Confessions of a Renegade (1975)

Workers Vanguard No. 61 (31 January 1975)

Wohlforth Terminated

In an account reminiscent of Jay Lovestone's recitation of the crimes of Stalin, ex-Workers League National Secretary Tim Wohlforth has now surfaced with a long document about his frame-up and purge at the hands of Gerry Healy, boss of the British Workers Revolutionary Party and godfather of the Workers League. After more than a decade of glorying in his role of fawning American junior partner to Healy, Wohlforth was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by his long-time lieutenant, Fred Mazelis (see “Workers League Crumbles,” WV. No. 56, November 1974). The ouster was carried out personally by none other than Healy himself.

While Wohlforth's lurid 39-page account (“The Workers League and the International Committee,” 11 January 1975) is evidently truthful as a description, it betrays a stunning lack of political understanding. Throughout his reign as tinpot despot of the Workers League Wohlforth slavishly emulated his mentor's organizational practices of suppression and slander, the deliberate destruction of cadres and the invocation of the absolute authority of the “International Committee” to intimidate any stirrings of opposition among the membership. Now that Healy has turned the notorious Wohlforthite “method” against Wohlforth himself, the deposed former accomplice finds the only possible explanation to be that Healy has suddenly lost his mind:

“He is seized by at times what approaches madness for subjective idealism is a form of madness as it rearranges the world according to the individual. He becomes convinced that he is surrounded by CIA agents and proceeds on that basis. Anyone who objects is denounced for being an anti-internationalist....”

Subjective idealism must be pretty rampant in Healyite circles. Wohlforth makes the following modest assessment of the import of his removal as National Secretary: “The explosion which has taken place between Comrade Healy and the Workers League is of great historic significance. Condensed within this experience is all the past experience of the Fourth International.” By way of contrast, the Spartacist tendency was compelled to break from Healy in 1962 in order to maintain our political integrity, but we refused to characterize Healy/Wohlforth's unprincipled organizational maneuvering as politically definitive (much less world-historic) until 1967 when it acquired a clear programmatic basis.

Wohlforth's testimony amply confirms every organizational allegation ever made by the Spartacist tendency, but for Wohlforth commencing only on 30-31 August 1974 when the skies fell in on him. Wohlforth's fundamental response to every exposure by us of the Workers League's cynical opportunism, Stalinist-style gansterism and fraudulent “mass” posturing has always been that Spartacist is no good because it is “anti-internationalist” i.e., that we refused to unquestioningly accept the “discipline” of the International Committee. We replied that the IC is no Marxist international, and “the IC” is but an empty abstraction to cover rotten politics, akin to the Stalinists' abuse of "the Party."

The Horse's Mouth

Now let us see what Wohlforth has to say today about the International Committee:

“.. It never was allowed to go beyond the level of small groups basically functioning as appendages of the SLL/WRP [Socialist Labour League was the earlier name of the Workers Revolutionary Party, Healy's British group]. More precisely, the IC never went beyond being an international organization around a single individual, Gerry Healy....

“...That these differences were not openly confronted and fought out within the U.S. and internationally reflected the atmosphere which prevailed in international relations within the IC. Open discussion and political struggle was discouraged by Comrade Healy's tendency to push every discussion to the most extreme point and to seek to break the person who disagreed with Comrade Healy. Only a most muted discussion ever took place in the international movement under such conditions....

“...There are no elected bodies. The IC is, as we shall see, whatever the Workers Revolutionary Party wants it to be. It is the WRP which writes whatever statements are occasionally issued. It is the WRP which calls whatever meetings of the IC that are held and which determines what sections should attend. It is Comrade Gerry Healy who determines what the WRP determines....

“...To Gerry Healy there is a complete identity between the international movement and his national party, the Workers Revolutionary Party. Internationalism stops at the frontiers of Britain. It is seen as a 'principle' which requires the subordination of other parties to the international which is seen as identical with the WRP. To what is the WRP subordinate?”

Well, former head of the American section, you should know. Only, we always thought you liked it that way!

Healy as Big Daddy

Wohlforth always dismissed the Spartacist tendency's allegations about the grossly bureaucratic practices of the Healy/Wohlforth regimes with smug demands that we demonstrate upon what materially privileged stratum the WL regime is based. In his present document, however, Wohlforth (never one to worry too much about consistency) makes no attempt to locate any "material base" for Healy's conduct. He simply declares that the Workers League has reverted to centrism (a term, incidentally, which he employs for every variety of political animal, including Max Shachtman in 1956 as the latter prepared to liquidate into CIA-influenced American social democracy). Yet there is a certain sociological logic to the Healyites' practices.

The Healy organization's attempts to work within the British labor movement have been uniformly sterile and disastrous. At one or another time over the past twenty years they have amassed a certain following among dock workers, construction workers, coal miners and auto workers, and have nothing but their ex-supporters' bitterness at the Healyite oscillations between adventurism and opportunism to show for it. (Their present "mass base" in the television and film industries can be expected to go the same route, although perhaps somewhat more eccentrically considering the vision of social reality as refracted through a television camera.)

But the Healy organization has been quite successful in maintaining a relatively large, flashy, high-turnover youth operation which every year draws in sizeable numbers of militant British youth by offering them pageants, dancing, rock bands and sports events together with a dash of "socialism," miscellaneous marches and lots of newspaper selling. The British masses are infused virtually throughout with a relatively very high degree of class consciousness, so that even the semi-lumpenized youth from whom the Healyites recruit characteristically share a strongly class-conscious outlook, even if their capacity to intervene in the class struggle is marginal and episodic.

But since such layers lack both the discipline of the labor process and any obvious immediate personal use for knowledge, a high-volume, high-turnover operation aimed at them necessarily requires a strong dose of authoritarianism and the manipulative use of dogma as a substitute for program. Thus we can attribute to the Healyites a lumpen proletarian component as the context for their opportunist/ adventurist oscillations and systematic organizational abuses.

Wohlforth as Huey P. Newton

Beginning in the summer of 1971 Wohlforth, evidently in association with Healy, launched the Workers League on a sharp turn "to the youth" intended to parallel the British technique. But the attempt to import the WRP style of semi-lumpen youth organizing intensified the contradiction between "Trotskyism" and the requirements of such an operation. The corresponding layers in American society to the raw material of Healy's Young Socialists are overwhelmingly ghettoized black and Spanish-speaking youth, a generation or two removed from rural isolation and poverty, very heavily chronically unemployed, in a country with no political class consciousness and themselves with so little access to the labor movement that economic class consciousness often appears as a privilege of older white workers aimed against minority-group youth. While Healy's pseudo-Trotskyism associated with a semi-lumpen base makes a certain kind of sense in class-conscious Britain, a nationalist or Maoist rhetoric corresponds far more closely to the ideological proclivities of American raw ghetto youth.

Very serious and dedicated revolutionists can indeed be recruited from such strata, but under prevailing conditions only by the individuals' involved breaking, through a difficult, lengthy (and often unsuccessful) process, from ghetto existence and its dominant ideologies. But the Healy/Wohlforth approach – which is strikingly analogous 'to government summer programs for restless youth – is not intended to lead to the crystallization of black and Spanish-speaking communist cadres but to supply a "mass" base for a mock-extremist political operation. Therefore the Workers League found itself forced to parallel the techniques of, for example, the Black Panthers: an infallible leader and a militarized regime to impose discipline.

The Workers League turn toward "youth in the neighborhoods" was evidently seen by Wohlforth as a bulwark against "liquidation" into “trade union work.” He explains that political backwardness “makes it so easy for demagogic forces to maneuver within the unions disguising themselves as militants. Union policy alone is insufficient to flush them out.” This is, of course, true given the Wohlforthites' crassly opportunist line in their every encounter with the union bureaucracy, which Wohlforth defends at some length over the example of support to Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers.

Not surprisingly, Wohlforth is unable to grasp what is wrong with his organization's incursions into the labor movement. For example, his only criticism of the “Trade Unionists for a Labor Party” operation is that the Workers League liquidated its public face into this front group; there is no mention of the fact that the front group's program deliberately omitted any mention of the crucial political issues facing the working class at that time, racial oppression and the Vietnam war. No wonder Wohlforth thinks that the only way to avoid opportunist trade unionists – i.e., cynical but articulate cadres who will sooner or later abandon the small change of the Workers League to carve out careers within the union bureaucracy – is to build a base in a milieu which is deeply alienated from the labor movement.

The document is full of vituperative attacks against “conservative,” “abstract propagandist” forces in the Workers League who “represented a centrist retreat from the construction of a revolutionary youth movement” and counterposed a call for more trade union work. (Before accepting the bogeyman of a Workers League totally submerged in the unions, we should point out that in the entire document the only trade-union fraction mentioned, although there are references to journalistic coverage of other industries, is a white collar fraction in the SSEU composed of college graduates.) These elements are castigated for holding themselves aloof from the militants drawn around the youth organizing; at the summer camps, for example, they even “hid behind bushes to keep away from the youth.”

What these summer camps were actually like is testified to by Wohlforth:

“...the first days of the [1974] camp became preoccupied with the question of discipline. It actually took longer this year than last to get some agreement on the rules which governed the camp. Even after this agreement was reached the disciplinary problem would plague the camp to its last day.... Anyone who now dismisses this experience as a 'disaster' dismisses the real material struggle to build a movement' of workers.... The United States is the center of the capitalist crisis. A peaceful, orderly camp would reflect only the unreal, idealist distance of such a camp from the class struggle in America.”

It may be surmised that some of the Workers League members balked at serving as wardens for restless youth lured to these events by means such as those of which Wohlforth boasts in explaining the great "success" of the 1973 YS conference:

“We held talent shows and bazaars and other events during. the course of building for the conference... . At the end of the conference, a highly successful dance was held with a well-known band.”

The Ax Falls

Internally in the Spartacist League around 1966, the following historical analogy was presented: Stalin/Healy, Foster/Wohlforth, Browder/Mazelis. Yet now even after the fact Tim Wohlforth is obviously unable to make head or tail of the reason for his dramatic fall from grace.

The first intimation of trouble occurred in 1973, when Wohlforth received a letter from the WRP's Mike Banda criticizing his draft resolution on American perspectives and insisting on “the primacy of the European Revolution-particularly in England” in apparent counterposition to Wohlforth's emphasis, allegedly based on Healy's remarks to a Workers League plenum, on the "understanding that the center of the world capitalist crisis was the crisis of American capitalism." In the present document Wohlforth criticizes Banda for the latter's infatuation with the Vietnamese and Chinese Stalinists, an astute observation coming a mere ten years or so after our tendency had noted that self-same fact. Wohlforth's response to becoming the recipient of two different lines from England was to try "as best we could to straddle the contradictory positions put forward by Healy in January and Banda in March."

But the ax was first unsheathed in conjunction with "a series of classes which we opened up to the Spartacist group" (i.e., the Workers League violated its long-standing practice of excluding Spartacist members from publicly advertised events). Wohlforth describes his peremptory summons to England:

"In late June the British comrades called me over for consultations. They were particularly upset by a reference in one of the classes which suggested that the relations between the British and French movements had been one of compromise.... The British intervention, however, took on an extreme character. Every even potential difference was magnified to an absurd degree. I was even attacked as being an American pragmatist for purchasing an American rather than a British web offset press: As the week progressed the hyperbola progressed. By the end of the week's visit the British comrades-more exactly Comrade Healy-threatened to break a 12 year political relationship with the League over this single sentence.

"The night before I was to fly back the discussion – actually a one way shouting match – went on until 2:30 a.m. I was sent to bed with all political relations broken. A public statement was to appear in the Workers Press [Healy's newspaper]. Then at 5:30 a.m. I was awakened for one last meeting with Comrade Healy at which I was told I would be given one last chance. I was to fight for the very life of the League against centrism within it. . . . Particularly I had to break with the centrist elements around me in the leadership and drive the movement forward into the working class. Special mention was made of Comrades Lucy St. John, Dennis O'Casey and Karen Frankel.

"I returned to the United States shell-shocked. I immediately launched a bitter struggle within the leadership of the party and throughout all the branches in the country...."

Having evidently interpreted his instructions as a license to undertake a wholesale purge, Wohlforth proceeded to drive out of the Workers League virtually every prominent experienced cadre (see "Whatever Happened to the Workers League?" in WV No. 53, 27 September 1974). How hollow now ring Wohlforth's pious words about the preservation of cadres: "Such individuals embody great experience. This is why we must proceed with such care, with such restraint and caution, when moving organizationally with a cadre."

Apparently Healy had not anticipated such carnage, because he intervened again claiming that "the very struggle he had urged me to take up within the party leadership was 'factional'." But he apparently was not yet prepared to move against Wohlforth, for at the April 1974 International Committee conference he held up the Workers League "as a model" and squelched the Greek delegate who requested a full discussion on the hemorrhaging of leading Workers Leaguers.

A Method in Healy's Madness?

Wohlforth was finally removed at the 1974 Workers League summer camp. Wohlforth's own recitation of the events indicates that here was a man who was prepared to capitulate time after time over any political or organizational question, until he was brought face to face with the ultimate insult: Healy's charge that Comrade Fields, Wohlforth's close companion, was an agent of the CIA.

Wohlforth recounts that two weeks before the camp he was again summoned to England. When he arrived:

"I was whisked to a special meeting with Comrade Healy also attended by Comrade Banda and other comrades. The following was immediately proposed: (1) the whole past year had been a mistake, a turn into community politics and a retreat from the working class; (2) the former party members who had left were driven out by myself and Comrade Fields who represented a clique leadership; (3) Comrade Fields was probably a CIA agent; (4) there was to be no national conference this Fall; (5) the group of former party members was to be urged to come to the camp for discussions and brought back into the party without discussion with the PC....

"I returned to the United States a bit shell shocked. The British comrades, I thought, had always been right. They must now be right. I did my best to hold to that position while I proceeded to build the summer camp-now less than a week away....

"Comrade Healy sent Comrade Slaughter ahead of him to make sure it was 'safe' for him to come. Comrade Slaughter was to call England to reassure Healy. A special Political Committee meeting of the WRP was scheduled to decide whether or not Comrade Healy would be allowed to come to the camp without risking his life...

"Immediately upon arriving in Canada Comrade Healy began on the question of the CIA.... Comrade Healy was now convinced he was in the midst of a nest of the CIA. He even considered the thought that the whole Workers League was a CIA front....

"A meeting was immediately organized of IC comrades at the camp. I was accused of harboring and covering for a CIA agent. It was stated that I had failed to report on Comrade Fields' past CIA 'connections'. ... I tried as best I could to accept everything Comrade Healy stated in the way of criticism of the League and my functioning. I no doubt accepted more than I should have. But I simply could not accept this charge against Fields....

"The Political Committee was taken in a large van across to the other side of the lake. There we sat silently with the former party comrades and Comrade Healy proposed their readmission. Without so much as a word being said the Political Committee voted the comrades back into
the party....

"On Friday night Comrade Healy, at the suggestion of the German comrade, called a special meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers League, attended also by IC members present at the camp. At this meeting everyone was encouraged to denounce the leadership of the party in order to bolster the characterization of the past year of party work as liquidationism. Comrade Healy called the session 'Christmas' and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was at this meeting that Comrade Healy first proposed that I be removed as National Secretary of the party. In actual practice, the shift in leadership was already well underway... .

"Comrade Healy started the discussion [at the next Central Committee] meeting with his charges that Comrade Fields was an agent of the CIA. I was held complicit in the situation [by] not reporting it to the "IC....In the middle of these proceedings I stated that I disagreed with the whole proceedings. This produced an extreme' reaction in Comrade Healy.

“It was this mild resistance on my part which encouraged Comrade Healy to go ahead with the already well developed plans to remove me as National Secretary. Comrade Healy proposed that Comrade Mazelis put forward a motion to remove me as National Secretary and to suspend Comrade Fields from party membership pending an investigation into the CIA charges. This Mazelis did and it passed unanimously receiving even my vote and that of Comrade Fields. Then Comrade Healy proposed that I nominate Comrade Mazelis as National Secretary. I proceeded to do so and it passed unanimously.... I shortly discovered that the action taken on August 31 was definitive in character. A special meeting of the IC was called which after the fact: (1) endorsed Comrade Healy's totally unauthorized actions; (2) specifically barred me from any role in the day to day political leadership of the party; (3) barred Comrade Fields from any contact with the League of any sort. I offered my resignation from the League in response to this action. To continue in the League would have been a mockery of the entire struggle which had preceded August 31."

Subsequently a commission of inquiry consisting of two people including Mazelis cleared Fields of the charge of being a CIA agent (although, with typical arbitrariness, after being acquitted she was barred from holding office for two years). On the commission's invitation, Wohlforth reapplied for membership. Healy, however, ruled that Wohlforth must first appear before the IC, which Wohlforth refused to do.

Stalin is reported to have told the Lovestonite leaders in Moscow, "By the time you get back only your wives will support you." Is it possible that Healy was pursuing an analogous method in his choice of technique for the disposal of Wohlforth – finding in Wohlforth's relationship with Fields the key to one abuse which even Wohlforth, with his apparently limitless appetite for political self-abasement, would be unable to swallow?

What is even less clear in the Wohlforth document are the precise reasons for Healy's decision to heave his American epigone over the side. One can speculate about the role of Banda or the possibility that Healy felt threatened by an occasional twisting of his tail by Wohlforth who had actually achieved junior partner status after the rupture with the French made the Workers League a correspondingly larger component, of the IC operation. But it is likely that Wohlforth's wholesale destruction of the Workers League cadre was a prime mover in the process, and thus Wohlforth is a victim primarily of his own gratuitous organizational brutality.

The prognosis for the Workers League is not good. The comparison of statistics Wohlforth adduces to document its decline is unreliable since the earlier counts were originally concocted with Wohlforth's well-known proclivity for mendacious multiplication, but it is obvious that the Workers League membership is shrinking. Healy/Mazelis' efforts to win back the separated brethren will have at best limited success, as the human material is badly damaged by its earlier experiences in Healyite "democratic centralism."

The new leadership is uninspired; even granting Mazelis a certain flair for legalistic stabbing-in-the-back, as demonstrated particularly at the 1966 London Conference (which Wohlforth sat out, sulking), he is so colorless as to be almost invisible. The disruption of the pecking order should continue to produce a lot of scrambling among ambitious WL cadres, among them David North, who figures prominently in the Wohlforth document. And the Healy organization in Britain has itself recently suffered a serious blow with the reported departure of some 200 members around one Alan Thornett.

No Tears for Wohlforth

As for Wohlforth, we can say with sincerity: it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Wohlforth has spent twelve years masquerading as a Trotskyist and helping Healy to do the same, in the process politically destroying whatever serious elements from among militant minority-group youth his organization has encountered, repelling most of them; convincing them that "socialism" is just another con game whose purpose is their manipulation, and converting a few into cynical fellow operators.

Wohlforth's greatest crime – in which he was abetted by Healy and Art Phillips – was that, in pursuit of supreme authority for himself and shortcuts to influence and numbers, he broke up the left wing within the SWP in the 1961-62 period. He split the opposition to the SWP's sharp right turn, cut it off from the possibility of winning valuable comrades from a section of the old-time SWP membership, set up our tendency for expulsion from the SWP in a situation of weakness and isolation which almost destroyed us, certainly setting us back a number of years. No amount of new-found empirical "wisdom" on Wohlforth's part can undo the enormous objective service he rendered the Pabloists at that crucial juncture, nor his continued service to them as foil and horrible example of what happens to those who break away to the "left."

But his ignominious departure from the Healyite fold at least accords us an opportunity to display to him a little piece of Wohlforthite viciousness. One of the practices at which Wohlforth excelled was the art of gratuitous denunciation. He always insisted that any individual leaving the Marxist movement for any reason must be denounced as a "renegade." In particular he waxed eloquent over a statement circulated internally within the Spartacist League in response to the resignation of Geoff White, formerly a founding leader of our tendency. Our statement replied to the evolved anti-Trotskyist political positions of White but also expressed recognition of his years of collaboration during which, recognizing his increasing political distance (the product in part of the demoralization engendered by Wohlforth's wrecking operations), he sought to train younger cadres to carry the movement forward.

Now Wohlforth has become, in his own terms as well as ours, a "renegade." With his usual pomposity, and lavish use of the imperial "we," Wohlforth pontificates:

"It is true we lost the skirmishes with the centrists but we won the theoretical fight at each point. We have left a priceless heritage in this theoretical struggle. This now passes on to the new generation of revolutionary fighters who face the big battles with the capitalist class itself."

Roughly translated, "I quit." And a final irony is that it was Geoff White who rendered the Marxist movement's verdict on Wohlforth when he remarked years ago, "Wohlforth is the living proof that crime does not pay."

Vietnam: Pabloism & the 'ICFI' (1973)

Excerpted from Spartacist Pamphlet "Stalinism & Bolshevism in Vietnam" (1973)
...

Ho “Assimilates the Permanent Revolution”

In their rush to capitulate to the heroes of the petty-bourgeois radical milieu, the fake-Trotskyists of the “United Secretariat” and the “International Committee” must gloss over the real history of Stalinism in Vietnam.

The USec of Frank, Mandel and Hansen is the direct descendent of the Pabloist International Secretariat, which in the early 1950’s formulated the “theory” that the world was divided into two camps, the imperialists and the Stalinists; because of the sharp character of the impending conflicts, the Stalinists would be forced against their will to defend the interests of the proletariat. Pablo’s conclusion: The Trotskyists should dissolve their movement in favor of “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties.

In the early 1960’s the U.S. Socialist Workers Party came over to Pabloism with its theory that Fidel Castro was an “unconscious Marxist” and thus the SWP’s function was to be merely a cheering section for Castroism, recapitulating the European Pabloists’ capitulation to the Algerian nationalists. The common thread of Pabloism is the belief that one or another non-proletarian force (the Stalinist bureaucracy, students, peasant guerillas, etc.) will carry out the revolution, thereby rendering superfluous or at least secondary the leading role of the Trotskyist party.

What this means in the case of Vietnam can be seen from a recent book by Pierre Rousset, a leading member of the French USec, on Le Parti Communiste Vietnamien. The book’s central thesis is that:

“... the Vietnamese leadership as a whole has assimilated the decisive implications of the permanent revolution for colonial and semi-colonial countries.” [emphasis in
original]

As we have shown, Ho Chi Minh’s policies of vacillation and betrayal were in direct counterposition to revolutionary Trotskyism and in fact required the massacre of thousands of supporters of the Fourth International. How does this revisionist explain the extermination of the Vietnamese Trotskyists?

“These assassinations, about which historians of the Indochinese CP don’t speak, in their writings in French at least, show at least two things: the width of the political gulf which then separated the Trotskyist groups from the Indochinese CP [one would hope so!], the former probably underestimating the importance of the national question in the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, the latter profoundly underestimating the social question in the colonial revolution, including at the outset.”
[-- Pierre Rousset, Le parti communiste vietnamien, Paris, 1973, p. 44.]

In short, for the Pabloists there is not only no need to be a Trotskyist in Vietnam, since the North Vietnamese and NLF leadership has absorbed the lessons of the permanent revolution; but in addition, the ideological conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam was entirely unnecessary, since there was a little bit of truth on both sides. The murders? Just an unfortunate mistake.

Healy and “People’s War”

The position of the USec at least has the virtue of reflecting a consistent long-standing policy: the open abandonment of the Transitional Program and rejection of the essential lessons of Trotskyism. It is noteworthy that the Socialist Labour League (Britain) and its fake “International Committee,” which claim to be fighting Pabloism, and which criticize sharply Hansen’s phrase about Castro being an “unconscious Marxist,” take precisely the same position regarding the Vietnamese Stalinists as the USec. In their obituary of Ho we read:

“There can be no doubt that he [Ho Chi Minh] contained within himself and came to personify, all the anti-imperialist hatred and fighting spirit of the colonial peoples....
“Like Mao Tse-tung, Ho instinctively yearned to do battle with imperialism and the internal forces of reaction within his native country.”
--[Newsline, September 9, 1969]

Rather than an “unconscious Marxist” (à la USec), we find here Ho Chi Minh the “instinctive” Marxist. A distinction without a difference, if ever there was one! Elsewhere the Healyites elaborated:

“It is indisputably true to say that, on the basis of the Vietnamese experience, guns combined with the courage and endurance of individual guerrilleros would have meant little or nothing if Ho Chi Minh and other leaders were unable to analyse the principal and secondary conditions within Vietnam as well as between Vietnam and imperialism and on that basis outline a strategy for the conquest of power.”
[-- Newsline, September 9, 1969]

And just what was this strategy?

“It [Vietnam] demonstrates the transcendental power and resilience of a protracted peoples war led and organized by a party based on the working class and the poor peasantry and inspired by the example of the October revolution [!].”
[-- “The Vietnamese Revolution and the Fourth International.” Fourth International, February 1968.]

And the Vietnamese Trotskyists, murdered by these “instinctive” Marxists—what of them?

Well, here it seems that Ho was a little naughty, for which the SLL slaps his hand in reprobation:

"We do not forget these crimes committed against our movement by Ho Chi Minh, any more than we seek to play down his very real contribution to the struggle against world imperialism.”

But at the very moment that Ho massacred the Trotskyists, he was according to the Healyites lined up against world Stalinism itself!

“Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were on one side of the barricades, Thorez, Stalin and French imperialism on the other.”
[--Newsline, 9 September 1969]

So you see, it is all here: The unconscious (or instinctive) Marxism, the assimilation of the lessons of the permanent revolution, the understanding attitude toward the murders of the Vietnamese Trotskyists. And it is no isolated case. Healy’s famous “method” also allows him to support the Red Guards, Mao Tse-tung, the “Arab Revolution” and Indira Gandhi as supposed fighters against imperialism.

Although Healy uses “theory” and “method” primarily as a smokescreen to hide his abandonment of fundamental Marxist principles, there is in fact a method to the madness. The thread which unites these various positions is the same objectivism which is implicit in Pabloism: Since the sweep of the revolutionary wave (the objective forces) is so all-embracing, the struggle for the program of permanent revolution, the organization of the Trotskyist vanguard party, the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International—all this is secondary and ultimately expendable.

SL and the Vietnamese Trotskyists

In contrast, the Spartacist League continues to uphold the struggle and the memory of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, while recognizing and seeking to learn from their mistakes. This is no secondary or sentimental question. We have seen how the scandalous abandonment of the theory of permanent revolution on the part of the IC and USec leads them to solidarize themselves with the Stalinists against the Trotskyists in Vietnam, going so far as to apologize for the murder of the latter. The practical consequences of Pabloism are liquidation of the revolution and annihilation of the revolutionaries.

The Spartacist League has consistently, throughout its history, called for military defense of the NLF/DRV, including in times or places where this has not been a popular demand. We have demanded that Russia and China provide adequate military aid to the Vietnamese. Alone of all the tendencies of the U.S. left we raise the question of the war in our trade-union work, calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal and labor strikes against the war. At the same time, as Trotskyists we hold high the banner of permanent revolution and expose the repeated betrayals of the Vietnamese Stalinists. Likewise we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in order, in the words of the Transitional Program, “to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be.” Only in this manner, by openly struggling for the program of revolutionary Marxism, can the Fourth International be reborn.

1966 London Conference 2: Defeat for World Trotskyism

Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)

Defeat for World Trotskyism

It is a bitter irony that the Newsletter (organ of the British Socialist Labour League) headlined its article on the April Conference of the International Committee "Rebuilding the Fourth International." The signal accomplishments of the conference: the Voix Ouvriere (a French Trotskyist group previously unconnected to either the I.C. or the United Secretariat) was driven away and Spartacist expelled. Thus the Fourth International was "rebuilt."

The break with Spartacist was accomplished over a transparent organizational pretext. Spartacist editor James Robertson, a delegate to the conference, excused himself from one afternoon session, and refused later to “confess” that his absence was either a violation of principle or the expression of “petty-bourgeois American chauvinism.” His failure to make the “proper apology” was deemed a departure from democratic centralism. It was grotesque that an international split should be precipitated by an undeclared rule on attendance which was applied only to the Spartacist delegation; so grotesque, in fact, that no section of the I.C. has yet found the courage to make this fact public. On the contrary, the American Committee for the Fourth International, which had formerly proclaimed itself an ardent advocate of unity, has suddenly "discovered" that the positions of Spartacist are incompatible with participation in the I.C., fabricating a smokescreen of political accusations in the ACFI Bulletin of 9 May 1966, to explain the unexpected break.

A Critical Review

Since all supporters of a principled unification among revolutionary Trotskyists must be surprised and confused at this about-face, it is necessary to review critically the political contributions and events at the London Conference, in order to determine what precipitated the split.

The major report of the conference was given by Cliff Slaughter, secretary of the IC, on "Rebuilding the Fourth International," the international resolution before the Conference. Incorporated in the summary by Slaughter was a vehement attack on the political activity and character of Spartacist and a special attack upon Robertson, as noted above. While our delegation voted in support of the resolution, they perforce abstained on the vote on the Slaughter report.

Where We Stand

Spartacist came to the conference because we were in basic political agreement with the main positions published by the International Committee. We remain in basic political agreement with the I.C. Resolution, despite particular exceptions.

Comrade Slaughter characterized the present objective context as one of “deepening crisis of imperialism,” especially since 1956. He saw the working class as both increasingly restive the world over, and rapidly exposing and rejecting the traditional labor bureaucracies. He described the rise of Pabloite revisionism as the reflection of conscious effort by the bourgeoisie to disorient and bridle the vanguard of the working class. Nevertheless, he declared, Pabloism has now been defeated decisively, and the struggle for leadership of the working class is the immediate task. The superiority of the I.C., he asserted, lies in its understanding of "Leninist methods of party-building and in Marxist theory."

The V.O. group stated a counter position that Pabloism his been the reflex of the petty-bourgeois composition of the Fourth International since World War II.

On the third morning of the Conference, Comrade Robertson's turn on the speakers' list was reached. He expressed Spartacist's fundamental agreement with' the line of the International Resolution and of the report, but he took the opportunity to make clear certain differences. (His remarks are printed in this issue, below.) Comrade Robertson then missed the session which followed the delivery of his remarks. Although three members of the Spartacist delegation were in attendance at the session, fully empowered to take part in the discussion, this absence by Comrade Robertson was made the excuse for a violent attack upon our organization.

Spartacist Expelled

During the session missed by Robertson, Michael Banda of the SLL chose as his comment on the Slaughter report a sharp political attack upon Spartacist’s positions. In the evening session which followed organizational issues of "indiscipline" were raised.

Attacks upon Spartacist continued for a twenty-four hour period during which the Healy group tried to create some political pretext for the expulsion. Finding none, they were left with the original shabby organizational pretext.

It should be noted that Robertson had informed Comrade Healy (National Secretary of the SLL) of his intended absence, and that furthermore upon returning to the conference he explained to the assembled delegates that he had known of no rule demanding his attendance, that he had had no intention of not following protocol and would certainly adhere to all rules in the future.

ACFI's Feeble Effort

What was the reason for this vehement assault? The Bulletin makes a feeble effort to provide some motivation. Thus: "Robertson stated that he was in general agreement with the report (of Cliff Slaughter) but showed that he had no understanding and in reality no agreement with its fundamental method and line." In evidence for this fantastic interpretation, the Bulletin, points to Spartacist's evaluation of the short-run stabilization of capitalism in the colonial world after the recent defeats sustained by the working class in the backward nations. Because Robertson has noted this temporary set-back for working-class forces, he is blind to the "unity of the crisis." If by unity of the crisis it is meant that despite interim advances the capitalist class cannot resolve or suppress the contradictions in society, then Spartacist vigorously concurs. But if the Bulletin and the I.C., whose line it represents, desires to- translate every defeat into a victory, to treat the crushing reversal, say, in Indonesia, as a new, higher stage in the struggle for socialism, that is another matter: so the Comintern in 1933 viewed Hitler's rise to power as the springboard for the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary conviction of Spartacist is based, not on euphoric optimism, but on confidence in the working class with the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party to become conscious of its mission to liberate society from the stranglehold of capital.

Negro Question

In a similar vein, the Bulletin article suggests that Spartacist's special approach to the Negro question disparages the white working class. This is especially dishonest of our ACFI comrades since it is they who went along with the SWP abdication to Black Nationalism in 1963. Spartacist comrades, then known within the SWP as the Revolutionary Tendency, voted for a revolutionary integrationist counter-resolution and have maintained a consistent position since then on the need for a class rather than national analysis of the Negro question.

To be fair, ACFI has since modified its line on this question, publishing in its Bulletin a revised position which characterizes the Negro people as a people-class, in analogy to A. Leon's characterization of the Jewish people as a people-class. Strangely, the ACFI delegation in London remained silent while Spartacist was denounced by Greek and French delegates for having an ACFI-like people-class line on the Negro question.

Why this sudden switch in line by ACFI, this insensitivity to the special position of Negroes in the U.S.? Because ACFI, like puppets on a string, must now view American questions in British terms.

Propaganda OR Agitation?

With "inexorable logic," the Bulletin article plods to the inevitable conclusion: Spartacist is only a propaganda group, incapable of fusing theory with action. Yet Tim Wohlforth, the uneasy ACFI leader, missed his signals and submitted to the London Conference a revealing document, "Some Comments on Perspectives for the Fused Movement," which concluded : "The Spartacist comrades, while insisting on a propagandistic course, have done more to break out of an exclusive propagandistic existence than we have." While Spartacist comrades have been arrested some twenty times over the past three years as a result of our active participation in the civil-rights movement, we have yet to hear of one single ACFI member facing similar persecution! This striking difference reveals the truth.

The final argument, all others failing, is that Robertson "did not agree that the I.C. and only the I.C. represents the continuity of the movement." If the Spartacist comrades did not believe that the I.C. was a political heir of Trotskyism, why have they sought unity within a disciplined International? The Bulletin intends something more: servile subordination is demanded.

No Bolshevik Discipline!

Most ironical: the I.C. is not an International: it has no discipline, at least not for the privileged British and French sections. The I.C. has instead accepted the position that "The only, method of arriving at decisions that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity." Yet it demands complete, unquestioning "discipline" from its sympathizers, even on the level of organizational trivia. Our friends in ACFI recently refused debate with us without first "clearing it."

For Robertson to have "apologized" in London would have meant that Spartacist would have accepted ACFI's puppet role in the international movement. This kind of subordination is political suicide.

It remains to answer why the Healy group in the I.C. chose to wreck the immediate prospects for rebuilding the Fourth International by driving out the V.O. group and expelling Spartacist. In the light of this how shall we evaluate the revolutionary potential of the Socialist Labour League despite its obvious achievements?

Behind the Split

In one sense, the remarks of Comrade Robertson did bring on the split. Clearly the I.C. felt unable to tolerate a disciplined but vigorous and independent tendency within its ranks. This is the organizational reality behind the. expulsion, behind the lies and distortions in the Bulletin. But what, in turn, is the political explanation for the monolithic bureaucratism of the I.C. and especially of its chief section, the SLL of Britain?

Rigid bureaucracy in a workers' movement always reveals fundamental lack of confidence in party members and ultimately in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. The Healy group has demonstrated a fundamental, incapacity to build a world revolutionary movement. It is up to Spartacist along with other sections of the International Committee to construct a leadership to that end.

1966 London Conference 1: Reunification Smashed

Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)

REUNIFICATION SMASHED

The unity between the American Committee for the Fourth International and Spartacist has been smashed. The Trotskyist movement internationally and in the U.S. is being seriously disorganized by G. Healy and M. Banda, leaders of the British Socialist Labour League. The Healy group dominates the International Committee of the Fourth International, whose forces, including ourselves, we deem the essential political repository in this period of authentic revolutionary Marxism, i.e., Trotskyism.

The current wrecking campaign being pushed in the columns of the ACFI Bulletin and elsewhere represents a 180-degree turn away from the principled fusion line advanced by Healy at the October 1965 Montreal conference. Then Healy insisted, with our full concurrence, that the three-year-long unjustified (and unprincipled) division between Spartacist and ACFI must be brought promptly to an end; ACFI-Spartacist fusion, he then insisted, was an absolute pre-condition for building the Trotskyist movement in the U.S.

Now, in the wake of the April London I.C. Conference (reported on in this issue) Healy, without offering any serious political pretext for his actions, has diverted the energies of the I.C. away from building an international to conducting a campaign of petty internecine warfare against those with whom, up to April, he proposed to unify. By his own criteria of last October, Healy has set out to wreck the revolutionary movement in the United States.

This compels Spartacist to evaluate this Healy with whom we have been in political solidarity since 1961. We must redefine our tasks in, the light of this recent development.

Healy's Line

The issue which Healy cites to justify his strange actions is that SPARTACIST editor, Robertson refused to denounce himself before the Conference as "a petty-bourgeois American chauvinist."

This incident proves, according to Healy, the political and organizational character of the entire Spartacist organization!

Now, the Bulletin and particularly Healy's voluminous personal correspondence to Spartacist and ACFI members, are filled with all sorts of charges against Spartacist. Most of these charges, it is interesting to note, are identical with objections to unification raised by Wohlforth at Montreal, where Healy denounced Wohlforth as a "non-Marxist" for his approach to Spartacist on just these grounds. Now, Healy reverts to this same "non-Marxist" nonsense -- on the pretext that Robertson suddenly revealed his "true nature" in London.

The Actual Issues

There is a consistent political issue underneath Healy's surface irrationalities. It was only with considerable negotiation that the Spartacist delegation at Montreal won the following concession from Healy: "Tactical disagreements on work in the U.S. will not be an obstacle to unity provided decisions do not contravene the basic documents of the world movement." Healy reluctantly agreed to the right of national sections to make their own tactical decisions, a right whose importance is demonstrated by the degeneration of the Comintern under Stalin: national leaderships reduced to incompetent, Kremlin-servile hacks devoid of revolutionary capacity.

Since Wohlforth had completely discredited himself at the joint ACFI-Spartacist New York membership meeting on the eve of the April Conference, Healy could no longer proceed on the (always false) assumption that a cohesive ACFI fraction under Wohlforth would simply march into and take over the "loose, activist" Spartacist organization. This weakening of Wohlforth's position was aggravated by the latter's political break with ACFI's proclaimed theoretical leader, L. Marcus, at the same time. If fusion were carried out, Wohlforth would enter Spartacist as representative of a doubly-isolated faction. Healy was faced with the prospect of an American section led, by a bloc which would resist Healy's Cominternist practices. Under the circumstances, Healy could not accept fusion unless Robertson servilely degraded himself at the conference. Healy doesn't want any section in the I.C. that Healy himself does not control down to the last nut and bolt.

What This Means

A section of Spartacist then forming the SWP Revolutionary Tendency had a similar experience with Healy in 1962. Healy insisted that the R.T. bloc with the Dobbs leadership of the SWP as a still genuinely revolutionary tendency, against Hansen, Weiss and Warde. R.T. leaders were given an ultimatum to sign such an agreement without discussion, vote or appeal. At that time the R.T. wrote: "One of the most serious implications of the mode of intervention of the SLL-IC is the question mark it places over the capacity of these comrades to rebuild the Fourth International on a solid basis. We must reserve final judgment until more of the circumstances are clear."

The circumstances are now quite clear. Healy and Banda, free-swinging figures in control of the SLL party machinery, have, for the moment, an organizational hammerlock on the I.C. They have used their hammerlock at the recent conference to drive out a number of candidate and observer sections and thus dissipate an historic opportunity for refounding Trotsky's Fourth International. The Healy-Banda machine itself is now aptly characterized as "fake Leninist," a tendency whose real political character is displayed by its "clever" machine politics. That is to say, the experience of the Conference, taken together with other evidence from the history of the SLL, demonstrates that the Healy-Banda machine subordinates real political issues of agreement and disagreement to the exigencies of organizational issues and personal, prestige politics. That organizational tendency is itself a political issue of the first order.

Turn to SWP?

In late 1962, Healy broke with the R.T. for characterizing the SWP leadership as centrist. Barely half a year later, after his opportunistic maneuver had failed, Healy began describing that same SWP leadership as total betrayers of Trotskyism without redeeming quality. Now, in the wake of the new split with Spartacist, Healy again makes certain moves toward a new maneuver with that same SWP leadership. In a letter to two, Spartacist members, he justifies the split on the grounds that unification "would have strengthened the anti-internationalist trend of the SWP." Then, in the 21 May Newsletter, after over six months' intensive denunciation of the SWP's Anti-War line in the Newsletter and Bulletin, Healy comments on the killing of a Detroit YSAer by a deranged person by praising the anti-war struggle of the SWP! In any case, the smashing of ACFI-Spartacist fusion is a gift to the revisionist SWP.

ACFI

We refrained from advancing conclusive judgments of ACFI until recently. The recent experience, added to our intimate acquaintance with Wohlforth and his circle over many years, brought us to the conclusion that he represents a literary left-centrist tendency. This was graphically revealed at the time of the NYC October 16 Peace Parade. Then while the Bulletin was correctly attacking the popular-front nature of he Parade Committee, at the same time the ACFI, membership was marching under the discipline of that committee, and refused to carry any slogans other than the officially approved "Stop the War in Vietnam Now."

However, the ACFI with which we proposed to fuse consisted of more than the original eight members of Wohlforth's SWP sectlet. Both experienced and new Marxists had been drawn to ACFI on the basis of the I.C.'s political program. ACFI's greatest rate of growth occurred on the basis of its perspective of fusion with Spartacist. Now, since Wohlforth first called fusion off in an outburst at the March 20th joint membership meeting, over a quarter of ACFI's nearly forty members has dropped from the organization or joined with L. Marcus and Carol Lawrence in carrying out fusion with Spartacist. Of those who remain in ACFI, a majority are simply unwilling to break with Healy's "junior Comintern," despite their contempt for the Wohlforth leadership clique; how many hang on remains to be seen.

We Go Ahead

Politics shapes the direction of organizations far more decisively than organizational and personal issues. At the same time the latter interact with and are therefore a part of real politics. It is from that that we draw the lessons of the April Conference and define our tasks flowing from it.

We draw appropriate political conclusions from the organizational wrecking practices of Healy and Wohlforth. However, we do not close the door to them, much less to all those forces within the I.C. who are their victims. Yet, from Healy and Wohlforth, in particular, we will need evidence of an inner-revolution before collaboration would be possible. So long as they remain on their present bankrupt course, we are locked in an implacable struggle to cleanse the revolutionary movement of their poisonous influence.

In our final statement to the I.C. Conference, with expulsion but minutes away in a grotesque, petty frame-up that gives the real measure of the Healy clique, we said: "If the comrades go ahead to exclude us from this Conference, we ask only what we have asked before -- study our documents, including our present draft on U.S. work before you now, and our work over the next months and years. We will do the same, and we firmly believe that real a unification of the proper Trotskyist forces will be achieved, despite this tragic setback."

In addition to extending our international ties and functioning as a conscious detachment of the world movement within the U.S., we have the duty to go on to build a strong American section rooted in the class struggle and to push forward our understanding through the inner-struggle confrontation between our acquired lessons from yesterday and the endless new challenges that are inherent in social life. We shall go forward, let our enemies beware!