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?
Showing posts with label Alan Gelfand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Gelfand. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Northite Blood Money (1991)
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
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 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?…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.
“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)?”
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:_____________________________
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.
_______________________________
”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?”Tony Banda’s “we were all crooks” indictment of “Mr. Holier-Than-Thou” North captures the cynical quality of this falling-out among thieves.
— printed in Fourth International, Autumn 1986
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.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Why Should Anyone Believe David North? (1989)
Workers Vanguard No. 485 (13 October 1989)
What is the Workers League?
Why Should Anyone Believe David North?
In our article “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (Workers Vanguard, No. 480, 23 June) we asked: “...why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why?” North’s Workers League made an international campaign out of helping railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, into 25 years in prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. In its lame response to our article the WL’s Bulletin (14 July) protests, “But the issue is not whether you believe the Workers League.” Of course for them it can’t be. Anybody the least bit familiar with David North and his minions would have to be completely deranged to believe anything they say.
To frame the rest of its lies, the Bulletin claims that the Spartacist League maintained a “15-month silence” over the Curtis case. On the contrary — Workers Vanguard publicized the Curtis case in the Partisan Defense Committee column in our 1 July 1988 issue (No. 456). Here we noted that the PDC had sent a letter demanding the charges against Curtis be dropped and had contributed $100 to his defense. Others were urged to do the same. It is hard to imagine that the megalomaniac North missed this issue given that it also featured an article about himself entitled “Anatomy of a Healyite Russia Hater — David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son.”
Who Is Whose Agent?
The Bulletin sneers, “Spartacist even raises its eyebrows because a 1976 FBI index of leftist groups does not list the Workers League, as though this was some sort of necessary credential.” The FBI’s 1971 ADEX file was not some kind of “honor roll,” it was the government’s hit list of those targeted as “enemies” of America. War at Home, a recent pamphlet on “Covert Action Against U.S. Activists,” details the government’s dirty war against everyone from the Black Panthers to pacifist preachers and grandmothers. Yet somehow the Workers League, which advertises itself as the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository on the face of the planet of “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” didn’t get included in the FBI’s ADEX file — the “short list” of Americans these official hitmen had lined up in their sights.
How come? If the Workers League wasn’t on that list then where were they?
This is all the more suggestive given the Northites’ claim that the U.S. government took over the SWP in order to destroy... the Workers League. In “The Carleton Twelve,” a demented saga retailed as “proof” that SWP leader Jack Barnes and his coterie at a Midwest college were groomed by the FBI (in league with Joseph Hansen) to infiltrate the SWP, we read that “The State Department’s greatest fear was that Trotskyism, as embodied in the International Committee, would emerge as the revolutionary alternative to the Stalinist bureaucracies.” Well then, how is it. that the U.S. government wasn’t concerned about the Workers League when it drew up the ADEX list?
In a recent scurrilous piece, “The Militant and the Miners,” the Bulletin (29 September) names SWP members working in the coal fields and smears them as “part of an intelligence- gathering operation on behalf of the government and the coal bosses.” Why? Because they were hired! The fact that SWPers get industrial jobs at all, when they are members of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, is offered as proof positive that they are police agents.
In concocting this paranoid conspiracy theory against the SWP the Workers League presents reality through the prism of the McCarthyite I950s, i.e., when anyone with even vaguely socialist leanings was run out of their job. What About Ed Winn? He worked for the NY Transit Authority but ran as the Workers League’s candidate for president. By the WL’s measure this should make him a cop. And how did Mark Curtis end up getting thrown behind bars for 25 years when, according to the Bulletin, all SWP. members are either cops or police dupes? How come Curtis got jail and Ed Winn got a presidential candidacy?
Witnesses for the Prosecution
Then there’s the question of a state attorney from Des Moines, Iowa eagerly taking the line of argument from the Bulletin, a “communist” newspaper, to convict a leading member of the SWP. In our article we asked if it was simply “One More Coincidence?” that prosecuting attorney Catherine Thune used virtually the same words in her summation at the Curtis trial as those that appeared in the Bulletin article “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis” (5 August 1988). The Bulletin replies: “The statement was reported by the Des Moines Register, the principal daily paper in the city, and evidently read as well by the prosecutor, who incorporated the seven questions into her closing argument on September 9.” Doubtless the state’s attorney reads the daily newspaper. The problem is that the seven questions raised in the Workers League’s statement which were picked up by the prosecutor could not be found there.
The Des Moines Register did run substantial quotes from the WL’s “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis.” The 18 August 1988 issue featured a piece entitled “Socialist newspaper calls Curtis’ claims incredible” which highlighted quotes from the Bulletin arguing that Curtis could not possibly have been framed up by the cops. Here was an apologia for the Des Moines cops, who viciously beat Curtis, coming from a “socialist” newspaper. The question still remains as to how the prosecuting attorney got her hands on the whole text. Who gave it to her, the Workers League, or someone else?
The Bulletin claims it was “compelled” to write the Curtis article. which would become the script for the prosecution, because “the Workers League was seeking ballot status in Iowa for the first time... and the first question which many workers in Des Moines raised was the party’s attitude to the Curtis case.” This is odd. Previous to “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis,” one can find no mention of the Workers League seeking ballot status in Iowa. They didn’t take their election campaign to Des Moines until after the Curtis article had been published.
Besides, why are they protesting so much? This wouldn’t be the first time that David North and his Workers League have used the agencies of the capitalist state to “get” the SWP. There’s the matter of one Alan Gelfand. RWL agent, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP’s Los Angeles branch in 1977 after filing a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s suit against the FBI, based on the wild-eyed Healyite conspiracy theory (as told by Healy and co-authored by North) that the SWP was government-controlled.
Gelfand appealed to the courts of U.S. imperialism to reinstate him as a member, to review minutes, finances and other internal business of the SWP, and to remove members and leaders from the organization. Two of the key character witnesses in the Gelfand suit, which the Workers League boasted was a “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts,” were ex-cops from the notorious LAPD red squad.
Now they retail the testimony of two Des Moines cops against Mark Curtis as unimpeachable evidence. No answer in the Bulletin reply to our question: “What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were ‘The Truth’?” By the Workers League’s lights the cops, prosecuting attorney and court were the instruments of “workers justice” in jailing Curtis.
The “Heritage” North Defends
“What is the substance of this claim that the Workers League, and David North in particular, are ‘shadowy’ and ‘sinister’?” asks the Bulletin. How about this for starters. David, who calls himself “North,” made his political career out of loyally serving as the American stooge of Gerry Healy. He made his way to the top by co-authoring the “Security and the Fourth International” smear that SWP leaders were government agents. He carried out Healy’s orders to pursue the expensive Gelfand provocation. When Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi CPers by the Ba’athist regime, North’s Bulletin duly followed suit. The payoff for these crimes was millions in money from a variety of Middle East regimes including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi.
This whole dirty business hit the fan following the downfall of Healy’s WRP as accusations flew fast and furious between Healy’s former lieutenants. A Control Commission of the International Committee delegated to attempt to control the damage reported that the sum of 1,075,163 British pounds sterling had been received from an assortment of Near East colonels, sheiks and dictators.
Here it was revealed that among other services offered was an agreement with the Libyan government to provide intelligence on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the IC Control Commission noted the “strongly antisemitic undertones” of this agreement in which “the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” An ex-WRP member told the London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) that the Healyites had taken information from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya.
In return the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press, and a month after the agreement was signed the WRP’s daily News Line was launched. So much for the Bulletin’s protests that the Workers League is neither “shadowy” nor “sinister” because it has lots of campaigns and a weekly newspaper.
Of course, the findings of the IC Control Commission, an investigation carried out by the guilty, can only be the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless it was too hot for the Northites to publish in their press. Could it be that North was worried that his current colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labor League, would be exposed as not only complicit but on the front lines shoveling Arab gold into his section?
And let’s not forget one of North’s other former collaborators, Alex Mitchell. Mitchell, who worked with North on “Security and the Fourth International,” now plies his pen for the Sydney Sun Herald in columns attacking striking airline pilots. The Australian Healyites and the Northites call Mitchell a “literary prostitute.” Nothing new here — the Healyites have long been someone’s hired pen whether as PR agents for Mideast regimes or as the servants of Thatcher’s redbaiting, union-busting press. The Healyites’ “expose” of British miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s remark that Solidarność was “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure to knife the union on the eve of the 1984-85 coal strike.
And what about North himself? When Healy was overthrown by his conniving henchmen, North, who was among this number, tried to claim that he and he alone had fought the glorious “founder-leader” over “dialectics.” But the only difference North ever had with Healy was whether 2+2=4.67 or 4.83, and they compromised on 4.5. As for the oil money received from despotic Near East regimes, none of Healy’s epigones objected to the vicious betrayals perpetrated by their organization to get the money when it was coming in. On the contrary, as we point out in an article in the latest Spartacist (No. 43-44, Summer 1989), they “moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.”
This is the only “heritage” David North defends. Nonetheless even the practiced liars who write for the Bulletin were incapable of squaring this history with their fulsome defense of the “integrity” of the Workers League leader. Quotes taken from our article are cut to conveniently disappear any mention of Gerry Healy. But North was nothing if not loyal to Healy. (Now he says that Healy has “placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB.” If North really believes this maybe he’s worried that “glasnost” might go too far and fill in the “blank spaces” that would explain the Workers League.)
How did David come to call himself “North”? When his predecessor as WL leader, Tim Wohlforth, was getting the chop he whined, “I was even attacked as being an American pragmatist for purchasing an American rather than a British web offset press.” To parody the Bulletin, we could ask whether Healy named North after “Lord North” the British prime minister during the American War of Independence who proclaimed that he would see “America prostrate at our feet” — to curb against further excesses of “American pragmatism.” Or whether David christened himself “North” as a show of fealty to his British master.
As we noted in our article, the men North today denounces as “renegades” — i.e., Healy, Banda, Slaughter, Wohlforth — taught him everything he knows about practicing politics with no concern for honesty, principles or consistency. The Bulletin chooses not to respond to any of this. But for flavor look at what North himself wrote of one of his former mentors, Cliff Slaughter:
If one were to try to match the luminaries of the Healy cult with the more notorious Stalinists it would roughly translate into Gerry Healy as Joseph Stalin, Slaughter as Mikhail Suslov, Michael Banda as Georgi Malenkov, Wohlforth as William Z. Foster, Freddy Mazelis as Earl Browder. This leaves David North as a jumped-up, creepy little Lavrenti Beria — for now the only master of “Security.”
Bandits and Renegades
It is quite ironic that the Bulletin retails the Bolshevik Tendency’s grotesque slanders of the Spartacist League. The BT is a collection of embittered ex-members of our organization who trickled out of the SL under the early pressures of the Reagan years. Claiming political agreement with us, they needed an excuse to alibi their cowardly departure. So they “discovered” the “regime question” and their model was... Gerry Healy, a ready-made horrible example of megalomania, paranoia, gangsterism and unbridled greed. Now David North, who rode Healy’s coattails and helped build the cult of the loathsome “founder-leader,” happily quotes the BTs self-serving attempt to smear the SL with the colors of Healyism.
Of course the BT can supply no evidence for its slanders. Here’s one example of how they tried to handle it. In an article advertised as “SL and the WRP Split” (1917, Winter 1986) the BT, after noting the Healyites were notorious for beating up internal opponents, wrote, “This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge,” while claiming that “intimations of such appetites are increasingly common”! This is like asking “When are you going to start beating your wife?”! The added fascination with “finances” shared by the petty criminal mentality in the BT leadership has also lent something to its lurid tales about the SL.
It says a great deal about the unscrupulousness of North & Co. that they would attempt to pass off parodies of their own, only too true, revolting history as the “truth” about the SL. The Bulletin uses the BT’s lies to condemn our call to stop Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland, while now with the reins of government in its hands Solidarność has openly declared its drive to restore capitalism. They both denounce us for hailing the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against the darkest imperialist-backed feudal reaction. They equally find repugnant our work to bring the power of labor and blacks to bear in successful mobilizations that have stopped the fascists — the BT calls it “ghetto work,” the WL claims it is “an obsession with race.” They both look instead to the good offices of the racist labor bureaucracy.
Despite differences in style, and insofar as one can find any political logic to either group, the Workers League and the BT have some overriding things in common: a shared hatred of Soviet Russia, an abiding hostility to the black working class in America, a bloodthirsty, vicarious enthusiasm for the death of others and a distinct smell of provocation.
Political Struggle by “Other Means”...
Having failed through episodic and flawed political struggle to uproot the Pabloite revisionism that destroyed the Fourth International, the Healyites substituted their psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign, centered particularly on the charge that former SWP leader Joseph Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the GPU and the FBI who recruited Jack Barnes and a bunch of other students at Carleton College to run the SWP for the U.S. government. But while one might have to look elsewhere to explain the Northites, the Barnesites have had a linear political consistency since their inception.
They started as student cheerleaders for Castro and were recruited to the SWP, where their positions found an echo. By that time the SWP was pretty much a doddering and vulnerable organization. The brutally bureaucratic Barnes regime persisted until they had cleaned out all centrist vestiges and holdovers, i.e., any nominal Trotskyism, and completely took over.
As for the role of Joseph Hansen. Far from being the tool of both the Kremlin Stalinists and the U.S. imperialists in the destruction of the SWP, Hansen played the centrist lawyer who tried to keep a cover of “Trotskyist” orthodoxy on the galloping opportunism of the SWP. And far from brain-trusting Barnes, Hansen was the last obstacle to the full-fledged emergence of the anti- Trotskyist Barnes gang.
Barnes hasn’t changed his political positions since he joined and neither has the circle of people he was sufficiently able to also recruit. They have a central political core based on a radical program alien to Trotskyism — a Fidelista fan club of American agrarian-labor reformers. In contrast, the Northites have taken political positions all over the map as served their own convenient and grotesque opportunist ends.
In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term for a phenomenon like the Healyites: “political bandits” or, if you like, political pirates, i.e., who 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.
The mendacious practices and assertions of the Workers League (and the Bolshevik Tendency) say a great deal about the Stalinist-derived breakdown and perversion of the “far left” both in terms of proletarian morality and any connection with the class struggle. When it has suited their own episodic interests North, his past masters and present collaborators have turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, have served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of desperately striking unionists, and have generally crawled before alien class forces.
Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality North and his gang can and will say or do anything. And these are the guys that did their level best to get Mark Curtis 25 years.
What is the Workers League?
Why Should Anyone Believe David North?
In our article “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (Workers Vanguard, No. 480, 23 June) we asked: “...why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why?” North’s Workers League made an international campaign out of helping railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, into 25 years in prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. In its lame response to our article the WL’s Bulletin (14 July) protests, “But the issue is not whether you believe the Workers League.” Of course for them it can’t be. Anybody the least bit familiar with David North and his minions would have to be completely deranged to believe anything they say.
To frame the rest of its lies, the Bulletin claims that the Spartacist League maintained a “15-month silence” over the Curtis case. On the contrary — Workers Vanguard publicized the Curtis case in the Partisan Defense Committee column in our 1 July 1988 issue (No. 456). Here we noted that the PDC had sent a letter demanding the charges against Curtis be dropped and had contributed $100 to his defense. Others were urged to do the same. It is hard to imagine that the megalomaniac North missed this issue given that it also featured an article about himself entitled “Anatomy of a Healyite Russia Hater — David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son.”
Who Is Whose Agent?
The Bulletin sneers, “Spartacist even raises its eyebrows because a 1976 FBI index of leftist groups does not list the Workers League, as though this was some sort of necessary credential.” The FBI’s 1971 ADEX file was not some kind of “honor roll,” it was the government’s hit list of those targeted as “enemies” of America. War at Home, a recent pamphlet on “Covert Action Against U.S. Activists,” details the government’s dirty war against everyone from the Black Panthers to pacifist preachers and grandmothers. Yet somehow the Workers League, which advertises itself as the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository on the face of the planet of “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” didn’t get included in the FBI’s ADEX file — the “short list” of Americans these official hitmen had lined up in their sights.
How come? If the Workers League wasn’t on that list then where were they?
This is all the more suggestive given the Northites’ claim that the U.S. government took over the SWP in order to destroy... the Workers League. In “The Carleton Twelve,” a demented saga retailed as “proof” that SWP leader Jack Barnes and his coterie at a Midwest college were groomed by the FBI (in league with Joseph Hansen) to infiltrate the SWP, we read that “The State Department’s greatest fear was that Trotskyism, as embodied in the International Committee, would emerge as the revolutionary alternative to the Stalinist bureaucracies.” Well then, how is it. that the U.S. government wasn’t concerned about the Workers League when it drew up the ADEX list?
In a recent scurrilous piece, “The Militant and the Miners,” the Bulletin (29 September) names SWP members working in the coal fields and smears them as “part of an intelligence- gathering operation on behalf of the government and the coal bosses.” Why? Because they were hired! The fact that SWPers get industrial jobs at all, when they are members of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, is offered as proof positive that they are police agents.
In concocting this paranoid conspiracy theory against the SWP the Workers League presents reality through the prism of the McCarthyite I950s, i.e., when anyone with even vaguely socialist leanings was run out of their job. What About Ed Winn? He worked for the NY Transit Authority but ran as the Workers League’s candidate for president. By the WL’s measure this should make him a cop. And how did Mark Curtis end up getting thrown behind bars for 25 years when, according to the Bulletin, all SWP. members are either cops or police dupes? How come Curtis got jail and Ed Winn got a presidential candidacy?
Witnesses for the Prosecution
Then there’s the question of a state attorney from Des Moines, Iowa eagerly taking the line of argument from the Bulletin, a “communist” newspaper, to convict a leading member of the SWP. In our article we asked if it was simply “One More Coincidence?” that prosecuting attorney Catherine Thune used virtually the same words in her summation at the Curtis trial as those that appeared in the Bulletin article “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis” (5 August 1988). The Bulletin replies: “The statement was reported by the Des Moines Register, the principal daily paper in the city, and evidently read as well by the prosecutor, who incorporated the seven questions into her closing argument on September 9.” Doubtless the state’s attorney reads the daily newspaper. The problem is that the seven questions raised in the Workers League’s statement which were picked up by the prosecutor could not be found there.
The Des Moines Register did run substantial quotes from the WL’s “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis.” The 18 August 1988 issue featured a piece entitled “Socialist newspaper calls Curtis’ claims incredible” which highlighted quotes from the Bulletin arguing that Curtis could not possibly have been framed up by the cops. Here was an apologia for the Des Moines cops, who viciously beat Curtis, coming from a “socialist” newspaper. The question still remains as to how the prosecuting attorney got her hands on the whole text. Who gave it to her, the Workers League, or someone else?
The Bulletin claims it was “compelled” to write the Curtis article. which would become the script for the prosecution, because “the Workers League was seeking ballot status in Iowa for the first time... and the first question which many workers in Des Moines raised was the party’s attitude to the Curtis case.” This is odd. Previous to “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis,” one can find no mention of the Workers League seeking ballot status in Iowa. They didn’t take their election campaign to Des Moines until after the Curtis article had been published.
Besides, why are they protesting so much? This wouldn’t be the first time that David North and his Workers League have used the agencies of the capitalist state to “get” the SWP. There’s the matter of one Alan Gelfand. RWL agent, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP’s Los Angeles branch in 1977 after filing a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s suit against the FBI, based on the wild-eyed Healyite conspiracy theory (as told by Healy and co-authored by North) that the SWP was government-controlled.
Gelfand appealed to the courts of U.S. imperialism to reinstate him as a member, to review minutes, finances and other internal business of the SWP, and to remove members and leaders from the organization. Two of the key character witnesses in the Gelfand suit, which the Workers League boasted was a “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts,” were ex-cops from the notorious LAPD red squad.
Now they retail the testimony of two Des Moines cops against Mark Curtis as unimpeachable evidence. No answer in the Bulletin reply to our question: “What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were ‘The Truth’?” By the Workers League’s lights the cops, prosecuting attorney and court were the instruments of “workers justice” in jailing Curtis.
The “Heritage” North Defends
“What is the substance of this claim that the Workers League, and David North in particular, are ‘shadowy’ and ‘sinister’?” asks the Bulletin. How about this for starters. David, who calls himself “North,” made his political career out of loyally serving as the American stooge of Gerry Healy. He made his way to the top by co-authoring the “Security and the Fourth International” smear that SWP leaders were government agents. He carried out Healy’s orders to pursue the expensive Gelfand provocation. When Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi CPers by the Ba’athist regime, North’s Bulletin duly followed suit. The payoff for these crimes was millions in money from a variety of Middle East regimes including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi.
This whole dirty business hit the fan following the downfall of Healy’s WRP as accusations flew fast and furious between Healy’s former lieutenants. A Control Commission of the International Committee delegated to attempt to control the damage reported that the sum of 1,075,163 British pounds sterling had been received from an assortment of Near East colonels, sheiks and dictators.
Here it was revealed that among other services offered was an agreement with the Libyan government to provide intelligence on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the IC Control Commission noted the “strongly antisemitic undertones” of this agreement in which “the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” An ex-WRP member told the London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) that the Healyites had taken information from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya.
In return the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press, and a month after the agreement was signed the WRP’s daily News Line was launched. So much for the Bulletin’s protests that the Workers League is neither “shadowy” nor “sinister” because it has lots of campaigns and a weekly newspaper.
Of course, the findings of the IC Control Commission, an investigation carried out by the guilty, can only be the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless it was too hot for the Northites to publish in their press. Could it be that North was worried that his current colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labor League, would be exposed as not only complicit but on the front lines shoveling Arab gold into his section?
And let’s not forget one of North’s other former collaborators, Alex Mitchell. Mitchell, who worked with North on “Security and the Fourth International,” now plies his pen for the Sydney Sun Herald in columns attacking striking airline pilots. The Australian Healyites and the Northites call Mitchell a “literary prostitute.” Nothing new here — the Healyites have long been someone’s hired pen whether as PR agents for Mideast regimes or as the servants of Thatcher’s redbaiting, union-busting press. The Healyites’ “expose” of British miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s remark that Solidarność was “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure to knife the union on the eve of the 1984-85 coal strike.
And what about North himself? When Healy was overthrown by his conniving henchmen, North, who was among this number, tried to claim that he and he alone had fought the glorious “founder-leader” over “dialectics.” But the only difference North ever had with Healy was whether 2+2=4.67 or 4.83, and they compromised on 4.5. As for the oil money received from despotic Near East regimes, none of Healy’s epigones objected to the vicious betrayals perpetrated by their organization to get the money when it was coming in. On the contrary, as we point out in an article in the latest Spartacist (No. 43-44, Summer 1989), they “moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.”
This is the only “heritage” David North defends. Nonetheless even the practiced liars who write for the Bulletin were incapable of squaring this history with their fulsome defense of the “integrity” of the Workers League leader. Quotes taken from our article are cut to conveniently disappear any mention of Gerry Healy. But North was nothing if not loyal to Healy. (Now he says that Healy has “placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB.” If North really believes this maybe he’s worried that “glasnost” might go too far and fill in the “blank spaces” that would explain the Workers League.)
How did David come to call himself “North”? When his predecessor as WL leader, Tim Wohlforth, was getting the chop he whined, “I was even attacked as being an American pragmatist for purchasing an American rather than a British web offset press.” To parody the Bulletin, we could ask whether Healy named North after “Lord North” the British prime minister during the American War of Independence who proclaimed that he would see “America prostrate at our feet” — to curb against further excesses of “American pragmatism.” Or whether David christened himself “North” as a show of fealty to his British master.
As we noted in our article, the men North today denounces as “renegades” — i.e., Healy, Banda, Slaughter, Wohlforth — taught him everything he knows about practicing politics with no concern for honesty, principles or consistency. The Bulletin chooses not to respond to any of this. But for flavor look at what North himself wrote of one of his former mentors, Cliff Slaughter:
“Slaughter, a consummate cynic and hypocrite, epitomizes in his political and personal life all that is corrupt and perverse in the British petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. He is, therefore, a specialist in gathering into his net the most degenerate human specimens produced by this decadent social milieu: from hallucinating journalists, alcoholic university professors, and aging film directors of unfulfilled promise to neurotic middle class ladies who blame Trotskyism for their unsuccessful love affairs and failed marriages. “Yet it was Slaughter who the Northites once held up as the pre-eminent authority on “Security and the Fourth International,” who Alan Gelfand included on his list of witnesses as “an expert.” Now, it is the obviously twisted North who is calling Mark Curtis a “depraved rapist”!
— Bulletin, 9 December 1988
If one were to try to match the luminaries of the Healy cult with the more notorious Stalinists it would roughly translate into Gerry Healy as Joseph Stalin, Slaughter as Mikhail Suslov, Michael Banda as Georgi Malenkov, Wohlforth as William Z. Foster, Freddy Mazelis as Earl Browder. This leaves David North as a jumped-up, creepy little Lavrenti Beria — for now the only master of “Security.”
Bandits and Renegades
It is quite ironic that the Bulletin retails the Bolshevik Tendency’s grotesque slanders of the Spartacist League. The BT is a collection of embittered ex-members of our organization who trickled out of the SL under the early pressures of the Reagan years. Claiming political agreement with us, they needed an excuse to alibi their cowardly departure. So they “discovered” the “regime question” and their model was... Gerry Healy, a ready-made horrible example of megalomania, paranoia, gangsterism and unbridled greed. Now David North, who rode Healy’s coattails and helped build the cult of the loathsome “founder-leader,” happily quotes the BTs self-serving attempt to smear the SL with the colors of Healyism.
Of course the BT can supply no evidence for its slanders. Here’s one example of how they tried to handle it. In an article advertised as “SL and the WRP Split” (1917, Winter 1986) the BT, after noting the Healyites were notorious for beating up internal opponents, wrote, “This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge,” while claiming that “intimations of such appetites are increasingly common”! This is like asking “When are you going to start beating your wife?”! The added fascination with “finances” shared by the petty criminal mentality in the BT leadership has also lent something to its lurid tales about the SL.
It says a great deal about the unscrupulousness of North & Co. that they would attempt to pass off parodies of their own, only too true, revolting history as the “truth” about the SL. The Bulletin uses the BT’s lies to condemn our call to stop Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland, while now with the reins of government in its hands Solidarność has openly declared its drive to restore capitalism. They both denounce us for hailing the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against the darkest imperialist-backed feudal reaction. They equally find repugnant our work to bring the power of labor and blacks to bear in successful mobilizations that have stopped the fascists — the BT calls it “ghetto work,” the WL claims it is “an obsession with race.” They both look instead to the good offices of the racist labor bureaucracy.
Despite differences in style, and insofar as one can find any political logic to either group, the Workers League and the BT have some overriding things in common: a shared hatred of Soviet Russia, an abiding hostility to the black working class in America, a bloodthirsty, vicarious enthusiasm for the death of others and a distinct smell of provocation.
Political Struggle by “Other Means”...
Having failed through episodic and flawed political struggle to uproot the Pabloite revisionism that destroyed the Fourth International, the Healyites substituted their psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign, centered particularly on the charge that former SWP leader Joseph Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the GPU and the FBI who recruited Jack Barnes and a bunch of other students at Carleton College to run the SWP for the U.S. government. But while one might have to look elsewhere to explain the Northites, the Barnesites have had a linear political consistency since their inception.
They started as student cheerleaders for Castro and were recruited to the SWP, where their positions found an echo. By that time the SWP was pretty much a doddering and vulnerable organization. The brutally bureaucratic Barnes regime persisted until they had cleaned out all centrist vestiges and holdovers, i.e., any nominal Trotskyism, and completely took over.
As for the role of Joseph Hansen. Far from being the tool of both the Kremlin Stalinists and the U.S. imperialists in the destruction of the SWP, Hansen played the centrist lawyer who tried to keep a cover of “Trotskyist” orthodoxy on the galloping opportunism of the SWP. And far from brain-trusting Barnes, Hansen was the last obstacle to the full-fledged emergence of the anti- Trotskyist Barnes gang.
Barnes hasn’t changed his political positions since he joined and neither has the circle of people he was sufficiently able to also recruit. They have a central political core based on a radical program alien to Trotskyism — a Fidelista fan club of American agrarian-labor reformers. In contrast, the Northites have taken political positions all over the map as served their own convenient and grotesque opportunist ends.
In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term for a phenomenon like the Healyites: “political bandits” or, if you like, political pirates, i.e., who 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.
The mendacious practices and assertions of the Workers League (and the Bolshevik Tendency) say a great deal about the Stalinist-derived breakdown and perversion of the “far left” both in terms of proletarian morality and any connection with the class struggle. When it has suited their own episodic interests North, his past masters and present collaborators have turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, have served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of desperately striking unionists, and have generally crawled before alien class forces.
Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality North and his gang can and will say or do anything. And these are the guys that did their level best to get Mark Curtis 25 years.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
David North and the Law (1987)
Workers Vanguard No. 430 (12 June 1987)
More Healyite than Healy
David North and the Law
For over 20 years the gang of political bandits led by Gerry Healy shamelessly used the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and bankrupt political opponents within the workers movement. Now the American Workers League’s David North, who rushed to claim this heritage as his own after his former British boss Healy was ousted a couple of years ago, is squealing like a stuck pig over how “anti-communist” appeals to the courts will “undermine democratic rights.” Why? Because it looks like the WL is going to get saddled with the court costs in one of the Healyites’ most infamous lawsuits: the sinister case of Alan Gelfand vs. the Socialist Workers Party.
An agent provocateur of the Workers League, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP in 1979. Then, backed and bankrolled by North & Co., Gelfand sued the SWP in federal court claiming that his expulsion was the work of U.S. government agents in “control” of the organization. Citing the Healyites’ notorious “Security and the Fourth International” slanders that central leaders of the SWP were agents of the FBI and the Stalinist secret police, Gelfand demanded that the court reinstate him as a member and “remove” particular SWP leaders and members from the party. As well as appealing to the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, the Northites also called on the court to pry into the SWP’s minutes, finances – in short, every aspect of its functioning! Two key “character” witnesses for the Healyite prosecution were former cops from the notorious LAPD red squad, the Public Disorder Intelligence Division.
As we wrote in “The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand - Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards”: “It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to ‘regulate’ the internal life of working-class organizations” (WV No. 321, 14 January 1983). While the court has yet to come down with a final decision, the SWP has asked for an interim settlement of $101,000 for legal costs. This has North screaming foul, declaring that “The actions taken by the SWP since the trial could only be taken by police agents who are deliberately seeking to undermine democratic rights through legal actions which have far-ranging implications” (Bulletin, 3 March). So what does that make David North who boasts that he alone went all the way with Gelfand in his obscene appeal to the agencies of the capitalist state to police the left and labor movement? Whose agent is he?
A Calculus of Marxist Decency
Opposition to the use of the bosses’ courts within the workers movement is among the most elementary of class principles. It is axiomatic for Marxists that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. Any worker who has ever faced the strikebreaking force of the courts and cops knows this. David North wouldn’t know the class line if he tripped over it, as he frequently does – because more often than not the Healyites have put themselves on the wrong side of it in the pursuit of their own advantage. In their two-volume opus on the Gelfand suit, the Workers League brags that this was a how-to “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts.” But now North and Gelfand are yelping that the same courts they used against the SWP could make them pay.
When the forces of capitalist “law and order” suit their convenience the Healyites have been willing and even wanton in using them. But when they’re on the receiving end, as in the case of the SWP motion (which we hardly condone), like a dying man who finds religion the Healyites suddenly discover class principles. Back in ‘83, in the midst of suing a British leftist newspaper, Socialist Organiser, Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party cynically announced that “the principled policy of the WRP” was to “close ranks in defence” of any “section of the labour movement” under attack by the class enemy! The WRP, you see, was begging for left support against a BBC program reporting on their financial ties to a variety of “Third World” Arab nationalist regimes.
Running to the state against their political opponents became the stock in trade of Healyism two decades ago with the vicious beating of Ernie Tate. In 1966, Tate was set upon by Healy’s goons outside a Healyite meeting in London for distributing SWP leader Joseph Hansen’s pamphlet “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International.” The pamphlet documented the trumped-up expulsion of Spartacist from the 1966 London conference of Healy’s International Committee.
When Tate circulated a letter of protest against this hooliganism the WRP sued him and threatened libel suits against left-wing publications in Britain who printed the letter! In 1975 the Healyites’ well-heeled movie star “angel” Vanessa Redgrave dragged former WRP member Alan Thornett through the courts over an outstanding personal loan.
In 1981, again in the name of Healy’s celebrity Redgrave, the WRP brought their libel suit against Socialist Organiser editor Sean Matgamna after he published a scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the suit took no objection to Matgamna’s charge that the Healyites were the paid agents of Libya’s Qaddafi. When the WRP went on a campaign against the BBC for reporting the same charges, Matgamna coyly asked, “Will the WRP Sue the BBC?” Of course they didn’t. A year later, Healy’s “expose” of British miners leader Arthur Scargill for criticizing Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure on the eve of the 1984-85 miners strike through the redbaiting, hysterically anti-Scargill Fleet Street gutter press.
“Security” and Healyism
For over a decade the Healyites plied their loathsome “Security and the Fourth International” campaign aimed in particular at veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen who was slandered as an accomplice in the Stalinist GPU murder of Trotsky. Echoing the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of his “own people,” the “Security” slander campaign was an attack on the revolutionary heritage of American Trotskyism. If Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the FBI and the GPU, then why not SWP founder James P. Cannon? Or for that matter Trotsky himself?
Hansen, a skilled polemicist, had tweaked Healy’s tail on more than one occasion. But the “Security” campaign was more than just a vendetta. It embodied the whole method of Healyism. The purpose of these cascading wild-eyed and paranoid lies was to keep the membership politically and morally straitjacketed, not to mention scared witless. Either you accept and defend the lies – all of them – or you yourself might be denounced as an agent of the CIA, FBI, GPU,... Indeed, David North’s road to power in the Workers League was paved by the termination of Healy’s former American toady, Tim Wohlforth, whose companion was framed as a CIA agent. And it was as the accomplice in and a main mouthpiece for “Security” that North won his spurs as Healy’s new American lackey.
Two years ago the political whorehouse that Gerry Healy built in his own image, the so-called “International Committee,” came crashing down when the self-declared “founder-leader” was ousted through the intrigues of his lieutenants (including North). With the lid blown off the Healyite rotting garbage can, the whole sordid history of physical violence against members and the scandalous pursuit of Arab capitalist gold was openly admitted (indeed Cliff Slaughter alleged that the WRP had acted as fingermen for the Iraqi Ba’athist regime against supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party).
The latest installment in this despicable saga is the jailing of Phil Penn, a founding member of the WRP and Healy’s former chauffeur. Penn, who went with the Slaughter wing, was thrown behind bars for four months on charges of assault brought by the Healy-Torrance wing (now sans Healy, who has split). Penn says he was assaulted by four of Healy-Torrance’s goons. We can’t claim to know what transpired in the incident. All sides have been well trained in the Healy school of gangsterism, brutal organizational practices and cynical lies to cover their tracks.
The Slaughterites argue in a letter protesting the jailing of Penn that “no organization calling itself socialist would collaborate with the police against members of the labour movement.” True enough, but for 25 years as Healy’s mouthpiece Slaughter was doing exactly that. According to North’s Bulletin, Slaughter was “among the leading protagonists and most forceful advocates” of the smear job on Hansen and offered to testify as a witness on Gelfand’s behalf. Since the WRP split, Slaughter has shamefacedly disavowed the “Security and the Fl” and the Gelfand case, claiming they were “frameups.” For his part North has clung to every despicable hallmark of Healyism.
David North loves the law. Last year, after our special issue of English-language Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) on “Healyism Implodes,” we found ourselves vilified at great length in a 14-part series in North’s Bulletin. The first installment defended Hormel strike leaders for filing a court suit against the scabherding International, coyly commenting, “We will consider the Spartacist position on the use of the capitalist courts in a later article” (Bulletin, I April 1986). As we noted in response, the Northites “will be hard put indeed to consider the elementary labor principle that the bosses’ courts are not the vehicle for solving disputes in the labor movement” (“Lord of the Fleas,” WV No. 412, 26 September 1986). And of course they didn’t. It’s not just the courts, the Workers League also loves the cops. In 1971 the WL championed the New York City cop “strike,” aimed at increasing bonapartist terror against blacks and working people!
For more than 20 years, the Spartacist League has exposed the Healyites’ crimes against the workers movement. When Ernie Tate was beaten we raised the biggest outcry we could, printing his account and appeal for workers democracy together with an editorial, “Oust Healy” (Spartacist No. 9, January-February 1967). We campaigned against the “Security” smear campaign, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” and defending Joseph Hansen as an authentic revisionist. When we first heard of the sinister Gelfand suit, which the SWP shamefully kept under wraps for close to four years, we immediately sought to defend the SWP and the workers movement against this criminal provocation. The SWP refused our appeal for more information. Now they’re appealing to the judge for retribution, with all the cringing faith in the capitalist courts of their “Watersuit” against the FBI where the SWP sought a legal license for its quirky brand of reformism.
For David North to rail against the SWP takes real chutzpah. In relation to any Marxist proletarian principles, the Healyites have all the programmatic and moral stance of a revolving door. Or as comrade Trotsky put it in speaking of the “morals” of the social democrats, liberals and anarchists who railed against Bolshevik “amoralism”:
Insofar as the Workers League can claim a coherent political core, it is virulent anti-Sovietism and gross capitulation to the worst elements of the pro-imperialist, racist labor tops. As we concluded our article “Healyism Implodes”:
* * *
"Resolution on Security and the Fourth International
The 8th Congress of the WRP, held in Hammersmith, 8th and 8th of February 1888, reaffirms Its support for the ICFI investigation, Security and the Fourth International.
We reject the attacks by the Bands-Slaughter group, who no longer represent the British section of the Fourth international, and who are attacking Security and the Fourth international, as part of their continuing attack on the ICFI.
We call on the ICFI to continue the fight to expose the role of state agents in the workers movement throughout the world as a central task in the building of the revolutionary leadership internationally.
This congress sends its warmest fraternal greetings and support to Alan Gelfand for his struggle to expose the state agents within the SWP In America.
In this struggle, he doesn’t act as an individual, but represents the struggle of all workers for their democratic rights."
More Healyite than Healy
David North and the Law
For over 20 years the gang of political bandits led by Gerry Healy shamelessly used the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and bankrupt political opponents within the workers movement. Now the American Workers League’s David North, who rushed to claim this heritage as his own after his former British boss Healy was ousted a couple of years ago, is squealing like a stuck pig over how “anti-communist” appeals to the courts will “undermine democratic rights.” Why? Because it looks like the WL is going to get saddled with the court costs in one of the Healyites’ most infamous lawsuits: the sinister case of Alan Gelfand vs. the Socialist Workers Party.
An agent provocateur of the Workers League, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP in 1979. Then, backed and bankrolled by North & Co., Gelfand sued the SWP in federal court claiming that his expulsion was the work of U.S. government agents in “control” of the organization. Citing the Healyites’ notorious “Security and the Fourth International” slanders that central leaders of the SWP were agents of the FBI and the Stalinist secret police, Gelfand demanded that the court reinstate him as a member and “remove” particular SWP leaders and members from the party. As well as appealing to the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, the Northites also called on the court to pry into the SWP’s minutes, finances – in short, every aspect of its functioning! Two key “character” witnesses for the Healyite prosecution were former cops from the notorious LAPD red squad, the Public Disorder Intelligence Division.
As we wrote in “The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand - Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards”: “It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to ‘regulate’ the internal life of working-class organizations” (WV No. 321, 14 January 1983). While the court has yet to come down with a final decision, the SWP has asked for an interim settlement of $101,000 for legal costs. This has North screaming foul, declaring that “The actions taken by the SWP since the trial could only be taken by police agents who are deliberately seeking to undermine democratic rights through legal actions which have far-ranging implications” (Bulletin, 3 March). So what does that make David North who boasts that he alone went all the way with Gelfand in his obscene appeal to the agencies of the capitalist state to police the left and labor movement? Whose agent is he?
A Calculus of Marxist Decency
Opposition to the use of the bosses’ courts within the workers movement is among the most elementary of class principles. It is axiomatic for Marxists that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. Any worker who has ever faced the strikebreaking force of the courts and cops knows this. David North wouldn’t know the class line if he tripped over it, as he frequently does – because more often than not the Healyites have put themselves on the wrong side of it in the pursuit of their own advantage. In their two-volume opus on the Gelfand suit, the Workers League brags that this was a how-to “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts.” But now North and Gelfand are yelping that the same courts they used against the SWP could make them pay.
When the forces of capitalist “law and order” suit their convenience the Healyites have been willing and even wanton in using them. But when they’re on the receiving end, as in the case of the SWP motion (which we hardly condone), like a dying man who finds religion the Healyites suddenly discover class principles. Back in ‘83, in the midst of suing a British leftist newspaper, Socialist Organiser, Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party cynically announced that “the principled policy of the WRP” was to “close ranks in defence” of any “section of the labour movement” under attack by the class enemy! The WRP, you see, was begging for left support against a BBC program reporting on their financial ties to a variety of “Third World” Arab nationalist regimes.
Running to the state against their political opponents became the stock in trade of Healyism two decades ago with the vicious beating of Ernie Tate. In 1966, Tate was set upon by Healy’s goons outside a Healyite meeting in London for distributing SWP leader Joseph Hansen’s pamphlet “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International.” The pamphlet documented the trumped-up expulsion of Spartacist from the 1966 London conference of Healy’s International Committee.
When Tate circulated a letter of protest against this hooliganism the WRP sued him and threatened libel suits against left-wing publications in Britain who printed the letter! In 1975 the Healyites’ well-heeled movie star “angel” Vanessa Redgrave dragged former WRP member Alan Thornett through the courts over an outstanding personal loan.
In 1981, again in the name of Healy’s celebrity Redgrave, the WRP brought their libel suit against Socialist Organiser editor Sean Matgamna after he published a scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the suit took no objection to Matgamna’s charge that the Healyites were the paid agents of Libya’s Qaddafi. When the WRP went on a campaign against the BBC for reporting the same charges, Matgamna coyly asked, “Will the WRP Sue the BBC?” Of course they didn’t. A year later, Healy’s “expose” of British miners leader Arthur Scargill for criticizing Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure on the eve of the 1984-85 miners strike through the redbaiting, hysterically anti-Scargill Fleet Street gutter press.
“Security” and Healyism
For over a decade the Healyites plied their loathsome “Security and the Fourth International” campaign aimed in particular at veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen who was slandered as an accomplice in the Stalinist GPU murder of Trotsky. Echoing the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of his “own people,” the “Security” slander campaign was an attack on the revolutionary heritage of American Trotskyism. If Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the FBI and the GPU, then why not SWP founder James P. Cannon? Or for that matter Trotsky himself?
Hansen, a skilled polemicist, had tweaked Healy’s tail on more than one occasion. But the “Security” campaign was more than just a vendetta. It embodied the whole method of Healyism. The purpose of these cascading wild-eyed and paranoid lies was to keep the membership politically and morally straitjacketed, not to mention scared witless. Either you accept and defend the lies – all of them – or you yourself might be denounced as an agent of the CIA, FBI, GPU,... Indeed, David North’s road to power in the Workers League was paved by the termination of Healy’s former American toady, Tim Wohlforth, whose companion was framed as a CIA agent. And it was as the accomplice in and a main mouthpiece for “Security” that North won his spurs as Healy’s new American lackey.
Two years ago the political whorehouse that Gerry Healy built in his own image, the so-called “International Committee,” came crashing down when the self-declared “founder-leader” was ousted through the intrigues of his lieutenants (including North). With the lid blown off the Healyite rotting garbage can, the whole sordid history of physical violence against members and the scandalous pursuit of Arab capitalist gold was openly admitted (indeed Cliff Slaughter alleged that the WRP had acted as fingermen for the Iraqi Ba’athist regime against supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party).
The latest installment in this despicable saga is the jailing of Phil Penn, a founding member of the WRP and Healy’s former chauffeur. Penn, who went with the Slaughter wing, was thrown behind bars for four months on charges of assault brought by the Healy-Torrance wing (now sans Healy, who has split). Penn says he was assaulted by four of Healy-Torrance’s goons. We can’t claim to know what transpired in the incident. All sides have been well trained in the Healy school of gangsterism, brutal organizational practices and cynical lies to cover their tracks.
The Slaughterites argue in a letter protesting the jailing of Penn that “no organization calling itself socialist would collaborate with the police against members of the labour movement.” True enough, but for 25 years as Healy’s mouthpiece Slaughter was doing exactly that. According to North’s Bulletin, Slaughter was “among the leading protagonists and most forceful advocates” of the smear job on Hansen and offered to testify as a witness on Gelfand’s behalf. Since the WRP split, Slaughter has shamefacedly disavowed the “Security and the Fl” and the Gelfand case, claiming they were “frameups.” For his part North has clung to every despicable hallmark of Healyism.
David North loves the law. Last year, after our special issue of English-language Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) on “Healyism Implodes,” we found ourselves vilified at great length in a 14-part series in North’s Bulletin. The first installment defended Hormel strike leaders for filing a court suit against the scabherding International, coyly commenting, “We will consider the Spartacist position on the use of the capitalist courts in a later article” (Bulletin, I April 1986). As we noted in response, the Northites “will be hard put indeed to consider the elementary labor principle that the bosses’ courts are not the vehicle for solving disputes in the labor movement” (“Lord of the Fleas,” WV No. 412, 26 September 1986). And of course they didn’t. It’s not just the courts, the Workers League also loves the cops. In 1971 the WL championed the New York City cop “strike,” aimed at increasing bonapartist terror against blacks and working people!
For more than 20 years, the Spartacist League has exposed the Healyites’ crimes against the workers movement. When Ernie Tate was beaten we raised the biggest outcry we could, printing his account and appeal for workers democracy together with an editorial, “Oust Healy” (Spartacist No. 9, January-February 1967). We campaigned against the “Security” smear campaign, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” and defending Joseph Hansen as an authentic revisionist. When we first heard of the sinister Gelfand suit, which the SWP shamefully kept under wraps for close to four years, we immediately sought to defend the SWP and the workers movement against this criminal provocation. The SWP refused our appeal for more information. Now they’re appealing to the judge for retribution, with all the cringing faith in the capitalist courts of their “Watersuit” against the FBI where the SWP sought a legal license for its quirky brand of reformism.
For David North to rail against the SWP takes real chutzpah. In relation to any Marxist proletarian principles, the Healyites have all the programmatic and moral stance of a revolving door. Or as comrade Trotsky put it in speaking of the “morals” of the social democrats, liberals and anarchists who railed against Bolshevik “amoralism”:
“...they are ready for any baseness – rejection of convictions, perfidy, betrayal – in the name of ambition or cupidity. In the holy sphere of personal interests the end to them justifies any means. But it is precisely because of this that they require special codes of morals, durable, and at the same time elastic, like good suspenders”To the pursuit of the Healyites’ base interests, rank opportunism and financial advantage correspond base means – like dragging leftists through the capitalist courts and other eager forays across the class line. Their support for the mythical “Arab Revolution,” beginning over the 1967 Mideast war, provided an elastic enough concept for the Healyites to fill their pockets and to embrace any act by any of the colonels, sheiks and oil-rich strong men according to who was dispensing the patronage. He who pays the piper calls the tune. And in 1979 the Healyites grotesquely heralded the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, a monstrous crime against the international working class. Later the Healyites supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in its war against Iraq, as they have backed every anti-Soviet force on the perimeter of the USSR – from Mao’s Red Guards to the CIA-backed mullahs in Afghanistan to the Solidarność failed counterrevolution in Poland. This is all part of the “heritage” which North defends.
(Their Morals and Ours).
Insofar as the Workers League can claim a coherent political core, it is virulent anti-Sovietism and gross capitulation to the worst elements of the pro-imperialist, racist labor tops. As we concluded our article “Healyism Implodes”:
“‘Morality’ for Marxists is inextricably tied to program. The Spartacists’ unwavering adherence to revolutionary Trotskyism – our genuine, concrete defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and against the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy, our commitment to building an international party of proletarian revolution – this has been our political compass. From that also comes a certain superstructure, a certain morality.”Anything goes under the mantle of Healyism, and North, a Healyite’s Healyite, could go anywhere. This gang has traversed the class line so often that who or what they are is forever dubious. On those rare occasions when they talk of principles and feign Marxist orthodoxy, it’s time to “hold fast to the opposites” – to borrow a page from Healy’s shell game “dialectics” – and above all hold on to your wallet.
Spartacist, No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86
* * *
Bulletin– 11 February 1986:
"Resolution on Security and the Fourth International
The 8th Congress of the WRP, held in Hammersmith, 8th and 8th of February 1888, reaffirms Its support for the ICFI investigation, Security and the Fourth International.
We reject the attacks by the Bands-Slaughter group, who no longer represent the British section of the Fourth international, and who are attacking Security and the Fourth international, as part of their continuing attack on the ICFI.
We call on the ICFI to continue the fight to expose the role of state agents in the workers movement throughout the world as a central task in the building of the revolutionary leadership internationally.
This congress sends its warmest fraternal greetings and support to Alan Gelfand for his struggle to expose the state agents within the SWP In America.
In this struggle, he doesn’t act as an individual, but represents the struggle of all workers for their democratic rights."
Bulletin's Hormel Lies (1986)
Workers Vanguard No. 403 (9 May 1986)
Bulletin’s Hormel Lies
We told it straight. “Hormel Strike Knifed,” declared our headline, adding “All Labor Will Pay for This Treacherous Defeat!” (WV No. 400, 28 March). For seven long months on the picket lines-against a union-busting company, backstabbing International union tops, a liberal Democratic governor and the National Guard-the Hormel meat-packers hung tough. But finally, in the face of this unholy alliance, the leaders of Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota decisively turned away from union action. Instead of a class-struggle program to clear the scabs out of the plant and win the strikers' jobs back, they called for a nationwide consumer boycott and announced they would sue the United Food and Commercial Workers. (UFCW) in the capitalist courts. “And so after a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed,” we wrote.
We knew we would hear soon from the fake-left and others, whose program of tailing after the labor bureaucracy prevents them from saying what is. Sure enough, on April 1, the Bulletin, newspaper of David North’s Workers League (WL), ran a full-page polemic titled, “'Workers Vanguard Buries the Hormel Strike.” The article, by Bulletin editor Martin McLaughlin, labels the Spartacist League “dyed-in-the-wool defeatists” and claims:
Bulletin’s Hormel Lies
We told it straight. “Hormel Strike Knifed,” declared our headline, adding “All Labor Will Pay for This Treacherous Defeat!” (WV No. 400, 28 March). For seven long months on the picket lines-against a union-busting company, backstabbing International union tops, a liberal Democratic governor and the National Guard-the Hormel meat-packers hung tough. But finally, in the face of this unholy alliance, the leaders of Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota decisively turned away from union action. Instead of a class-struggle program to clear the scabs out of the plant and win the strikers' jobs back, they called for a nationwide consumer boycott and announced they would sue the United Food and Commercial Workers. (UFCW) in the capitalist courts. “And so after a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed,” we wrote.
We knew we would hear soon from the fake-left and others, whose program of tailing after the labor bureaucracy prevents them from saying what is. Sure enough, on April 1, the Bulletin, newspaper of David North’s Workers League (WL), ran a full-page polemic titled, “'Workers Vanguard Buries the Hormel Strike.” The article, by Bulletin editor Martin McLaughlin, labels the Spartacist League “dyed-in-the-wool defeatists” and claims:
“For all the rhetorical denunciations of the betrayals of the UFCW International, the resolution and the entire analysis of Spartacist AGREE with the position of the UFCW that the strike is over and it is time for a post-mortem.”
It’s not surprising the Bulletin resorts to this lying amalgam, a smear tactic from Stalin’s arsenal, equating the SL’s call for class-struggle unionism with the UFCW International’s scabherding. The entire resolution he refers to, by Spartacist supporter Stan Gow in the West Coast dock union (ILWU), is a bitter attack on the labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement for having “deliberately isolated and stabbed in the back” the Hormel strike.
The professional con artists of the Workers League don’t have to bow to the Stalinists when it comes to cynical lies: having signed up as press agents for local president Jim Guyette and his adviser Ray Rogers of Corporate Campaign, Inc., the WL simply declares that P-9’s “decision to defy the International” was an “enormous advance” and a “great step forward for the entire labor movement.” So-presto! – the workforce of more than 1,000 scabs who have been working in the Austin plant for more than two months now is simply disappeared! What is this act of “defiance” North's WL praises so highly? They’re not talking about a plant seizure, mind you, or militant mass picketing (as opposed to symbolic “civil disobedience”) to drive out the Guard, stop the scabs, shutthe plant down and keep it shut until the strike wins. Guyette and Rogers accept the government's claim that such class-struggle tactics would be “violent” and therefore unacceptable. No, what they are referring to is taking the UFCW International union to court. The Bulletin article explicitly states that “the P-9 lawsuit is perfectly justifiable as a defensive measure....”
In 1979, when a WL agent, Alan Gelfand, was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, North & Co. sued the SWP in federal court. Thus the Northites were calling on the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization! And as part of this provocation, the WL called on the court to pry into the SWP's minutes, finances-in short, every aspect of its functioning. Gerry Healy, North's British boss until recently (when Healy was blown out of the water in a scandal involving Libyan gold, fingering Iraqi Communists and allegations of sexual importunities with young women), would have leftist opponents beaten up by his goons, then sue them when they complained about it in print.
The Workers League has always had great faith in bourgeois justice. Remember their notorious support for the 1971 NYC police “strike,” moreover at a time when the racist cops were flexing their bonapartist muscles for more leeway to go after the Black Panthers! Until recently virtually the entire British left shared with the Healyites the idea that cops were incipient “comrades.” But the British miners strike, when the cops beat heads and tear-gassed strikers for 12 solid months, taught the British workers a lesson in the nature of the state and discredited the cop-loving Healyites in the eyes of militants.
For Marxists it is axiomatic that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. The behavior of the , cops, courts and National Guard during the Hormel strike has dramatically proved this again. What P-9er expects to get justice in the courtroom of Judge Bruce Stoner, whose injunctions have made real picketing illegal? Experience from the United Mine Workers to the NYC hospital union has shown over and over that when the government intervenes in the internal affairs of labor, the workers always end up paying. Rather than being a weapon for the Hormel strikers against the company and the treacherous UFCW bureaucrats, this suit will only help the bosses hamstring and control the union movement.
The Bulletin article promises to be the first of a series on “The Politics of the Spartacist League.” An introduction describes the SL as “imbedded . . . deeply into the sewers of middle-class radicalism,” and other uncomplimentary phrases. (This is a comedown, of sorts - last year the WL was labeling us “racist” and even “fascist.”) To back up such charges, it claims that the SL last year “hailed” the NYC “subway vigilante,” Bernhard Goetz, and “denounced” black revolt in South Africa, supposedly saying that armed struggle against apartheid was “hopeless.” Anyone who has read Workers Vanguard or is familiar with the politics of the Spartacist League knows that these are patent lies. We have refuted them, exhaustively, in our article “Smash Fascist Smear of SL” (WV No. 379, 17 May 1985). But North, McLaughlin et al. have fed well at the Healyite trough, and figure that they can dish out any amount of hogwash and get away with it.
The Bulletin lies about what we say on the Hormel strike; they lie about the SL's position on South Africa and the black question in the U.S. Aren't they afraid of getting caught out? The purpose of such obvious falsehoods is not to win over any independent worker or radical who comes in contact with the Spartacists. (In fact, anyone who does admit having talked to the SL is immediately given an ultimatum – break off all contact with “the Sparts,” or else.) Rather, these deliberate lies are a political straitjacket, to imprison their own members, morally and programmatically. Either you accept and defend them – all of them – or you're out of the Workers League. And once you've prostituted yourself peddling this crap, you’ve signed away your right to differ on anything: you are a proven liar.
There is one industry in the country where the WL is active and their work can be compared with that of Spartacist supporters: New York City transit. Recall that the Bulletin declared Bernhard Goetz a racist would-be killer on the sole grounds that he was a white man who shot some black youths; whether or not Goetz faced or feared a mugging was irrelevant to them, because in their legalist view only the “authorities” should have guns. The Goetz case was ambiguous, and we s aid so at the time. But recently a clear-cut case of self-defense has arisen, of black subway token clerk James Grimes, who shot robbers threatening his life in a hold-up attempt. Spartacist supporters together with token clerks and other transit workers have taken up Grimes’s case, seeking to mobilize broad union support. But the WL has done nothing to defend Grimes against management discipline and attempts by the D.A. to railroad him to jail on gun possession charges or worse. The Bulletin has not mentioned this case once. This group which hailed the 1971 NYC cop “strike” won’t defend a black man with a gun.
The WL's brand of “colorblind,” legalistic unionism shares the fundamental values of the racist pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which is why the Bulletin kept calling on every sworn enemy of P-9, from the AFL-CIO, and UFCW tops on down, to aid the Hormel strike. The Spartacist League, in contrast, put forward a program to mobilize the ranks of labor in militant class struggle. It is not “defeatism” to recognize a defeat when it is staring you in the face. No doubt many Hormel workers will find this hard to take. But revolutionary politics is not a popularity contest: it's a matter of providing leadership. According to the Bulletin, things are getting better and better – all you have to do is believe. But Hormel workers aren’t Peter Pans, and David North sure as hell isn’t Tinkerbell.
As Trotskyists we prefer to face the facts, in order to forge a party that can lead a winning fight. As Stan Gow's motion in the ILWU said of the Hormel strike, “All American workers are going to pay for this treacherous defeat. Next time there had better be a massive show of force by the labor movement to smash the union-busters.”
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Healyite Slanders, SWP Cowards (1983)
Workers Vanguard No. 321 (14 January 1983)
The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand
Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards
We reprint below and exchange of correspondence between the Spartacist League (SL) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP was for 35 years the Trotskyist organization in this country, but in the early 1960s it abandoned Trotskyism in all but name and, passing rapidly through centrism, transformed itself into and eccentric reformist formation.
In our last issue, WV explored the internal wrangling now at an advanced stage in the SWP (see “Barnestown, U.S.A.” WV No. 320, 31 December 1982). We laid particular emphasis on SWP head Jack Barnes’ ongoing purge of survivors of the old revolutionary party, noting that the SWP’s decisive break from Trotskyism did not automatically expunge all aspects of human and organizational continuity with the old party.
Alan Gelfand is a lawyer and a political agent of the Gerry Healy group, an unstable and sinister British-based tendency which after years of shamelessly opportunist political banditry jumped from the ranks of the workers movement into the political service of certain Arab governments. In 1979 Gelfand sued the SWP in Federal court.
The very strange case of Alan Gelfand began in 1977 when Gelfand surfaced in the Los Angeles SWP as a mouthpiece for Healy’s “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against the SWP. The campaign, launched in the Healyite press in 1975, claimed that the central leaders of the SWP were actually long-time agents of the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. In particular, the slander campaign targeted Joseph Hansen, who had served as secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky by the Stalinist GPU in 1940.
Healy’s loathsome lies – echoing the discredited Stalinist tales that Trotsky’s murder was carried out by his own people – were an assault not only against the SWP of today but against the revolutionary past of the SWP whose Trotskyist work we claim as part of our own history. So the Spartacist League campaigned actively against Healy’s slanders, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs demanding, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”
Much of Healy’s smear campaign centered on Hansen’s role as a main SWP contact with the bourgeois authorities in the investigation of Trotsky’s murder. This confidential work, testifying to Hansen’s position of trust in the Trotskyist movement, constituted the core of Healy’s “evidence.” In 1975-76 Hansen published point-by-point refutations of Healy’s claims as well as statements of support from prominent left political spokesmen (including Spartacist national chairman James Robertson), veterans of the Trotskyist movement of Trotsky’s time, etc. These materials effectively laid Healy’s baseless slanders to rest.
Indeed, Healy's “evidence,” where there is any, itself refutes Healy’s claims. For example, prominently featured in the Healyites’ press was a letter from Hansen to the American Consul in Mexico City (regarding the Trotskyists’ attempts to unravel the identiy of Trotsky’s assassin). Healy claims that this shows secret contact between Hansen and the FBI behind the backs of the SWP. Unfortunately for Healy, Hansen’s letter gives as his return address 116 University Place in New York – which was at the time the SWP’s own national headquarters.
The Gelfand lawsuit is the latest round in Healy’s scurrilous, paranoid vendetta. In January 1979 the SWP discovered to its horror that Gelfand had filed a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s own lawsuit against the FBI. Gelfand was hastily expelled from the SWP on January 11. He then brought suit against the SWP charging the expulsion resulted from FBI control of the party, and citing all of Healy’s crazy lies to “prove” it. Gelfand's suit claims the government has the right to intervene in the internal life of left organizations, ostensibly to enforce their adherence to their own rules. It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to “regulate” the internal life of working-class organizations. That in this case the disgruntled ex-“member” was from the outset evidently a Healyite plant only adds insult to injury.
Nothing to Cover Up, But SWP Covers Up Anyway
The uninformed observer might imagine that the SWP, in elementary self-defense, would seek broad support for its rights and its good name in this important legal case, much as Hansen did when Healy’s “accomplice” smear first started. But the uninformed observer would be reckoning without Jack Barnes’ singular capacity for political stupidity. Incredibly, the SWP’s public press has said not one single word about the Gelfand case since it began! Apparently Barnes & Co. made a deliberate decision to treat the lawsuit as some kind of guilty secret – as if Healy’s threadbare lies were impossible to answer. This is a crime not only against the members of the SWP but against the late Joe Hansen and all the founding Trotskyist leaders whose reputations are being dragged through the mud. The SWP’s failure to mount a vigorous public counterattack aimed at mobilizing support against Gelfand’s provocation is equally a crime against all working-class organizations, who have the right and the duty to smash Gelfand’s precedent for government snooping and witchhunting against the left.
In August 1982, the newspaper of the American Healyites, the Bulletin, gleefully reported that the SWP’s motion for summary judgment in the Gelfand case had been denied. In October 1982, Rachel Wolkenstein on behalf of the SL wrote to the SWP asking for information enabling us to cover the lawsuit in our own press. We think the letter speaks for itself, as does the SWP’s two-sentence reply to us.
The SL’s expressed interest in the case probably helped the SWP to figure out that the issue could not be buried forever. In any case, the SWP National Committee plenum held in December was embarassedly self-critical about the public silence. The SWP finally made some public acknowledgement of the case at the convention of its youth group in Chicago over New Year’s. But incredibly, the report did not mention the Healyites at all, much less their year-long slander campaign against Hansen. If ever a policy were guaranteed to lend credence to Healy’s baseless slanders, this is it.
Instead of covering over the “Healy connection,” the SWP should acquaint the American radical public with Healy’s long and sordid history of going to the capitalist courts against his political opponents. In England right now, Healy is pursuing a vicious two-year legal effot to muzzle and bankrupt a small socialist current on the fringes of the Labour Party, the “Socialist Organizer” grouping of Sean Matgamna. Taking exception to some hostile political characterizations of the Healy organization which appeared in a January 1981 Socialist Organizer article, Healy simply sued for “libel” under Britain's draconian libel laws. When Matgamna complained, the Healyites gave the rich man’s answer, coyly suggesting the little group should hire itself sime good barristers.
The SWP is unfortunately not unique in its criminally sectarian refusal to mount an aggressive public defense against legal provocation. Progressive Labor (PL), the target of a vicious civil suit by the Los Angeles police, similarly rejects the support of other left organizations, all of whom have a stake in a PL victory over this assault on their existence and rights.
One doesn’t have to agree with or even like the SWP or PL to recognize the need for substantial and urgent support in these important cases. In this spirit, we are publishing the Wolkenstein letter and the SWP’s reply for the information of our readers.
Attorney at Law
299 Broadway
New York, New York
October, 1982
Shelly Davis
Attorney at Law
Socialist Workers Party
410 West Street
New York, New York
Dear Ms. Davis:
In my telephone conversation with you on 5 October 1982 I requested access to and a coy of the public court record of Gelfand vs. SWP, et al. This request was made on behalf of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the international Spartacist tendency (iSt). Although this record is available to the public from the federal court clerk in Los Angeles, California, given the location and volume of the file, I thought it expeditious to try to secure access to and a copy of the court recourd from your office. Additionally, I have since learned that permission is needed from one of the attorneys on the lawsuit to gain access to the depositions taken of the Socialist Workers Party defendants. Of course, I offered to pay all costs for copying.
Your response, after consultation with your client, was to inform me that the request must be “made in writing, on official letterhead, containing the reasons for the request.” Since those reasons were given to you in our phone conversation, I am perplexed as to the rationale for this prerequisite to determining whether you will assist th Spartacist League/iSt in obtaining access to the Gelfand court record. However, because of the seriousness of the issues posed by this lawsuit, compelling the Spartacist League/iSt to take a stand, the reasons for this request are restated herein.
The Spartacist League/iSt became aware of the gravity of this lawsuit after the appearance of an article in the August 6, 1982 issue of the Bulletin stating that a Federal District Court judge denied the Socialist Workers Party defendants’ motion for summary judgment. Reportedly, the court held this case for trial after finding factual suport for Gelfand’s claim that his expulsion from the SWP was due to government manipulation and control of the SWP.
It is apparent that Gelfand’s case was instituted and is financed by the Workers League/ Workers Revolutionary Party/ International Committee of the Fourth International. This lawsuit is a continuation of Gerry Healy’s vicious slander campaign against Joseph Hansen, accusing him of having been an agent of the GPU/FBI, implicated in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. It has been and continues to be the position of the Spartacist League /iSt that those charges are manifestly groundless. This slander campaign against Joseph Hansen constitutes and attack on the entire SWP leadership around Trotsky and Cannon, posing directly the question of Healyism versus Trotskyism.
The Spartacist League/iSt is publicly on record in vehement opposition to these slanders. James Robertson, National Chairman of the Spartacist League signed a statement circulated by the SWP in 1976 entitled, “A Shameless Frame-Up.” Since 1975 the Spartacist League /iSt has held demonstrations against the Workers League/RWP asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” Thus it is with the utmost concern and outrage that the Spartacist League/iSt views this most recent addition to the Healyite frame-up campaign, this time invoking the government’s courts against the Socialist Workers Party.
While the Spartacist League/iSt takes no position on the question of whether Gelfand’s rights as a member of the SWP were violated in the expulsion process, it is clear that asking the courts to make that determination is a violation of workers democracy. The case presents a dangerous precedent for all working class organizations.
The Spartacist League/iSt believes that a vigorous, aggressive counter-attack must be made against the Gelfand lawsuit. However, to date, the available information on this case has been in the press of the Workers League. There does not appear to have been any information on or excerpts from this lawsuit in the pages of the Militant or Intercontinental Press.
The Spartacist League/iSt is necessarily interested in examining the “evidence” submitted by Gelfand in support of his allegations of government dominion over the Socialist Workers Party as well as examining the development of the legal defense and counteroffensives taken by the SWP defendants. To the extent the Spartacist League/iSt has concrete information in hand, particularly the court record, then to that extent it will be able to be more categorical in publicly dealing with the vital issues of workers democracy involved. The deliberate introduction of the bourgeois state into the life of private political organizations does have a history; this has been used in England by racist/fascist organizations during their quarrels and splits. Is it now to be imported into socialist organizations in the United States? This must be fought.
I trust that an expeditious reply will be given to this request (in writing).
Yours truly,
Rachel H. Wolkenstein
cc Spartacist League/iSt
The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand
Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards
We reprint below and exchange of correspondence between the Spartacist League (SL) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP was for 35 years the Trotskyist organization in this country, but in the early 1960s it abandoned Trotskyism in all but name and, passing rapidly through centrism, transformed itself into and eccentric reformist formation.
In our last issue, WV explored the internal wrangling now at an advanced stage in the SWP (see “Barnestown, U.S.A.” WV No. 320, 31 December 1982). We laid particular emphasis on SWP head Jack Barnes’ ongoing purge of survivors of the old revolutionary party, noting that the SWP’s decisive break from Trotskyism did not automatically expunge all aspects of human and organizational continuity with the old party.
“Long after the Trotskyist content was gone, some elements of basicWe noted that the “age purge” process unleashed by Barnes, particularly following the death of SWP revisionist theoretician Joseph Hansen in 1979, had systematically destroyed those residues, citing in particular, “the very strange case of Alan Gelfand” as a demonstration of the hard-to-believe ineptness of todays SWP.
organizational competence and professionalism still functioned... something that could still organize a demonstration, write a polemic, co-opt an opponent, run a defense case... ”
Alan Gelfand is a lawyer and a political agent of the Gerry Healy group, an unstable and sinister British-based tendency which after years of shamelessly opportunist political banditry jumped from the ranks of the workers movement into the political service of certain Arab governments. In 1979 Gelfand sued the SWP in Federal court.
The very strange case of Alan Gelfand began in 1977 when Gelfand surfaced in the Los Angeles SWP as a mouthpiece for Healy’s “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against the SWP. The campaign, launched in the Healyite press in 1975, claimed that the central leaders of the SWP were actually long-time agents of the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. In particular, the slander campaign targeted Joseph Hansen, who had served as secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky by the Stalinist GPU in 1940.
Healy’s loathsome lies – echoing the discredited Stalinist tales that Trotsky’s murder was carried out by his own people – were an assault not only against the SWP of today but against the revolutionary past of the SWP whose Trotskyist work we claim as part of our own history. So the Spartacist League campaigned actively against Healy’s slanders, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs demanding, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”
Much of Healy’s smear campaign centered on Hansen’s role as a main SWP contact with the bourgeois authorities in the investigation of Trotsky’s murder. This confidential work, testifying to Hansen’s position of trust in the Trotskyist movement, constituted the core of Healy’s “evidence.” In 1975-76 Hansen published point-by-point refutations of Healy’s claims as well as statements of support from prominent left political spokesmen (including Spartacist national chairman James Robertson), veterans of the Trotskyist movement of Trotsky’s time, etc. These materials effectively laid Healy’s baseless slanders to rest.
Indeed, Healy's “evidence,” where there is any, itself refutes Healy’s claims. For example, prominently featured in the Healyites’ press was a letter from Hansen to the American Consul in Mexico City (regarding the Trotskyists’ attempts to unravel the identiy of Trotsky’s assassin). Healy claims that this shows secret contact between Hansen and the FBI behind the backs of the SWP. Unfortunately for Healy, Hansen’s letter gives as his return address 116 University Place in New York – which was at the time the SWP’s own national headquarters.
The Gelfand lawsuit is the latest round in Healy’s scurrilous, paranoid vendetta. In January 1979 the SWP discovered to its horror that Gelfand had filed a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s own lawsuit against the FBI. Gelfand was hastily expelled from the SWP on January 11. He then brought suit against the SWP charging the expulsion resulted from FBI control of the party, and citing all of Healy’s crazy lies to “prove” it. Gelfand's suit claims the government has the right to intervene in the internal life of left organizations, ostensibly to enforce their adherence to their own rules. It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to “regulate” the internal life of working-class organizations. That in this case the disgruntled ex-“member” was from the outset evidently a Healyite plant only adds insult to injury.
Nothing to Cover Up, But SWP Covers Up Anyway
The uninformed observer might imagine that the SWP, in elementary self-defense, would seek broad support for its rights and its good name in this important legal case, much as Hansen did when Healy’s “accomplice” smear first started. But the uninformed observer would be reckoning without Jack Barnes’ singular capacity for political stupidity. Incredibly, the SWP’s public press has said not one single word about the Gelfand case since it began! Apparently Barnes & Co. made a deliberate decision to treat the lawsuit as some kind of guilty secret – as if Healy’s threadbare lies were impossible to answer. This is a crime not only against the members of the SWP but against the late Joe Hansen and all the founding Trotskyist leaders whose reputations are being dragged through the mud. The SWP’s failure to mount a vigorous public counterattack aimed at mobilizing support against Gelfand’s provocation is equally a crime against all working-class organizations, who have the right and the duty to smash Gelfand’s precedent for government snooping and witchhunting against the left.
In August 1982, the newspaper of the American Healyites, the Bulletin, gleefully reported that the SWP’s motion for summary judgment in the Gelfand case had been denied. In October 1982, Rachel Wolkenstein on behalf of the SL wrote to the SWP asking for information enabling us to cover the lawsuit in our own press. We think the letter speaks for itself, as does the SWP’s two-sentence reply to us.
The SL’s expressed interest in the case probably helped the SWP to figure out that the issue could not be buried forever. In any case, the SWP National Committee plenum held in December was embarassedly self-critical about the public silence. The SWP finally made some public acknowledgement of the case at the convention of its youth group in Chicago over New Year’s. But incredibly, the report did not mention the Healyites at all, much less their year-long slander campaign against Hansen. If ever a policy were guaranteed to lend credence to Healy’s baseless slanders, this is it.
Instead of covering over the “Healy connection,” the SWP should acquaint the American radical public with Healy’s long and sordid history of going to the capitalist courts against his political opponents. In England right now, Healy is pursuing a vicious two-year legal effot to muzzle and bankrupt a small socialist current on the fringes of the Labour Party, the “Socialist Organizer” grouping of Sean Matgamna. Taking exception to some hostile political characterizations of the Healy organization which appeared in a January 1981 Socialist Organizer article, Healy simply sued for “libel” under Britain's draconian libel laws. When Matgamna complained, the Healyites gave the rich man’s answer, coyly suggesting the little group should hire itself sime good barristers.
The SWP is unfortunately not unique in its criminally sectarian refusal to mount an aggressive public defense against legal provocation. Progressive Labor (PL), the target of a vicious civil suit by the Los Angeles police, similarly rejects the support of other left organizations, all of whom have a stake in a PL victory over this assault on their existence and rights.
One doesn’t have to agree with or even like the SWP or PL to recognize the need for substantial and urgent support in these important cases. In this spirit, we are publishing the Wolkenstein letter and the SWP’s reply for the information of our readers.
__________________________Rachel H. Wolkenstein
Attorney at Law
299 Broadway
New York, New York
October, 1982
Shelly Davis
Attorney at Law
Socialist Workers Party
410 West Street
New York, New York
Dear Ms. Davis:
In my telephone conversation with you on 5 October 1982 I requested access to and a coy of the public court record of Gelfand vs. SWP, et al. This request was made on behalf of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the international Spartacist tendency (iSt). Although this record is available to the public from the federal court clerk in Los Angeles, California, given the location and volume of the file, I thought it expeditious to try to secure access to and a copy of the court recourd from your office. Additionally, I have since learned that permission is needed from one of the attorneys on the lawsuit to gain access to the depositions taken of the Socialist Workers Party defendants. Of course, I offered to pay all costs for copying.
Your response, after consultation with your client, was to inform me that the request must be “made in writing, on official letterhead, containing the reasons for the request.” Since those reasons were given to you in our phone conversation, I am perplexed as to the rationale for this prerequisite to determining whether you will assist th Spartacist League/iSt in obtaining access to the Gelfand court record. However, because of the seriousness of the issues posed by this lawsuit, compelling the Spartacist League/iSt to take a stand, the reasons for this request are restated herein.
The Spartacist League/iSt became aware of the gravity of this lawsuit after the appearance of an article in the August 6, 1982 issue of the Bulletin stating that a Federal District Court judge denied the Socialist Workers Party defendants’ motion for summary judgment. Reportedly, the court held this case for trial after finding factual suport for Gelfand’s claim that his expulsion from the SWP was due to government manipulation and control of the SWP.
It is apparent that Gelfand’s case was instituted and is financed by the Workers League/ Workers Revolutionary Party/ International Committee of the Fourth International. This lawsuit is a continuation of Gerry Healy’s vicious slander campaign against Joseph Hansen, accusing him of having been an agent of the GPU/FBI, implicated in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. It has been and continues to be the position of the Spartacist League /iSt that those charges are manifestly groundless. This slander campaign against Joseph Hansen constitutes and attack on the entire SWP leadership around Trotsky and Cannon, posing directly the question of Healyism versus Trotskyism.
The Spartacist League/iSt is publicly on record in vehement opposition to these slanders. James Robertson, National Chairman of the Spartacist League signed a statement circulated by the SWP in 1976 entitled, “A Shameless Frame-Up.” Since 1975 the Spartacist League /iSt has held demonstrations against the Workers League/RWP asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” Thus it is with the utmost concern and outrage that the Spartacist League/iSt views this most recent addition to the Healyite frame-up campaign, this time invoking the government’s courts against the Socialist Workers Party.
While the Spartacist League/iSt takes no position on the question of whether Gelfand’s rights as a member of the SWP were violated in the expulsion process, it is clear that asking the courts to make that determination is a violation of workers democracy. The case presents a dangerous precedent for all working class organizations.
The Spartacist League/iSt believes that a vigorous, aggressive counter-attack must be made against the Gelfand lawsuit. However, to date, the available information on this case has been in the press of the Workers League. There does not appear to have been any information on or excerpts from this lawsuit in the pages of the Militant or Intercontinental Press.
The Spartacist League/iSt is necessarily interested in examining the “evidence” submitted by Gelfand in support of his allegations of government dominion over the Socialist Workers Party as well as examining the development of the legal defense and counteroffensives taken by the SWP defendants. To the extent the Spartacist League/iSt has concrete information in hand, particularly the court record, then to that extent it will be able to be more categorical in publicly dealing with the vital issues of workers democracy involved. The deliberate introduction of the bourgeois state into the life of private political organizations does have a history; this has been used in England by racist/fascist organizations during their quarrels and splits. Is it now to be imported into socialist organizations in the United States? This must be fought.
I trust that an expeditious reply will be given to this request (in writing).
Yours truly,
Rachel H. Wolkenstein
cc Spartacist League/iSt
* * *
October 28, 1982
Spartacist League
c/o Rachel Wolkenstein
299 Broadway
New York, N.Y.
This is in response to your letter, postmarked October 21, which has been referred to me for reply.
The Socialist Workers Party will not provide any assistance to the Spartacist League.
Craig Gannon
Socialist Workers Party
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