat of the PDPA government by Islamic fundamentalists has led to the institution of a reign of medieval terror, torture and virtual enslavement of women, and continuing bloody civil war between the ultrareactionary local factions. These are the fruits of the victory of the reactionary forces that the Northites supported.

We sought to fight counterrevolution while there was still time: far better to defeat counterrevolution in Afghanistan than be defeated by it later in the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out, we offered to the Afghan government that we would organize an international brigade to fight against the CIA-backed mujahedin. Not least, this would have served to awaken the revolutionary internationalist consciousness of Soviet workers and soldiers in the direction of proletarian political revolution. Several months later, we threw a significant proportion of our international resources into East Germany, fighting for workers and soldiers soviets throughout Germany to smash capitalist reunification, through political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West. We called for “A red Germany of workers councils, part of a Socialist United States of Europe.”

Poland: Northites in League with Solidarność

At a time when virtually the entire Western left was proclaiming “Solidarity with Solidarity,” our tendency sought to expose before the world's working class that Lech Walesa & Co. were a counterrevolutionary agency for the CIA and Western bankers, Ronald Reagan, the Pope and clerical nationalists. We supported the Jaruzelski regime's spiking of Solidarność's bid for power in December 1981, while emphasizing that the Stalinist progenitors of Poland's crisis were incapable of politically defeating Solidarność and that what was necessary was to forge a Trotskyist party that could lead a proletarian political revolution to oust the sellout bureaucracy. Volkov quotes as if it were an outrage our forthright statement from that period: “If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily... we will support this. And we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity's counter-revolution” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981). David North et al., in the name of “anti-Stalinism,” lined up with the counterrevolutionary Solidarność cabal and held them up as a model “trade union.”

The purpose of the Northites' embrace of Solidarność had little to do in any case with the Polish workers. Fully in step with other fake leftists at whom the Northites like to sneer as “diseased petty-bourgeois" tendencies, they were joyfully cuddling up to the American AFL-CIO, the German SPD, the British and Australian labor parties, etc. In hailing Solidarność, the social democrats and their “left” tails were simply doing the bidding of their imperialist masters once again, providing a “labor” face for Cold War anti-Sovietism.

According to Volkov, Jaruzelski's coup “expressed the fear of the bureaucracy in the face of spontaneous protest by the working class that could have led to a new political revolution in Poland and the establishment of a genuine workers republic there.” But had Solidarność taken power, it would not have been a political revolution but a social counterrevolution (and when Walesa & Co. did eventually take power as Stalinism was collapsing worldwide, a counterrevolution is exactly what it was). The Northites are cynically distorting the views of Leon Trotsky, who used the term “political revolution” to mean the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste by the workers and the establishment of a regime of soviet democracy, based on preserving the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalized planned economy. Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October Revolution and organizer of the Red Army, stood unconditionally for the defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against capitalist counterrevolution.

The implicit methodology of Volkov & Co. is that any attempt to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy constitutes a “political revolution.” But Solidarność was very different from the pro-socialist Hungarian workers who rose up against the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1956. And the consciousness of the Polish working masses in 1981 was much different than during earlier periods of working-class protests in 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1970-71, when the influence of capitalist-restorationist tendencies was far weaker. What is decisive here is from what class standpoint the Stalinist bureaucracy is opposed. As we have noted, “whether the collapse of Stalinist rule led to a workers government or to capitalist restoration would be determined by the political consciousness and leadership of the working class, specifically the ability of the workers movement to overcome and combat illusions in parliamentarism and nationalist prejudices” (“On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe,” Spartacist No. 45-46, Winter 1990-1991).

Back in 198, North's U.S. Workers League literally gushed over Solidarność, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). Naturally now that the Polish workers have been through the brutal experience of Walesa's capitalist-restorationist government, it is no longer fashionable for fake leftists to be cheerleaders for Solidarność. To prettify their earlier support to Walesa & Co., Volkov has to pretend that somehow the organization has degenerated. Thus he writes that “it was precisely the violent suppression of Solidarność which drove it to total anticommunist degeneration.”

This is utterly absurd. When Solidarność first emerged in a wave of strikes in August 1980, a revolutionary leadership would have sought to split Solidarność, winning the mass of the workers away from the anti-Soviet and pro-Vatican leadership around Walesa. But by the time of its founding conference, in September 1981, the forces of clerical reaction and capitalist restoration had decisively taken the ascendancy. In sharp contrast to the Hungarian workers councils of 1956, the Solidarność congress resolutions made no mention of socialism. Instead they espoused “self management,” calling for the abolition of centralized economic planning. Solidarność's central political demand was for “free elections” to the Sejm (parliament), thereby rejecting soviet democracy in favor of "democratic” counterrevolution.

Taking its cue from its advisers in the fanatically anti-Communist bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, the American trade-union federation, Solidarność called for “free trade unions.” While the demand for trade unions independent of bureaucratic control is integral to the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution, the slogan of “free trade unions” was long associated with NATO imperialism. For the U.S. Cold Warriors who authored it, it had one meaning: trade unions without communists, i.e., its central thrust was the same as the slogan of “soviets without Bolsheviks” raised by the Kronstadt mutineers of 1921. Were the ICFI more honest, it would denounce Trotsky for the necessary suppression of the counterrevolutionary Kronstadt uprising.

There was nothing “independent” about Solidarność, least of all its financing. Years later, the American bourgeois weekly Time (24 February 1992) said openly what we had exposed years before: “Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and [Pope] John Paul II.... Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.”

Solidarność leaders hobnobbed with anti-Communist leaders of the American “AFL-CIA” and big-time capitalists. Invited to Solidarność's first conference in 1981 as part of the AFL-CIO delegation was one Irving Brown, identified by ex-CIA official Philip Agee as the “principal CIA agent for control of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.” Brown's notorious career began in the post-World War II years, when he used hundreds of thousands of CIA dollars and the services of gangsters to split and destroy militant Communist-led unions in West Europe. And in October 1981, barely two months before Solidarność's bid for power, Walesa was wined and dined at a hush-hush breakfast (subsequently exposed in Le Canard Enchaine, 16 December 1981) with some 20 top-level American financiers and industrialists who flew in just to meet him at a posh restaurant at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. As the saying goes, “Tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are.”

Nor did Solidarność solidarize with the struggles of the workers in the capitalist West. When Ronald Reagan fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 – the entire national union membership – practically every trade-union federation in the Western world protested. But not Polish Solidarność! Nor did Walesa & Co. support the British miners when they went on a year-long strike in 1984-85. Not for nothing did we say that Solidarność was the only “trade union” in the world supported by Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the Vatican!

On the eve of the British coal strike, it was North's own international leaders, in Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party, who instigated an anti-communist witchhunt against Arthur Scargill, the head of the miners union. Healy's press blasted Scargill for accurately calling Solidarność an “anti-socialist” organization. This was a completely calculated act on the part of the Healyites, timed to be a bombshell, and one which was played for all it was worth by Thatcher, the bourgeois press and the anti-Communist labor bureaucrats in Britain in their campaign to cut off solidarity with the miners. The Healyites were so proud of themselves that they published an entire pamphlet about it.

The British miners strike was a class confrontation which could have toppled the Tory government and posed the question of which class would rule. And it was seen as such by the British state. Subsequently it emerged that the political police (MI5) were up to their necks in a vendetta against Scargill, which sought to starve the miners into submission by seizing their treasury and the funds being raised in solidarity internationally, including from Soviet trade unionists. On a more modest scale, our tendency, working with our defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, also raised funds for the British miners, in the face of hostility from the American AFL-CIO tops who considered Scargill a dangerous “red.”

Whitewashing the counterrevolutionary character of Solidarność, Volkov claims that there were “several political tendencies fighting inside ‘Solidarność.' The question of which was going to achieve overwhelming dominance depended entirely on whether the Polish proletariat could break from the influence of Stalinism and liberalism.” But the leaders of Solidarność were not Stalinists or social democrats, or even liberals. They were ardent enthusiasts for Western capitalism and the Roman Catholic church hierarchy. Thus, one of the demands of the Gdansk ship workers who struck in August 1980 was for access to the mass media for the Roman Catholic church. And the church had strong support particularly among the one-third of the population employed in agriculture, most of whom worked on privately owned farms. This represented a substantial spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution.

Indeed, the “several political tendencies” which Volkov refers to as fighting within Solidarność did not include a single known current which opposed capitalist restoration. "Tendencies” there were: liberal anti-Communists, Catholics, monarchists, fascists, etc. The “left wing” of Solidarność, including Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron (who later became minister of labor in capitalist Poland), refused to oppose the church. Their newspaper Robotnik enthusiastically greeted the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979 (Robotnik, 1 June 1979). Nor were the ranks mostly workers – at the time of Solidarność's bid for power, two-thirds of its members were peasants and priests!

As we noted in our article headlined “Stop Solidarity's Counterrevolution!” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981):

“What do revolutionaries do when the Marxist program stands counterposed to the overwhelming bulk of the working class, a situation we of course urgently seekto avoid? There can be no doubt. The task of communists must be to defend at all costs the program and gains of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today Trotskyists find themselves in such a position over Poland, and it is necessary to swim against a powerful current of counterrevolution.”

In this same article we note that “in Poland it is the Stalinists themselves, through decades of capitulation to capitalist forces, who have produced the counterrevolutionary crisis.... The crimes of Stalinism, not least the present counterrevolutionary situation in Poland, mandate proletarian political revolution in the Soviet bloc.” Naturally, Volkov does not quote this!

Nor does he acknowledge that after Jaruzelski's countercoup, we wrote: “As the immediate counterrevolutionary threat passes, these martial law measures must be ended, including release of the Solidarność leaders. A Trotskyist vanguard seeks to defeat them politically, by mobilizing the Polish working class in its true class interests" (“Power Bid Spiked,” WV No. 295, 18 December 1981). In fact, nowhere in his long screed does Volkov ever admit that we have consistently raised the slogan of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy in our propaganda directed to the deformed and degenerated workers states. This alone testifies to the total intellectual mendacity of North, Volkov & Co.

Dual Role of the Bureaucracy

Volkov claims that “the main theoretical reason that made the Spartacists the eager defenders of Stalinism was their inability to understand the dual nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR.” What chutzpah from the people who systematically and with loud “theoretical” fanfare falsified Trotsky's views on the bureaucracy while in practice portraying it as a pure and simple “counterrevolutionary” agency working hand in hand with imperialism. Thus in his 1989 tract on Perestroika Versus Socialism, North declares that “the political and economic goals of the bureaucracy in its relations with world imperialism” are “the destruction of the planned economy and the social conquests of the October Revolution” and restoration of capitalism. And, more generally, in his 1988 tome, The Heritage We Defend, he declares that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as 'counterrevolutionary through and through'.” This stupidly one-sided formulation was the banner of every latter-day anti-Soviet fake Trotskyist.

Trotsky never said the Stalinist bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary through and through" In fact this dubious formulation had its origins in the 1953 faction fight in the American Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) against the pro-Stalinist Cochran-Clarke faction. Used in the heat of argument by the majority's Dave Weiss, the formulation was then picked up and defended by Joseph Hansen.

Today Volkov seeks to refurbish the Northites' longtime perversion of Trotsky's analysis of the USSR with a new twist: the claim that they agree that the bureaucracy has a “dual nature.” Their best hope is that the reader will emerge totally confused. So a selection of excellent quotes from Trotsky is followed by the mind-twisting statement that “the progressive function of the bureaucratic caste was always relative, but its counterrevolutionary role was absolute”! Of course, the bureaucracy – the usurpers of political power from the proletariat and the executioners of the Old Bolsheviks – never had any “progressive function.” But so long as it rested on the proletarian property forms, it was constrained to behave in a contradictory fashion with respect to the defense of the degenerated workers state.

When Trotsky referred to the dual role of Stalinism in the USSR, he meant that the bureaucracy was not a ruling class but a brittle caste, resting on the collectivized property forms inherited from the October Revolution, while serving as a transmission belt for the pressures of imperialism. Thus at times the bureaucracy was constrained to defend – in a bureaucratic fashion – the workers state in order to protect its own privileges. Simultaneously, in myriad other ways it was undermining the workers state. In a 1937 article against the future renegade Burnham, Trotsky noted:

“The function of Stalin, like the function of Green [then head of the American trade-union federation, the AFL], has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through the defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of this that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.”
– “Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937) [our emphasis]

In situations where the bureaucracy felt compelled to defend the workers state, albeit in a bureaucratic fashion, it was in order for Marxists to enter into a united front “with the Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy against open attack by capitalist counter-revolution” (in the words of the founding program of the Fourth International). This was the situation in Poland in 1981, when Jaruzelski took measures that temporarily suppressed capitalist counterrevolution. But for North, Volkov et al., since in practice the bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary through and through,” it was permissible, indeed obligatory, to support any force that opposed it, no matter how reactionary. Using this revisionist methodology, the ICFI ended up in bed with the imperialists' favorite “union” in Poland, the CIA-backed mullahs in Afghanistan, and fascist-infested nationalists in the Baltics.

Northites Cover Their Tracks

Having supported every counterrevolutionary force that sought to destroy the Soviet Union, now that it no longer exists the Northites seek to pose as “Soviet patriots.” They take us to task, claiming that “the refusal of the Spartacists to raise the call for the restoration of the Soviet Union is the continuation of their policy of accommodation to Stalinism and to the national bourgeoisie.” The Northites admit that the progressive social foundations of the former Soviet state – based on the overthrow of capitalist class rule by the October Revolution and the construction of a planned, collectivized economy – have been smashed and capitalism restored. So what could the call to “restore the Soviet Union” mean today? It is cynical nonsense mouthed by the degenerate Stalinist remnants – now capitalist politicians who are outright nationalists – who seek to play on nostalgia for the Soviet Union in order to build support for a program of racist, anti-Semitic Great Russian chauvinism. And notwithstanding Volkov's declarations that the ICFI has nothing in common with the Russian nationalism of the Communist Party (KPRF), the facts show otherwise.

As we explained in our article “Why Marxists Do Not Raise the Call `Restore the Soviet Union',

“even after the Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet Union still retained a progressive character based on the collectivized economy established by the October Revolution. This progressive character had nothing whatever to do with its particular national composition. There is nothing inherently progressive about a state incorporating in its boundaries Russians and Uzbeks, Ukrainians and Chechens, etc. It is not for nothing that Lenin termed the tsarist empire a 'prison house of peoples'.”

As is well known, Lenin strongly and clearly advocated the right of national self-determination, i.e., the right to secede and form independent states, for the subject nations of the tsarist empire. This was key in enabling the Bolsheviks to win the support of the non-Russian toilers. And later, after the successful October Revolution and against the opposition of Stalin, Lenin insisted that the right of national self-determination for the constituent soviet republics be written into the founding constitution of the USSR.

With the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state, the key task for communists in the former USSR is to work for proletarian socialist revolutions to overthrow the new bourgeois states. Whether future workers states in this region will form a multinational federation and what its configuration would be is a historically open and, at the present time, rather abstract question. What is sharply and directly posed at present is the defense of non-Russian peoples against renascent Russian chauvinist ambitions, including those would-be Russian imperialists who call for “restoring the Soviet Union.”

A central question for would-be Russian communists was the war in Chechnya. While giving no political support to Chechen nationalism, we called for the defeat of the Russian invading and occupying forces and for the right of Chechnya to decide its own fate. This obviously includes the right to establish its own state if the population so desires, as is apparently the case. As for the Stalinist has-beens in the KPRF, they attacked the Yeltsin government from the right, denouncing the withdrawal of Russian troops as a “betrayal.”

No less than for the Stalinists, the ICFI's call for “restoring the Soviet Union” serves as a cover for Russian chauvinism. Thus Volkov cites with approval a resolution by the KRD in Ufa, which says in part:

“Yeltsin's victory brings colonialist oppression to the proletarians of Chechnya and to Russian workers, it brings death in other imperialist military campaigns which will surely come, for example, to the Ukraine or toward the Indian Ocean. For Chechen toilers, a victory of Dudayev means neocolonial oppression by Muslim countries, as well as maintaining a semi-fascist regime domestically....

“In imperialist war, communists must not justify or prettify a government or a bourgeoisie of any of the fighting powers because it means supporting the right of one of the fighting blocs (in this case Western or Muslim imperialism) to rob and oppress dependent peoples (including Chechnya). We cannot support 'self-determination' of the Chechen people in the abstract without posing its dependence on the revolutionary proletarian movement in Chechnya and in the other republics of the former USSR.”

This “even-handed” position on the war reflects a chauvinist refusal to distinguish between a regional imperialist power (capitalist Russia) and a subjugated people (the Chechens). To seize on the Muslim leadership of the Chechen people to raise a spectre of Russia being in danger from “Muslim imperialism” simply reflects racist Russian imperialist propaganda. The position of Leninists and Trotskyists in wars between imperialists and colonial peoples is to call for military defeat of the imperialists. Thus in the war between China and Japan in the 1930s, while not giving any political confidence to the anti-communist butcher Chiang Kai-shek, the Trotskyists gave military support to the Chinese against Japanese imperialism. A similar position was taken in military defense of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia in its war against Mussolini's Italian imperialism.

In opposing independence for the Chechens, the Northites are making a political bloc with Yeltsin, Russian fascists like Zhirinovsky and chauvinists of the Zyuganov ilk. This kind of methodology, with the false appeal to “proletarian internationalism” as a smokescreen to avoid taking a side for the military defeat of one's own imperialist bourgeoisie, is typical of the methods of the social-patriotic Second International and alien to Leninism.

It is notable that nowhere in their statement do the Northites make any reference to the whipping up of a racist witchhunt against the Caucasian minority in Russia, fueled by the war in Chechnya. There is no criticism whatsoever of the anti-Semitism, anti-gay and racist bigotry which saturate the Stalinist milieu, nor any mention of the need to mobilize against fascist scum like Pamyat or the other fascist groups that have proliferated in Russia. Indeed, the Northite press in Russia is notorious for failing to address any of the questions of special oppression. In contradistinction, readers of our Russian-language material (see for example Biuleten Spartakovtsev No. 3) are well aware of our insistence that a Leninist party must be a “tribune of the people,” combatting all manifestations of oppression in society.

The Northites try to dress up their chauvinist line on Chechnya by claiming they are “fighting” bourgeois nationalism. Likewise, they have “discovered” that the Tamils in Lanka, the Quebecois in Canada, etc. have no right to independence. (See our article, “David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination,” WV Nos. 626 and 627, 28 July and 25. August 1995.) There's hardly anything “leftist” about this position. As we noted earlier, Healy/North were shameless enthusiasts for bourgeois nationalists like the Sajudis, or Walesa's Pilsudskiites, when such outfits were being supported by the imperialists as a means to destroy the Soviet Union. But now that the USSR is no more, the imperialist powers are not happy that the spoils they hoped to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. And the Northites follow suit. It's notable that the American and European governments supported the territorial integrity of Russia and its war against Chechnya. U.S. president Clinton grotesquely drew a parallel between the Russian attempted rape of Chechnya and the struggle against the Southern slavocracy in the American Civil War, claiming that the common principle was “that no state has a right to withdraw from our union.”

It's particularly obscene to hear lectures about the dangers of bourgeois nationalism from this lot. The Northite tendency is not just a bunch of opportunists with bad ideas, but is deeply corrupt. Today fanning fears of “Muslim imperialism” in Chechnya, the Northites for years operated as shameless apologists for a number of Arab nationalist regimes. In 1979, North's Bulletin reprinted articles from Gerry Healy's News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government. That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” Operating as press agents for a variety of oil-rich Middle Eastern regimes, the ICFI was rewarded with millions in money from Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi, among others. Of course, today the Northites would like to claim that it was all Healy's fault. But none of the leaders of the ICFI objected to the vicious betrayals that were carried out to get the money that came pouring in from Middle Eastern regimes. On the contrary, Healy was deposed by his former lieutenants only after the money was no longer coming in (see “Trotskyism: What It Isn't and What It Is” [“Shto Takoe Trotskizm,” Biuleten Spartakovtsev No. 1, Autumn 1990].

With the Northites, yesterday's orthodoxy is tomorrow's anathema. During the Vietnam War, the Workers League appealed to the viciously anti-Communist AFL-CIO union bureaucracy headed by George Meany to build a “labor party.” The Healyites' platform for such a party made no mention of either the war or the fight against racism, which is key to unlocking proletarian struggle in the U.S. But today the Workers League preaches that the trade unions are totally bourgeois institutions that cannot serve as economic defense organizations for the working class. The only constant here is the refusal to politically fight the sellout bureaucracy within the unions; formerly they prettified the “labor lieutenants of capital,” today they write off the unions, which they equate with the pro-capitalist leadership.

Or take Volkov's assertion that our tendency originated “in the wave of protests against the Vietnam War.” Actually our origins are earlier, in the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the American Socialist Workers Party. The leaders of what became the Workers League were also part of the RT until they and Healy decided to conciliate the then-centrist SWP tops by fingering us to the party leadership. One of the central planks of the RT was its criticism of the SWP majority for uncritically enthusing over the Castro regime in Cuba – a fact which it is inconvenient for Volkov to admit since it runs counter to his line that we are pro-Stalinist. Moreover, during the Vietnam War the Healyites oscillated between slavish support to the reformists who sought to keep the antiwar movement chained to the capitalist Democratic Party politicians, on the one hand, and opportunist lunges after assorted Stalinist outfits. Thus, they uncritically hailed Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Stalinists, who murdered the urban-based Vietnamese Trotskyists; they acted as cheerleaders for Mao's bogus “Cultural Revolution” in China – a power struggle between wings of the Stalinist bureaucracy which was ultimately settled by the army.

The Healy/North operation is sometimes capable of putting some orthodox-sounding stuff on paper, but the reader had better “hold on to his wallet.” To use Lenin's term, these people are “political bandits” – that is, they function as political pirates who will show any flag in order to attack any target. When it has suited its episodic interests, the ICFI has taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes; they have served the queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of the miners union as a desperate class battle was looming. And they crawled before any and all forces hostile to the social gains that existed for working people in the collectivized property forms of the former USSR. In their own small way, the Northites facilitated the destruction of the Soviet Union as they made common cause with the imperialist enemies of October, in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” We, the Trotskyists, fought for the only program that would have prevented the catastrophe of counterrevolution: proletarian political revolutions in the deformed and degenerated workers states, and the socialist overthrow of capitalism on a worldwide scale.

The final undoing of the October Revolution has unleashed in its wake intensified capitalist attacks on the working class on every continent, as each imperialist power scrambles to improve its competitive position against its rivals, seeking to turn the screws of exploitation tighter at home while jockeying for the spoils of neocolonial plunder abroad. Defensive struggles, often sharp, have broken out as the toiling masses seek to protect their living standards. But what is required to win such struggles and take the working class over to the offensive to finally put an end to the capitalist imperialist system is an internationalist revolutionary leadership rooted in the working class – a Leninist party which must fight to the finish to defend every past proletarian conquest as part of fighting for new ones. As we wrote in the last issue of Spartacist:

“In the remaining deformed workers states which emerged while the USSR existed, there is still a narrow window of time open for Trotskyist intervention, fighting to defend the remaining gains of the revolutions from China to Cuba through workers political revolution. Trotskyist parties, part of a reforged Fourth International, must be built to lead new October Revolutions to bring the workers to power all over the globe. It is for this aim and purpose that the International Communist League fights.”
-“Trotsky's Fight Against Stalinist Betrayal of Bolshevik Revolution,” Spartacist [English language edition] No. 53, Summer 1997

October 1997

Bulletin Liquidated (March 1996)

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Workers Vanguard No. 687, 27 March 1996

Bulletin Liquidated

Northite Pirates Run for Cyberspace

After years of hysterically trumpeting the need to build a weekly, then twice-weekly, then daily Bulletin, David North’s fake-Trotskyist “Socialist Equality Party” (SEP — formerly the Workers League, and before that the “American Committee for the Fourth International”) has now officially thrown in the towel on what was always a grotesquely fake newspaper. A February 13 “Dear Reader” letter announcing the SEP’s latest grandiloquent scam, “the launching of the World Socialist Web Site,” mentioned in passing: “We… will no longer be publishing The International Workers Bulletin. “ North’s British SEP satellite has similarly announced the end of its International Worker.

So much for the Northites ”mass paper” pretensions. Since anointing himself supreme leader of the “International Committee of the Fourth International” following the ouster of the discredited (now deceased) Gerry Healy a dozen years ago, North has followed in Healy’s corrupt, thuggish and megalomaniacal footsteps. When in 1976 Healy launched a fancy, four-color, daily paper modeled on the British tabloids, we asked: “Where’s the Class Line in the News Line?” (WV No. 114, 18 June 1976). That soon became clear, as Healy — and his American flunkey North — began running paeans to Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi and other oil-rich Arab bourgeois regimes (see “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” WV No. 158, 20 May 1977). Two years later, Healy and North openly hailed Saddam Hussein’s execution of 21 Iraqi Communists, while Healy’s outfit secretly spied on Iraqi oppositionists in Britain.

When the flow of petrodollars for services rendered dried up, Healy’s regime imploded. North stepped into the breach, soon proclaiming himself, ever so modestly, the leader of the international proletariat.

Humbug

The Northites are now rhapsodizing about the Internet as a “revolutionary medium” which is supposedly “relatively cheap and accessible” to “potentially millions.” This pompous dismissal of the vast majority of the world’s workers and poor — especially minorities and immigrants — who don’t have up-to-date computers, modems and netsurfing capacity sums up the Northites’ appetites as “middle-class radicals” (an epithet they are fond of throwing at the Spartacist League in an attempt to deflect our polemic attacks). For North, the Internet is a evolutionary medium” because it enhances his ability to bury his wildly opportunist 2ig-zags of yesterday in flickering digital documents that may appear today and be wiped out tomorrow. And the Northites no longer have to face attacks from angry trade unionists who noticed that the Bulletin was a scab paper, published without a union “bug.” The new SEP Web site, rapidly expanding via the gaseous “great thoughts” of David North, is the latest in a growing junk belt of virtual fantasy worlds, where posturing little grey men with gigantic egos and dubious politics can play at revolution. Nowadays it’s become quite the rage for burnt-out drop-outs to set up Potemkin Village Web sites as outposts of retreat. It’s fitting, indeed, that the “Internationalist Group” of Jan Norden, a shamefaced defector from Trotskyism who was formerly editor of Workers Vanguard, has also created its own little world within the Net.

The liquidation of the Bulletin is part of a broader phenomenon as a host of reformists and centrists, buying into the imperialist lie that “communism is dead;” submerge themselves in larger social-democratic formations or split up on the road to oblivion. Among the flotsam and jetsam of anti-Spartacist grouplets in the U.S., both the “Bolshevik Tendency” (BT) and Workers’ Voice recently announced (hopefully fatal) splits. The BT has long pushed grossly Anglo-chauvinist opposition to independence ‘for Quebec; now a wing has decamped ostensibly over its abstentionist line on the anti-working-class European Union Maastricht Treaty — of 1992! And in a January 23 Internet posting, the Bay Area Workers’ Voice announced that its Detroit branch — which ”constituted the majority of the leadership… but were a minority in the organization” — had split.

Contrary to the hostile buzzing of a small clot of petty-bourgeois losers and nerds who obviously have nothing better to do than clog up the Internet with sneers that the SL is “anti-technology,” we actually do believe that computers, and yes, even Web sites, are useful tools — for certain purposes. But that’s all they are. To pretend dumping some documents into cyberspace is any substitute for the hard fight — in the real world, among real people — to build a revolutionary workers party, only confirms the total depths of cynicism and humbug for which the Northites are infamous.

Sordid

The Healy/Northites are, to borrow Lenin’s term, “political bandits” — political pirates who will show any flag to attack any target — for whom the class line is a revolving door. In the bureaucratic infighting of the 1960s “Cultural Revolution” in China, they enthused over Mao Zedong’s wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy; throughout the Cold War of the 1980s, they supported every imperialist-backed force arrayed against the Soviet Union, from fascist-infested Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin. After years of routinely pleading with the racist Cold Warriors of George Meany’s AFL-CIO bureaucracy to “build a Labor Party,” North & Co. veered recently into writing off the trade unions entirely as workers organizations — openly apologizing for scabs who crossed United Auto Workers picket lines in the long and bitter Caterpillar strike (see “David North, 'Socialist’ Apologist for Scabbing” WV No. 637, 19 January 1996).

There is much, much more to this tendency’s sordid history — all thoroughly documented and readily available in bound volumes of back issues of Workers Vanguard. Indeed, since North’s Bulletin had barely 150 subscribers, many of you are probably only here learning of its demise. At its core, the program of the SEP, proclaimed with great fanfare in the leadup to the 1996 presidential elections, is profoundly reformist — or worse. Reflecting their long history of hostility to the struggles of blacks, women and gays, this strange “equality” party made a central focus of its election campaign an attack on affirmative action — in an election year marked by a virulently racist bipartisan assault on welfare and affirmative action. The SEP also advised the capitalist rulers on how to reallocate economic resources, mewling: “Tax codes would have to be radically revised to place the greatest burden on those who can afford it, the corporations and the rich” (International Workers Bulletin, 11 November 1996). “Our aim is not to reduce the rich to conditions of penury,” they wrote. Well, our aim is to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class, and they can then find meaningful employment, if they want to eat. You need a world party of socialist revolution — a reforged Fourth International — to do that, and you need a Trotskyist press to build that party.

"Socialist" Apologist for Scabbing (1996)

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Workers Vanguard No. 637, 19 January 1996

David North, “Socialist” Apoologist for Scabbing

Four years ago, the organization known as the Workers League, led by one David North, decided to write off the trade unions, saying “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992; see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). Now, in the context of the defeated 17-month-long Caterpillar strike and the four-month battle by Liverpool dockers against union-busting, North & Co. have taken this formulation out of the realm of theory and shown it for what it really is: an open prescription for strikebreaking.

Early last month, as dock workers unions from North America to Australia announced their refusal to handle ships loaded in Liverpool by scabs, North’s followers in the British International Communist Party (ICP) wrote a scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), calling this basic declaration of solidarity a “fraud.” Yet some two weeks later, American trade unionists of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) turned back a scab Atlantic Container Lines ship from three U.S. ports by honoring picket lines put up by dock workers who had flown in from Liverpool, giving a huge boost to their strike.

_______________________________
North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
_______________________________

As a cover for their anti-internationalist, anti-working-class line, the Northites point to the ILA’s “history of working with the U.S. State Department and CIA backed operations abroad.” This is pretty cheeky coming from these political bandits, who took up the cause of every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet movement from the Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin reactionaries. North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.

The link between the Northites’ current anti-labor line and their historic anti-Sovietism was captured in a recent appeal by ICP National Secretary David Hyland to the deeply reformist Militant Labour group for a “mass socialist party,” Openly calling to “destroy the influence and control of the old unions,” Hyland offers as proof that any “trade union perspective” is bankrupt… “the example of Solidarność in Poland” (IWE, 11 September 1995). Solidarność, in fact, was a counterrevolutionary political movement masquerading as a “union” on behalf of its CIA and Vatican bankrollers, which was cheered by the Northites as it organized Polish workers behind a program of capitalist restoration.

Never ones to differentiate the trade unions from the pro-capitalist bureaucracy that keeps them chained to the exploiters and their state, North & Co. have now become lawyers for scabbing. Reporting on the Caterpillar UAW strike, which was betrayed outright by the UAW bureaucracy, their American newspaper writes, “UAW officials have attempted to absolve themselves of blame for whar has happened by diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines” (International Workers Bulletin, 18 December 1995). Putting quotation marks around “scab” is no slip. In fact, the article justifies scabbing, claiming that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union. Most simply recognized the futility of the policies being pursued by the UAW, which had, after all, abandoned the previous strike.” Now that corporations are shelling out billions every year to hire union-busting law firms and private police, are the Northites offering themselves as PR agents for the growing army of strikebreakers?

The “hot-cargoing” of scab shipping by dockers internationally is an example of the kind of genuine solidarity in action which can fortify the unions against the worldwide capitalist offensive. Our perspective is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. This requires a hard political struggle to drive out the sellout bureaucracy — the “labor lieutenants” of the bosses — that is undermining and destroying the unions. That fight must also be waged against scab “socialists” like the Northites, who spit on the best traditions of working-class struggle as they stand on the side of the capitalist union-busters.

WL Scabs on Defense of W. Virginia Miner (1994)

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Workers Vanguard No. 607, 30 September 1994

Workers League Scabs on Defense of West Virginia Miner

With United Mine Workers (UMWA) member Jerry Dale Lowe now sentenced to nearly eleven years in federal prison, on an anti-union frame-up, it is urgent for all supporters of labor to redouble their efforts in fighting for his freedom. That includes raising the large sums of money needed to carry out a legal appeal to overturn his conviction. As part of our efforts to defend Jerry Dale Lowe and seven other Logan County, West Virginia strikers, Workers Vanguard has warned miners and other supporters of his cause to beware that “a dubious outfit called the Workers League has tried to stop money from going to Lowe’s defense fund” (WV No. 603, 8 July).

Now this “Workers” League — which publishes its newspaper without a printers’ union label — has confirmed its scabby role in the case of Jerry Dale Lowe. A smear piece in the WL’s International Workers Bulletin (18 July) accuses us of being “accomplices” of the UMWA bureaucracy, because we call on our readers to send contributions to the place Jerry Dale Lowe wants them to go, the UMWA Region II Defense Fund. This, according to the Workers League, is “How the Spartacist League Aids the Frame-up of a Miner”!

The Workers League has written several articles on the outrageous frame-up of Jerry Dale Lowe. So why are they going out of their way to stop contributions being sent to his legal defense? An article in their 9 May Bulletin says that any money sent to the union defense fund would be used “for the purpose of further isolating the Logan County miners and ensuring their conviction.” Yet that is where Lowe himself has asked that donations for his defense be sent. The Workers League offers no alternative for how to raise money for his defense and dismisses any attempt to mobilize the union to free this victimized striker.

Why? The Bulletin (4 July) writes that Lowe’s case demonstrates the “transformation of the UMWA and the entire AFL-CIO into agencies of big business and the capitalist state.” Union members who have seen their wages slashed, their working conditions destroyed, their jobs decimated and their strikes sold out, are increasingly and painfully aware that their union “leaders” operate as the labor lieutenants of the bosses in enforcing the capitalist status quo. But the Workers League openly declares that it does not defend the UMWA or any other union against the bosses and their government — because it equates the unions with the bosses and government. The WL tells workers to “break with this apparatus and build new organizations of struggle.” But far from promoting class struggle, these appeals for workers to junk their unions neatly dovetail with those of the union-busting bosses.

The Spartacist League defends the unions as elementary defense organizations of the workers, while fighting to get rid of the pro-capitalist misleaders. Every strike brings home the fact that a new, class-struggle leadership is needed for labor to get off its knees and fight. But you can’t win any labor battles by scabbing on defense of the unions.

The Workers League willfully ref uses to distinguish between the unions and the sellout bureaucrats. So they attack us as “accomplices” of the bureaucracy and claim that we “promoted the lie that the UMWA bureaucracy was defending Lowe.” Let’s see who’s lying. When Lowe and seven other miners were indicted last year, we denounced UMWA president Trumka for his statement that violence “has no place in the coal fields” and his pledge to aid the frame-up by giving “whatever support and assistance we can give in that investigation.” At the same time we demanded:

“The Mine Workers union must mobilize its strength to defend these victimized union men. But that will take a sharp fight inside the UMWA against the leadership that has sold out union conditions, sold out union militants and presided over the decimation of a union that was once proud to be the shock troops of American labor.”
— WV No. 589, 3 December 1993

Who does fit the description of “accomplices” to the UMWA bureaucracy? When Arnold Miller and his “Miners for Democracy” invited the capitalist government’s Labor Department to “clean out” the UMWA in the early ‘70s, a betrayal which led to decisively weakening the union, nobody cheered louder than the Workers League. The WL’s Bulletin (11 December 1972) called or “all miners to vote for the Miners for Democracy slate,” hailing it as “a real alternative to the Boyle leadership” (see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). In contrast, Workers Vanguard (No. 17, March 1973) headlined: “Labor Department Wins Mine Workers’ Election.” A few years later, miners were burning effigies of Miller in the 1978 coal strike, as the WL’s “real alternative” knuckled under to strikebreaking Taft-Hartley injunctions and tried to shove giveback contracts down the miners’ throats.

And when it comes to financial shenanigans, why should anyone believe the Workers League? In 1991 the WL’s phony “International Labor Defense Committee” launched a “Vorkuta Miners Relief Fund,” supposedly to raise money for medical supplies for workers in northern Russian coal fields. (Curiously, the “Vorkuta miners” had well-documented links to the CIA through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy and the AFL-CIO, which had itself just set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners.) In April 1992, the WL’s affiliate in Australia declared that “more than $40,000 worth” of supplies had been sent to Vorkuta. Yet one month later, the WL’s paper admitted that they never delivered anything to the miners. The supplies ended up instead with a doctor in the Ukraine… or so their story goes (see “Workers League’s ‘Vorkuta’ Fund,” WV No. 563, 13 November 1992). The WL has given no public accounting of donations to its “relief fund.”

Whether tailing the pro-capitalist union misleaders or undermining defense of unions in the face of capitalist assault, the political bandits of the Workers League are always up to something dirty. The WL’s undermining of Jerry Dale Lowe’s defense is one more treacherous example. And the next time these fake-socialists pop up, ask them where is the union label on their IWB rag.

D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 2 (1995)

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Workers Vanguard No. 627, 25 August 1995

A Case Study of Chauvinism

David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination

PART TWO OF TWO

Part One of this article, polemicizing against a pamphlet by David North ‘s International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), titled “ The Road to Tuzla.” appeared in WV No. 626 (28 July).

From Sri Lanka…

In his speech, “Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today,” North says he drew inspiration for the ICFI’s opposition to self-determination from Keerthi Balasuriya, a former leader of their largest section, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) of Sri Lanka.

Following Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 from the racist colonial rule of the British and the subsequent passage of a Sinhala-only language law in 1956, the national chauvinism of the Sinhalese ruling class has led to au increasing, and increasingly bloody, communal polarization of the Sinhala and Tamil peoples of the island. This reached a watershed with the 1983 government-inspired pogroms against the Tamils. Hundreds upon hundreds of Tamils were murdered in bloodcurdling wholesale massacres, Tamil homes and businesses in Colombo were burnt to the ground (often with the occupants inside), economic and geographic interpenetration of the two peoples was severed in blood as the Tamils were increasingly compacted in the North and East of the island.

Sinhala communalism, designed and instigated by the Lankan ruling class, has always been wielded to assert its own class domination over both the Tamil and Sinhalese working people and oppressed, to head off any popular revolt by preventing class unity. From our inception as a tendency in the 1960s, we have championed the rights of the oppressed Tamil people. At the same time, we oppose Tamil nationalism, which, for example, dismissed the struggles of the strategically placed Tamil plantation workers in the central highlands of the island. In fact, the Tamil nationalist politicians wrote off these stateless “Indian Tamils” who had lived and worked on the island for more than a century. In fighting against the popular-frontist betrayals of the once-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), we pointed out that their class collaboration was rooted in an accommodation to anti-Tamil Sinhalese chauvinism.

We had always called “For the Right of Self-Determination of the Tamil People!” From the time of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms, we raised the demand for the right of Tamil Eelam. As we wrote in “Massacre in Sri Lanka” (WV No. 336, 12 August 1983):

“The impact of the bloodletting and mass population transfers can only be described as a catastrophe….
“What is posed now as a minimal democratic demand is a plebiscite of the Tamil working people to decide on the formation of an independent state in the North….
“What is desperately necessary is the building of an internationalist Trotskyist party in Sri Lanka, necessarily substantially based among the exploited Tamil masses. The struggle against the hideous national oppression of the Tamils and communalism is central to forging such a party.”

In the early 1970s, Healy’s ICFI stridently opposed the national rights of the oppressed Tamil people, arguing that a separate Tamil slate would only serve imperialism. By the late ‘70s, however, they were uncritically cheering the petty-bourgeois nationalist “Tamil Tigers” (LTTE). In the late 1980s, the RCL did manage to approximate a decent and correct line — defending the right of self-determination for the Tamil minority, opposing the intervention of India, demanding the withdrawal of the Sinhalese government troops from the Northern and Eastern Provinces and calling “For a United Socialist States of Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka.”

Now, RCL leader Wije Dias repudiates the Tamil struggle for self-determination. For all North’s denunciations of Healy, he and his supporters have come full circle to the original chauvinist position (as articulated by Michael Banda) of Healy’s ICFI. In Dias’ words:

“If the LTTE established a separate Eelam state, it would, like any other comprador regime, offer the masses of Tamils as cheap labour to the transnational corporations. This is inevitable, as there exists no possibility of implementing any programme of national development under the present capitalist global system of production…. These nationalist aspirations lead not to national liberation, but to national subjugation to imperialism.”
— International Worker [Britain], 22 January 1994

This is truly Orwellian — to “prevent” national subjugation to imperialism one must preserve national subjugation to the dominant state power and to ...imperialism. Even the demand for withdrawal of the Lankan army from the Tamil areas is missing from articles in the ICFI’s International Workers Bulletin — rather contradicting all the bombast about the RCL’s opposition to what is euphemistically termed the government’s “racist” war. The Northites even mimic the chauvinism of the Sinhalese rulers by referring to the Tamil areas with quotation marks around the term traditional homelands.

This chauvinist denial of the right of self-determination for the Tamil people is alibied in the name of “proletarian internationalism.” But the Northites’ opposition to Tamil national rights is not simply confined to the “here and now.” The RCL’s previous call for “A United Socialist States of Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka” has been changed to the call for a single “Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.”

J.V. Stalin had a similar idea when in 1922, as Commissar of Nationalities, he highhandedly sought to subordinate the national independence of the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani soviet republics by turning their nascent Transcaucasian federation into a single federated republic. When Lenin then objected to Stalin’s subsequent plans to bring the Transcaucasian republics into the Russian republic, Stalin stubbornly persisted by incorporating the Transcaucasian federation again as a single republic into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The last fight of Lenin’s life was against the Great Russian chauvinism which was the initial signature of the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy.

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Every few years, the membership of North’s ICFI have their heads put through another “dialectical” wringer. From prostration before bourgeois-nationalist regimes, it is now pronounced that any and all struggles for self-determination must be vigorously opposed.
______________________

Of a piece with their new appreciation of the Tamil national question in Sri Lanka, in “The Road to Tuzla” the Northites write, with apparent alarm, that “India is faced with the threat of dismemberment.” Citing the fact that “the Marxist movement opposed the partition of India and Pakistan along ethnic and religious lines in 1947” — a partition that was engineered by British imperialism as the culminating act of over 300 years of colonial “divide and rule” — they oppose legitimate national struggles such as those in Kashmir and of the Sikhs in the Punjab. This is nothing other than an apology for the maintenance of bourgeois “secular” India, a living hell for oppressed castes, women and myriad different peoples and nationalities.

…to Quebec

In Canada, leading up to the electoral victory of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Quebecois (PQ) in the Quebec elections last fall, the Northites were screaming like a bunch of Alberta prairie yahoos: “A PQ victory would throw the continued existence of the 127-year-old Canadian nation-state into question and raise the specter of a Yugoslav-style civil war in North America” (International Workers Bulletin, 29 August 1994)! The idea that Quebec is about to become the next Bosnia is truly dérangé. Unlike the Balkans, where the bloody nationalist conflicts are inspired by the competition of interpenetrated peoples for the same territory, Quebec is a separate French-speaking nation with a common people, common language, common culture and common history. Although Native Indians would certainly continue to get it in the neck should Quebec secede (not that they aren’t presently abused and denigrated by the English-Canadian imperialist rulers), independence would hardly require “ethnic cleansing” to drive out another people or nationality.

Quebec was forcibly incorporated into British North America following the 1759 defeat of the French garrison on the Plains of Abraham. In 1867, the national subjugation of the Québécois was the cornerstone of Canadian confederation. Almost 100 years later, the belated emergence of Quebec from clerical-dominated backwardness produced an upwardly mobile French-speaking petty bourgeoisie, and at the same time there emerged one of the most militant and class-conscious proletariats in all of North America. Opposition to Anglo chauvinism and the suppression of the national and language rights of the Quebecois fueled an upsurge in labor militancy in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

The Quebec labor bureaucrats channeled the militancy and combativity of the Québécois working class into support for the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois. In this they were assisted by the Anglo chauvinism of the labor misleaders in the rest of Canada, who militantly opposed the legitimate national and language rights of the Québécois. The fact that Quebec is a separate nation, with corresponding national rights — -i.e. the right to independence — -is similarly not even given a nod in the Bulletin’s articles on the question. Nor do they mention, much less oppose, the raving Anglo chauvinism against Quebec in English Canada.

Today, such chauvinism is particularly represented by the prairie-based Reform Party, which is now one of the two major opposition parties in the Canadian parliament. The other major opposition party is the Bloc Quebecois — the federal’ analogue to the PQ which now rules Quebec. This alone should give some idea of the dominance of the Quebec national question in Canada and the extent to .which it poisons relations between the workers of Quebec and English Canada.

Our Canadian comrades of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste have consistently championed Quebec’s unconditional right to independence, not out of support to the emergent Quebecois bourgeoisie‘s aspirations to become maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house), but out of a proletarian internationalist commitment to remove the national barriers to the class unity of the English — and French — speaking workers of North America. The Northites, however, although claiming to fight “to unite workers in Canada with their class brothers in the US and Mexico,” refuse to defend Quebec’s right to independence. This is antithetical to an internationalist struggle for revolutionary working-class unity.

On the contrary, it is simply a backhanded endorsement of the “unity” of the Canadian bourgeois state. In the words of Lenin:

“The proletariat cannot remain silent on the question of the frontiers of a state founded on national oppression, a question so ‘unpleasant’ for the imperialist bourgeoisie. The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state, which means that they must fight for the right to self-determination. The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words; neither confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations; the hypocrisy of the reformists and Kautskyites, who defend self-determination but remain silent about the nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation and kept in ‘their own’ state by force, would remain unexposed.”
— “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (January-February 1916)

Counterfeit “Orthodoxy”

While the Northites’ open rejection of right of nations to self-determination may be a new innovation, getting there is not a very big step. They have long sneered at racial and other forms of oppression born of capitalist exploitation somehow irrelevant to the “class struggle” — by which they meant the pursuit a crude workerist adaptation to the racist Cold War labor bureaucrats. At the height of the Vietnam antiwar protests and struggles for black freedom, the Bulletin put forward a program for a labor party which took up neither opposition to the war nor the fight for black liberation!

In a long series of articles in the U.S. Workers League’s Bulletin titled “The Politics of the Spartacist League,” written in the mid-1980s, the denounced us for “An Obsession With Race.” Why? By the Northites’ lights, Workers Vanguard featured too many articles on the question of black oppression, racist terror and opposition to fascism, and not enough on “workers.” Never mind that blacks are heavily represented in the ranks of organized labor and that the fight against racist and fascist terror is integral to the defense of the labor movement as a whole. But obviously not for the Bulletin. In 1983, it ran an article smearing the SL-initiated November 1982 labor/black mobilization in Washington, D.C. — in which over 5,000 black workers and youth came out and stopped the Klan — as “an adventure which played right into the hands of the police”!

Even Gerry Healy wrote of “D. North’s whiter than white socialism.” In American society, where the forcible segregation of blacks at the bottom is a keystone of U.S. capitalism, labor must champion the cause of black liberation if it is to break the chains of capitalist exploitation and degradation. This, the Northites claimed, is to “counterpose …struggle against racism” to “the struggle of the working class.”

The same Bulletin series reviled us for the simple (and eminently truthful) statement that the hard-fought 1986 strike by Hormel meatpackers had been knifed by the “labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement.” The Workers League sneered that this was only further evidence of our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism.” The Northites’ equation of the trade-union misleaders with the unions themselves has been one of their few political constants. Now they have simply reversed the equation. From squealing that to attack the labor bureaucrats was some kind of “proof” of “hatred of the working class,” they have gone on to pronouncing that the unions as a whole can no longer be considered workers organizations!

A few years back, in one of his ponderous speeches, titled “The End of the USSR,” David North declared that “to define the AFL-CLO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992).

The unions have been grievously undermined by the pro-capitalist labor tops to the point where organized labor in this country is increasingly a hollow shell. Nonetheless, even though now only representing a small percentage of the working class, the unions are still the economic organizations of the working class. To transform them into fighting organizations for the working class and all of the oppressed requires a political struggle to break the trade-union bureaucracy’s stranglehold and replace these sellouts with a class-struggle leadership.

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There are, of course, so-called “unions” which have fit North’s description as “direct instruments of imperialism.” Solidarność in Poland is one, and one which the Northites eagerly and vigorously supported.
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But it is precisely such a political struggle that is excluded in either incarnation of the Northite line on the unions. From appealing to the AFL-CIO tops to do everything from launch general strikes to form a labor party, the Northites now equate all of organized labor with the bosses and their government. Such a view of the unions is one that is obviously not shared by the capitalists or their state, which have poured some billions of dollars into mercenary strikebreaking outfits. Far from promoting working-class struggle, the Northites’ appeals for the workers to junk their unions neatly dovetail with the interests of the union-busting bosses.

There are, of course, so-called “unions” which have fit North’s description as “direct instruments of imperialism. Solidarność in Poland is one, and one which the Northites eagerly and vigorously supported. Another is the “Union of Democratic Miners” in Britain. Consisting of a bunch of scabs on the heroic British coal strike of 1984-85, this “union” was set up at the behest of the Thatcher government to destroy the National Union of Miners (NUM).

Healy/North’s ICFI had its own hand to play against the British miners union. On the eve of the strike, Healy’s press made a big splash by scandalizing NUM leader Arthur Scargill for his correct opposition to Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” This scurrilous anti-Communist campaign was instantly picked up by the Fleet Street tabloids as well as the Labour Party/Trades Union Congress right wing with the aim of isolating the miners union and trying to crush it. The campaign to smear and discredit Scargill was taken up by the British secret police of MI5 as part of a full-scale mobilization of all the forces of the capitalist state aimed at destroying the miners union. Yet even now the Northites’ only criticism of Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) when it comes to the British miners is that it supposedly “ruled out any criticism of Scargill” (International Workers Bulletin, 25 April 1994)!

Classless Demagogues

In the concluding portions of “The Road to Tuzla,” North’s ICFI statement declares that Cliff Slaughter’s WRP “has been transformed as the result of a protracted national opportunist degeneration into a bourgeois tendency.” That just about finishes it. North’s organization has written off the unions, the social-democratic and ex-Stalinist parties, all of what they perceive as their major “Trotskyist” contenders — from Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat to Slaughter’s WRP — as thoroughly bourgeois organizations. As Hegel and Marx would say, the Northites have obliterated all contradictions — to the end of portraying themselves as the last, the only, proletarian leaders on the face of the planet.

The Northites’ description of Slaughter’s organization sounds all too much like their own, particularly the statement that the positions of the WRP serve to “ideologically” condition its membership “to reject any connection between the party’s politics, on the one hand, and the class interests of the proletariat and the principled positions of Marxism, on the other.” More than ten years ago, in responding to the Bulletin’s smear of our anti-Klan mobilization in Washington, D.C., we wrote that the leaders of Healy’s ICFI were “classless demagogues, all-purpose mock extremists whose radicalism has nothing in common with socialist struggle” (“Smash Fascist Smear of SL,” WV No. 379, 17 May 1985).

Every few years, the membership of North’s ICFI have their heads put through another “dialectical” wringer. From prostration before bourgeois-nationalist regimes, it is now pronounced that any and all struggles for self-determination must be vigorously opposed. After years of pandering to the AFL-CIO tops, the membership is now told that the unions are the “direct instruments of imperialism” and must be destroyed.

North’s grand speeches proclaiming “decisive turning points” for the proletariat not only serve to justify and reinforce his organization’s distance from the class struggle, they are a direct echo of the interests of the imperialists. The ICFI’s “theories” are nothing but cowardly rationalizations for sneering at struggle against chauvinist oppression, and for writing off the economic defense organizations of the working class, in order to boost their own petty advantage. The Northites’ policies are those of poseurs seeking a niche as spoilers. Otherwise, they are utterly devoid of, and antithetical to a program which can lead the international working class and oppressed to a socialist victory over their exploiters.

D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 1 (1995)

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Workers Vanguard No. 626, 28 July 1995

Revelation on the Road to Tuzla

David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination

PART ONE OF TWO

The collapse of the former workers states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union unleashed an orgy of nationalist bloodletting. Today the imperialist media denounces Serbian war crimes in the fratricidal slaughterhouse that is now Bosnia. But “ethnic cleansing” is hardly a practice unique to the Serbs. Not only are grisly atrocities carried out by all sides in the Balkans, but no less bloody national wars have been waged between Armenians and Azeris for possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, by Georgia against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, and throughout the Caucasus. To assert its domination in the region, the Russian army launched a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya which has virtually obliterated the capital city of Grozny and devastated the countryside.

To read the bourgeois press one would get the idea that these gruesome nationalist slaughters are inspired by the revival of some ancient “tribal” feuds. In fact, it is the logic of capitalist counterrevolution that is the motor force behind the resurgence of nationalism from Central Europe to the Caucasus, as economically more advanced peoples seek to consolidate their own advantage at the expense of their less-developed neighbors. As we wrote in “`Ethnic Cleansing’ and Nationalist Wars” (WVNo. 580, 16 July 1993): “What is happening in Bosnia is a recurrent phenomenon in this epoch of capitalist decay.... Thus national consolidation under capitalism has been reduced to its stark component of communal savagery to drive out or eliminate minority nationalities.”

Yet it is to the capitalist imperialist rulers that a whole number of Vietnam-era “doves,” liberals and radical intelligentsia appeal for military intervention to bring “democracy” to the Balkans. Among this lot is one Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the American Workers League, the U.S. satellite of the now-departed Gerry Healy and his International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In his current role as saved sinner and “born again” anti-Leninist social democrat, Wohlforth called for U.S. imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the headline “Give War a Chance” (In These Times, 26 July 1993).

Wohlforth’s former master, Gerry Healy, was the consummate example of what Lenin called a “political bandit” able to wield Trotskyist orthodoxy when that suited his purpose and equally capable of being the bought-and-paid-for press agent for a variety of bourgeois-nationalist Mideast regimes (which he and his organization were for many years). Almost a decade ago, Healy’s organization blew apart, but the mark of this self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the ICFI can be found today in the heated exchange between Healy’s one-time lieutenants over their mutual responses to the Balkan quagmire. One side openly embraces Bosnian Muslim nationalism, while the other feigns orthodoxy in a supposed anti-nationalism which turns out to be de facto support for imperialism and national oppression.

For the past couple of years, Healy’s former “theoretician,” Cliff Slaughter, and his Workers Revolutionary Party have occupied the leading position in the campaign for “Workers Aid to Bosnia.” Running supplies to the bourgeois-nationalist Bosnian Muslim regime, with French and British imperialist troops in “UN” blue helmets riding shotgun, the WRP calls this an example of “working class internationalism”! To believe this line, one would have to include former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher — who is beating the drums for more aggressive aid to the Bosnian Muslim government — in the ranks of “proletarian internationalists.” In short, “Workers Aid to Bosnia” is nothing other than a direct echo of, and stalking horse for, those ruling-class forces who want to take a more belligerent military stance against Serbia.

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North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
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Occupying the “orthodoxy” corner is David North, who replaced Wohlforth as leader of the Workers League and is now the head of the various national fragments who lay claim to the heritage of Healy’s ICFI. In response to Slaughter’s “Workers Aid” campaign, North’s group published a lengthy statement titled, “The Road to Tuzla — How Slaughter’s WRP Aids Imperialism in the Balkans” (May 1994).

Correctly arguing that communists must “fight intransigently against the nationalist poison spread by capitalism,” North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.

It is hardly a large leap for Slaughter and the WRP to go from singing the praises of Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Iranian Revolution” to becoming the blatant press agent for the Islamic regime of Sarajevo’s Alija Izetbegovic. But North’s Workers League was also up to its neck in backing the sheiks and colonels in the name of the so-called “Arab Revolution.” If today North’s ICFI chooses to wax “orthodox,” it is simply because that is what fits their perceived opportunist advantage.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, amidst the imperialist chorus hailing the “death of communism,” North’s organization began issuing strident statements writing off the unions as “direct agents of imperialism.” Any and every other tendency within the workers movement have been deemed to be thoroughly bourgeois organizations. To what end? The obvious conclusion is that one is to believe that David North is now the sole uncontested proletarian leader on the face of the planet. Now, posing as Marxist theoretician maxim, North writes off the right of nations to self-determination as completely retrograde.

Proletarian Internationalism and the Right to Self-Determination

There can be no democratic solution to the bloody nationalist conflict in Bosnia and other regions of ex-Yugoslavia short of a thorough-going socialist revolution. Bosnia is not a nation, and there is no Bosnian “people.” Rather, Bosnia-Hercegovina is composed of three heretofore intermingled and closely related peoples — Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims. Formerly a province in the Ottoman and then Habsburg empires, Bosnia — Hercegovina was set up as a constituent republic in Titoist Yugoslavia, intended to be a model of interethnic harmony. Now, within the framework of capitalist counterrevolution, the heavy geographic interpenetration of these various peoples means that the national rights of one can only he realized through savage persecution aimed at driving out the others.

While various social-democratic and pseudo-Trotskyist organizations back the Bosnian Muslims and some leftover Stalinists back the Serbs, as communists we oppose all sides in this national/ communalist slaughter. We also, naturally and necessarily, oppose all imperialist intervention in the Balkans. Concretely this means that our organization internationally has stood for the defense of the Serbs against repeated NATO air strikes, as well as demanding that all UN troops, including those of Yeltsin’s Russia, get out of the Balkans and calling for an end to the UN/NATO blockade of Serbia. The only perspective that offers a way out of this all-sided slaughter is for the working class throughout the former Yugoslavia to overthrow their bourgeois-nationalist leaders in an internationalist struggle for a socialist federation of the Balkans.

To realize such a perspective, to forge proletarian unity and bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class of the Balkans, requires a leadership which in Lenin’s words acts as a “tribune of the people,” fighting against every manifestation of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnic hatred. Only in this way can the various competing nationalisms be undercut and the common class interests of all of the working people be brought to the fore. It was in this respect that the Bolshevik Party championed the right to self-determination for the myriad nations and peoples imprisoned in the tsarist empire.

But such a leadership is not what the Northites have on offer, nor could they. While they write that the “strong internationalist traditions of the Yugoslav proletariat must be revived on the basis of a scientific analysis and revolutionary program,” in “The Road to Tuzla” they simultaneously write off the whole question of the defense of the right to self-determination as an anachronism, inapplicable in today’s “global economy”:

“In politics, terms which had a definite social and class content in one period often come to represent something quite different in the next. This is the case with the slogan of ‘self-determination.’...
“Those who advance the demand for self-determination through national separatism and bourgeois rule are responsible for the global consequences of such slogans. This ‘right’ will be championed by imperialist powers and backed by their military forces in other parts of the Balkans and throughout the world.”

Beyond Bosnia, the Northites argue against the right of self-determination for Kashmir, the Punjab and other nations locked into the “prison house of peoples” that is the Indian bourgeois state. Similarly, they come out against the national rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Quebecois in Canada.

The ICFI statement invokes the authority of the Marxist movement and Lenin. But in fact the Northites’ position is a purely chauvinist one which accepts the rule of the dominant nation in multinational states. Or as Lenin himself put it in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914): “Repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration...”

Far from having become some kind of anachronism, defense of the right of self-determination is, if anything, increasingly important. The escalation of interimperialist rivalries coming in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the drive by major powers to redivide the world into regional trade blocks and the increasing offshore production in low-wage “Third World” countries reinforces the need for communists to champion the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

North’s ICFI and Nationalist Reaction

The Northites try to find refuge in the statement that in “Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, nationalism arises today as part of a retrograde tendency seeking to restore both direct imperialist domination and capitalist property relations.” But nationalist reaction is not simply a product of counterrevolution. It was also a driving force for capitalist restoration in the former Stalinist-ruled workers states. In the latter case, North’s organization was among the bigger fans of nationalism.

For decades the imperialist rulers howled about the “oppression” of the so-called “captive nations,” seeing them as a battering ram for shattering the former Soviet bloc. And the Northites howled right along with them. In 1979-80, when the Soviet army intervened in Afghanistan, we of the Spartacist League said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” noting that this brought with it the possibility, albeit unfulfilled, of breaking the chains of Islamic feudal reaction and extending the gains of the October Revolution to that hideously backward country. The Northites, in contrast, squealed along with U.S. president Jimmy Carter that the Soviet intervention was an attack on “the national rights and feelings of the Afghan people” (Bulletin, 8 July 1986). But there was no Afghan “nation,” and the peoples whose “rights” were being attacked were a cabal of tribal chiefs and Islamic mujahedin funded by the CIA.

Together with the Vatican and the CIA, North’s Workers League made the counterrevolutionary cause of the Pilsudskiite nationalist Solidarność in Poland their own, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). In 1990, they echoed crazed anti-Communists like U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in denouncing then-president George Bush for refusing to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union for its clampdown on the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania.

An article headlined “Gorbachev Steps Up Stalinist Aggression Against Lithuania” (Bulletin, 30 March 1990) decried that the “Bush administration has pointedly refused to make any condemnation of the Soviet military actions in Lithuania.” As we wrote in our article, “Imperialists Demand the Baltics” (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991):

“As Leninists and internationalists, we stand for the democratic reorganization of the Soviet Union and for the right of any nationality with a leadership that opposes counterrevolution to withdraw to any extent it sees fit. But in Lithuania and the other Baltic republics the fig leaf of ‘national independence’ is being used as a cover for capitalist restoration. And this must be fought.... To prevent the disintegration of the USSR amid fratricidal nationalism, it is necessary to recapture the proletarian internationalism which animated the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky.”

Looking to establish their own independent capitalist states, the nationalist movements in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had their own program for “ethnic cleansing,” calling for the suppression of any and all rights of other peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Poles and others) within these states, if not openly advocating their forcible removal. But this didn’t much bother the Northites then.

Now they try to palm themselves off as the epitome of proletarian internationalism. Not only is this a monumental fraud, but the ICFI’s new-found opposition to nationalism is neither “orthodox” nor even vaguely leftist. Rather, once again, their position mirrors that of the imperialist rulers. Whereas yesterday they aided and abetted reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, today international capitalism is far from happy that the spoils they expected to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of bloody nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. While raising a hue and cry about “poor little Bosnia,” the imperialist rulers now generally decry the very nationalist forces they fomented, and the Northites join the chorus.

Was It All Gerry Healy’s Fault?

In his article, “Permanent Revolution . and the National Question Today” (The Fourth International, Winter-Spring 1994), David North declares that Healy’s WRP “systematically betrayed the principles of Trotskyism as it subordinated the proletariat to...bourgeois regimes such as those of Libya, Iran and Iraq.” From here he goes on to opine that only the “split within the International Committee made possible an intensive reexamination of the entire historical significance of the movements of ‘national liberation’ and their relation to the proletariat and the perspective of socialist revolution.”

North certainly has an elastic view of his own history — similar to his organization’s relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. His support to bourgeois — nationalist forces was far from abstract. In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an official Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.” That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” The ICFI, including North and his current cohorts, also enthused over “the anti-imperialist content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini” — i.e., the Iranian ayatollah’s “struggle” for an Islamic Republic (to the best of our knowledge this praise was gratis).

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left long before the 1985 implosion of his Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. As for the so-called “split” in the ICFI, it would better be described as a falling out among thieves. Healy was ousted, North rushed to claim his mantle as the ICFI “leader,” and Slaughter took the name of the WRP and ran. For years, North & Co. have sought to clear their name by claiming they had no idea Healy was being paid for the role as publicity agent for Hussein, Qaddafi and others. In other words, their defense is that they betrayed the very same Trotskyist principles — except that unlike Healy, they did it for free! But even this “defense” would appear to be rather threadbare, considering that, for one, North’s colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, got censured by the Central Committee of his own organization in February 1986 for failing to report the receipt of monies from Arab regimes to the IC (Socialist Labor League Internal Bulletin, February 1986).

To alibi their former support for a whole variety of reactionary nationalist causes and regimes, today North’s ICFI acts as if nationalism has only recently become a “retrograde tendency.” In the “Road to Tuzla,” they write of the “progressive, unifying characteristic of the national movements of the epoch in which Lenin put forward the slogan of self-determination of nations.” But in calling for military support to national movements fighting against imperialist-colonialist subjugation, Lenin never praised their supposed “progressive, unifying character.” On the contrary, in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), Lenin called for:

“...a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

The Bolsheviks championed the right of self-determination not to advance the cause of nationalism but to advance proletarian class unity. The fundamental propositions of a Marxist position on the national question in the imperialist epoch were underlined by Lenin in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”: “on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle.”

The right to self-determination is purely a bourgeois-democratic demand and as such is correspondingly a subordinate part of a revolutionary-internationalist program. This question was posed point-blank for the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. In the latter region, newly independent bourgeois regimes sought and found the direct military backing of the imperialists — first the Germans and then the British — posing a direct threat to the revolution. At the close of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks took power in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan through a combination of local uprisings and Red Army intervention. As Trotsky wrote two decades later, “Forceful sovietization was justified: the safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before formal democratic principles” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” [April 1940] in In Defense of Marxism).

The “Global Economy”

Other than claiming that their newfound “wisdom” on the national question is the fruit of having got rid of Healy, the ICFI claims a “new world reality” for its line change:

“Vast changes in world economic and political relations have created corresponding changes in the character of the national movements.... Can it be seriously argued that the resurgence of ethnic chauvinism in the Balkans, or for that matter in the former USSR or the Indian subcontinent, expresses an effort to put an end to the legacy of imperialist and feudal domination? Can one speak today of the national bourgeoisie of Bosnia, or Kazakhstan or Kashmir seeking to ‘capture the home market,’ thereby creating conditions for the ‘victory of commodity production’ and hence a fuller development of the class struggle?”

The idea of an “era of global economic integration” which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique “theoretical breakthroughs” has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!

Up until the mid-1880s, Marx and Engels judged national movements according to their ability to consolidate modern independent nation-states favorable to economic development. But with the development of imperialism the terms of reference changed. Marx and Engels began to address this over the question of Irish independence. As Marx wrote in a paper on the Irish question in 1869: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.”

Marx’s position on Ireland was further developed by Lenin in his writings on the national question. For Lenin the question of self-determination had nothing to do with the ability to develop a modern, economically independent capitalist nation. Indeed he polemicized at some length against Rosa Luxemburg, who declared that self-determination had become an “illusory” demand with the development of imperialism. In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin answered:

“Not only small states, but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of ‘rich’ bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states, but even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as Marx pointed out in Capital....
“For the question of the political self-determination of nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society, Rosa Luxemburg has substituted the question of their economic independence.”

Unlike the Northites, however, Rosa Luxemburg was animated by genuine proletarian internationalism. Although wrong, her visceral opposition to the right of self-determination was motivated by revulsion with the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in Poland (forces which some decades later the Northites would cheer on in the name of Solidarność counterrevolution).

Lenin recognized that imperialism was the epoch of capitalist decay, in which the development of a national economy and emergence of a vigorous bourgeoisie were stifled by imperialist exploitation and domination over the more backward capitalist countries. The understanding that the national bourgeoisies of these countries are incapable of carrying out the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as genuine national independence, is ABC Trotskyism — in fact it is a fundamental underpinning of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

Of course, very real changes have taken place in the world in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The relentless drive to destroy the Soviet workers state provided a point of unity for the various imperialist powers. With that removed, inter-imperialist rivalries have escalated. The global system of “free trade” the economic cement which held together the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet alliance — has crumbled as the major powers seek to redivide the world into regional trade blocs. But what is going on is not “new.” Rather, the post-Cold War world increasingly resembles the pre-1914 world of heightened interimperialist rivalries intersecting regional nationalist conflicts.

The so-called “globalization of production” — i.e., the export of capital — simply means that the capitalists have moved large chunks of industry to low-wage “Third World” countries. This, for example, has meant the attempted wholesale takeover of Mexico by U.S. imperialism under the conditions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Far from being a negation of the Leninist position on the national and colonial question, the current situation underlines the importance for communists of defending the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations against imperialist depredations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers League vs. the Unions (1993)

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Workers Vanguard No. 571, 12 February 1993

Workers League vs. the Unions

For more than five months, United Mine Workers members have been battling the coal bosses with one hand tied behind their backs, straitjacketed by UMW president Richard Trumka’s “selective strike” scam. From the outset, Workers Vanguard has told miners the truth: to wage a militant strike “means a clean break from Trumka’s Democratic Party ‘friends’ like Clinton, and a fight for a workers party …. You need a class-struggle leadership prepared to take on the Taft-Hartley ‘slave labor’ law, court injunctions and the cops, as well as the capitalist politicians from plutocrat Democrat Jay Rockefeller to ‘right to work’ Clinton” (WV No. 570, 26 February).

When WV teams traveled through the coal fields of southern Illinois and West Virginia, miners were receptive to our call for a solid strike to reverse the gutting of their union at the hands of the coal bosses and the UMW bureaucracy. But the Bulletin (5 March) of David North’s Workers League (WL) vituperated against our article for “promoting syndicalist nostrums” and “bankrupt illusions in trade union reformism.” In a piece entitled “Trumka’s Accomplices,” after a few swipes at the craven apologists for the UMW bureaucracy in the Communist Party (CP), Workers World and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Northites turn to their real target, the Spartacist League: “The February 26 edition of their weekly paper Workers Vanguard carried an article which presented the bureaucracy as waging a serious fight against the coal bosses.”

And how, pray tell, do we do that — by our call, “Coal Miners: Fight for a National Strike!” (WV No. 569, 12 February)? According to the Bulletin, “The Spartacists issue their appeals not to the working class but to its corrupt bureaucratic leadership. They cover up the transformation of the UMWA under the grip of the bureaucracy into an appendage of the coal bosses and the government.” Similarly, North’s German followers recently denounced our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party as a “left fig leaf for the trade-union bureaucracy” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 14 May) for the Spartakist headline during the recent East German metal workers strike, “Metal, Steel, Coal: Full Strike Now, East and West!” (along with the kicker “Workers Must Fight for Power!”).

Interestingly, the 21 June Bulletin headlines, “It Is Time for a Nationwide Strike,” but they coyly put this in the mouth of a “West Virginia miner.” Above all, for the WL there is no possibility of a fight for the union to wage a national strike. Equating the pro-capitalist bureaucracy with the union as a whole, the political bandits of the WL are currently claiming that the unions are in no sense working-class organizations.

This is pretty rich coming from North & Co., who for years have issued endless appeals to the pro-capitalist AFL-CIO traitors to do everything from call a general strike to form a labor party! As recently as the 1990-91 New York Daily News strike, when striking pressmen gave the WL some heat over the lack of a union bug on their rag, we were taken to task by the Northites: “Spartacist never makes any demands on the New York AFL-CIO” (Bulletin, 16 November 1990).

The one constant for the Northites is their identification of the unions with the pro-capitalist bureaucratic apparatus which chains them to the bosses’ state. Thus the WL has never fought to unchain the unions. Quite the contrary, from Arnold Miller to the 1985-86 Hormel meatpackers strike, they have supported government intervention into the unions. It is crucial that class-struggle militants recognize that the regime atop the UMW today is the continuation of the pro-Labor Department bureaucracy that was installed with the approval and assistance of the capitalist government — and to the applause of most of the left, from the reformist Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party to the Workers League. In our coverage of the miners’ class battles, we have repeatedly pointed to the key question — fighting for the independence of the union from the capitalist state:

“From the Labor Department campaign of Arnold Miller, to Carter/Mondale’s use of Taft-Hartley against the long, bitter 1977-78 strike, to Trumka’s bowing before the injunctions of the coal company judges during the Pittston strike, the miners’ historic militancy has been throttled in the service of the bosses’ parties and the capitalist state.”
— WV No. 569, 12 February

The Spartacist League stood virtually alone on the left 20 years ago in refusing to capitulate to the Labor Department-run Miners for Democracy “rank and file” opposition in the UMW. Though many miners only came to. recognize Miller as the class traitor he was during the coal strike of 1977-78, we told the truth from the beginning:

“For communists, whose fundamental aim in the labor movement is to transform the unions into a tool of the revolutionary will of the proletariat, no reform can increase the power of the working class if ‘it is won by placing the unions under the trusteeship of the capitalist state, thus destroying the first precondition for their mobilization in the struggle to smash that state.”
— ”Labor Department Wins Mine Workers’ Election,” WV No. 17, 17 March 1973

In recent years, the WL pretends they always opposed Miller et al., whom they now term “‘reform’ candidates backed by the capitalist state. In the 1970s, the Labor Department put Arnold Miller in as head of the Miners for Democracy movement to suppress the powerful rebellion against the gangster leadership of UMWA President Tony Boyle” (Bulletin, 2 November 1990). But in the 1970s, when North was “Labor Editor,” the Bulletin (11 December 1972) hailed the MFD as “a real alternative to the Boyle leadership” and called on “all miners to vote for the Miners for Democracy slate, and to fight for this leadership to carry through a real struggle to defend the miners against the mining companies and the government”!

A few months before that, North himself held an “exclusive interview” with hidebound anti-Communist Steelworkers president I.W. Abel — in his Miami Beach hotel room, no less — where North enthused about the “developing break between the labor movement and the Democratic Party” (Bulletin, 24 July 1972). This was at a time when the Meanyite bureaucracy stood to the right of significant sections of the ruling class on the burning question of the Vietnam War. North reprinted excerpts from a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in which Abel “broke” with Democratic “peace” candidate McGovern, meticulously editing out his endorsement of the right-wing Democratic “Senator for Boeing” Henry Jackson.

Has North come clean after two decades of tailing the racist, anti-Communist AFL-CIO lieutenants of capital? Hardly. Since parting ways with his lord and mentor Gerry Healy (when their “International Committee” spectacularly imploded after the blood money from Arab sheiks dried up), North has continued as a political bandit who, as we put it, “will show any flag to attack any target. For this, the CIA-inspired graduate departments of elite universities attended by those among North and his crew were a good classroom. It, at the least, taught them how to write on every side of the question, like the position papers of the State Department” (“Why Should Anyone Believe David North?” WVNo. 487, 13 October 1989).

Take the “Russian question.” Trotsky argued, against those who wrote off the Soviet Union, that’ just as militant workers defend a trade union under bureaucratic leadership against the employers’ attacks, ‘so must they defend against imperialism the bureaucratically degenerated workers state. For decades — whether under Healy or without him — North tailed every anti-Soviet force from the “AFL-CIA” to Polish Solidarność, the CIA-sponsored Afghan mujahedin and the Lithuanian Sajudis. When Yeltsin formally dissolved the USSR in December 1991, North rushed to announce the death of the Soviet workers state. And in a grotesque inversion of Trotsky’s argument, North wrote off the unions as well, saying that “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (“The End of the USSR,” Bulletin, 10 January 1992).

Over 50 years ago, Trotsky wrote of “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (August 1940):

“They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no
room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can
either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the
subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution,
or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the
revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”

Subsequent historical development has fully borne out Trotsky’s warning. The anti-Communist trade-union bureaucracy installed in the Cold War is so beholden to the bourgeoisie that it has presided over the destruction of union gains and whole unions, like PATCO. Writing about the closing of the auto plants in Detroit, already a decade ago we denounced United Auto Workers leader “Doug Fraser: Company Cop” (/em)(WV No. 330, 20 May 1983). But the unions themselves remain the principal mass organizations of the working class, and the point Trotsky was underlining was the necessity for a communist struggle for leadership.

As always with the shameless opportunists of the WL, even as they deny that the unions are any longer workers organizations, this doesn’t stop them from appealing to the wretched bureaucracy in North’s vile campaign of helping to railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the SWP, into a 25-year prison term on frame-up charges of burglary and sexual abuse. Thus the 13 September 1991 Bulletin ran an article headlined “Iowa AFL-CIO Denounces Mark Curtis Campaign,” complete with photo of Iowa AFL-CIO South Central Federation of Labor president Perry Chapin! The WL reprinted the bureaucrats’ entire resolution, including a call on the national convention of the AFL-CIO to “refuse any support to the Mark Curtis defense campaign.”

And today, the Northites will in one and the same issue of the Bulletin (12 February) compare the UMW to a “company union” — which the workers must seek to smash — while trumpeting headlines from the coal fields calling for (that “syndicalist nostrum “?) a national UMW strike! Writing off the unions’ potential to act in pursuit of the class struggle and kowtowing to the pro-capitalist bureaucracy are flip sides of the same coin. Both variants exclude a communist political struggle within the unions. But though the WL’s two postures may be symmetrical, they imply rather different appetites, and one thing we know about the WL is that it determines its “political” positions by their utility in pursuit of egregiously corrupt (often financial) self-interest.

What new appetite does the WL’s anti-union incarnation serve? We don’t know, but we notice the Bulletin’s recent makeover into a yuppified, expensive-looking weekly done up in modish earth tones. The great prevaricator Stalin once boasted that “paper will take anything written on it,” and the WL evidently intends to prove that fancy paper will, too.

WL's "Vorkuta" Fund: Follow the Money (1992)

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Workers Vanguard No. 563, 13 November 1992

Follow the Money

Workers League’s “Vorkuta” Fund

With great fanfare, David North’s Workers League and its bogus “International Committee” launched a “Vorkuta Miners Relief Fund” last year, ostensibly in response to an appeal by Soviet workers in the northern Russian coal fields “for desperately needed medical and pharmaceutical supplies.” This was announced as “one of the principal decisions” of the Northites’ November 1991 Berlin “World Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism,” and the opening shot of the WL’s new “International Labor Defense.” The fund drive was scheduled to “run until February 29,” supposedly aimed at helping the Vorkuta miners overcome the brutal winter in the face of the ravages of capitalist restoration. Yet right through May, week after week, the WL’s Bulletin and North’s Australian and English acolytes carried impassioned appeals exhorting workers to “come to the aid of their brothers and sisters in the Vorkuta mining region.”

In “Workers League Vile Provocation” (WV No. 549, 17 April), we raised some questions about this dubious “aid campaign.” We noted that the Vorkuta miners “are not presently engaged in any particular struggle,” and that the Northites had not published the appeal on which the fund drive was supposedly based. We asked, “Could this be related to the fact that a few months earlier the AFL-CIO set up a ‘relief fund’ for Soviet miners?” The pro-Yeltsin leadership of the Vorkuta miners in the “Independent Miners Union” had well-documented links to the CIA, through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy and the AFL-CIO’s “International Department.” Two of these “Vorkuta miners” toured Britain in June 1990 — where they addressed a conference of the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” — under the auspices of the Russian fascist NTS, which has been financed for decades by Western intelligence agencies.

The Northites, who are wont to write voluminous multipart “exposes” on the Spartacist League at the drop of a hat, never replied to these questions. However, a month after our article appeared, the Bulletin mysteriously stopped running its Vorkuta appeal box, without further explanation. Nothing more was heard for months, until a front-page article in the 4 September issue of the Bulletin trumpeted “International Campaign Aids Soviet Workers,” claiming that “seven tons of medicines, worth over a quarter million dollars” had been sent to one “Doctor Alexander Apenko” in …the Ukrainian town of Shostka. This was supposedly in response to a personal appeal to a visiting IC delegation by the “Chernobyl Union of Shostka” in the summer of 1991. As far as we could tell, this Chernobyl “appeal” had hitherto gone unmentioned in the Northite press.

Whatever happened to Vorkuta? At the conclusion of the article the reader discovers those were the supplies that the WL had earlier “assured” would go “directly to the miners”: “Originally it was planned that the bulk of the medical supplies collected would go to the miners of Vorkuta,” but because of problems with “transportation,” “corruption” and “security,” the IC “could not obtain any reasonable assurance that its shipments would arrive safely in Vorkuta.” Yet in April, the Australian Northite Socialist Labour League declared in Workers News (24 April) that it had “this month shipped more than $40,000 worth of desperately-needed medical supplies” to Vorkuta.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said. In reporting on its fund drive efforts, the Bulletin cited the fears of Detroit union auto workers at a plant gate collection: “Expressing their distrust of the trade union officialdom, workers wanted to make sure that their contributions really reached the miners and would not be pocketed by either the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in the United States or the Stalinist mafia in the Soviet Union.” Concerns about what happens to money donated to the WL are certainly in order. Indeed, we wonder if the shift of focus in the Northites’ philanthropical efforts from Russia to the Ukraine has anything to do with the fact that an AFLCIO delegation traveled to the Ukraine this past summer.

Even a cursory reading of the Northite press, raises myriad questions. On February 28, the day before the (first) announced end of the campaign, the Australian SLL’s Workers News lists a total collection of $631.45 in the U.S. and £700 in Britain. Two weeks later they added $1,400 Australian. In a few weeks this becomes $40,000 Australian, and after it is “shipped,” the next issue of Workers News announces a $60,000 “Party Development Fund.” After a few months, during which the campaign never again appears in their press, the Northites’ international collection mysteriously grew to $250,000 “worth” of supplies. Perhaps cynical political bandits like North have been lying so long they think no one notices.

The financial chicanery and deceptions displayed in the Workers League campaign is not surprising to anyone who knows the WL’s history of political prostitution in the service of anticommunist reaction. In the “Vorkuta” campaign, the Northites, with consummate cynicism, denounce British National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president Arthur Scargill as a Stalinist, while condemning “the state orchestrated campaign against Scargill” (International Worker, 18 January) over the aid that Soviet trade unions sent to striking British miners.

Just who kicked off that campaign? On the eve of the 1984-85 British miners strike, when Thatcher and the ruling class were preparing all-out war on the NUM, the “International Committee” (then run by North’s mentor Gerry Healy) publicly crucified Scargill for opposing Solidarność — Reagan and Thatcher’s favorite union — as “anti-socialist.” Their redbaiting crusade was picked up, as Healy intended, by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress traitors and the Conservative bourgeois press, and used as a battering ram against the miners. It was Healy/North who supplied the ammunition the bourgeoisie used to go after Scargill and the NUM.

We have noted before that the WL’s relationship to the class line is that of a man in a revolving door. Presently, the Workers League is engaged on several fronts in acts of profound hostility to the interests of the working class — from being junior G-men for the prosecution in the case of imprisoned Socialist Workers Party activist and unionist Mark Curtis, to blocking with racist scum against black schoolchildren in Detroit. Revolutionaries gag at the mercenary “IC” trying to appropriate the honorable name of the early American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, led by James P. Cannon. In founding the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League has emulated the ILD’s strict accounting of funds through publishing in the PDC’s Class-Struggle Defense Notes a full list of numbered receipts for all in the workers movement to see. If the Healyite “IC” listed its receipts over the years, it would have to include the names of various Near East sheiks and bonapartist butchers who paid at least two million dollars for services rendered by the Healy gang as press agents, spies and provocateurs during the 1970s and ‘80s (see “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March 1991). Now that the money from anti-communist bourgeois regimes has dried up… .

Freddy and the Mob (1992)

2009-10-06T21:44:00.006-04:00

Workers Vanguard No. 562, 30 October 1992

Freddy and the Mob

In the early 1980s, as the Reagan White House kicked off a full-scale judicial counterrevolution — aimed at gearing up the state’s machinery of repression by shredding any semblance of democratic rights — it stepped up its legal vendetta against “the Mob.” As we noted, “The Reaganites want to institutionalize the frame-up principle, and what easier target for a frame job than vicious parasites like gangsters?” (“Feds Frame Up Mob,” WV No. 400, 28 March 1986). For the past ten years, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) “conspiracy” law has been wielded for murderous frame-ups of the government’s leftist opponents, wholesale attacks on labor, and general intimidation of the population.

So when the feds’ RICO dragnet finally got John Gotti, the reputed New York “crime boss” who last summer was sentenced to life without parole, we responded with a straightforward statement based on the understanding that democratic rights are indivisible. As we observed in “Gotti, RICO and You” (WV No. 557, 7 August): “Civil liberties, if they mean anything at all, apply first of all to those perceived as really far out — whether they be Marxists, religious sects (recall Rev. Sun Myung Moon or Oregon guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) or even in fact mobsters.”

One would think that any self-proclaimed leftist, of whatever political persuasion, would by definition be opposed to RICO even if only out of self-preservation. But not David North’s Workers League. A raving response to our article on Gotti by the Northites’ vice-presidential candidate Fred Mazelis, titled “The Spartacists and John Gotti” (Bulletin, 2 October), doesn’t even mention, much less oppose, the police-state RICO laws that were used to nail Gotti.

On the contrary, Mazelis takes umbrage that the “Spartacists go on to compare Gotti favorably to the leading spokesmen of US imperialism in the Democratic and Republican parties,” citing our observation that: “If John Gotti were running with Noriega in this year’s elections, they’d be the lesser evil.” Mazelis is so insulted by the comparison of the Italian “mobster” and the Panamanian strongman with “his” imperialist rulers that he choked on quoting our next sentence: “Gotti’s probably not nature’s nobleman, but neither is the Arkansas executioner Bill Clinton nor George Bush, who regularly bombs small countries to rubble.”

This, writes Mazelis, “is the language of politically deranged elements of the petty bourgeoisie.” But somehow the oh-so-proletarian “Workers” League has been strangely mum on a law that has been the government’s primary legal weapon against the unions. Sponsored by segregationist Arkansas Senator John McClellan, who presided over the witch-hunting Senate subcommittee in the 1950s that went after Jimmy Hoffa and produced the Landrum-Griffin Act outlawing “hot cargoing” in the trucking industry, the RICO laws were in fact intended to equate “organized labor” with “organized crime.”

In the name of fighting “mob influence” in the labor movement, the gang of criminals that run this country invoked RICO to place the Teamsters under government trusteeship. Mine Workers, Longshoremen, Laborers and Hotel Workers number among the other unions to feel the RICO sting. And it is rare today that a picket line isn’t met by the threat of RICO suits.

RICO’s definition of “racketeering “ is so elastic it allows the government to go after whoever they want, whenever they want, without any evidence of any crime. You’re guilty until proven innocent and sentenced before convicted. The government has free rein to take everything you own, and without any assets it’s pretty hard to find a lawyer to take your case. Attorneys’ fees may be seized if the government claims these were paid with “ill-gotten gains,” RICO’s witch-hunting provisions were applied with a vengeance against the “Ohio 7,” a group of leftist opponents of U.S. imperialism, who were met with wiretaps, dragnets, preventive detention, kidnapping and interrogation of children.

Mazelis’ lips are sealed on all of this. But then again the Workers League would be hard pressed pretending to oppose government intervention in the labor movement or capitalist state persecution of leftists. After all, the Northites have a wealth of experience in using the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and otherwise try to bankrupt their political opponents. In their psychotic vendetta against the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which they charge with being a government conspiracy, the Northites have pursued their own version of RICO.

In the late 1970s, a Workers League provocateur, Alan Gelfand, filed suit against the SWP demanding the court seize its membership lists, financial records and minutes. In 1988, the WL’s Bulletin supplied the closing arguments for the bourgeois state’s prosecution of a young SWPer, Mark Curtis, who was sentenced to 25 years in jail on frame-up charges of sexual abuse.

One of the most common means the government uses to nail people under RICO is the charge of using the mails or wire services for “fraudulent” purposes. The Workers League, which has made an international campaign out of condemning “The Mark Curtis Hoax,” threw its support behind a court case filed by the father of the alleged victim claiming that Curtis’ defense committee was engaged in an “international smear campaign,” and demanding that the courts requisition monies raised in Curtis’ defense for damages.

Now Mazelis charges that our article “Gotti, RICO and You” is evidence of the “class affinity between the Spartacists and the mob.” This is pretty rich coming from an outfit which is internationally renowned for its gangsterism and truly criminal financial deals with a whole variety of colonels, sheiks and despots in the Near East. Moreover, given that the Workers League claims to be the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository of Marxism on the face of the planet, what kind of protection racket do they have going that makes them feel so smugly secure against the repressive legal arsenal of this capitalist government?

Would-Be Prosecutors... (1992)

2009-10-06T21:41:00.009-04:00

Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Would-Be Prosecutors Can't Get Their Story Straight

A couple of documents are being circulated by the campaign to get supporters of Mark Curtis’ defense to “dis-endorse.”

“Labor Defense and the Mark Curtis Case” was written in 1989 by Charles Adams. Adams is a former member of Socialist Action who was expelled by the group for conducting a private “investigation” into the Curtis case; they noted his “secret contact with the Workers League.”

“The Case Against Mark Curtis” was written by Greg McNaghten, a Seattle official of Brakemen’s Local 1024, in the form of a 29-page open letter to his “fellow UTU [United Transportation Union] members.”

These documents are cited as showing how a “leftist” and a “unionist” undertook “independent investigations” and supposedly found that the evidence proved Mark Curtis guilty. But some of this “evidence” is more than suspect: for instance, Adams’ account that after Demetria Morris was attacked, “blood was running down her face.” This is repeated as fact by other accounts, yet at the trial it was never stated that Morris was bleeding. Where does this come from?

Parts of these documents are bizarrely revolting: Thus Adams reports his “long conversation” with Assistant D.A. Catherine Thune, whom he asked to explain how a person like Mark Curtis, a union activist committed to the rights of the oppressed, could commit such a crime: “Mrs. Thune explained that she had handled many rape cases and that unfortunately is the profile very often. Mark is a very gentle passive person…. They do lots of little kind things for people but there’s an inner rage that may come out only once in a lifetime.” So Curtis is deemed prone to rape because he’s a quiet person!

Then there’s Adams’ dismissal of the time discrepancies in Demetria Morris’ testimony - he “explains” that black people can’t tell time, are guided by “Colored People’s Time,” and the only reason the defense attorney pushed the time question was that he “was viewing the conception of time from white cultural perspective.” This is blatant racism.

UTU official Greg McNaghten also says he “spent several hours on the phone with Mrs. Kathy Thune, the prosecuting attorney in this case,” as well as the Iowa State Parole Board, Polk County prosecutors and others, and “as a result of all this digging” concluded that “Mark Curtis was given a fair trial” and is guilty. McNaghten has a novel theory as to why the cops beat Curtis bloody - it was all part of Curtis’ plot to show he was framed up: “Ergo: create a mysteriously disappearing woman, throw in police racism and bigotry; get yourself beat up …and you’ve got yourself a defense.”

But, interestingly, on some of the key facts about the case, these two accounts contradict each other. Take the question of dog hairs. The forensic expert testified Demetria Morris had dog hairs all over her sweatshirt, yet no dog hairs were found on Mark Curtis. How can this be, if, according to the story, Curtis wrestled Demetria to the ground and attempted to rape her? The anti-Curtis people attempt to explain this, for instance Adams asserts that “The dog is never kept on the front porch.” But McNaghten states flatly, “Demetria testified that they often let the dog on the front porch.”

Curtis says that after work on March 4, he attended and spoke, in Spanish, at a large meeting (which was videotaped) called to protest the INS raid and arrest of 17 fellow workers at the Swift plant. Adams says he’ uncovered the fact that “Nobody remembers him [Curtis] even at the meeting,” the meeting was small and the media wasn’t present. But McNaghten says that he spoke with a member of Curtis’ union local who “said it was true that Curtis spoke and in Spanish but he did so from the assembled crowd and was one of a great many who spoke up.”

In repeating the lines fed to them by the prosecutors, the witchhunters can’t even get their stories straight.

WL Blocks with White Segregationists (1992)

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Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Fight over Malcolm X School

Detroit: WL Blocks with White Segregationists

Swastikas emblazoned on school doors. A poster reading “We won’t have Malcolm X” and signed “KKK.” A crowd of angry whites shouting “Open your school in a crack house!” Is this Little Rock, 1956? Selma? Ole Miss? No, it’s Detroit 1992.

Last year the Detroit school board opened three “black male academies” for elementary school students, named after Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X. This summer, the Malcolm X school was moved to the closed Leslie school in Warrendale, a neighborhood on the far west side of Detroit. Warrendale, which is over 75 percent white (the inverse of the rest of this heavily black city) is home to many white cops who are forced by a residency law to live inside the city limits. There was an eruption of segregationist filth against the opening of the school at two school board meetings in August that left no doubt about the motives of the opposition: “Is this the forcible integration of Warrendale?” one racist shouted.

But there was one organization that rushed to defend the segregationists and deny that the opposition had anything to do with racism! The Detroit-based Workers League and their newspaper, the Bulletin, have championed the racists’ attempt to keep the Malcolm X school out of Warrendale. The WL brags that their candidates “were warmly received by residents when they canvassed the neighborhood” and “denounced the racialist policies of Mayor Coleman Young and the school authorities” (Bulletin, 14 August). With that line they could also get applause at a David Duke rally.

The WL says “the issue in Warrendale is not race,” and proceeds to disappear every racist taunt and placard at school board meetings and outside the school. With phony talk of uniting the working class in a “color-blind” fight against budget cuts, the WL covers up the raw racism spewing from opponents of the Malcolm X Academy. In dozens of pages denouncing the black Democratic Party liberals as “racialist,” there is not a single mention of the largely white crowd of several hundred that turned out for a school board meeting on August 3 and shouted down speakers with racist slurs.

Of course, there are whites in Warrendale who aren’t racists. However, unlike the Workers League, they can recognize the racist nature of the opposition to the school. One white woman whose son attends Malcolm X spoke out against protestors at the school opening: “It’s ridiculous, I’m just interested in getting my son into a good school. The school is mostly black, but so what?” One letter writer to the Detroit Free Press wrote: “I am a white resident of Detroit who grew up in the Warrendale neighborhood. I am appalled, but not surprised, at the racist sentiments expressed by many who oppose the new Malcolm X Academy.”

Giving a “left” cover to “we just want our neighborhood school” racists, the Bulletin (11 September) screams: “Radicals Defend Segregated Schools.” This is a prime example of the Workers League brand of laborite provocation, the product of years of tailing after the pro-capitalist, racist labor bureaucracy. While WL honcho David North today writes off the unions as’ no longer working-class organizations in any sense, on questions of racial oppression he sidles up to the racists in a way that even the UAW’s Owen Bieber couldn’t get away with.

“African-Centered” Education

After the board set up the schools as male-only academies, it was forced to admit girl students last year after a court suit by the ACLU and the National Organization for Women. Currently there are 422 boys and 39 girls enrolled in the Malcolm X school, and despite the WL’s claim that Warrendale residents cannot send their children there, 160 slots are reserved for neighborhood children.

These “African-centered” schools are a national phenomenon, a response by liberal nationalist educators and politicians to the destruction of the lives of black and Hispanic youth in the cities. But this “voluntary” segregation is a dangerous accommodation to the racist status quo. As opposed to the schemes of black elected officials and black nationalists who accommodate to the rollback of black rights with “Afrocentric” school proposals, the Spartacist League has consistently championed the fight for integrated education. In an exchange last year with jailed Black Panther Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, we pointed out:

“White schoolchildren as well as black schoolchildren need to learn about Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Karl Marx. But we‘re Marxists, not idealists, and understand that education is a class question. True quality education for the masses will be possible only with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of working-class rule.”
- ”On Integrated Education and Black Liberation,” WV No. 526, 10 May 1991

Conditions for children in the Detroit schools mirror the devastation that capitalism has wrought on the working class of the city. The Detroit district’s 170,000 students are 90 percent black. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, Detroit ranks first among all major cities in the number of children living in poverty - 46.6 percent. Black Democratic mayor Coleman Young, installed by the Big 3 auto bosses to derail and repress social struggle in response to the 1967 ghetto rebellion, has been on the warpath against city unions, slashing wages and thousands of jobs. And school board superintendent Deborah McGriff has gone after the teachers union, provoking a bitter strike in her efforts to gut teachers’ seniority while packing more students into the overcrowded classrooms.

WL “Blind Eye” to Racism

The Workers League has campaigned heavily in Warrendale, holding a press conference there on August 25, and alibiing the racists on the Sally Jessie Raphael TV show in September. WL Congressional candidate D’Artagnan Collier spews their “color-blind” line that the racists in Warrendale “were justifiably angry at the news that Leslie was to be reopened as a `black academy’ with only a few openings for youth from Warrendale.” Then comes his “evenhanded” cover for his campaign pitch to Warrendale: “I am opposed to segregated schools, whether they are proposed by David Duke or by Deborah McGriff” (Bulletin, 11 September).

This revolting “blind eye” to racism is nothing new for the Workers League. From its inception, the WL has tailored its program to the most reactionary prejudices of the union bureaucracy. Rather than speak the truth-that the bedrock racism of U.S. society is the single greatest obstacle to the construction of a multiracial, revolutionary workers party-the WL has responded with something much worse even than the Debsian position that the socialist movement has “nothing special to offer the Negro.”

The WL sneeringly calls the Spartacist League’s commitment to build black leadership, our view that the black working class is strategic to the success of proletarian revolution in this country, an “obsession with race.” And in the streets of Boston and Washington, D.C., this denial of the need to fight against special oppression has placed North & Co. squarely on the wrong side of the class line.

When racist anti-busing mobs took to the streets attacking black schoolchildren in the early 1970s in Boston, the SL fought for mass mobilizations of labor/black defense to stop racist attacks and to extend busing to the suburbs. At the height of the violent, racist rampages, when black schoolchildren’s lives were in physical danger and defense of integrated education was posed in the concrete, the WL’s Bulletin (13 September 1974) declared: “The issue of forced busing is being used to whip up racism to divide the working class.”

In November 1982 in Washington, D.C., the Spartacist League initiated and led an important victory against the resurgent racist terror of the Carter/Reagan years, when 5,000 black and white workers and youth drove the KKK off the streets. It was built in sharp struggle against the black Democratic Party politicians and reformists like Workers World who sought to divert workers from stopping the Klan. But for the WL - which wasn’t to be found in D.C. that November 27 - the successful mobilization was a “Revisionist Frenzy Over Klan” (Bulletin, 7 December 1982) and “an adventure which played right into the hands of the police”: “For the Spartacists, the issue in America is race, not class…. The grotesque fixation with the issue of race plays an utterly reactionary role and the Klan undoubtedly sees it as an assist for its own recruitment campaign.” Only Northite pseudo-dialectics could claim that the Klan was emboldened by fleeing before they even donned their sheets. But the KKK will get a boost from the activities of the segregationist thugs the WL is shielding in Warrendale.

If the racists mobilize in the streets against the Malcolm X school, the multiracial Detroit labor movement should be organized to defend those wanting to attend the school. No reliance on the cops or the state! An integrated labor battalion from the nearby and historically militant Ford River Rouge auto plant should be dispatched to dissuade the segregationists from any provocations - including those of the misnamed Workers League.

Free Mark Curtis! WL Brokers Frame-Up Operation (1992)

2009-10-06T21:34:00.019-04:00

Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Free Mark Curtis!

Workers League Brokers Frame-Up Operation

There’s a first-rate anti-communist witchhunt in progress over the case of Mark Curtis, a member of the quirky reformist Socialist Workers Party, now doing 25 years in the Iowa state penitentiary on frame-up charges. The Des Moines district attorney’s 1988 railroading of Curtis was aided and abetted by the Workers League, a dubious outfit that specializes in provocation, in pursuing its vendetta against the SWP, long a target of government harassment and “dirty tricks.” But although Curtis has spent the past four years behind bars, his defense campaign has been the object of a frenzied assault by right-wing feminists who want to prevent him from getting out on parole. Their aim is to smear the entire left as racists, rapists and sexists. To do so, they pass off the Workers League as good coin, ignoring its history of many years of sinister provocation, insist on the existence of a “rape” which even the prosecution doesn’t claim took place, and cite a plethora of “pro-victim” sources which turn out to be linked to government agencies.

There’s some pretty strange stuff going on, particularly coming out of the Boston area. Consider the following:

• The Boston NAACP has been on campaign footing circulating a letter (dated March 14) declaring “MARK CURTIS IS A VIOLENT RAPIST!” and urging those who had defended him to withdraw their names from the Curtis campaign.

• When multiracial protests swept the country in solidarity with the Los Angeles upheaval against the acquittal of the racist cops who beat Rodney King, Boston NAACP official Mary ‘ Benin and some associates attended a May 8 demonstration at Boston City Hall. They were there not to protest the racist L.A. verdict, but …to circulate an anti-Curtis tract calling to “Dis-endorse now” and saying “it’s not anti-left to be anti-rape.”

• Days later, at a May 16 Boston SWP forum on the Rodney King case, a group of so-called progressives showed up including Bertin, Fred Pelka of “Men to End Sexual Assault” (MESA) and other activists of the “stop rape movement.” They had come, not to discuss police brutality, and certainly not to criticize the SWP’s reformist call on George Bush’s “Justice Department” to indict the cops, but …to set up a picket line outside the Pathfinder Bookstore, chanting “Racist, sexist SWP!” and “Keep Mark Curtis in jail!”

• On July 18, a forum was held at the Boston Public Library where Bertin, Pelka and Ann Russo, a women’s studies professor at MIT, participated in a panel discussion whose purpose was …to destroy the Mark Curtis Defense Committee activities in the Boston area. Mark Curtis was described here as a “white man” who “raped” “an Afro-American woman,” and the SWP as “racists” who “glorify” a “rapist.”

• At a demonstration in Boston on September 30, where thousands of black Haitian workers were protesting the anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the government of the radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the anti-Curtis crowd was back again, with leaflets not against the bloody junta and its links to the U.S. government but …denouncing a socialist group and its imprisoned member for “Racism and Rapism.”

What kind of people go to a Rodney King demonstration against cop brutality and a Haiti demonstration against a military junta in order to pillory a young socialist militant who was active in the defense of immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant in the Midwest? Even if they think he is guilty of rape, why are self-proclaimed advocates of the interests of women, blacks and labor so driven to go after someone who is already in jail? What is going on here?

What’s going on here is a sinister, organized provocation with a not-so-hidden agenda of vilifying the left. In the name of victims’ rights and stopping rape, a network has sprung up that works closely with the police, embraces vigilantism and is in the tow of reactionary forces. With liberal rhetoric they engage in witchhunting taken straight from the hook (literally) of J. Edgar Hoover. And the whole operation is being brokered by David North’s Workers League, which is obsessed with destroying the Socialist Workers Party and sees this case as its vehicle.

The Spartacist League has no love lost for the rotten-reformist SWP, but we can tell a dirty frame-up when we see it. And this one is a threat to everyone. Rape and sexual abuse are serious crimes, and we have given careful consideration to the Curtis case. We have read the 400-page trial transcript and the voluminous articles and pamphlets on this case, and we have documented our conclusion that Mark Curtis was framed – see the statement of the SL/U.S. Political Bureau, “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (WV No. 480, 23 June 1989), and our article “Why Should Anyone Believe David North?” (WV No. 487, 13 October 1989).

The Railroading of Mark Curtis

Mark Curtis is a former national chairman of the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. At the time of his arrest he was a union activist at the Swift packing plant in Iowa. There had been a lot of turmoil in the Midwest meatpacking industry, particularly around the protracted 1985-86 Hormel strike by Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, which was broken by the combined efforts of the company, the Democratic state government and the social-democratic national union bureaucracy. In the Swift plant in Des Moines, four days before Curtis’ arrest in March 1988, an INS immigration raid had picked up 17 workers. On March 4, Curtis spoke in Spanish at a meeting in defense of these workers. Only hours after this, he was arrested at the Morris residence in Des Moines by cops who took him to police headquarters where they beat him to a pulp, calling him a “Mexican lover.”

In September 1988, Curtis was convicted of third degree sexual assault and first degree burglary. The state charged that he had forced his way onto the porch of the Morris house, and attempted to rape 15-year-old Demetria Morris. Curtis said he was lured there by a request for aid. By no account, not even that of the police or the young woman at the trial, did a rape ever take place, nor was anything stolen, nor was there a weapon. Whatever may have happened to Demetria Morris, there was never any physical evidence of contact between Curtis and the alleged victim. The court refused to allow testimony about the government’s multi-year campaign of “dirty tricks” aimed against the SWP. And now Curtis is serving a 25-year sentence. Despite vows by members of the Iowa State Parole Board that he will serve his entire sentence unless he confesses his “guilt,” Curtis has not been broken. “I am not a rapist, but a fighter for women’s rights. And I am not guilty of the crimes I have been charged and convicted of,” Curtis declares.

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But in the midst of all this imaginary psycho-projection and demagogic collective guilt-tripping, a simple fact has been left out: in this case there was no rape! In fact the state dropped the charge of rape against Mark Curtis. So why then this tabloid-style hysteria based on the assertion that there was a rape?
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The Workers League has aided the capitalist state prosecution of this young socialist militant as part of their decades-long vendetta against the eccentric, and pretty irrelevant, reformists of the SWP. In the trial, the closing arguments of the Polk County prosecutor were taken virtually verbatim from the pages of the WL’s paper, the Bulletin. After the conviction, they have sought to destroy Curtis’ defense committee and drive away its endorsers. Through the father of the alleged victim, Keith Morris, they went to the capitalist courts demanding the names of endorsers, and access to the defense committee finances. WL agents have crisscrossed the globe searching out individuals who endorsed or contributed to the defense fund, contacting and harassing them.

In January, Mark Curtis won a police brutality suit against the Des Moines cops who beat him bloody the night of his arrest. (The verdict came a month after the Des Moines cops were exposed for the brutal beating of a black worker, Larry Milton, who they subsequently tried to frame up on “theft” charges.) The court decided the cops lied when they said they didn’t beat up Mark Curtis, and awarded him $11,000 plus attorney’s fees. Since the cops were critical witnesses at Curtis’ trial, that testimony is deeply suspect as well.

The Smear Campaign

All this has only been a spur for the Workers League to accelerate their campaign smearing Curtis as a “depraved rapist.” The WL went after Curtis’ labor support, lining up with the Iowa AFL-CIO officialdom as well as bourgeois black organizations like the Des Moines NAACP and Black United Front. More recently they have hooked up with a clot in Boston including the Rape Crisis Center, black politicos and union officials. As a result of their poison campaign, some 20 people have reportedly withdrawn their support, including former Boston mayoral candidates Mel King and Rev. Graylan Ellis-Hagler, IUE Local 201 president Jeff Crosby (Lynn GE), former Boston University professor Howard Zinn and feminist author Margaret Randall.

Circulating in the feminist milieu are several articles notable for their praise of the Workers League and virulent attacks on “the left” for supposed racism. “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis: Victim or Victimizer?” by Fred Pelka of Boston MESA appeared in an obscure Queens, New York “progressive woman’s quarterly” On the Issues (Spring 1991). And the Boston-based feminist newspaper Sojourner (October 1992) has , an article by Ann Russo, “Mark Curtis: When Racism Equals Rapism.” Russo calls the WL’s Martin McLaughlin “one of the few progressives who supported the rape survivor and her family.” She also lays out the witchhunt campaign in detail:

“Efforts to challenge the propaganda of the defense committee escalated this past spring when Mary Bertin, on behalf of the Boston NAACP, got involved …. A group of us, including Barry Shuchter, Fred Pelka, Anita Saville and others, including myself on behalf of White Women Against Racism and Violence Against Women, have been directing our efforts towards supporters of Curtis, encouraging them to disendorse his defense campaign.”

“Some activists wonder why we are making such an effort to stop the Curtis defense campaign,” Russo writes. “In this case, the rape survivor faces an international progressive community that supports this white male rapist.” She quotes Mary Bertin saying: “For the past four years, [the SWP has] literally had the reign of the world, and that has to end. I felt the NAACP could be her voice, and so we designed a campaign to inform people of Demetria’s story.”

Russo’s piece is loaded with emotional white liberal guilt-tripping. At issue in the Curtis case, she claims, is “a young working-class African-American girl … brutally raped and beaten by a white man.” Russo keeps repeating: Demetria Morris was “brutally raped and assaulted,” she is “a rape survivor.” Russo puts herself inside the victim’s mind, saying “imagine being reminded” about “the good things that the man who raped you has done.” Russo imagines this, imagines that. Of the SWP, she says that “they consistently downplay the rape” of one of the “women of color who have been raped by white men,” and they ignored “the impact of their campaign on the rape survivor.” How has the SWP “gotten away with” a “support campaign in defense of a, rapist,” she asks. The “progressive community …supports this white male rapist,” and this supposedly “illustrates the racist ignorance and denial of sexual assault that continue to permeate the progressive community.”

Russo locates the source of this in “the ideology that so-called ‘good men’ (which in this country translates into white men) don’t rape.” In the May 8 (leaflet this is rendered as “‘good men,’ that is, progressive activists) don’t rape.” What is the conclusion? That all men rape? But in the midst of all this imaginary psycho-projection and demagogic collective guilt-tripping, a simple fact has been left out: in this case there was no rape! In fact the state dropped the charge of rape against Mark Curtis. So why then this tabloid-style hysteria based on the assertion that there was a rape? And what purposes does the exploitation of the non-rape of Demetria Morris serve?

In Defense of the Scottsboro Boys

In this respect, the article by Fred Pelka of Men to End Sexual Assault is instructive. This smear job paints the left as “sexists” who reflexively defend and harbor rapists if they are among “their own.” Pelka claims that a “feminist analysis of the Curtis case” shows “how effectively the left has acted to silence the survivor.” “What does it mean … when so many ‘politically correct’ people are willing to take, at face value, the word of a white man convicted of rape , over that of his Black victim?” And in showing that the left supposedly has a long tradition of vilifying rape victims, he obscenely cites the case of the Scottsboro Boys!

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While fraudulently claiming to have recently resuscitated the traditions of the CP’s International Labor Defense, the economist WL never mentions any of the ILD’s defense of blacks. Moreover, the WL’s Bulletin (31 July) fulsomely quotes from Pelka and Russo without a mention of their vicious anti-communism and racism. Their silence on these issues is utterly damning.
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This astounding claim comes in response to Russ Davis, a Boston supporter of the Curtis defense campaign, who wrote that there are historical precedents for the use of rape in frame-ups. Pelka asserts:

“It’s significant that Davis’ list of cases where rape ‘has been used in frame-ups’ begins and ends with the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ – a group of African-American men convicted of rape by an all-white (and all-male) jury in Alabama in 1931 ….
“There is one similarity, though, between the Curtis case and that of the Scottsboro defendants. In both cases, the prosecution witnesses, women without access to power and unable to tell their stories, were vilified by the left. In 60 years that much, at least, hasn’t changed.”

What racist, anti-communist trash! Naturally Pelka doesn’t bother to mention that the Scottsboro Boys – nine young black men – were sentenced to die on the basis of the testimony of two young white women, based on charges of rape that had been manufactured by the Alabama cops! But to keep Curtis in jail, Pelka is glad to retry these victims of Southern lynch law.

Defense of the Scottsboro Boys was the focus of an international campaign, centrally led by the Communist Party, in which hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to save these young black men from Jim Crow “justice.” As for the two women, one did “tell her story.” Ruby Bates later recanted her testimony, and in 1933 marched at the head of a protest in front of the White House demanding freedom for the Scottsboro Boys. As James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, wrote in a 1932 article entitled “Mobilize White Workers for Scottsboro Prisoners”:

“The deliberately planned assassination of the unfortunate Negro children is notice to the entire world that imperialist America, this pretended pacifist and friend of justice, is in fact a monster. The endeavor to thwart its bloody designs in the present case calls out the deepest and best human instincts.”

Not so for Pelka & Co., for whom, even 60 years later, the case of the Scottsboro Boys calls out the basest, if reflexive, instincts.

What gets them seeing red is not the lynch rope, but that the lives of these young men were saved by mobilizations led by Communists. In his attack on the left over the Scottsboro Boys, Pelka is playing on an old theme. The NAACP sabotaged the Scottsboro defense, defended the court that convicted the framed-up youth, denounced the mass mobilizations and raised the cry of the “red menace,” accusing the CP of using the case for its own purposes. (Only four years later, under intense pressure from the black masses, did the NAACP finally take up the case.) During the McCarthyite witchhunt, the liberal historian Wilson Record vituperated against the CP over the Scottsboro case in his book The Negro and the Communist Party (1951). And today we have the Boston and Des Moines NAACP and Fred Pelka playing the same theme in the Mark Curtis case.

At the same time, the Workers League has scandalously erased the Scottsboro Boys from American working-class history. While fraudulently claiming to have recently resuscitated the traditions of the CP’s International Labor Defense, the economist WL never mentions any of the ILD’s defense of blacks. Moreover, the WL’s Bulletin (31 July) fulsomely quotes from Pelka and Russo without a mention of their vicious anti-communism and racism. Their silence on these issues is utterly damning.

The Scottsboro and the Curtis frame-ups are wielded in a cynical attempt to portray the left as enemies of women and blacks. Pelka, Bertin & Co. are supporters of the racist capitalist system. Just look at the charge of “lying.” Pelka approvingly cites the argument of prosecutor Catherine Thune that Curtis can’t be trusted because he lied …on an employment application! Is there another way to get a job? And what about the “illegal” immigrant workers at Swift whose jobs Curtis was defending – if their documents weren’t in order does that mean they should be deported? On the other hand, Pelka waves aside the fact that one of the cops, Gonzalez, had been suspended from the Des Moines police for lying, saying he was only “fudging an arrest report to protect the identity of an informant.” Actually, Gonzalez was caught lying about beating a suspect.

A lot of Pelka’s stuff sounds like it comes out of the House Un-American Activities Committee. “How is it,” he wants to know, that the SWP has gotten so much support for Mark Curtis? For the answer he goes to Barry Shuchter, formerly an editorial committee member of the Boston Labor Page. “The first thing (SWP members) do is the personal favors trick,” says Shuchter. “They say, ‘We’ve been on the line with you, we’ve come to your events. Now we’re asking for this one favor in return.’ Then comes the ‘Look who else has endorsed’ trick.” This sounded so much like a page out of J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit that we decided to check. Sure enough, the FBI boss gave as an example of Communist agitation:

“The communists publish a story: John Doe has been arrested, the charge is murder …. The Party machinery springs into action, typical of thousands of mass-agitation campaigns …. The next step is probably the formation of the XYZ Committee to Save John Doe …. Finally come the unsuspecting noncommunists, with contact being made either in person or on the telephone.
“‘Mr. X, I’m So-and-So from the XYZ. Committee to Save John Doe. I was just over at Mr. Y’s office. You know him, don’t you?’ …
“On and on. ‘Dr. F, Rev. O, etc., have given statements’ ….
“‘Why,’ a friend will say after reading the testimonial, ‘if So-and-So endorses that organization [or issue], it must be OK.’ The dupe becomes a communist thought-control relay station.”

Pelka and Shuchter have learned well at the knee of this master of frame-ups. Incidentally, the first use of the term “PC,” to our knowledge, comes from J. Edgar’s how-to chapter on “The Communist Front”: “Don’t just ‘slap’ slogans on cardboard. Make sure they are ‘politically correct’.”

Police Aides, Vigilantes and Willie Horton

What’s behind the new assault on Mark Curtis is a right-wing trend that might be called yuppie feminism. One of the most tangible effects of the women’s movement has been the appearance of a layer of women professionals and executives: lawyers, professors, bank managers. They’re hostile to the left, and the heroines of this upwardly mobile strata include Democratic women politicians and lady prosecutors, from Liz Holtzman to Des Moines’ Catherine Thune. They have a ruling-class outlook, including seeing the state and its police as their defenders and allies, from going after rapists, child abusers and “pornography” to “protecting” abortion clinics (by clamping down on radicals who seek to stop the bible bigots besieging the clinics).

The politics of these self-styled “progressives” are thoroughly bourgeois, and can get pretty reactionary. The Pelka article appeared in the same edition of On the Issues (Spring 1991) as a column by editor Merle Hoffman in support of Bush’ s Persian Gulf War! On the Issues has a distinct Zionist flavor, with articles on the “pros and cons” of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It features photos of the Vigilante Queen, the Guardian Angels’ Lisa Sliwa (at the trial of the black youths who brutally assaulted the Central Park jogger). The current (Fall 1992) issue has an article, “Let’s Make Rape an Election Issue,” which blames Dukakis’ 1988 defeat on his wimpy response as to what he would do if Kitty was raped – supposedly showing his “insensitivity” – while Bush at least was addressing the “issue” with the Willie Horton ad!

In the Mark Curtis case, it’s striking how the people lined up in the witchhunt against him all base themselves on the story being disseminated by the Des Moines police and their adjuncts. Pelka quotes prosecutor Thune, Marti Anderson of Polk County Victim Services, Demetria Morris’ rape crisis counselor Terry Schock. Barry Shuchter, who kicked off the Boston disendorsement campaign, says, “We called the Des Moines Rape Crisis Center who gave us quite a different story” from Curtis’ defenders (Labor Page, April/May 1990). Well, we called the Des Moines Rape Crisis Center, too, and they answered the phone, “Victim Services.” We confirmed that all of these are Polk County, Iowa, official agencies: Catherine Thune, Marti Anderson and Terry Schock are all government spokesmen and worked together in preparing the case against Mark Curtis. So the witchhunters call up the prosecution, and surprise, they get the prosecution line.

How could you not believe the victim, these righteous feminists ask? A piece of literature titled, “Rape Myths and the Mark Curtis Case,” claims: “In fact, more than ninety-eight percent of all rapes reported to the police actually occurred as described by the victim.” Yet, as the SWP points out, the source of this assertion can only be the police themselves. In reaction to the whole history of rape trials, in which the woman victim was placed on trial, her character assassinated and her word dismissed, it has become an article of faith in the “stop-rape movement” that the victim never lies. Russo says the Curtis defense campaign must be fought because it “betrays the already shaky alliances between the feminist, civil rights, labor, and progressive movements,” since “trust …cannot be assumed when a white man’s word” is taken as truth “against the words and experience of an African-American girl.”

This brings to mind the Tawana Brawley case, in which a black teenager having family trouble invented a story about being a victim of a racist rape. This became a cause célèbre as it was pushed by black nationalists with their own agenda and taken up by liberals and radicals who implicitly took the word of “the victim” as good coin. And it was all a pack of lies.

In his article, Pelka quotes Claire Kaplan of the “National Coalition Against Sexual Assault” who sees in the Curtis case “this eternal denial on the part of the left to think that men among their ranks couldn’t possibly commit such a crime.” Kaplan is one of the main proponents of the victims-don’t-lie argument. So much so, that in a Virginia case where the day after a Manassas man was convicted of rape the alleged victim (who was married with two children) recanted, admitting the sex was “probably consensual,” Kaplan told the press that such an incident was rare: “if a case is falsely reported …it doesn’t even get to a conviction” (Washington Post, 9 May 1990). For her, Curtis must he guilty, because otherwise it will damage the “stop-rape movement” and “groups will be divided wherever the SWP takes this campaign.”

Kaplan & Co. not only work closely with the police, but they also sanction reckless vigilante action, with not the slightest concern for the rights of the accused. In 1987, a teenage boy in a small California town sued for defamation when his name appeared on flyers posted around the county by the Santa Cruz Women Against Rape listing supposed rapists. The flyers included not only his name but a physical description, his address, place of employment and what kind of car he drove. The young man commented bitterly, “It’s a vigilante thing – they’re the Lone Ranger and all of a sudden they started getting out of hand with it.” The young woman who initially named him to the Women Against Rape settled out of court, putting in writing that “I was not raped by you …on the night described in the flyer, or at any time.” Kaplan, however, justified this vigilantism, saying “the whole anti-violence movement got started by guerrilla tactics and this is just one of them” (Los Angeles Times, 10 December 1987).

Working as adjuncts of the police, vigilantism, slander, anything goes in this milieu. And don’t forget one of the favorite themes of the new McCarthyism, child abuse. The current uproar against and police investigation of Woody Allen, in retribution for leaving Mia Farrow, is the worst kind of frame-up, designed and guaranteed to destroy his reputation and his life. Here also, some enraged feminists are making common cause with the Republican right in their vicious crusade over “family values.”

Boston Feminist Witchhunters

In Boston the anti-Curtis campaign has taken on a particular frenzy. Here the Workers League found fertile ground for its frame-up campaign against Curtis and the SWP. A center of the “disendorsement” campaign is the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, which is the parent outfit of Pelka’s MESA. In passing, let us note that this center gets almost half of its funding ($81,000 out of a total of .$178,000 in 1991) from agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Another chunk of their income comes from the Haymarket People’s Fund, based heavily on the inheritance of Abby Rockefeller and the Kellogg heirs, which underwrites various “progressive” causes in the Boston area. Until several months ago, NAACP official Bertin was on the Board of Directors of the Haymarket fund. What the WL has tapped into here is a feminist/popular-front milieu in which key actors have hated the SWP (and anyone they consider “Trots”) for the last 20 years.

It goes back to 1970 when the SWP split the Boston radical women’s group Cell 16, led by Roxanne Dunbar and among whose founders and funders was Abby Rockefeller. The history of “Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975” by Alice Echols (Daring to Be Bad [1989]), notes: “Cell 16’s shift from Marxism might have been related to the Socialist Worker’s Party’s (SWP) attempted take-over of the group some time after Dunbar’s departure …, non-SWP women circulated a letter throughout the movement alerting women to the SWP’s efforts to ‘infiltrate’ feminist groups.” Old history? Not at all. It’s still useful in whipping up anti-communist frenzy.

This summer, the New York Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) was a hotbed of controversy after abortion clinic defense demonstrations against the combined efforts of Operation Rescue and Cardinal O’Connor on the eve of the Democratic Party convention. Political polarization at WAC meetings led to an exclusion attempt against the Spartacist League and the ISO. At one meeting we found rent-a-cops and lady goons at the door, and leaflets of pages from a book by Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960(1990) retailing horror stories about how the Boston women’s liberation movement was “infiltrated” by “outsiders, primarily by the Socialist Workers’ Party,” which had “targeted” Cell 16. Railing against “takeover attempts by the Trots,” Davis wrote: “The Cell 16 women soon realized that they’d lost control. The Trots had their mailing list; they had the signature on the bank account …they had most of the back issues of the journal and the posters.”

Certainly, the SWP’s apolitical organizational maneuvering in the style of the Stalinist CP leaves them open to this kind of anti-communist attack (as occurred also in NOW at around the same time). Moreover, the by then anti-Trotskyist SWP recruited women not to Marxism but to socialist-flavored feminism. In contrast, the SL was able to beat back the WAC redbaiting attack with an up-front defense of our communist program for women’s liberation through socialist revolution (see “SL Zaps WAC Attack,” WV No. 557, 7 August). But in the Mark Curtis case, what’s notable is that liberal witchhunters are still burning over the SWP, and this feeds into their desire to burn Curtis at the stake. This is the culture medium of ex-New Leftists-become-social-democrats, the rad-lib Jamaica Plain crowd (more lib than rad) in which Pelka, Russo, Beltin, Shuchter and their friends are getting a hearing. And the SWP can’t fight it because they capitulate to it politically, not wanting to “alienate” potential bloc partners in their endless lowest common denominator pop-front coalitions.

WL and the Anti-Curtis Cabal

We have had our own experience with this crowd. In March 1991, when fascist David Duke tried to hold a rally at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee initiated a united-front demonstration and mobilized 1,500 people in the streets to stop this Klansman-in-a-suit. The NAACP and the various bureaucrats around Labor Page gave us the run-around and refused to endorse. And a slanderous whispering campaign was started, violence-baiting the Partisan Defense Committee and SL and claiming that the communists just want to “take all the credit,” to try to poison the atmosphere and prevent a united-front mobilization. Above all, this milieu of liberals, reformists and labor bureaucrats don’t like reds mobilizing in what they consider “their” constituencies, because it undermines their political “credit”-ability. It’s noteworthy that when there is a major class battle, to defend minorities against the fascist Duke or to protest cop brutality in L.A., these friends of the police are nowhere to be seen …or show up only to trash Mark Curtis!

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These days, along with targeting the Curtis campaign, the Workers League’s other major activity in Detroit is blocking with white racists against the Malcolm X school... But in order to get Mark Curtis, the Northites suddenly and cynically “discover” black oppression and play to the bourgeois feminists and “stop rape” vigilantes
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This slander campaign has become even more ominous now that it has been taken up by a “respectable” layer of antirape feminists and wannabe bureaucrats. Their anti-communism is their own, but their ammunition comes from the professional provocateurs of David North’s Workers League. This is hardly the first time that North’s sinister outfit has acted as fingermen for forces hostile to the interests and defense of the workers movement. In 1983, on the eve of the British coal miners strike, the WL’s British mentors, the Workers Revolutionary Party, set off an anti-red witchhunt against miners union leader Arthur Scargill by “exposing” his forthright statement that Polish Solidarność, the favorite “union” of Ronald Reagan, was “anti-socialist.” The WRP “exposé” was taken up by Cold War labor bureaucrats and the labor-hating Fleet Street press with the aim of crushing the militant miners union.

In the late 1970s, the WL tried to use the bourgeois courts against the SWP, in the Alan Gelfand case, demanding that it turn over its membership lists, financial records and minutes to the imperialist government which had been spying on it for 50 years, most recently in the COINTELPRO case. Meanwhile, for years North’s “International Committee,” then under founder-leader Gerry Healy, was on the payroll of virtually every Arab regime in the Near East. By its own later admission, the IC received over one million pounds sterling (at least) from these kings, sheiks and tin-pot colonels. In exchange, the “IC” offered to supply the names of, and intelligence on, prominent “Zionists” in “finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” to Qaddafi’s Libya. Financial backing from Saddam Hussein to the “IC” bought his regime not only the publicity services of the Healy/Northites – whose press hailed the 1978 execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members – but photographs of anti-Hussein protesters in Britain.

Insofar as one can speak of this Healyite outfit on a political level, its defining characteristics have been vicious anti-Sovietism and a crude workerist adaptation to the Cold War AFL-CIO tops. Their catering to the labor bureaucracy means mimicking every form of racial insensitivity and political backwardness. Or in the immortal words of former Workers League leader Tim Wohlforth: “the working class hates faggots, women’s libbers and hippies and so do we”! These days, along with targeting the Curtis campaign, the Workers League’s other major activity in Detroit is blocking with white racists against the Malcolm X school (see article on page 12). But in order to get Mark Curtis, the Northites suddenly and cynically “discover” black oppression and play to the bourgeois feminists and “stop rape” vigilantes.

The Curtis case is the latest installment of the Northites’ psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign slandering the SWP as an organization supposedly controlled by the U.S. government. The WL’s Bulletin (17 July) writes: “The issue has gone far beyond the guilt or innocence of Mark Curtis. The real question is: What is the Socialist Workers Party, and whose interests does it serve?” The same article provides a veritable data sheet of the names of leading SWPers and their industrial employers. This scurrilous McCarthyism is then offered as “proof’ that they are police agents – because they got hired! (Of course, for Pelka & Co., it’s the opposite, Curtis is a dishonest commie because he lied to the boss!)

Today the Northites act as brain-trusters for government prosecutors, right-wing feminists, AFL-CIO labor traitors, to get the SWP. Only a paranoid believes history is a conspiracy, but everybody knows there are conspiracies in history. And about North’s organization we can only warn: Beware! To paraphrase the Bulletin, “what the Workers League is” is pretty hard to fathom, but “whose interests it serves” are definitely not those of women, minorities or the working class.

Workers League Vile Provocation (1992)

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Workers Vanguard No. 549 (17 April 1992)

Workers League Vile Provocation

The murder of our comrade Martha Phillips in Moscow has drawn the sinister attention of David North’s Workers League and other denizens of his self-styled “International Committee of the Fourth International.”

For more than 20 years this outfit has variously described the Spartacists as “racist” and “fascist,” the “main spokesman for the national interests of the American bourgeoisie,” “provocateurs in the service of Stalinism,” “the finger-man for the world capitalists,” “Finger Man for the FBI” and generally as the most decadent and unregenerate, “politically diseased” elements, motivated by “hatred of the working class.” Why would they care what happens to our comrades? Yet twice in the space of four weeks the Workers League’s Bulletin has carried articles dealing with the death of our comrade.

Their 28 February issue cites the “disturbing report” in Workers Vanguard (No. 545, 21 February) of Martha’s murder. They shed a few crocodile tears, although everyone who knows the Workers League knows full well that they would gleefully break open a bottle of champagne over news of an SL leader’s death. There soon follows a long list of dark and insinuating “questions” and innuendos about “sketchy” accounts of the murder, “hastily” organized memorial meetings, a “highly unusual” lack of any reports on the murder in the Moscow or U.S. press. The article asks darkly, “Could the killers have been known to Phillips?” Even more explicitly, a second installment on “The Murder of Martha Phillips” (Bulletin, 27 March) talks of “the unavoidable inference that Spartacist has something to hide.”

For Martha’s comrades, the agony of her brutal and untimely death has been compounded by the fact that we still do not know who murdered her. Describing — in the obituary the circumstances of the discovery of Martha’s body on the mom ing of February 9, we said:

“At the present time, the possibility cannot be ruled out that this hideous crime may have been politically motivated. The Moscow militia is carrying out an investigation in which our friends and supporters in Moscow are cooperating.”

Two weeks later, after we had managed with great difficulty to get some further details from the militia investigation, this was reported to a memorial meeting by SL/U.S. National Chairman James Robertson. Laying out the range of potential suspects, comrade Robertson concluded:

“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 independent mine workers union is run straight out of Washington by a Russian fascist and the CIA; we intervened and got in their way. There are many other possibilities. Moscow is hardly New York — that is, you don’t get knifed in the street in Moscow, although increasingly 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.”

North & Co. talk as though they do know more, or pretend to, claiming to find in our straightforward statement the “smell of political coverup.” They demand a “public accounting of the ‘milieu”‘ in which we intervene in the Soviet Union, reports of which appear regularly in Workers Vanguard. These virulent Stalinophobes point an accusing finger at the “political swamp of disintegrating Soviet Stalinism,” with which they attempt to put us in league. They find it expedient, to say the least, to ignore other suspects, such as the numerous “assets” of the CIA in the Soviet Union, or even the possibility of a simple criminal act.

The Bulletin remarks that the WV obituary has “no suggestion in the headline that Phillips was the victim of murder.” Perhaps they will next denounce Trotsky for titling his obituary of his slain son, “Leon Sedov — Son, Friend, Fighter.” And maybe they will go after Trotsky’s article as well for the fact that “the first mention of murder as the cause of death comes more than three-quarters of the way into the article.”

They cynically pick up on a call for a “commission of inquiry” raised in a very powerful letter of solidarity by a sympathizer of our organization (see WV No. 546, 6 March). They even cite Trotsky as a precedent. Yet the Dewey Commission was convened not to determine that it was Stalin who murdered Left Oppositionists in the 1930s, but to clear Trotsky’s name from the lies heaped on him by Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials.

As we wrote in reply to our supporter, “unlike in Stalin’s time, today it is not an easy task to identify the culprit(s).” The Workers League claims this statement is “so specious and flimsy that it invites suspicion.” What “invites suspicion” is that the Bulletin editors willfully ignore the many sinister and deadly forces we pointed to as potential suspects. We observed that “within the decomposing bureaucracy, several of its wings” could be implicated, but “equally there are those with considerable investment in Yeltsin or ties to Yeltsin,” as well as smaller forces who “may have seen our activities as a direct roadblock to their aspirations.” The Workers League certainly fits in this last category. Far from demanding a commission of inquiry, they should be worried about what an inquiry might reveal!

What do they really want, these people who have for years treated the Spartacists as deserving nothing more than to be shot down like mad dogs? They want to seize on a tragedy which has struck our organization, and use that tragedy to hurt the Spartacist League.

The SL has earned a reputation for telling the truth, no matter how bitter, just as the rules of Trotsky’s Fourth International instruct us, from warning against Solidarnosc counterrevolution back in 1981, when the bulk of the left (and .the Workers League) was cheering it on, to correcting errors in our press. We stand on our record, making available the indexed bound volumes of Workers Vanguard and Spartacist dating back to our first issue.

We tell our readers the truth, as it is known to us, when it is known to us. And when we don’t know, we say that too.

The Northites, on the other hand, specialize in the arts of fabrication, innuendo and anti-communist smear designed to bring forces far more powerful than their own down on those whom they target. In short, they are an organization devoted to committing provocations against the left. And go after the SL not least because they see in us all-purpose surrogates for their anti-Soviet venom.

This is not the first time they have expressed a macabre interest in our dead. Following the suicide of one of our cadres two years ago, the Northites raised this in an article on the New York Daily News strike, as they tried to weasel out of our exposure that the Bulletin is published by non-union labor. Several months later, they seized on the untimely death of another comrade from cancer to twist their gruesome knife again.

Take this ghoulish mindset, add the mercenary appetites of a poison pen for hire, and that gives you a rough approximation of the North gang. In exchange for petrodollars, the IC under North’s British mentor Gerry Healy served as press agents for anti-Communist repression by Near East dictators. They are notorious for assisting the bourgeois state in persecuting working-class militants, from the Healyites’ smear of British miners leader Arthur Scargill to North’s campaign to imprison American SWP trade-union activist Mark Curtis.

In November 1990, they seized on the attempted assassination of German SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine to go after our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany (SpAD), the only organization to unambiguously oppose the imperialist annexation of the DDR (East Germany). Ina vicious smear, whose only purpose could be to set us up as would-be “terrorists” in the eyes of the Fourth Reich’s agencies of repression, the German Northite BSA vituperated that “The hysterical language of the SpAD is directed at people who are in a mental state similar to that of the schizophrenic would-be assassin of Lafontaine.”

For years, the Workers League has been out to get us. Now they seek to use the tragic murder of our comrade who died at her post, fighting to defeat counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, for another of their insidious “campaigns.” Whose interests does the Workers League serve?

Poisoned Pens for Hire

The “International Committee” has a well-known history as a mercenary outfit. This is a matter of public record. By their own later admission, Healy’s IC received at least well over £1 million (over $2 million at the time) from a variety of Near East sheiks and bonapartist butchers over a period of years beginning in the mid-1970s (see “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March 1991). And this really was for services rendered.

Beginning with a 1976 deal with the Libyan government for £50,000 with which to buy a four-color web offset printing press, according to an IC Control Commission report, the IC received more than a half million pounds from the Qaddafi regime over the years, Among the services this money bought was turning Healyite publications into hagiographic press agents for the Libyan strongman, as well as supplying names of and intelligence on prominent “Zionists” in “finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere.”

Another £20,000 — and this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the “investigation” was carried out by the guilty parties themselves — came from Saddam Hussein. In exchange, the IC hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1978. They not only whitewashed the Ba’athist regime’s anti-Communist terror, they actively assisted it. Healyite provocateurs spied on anti-Saddam demonstrations in Britain, taking pictures of Iraqi leftists and turning them over to the Ba’athist regime.

North points to the IC “control commission” to claim innocence, protesting the WL never got any of the loot, But the entire IC carried out the political services required for this money over a whole period, and the fact that the Healyites were on the take was obvious to anyone who looked. In 1977 we ran an article, “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” concluding that “even a cursory look” at the IC’s “year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Three years later, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, was dragged by Healy into Her Majesty’s courts on libel charges. But the one charge that Matgamna raised which Healy didn’t contest was the central one, that the Healyites must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In 1985, when Healy was deposed by his lieutenants, the accusations of taking blood money from Arab bourgeois regimes became a big scandal in the IC. Why? Because by then the flow of money had dried up. When it was coming in, nobody complained (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86).

More than 20 years ago, we characterized the Healyites as unsavory “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic advantage. As they continued to degenerate, their ostensible politics, like their cheering for a mythical bourgeois “Arab Revolution,” became a front — basically dependent on who they were working for at any given time. The petrodollar connection was only one of their contracts. In Australia they took money to print a Vietnamese rightist emigre newspaper, the Bell of Saigon, which called on its fascist supporters to “exterminate” communists. Even when it isn’t exactly clear in whose employ they are at a given moment, like out-of-work gunslingers in the Old West they have continued to do their dirty work with the aim of serving somebody.

In the early 1970s, the Healyites began a decades-long vendetta against the reformist SWP entitled “Security and the Fourth International.” Resuscitating the vile Stalinist slander that Trotsky had been killed by “one of his own,” the Healyites tried to smear the entire SWP leadership — especially Trotsky’s secretary Joseph Hansen — as “FBI and KGB agents” and “accomplices” in the murder of Leon Trotsky. This slander, of course, also implicated SWP leader James P. Cannon and Trotsky himself. David North cut his teeth on that campaign.

The Workers League’s modus operandi in order to get left-wing opponents is to place themselves at the service of larger forces hostile to revolutionaries. In 1971, at a time when the bourgeoisie worried over growing radicalization, the SWP decided it was time to draw a blood line in the “antiwar movement.” At a meeting of the SWP’s “National Peace Action Coalition,” a popular front including prominent Democratic Party politicians, the WL rushed to join in a vicious thug attack led by SWP goons against Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League when we protested the presence of Senator Vance Hartke on the podium. And here they were acting as guard dogs for the same SWP which they now claim has been an FBI-controlled organization for decades. Within their own demented framework, what would that make the Workers League?

True to form, the main vehicle North & Co. have used in pursuing their vendetta against the SWP is the capitalist courts-appealing to the U.S. government to determine that the SWP is an organization of “government agents”! In 1979, when the SWP was engaged in a lawsuit against the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration, the Northites — using WL tool Alan Gelfand — took the SWP to court in order to force it to hand over Political Committee minutes.

Four years ago, the “Workers” League launched a big international campaign with the aim of sending SWPer Mark Curtis to prison (see “The Workers League and Mark Curtis,” WV No. 480, 23 June 1989). Curtis was an Iowa trade unionist who was getting in the way of the Swift Packing Co. He is currently serving a 25-year prison term after being railroaded on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. Whole paragraphs of the prosecutor’s summation at the trial that put Curtis behind bars were taken almost word for word from what the Bulletin had written a month earlier! As the headline of a subsequent WV article said, “Why Should Anyone Believe David North?”

What “Milieu” Does North Work In?

And that brings us back to the Northites’ grotesque insinuations concerning the murder of Martha Phillips in Moscow. We have sought to marshal whatever resources we can to press Moscow authorities to pursue all possible avenues of investigation with vigor and rigorousness. And we are taking other measures. Particularly given the chaos of the disintegrating Soviet Union since Yeltsin’s pro-imperialist countercoup last August, pursuing this investigation is fraught with difficulty. This is compounded by the fact that Martha was a Trotskyist, a Jew and an outspoken public opponent of Yeltsin counterrevolution. As we’ve said, at this point we have no way of knowing who killed our comrade and are in no position to exclude any possibility.

But as noted above, the Workers League has been quick to exclude certain possibilities, notably those connected to the CIA and the Yeltsinites. Why might that be? From opposing Soviet intervention against CIA-financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to hailing CIA-sponsored Solidarność in Poland. the Healy/Northites have been found on any side fighting against the Soviet Union.

Thus in Britain, when anti-Communist “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher was gearing up for a bloody showdown with the powerful National Union of Mine-workers, the Healyites put their support for Solidarność into service for the union-busting cabal. On the eve of the heroic 1984-85 miners strike, Healy’s press made a big play of scandalizing NUM leader Arthur Scargill for opposing Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” The scurrilous anti-Communist campaign was instantly picked up by the Labour Party/Trades Union Congress right wing and the Fleet Street tabloids with the aim of isolating the miners union and trying to crush it.

A few years later, the American AFL-CIO’s International Department (widely known as the “AFL-CIA”) sought to put together a new Solidarność by creating a layer of pro-imperialist “free trade unionists” in the Soviet Union. To this end, they tried to get the so-called Independent Union of Miners (NPG) to endorse slanders that Scargill had pocketed contributions by Soviet miners to the British miners strike. Our comrades’ intervention into the founding conference of the NPG in the Donbass in 1990 put a spike in this disinformation campaign. We gored the ox of these CIA-connected elements, and they have good cause to hate us.

Currently, the Northites are engaged in a fund drive for “aid to the Vorkuta miners,” who however are not presently engaged in any particular struggle. This was launched at a November Berlin meeting of North’s “IC,” supposedly on the basis of an appeal from the miners. Yet the appeal has not been published. Could this be related to the fact that a few months earlier the AFL-CIO set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners? This was reported in an article on Boris Yeltsin’s visit to AFL-CIO headquarters, where he was hailed for his “commitment to free unions.” Interestingly, the article talks of the “plight of the Soviet miners, who first struck in November 1989 in Vorkuta” (AFL-CIO News, 24 June 1991).

Now this is curious indeed, for the Soviet miners struck massively across the country in the summer of 1989. The later Vorkuta strike, however, was the first to openly raise anti-Communist demands. The WL’s Bulletin (8 December 1989) publicized an appeal by the “Vorkuta Workers' (Strike) Committee,” which included a demand for the “complete cutoff of the financial and economic help to the fraternal totalitarian regimes” — i.e., Cuba, Vietnam, etc. In introducing this appeal, the Bulletin explained that it had been “transmitted by telephone from Vorkuta to Leningrad and published there by the Democratic Union Party.” The Democratic Union is a pro-Western, anti-Communist outfit which has been financed by the American government through the notorious conduit of the “National Endowment for Democracy”!

One of the leaders of the Vorkuta miners is Nikolai Terokhin, who railed that “The Cubans receive this money out of our pockets and practically flip out under their beautiful sun” (taz, 18 November 1989). This same Terokhin, along with another Vorkuta miner, Sergei Masolovich, were brought to Britain in June 1990 by the fascistic NTS, which has been financed for decades by Western intelligence agencies. There they addressed the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” which was set up to destroy Arthur Scargill’s NUM. These two are also sponsored proteges of AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland, who have been highlighted in the pages of that other Bulletin, published by the AFL-CIO “Department of International Affairs.” Is this the “milieu” that North & Co. have been working? What’s in it for them, we wonder, and does it have anything to do with their interest in the murder of our comrade?

Hate the Soviet Union, Hate the Spartacist League

If there has been one political constant to North’s organization for the past couple of decades, it has been unadulterated anti-Sovietism. This is “theoretically” justified with the description of the Stalinist bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through” — which flatly denies Trotsky’s understanding of the dual nature of this parasitic caste sitting atop proletarian property forms. Hostile to defense of the gains of the October Revolution, now the Northites have joined Yeltsin in proclaiming the death of the Soviet Union. Under a headline trumpeting “The End of the USSR,” David North writes: “It is impossible to define the Confederation of Independent States as a whole, or any of the republics of which it is comprised, as workers states” (Bulletin, 10 January).

In his famous trade-union analogy, Trotsky compared the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule to a giant labor organization which must be defended against the capitalist enemy despite its bureaucratic misleaders. North inverts Trotsky’s analogy to write off the organized labor movement along with the Soviet Union. After years of groveling to the racist, pro-imperialist labor fakers to build a “labor party,” the Workers League now says, “to define the AFL-CIO as a working-class organization is to blind the working class to the realities which they confront.”

Only a few years ago, the WL denounced us for saying that the hard-fought Hormel meatpackers strike had been knifed by the “labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement.” North’s Bulletin (1 April 1986) claimed that this revealed our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism.” Now the Workers League writes off the unions along with the Soviet Union. This comes from an outfit which is notorious for hailing police “strikes,” a supposedly “working-class” group whose newspaper is produced with no union label, an ostensibly socialist organization which in this deeply racist society fulminates against SL-initiated anti-Klan actions as an “obsession with race.”

Other than providing a convenient excuse for scabbing on strikes, North’s pronouncement that the unions in the U.S. can no longer be considered working-class organizations reflects his líder maximo complex. In Berlin last November, North pompously declared: “The delegates today speak to the international working class as the authoritative representatives of the Fourth International” (Bulletin, 22 November 1991). From the “modest” start of crowning himself as Healy’s heir apparent at the top of the IC garbage heap, North is now assiduously trying to eliminate any perceived rivals to his new claim to be leader of the world proletariat.

In his Berlin speech, North declared that Ernest Mandel, leader of the United Secretariat, has “become, in the full sense of the word, a bourgeois politician.” He took Mandel to task for preparing “the ground for the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe,” in particular by supporting Polish Solidarność and its ideologue Jacek Kuron. He charged that “through the medium of Jacek Kuron, Lech Walesa himself is a political Frankenstein created by Man-del.” What chutzpah! When it comes to cheering Solidarnosc, the Northites took second place to no one, including the Mandelites. David North is a “political Frankenstein” created by Gerry Healy (and who knows who or what else).

Having now defined themselves as the sole representatives of the working class, where the megalomaniacal Northites go from here is anybody’s guess. We do know that they are capable of anything; they will work for just about anyone, and maybe they do.

The Workers League claims to be calling for an “inquiry” not “as a question for factional dispute,” but because “If Phillips was the victim of a political killing, her death is of concern not merely to the Spartacist League, but to the entire working class movement.” If Martha’s murder was politically motivated — which at this point we do not know — it is indeed a matter of vital importance and concern for the workers movement internationally. But such interests are of no concern to North’s organization, which has crossed over the class line with such frequency and ease that where it fits in relation to the workers movement is elastic, to say the least. The WL and its activities and associations do indeed warrant close scrutiny.

Martha Phillips was a proletarian internationalist, and as our most prominent spokesman in the Soviet Union she riled the counterrevolutionary nationalists who spearhead the drive to restore capitalist exploitation there. The very forces she fought against are the ones that are championed by the Workers League, from the reactionary Lithuanian Sajudis government to the “AFL-CIA” — backed “independent” miners, whose masters pull the strings from Washington. We know that there are powerful and sinister elements intent on stopping us from building the Leninist-Trotskyist party needed to lead the Soviet workers in a proletarian political revolution to defeat the counterrevolutionary onslaught.

As the capitalist-restorationists seek to consolidate a hold on power and uproot the foundations of the Soviet workers state, we honor our martyred comrade Martha by continuing the struggle to reimplant Bolshevism in the land of its birth, to return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.

Northite Blood Money (1991)

2009-09-24T11:47:00.019-04:00

Workers Vanguard No. 523 (29 March 1991)

Northite Blood Money

“Lenin received German gold.” “Leon Trotsky was an agent of the Mikado.” “Spartacist — Finger Man for the FBI.” The first slander was supplied by self-proclaimed “socialists” and other elements in 1917 Russia who wanted to continue the imperialist carnage of World War I, the second by J.V. Stalin and the last by David North’s Workers League. In the 8 February issue of the Workers League’s press the Bulletin we read: “As American bombs are dropping on Baghdad, Workers Vanguard uses rhetoric indistinguishable from that of the Bush administration…. It willingly places itself on the ‘left’ flank of the bourgeois media propaganda blitz which seeks to demonize Saddam Hussein and whip up hatred for the Iraqi people.”

At least when the pro-war forces in imperial Russia lyingly accused Lenin of being a German agent they attempted to give a political façade to this slander by pointing to Lenin’s opposition to Russian imperialism and to the war. But for the Workers League to accuse the Spartacist League of trying to undermine the defense of Iraq while U.S. imperialism was raining down death on Baghdad is such a shameless lie that it would make the tsarist writers of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” blush.

In our banners at antiwar demonstrations, in the headlines of Workers Vanguard, in our speeches to protesters — the Spartacist League forthrightly fought for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and military defense of Iraq (without failing to note the crimes of Hussein’s regime against the Iraqi toiling masses). We sought to mobilize the social power of the working class in labor political strikes against the war. And what of the Workers League? As American bombs rained down on Baghdad, North’s outfit campaigned for a “democratic” referendum on the war! At the red-white-and-blue “antiwar” demonstration in Washington, D.C. on January 26, the Northites marched under a banner reading: “Stop War Against Laos — Let the People Vote on War.” This is worse than the most abject social-pacifism, appealing to the imperialist butchers to give a more “democratic” cover to their genocidal war against the Iraqi people. At the time, the American “people,” in their overwhelming majority, supported Bush’s war!

Crime and Dividends

What really has the Workers League frothing at the mouth is the one subject truly close to their hearts — lucre, as filthy as it comes. Earlier this year we Ian a short article entitled “Healyites Got Blood Money” (WV No. 517, 4 January), which detailed how the late Gerry Healy’s “International Committee” was on the take from a number of Near East despotic regimes, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And we pointed to the Healyites’ criminal cheering for the 1978 execution of Iraqi Communist Party members.

The Workers League headed by David North — the current representative of unadulterated Healyism here on earth — is squealing like stuck pigs. The Bulletin decries our exposure of their direct and immediate ancestors for being on the payroll of virtually every sheik and military bonapartist in the region as an attempt “to provide the FBI with a pretext to frame up the Workers League.”

The Northites certainly have an elastic view of their own history — similar to their relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. We nailed the Workers League as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” more than a decade ago. At the time Hussein was a client of U.S. imperialism, which was providing him with military aid and intelligence. (As we have reported, the first anti-Communist bloodbath carried out by the Ba’ath used hit lists supplied by the CIA.) In our most recent article we also noted that at the same time Healy et al. were raking in thousands from those other clients of American imperialism, the Kuwaiti emirs!

The Workers League probably has plenty to fear for the crimes they have committed, but getting in trouble with the FBI is at the bottom of the list (if they are on any FBI list at all). After all, the Healyites were working the same side of the street as U.S. intelligence! In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Hussein’s government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.”

According to the 1985 International Committee Control Commission report — which the Bulletin tries to hide behind as proof of their “innocence” — the Healyites got close to £20,000 from Iraq in the late 1970s. And this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the IC “investigation” into their organization’s financial dealings in the Near East was carried out by the guilty themselves.

The Bulletin doesn’t deny that it cheered the murder of Communist worker militants in Iraq. It simply whines that the Workers League didn’t know Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party got paid for this and other crimes. This, it is claimed, was done “without the agreement or knowledge of the International Committee.” For the Northites to claim that they didn’t know is about as believable as Bush and Reagan’s protests that they were “out of the loop” while another criminal by the name of North, first name Oliver, was running the Contragate arms-and-drugs scam out of the White House basement.

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left. From the time the WRP started up its daily News Line in May 1976, it was clear that Healy’s organization was on the take from Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan regime. Less than three months earlier, the WRP had folded its previous paper Workers Press following months of publicity pleading for funds for a press “Crisis Fund.” Then amidst great fanfare out comes a flashy new four-color daily full of articles extolling the Libyan dictator and “special reports” from Tripoli. Where did the money come from in this rags-to-riches story?

As early as May 1977, we ran an article entitled “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” which concluded that “even a cursory look at News Line’s yearlong pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.” Two years later we picketed Workers League meetings with signs reading “Workers League — Press Agents for Libyan Dictatorship!” and “Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi.”

Then in 1980, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, observed that the WRP must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In a vengeful attempt to destroy Matgamna’s organization, the WRP (under the aegis of jet-setting actress Vanessa Redgrave) filed a libel suit against Matgamna for his scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the one statement in Matgamna’s article which the suit did not take up was the central charge that the Healyites were being funded by bourgeois Arab regimes.

Now, the Bulletin writes that following the Control Commission investigation “the International Committee, with the support of the Workers League… denounced the WRP’s ‘pursuit of unprincipled relations with sections of the colonial bourgeoisie in return for money’.” But what did the Workers League find ”unprincipled”? Obviously not acting as press agents for Qaddafi (celebrating the ”Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the WL sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies”) or cheering the execution of Iraqi Communists. North’s “defense” is that Healy did it for money, while the Workers League did it for free! But did they?

Who Got the Money?

After the IC Control Commission had delivered its report, in 1986 Cliff Slaughter, another of Healy’s former lieutenants, wrote a letter to all WRP members asking

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments? Which other sections did so? “Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousand [sic] of dollars) in 1983?…
“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North? That is what happened. “Finally: is it not true that Comrade North and Beams agreed the matter should not be raised at the IC because they considered it did not constitute a ‘class betrayal’? How did they differentiate between the class betrayal of the WRP in this matter — on which was based the argument for suspending the WRP from the IC without charges and without a hearing — and the actions taken on behalf of the SLL (Australia)?”

Slaughter’s accusations against North’s cover-up for his colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, have the ring of (self-serving) truth. A month after Slaughter’s letter was circulated, the Central Committee of the SLL seems to have felt constrained to censure Beams for failure to report receipt of money from Arab regimes to the IC. Further information came from former SLL leader Phil Sandford, who revealed how another leading Australian Healyite was slapped down by Healy for attempting to poach on his Iraqi preserve to get $100,000 for a printing press (see “Some Political Bandits at the End,” Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989). Sandford reports that their relations with Libya were much more lucrative.

_____________________________
Only the Tip of the Iceberg…

Libya - £542,267
Kuwait - 156,500
Qatar - 50,000
Abu Dhabi - 25,000
PLO - 19,997
Iraq - 19,697
Unidentified or other sources - 261,702
Total : £1,075,163
(Reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)

Account of monies from Near East paymasters received by Healy’s WRP as reported by 1985 IC Control Commission — an “Investigation” carried out by the guilty.
_______________________________

But was North’s only role in this sordid affair to alibi for Beams? Not according to a letter from Healy lieutenant Tony Banda to the American Workers League Central Committee of 23 January 1986. Responding to accusations that leading members of the WRP, following the ouster of Healy, were refusing to make IC documents available to WRP members, Banda writes:

”This I find extremely interesting coming from you, who through your minions, have suppressed virtually the entire discussion on Healyism…. This is like the thief in the crowded bazaar crying,’ Stop, thief’ to distract attention from his own misdeeds. Up north Mr. Holier-Than-Thou makes his getaway with 90 grand, while his apprentice/accomplice makes off with another 25 grand down south. Is this your revolutionary morality? Is this your kind of internationalism?”
— printed in Fourth International, Autumn 1986

Tony Banda’s “we were all crooks” indictment of “Mr. Holier-Than-Thou” North captures the cynical quality of this falling-out among thieves.

It seems evident that when it looked like Healy was collecting all of the big payoffs from the Near East, the rest of his mob were driven into a shark-like feeding frenzy to get their share of the blood money. As we have noted many times, none of Healy’s epigones protested the vicious betrayals that were perpetrated by their organization in order to get money from Near East bourgeois governments. It was only when this revenue dried up that they moved in to depose Healy.

According to a financial report by Corin Redgrave, dated 8 October 1985, in 1984-85 “scarcely a single rent or rates demand was paid on time. Bailiffs took walking possession of the contents of the party’s printshop in Runcorn, the party bookshops, and on one occasion at least, the party headquarters at Clapham.” At first the WRP tried to blame the whole mess on their financial apparatus. But by the summer of 1985 it became clear that the whole stinking house that Healy had built was about to come crumbling down. Well-trained by their “founder-leader,” Healy’s longtime henchmen went, like sharks, for the kill.

North desperately wanted to declare himself as the new leader and wielded the IC Control Commission for his own cynical power play. Today, the Bulletin claims that the Workers League’s participation in this commission clears them of all crimes. Yet, curiously, they have chosen never to print the results of even this heavily censored and self-serving ”investigation” into the IC’s sordid financial wheeling and dealing.

The Commission’s report was completed in a big hurry, and this was not simply because Healy & Co. had allegedly spirited away the WRP’s financial records. No attempt was made to investigate allegations that other IC sections had been on the take. The names of implicated senior WRP members who had not left with Healy were deleted from the report. North used the “findings” to get the leftovers from Healy’s WRP out of his way. Slaughter’s rump WRP was suspended from membership and North anointed himself king of the remaining Healyite dung heap.

The Workers League tries to palm, themselves off as Trotskyists and from time to time, when it suits their purposes, they can sound quite orthodox. We recognized them for what they were twenty years ago when we publicly exposed the Healyites as “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic and unsavory advantage. In their further degeneration they became outright bandits, and far worse.

Talk about fingermen: for a fistful of petrodollars, the Healyites took pictures of protesters at an anti-Hussein demo in London and turned them over to the Iraqi embassy! For cash they cheered the murder of Iraqi CP members. One of Healy’s main bagmen in Baghdad was none other than Alex Mitchell, who together with North co-authored “Security and the Fourth International” — the sinister campaign to smear the leadership of the American Socialist Workers Party as agents of the FBI and the GPU!

While Mitchell today plies his pen for the capitalist press in Australia, North continues to use his for new installment of “Security.” After spending a fortune trying to get the capitalist courts rule that the SWP was being run FBI agents in the notorious case of provocateur Alan Gelfand, the Northites waged an international campaign as fingermen for the American imperialist state’s prosecution of a young SWP Mark Curtis — who is now behind bars sentenced to 25 years in jail on trumped! up rape charges. But why would the cope jail one of their own agents? And why does the Workers League profess to be worried about the FBI going after them? On the face of it, the U.S. government ought to be satisfied with their work. As for the Arab dictators, sheiks and colonels that the Healyites shook down for cash — doubtless on the claim that the IC was an organization with “mass” influence which could help them out — they might rightly feel duped, not to mention vindictive.

Northite Fool's Gold (1991)

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Workers Vanguard No. 533 (22 November 1991)

Northite Fool’s Gold

This article was written for Spartakist No. 91, published by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany

For close to two decades David North’s Workers League and his cohorts in the “International Committee of the Fourth International” have been foam-flecked cheerleaders for virtually every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet force in the world. But these days the WL is talking a lot out of the other side of its mouth. Now we read in the “ICFI” statement on “The Lessons of the August Putsch and the Tasks Before the Soviet Working Class” (Bulletin, 6 September) that only their organization “defends the historic conquests of the Soviet proletariat and upholds its great socialist traditions”! Our advice to anyone who falls for this one is, as the Romans said, caveat emptor - hold on to your wallet.

More than 20 years ago we recalled Lenin’s term “political bandits” to describe the Workers League and its “International,” then headed by IC “founder-leader” Gerry Healy. Over the years, the Healyites’ “political” banditry was eclipsed by their degeneration into outright gangsters-for-hire. In 1979, after years of pimping for Libya’s Qaddafi, Healy & Co. heralded Iraqi Ba’athist dictator Saddam Hussein as a leader of the struggle against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism” and hailed his execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party. At the same time they photographed anti-Saddam protesters in London and handed the photos over to the Iraqi embassy, fingering demonstrators for arrest, torture and possibly death. Meanwhile the Healyites were receiving tens of thousands of dollars from the Ba’athist regime.

Although the most heinous, this was only one of many crimes committed by the Healy/Northites, for which they were put on the payroll of virtually every Arab sheik and dictator in the Near East (see “Healyites Got Blood Money,” WV No. 517, 4 January, and “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March).

In 1985 when this dirty source of revenue dried up, Healy’s organization fell apart and Workers League leader David North declared himself the heir to his former master’s seat at the head of the shattered remnants of the International Committee. Now that it seems like nobody’s paying them for what they say and write, the Northites have reverted to an earlier scam: selling themselves as supposed orthodox Trotskyists in the abstract, while still tailing after anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries in the concrete. But this latest con game blew apart with the August showdown in Moscow, as Yeltsin’s countercoup brought to power the capitalist-restorationist forces that the Bulletin has been covering for.

The Northites’ current posture as the defenders of the gains of the October Revolution is so manifestly fraudulent that they can’t get it straight themselves.

Healyite Schizophrenia

The “ICFI” statement on tie coup and Yeltsin’s countercoup reads like it was written by a schizophrenic. First we have the declaration that “The International Committee of the Fourth International welcomes the humiliating collapse of the August 19 Stalinist putsch in Moscow.” Yet the very next paragraph states, “But the justified satisfaction felt by workers both in the Soviet Union and internationally at the failure of the putschists must not blind them to the fact that those now assuming center stage in Moscow are bitter antisocialists and ruthless exponents of capitalist restoration.” Again later it declares, “The collapse of the August 19 coup is a large. nail in the coffin of the Stalinist bureaucracy.” Yet this is followed by:

“But any premature jubilation on the part of the working class would be totally unjustified.
“Those forces now in the forefront are the most ruthless and frothing enemies of the working class. Their aim is nothing less than selling off all the assets of the Soviet Union and its reduction to a semi-colonial status.”
– Bulletin, 6 September

It’s those telltale “buts” that give the game away. For the collapse of the coup, which North & Co. “welcome,” is not divorced from, but identical with the victory of “those forces now in the forefront” who they admit are “frothing enemies of the working class.” What’s to welcome? This is not “dialectics,” which Healy and North have done so much to discredit, but the squirmings of opportunists hoist on their own petard. They want to be with the Yeltsinite “masses” on the barricades while warning against Yeltsin the harbinger of capitalism. The dilemma, which many Stalinophobic pseudo-Trotskyists resolve by prettifying the “democrat” Yeltsin, North deals with by talking out of both sides of his mouth.

The anti-Stalinist David North evidently agrees with Joseph Stalin on one thing: “Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.”

Even at the level of description, the “two-line” statement exposes itself. It heralds “the implacable opposition of the socialist working class to the military-KGB coup.” Yet a few paragraphs later it notes Yeltsin’s “appeal for a general strike went largely unanswered, even in Moscow. The working class identified with neither faction.” The Northites warn that “without the independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program, the collapse of Stalinism will lead to even more brutal forms of repression and social devastation” and “the terror of capitalism.” Yet for years these Stalinophobes have denounced the Kremlin bureaucracy as the sole moving force for capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR.

Thus in one of his interminable speeches, spread over six pages of the same 6 September issue of the Bulletin, David North refers to Gorbachev as “leader of the restorationist faction of the official Communist Party apparatus” while Yeltsin is called “a representative of the emerging Soviet bourgeoisie” and of “bourgeois comprador elements,” dating this as far back as 1987. But as recently as the 21 June Bulletin, an article titled “Behind the Election of Boris Yeltsin” writes of “the drive to capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, whether it is led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin or some other counterrevolutionary representative of the bureaucracy.”

And referring to Yeltsin the bureaucrat rather than Yeltsin the bourgeois is no mere slip of the pen, for in the Northite zodiac the Soviet bureaucracy is nothing but a “counterrevolutionary” agency working hand in hand with imperialism. Thus in his 1989 tract on Perestroika Versus Socialism, North declares that “the political and economic goals of the bureaucracy in its relations with world imperialism” are “the destruction of the planned economy and the social conquests of the October Revolution” and the restoration of capitalism. And, more generally, in his 1988 tome The Heritage We Defend, he declares that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘counterrevolutionary through and through’.” This stupidly one-sided formulation is the banner of every anti-Soviet fake-Trotskyist. And it is a lie.

Leon Trotsky never said any such thing. Rather, he wrote in “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933) that “Whoever fails to understand this dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has understood nothing.” He is referring here to the position. of the bureaucracy, which rests upon the collectivized property forms inherited from the October Revolution, at the same time as it seeks to balance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, transmitting the pressures of imperialism but also, on occasion, constrained to defend in its bureaucratic fashion the workers state in order to protect its privileges. Trotsky repeatedly insisted on this fundamental point, as in The Revolution Betrayed, which has a section on “The Dual Character of the Workers State” And in a 1937 article against the future renegade Burnham, Trotsky noted:

“The function of Stalin, like the function of Green [then head of the American trade-union federation, AFL], has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through this defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of This that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.”
– ”Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937)

We discussed the genealogy of the anti-Trotskyist formula that Stalinist is “counterrevolutionary through and through” in our article “David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son” (WV No. 456, I July 1988). It is important to underline it here once again, for behind North’s analytical deceit lies a fundamental assault on the Trotskyist program of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against counterrevolution. And indeed, at the decisive moment in the face of a direct counterrevolutionary assault by forces which North himself acknowledges to be a “comprador bourgeoisie,” North’s bottom line was “we were for the defeat of this coup” – which was also Yeltsin’s bottom line.

From Walesa to Yeltsin: Crush the Counterrevolution!

In an article titled “Middle Class Radicals and the Soviet Coup” (Bulletin, 13 September), the Northites assume a posture of denouncing the cabal of fake-Trotskyists who cheered Yeltsin’s countercoup. At the same time they rant that the Spartacist League “criticized the coup plotters only for ‘ineptitude’ and ‘stupidities,’ because they did not arrest Yeltsin or even cut off his phones, and did not mount a ‘serious assault’ on the Russian parliament building. In other words, this politically-diseased organization was hoping against hope for an old-fashioned Stalinist bloodbath.” North’s German followers of the BSA (Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter) continue in the same vein, saying the Spartacists only criticize the coup plotters “because they didn’t carry out a bloodbath in front of the White House in Moscow like the Chinese Stalinists did two years earlier in Tiananmen Square in Peking” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 4 October).

To compare the couple of thousand scruffy yuppies, speculators and Russian nationalists, including fascists and priests, who were the pathetic advance guard of Yeltsinite counterrevolution, with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students, many of them explicitly pro-socialist, who rallied day after day in Tiananmen Square, is obscene. Like the less duplicitous cheerleaders for Yeltsin, the Northites can’t stand our statement that “a call on Moscow workers to clean out this counterrevolutionary rabble was in order.” And to North & Co., the crime of crimes would be a military bloc with a section of the bureaucracy seeking to fight the outright capitalist restorationists. And as we wrote in our polemic “Traitors, Not Trotskyists – Cheerleaders for Yeltsin’s Counterrevolution” (WV No. 535, 27 September):

“The ‘gang of eight’ was incapable of sweeping away Yeltsin in its pathetic excuse for a putsch because, as we wrote, it was a ‘perestroika coup.’ But both imperialism and the forces of internal counterrevolution were aligned on Yeltsin’s side. The coup plotters were not only irresolute but didn’t want to unleash the forces that could have defeated the more extreme counterrevolutionaries, for that could have led to a civil war if the Yeltsinites really fought back. And in an armed struggle pitting outright restorationists against recalcitrant elements of the bureaucracy, defense of the collectivized economy would have been placed on the agenda whatever the Stalinists’ intentions. Trotskyism would have entered a military bloc with ‘the Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy against open attack by capitalist counterrevolution,’ as Trotsky postulated in the 1938 Transitional Program. This was precisely our policy toward Jaruzelski in 1981.”

And indeed, it is precisely the example of Poland which lies behind the Northites’ policy in the Moscow coup. At that time, when the entire left was proclaiming “Solidarity with Solidarity,” the international Spartacist tendency sought to expose before the world’s working class that Lech Walesa & Co. were an agency for the CIA and Western bankers, Ronald Reagan, the Pope and clerical nationalists. They quoted as if it were an outrage our forthright statement: “If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily …we will support this. And we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity’s counterrevolution” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981). Healy, North et al. lined up with the counterrevolutionary cabal.

Now that Solidarność leader Walesa is presiding over the capitalist immiseration of Poland, all the fake-lefts are jumping ship, including North. Thus in its statement on the August coup, the Bulletin denounces Walesa for running a “pro-imperialist regime” which uses police and troops to smash workers strikes. But ten years ago, the Northites joined with anti-Communist Polish emigres and AFL-CIO bureaucrats at a pro-Solidarność rally in Chicago which was addressed by the Reaganite governor of Illinois. “Mass Support for Solidarity,” ran the front-page headline of the Bulletin (18 December 1981) describing this anti-Soviet political orgy.

Anti-Soviet Nationalists and Anti-Union Witchhunts

With openly. capitalist-restorationist forces on the ascendancy in Russia and other republics, the Northites offer themselves as the leadership for the struggle of the Soviet working class to “stop the degradation of the Soviet Union into a Balkanized semicolony of imperialism.” What gall! The Workers League has been the most fervent defender of every force in the USSR that was fighting for just such an outcome.

Last year they championed the cause of the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania. Echoing the most right-wing, anti-Communist elements of the American ruling class, the Workers League even denounced Bush for not imposing imperialist sanctions against the Soviet workers state on behalf of Lithuanian independence:

“The April 24 announcement by the White House that it is taking no retaliatory actions against Moscow for its blockade of Lithuania underscores the unprecedented level of collaboration between imperialism and Stalinism against the international working class.”
– Bulletin, 27 April 1990

Here the militantly counterrevolutionary Lithuanian Sajudis regime – whose first act when granted independence by the Yeltsin-Gorbachev regime was to grant a blanket amnesty to the native fascist collaborators of Hitler’s Germany – Is identified with the international working class!

Today the Northites declare that the Soviet working class “must retain its complete independence from the political aims of the imperialists and their political and economic agents in the Soviet Union.” Yet last spring the Bulletin uncritically enthused over the Soviet coal miners strike, which was organized and manipulated by the pro-Yeltsin leaders of the newly formed Independent Union of Miners to demand that control over the mines and other industrial enterprises be transferred from the central Soviet government to the Yeltsin regime of the Russian Republic.

Although the strike reflected the desperate economic conditions facing the miners and their growing hatred for the Gorbachev regime, we warned of the hardline Yeltsinites at the head of the miners union:

“These people are bitter enemies of the Soviet working class. They seek to turn the powerful Soviet miners into a battering ram for openly pro-capitalist forces whose victory would mean the destruction of every remaining social gain - the right to work, cheap housing and low food prices, free medical care-which the Soviet workers have as a result of the collectivized economy.”
– ”Soviet Miners Strike Amid Perestroika Turmoil,” WV No. 522, 15 March

We pointed out how many of the leaders of the new union were “well known to the AFL-CIO,” according to the American union federation’s newspaper, and indeed they had been toured through the U.S., paid for by the Bush government. And we noted how the AFL-CIO is notorious as an agency for CIA intervention into the labor movement internationally. Not a peep on any of this from the Northites.

Among the cabal of CIA types present at the founding congress of the Russian miners union in October 1990 was a delegation from the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” in Britain. A creature of the Thatcher government and the British mine bosses set up to destroy the real miners union during the 1984-85 coal strike, the UDM was there to purvey the imperialist-orchestrated Big Lie campaign that miners union leader Arthur Scargill “mishandled” funds that were donated by Soviet miners during the strike. The bourgeoisie was enraged at this internationalist solidarity from Soviet workers, who dug deep in their pockets to aid this bitter class battle. After years of persecuting the union, and even stealing union funds from the banks, the British state finally had to drop court charges against Scargill.

Spartacists who were present at the Soviet miners congress exposed this anti-union vendetta. Now the Northites say nothing about the whole affair. Small wonder. In 1983 it was their own international leaders, in Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, who instigated the initial anti-Communist witchhunt against Scargill. On the eve of the coal strike, Healy’s press lambasted the miners union leader for accurately calling Solidarność an “anti-socialist” organization. This was a completely calculated “bombshell” by the Healyites and one which was played for all it was worth by Thatcher, her Fleet Street media and the anti-Communist labor bureaucrats in Britain in their campaign to cut off any solidarity with the miners. The Healyites were so proud of themselves that they published an entire pamphlet about it.

David North and the “AFL-CIA”

Here we had the intersection of the two political hallmarks of Healyism – vicious anti-Sovietism and belly-crawling before the Cold War trade-union tops. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Workers League put out a program for a labor party that didn’t mention either the war or the fight for black liberation in the U.S. And in the December 1990 German Bundestag elections, the Northite BSA ran on a program that did not even mention immigrant workers, racist/fascist attacks or women’s rights. And while they included ritual criticisms of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Northites called for votes to the SPD witchhunters, who served as the advance guard of capitalist reunification in a Fourth Reich of German imperialism.

Today, as part of its “orthodox” con game, the Northite “ICFI” is making critical noises about the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy. North cynically proclaims: “We do not make a fetish of the so-called mass organizations, with their paper membership and their overstaffed and overpaid bureaucracies…. The AFL-CIO, like all the other bureaucracies which exist in this world, is an instrument of imperialism which exists to control and discipline the working class” (Bulletin, 6 September). He calls for a “Fight for a Labor Party Based on a Socialist Program,” and even declares at such a party need not be “some sort social democratic party under the aegis of the AFL-CIO.” Quite a mouthful coming from the same Workers League which for years routinely called on the same sellout AFL-CIO bureaucrats lead everything including general strikes.

In fact, during the Iran-Contragate scandal, the Northites demanded that he AFL-CIO conduct[s] its own independent inquiry into the, illegal White House activities and the direct dangers they pose to the working class” (Labor Must Act on Iran-Contra Crisis, January 1987). This is tantamount to calling on e CIA to investigate itself! The AFL-CIO tops were no less involved in the U.S. war crimes in Central America than the crew in the White House basement. Lane Kirkland was a member of the Rockefeller Commission, which carried out a whitewash of CIA assassination activities for the Ford administration in 1975. Kirkland was a member of the Kissinger Commission, which rubber-stamped Reagan’s support to the contra terrorists in Nicaragua. He is a member of the National Endowment for Democracy, set up to give a veneer of legitimacy to CIA-funded subversion. And the AFL-CIO has for years provided cover for CIA “labor” activities through the “American Institute for Free Labor Development” in Latin America and similar outfits elsewhere.

“Democratic” Cover for Imperialist War

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, but hardly new for the sinister David North, who was one of the prime authors of the Healyite cop-baiting smear job against the American reformist Socialist Workers Party, “Security and the Fourth International,” and who more recently appealed to the capitalist state to jail SWP member Mark Curtis, while lining up AFL-CIO bureaucrats to back this vicious frame-up. As part of his current pseudo-orthodoxy jag, North is putting his membership’s heads through yet another Healyite wringer as they build for a “Berlin Conference Against Colonialism and War” this month.

This is quite a name for a conference held by this crew. When the U.S. imperialists’ mad bombers were laying waste to Iraq, the central demand of the Northites was for a “national referendum on the gulf war in which all workers and youth of voting age would be able to take part” (Bulletin, 30 November 1990). We pointed out (and perhaps members of North’s Workers League could figure out for themselves) how this amounted to “democratic” support for the imperialist war:

“At the red-white-and-blue ‘antiwar’ demonstration in Washington, D.C. on January 26, the Northites marched under a banner reading: ‘Stop War Against Iraq – Let the People Vote on War.’ This is worse than the most abject social-pacifism, appealing to the imperialist butchers to give a more ‘democratic’ cover to their genocidal war against the Iraqi people. At the time, the American ‘people,’ in their overwhelming majority, supported Bush’s war!”
- WV No. 523, 29 March

North’s attempt to invoke Trotsky in defending this social-patriotic ploy is a slander against the Bolshevik leader, who consistently fought for class struggle against imperialist war. While the “ICFI” was peddling this line, the Spartacist League marched under the banner “Defeat U.S. Imperialism! Defend Iraq!” and the sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought for labor political strikes against the war.

So our advice to anyone who might be taken in by North’s latest shell game is to look carefully at the record of this dubious tendency which took well over £1 million from Arab bourgeois regimes; which set up the leader of the British miners union for persecution by the class enemy; which has systematically used the capitalist cops and courts against its opponents on the left; which extolled the execution of Iraqi Communist workers, and fingered opponents of the Ba’athist regime for bloody repression; which hailed feudalist Ayatollah Khomeini and Walesa’s Solidarność, the only union Ronald Reagan ever loved; which has supported fascistic Lithuanian nationalists and Yeltsinite “union” misleaders bought by the “AFL-CIA”; which has catered to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in America and the Fourth Reich Social Democrats in Germany …look carefully at all this and understand that the slimy reality of the Northites is not just what you read on paper. These people are capable of saying and doing anything.

Healyites Got Blood Money (1991)

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Workers Vanguard No. 517 (4 January 1991)

Healyites Got Blood Money

Incredibly, the anti-Communist repression in Iraq in the late 1970s was actually supported by one tendency which masquerades as Trotskyists, Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC), represented in the U.S. by David North’s Workers League. They alibied the Ba’athist executioners, declaring: “This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in Iraqi armed forces for the purpose of undermining the regime. It must accept the consequences” (Bulletin, 16 March 1979). The Healyites’ “justification” for the massacres of CPers was that “the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party of Iraq has played a hundredfold more progressive role in the Middle East than Stalinism.”

The Spartacist League had long described the Healy tendency with Lenin’s phrase, “political bandits.” In 1967 the Healyites became champions of a mythical “Arab Revolution,” a catch phrase to justify tailing after Arab nationalist despots. By the mid-’70s, they had become press agents for Libyan strongman Qaddafi, and then shameless apologists for anti-Communist terror in Iraq (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April 1979). The details of this sordid affair came out in 1985 following the spectacular implosion of international Healyism. Not only did Healy & Co. hail the extermination of Iraqi CPers, but they photographed protest demonstrations in Britain and turned over to the Iraqi embassy the pictures of Iraqi militants, fingering them for arrest, torture and possible death.

How was it possible for a group claiming to stand for “socialism” to support anti-working-class terror carried out by a capitalist government? The answer can be summed up in two words: blood money. A 16 December 1985 report by an IC Control Commission documented how their “founder leader” Healy and his cohorts like the actress Vanessa Red-grave had shuttled around Libya and various Near East countries — including both Iraq and Kuwait! — looking for and, receiving subsidies to pay for their expensive daily press in Britain. (It should be noted that the implosion of Healyism didn’t come about over taking the money, but only when the money ran out.) The Control Commission was only able to trace part of the money because no serious financial records were kept, but it published the amounts it was able to uncover, which were received from various countries over a seven-year period beginning in the mid-’70s:

Libya ........................£542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar ...........................50,000
Abu Dhabi ....................25,000
PLO ..............................19,997
Iraq .............................19,697
Unidentified
or other sources ........261,702
Total ....................£1,075,163

(reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)

In exchange for this largesse to keep their showpiece press alive, Healy & Co. filled their pages with grotesque paeans to these very same Arab dictators. At the same time as they were alibiing the murder of Iraqi CPers, here is a sampling of what the Healyites had to say about Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds:

“The Iraqis are slandered with the tale that the Ba’athists ‘shot thousands’ and
denied Kurdish independence....
“In a statement in [the Healyite] News Line the party leadership critically appraised the efforts of the Ba’ath Party to solve the Kurdish question.
“At the same time the [Healyite] WRP defended the Iraqi government from the CIA-organized forces of General Barzani.”
- Bulletin, 20 April 1979

Today David North cynically pretends that he and others of Healy’s loyal henchmen and toadies didn’t know that the “IC” was on the take. Yet we and others had denounced Qaddafi’s patronage of Healy for years! Moreover, in the factional blowout which followed Healy’s overthrow, British WRP leader Cliff Slaughter wrote a letter (14 January 1986) revealing that Australian Healyite Nick Beams had obtained tens of thousands of dollars from Near East regimes and had passed on the information to David North, who agreed not to raise the matter within the IC (see “On Baghdad, and Bagmen,” Australasian Spartacist No. 138, September-October 1990). Beware of these provocateurs for hire.