Lord of the Fleas (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 412 (1986)

Workers League Cult Attacks Marxist Spartacists

Lord of the Fleas

Our party, the Spartacist League, is currently being subjected to the “polemical” attentions of one David North. In fact, a series on “The Politics of the Spartacist League” appearing in North’s Bulletin is already in its 13th part and still going. But who or what is David North? He is the little lord of neo-Healyite, anti-Healyite, total Healyism – i.e., of nothing-who heads the American Workers League (WL), a very small and very discredited staphylococcal pimple on the rump of ostensible Trotskyism.

Why North chooses this moment to work us over at such length must have something to do with his having become, at the moment, the top dog in a fragment of what used to be called the “International Committee” (IC), an unpleasant formation once built by Gerry Healy in his own image. When Healy was ousted last year by backstabbing intrigues among his lieutenants, including North, the “IC” broke into at least four pieces, with splits within its sections in several countries.

Only someone who wanted to be “the leader,” never mind of what, would rush to claim Healy’s mantle. Healy’s IC was an appendage of his British organization, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which was distinguished by its physically brutal internal regime and by its capacity, unmatched by garden-variety opportunists, for wild swings of political line in pursuit of egregious and often mutually contradictory appetites. To the extent that the Healyites had a coherent political core, they were cringing legalists/Labourite economists, and virulently anti-Soviet in concrete program. Through it all, the hapless denizens of the IC were assured that, small and miserable though their own groups might be, the British WRP led by Healy (who eventually dubbed himself the IC’s “founder-leader”) was conquering the masses through its daily paper.

In fact, Healy’s daily paper was also a fraud which, lacking a sufficient number of members to support it, came to depend on funding from the most unsavory forces. And the WRP’s sole significant “contribution” in many years to the British class struggle came when it made itself the “vanguard” of a redbaiting, union-busting attack on the National Union of Mineworkers, on behalf of the right-wing leaders of the Trades Union Congress. Healy’s “expose” of miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s minimal criticism of anti-socialist Polish Solidarność was timed for maximum exposure in Margaret Thatcher’s Tory press, and became the opening shot of the campaign to isolate the militant miners union on the very eve of their heroic strike.

When Healy was pushed out of power in the IC last year, the lid came off a real stinking garbage can. We responded by publishing a special issue of our Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) on “Healyism Implodes,” There we re viewed Healy’s history, which impinged on our own history until about 20 years ago; the next issue of Spartacist (No. 38-39, Summer 1986), devoted to the degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party, also had some relevant things to say about Healy and his IC. And now we find ourselves being vilified at such great length in the Bulletin. We know from experience that this means we’ve touched the WL where it hurts, and that the Northites have decided it’s time for them once again to administer some “education,” Healy-style, to their supporters – a refresher course in cynicism and how not to think.

Healyism Implodes

North got involved early on in the whisperings of proffered deals among longtime Healyite henchmen that started when Healy started losing his grip on the WRP/IC. Gerry the tinpot despot had got old, while at the same time evidently becoming more uncontrollable than ever in his habits. When Healy reneged on an earlier promise to retire, Mike Banda, Cliff Slaughter and others in England started playing around with revelations of alleged spectacularly abusive behavior by Healy. At the same moment, a first-rate financial scandal erupted: unpaid bills, some going back two years, came to light and it was estimated that one and a quarter million pounds would be required or the WRP would cease to exist. The “revelations” process, begun as blackmail, acquired its own momentum: the leadership was in pieces and the members began to clamor for an explanation for some of the more grotesque atrocities. For example: why were WRP photographers sent to the Iraqi Embassy to photograph Iraqi dissident protesters, the pictures then to be turned over to the Iraqi regime?

North himself became a “leader” in the IC when he was specially chosen by Healy to head the Workers League as his reward for eager services as a mouthpiece for Healy’s infamous “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against the historic American Trotskyist movement. In the early 1980s, though, North began testing the waters for a revolt against Healy, through timid criticisms – always withdrawn with craven apologies – mainly of Healy’s idealist-gobbledygook perversion of dialectics. Now he claims he “fought” Healy. He has to make such a claim, ludicrous though it is. Once Healy the supreme authority of the IC was exposed as the emperor who had no clothes, the members revolted. No longer could they be kept in line with doubletalk “dialectics,” endless mindless activism and felt threats. All of Healy’s loyal lieutenants scrambled to wash their hands of the IC’s more spectacular crimes and organizational “excesses.” The contest was on: who has less filth on whose hands? Banda, Slaughter, North, etc. all lacked credibility as virgin crusaders against Healyism (the “new Nixon” had similar problems). Soon the IC house of cards was a pile of rubble.

The departure of Healy and his well-heeled ally, actress Vanessa Redgrave, with a minority of the British WRP was only the beginning. North’s demand that the WRP recognize the hegemony of the IC (i.e., him) took another minority out of the WRP, along with most of the WRP youth. Cliff Slaughter leads what’s left now sans Banda, who split after writing his ignorant anti-Trotskyist diatribe, “Twenty-Seven Reasons Why the IC Should Be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.” North took the bigger piece of the split in Australia as well as the West German and Sri Lankan groupings. (The Peruvians who went with North have recently departed, allegedly in solidarity with some form of Stalinism/Maoism.)

So North’s IC doesn’t amount to much. Its record is of a bunch of political bandits who became corrupt press agents for despotic “Arab nationalist” capitalist regimes. Alleged to have received at least a million pounds from 1977 on from Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Iraq, among others, Healy’s British group and its subservient IC worked to give “anti-imperialist” cover to anti-working-class crimes by their patrons. In 1979 the Healyites hailed the execution of 21 members of the Communist Party of Iraq by the Ba’ath regime. This is North’s IC – loathsome, but at least it’s all his. Provided that the American WL (which Slaughter in 1984 said had 74 members) can avoid its fair share of the implosion. North played the “who’s dirtier?” game when required to oust Healy and secure the IC label. Once that was accomplished, he began to move to belittle the IC’s crimes in the service of oil-rich Near Eastern dictators. Now he’s embarked on a crusade to rally his ranks, not least through a hate campaign against the Spartacist League.

Why us? For one thing, we are the acknowledged Trotskyist organization in this country. Our forces are rather larger than North’s. We exist today as an international tendency, the only one to have fought in a principled political fashion against both the degeneration of the ex-Trotskyist (now explicitly anti-Trotskyist) Socialist Workers Party and, early on, against Healy’s fundamental corruption of the IC. This history, covering two decades, is long documented, most lately in the last two issues of our Spartacist.

Healyites: Counterfeit Trotskyists

The Workers League’s own history begins with its former leader – Tim Wohlforth – acting as Healy’s agent to split the left opposition (Revolutionary Tendency, RT) inside the SWP in 1962. The pretext was an ultimatum that all RT members must sign a document affirming they believed that the SWP, which was then centrist and moving rapidly to the right, remained a “revolutionary party.” In the hope that the SWP would remain aligned with Healy as part of the International Committee, Healy identified the party leadership’s deepening revisionism as solely the property of right-wing elements like Weiss and Swabeck, putting forward the perspective of the RT effecting “a united front where possible with the center elements” – i.e., the Dobbs leadership. Most of the RT, led by Jim Robertson and Geoff White, refused to sign the Wohlforth/Healy diktat. Wohlforth’s only successful “united front” with the Dobbs regime was in setting the RT majority up for expulsion.

In the present Bulletin series, great exception is taken to our remark that Wohlforth in 1964 “engineered his own group’s expulsion” from the SWP. Aha, says Bulletin editor McLaughlin, or whoever is actually writing the series, the Wohlforthites were expelled for an exemplary fight against the Ceylonese Trotskyists’ class-collaborationist betrayal in 1964. No doubt for distant consumption, the Bulletin fulminates that Spartacists, “as 100% American radicals... could not understand why someone would risk being thrown out of the party because of a dispute over events taking place halfway around the world.”

What happened in Ceylon didn’t drop magically from the skies at the moment Wohlforth decided he wanted out of the SWP. “Trotskyism” in Ceylon was founded very late and by some people of extremely privileged social origins. The Ceylon Trotskyists, the Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP), involved themselves in anti-imperialist activism and plebeian social struggles, achieving something of a mass electoral base. When after independence from Britain the main ruling-class political formation split to produce a populist, “national” party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the LSSP was pulled in its wake, led by the LSSP’s reformist wing, which had always ultimately called the shots for the party’s vacillating “center.”

By 1960 it was evident even to a distant American comrade like Jim Robertson that the situation had gone rotten. On 8 August 1960 comrade Robertson wrote a letter (reprinted below) to the SWP Political Committee (PC) urging the SWP to wage an open struggle against the LSSP’s course. Robertson’s letter was appended to the PC minutes, as were news articles from this period from the Ceylon News reporting the LSSP’s electoral pact with the SLFP and its withdrawal of opposition to the SLFP’s chauvinist “Sinhala Only” language program. The Ceylon News quoted longtime LSSP spokesman N.M. Perera: “the only logical tactic was for the LSSP to join hands with the SLFP in a Government and gain control of that Government. This was the only means the LSSP now seemed to have of gaining power.”

The SWP, which didn’t have much going for it in Ceylon, was proposing to publish a Militant article criticizing the LSSP’s policy as a classic “Popular Front.” But a letter dated 14 August 1960. by Gerry Healy (also reprinted below) urged the SWP to hold up any comment. Healy’s implication is clearly that he has people lined up who might he disturbed by criticism of their party. If only the SWP will avoid flying off the handle in such a delicate situation, Gerry will take care of it. What is striking in Healy’s letter, as much as his claim that the situation could be saved by maneuvers, is his gratuitous mendacity in suggesting that the reports in the Ceylon bourgeois press were just a pack of lies.

It was a foregone conclusion that the LSSP would decisively capitulate when opportunity presented. In 1964 the SLFP offered the LSSP ministerial portfolios; the LSSP eagerly accepted. Embarrassed, the Pabloite USec hastily expelled the LSSP, as elements of the left wing shook themselves out of the LSSP, finally. Now Wohlforth also discovered betrayal in Ceylon.

Wohlforth’s restlessness prior to the emergence of the Ceylon pretext is testified to by Albert Philips, bloc partner of Healy and Wohlforth in splitting the RT. “The Methodology of Frustration,” a document by the Philips group dated 23 April 1964, complains that “several months after the 1963 SWP convention,” the “frustration” at the SWP’s degeneration that had “characterized the Robertsonites” showed up in Wohlforth. “There had been no real changes in the SWP,” Philips observes, “yet comrade Wohlforth thought it was time for a reevaluation.” At the November 1963 tendency meeting, says Philips, “it was stated that the party was an unfinished centrist organization, and that we had better put ourselves in the best factional position for the time when we would be expelled.” After the Kennedy assassination, says Philips, “in terms that the Robertsonites never dared to use, comrade Wohlforth explicitly called for us to split.” But under pressure from those like Philips who still wanted to cling to the SWP and its purported “proletarian core,” Wohlforth “pulled back,” Philips says, from an open split perspective. Instead, he demanded a discussion on Ceylon, violating internal discussion procedures, knowing this would get his group expelled from the no longer very democratic SWP.

Now North recasts this deliberate organizational provocation as a supreme political act of internationalism. And no doubt inspired by that paragon of internationalism himself, Gerry Healy, who had intervened so strongly in 1960 to reassure worrywarts like Robertson that he had the Ceylon problem in hand.

Healyism: A Machine for Destroying Cadres

We had refused to accept Healy’s 1962 rupture as definitive, given that we and Wohlforth both still claimed to stand on the same anti-revisionist program. Unity negotiations were undertaken in 1965. But at the infamous 1966 IC Conference in London, Healy expelled the Spartacist delegation, ostensibly on the grounds that Robertson had missed a session without “permission.” In remarks to the conference, Robertson had sketched out the views of the Spartacist group. His subsequent absence was then used as the excuse for savage attacks by Healy & Co. on the Spartacists for petty-bourgeois arrogance and American chauvinism, and an “apology” (confession) was demanded. As the next two decades of Healy’s history amply demonstrated, this method was absolutely characteristic: to try to extract cringing false confessions from comrades, rendering them thereafter subservient instruments, destroyed in their own eyes and before their comrades.

For David North, the Spartacists’ refusal to be diverted from a Trotskyist course (they call this “Robertson Breaks from Trotskyism”) constitutes “American nationalism and the wounded vanity of an arrogant petty bourgeois.” The Bulletin series echoes Wohlforth’s own 1970 opus, “What Is Spartacist?”, which sneers at “Robertson’s noble battle for honor, his unbending head.” Never mind who that “international” was and what it did for the next 20 years. Robertson should have done like me – I David North always groveled (until I was ready to knife them).

North’s own account of how he “fought” Healy is revealing. In an October 1985 speech to the British WRP “Special Congress” North describes how he raised his differences over “dialectics” beginning in late 1982. “We decided,” he says (using the royal “we”), “to come and take the first opportunity to raise it with Gerry Healy in an objective manner. Well, the reaction was an explosion. We were told immediately, within a half a minute... he said the alliance is finished.”

After the Political Committee unanimously supported Healy, North says, he was privately approached by Banda, who “said that in fact he had grave differences.... And I must say that while I was shocked by the depth of the political differences that existed between Comrade Banda and Gerry Healy, I wasn’t in a sense surprised.” After “lengthy discussions,” it was “agreed that there would be a common fight in the International Committee to raise these issues.” North returned for the next IC meeting “fully expecting” to pick up his alliance with Banda. “But instead when I arrived I was immediately confronted [by Banda].... I was immediately told that the notes which I had written constituted a huge attack on Marxism. He said he had been wrong to come to an agreement with me.” They then went into a WRP PC meeting “in which we [North] were told that if we pressed ahead with these differences it would mean a split with the Workers League. And I must say under those conditions... “ (guess what!) “we thought that given the enormous authority and experience of the British section we should reconsider our position.” North “bit our tongue, we said we did withdraw the document, it wasn’t really a document it was notes....” And so it went, right up to the end.

But, says North today, Robertson still should have submitted himself to international authority. Never mind why North thinks it’s so natural, and so smart, to grovel and lie (it never occurs to North that in 1966 we thought: we’ll say what we believe and see what happens.) But what makes Healy (and the rest of his crew, like Banda and Wohlforth, now shown to have been a bunch of semi-competents and semi-gangsters) synonymous with “international authority”? Gerry was hardly the only person around laying claim to the mantle of the Fourth International.

Healy Flunks

We spent a long time looking at the fragments of the disintegrated Fourth International, i.e., as it emerged from World War II and the Second World Congress in 1948. In 1953-54, “orthodox” Trotskyists put together the International Committee out of national factions which had come out against the revisionism which gained hegemony under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s.

With the senior cadres of the American SWP used up, as we had direct reason to know, that left an IC mainly of Healy’s forces in England and Pierre Lambert’s in France. Healy claimed to be the IC in the face of the SWP’s political defection, and we were prepared to give him some conditional credit based on what looked like impressive work in England and some good documents. We were the majority of the small forces which had opposed the centrist degeneration of the SWP, once a revolutionary party and a close collaborator of Trotsky’s struggle for the Fourth International. We had no doubt of the necessity for disciplined subordination of our national group to a programmatically cohesive international movement committed to Trotsky’s program. So Healy thought he had us on trial in his “IC” kangaroo court? We had Healy on trial too, and so long as there seemed to be a programmatic basis of agreement, we were very patient about it. In 1962 we evaluated our first close encounter: “if Healy intervenes roughly and using authority to try to shove a puppet regime down our throats. it opens up a lousy vista of the future of the IC” (Jim Robertson, letter to Geoff White, 27 September 1962).

From the time of our inception as an independent tendency in 1964, we sought to work with and examine those who stood to the left among ostensible Trotskyists – e.g., Healy, Lambert in France. Guillermo Lora in Bolivia, the group in Ceylon around Edmund Sarnarakkody. These tendencies (except for Healy, who was a political bandit) proved to be nationally defined and delimited and/or used up.

Throughout, we were also aware of the United Secretariat (USec) led by the erudite Belgian Ernest Mandel. The USec was the Pabloists sans Pablo (who we also checked out) and somewhat allied with the SWP of Dobbs and Joseph Hansen. The USec had by far the most groups in the most countries, adhering to them in a semi-accidental way; then they got a big jolt from the international “generation of May ‘68.” It was our observing that the anti-revisionists had not done a very good job of exposing the USec’s (and others’) claims to be the Fourth International that evidently got us tossed out of Healy’s 1966 IC conference.

A decade or so later, Healy, North & Co. concocted a devil theory to explain the survival of Pabloite revisionism: the U.S. government, and also Stalinism, had adopted Hansen and then Jack Barnes to do the devil’s work. Healy, though, proved to be a very different sort of character – a political bandit capable of anything. What form the “anything” would take for him and those who through the self-selection process of groveling and lying became his creatures was not predetermined at the time Healy broke with us in 1966.

But it quickly ceased to be our problem at all, because by 1967 Healy had broken far away from “orthodox” Trotskyism. His forces emerged as the most vulgar, super-Pabloite cheerleaders for Stalinism (Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”) and Third World nationalism. The “Arab Revolution” line the Healyites adopted as the excuse to hail the 1967 Arab-Israel conflict proved most fruitful. A transclass, transnational, totally disembodied “Arab Revolution” is elastic enough to embrace any act by any Arab regime, depending perhaps on which monarchy, theocracy or military dictatorship is dispensing patronage. Thus in 1979 Healy hailed the execution of militant Communist workers in Iraq, who were allegedly undermining the glorious “anti-imperialist” Iraqi army. But later, Healy supported Khomeini’s Iran in its war with that same Iraqi regime.

The alternation of leftist posturing and egregious opportunism – that was Healyism. And the Workers League was a smeared carbon copy of that prototype. Wohlforth himself was dumped in 1975 amidst Healy’s slanderous CIA-baiting of Wohlforth’s companion, Nancy Fields. That set the stage for North’s ascent, but Healy evidently never got much joy out of his U.S. epigones. Indeed he seems to have concluded a decade ago that his loyal American satellite wasn’t worth too much. In an article titled “Healy writes off the American working class” (Workers News, 27 May) Martin McLaughlin whines:

“It suffices to say that from 1975 to 1984, a period of nine years, WRP leaders made exactly two trips to the United States for brief discussions with the Workers League, once each by Michael Banda and Cliff Slaughter.
“Healy never returned to North America alter the struggle against the renegacy of Tim Wohlforth in 1974-75.”

We know a bit about Healy and we know he never thought much of Wohlforth. Apparently he thought even less of North.

The Big Lie as “Method”

The present Bulletin series strings together lies so outlandish and shameless that they are clearly designed to drive away anyone in or around the WL who has the ability to read and think. This use of the Big Lie was perfected by Stalin as a method of control; Healy/ North elevated this method to a psychotic principle. It goes like this: here, comrade, are 50 articles in the Spartacist press calling for the smashing of apartheid, the forging of a genuine Bolshevik party to lead a proletarian revolution, for the establishment of a black-centered workers republic in South Africa. Memorize them and then go out and sell the Bulletin which says that Spartacist “Opposes Anti-Apartheid Struggle.” If you have a problem with this, you don’t understand “dialectics.” You are supposed to know you’ re lying; then having lied, you are bound to your leaders until you finally slink away – ashamed, destroyed. Such intentional destruction of cadre is a Healyite hallmark, the ugly cult side of Healyism.

In the past, the WL has smeared us as “racists” and “fascists” (see our article, “Smash Fascist Smear of SL,” WV No. 379, 17 May 1985), and even as “the fingerman for the world capitalists” (Bulletin, 2 December 1969). In November 1978 a leaflet of the German Healyites, now with North, called Jim Robertson the “main spokesman for the national interests of the American bourgeoisie”! We note our demotion to the old “middle-class radical” category in the current series, which simultaneously portrays us as black nationalists and white racists, Shachtmanites and Stalinophiles (i.e., anti- and pro-Russia).

The Bulletin’s first installment claims that our statement of simple fact – that the Hormel meatpackers strike was knifed – reveals our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism” (Bulletin, 1 April), then quotes from WV a citation which proves rather the opposite: “After a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed.” Counterposing to us its own prostration before the local P-9 bureaucracy, the WL hails a federal court suit against the backstabbing UFCW International and another “major proposal” – “to take the strikers’ case to International President William Wynn, even out to his golf course if necessary.” The coy parenthetical note, “We will consider the Spartacist position on the use of the capitalist courts in a later article,” tops it off.

Did David North Go to Carleton College?

We think the Bulletin 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. Healy made recourse to the state against opponents a hallmark of his “tactics” 20 years ago against the USec’s Ernie Tate. North & Co. have themselves dragged the capitalist courts in to police the left – most notoriously in the case of one Alan Gelfand. WL agent Gelfand was expelled from the SWP and sued that organization in federal court in 1979, citing Healy’s notorious slanders that the FBI (along with the Stalinist GPU) controlled the SWP. He demanded the court uphold these slanders and reinstate him as an SWP member. Gelfand was vigorously supported by North and financed by Healy. Since the WRP split, Slaughter and Banda have belatedly disavowed both the Gelfand provocation and the scandalous “Security and the Fourth International” campaign against the SWP. North – a major mouthpiece of “Security...” – is still proud of it.

North’s cohort was one Alex Mitchell, formerly the editor of Healy’s British paper and now described by his ex-comrades as “ace Healy snoop and his top hand-shaker. Master-minded disgraceful ‘Security & Fl’ with North, justified killing of Iraqi CPers.... Mideast link man, widely mistrusted” (Workers Press, 7 June). The “Security...” slander campaign was aimed specifically at veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen, accusing him of being an accomplice of the Stalinist assassination of Leon Trotsky. Mitchell is still with the Healy Healyites.

North was Healy’s accomplice in the loathsome assault on Hansen’s reputation, and, through that device, they attacked the reputation of the old SWP and Trotsky himself. After Trotsky’s murder by the degenerate Stalinist secret police in 1940, the Stalinists tried to put about the disgusting lie that Trotsky was murdered by “his own people.” This claim got no credence at the time, and the main effect of its resuscitation in new form by the IC was simply to discredit Healy/North.

Hansen had served as one of Trotsky’s secretaries in exile, one of the human links that welded the American party in its revolutionary days to Trotsky in his struggle to reforge an authentic Bolshevik international. Hansen was won in his youth to a revolutionary party; after that party degenerated, he spent long years as a centrist and then a reformist spokesman. In this he was no different from many others, in many countries, whose leftist impulses wore out before they themselves wore out.

For Healy, though, such an explanation is not sufficient. No, Hansen has to have been a police agent-indeed, a simultaneous agent for the FBI and the Stalinist GPU. The implicit corollary is: if Hansen, why not SWP founder James Cannon? And why not Trotsky himself? After Hansen died, the emphasis of Healy’s paranoid slander campaign shifted to the present SWP head, Jack Barnes. Hundreds of pages in the Healyite press sought to show that Barnes (who’s not one of our favorite people, by the way) was an FBI agent; in fact, they claim, so are all his cronies in the present leadership of the SWP. Why? Because a bunch of them all went to Carleton College, a small school in the American Midwest. For “proof” we are offered, among other things, a 1961 report on a visit to Carleton by... Jim Robertson! Robertson, then a leader of the SWP’s Young Socialist Alliance, went on tour for the YSA in 1961. At Carleton, he met with a loose group of youth, some of whom were SWP supporters. When he arrived he found that these leftist students “had all the party [internal] bulletins on the Cuba discussion and in the presence of a whole group of 18 students, their leader innocently asked me to fill them in on Wohlforth’s side in the dispute” (this letter by Robertson is quoted in the WL’s 1981 pamphlet, “Security and the Fourth International: The Carleton Twelve”).

Robertson, himself in opposition on Cuba, suggested the students should join the SWP if they wanted to be privy to its internal life. For Healy & Co., that these non-members had gotten some interesting documents (from SWP leader Carl Feingold) is “irrefutable” evidence of an FBI conspiracy, carried out by Hansen and Feingold, to groom Jack Barnes and his Carleton cronies to take over the government’s SWP operation from Hansen. Those familiar with Healyite doublethink will find nothing unusual about the idea that Robertson – elsewhere portrayed as the most pernicious agent of Hansen – here constitutes an unimpeachable witness to the Carleton College “conspiracy.” But perhaps there’s more to it. Is North himself an agent of Robertson? Why else would he use Robertson as an authority, when we all know how Robertson covered up for Hansen the FBI agent? Did David North also go to Carleton College?

As we have noted before, “Security and the Fourth International” was always a supremely cynical device, used along with a deliberately mystified “dialectics” to keep the Healyite membership scared witless and hopelessly confused. Healy was the man with the answers: who is a CIA/FBI/GPU agent and which “opposites” to hold fast to. Healy’s little heir, North, doesn’t believe his own lies, if there is any truth to the following story. According to Savas Michael (Greek IC section leader still with Healy), North visited Michael in Athens to line him up against Healy when it became clear the WRP was about to blow apart. Michael claims he asked North about “Security and the Fourth International” and North “spoke about a ‘personal vendetta’ between G. Healy and Joseph Hansen” (Marxist Review, May 1986).

Such a vendetta did indeed exist. A conscious revisionist and skilled polemicist, Hansen twisted Healy’s tail on more than one occasion – especially in his exposure of Healy’s antics at the 1966 London IC Conference. It was for selling Hansen’s pamphlet of documents on our exclusion from that conference that Healy had a Canadian USec leader, Ernie Tate, beaten up in London, then sued him when he protested. Then when Wohlforth was purged, his lengthy, lurid account of life in Healy’s IC was printed by Hansen in Intercontinental Press, the journal he edited. The Bulletin produced a reply to Wohlforth in the form of a polemic against our own article “Wohlforth Terminated” (WV No. 61, 31 January 1975). Hansen must have enjoyed himself thoroughly when he added the following footnote on the Healyite article:

“It is not clear why the Workers League Political Committee concludes that Robertson and Wohlforth have consummated ‘a political marriage that is pregnant
with historical ironies.’ Perhaps the WL PC misread the quip in the ‘Wohlforth Terminated’ article: ‘As for Wohlforth, we can say with sincerity: it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy’.”
– Intercontinental Press, Vol. 13, No. II, 24 March 1975

Healyism and Racism

When Healy wrote of “D. North’s whiter than white socialism” he doubtless didn’t know how right he was. For North continues the long tradition of U.S. Healyite “colorblind” economism. Perhaps the most self-indicting piece in the Bulletin’s series is the one entitled, “An Obsession With Race.” It both proves that nothing in the real world stands in the way of what the Bulletin will print and that the WL’s profile in this deeply racist country is, on the black question, akin to the old AFL, job-trusted white-racist unions. Of the latter, founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon said: “They also had nothing special to offer the Negroes; nothing at all, in fact” (“The Russian Revolution and The American Negro Movement”). According to the Bulletin’s research:

“The Workers Vanguard’s 1985 subject index contains references to at least 60 articles on the ‘black struggle,’ civil rights, police terror, racial attacks, fascist groups, etc. These included a number of articles on the MOVE bombing which was certainly one of the most important political developments [!] of the year, but dozens of other incidents as well.
“In the same one-year period, according to the index, the Spartacist newspaper managed a single article on auto workers, two on steelworkers and one on (US) coal miners.”
– Bulletin, 3 June

Talk about perfect Healyite hypocrisy. By rights, their tongues should grow hair and their toes shrivel up and fall off as they utter the word “index.” Can you imagine the WL putting out indexed bound volumes of the past years of the Bulletin so that advanced workers can study their record? Now what does the index controversy show? 1) That “only the Workers League” could refer to the hideous racist massacre of Philly MOVE by the state in such bloodless, colorblind terms. 2) That in Reagan’s America, racist terror has been unleashed viciously and consciously and often as part of the domestic reflection of the anti-Soviet war drive. 3) That the auto, steel and (U.S.) coal unions probably weren’t writing a proud new chapter in the history of the American class struggle last year.

For the Bulletin, though, it demonstrates that the Spartacists “counterpose” the “struggle against racism from the struggle of the working class,” “making the working class, rather than the capitalist system, responsible for racial discrimination and prejudice.” Inexorably, what follows is an example of our work proving precisely the opposite: the successful SL-initiated, union-backed Labor/Black Mobilization to Stop the Klan in Washington, D.C. on 27 November 1982. Over 5,000 black workers and youth turned out and placed themselves under our leadership and the threatened KKK march was stopped in its tracks. It was a singular victory for labor, and particularly for doubly oppressed black labor, in Reagan’s America.

At the time, the Bulletin smeared the anti-Klan mobilization as “an adventure which played right into the hands of the police,” but this grotesque and cowardly lie is not now repeated. Now, North & Co. sneer that our “reaction” was “seemingly out of all proportion to the significance of the threat posed [by] a handful of KKK scum in a city which is 60% black.” Fortunately, black Washington residents and unionists from the Tidewater area docks didn’t see it that way.

Belittling the Klan danger, North & Co. pretend not to know that the November 27 display of labor/black power faced down the Reagan government’s determination to shove the Klan provocation down the throat of that city. Our mobilization was a labor action not only in its program but in the simplest literal sense. Respectful treatment from the cops for the mobilization was wrested not mainly by the size and militancy of the assembly, though that was impressive, but by the black union presidents who made it known in the face of police threats that their memberships would take amiss any interference with this heavily union-endorsed anti- Klan action. Again, to our statement that the fascists in this country have been able to poll hundreds of thousands of votes, the Bulletin snaps: “the Spartacists cannot point to a KKK candidate who has received such a mass vote.” Try these for starters: KKKer Tom Metzger received over 32,000 votes in a 1980 Democratic Congressional primary in California; a brown-shirted Nazi, Harold Covington, took 56,000 votes in a North Carolina statewide election for attorney general. The Klan, of course, endorsed Ronald Reagan and took his victory as their own. But this is just social reality and therefore has no place in the Northites’ attempt to work us over. Perhaps the most idiotic part of the Bulletin’s anti- anti-racist tirade is the denunciation of our slogan “Finish the Civil War!” as “utterly reformist”!

Northite “Internationalism”: Little Lords of Nothing

By the mid-I970s, the IC had become unashamed apologists for Near Eastern bourgeois regimes. In 1985 Slaughter admitted:

“GH [Healy] sought and found relations with bourgeois leaders like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Nkomo. It is not only that Marxism was distorted in order to mislead on their class nature. This Party, through Healy, sought financial support from these bourgeois, not just for this or that political purpose, but as a system.”
– News Line, 20 November 1985

But now that these revelations have served their purpose in dumping Healy, North & Co. want to turn the IC’s crimes into Healy’s personal responsibility. Slaughter says that it was when he “raised the question of Comrade North tackling his own responsibility for the IC’s past” that North “moved very quickly to propose suspension of the WRP from the IC.” He also spills some beans about Nick Beams, North’s bloc partner in Australia:

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments?...
“Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousands of dollars) in 1983?...
“Is it not a fact that the receipt of this money by the Australian section [w]as reported to the Central Committee of the SLL (Australia) only in the month before the IC meeting of Dec 16 [1985]?...
“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?”
– Slaughter, Letter to all members, 14 January 1986

According to the Slaughter Workers Press (28 June 1986) Beams “was formally censured... for failing to report to the December 17 [1985] meeting of IC leaders, held in London, on the SLL’s role in carrying out Healy’s betrayals especially in the Middle East.... At a further conference held on March 1 and 2 the [Northite Australian SLL] majority could not even agree on whether a betrayal had occurred when the SLL supported the execution of the 21 Iraqi communists.”
This article also notes that Beams and North had initially opposed Healy’s expulsion.

From virtually all quarters, save North’s own, comes the same story. Crisis in the WRP North maneuvering for junior “founder-leader” status - blocking with Slaughter/ Banda to dump Healy, banking on the demise of his bloc partners thereafter. Greek Healyite Michael says that when North visited him in September, “he spoke with the utmost contempt for the ‘unprincipled, nationalist British ‘ including his present day [now ex-] allies, Slaughter. Banda and Pilling. He called Slaughter ‘a physical coward’, Banda an opportunist and Pilling ‘an alcoholic’.” Slaughter supporter Bill Hunter, in his cogent reply to Banda’s “Twenty-Seven Reasons...”, adds:

“His [North’s] ‘authority’ is based on the Eighth Congress of the IC.... Every proceeding at that congress, every word which came out of it, is a monument of ‘Healyism’.”
- Workers Press, 15 February

What is North’s IC?

When you turn over the rock to see what makes them move, you find a dead-end pecking-order invidiousness appropriate to those who aspire to be little lords of nothing. Certainly there is no connection between these fracturing grouplets and the class struggle, the defense of the oppressed. The German Northites - the Bund Sozialistische Arbeiter (BSA) have adopted a “new” line for electoral support to the German Social Democratic Party, according to the 25 July Bulletin. Only three days before, the Bulletin had published a BSA statement entitled “Social-Democracy and the ‘Trail of Blood’.” While the Peruvian regime was massacring hundreds of political prisoners, the SPD and its fellows were meeting at a congress of the Second International “only a few kilometers away.” Former SPD chancellor Willy Brandt, we are told, made what amounted to “a complete apology for the blood bath.” He is, according to the Bulletin, “on the side of imperialism in Latin America.... His political aim differs from Ronald Reagan’s only in nuances.” Yet it is to this very SPD that the German Northites now extend their electoral support. Beams’ Australian SLL admitted publicly that it had printed an exile organ of the fascistic Vietnamese emigres, The Bell of Saigon. This link with the thugs who have been physically attacking leftist and labor meetings was “explained” by the SLL as part of a turn toward “commercial enterprise.” Has the financially beleaguered WL found similar sources of income yet?

David North: A Healyite’s Healyite

North and his gang are worthless people for the international working-class movement. Separated from their own “continuity” – Healy – their trajectory might lead anywhere. With supreme cynicism, the Bulletin has begun a series penned by North on “The Heritage We Defend,” which obscenely tries to claim connection with Trotsky and Cannon. The heritage North really defends is Healy’s at its worst: “Security and the Fourth International”; eager ventures across the class line in pursuit of trivial opportunist advantage or financial support; shameless use of the bosses’ courts within the workers movement.

Programmatically, the IC under Healy and now North is a virulently anti-Soviet sect. Beginning with embrace of the Maoist “Cultural Revolution” in 1966, they have moved on to support virtually every hostile force on the borders of the USSR, from Khomeini’s Iran to the Afghan mullahs to Polish Solidarność. Their enthusiasm for Solidarność, the Pope’s and Wall Street’s best hope for plunging Poland into a bloody civil war for the restoration of capitalism, led them into the arms of Margaret Thatcher when they red-baited miners’ leader Arthur Scargill on the eve of the heroic miners’ strike.

“Anti-Stalinism” was their cover for supporting the beheading of the Iraqi proletariat when they applauded the execution of the CP members on the grounds that, after all, “they were only Stalinists.” In the 3 January Bulletin, North denounced Pabloism for overthrowing “Trotsky’s characterization of Stalinism as ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’.” This formulation owes nothing to Trotsky; in fact, it comes from Dave Weiss (“D. Stevens”), who put it forward during the 1953 Cochran-Clarke fight in the SWP. A historical irony here – it was Healy/North’s arch enemy, Joseph Hansen, who defended this one-sided formulation in the debate. (Any curious Northites are referred to SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, Nos. 3 and 4, February 1953.) By Healyite logic, North must be: 1) a hopeless ignoramus or 2) a secret agent of Hansen.

Trotsky in all his writings insisted on the contradictory nature of Stalinism, a conservative bureaucratic caste which rests upon the socialized property forms in the deformed workers states; at the same time Stalinism, by seeking accommodation with imperialism, undermines the defense of the workers states, necessitating proletarian political revolution. (Denying the dual nature of Stalinism, how can the Healyites explain such occurrences as the overthrow of capitalism in Vietnam? They can’t, which explains that characteristic Healyite schizophrenia: slavishly tailing the Vietnamese leadership, while at the same time denying that an anticapitalist revolution took place in Cuba.)

The WL’s “anti-Stalinism” leans heavily on the notion that Washington and the Kremlin are united for counterrevolution in a global conspiracy against, e.g., Solidarność and the national liberation of Third World peoples. A glance at the real world, though, shows that more than 60 years of sincere Stalinist commitment to “peaceful coexistence” hasn’t reconciled (and can’t) the capitalist rulers to the continued existence of the Soviet Union. Indeed, a frenzied imperialist regime identifies as “Soviet surrogates” every movement for social freedom, from Nicaragua to South Africa. And needless to say the WL, busy denouncing Russian capitulations, never mentions how the Chinese are serving as direct military agents of U.S. imperialism from the Vietnamese border to Angola to Afghanistan.

Anti-Sovietism is a necessary credential for those who seek patronage from the maggoty labor bureaucrats, from those traitors to the working class who serve their “own” imperialism. And it’s among those traitors that the Healyites seek to nest. Thus the WL in the New York transit union seeks to entice the union tops to form a “labor party” by mimicking their bureaucrats’ hostile indifference to the defense of James Grimes, a black worker prosecuted for a courageous act of self-defense. The WL’s racist economism is fundamental. But there is also a chameleon-like quality to the WL’s politics. The Bulletin series paints us as “obsessed” with black people in America. But over South Africa, for example, they are simultaneously for imperialist “divestment” and for blood and vengeance, People’s War, and charge us with being obsessed with... white people. That’s because the Healyites/Northites are whores, and who they’re seeking to please varies from one moment to the next.

The thoroughgoing defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states against imperialism and capitalist restoration requires revolutionary leadership. It requires the forging of Trotskyist parties in each country welded together as disciplined sections of a reborn Fourth International. The international Spartacist tendency was forged to preserve and build upon the threads of continuity that link the authentic Fourth Internationalists of today to the movement of Trotsky’s and Cannon’s time. Those threads are slender. We are thinking not only of the murder of Trotsky and the decimation of the European Trotskyist groups by fascism and world war. We recall also the murdered Andres Nin, the Hanoi Trotskyists who were extinguished, and others about whom we know even less. From our independent inception in 1964, we sought to intersect and test out every kind of grouping that claimed to have something to offer in the way of international leadership. For our American-based grouping, tossed out of the SWP with small forces, the struggle for international collaborators was an uphill battle, and one that still continues.

Gerry Healy and his heirs are a world apart from this. They have a publishing machine, so we have to answer what they say. But what they say means nothing – their words are but applications for some sordid and episodic advantage, bearing no relationship to what they claim to believe. What is Healy, what is North? We have to concur with Trotsky’s remark about Stalinism, but in microcosm of course: to the extent the Healyites/Northites are part of the working class, they are its syphilis.

* * *

New York, N.Y.

August 8, 1960

To the Political Committee:

Dear Comrades,
I am addressing you on the matter of our party’s public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party’s entry into a “Popular Front” electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.

In raising this matter privately with several members of your body I was told that letters have been sent the Ceylonese and that your view is that for the present a greater advantage is to be gained by revolutionary Marxists in the LSSP through our remaining publicly silent. I must disagree and urge you to reconsider.

When I read in the New York Times of the electoral pact and then of the election and finally of the continued support by the LSSP to the new capitalist government, my concern over this classically social-democratic capitulation was mitigated by two thoughts: (1) first that the construction of a genuine Trotskyist party for the island could perhaps emerge out of the shambles, and (2) that now the blocks would really be put to Pablo, not over an obscured vote by his English followers in a provincial British Labour Party meeting, but over a clear act of historic proportions by a major party, an act about which the central world organs of the FI would have to take a stand and on the grounds for or against elementary revolutionary principle.

But the silence in the Militant weakens both these hopes. Within Ceylon our silence while it may temporarily continue our “respectability” in the mouths of the leaders also places a terrible weapon in their hands against any militants they may have to contend with – “Even the Americans are only privately disturbed and are treating this as a matter between comrades.” And as for Pablo’s stature before the world movement, every day of delay allows him to say in effect: “You’re another maneuverer subordinating principle to tactics.” Comrades, that you condemn the Ceylonese ex-Trotskyists, I have no doubt, but your failure to raise this publicly and with great seriousness does the movement internationally a disservice.

With comradely greetings,
James Robertson


* * *

SOCIALIST LABOR LEAGUE
186 Clapham High Street London S.W. 4, England

14th August, 1960

Joe Hansen

Dear Joe,
We discussed at some length on our Organizing Committee (the equivalent of your Political Committee) the proposition concerning the situation in Ceylon.

The opinion here is that the Ceylon News, being a Ceylon Embassy information hand-out, is not reliable and should not be used as the basis of the piece for the Militant. We think that it is necessary to write again asking for the fullest possible information concerning the current situation in the party in Ceylon.

There is no doubt that they are in a severe crisis but if we take their situation and recent events in Europe it is not improbable that there will now be important developments inside the Pablo camp. This is all the more reason for us to proceed with caution - as you have in the past so rightly insisted.

We are going to cable them tomorrow for information and we suggest you do likewise and hold up for the time being publication of anything in the Militant.

Best wishes,


Gerry
Copy to J.P.C.

Interview on the 1966 Split (1985)

English Language Spartacist, No. 36-37 (Winter 1985-86)
[Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007: http://www.marx.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/1966interview.html]

On the 1966 Split

Interview with London Conference Participants

On November 16-17 [1985], Spartacist interviewed four leading members of the Spartacist League/U.S. in the aftermath of the spectacular implosion of the Healy/Banda WRP in England. The subject matter covered in the interview is wide-ranging, but it centered on the expulsion of Spartacist from Healy’s and French leader Pierre Lambert’s April 1966 London Conference of the International Committee (IC). Three of the comrades interviewed — Jim Robertson, Joseph Seymour and Liz Gordon — were participants in the London Conference as members of the Spartacist delegation. (The fourth Spartacist delegate, Rose Jersawitz, was passing through London on her way to study politics with the Voix Ouvrière group in France. Upon returning to the U.S. she launched a faction fight in the SL urging emulation of VO, and then quit to do so, founding the Spark group based in Detroit.) The other comrade interviewed, Al Nelson, was the party leader in command back in New York when Healy broke with us at the London Conference.

As necessary historical background to the material presented in the interview, a narrative account of our tendency’s history and experiences with Healy is provided in “Spartacists and Healyism.”

Conducting the interview on behalf of Spartacist was a panel of five comrades. Mark Kellerman (joined 1965) is a former member of the Central Control Commission, a member of the SL Central Committee and a staff writer for Workers Vanguard. Reuben Samuels (joined 1968) is a member of the Workers Vanguard editorial board and the SL Central Committee. Joel Salant (joined 1968) once edited Spartacist East and is currently a member of the SL Central Control Commission. Bonnie Brodie (joined 1974) is the editor of Young Spartacus. Helene Brosius (joined 1964) is secretary of the International Secretariat and managing editor of the English-language edition of Spartacist.

SPARTACIST: Since the definitive rupture between ourselves and Healy took place nearly two decades ago, we might begin by indicating where the idea came from to interview the participants in that history.

Robertson: The Healy/Banda organization has blown apart, and a lot of dazed people are asking “where did we go wrong?” And the 1966 IC Conference and our expulsion keeps coming up over and over again. Now Wohlforth says, oh of course Ernie Tate was maliciously beaten. Banda says to his miner supporters, yes, maybe it was a mistake to get rid of the Spartacists in ’66. And it seems that François Demassot had told a lot of people that I was beaten up in London, which isn’t even true.

And now we are told, by people who were in a position to know, that Healy was wild, drunken and really violent in the summer of 1966, after his expectations were thwarted at the ’66 Conference in April.

The article that we wrote last summer also figures strongly. That article was on what the Healyites did to the mine union leadership, playing running dogs for the Labourite right wing and the Tories. Because we heard from miners: “You better watch out for the WRP, Banda is absolutely out of his mind over what you people have written and he has sworn to get you.” So we may have helped to crystallize a split in the WRP that was evidently one or two years in the making, and having nothing to do with Healy’s alleged sadistic sexual proclivities.

You know, Shachtman once got very, very mad at Cannon who observed that we Trotskyists are the only moral people. And he thought that was a little too angular a formulation, leaving Shachtman in a brothel somewhere. Well, what Cannon meant was that without a correct program you cannot be very moral in the course of wars, revolutions, repression, betrayals, lawsuits. Without a correct program that crystallizes, in writing and in your work, the historic aims of the proletariat, you simply cannot be moral. Even if you are the Reverend A.J. Muste, who wouldn’t kill a fly. To the extent that we have something to crow about here, we have to locate it in our programmatic outlook.

It turns out that we have a profound difference with the WRP, over politics. Their nominal defense of the Soviet Union is at such a level of abstraction that any concrete expression for several decades has been against the Soviet Union, on most anything you can name. Including, interestingly, going way back, support for the Cultural Revolution, which was virulently anti-Soviet. And they applauded the execution of Communists in Iraq. Then they had to dump the Ba’athist connection in Iraq in order to back the Ayatollah, because Iran and Iraq were at war. And may I point out that to back the Ayatollah is also to be anti-Russian. And they back Solidarność, which wants a bloody counter-revolution to make Poland safe for NATO. Iran, Poland, China. Afghanistan — back all the enemies of the Soviet Union on the perimeter of the Soviet Union. And this is called “defense of the Soviet Union”!

So we have some stuff to say now, because we were the principled people the whole way. And I would suggest that the main reason is not some morality associated with Americans versus English persons, but that over a long period of time, through many fights, through one tendency after another, we stood concretely for the defense of the Soviet Union, against imperialism, and against the damn Russian bureaucracy. That has in fact been our political compass, and it also generates a certain cultural superstructure and a certain morality.

Our political culture is associated with an actual Leninist program that seeks to live, instead of a series of sideshows and circuses.

In light of the things that the two WRPs are daily revealing about their stinking common heritage and recent practice, one is tempted to say “thank god we’re not Healyites.” But this is not an accident. Our practice and tradition come out of the international communist movement, and we have the examples before us of the Cannonites and Shachtmanites. Whose leaders weren’t “maximum leaders”: they sometimes had fights in their central committees. And they lived modestly and they did not claim to have total knowledge — of “security,” dialectics and everything else in the world. Unlike Gerry Healy. J.V. Stalin, Elijah Muhammad, the Reverend Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, Lynn Marcus and L. Ron Hubbard.

SPARTACIST: Do you consider the Shachtmanites part of our Trotskyist heritage?

Robertson: There was a lot wrong with the Shachtmanite organization: it was deeply programmatically weak, disoriented and subject to demoralization, which did in fact, in a difficult time, destroy it. But as far as internal administration and party democracy went, it was very good. You could get up in conferences and say rude things about Shachtman, have debates. A pretty lively National Committee, as many internal bulletins as people were capable of writing. And I learned a lot.

The SWP I thought was basically a sound organization but I saw certain practices that seemed kind of bureaucratic. In particular, every week members of the National Committee got a big packet of information from the center, which was confidential unless you happened to be personally close with an NC member. If it was a real issue, it would hit the internal bulletin within a year or so. But there was a kind of vicarious insiderism that I thought was offensive and manipulative.

But by and large the organization seemed to run OK. I mean, you knew what your rights were. And if you stepped over the line, you knew you could get thrown out. But at least you sort of knew what the line was.

My first fight with Wohlforth was on that subject. We had our first faction meeting, and I mentioned in the course of it, “Well, comrades, this is a pretty serious business.” This was right around the time of the 1961 plenum where we had it out on Cuba — I think it was immediately following it. Hansen sort of booby-trapped us into turning up as an opposition. The intention was to smash this youth leadership and bring them to heel on Castro. Well, we didn’t smash. We came out fairly hard and we called a faction meeting a few days later. We had quite a few people there. And I said, “Well, the way things are going, looking at the party and looking at the situation, I give us about 18 months here.” And Wohlforth yelled at me and screamed and yelled and screamed.

After the meeting, I hung around a little bit — it was in his apartment — and I went up to him and said, “Well, Tim, why did you argue with me about that? You know the nature of the organization we’re in, we’re on a pretty hard collision course. I think we’ll be pretty lucky if we last 18 months, given the logic of the situation.” He said, “I know.” I said, “So why did you fight me about it?” He said, “Well, there are people like Freddy Mazelis who are very nervous, and I didn’t want to scare him.”

We lasted about 18 months.

But insofar as I encountered the Healy organization, there was nothing top to bottom that I found appetizing, in accordance with my understanding of a communist organization. And the Healyites did indeed march to a different drummer. We were put off track by their literary side for several years because of Healy’s success in winning over significant sections of the trade-union and educational apparatus of the British CP to an ostensibly Trotskyist position. They wrote very powerfully. And it took a little while for Gerry to work through that and use it up, and to create some kind of nasty, shabby, deepening and evolving cult.

SPARTACIST: When did you develop the slogan, “However Healy does it, do the opposite”?

Robertson: It was from watching the Wohlforth operation here, grinding the members to pieces. I’ll give you a nice example. We just spent about 18 months preparing and running an election campaign in New York. We got a good party organizer in, a campaign manager and two candidates. And we ran hard for many months, the best campaign we could, pound, pound, pound.

OK, in a Healyite organization, the day after the election, you walk in and you say, “Well, comrades, the crisis intensifies and you’ve been semi-traitors for the way you’ve dogged it. Now you’ve really got to go to work.” That’s an absolutely normal Healyite technique. Instead of, “Well, comrades, take some vacations now. Go and skin dive, or go to Portugal, or do something. Pay as much of your own way as you can, and perhaps the party treasury can assist you. We have worked you relentlessly, now take a break.” That’s a very good example of an anti-Healyite technique. And so maybe we’ll have some of the same candidates around in a few years.

In a Healyite organization it would be: “Turn over your vacation money and work twice as hard.”

What does this reflect? If you’re going to try to build a revolutionary workers party, you’ve got to have cadres. If you’re running a perpetual sideshow, you don’t want cadres. You need a few supervisors or foremen, and you just run through the human material and milk it. These administrative techniques reflect qualitative differences in purpose.

SPARTACIST: How did the Revolutionary Tendency first get involved with Healy?

Robertson: It all began really in 1961 with the document called “World Prospect for Socialism.” At that time there was the old International Committee, which was the SWP and a little group in England and a little group in France and a little group in Switzerland and maybe a few corresponding sympathizers here and there — the Cannon wing fallout from the 1953 split, which was pretty moribund.

And then the Healyites broke away from their deep entrism in the Labour Party, in the course of winning over several hundred very able people out of the CP, from the education and industrial departments, mainly in the wake of the Khrushchev revelations and the Hungarian Revolution. And they wrote this document, which was very fine. And there was Healy’s magazine Labour Review, in which was appearing some of the finest Trotskyist analytical and political material written since the ’40s fight, particularly material by Cliff Slaughter but not restricted to him. Peter Fryer’s material on dialectics. The American magazine Fourth International of the SWP was fairly dull and pedestrian.

The youth leadership of the founding YSA was kind of restless with the SWP. For a while Tim [Wohlforth] got into secret correspondence with Patrick O’Daniel (Sherry Mangan), who was the editor of Pablo’s English-language magazine, the Fourth International. I was a little nervous about this correspondence.

And then one day Tim was on tour and a letter came, and a majorityite comrade, Al Taplin, opened the letter instead. It was forwarded immediately to Jim Cannon in L.A., who invited Tim over to his house. And Cannon pulled out the party constitution and read him the relevant passage, and then handed Tim the letter. I ran into Tim in San Francisco a few days later. He was still shaking.

We were smuggling in half a dozen copies of the Pabloite FI and handing them around surreptitiously. Because Pablo was putting an orthodox front on things, and we were kind of nervous, because we were wondering what the devil we were doing in a very small, largely Anglo-Saxon wing of the world movement. We hadn’t worked anything out—we were poking around, as youth will.

When I first came into the SWP I noticed that if I asked any of the younger comrades. “What party are you a member of?” they would answer, “The SWP.” So I said to them: “Read this book.” And they would come back after having read the book and I would ask, “What party are you a member of?” and they would answer, “The Fourth International.” The book was The Case of Comrade Tulayev, by Victor Serge. Thus, in a rather unintentional way, I was building a proto-faction.

So we were disgruntled in a non-focused way with the SWP, it was very much of a national party. We were casting around looking at various socialist currents and tendencies in the world. It would be useful to explain what caused us to shift from looking at the Pabloites sympathetically to looking at the Healy group sympathetically.

The Pabloites put out their English-language Fourth International which looked attractive and sufficiently orthodox. We studied the resolutions from their Fourth and Fifth Congresses which looked very straightforward.

Then there was a huge scandal. A Healyite fraction got expelled from a local constituency Labour Party organization and it was alleged that supporters of Pablo had blocked with the right wing to get rid of them. The SWP publicized this as a classic atrocity which was supposed to show how rotten the Pabloites were as opposed to their good friend Gerry Healy. But Wohlforth and I thought: what happened one night in some town several thousand miles away is not susceptible to our critical examination.

Then, when the Marcyites split from the SWP in 1958. Pablo gave them some coverage in his press. But he made a careful political separation between himself and them. We thought that was fair, even though we knew that the Marcyites were no good. One always wants to exploit the misfortunes of one’s opponents, and the SWP was an opponent of Pablo.

However, something took place which we could evaluate from a distance. Around 1959 or so, a group with some prominent people, including Alasdair Maclntyre, broke away from Healy. We got their documents—probably published by Pablo—and saw that they mainly complained about various organizational abuses and had drawn classically Menshevik conclusions on the party question. So we said, these guys are no good. But Pablo, in his introduction, supported them without reservation. So we thought, forget Pablo. We also drew another, objectively quite stupid conclusion. Healy’s defense of the correct Leninist position on democratic centralism caused us to tilt toward Healy and we started looking upon Healy much more favorably. But the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

And then “World Prospect for Socialism” came out in 1961. We were getting more than restless over the Cuban question. And here was this really good, hard line “for the revolutionary workers party!” Since it wasn’t against the law in the SWP, we got scores of copies and started handing them around. We thought, well, program is decisive, and this is the clearest and most pristine expression of the program of international Trotskyism that we’ve seen in a long time.

Then we got into this fight on the Cuban question, and got plunged into being the minority faction in the SWP.

And we were still trying to run the youth group, which I knew was going to be for a very short time. Wohlforth didn’t seem to want to understand that, either.

And I couldn’t stand the alternations that Wohlforth was doing. Every week he’d go down to 116 University Place and he’d be jerked around by Farrell Dobbs, and either we’d be in a hard oppositional stance or we were going to be conciliatory. And I said, we’re through in the youth org. I think we ought to pay attention to what we can do. We’ve got some pretty good young cadres, there’s a few branches that can be taken, because in those days branches were like independent castles with barons. They didn’t use membership transfers—there weren’t enough people to move around and they were all too old.

But I thought if we could get Philadelphia and New Haven and a branch on the coast, transform ourselves from the youth majority into a tendency in the party as a whole with a majority in a couple of branches, that we’d get more longevity, to run a fight. Also we’d get more political prestige, because the youth didn’t count for much. The old Cannonites vividly remembered what happened to the last youth organization: the YPSL-Fourth left with Max Shachtman.

Well, Wohlforth wanted to play around, and then just got mulish. At the same time, Mage had gone on a walking tour through Algeria in the middle of the war against the French and he came back pretty much a Lambertist. He was keeping it very quiet — I had to go visit his house, and I reached into his file of magazines, and there was a whole bunch of La Vérités. And Tim had done the same thing he pulled with Pablo — this time behind my back — and that is he had gotten into secret communication with Gerry Healy.

So we reproduced in our own little minority tendency the IC: we had a Cannonite, we had a Healyite and then we had a Lambertist! Earlier Wohlforth had made another departure; he had decided to support Swabeck on Mao’s Great Leap Forward of ’59-’60. Well, he got badly burned on that, because Larry Trainer and Jim Cannon got up and disavowed Swabeck—Shane and Murry Weiss being the principal polemicists that shredded Swabeck. And I remember in a break one of the younger leaders, Bert Deck, asking me, “How come you didn’t speak, Jim?” And I said, “Well, Comrade Swabeck was at the Fourth Congress of the CI. I think he’s terribly out of line now. I think he was beautifully handled by Murry and Shane and I don’t think you needed me to put my boot in too.”

And the youth leadership was a bloody disaster. The Weissites had had the youth leadership. And then Wohlforth and Weiss had a falling out, and the majority of the youth leadership went with Wohlforth. So there was a very small and not very competent and quite hysterical Weissite presence in the youth leadership. (That’s when we started asking for party reps. I remember Tom Kerry came once or twice, and he never came back. He had had it with these maniacs.)

Well, that’s all Dobbs was waiting for. So he started pouring in Barry Sheppard and Peter Camejo. And he managed then, over the Cuba issue, to bring it to a national youth conference in December of ’61, and clean us out.

OK, so suddenly we were in a situation in which Wohlforth is in private communication with Healy. He kept those letters pretty close to his vest. He had a set of two or three lieutenants, that he would reveal little bits and pieces to. Wohlforth and Healy would do whatever they did in their letters, and then Freddy [Mazelis] and I and one or two other guys would get the word to line up the masses of the faction, which probably consisted of 15 people in New York. I went out to California and I lined up some people that I’d known out there. So we got another wing, with the pre-eminent figure being Geoff White, with whom I had been seriously at odds for years, because I was in the left wing of the SWP and he came out of the CP pretty much a Deutscherite. So we got on not well at all. Also he was much more diplomatic than I was and the SWP believed in suavity, and suave I wasn’t. So I got dumped out of the Bay Area and into the center. From which there is a political moral: if you really want to wipe somebody out, don’t send them to the center.

SPARTACIST: How did the 1962 split in the RT come about?

Robertson: Then we started getting into trouble about the nature of the SWP. Because it looked to me like, with the SWP embracing the Castro road to revolution, we had a flagrant case of centrism here. You can go read the documents and, starting with a flirtation with Tito, every time there was an opportunity or an action, you could see that the SWPers were straining against the bounds of a formal revolutionary program, because their appetites were going somewhere else. The SWP was physically and socially in very bad shape by 1960. It had about 600 members, and they were ready for something.

They got it over Cuba. I remember Morris Stein, a nice fellow. He got up at the June ’61 SWP convention and said, “What’s happening in Cuba is the greatest thing since the October Revolution.” He sat down, and that was the last we ever saw of him. Hooray—he had lived to see it. One has to draw conclusions from the SWP’s Cuba position: that the party was a centrist formation rapidly moving to the right. It had crossed a certain kind of watershed. And we had to fight.

I wrote a letter to Ed Lee in the Bay Area about how we have to not get wiped out. We used the phrase: otherwise each new rightward departure is going to create a new wave of oppositionists, who then will let themselves get washed out; our job is to stay here and accumulate such revolutionary Marxian discontent as the current course of the party is throwing up.

And Wohlforth didn’t want that. Healy was saying, “Trotskyism Betrayed: The Story of the SWP,” and at the same time, “the SWP in its central core is firmly proletarian and revolutionary.”

And so Healy and Wohlforth pulled a coup in ’62. The only trouble is, Wohlforth has never won a faction fight, ever. I mean, it’s almost impossible for the main leader of a group to lose a faction fight (and he’s lost about six of them in a row) — you really have to do it badly. The crucial trick is to alienate the large majority of your key lieutenants. Really infuriate and offend them. And be very unstable. You zigzag all over the place. That’s Wohlforth — a talented, hard-working guy, but this short-term appetite for maximum-leader status. And terrible weakness — if you got a chance to pound him politically for a couple of days, you’d get the opposite line.

And so he really wanted to be the principal leader and he worked like a son of a bitch. He’d bring out all kinds of copy — which wasn’t very good, he wrote a major error into every single article.

So he made an ever-closer pact with Healy, and dumped us. And that was supposed to be the end of us. Because I’m pretty sure that they believed that they were going to wipe us out. That we were a petty-bourgeois little group of six people hanging around Columbia University, and that in 1962 it was going to be all over for us. And then Wohlforth, to make sure, made a bloc with Dobbs to get rid of us. At least, Dobbs thought getting rid of us was a charming idea, but didn’t think much of keeping Wohlforth around either. And then, once we were thrown out, Wohlforth got immediately demoralized and quit, declaring the party centrist.

SPARTACIST: But you didn’t draw final conclusions about Healy?

Robertson: We didn’t know what to do vis-a-vis Healy and the SLL. Because we continued to be impressed by them politically, by what they said programmatically. It looked like a big force, Gerry said he was the leader of the world proletariat and we were prepared to give him a contingent credit. So we persisted — we fought as nastily as we could with the local Wohlforthites, continued to be polite with Healy and took the best articles that Slaughter and others wrote for Labour Review and printed them as a pamphlet, “What Is Revolutionary Leadership?”

SPARTACIST: And that was it until the Montreal meetings in ’65 and the ’66 Conference?

Robertson: We had our ups and downs and Gerry diddled us a little bit over the years. Then I guess he was thinking that in 1966 something very big was going to happen. So he upped the voltage, and set up for the fall of ’65 this conference in Montreal. And we went in, a lot of us, and all the Wohlforthites. We did some hard negotiating, got what we thought was a very satisfactory, principled resolution of our negotiations, rubber-stamped of course every step of the way by the poor Wohlforthites, who came out of there looking pretty gloomy—very gloomy indeed. Well, I guess I was looking at them about the way the Chinese peasant looks at a little pig.

And off we went to London. We were under a lot of pressure, because the Wohlforthites had written their perspectives document as fluently and rapidly as they always did. And we were still working on ours when our delegation left for London in April 1966. I turned it in, kind of ruined and exhausted, and after that, stayed up all night again because they started the general discussion on the state of the world, and I thought, well, we’re coming in, we’re this very junior, puny, unimportant American group, but we owe it to these comrades that we’re uniting with to offer some of our views on the main questions of the international movement. So we went in, and I made a presentation.

And on the way out that noon, finished, thinking that nobody would ever pay any attention, I ran into Gerry on the stairs and I said, “I’ve really had it. We did our document for the fusion. I made a statement to show where we’re coming from, and now I want to go and take a nap.” He just nodded. And then someone — I always sort of thought it was Banda, but I don’t know — really didn’t like some of the stuff we said.

Gordon: Our long-standing position that the fight against Pabloism had never been carried through internationally put us on the “wrong” side of a concealed power fight between the British and the French.

Seymour: There’s another aspect where I think that we, again possibly inadvertently, gored their ox. They had this “final crisis” line, that the incomes policy was the beginning of fascism in Britain, that the ghetto upheavals in the U.S. were the beginning of the American revolution. And in the Spartacist presentation was the refusal to inflate—we said that the crisis of the Fourth International is not comparable to the situation of 1914, that revolutions are not on the order of the day, that we’re not at the head of mass parties.

Robertson: So they were paying more attention to us qualitatively than we imagined.

SPARTACIST: Jim, how did you personally get along with Healy?

Robertson: I think Gerry Healy knew me a lot better than I knew him. In the first place, he only showed a face—he had a lot of faces. But he had 20 years on me. He’d seen all kinds of people in politics. And I think he had a very good idea of the customer he was dealing with.

Let’s be clear: I liked Gerry Healy, I got on very well with him, we saw eye to eye on all kinds of questions, gossip, nuances, tactics, like a couple of fairly hard-bitten communists who’d been through some mills. He had a hard young Cannonite on his hands.

I noticed a few odd things here and there. I did not like at all at the [April 1966] Morecambe conference of the Young Socialists, when he said, “you know, some YCLers turned up to distribute their paper and we sent them packing.” I thought, wait a minute, that doesn’t sound so good. And I thought he was a little flamboyant, telling me all these stories that I thought he shouldn’t have told me, about concealing assets in the middle of a bankruptcy proceeding, for example. And he bragged that his organizers had cars, but he was planning to get them helicopters to move around Britain.

This is only now, in the light of this split that took place a couple of weeks ago —I think Healy was on to me a lot better than I was ever on to him. And he had an idea of what I’d come out of. I think he wanted a fusion in London very badly. He had to make what he took to be an unacceptable compromise in Montreal (which we took as good coin), figuring that he’d rectify it by a pressure cooker in London. And that blew up.

I think that he was under pressure from the French already, and wanted to produce in the English-speaking world, which was his half of the world. And I think that it bothered him a very great deal that it blew up, judging by the accounts coming out now that he was drunk and wild and unusually violent in the summer of ’66; we represented in his mind a very big setback.

I know he had a perfectly good idea of what Wohlforth was. Because after the night of the first blowup, when I wandered back in, probably after dinner, we went at it for a while. And then when that session adjourned, fairly late, Liz and I were called into Healy’s room, with Banda in a shadowy corner, and Healy quite drunk, and he said, “Listen, Jim”— very friendly then, the sudden switch — “we can work this out. The fusion can go through. Just go and make a good act of contrition. You know you’ve got this petty-bourgeois American background; together we will struggle to overcome it. And I care nothing for Wohlforth — you’ll go back home the leader.”

And I looked at Liz out of the corner of my eye — I had come out of the CP you remember, not entirely an innocent — and I said something to the effect of “Gee, Gerry, this is a really interesting proposition. Our delegation wants to leave right now and consider it.” And we got out of the room as fast as we could.

We’d run into Healy’s Stalinist technique in ’62. Geoff White and others wrote most eloquently then — if you sign confessions to stuff you don’t believe, you have had it. You are neutralized as a reputable political factor henceforth.

Nelson: You know that you’re making public allegiance to views that you don’t hold, and it sort of guts you. You’re somebody else’s person. You’re Zinoviev waiting for the Moscow Trials.

SPARTACIST: So they did this long denunciation of you. What was the response of the other delegations that were there?

Gordon: I remember being endlessly harangued by large quantities of people from the Lambert section and VO: “Why don’t you just apologize? We can get this out of the way, and then we can have clear political discussion.” And VO would say: “So it’s wrong. So it’s unfair. But you are being petty-bourgeois individualists. OK, we can see it’s unfair. But it’s not that important, is it?”

Robertson: VO just backed off; they figured it was Healy’s conference.

Seymour: The Japanese observer, I think, abstained, or maybe voted against.

Robertson: Hardy [VO] said to me, “You know, I made a mistake. I came with 18 female schoolteachers who speak English. I should have brought 18 of my auto workers. If I ever get into another conference with the Healyites....” But they just went along, that’s all.

You know, it didn’t happen by accident. Healy/Banda wanted to pick a fight, and we were either supposed to crawl or become wild and enraged and make weird indefensible political statements—it was a technique of Healy. Put the blocks to somebody, and you either break them or drive them to stand up and announce that Michel Pablo is the real world leader. And I thought, we’ll just hang in here like Ulysses S. Grant, and fight it out all summer — because they started the fight on indefensible grounds, and we’re not going to give them anything else to make the split over.

SPARTACIST: With the recent split everyone’s started talking, and we learned that a lot of people on the British left think Robertson was beaten up at the London Conference.

Robertson: That story needs a correction. Our expulsion had the smell of violence about it, all right. We got downstairs at the end, and Gerry was quite drunk, and he was running around and he was visibly working himself up into a punchout—not between him and me, but he had these guys in the shadows. And I had a very vivid image of the alley in back.

What is quite true is that it was Lambert who intervened to cool Healy off, and we got out of there. So I never had a hand laid on me, but the suggestion was in the air.

Gordon: I can remember Jim telling me in London, “You know, we really fought hard in the SWP. We said some unkind things about Farrell Dobbs, we told Tom Kerry to shut up and sit down when he was heckling in a national convention, and there were a lot of people there that just couldn’t wait to get rid of us, but I never felt that I was in physical danger when I was in the SWP headquarters.”

SPARTACIST: After the ’66 split, the Spartacist organization maintained a posture of loyalty to the IC for a period of time.

Robertson: As long as we had the same formal program in common. So we complained about Healy’s administration, ending up with “Oust Healy!” But within a few months, the “Arab Revolution” and the Red Guards obtruded, and we said, wait a minute — we don’t care now about Healy’s internal administration, it is the administration of a formally, programmatically alien tendency. When you have a regime that is nominally of a revolutionary Marxist character, and is multi-facetedly corrupt, that creates a tension. Because the corruption has to reflect an appetite alien to the program. That’s always the basis of bureaucratism—when you proclaim one thing and practice another.

SPARTACIST: How did Hansen actually get hold of our documents, the ones he used in his pamphlet, “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International”?

Robertson: When we got back, we took about every scrap that we had in connection with the London Conference and the earlier negotiations in Montreal—we immediately mimeographed it all up in kits. I remember one night we had a social and invited everybody we could think of over, and we were handing these kits around to whoever turned up. And we got in the subway, and there was a friend of ours, a left civil-libertarian who we’d worked with on some cases before, his name was Marvin Siegal. I reached into the leftover kits, and I handed him one.

So he went home with his kit. He was pretty interested in it. He was living with Berta Green, who I think was on the National Committee of the SWP at the time. And he mentioned, “Oh, I ran into Jim, look what I got.” And she took it right out of his hands! (He complained later, “She wouldn’t even let me read it. She said it was a security matter.”) And took the documents straight to the SWP. And the next thing we know, it’s a pamphlet by Hansen, whose introduction seems so penetratingly knowledgeable, you’d think it was the power of Marxism. I gather he’d also had reports from the two dissident USec delegations that were there. So he had a lot of fun writing that introduction.

And then Healy made a great to-do out of it, that we had betrayed the class line by going to the SWP and giving the documents to them. Well it was a public split and these were our documents.
And in a straightforward way, that led to the beating of Ernie Tate, because that’s the pamphlet he was selling when they creamed him.

SPARTACIST: Our tendency made a vigorous outcry against Healy after Banda’s beating of Tate and Healy’s legal action to suppress the story.

Robertson: It was either Healy or Banda, and I don’t expect now we’ll ever know which one, that actually organized the beating. It was a calculated act, orchestrated, not just somebody becoming unhinged. Tate was selling, they harassed him, they went inside and then half a dozen guys came out all at once and systematically beat the shit out of him. At the time (I don’t know what’s happened to him since) he had a bad medical condition. He had some kind of fine, black, grainy stuff in the fluid inside his eyes; and if he got a sharp blow it all swirled up and he was blind for some time afterward and had to lie in a darkened room for a long time while it settled out. So the Healyites knocked him down in the gutter and kicked the hell out of him! He was rather a mess. And we’d been pretty friendly — at one point we were right on the edge of winning most of the young and quite able Canadian Trotskyist cadre. But one of their key guys, John Riddell, had some contact with Healy that put them off very badly. They then went on to found the USec [United Secretariat] section in England.

SPARTACIST: In hindsight, did Healy have a “good” period, let’s say 1957-67?

Seymour: I think the split of the Healyites from the Labour Party Young Socialists in ’64-’65 actually—with all proportions guarded—created some of the conditions that Jim Jones got when he took his operation to Guyana.

Because it’s not simply that Healy had a formal literary posture, but that he had to fight for the line of orthodox Trotskyism, including the Soviet defensism which was expressed in those documents—he had to fight for that line as long as he was doing entry work in the Labour Party against the Labour Lefts and the Cliffites. For example, one of the split issues was that the Labour Party Young Socialists should defend the Warsaw Pact against NATO. And that was one of the key—if not the key—issues of a somewhat ragged split.

I was a very junior member of the Spartacist League coming not from the SWP, but rather from a background of sort of New Left Maoism with a short stint in Progressive Labor. And I went to England in September of 1965, to be an economics graduate student, and what struck me was precisely the degree to which the Healyite youth operation was like the politics that I had had to break from to become a member of the SL. In fact it reminded me of nothing so much as the Marcyite youth operation—on the terrain of a society much more dominated by Labourite reformism and with a more plebeian but not proletarian base—a youth group that basically consisted of high school students, not young workers. Some apprentices, but certainly not youth that were active in the trade unions as a central arena.

I had been in London for a couple of months when I wrote back, “Apparently the SLL has been recruiting into the YS on an activist, revolution-tomorrow line. Little attempt is made to raise the level of consciousness of most of them or to build cadre, but they’re used for purely organizational work, selling the paper, etc., and peopling demonstrations. Needless to say, the turnover of the kids is high. If true, and I believe it is, it is a serious fault. At best it can be considered negligence caused by a rapid influx of young members, and at the worst a cynical exploitation of the aimless discontent of lower-class youth.”

So I don’t know what subjective change the central cadre underwent, but it was clear that once they had broken from the Labour Party, they built a pretty self-isolating, rather apolitical lumpen-plebeian youth operation which did not intervene in the mass organizations of the British working class. And I think that this provided them with what could be called the sociological and organizational basis for the subsequent degeneration, culminating in becoming agents for Qaddafi and justifying the murder of the Iraqi CP members.

Robertson: Remember their academic student journal, The Marxist? Very high level, fine stuff. And then I saw some of the members of the executive committee of the YS at Morecambe. Real good guys. There was one from Ulster in particular that I would love to have talked to. But every time there was the faintest air of the possibility of the loss of unanimity, Healy and Slaughter were right up at the front of the platform. I wasn’t used to this in the youth organizations that I’d been in, where Shachtman had a reliable gang of half a dozen kids who were perfectly capable of running an operation.

I think we understand now where Healy’s SLL came from. It had Gerry’s cadres from the old RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party], the people that he got out of the Communist Party after ’56, and Seymour has added the third crucial component—the Young Socialists operation. Winning over this big chunk of the Labour Party Young Socialists gave them a certain kind of base in what you’d roughly call a lumpen section, and they were also at the same time working the adult employed industrial workers — and so they were walking on two stilts. If you look at “Wohlforth Terminated,” you’ll see that in Britain in those days, the lumpen consisted of unemployed, unskilled white kids who were actually the sons of employed industrial workers. The gap didn’t open up the way that it certainly did for the Workers League in the United States when they tried to work the parallel social strata, so that on the one hand the WL aimed at black and Hispanic youth, at the same time pushing this Committee for a Labor Party which denied the black question, the war in Vietnam, and wanted to found a Labor Party headed by George Meany.

The SLL actually got a base among footloose kids. And it required the “festival” quality of ersatz politics to keep them going. Marches all over bloody hell, and all that sort of thing. The WL tried to reproduce that in the United States, and they’re still looking for the killers of Tom Henehan. The Healyites were always on the lookout for the take, and always sucking up to somebody. I think it was to Healy only a quantitative shift to go from playing footsie with Nye Bevan to Qaddafi.

SPARTACIST: After your experiences in ’62, comrades, weren’t you concerned going into the London Conference about Healy’s manipulative organizational practices?

Nelson: If there’s a cult made of Lenin, there’s also from the social-democratic side a reverse cult made of Stalin. You know, Stalin was this beast that always lived in the belly of the Bolshevik Party, and then one day like in the movie “Alien” it comes ripping out and all of a sudden it starts chomping up everything in sight, and then you have Stalinism. That’s kind of simple-minded.

So Healy had been around for a long time and done some rotten things. I also expect he could turn the leftism on and off if it served a purpose. So it’s hard to tell from afar. We knew a lot more about the Workers League because we worked closely with them and knew the cast of characters. We weren’t worried about Wohlforth and his bunch because we were very much harder politically than they were. And the differences they had with us, which we understood was a left-right difference, could be contained within one democratic-centralist organization. Except we were concerned about having the right relationship on our domestic ground with the international. And their organization was something of a curiosity, because they had tried to kill us in ’62 and simultaneously put out some fine material.

Gordon: I want to go back to the Montreal Conference in ’65. That ran for three or four days. We brought in a much heavier delegation than we sent to London; Montreal was the first time that I ever saw Geoff White. And we really went at it with Healy. The main bone of contention was whether a disciplined section can select its own leadership and make its own tactics. And Al reminded me that at one point Healy said, “Not one word of this document will be changed,” and we were prepared to split right there. And it was then that Harry Turner and Bob Sherwood came forward as the capitulators just by making a little noise in that meeting.

Nelson: Turner broke discipline: “Let’s not be hasty, comrades” — as Jim was packing up his briefcase.

Gordon: Enabling Healy, after the London split, to address his letter to those two people, because they were soft. Healy was a lot of things but not stupid. And our tendency, including in ’62, was prepared to accept international discipline. We found out only after the London Conference that there was no democratic centralism in the IC — they admitted the IC was governed by the principle of unanimity between the English and the French.

In Montreal, we raised our differences and Healy was pretty conciliatory on the politics and he said, “Oh, we have lots of differences with Mike Banda. We have differences over Vietnam, we have differences over Indonesia.” And it’s when Nelson got up and made a presentation on the ’62 split — that Healy was responsible for it—at that point Healy blew his stack. Then he started saying, “Oh, come to London. We’re not going to discuss this now — come to London, you can discuss this in London.”

Here’s a small story about something Healy didn’t like at the London Conference. We said, “We and the Japanese comrade want to go off to Highgate Cemetery and see Marx’s grave.” Healy said, “Agh, only the Stalinists do that—all the visiting Stalinists from Eastern Europe go and lay flowers there.” Well, we didn’t care; we went and didn’t think twice about it. It’s that kind of attitude that I think made Healy decide we were unassimilable.

Robertson: You know, we weren’t afraid of these guys in some political sense. I remember the ’62 split. The night that Philips got back from England — Wohlforth and Philips, triumphant. First they both lit cigars to show there were members of the proletariat in the room. And then they brought out the document we were supposed to sign: “Here it is — take it or leave it.” And I said: “Did you write it all down, Lynne [Harper]? Okay, that’s a split, isn’t it?” We weren’t afraid of these birds. Why should we be? We thought we were probably quite as good as they were.

We knew how Leninism is supposed to work: the majority controls the line. You get a majority, you control the line; we get a majority, we control the line. If you don’t like it enough, one of us splits! You want debate? You get debate. You want an internal bulletin? You get an internal bulletin. You have a “non-negotiable demand,” and we don’t accept it — well, that’s that, it’s time to go!

Nelson: That’s how it was in ’65 too. We worked our position out in caucus. Healy read us his proposal, we asked some questions, wanted some assurances about the relationship between the fused section and the international. He said, “That’ll be handled by the American Commission.” And then he read his statement. We said, “Well, what about putting...” He said, “Nothing different can be put in here. Nothing will be changed.” And we had had a caucus where we said that if we don’t get these assurances, we get out. Healy said no and Jim started packing his stuff up. I think Geoff White was talking, and Jim was starting to pack his material up. And then Turner pops up with, “Let’s not be hasty.”

Robertson: Have a good time with Moreno, Harry! [Laughter.]

Nelson: And we held out and Healy backed down.

Robertson: So here’s the answer to the implied question, “when did we first know that Healy was a beast?” Well, we didn’t care whether he was a beast—because we figured we were pretty tough too. It was Healy that wasn’t willing to be in the same cage, let’s keep that in mind. Somebody said to Cannon something about how Stalin corrupted the American Communist Party. He said, “No, don’t be so sure. There were a lot of people who were yearning for corruption in the American Communist Party. Don’t blame it all on the Russians.” Wohlforth was not a victim of Healy. Wohlforth was a servant.

And we were not in a big hurry to go around and justify everything. We got bounced? Weaklings then run and suck differences out of their thumbs. We thought: well, this seems fraught with the possibility of political differences. We said: a leadership that behaves in such an irresponsible fashion is no good. And we let them come up with the political differences.

And now the evidence — it’s not conclusive — is that Healy went around the bend that summer.

This absurd thing about an apology... “Gerry, you are rude! You will apologize to me” — except I wouldn’t dare do that, I would have been beaten to a pulp on the spot. But given an equal relationship of forces, with VO’s 18 auto workers in the room, Healy would have apologized to me for insult — then we might have had a unity. Healy was very good in Ceylon when he went out there in ’64. Pudgy little colonial imperialist, he got up and started swinging his weight around. Bala Tampoe went and stood over Healy and said, “Sit down and shut up!” And Healy sat down and shut up.

So one noticed early on that Healy didn’t seem to have a lot of fixed politics. Looking back, reviewing the fight we had in Montreal in ’65 and the rest, I can see where Gerry would get nervous about us. We actually had firmly committed politics. We looked at what we thought were his fundamental political statements and we thought: this is very good, this is really what we’re about. And I can see where that would make brother Healy very nervous, encountering an organization in the United States that actually believed the stuff he was currently peddling, whereas he knew perfectly well that yesterday he was singing a different tune and would be again tomorrow.

Well, Gerry has his own administrative means. If we sign a sufficient number of confessions, get our back broken, then it doesn’t matter where he takes his sleigh, we’re going to take the ride. Only he ran into a lot of obstruction. Some of it came programmatically. And some was that we were in a fairly strong position: we were in another country, where we were more numerous and entrenched than they were. They announced in London at the end of the conference, of course we’re going to make a campaign and rip the Sparts wide open. Instead, we ripped ten or a dozen people out of the Healyite organization in this country, because they were much smaller and their people were looking forward to getting into a fused organization with us, even if Wohlforth’s head was going to roll.

Not that we did anything specially good, it was pure missionary position, going straight down the road according to program. When Tate got beaten up we yelled and screamed, while everybody in Britain was taking a dive on account of a couple of writs. “A high court writ? — oh my god, that’s it.” Well that didn’t travel too well into another country.

The Tate beating — that’s the first hard evidence we ever had of Healy’s kind of violence. And then we yelled our heads off. Subsequently I’ve run into too many people in England who personally either participated in beatings for Healy/ Banda or were the victims — or both — who simply shut up. So we have to ask a question: is this a matter of English moral fibre, or is there another political process at work here? Is it just the way things are done, the flip side of the mateyness in and around the Labour Party, to treat gangsterism like a guilty secret?

Well, part of the silence was certainly embarrassment. That if the truth comes out, “Trotskyism” looks bad. But you have to be hard-nosed — in politics you can’t do the gentlemanly thing and hope that if you don’t talk about it, it will just go away. This thing happened, it has to be exposed and dealt with — and now there’s a big public split and all the old bodies have risen to the surface.

Maybe there is also a certain cultural component: the background in Methodism. The Healy organization at their summer camps had sexual segregation and sex patrols. Their attitude toward homosexuals is vicious — the A. Jennings letter says: we uncovered the fact that there was a homosexual who slipped through and was actually training our pure youth, and you know what that means.

I think Peter Fryer was the SLL’s most important recruit from the CP. He’d been a British Daily Worker correspondent in Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution. He came back and wrote a beautiful little book, which was called The Tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution. We must have sold those by the tens of thousands. Well, Peter Fryer turned out to be a man of many facets — he was quite good. And he started, presumably at the instigation of Healy and others, Peter Fryer’s Newsletter, which became the Newsletter, organ of the SLL. So what happened to Peter Fryer? Well, I don’t know.

Healy and Fryer had some kind of falling-out. And this was the first time I ran into some of Healy’s megalomaniacal practices. Healy told me, he may have printed it, “Fryer has run for it. I’m having all the ports of England watched.” In fact Fryer wisely had taken off for Portugal. The Healyites made much of it: “And this Peter Fryer — when he ran for it he left the country with his wife, his mistress and his mother.” We were supposed to be appalled. I always felt that was rather elegant.

Peter Fryer really was the guy who introduced the SLL into the milieu of the British CP: the industrial apparatus, the intelligentsia and education department. Later when the Healyites were busy denouncing Fryer, Healy printed a little thing that said: “And now, look what has happened to Peter Fryer, as happens with all renegades” and they listed a bunch of renegades and the low pass they had come to. “This Fryer, he now writes books on ‘sex’.” So I read this, and I wondered what happened to Peter Fryer.

One night I was walking down Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and looked into a bookstore. Sure enough, there was a book by one Peter Fryer called something like The Anthropology of Sex Through the Ages. He was indeed writing books on sex.

This gives you some of the flavor of the Healyite organization rather early on. Fryer was a very important acquisition from the CP. He did set up the Healyites’ first press. And he was a top-flight Marxist journalist. He also had very fine theoretical capacity. His little article on Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (Volume 38) is a masterpiece, and is something that we’d always wanted to print as our own pamphlet, “What Is Dialectics?” And he was savaged by Healy.

And I thought that Healy made a mistake after 1966 with his whispering campaign against me personally — the way he put it in writing was “the relations within the delegation resembled that of a clique,” which, translated, was a verbal campaign around the world that Robertson likes liquor and women. (Now during that conference I was a lot more sober than he was. He kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer which he drank neat; I was pretty much dried out because I had a lot of writing and speaking to do.) But the nonconforming religious derivation of significant sections of the British working class is such that he thought this would be effective. And I thought: wait a minute, I think I know a little more about the proletariat of the world, a liking for liquor and girls is not automatically going to disqualify a Marxist politician from consideration over political issues.

One is reminded of the psychological pattern of a Jack the Ripper who on Sunday morning gets up and gives lay lectures about demon rum and bad women. The Banda wing says: if Healy was single-handedly building the party, what was he doing with his other hand? Well we don’t know anything about Healy’s relations with women, but we have seen the sanctimonious puritanism of the Healy organization — an attitude which goes back to the Methodist traditions of a founding section of British trade unionism in the last century.

One of the top leaders of the Independent Labour Party in the ’30s put in his book something along these lines: “Ah, it’s terrible, the drink. I’ve seen so many fine young men come to Parliament from the mines and the mills. And because the evil Tories have licensed Parliament as a royal palace exempt from the licensing laws, during the long hours in Commons these fine working-class lads turned to drink. And within a few years they became completely useless, completely corrupted.” My answer is, in the thousand years that the Tories have ruled England, I don’t believe that one of them has drawn a sober breath.

Gordon: At the London Conference in ’66 Healy complained: we’ve got to have these bottles of wine here for the French during the meal breaks. Whereas you were supposed to do your drinking privately, out of Gerry’s bottle presumably. So we had our meals with the Lambertists and VOers, who liked to drink wine and crack jokes—we just dove in indiscriminately among them, keeping them between us and the English delegates.

Robertson: The IC said things, and we acted on what they said. We weren’t entirely blind, although I must say that we were very innocent of the techniques of controversy associated with Pabloism in Europe, which seem to consist of—if you announce that your most unyielding and fundamental principle is X, that’s sure to be a lie. It took us a couple of trips to Europe to figure that one out, because we came from the “parochial American” Cannon/Lenin school, not the Michel Pablo style of wheeler-dealerism.

Lately we’ve heard countless stories of brutality. One such story is that Healy went up to a putative cripple, a comrade of the editorial apparatus, who was writing at a desk, and Healy began to kick him, and went on until eventually he got tired of kicking him and wandered away. I never got a chance to see anything like that. When we left the London Conference there was the smell of violence in the air, which we said some months later — after the Tate case, when we had something more than “we think maybe Healy was ready to have us beaten.”

But we can do some reevaluation too: I think we were a lot more important to Gerry Healy than we considered at the time. We were actually a significant entrenched group. He had already tried to destroy us once, in ’62. It hadn’t worked — we bounced back and went straight down the road according to program.

He tried to pull us in again with the unification agreement in Montreal in ’65. He had to give us what we thought was essential. He hedged it, with all his own protections, but we got what we thought we had to have. The IC determines the overall international program, Healy has the right to address our national conference, but the conference majority decides. That was the crucial clause that we fought about. His draft said: the future of the American section will be decided in the American Commission in London. Ours said: it will be decided in an American conference (where we happen to have the majority). So Healy bracketed it in all known ways, but he gave us what we said we had to have, expecting to take it away from us in London once he got us there.

And then that attempt blew up in his face, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. And it’s reported that he went quite mad in the summer of ’66. In hindsight I think that we were a giant disappointment — much more so than we understood at the time — to the old man and it helped unhinge him. And I am sorry about the guys that were beaten (and the abused girls, if one believes what the Banda/Slaughter wing says) — the people Healy could get his hands on, who paid the price that summer for our intransigence. And if we were surprised by what happened at the London Conference it didn’t matter because we just did what we had to do, according to our program and understanding.

SPARTACIST: Comrade Nelson was the anchorman in New York when the delegation went to London. Was that in the expectation of trouble?

Robertson: It sounded exactly like going to Moscow in the late ’20s. You know, the factions go off to Moscow. You don’t send everybody. Somebody’s got to mind the store. We had the predominant assumption, since we’d fought with Healy in Montreal, that those accords were going to be carried out, but we were not hopelessly naive.

SPARTACIST: When the split took place in London, what was happening here?

Nelson: Well it actually started after the Montreal Conference. We started some common work and we had a pretty good fix on their U.S. organization, which was extremely soft. For instance, when we split out of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee in October ’65 they stayed. Over the massive American bombing of Haiphong harbor they signed a call beseeching, “Where is the voice of our president for peace on Christmas?” They were politically soft. Wohlforth broke down in a joint meeting and ran out of the room, crying, a month before the fusion as I recall. While we were being very sharp-toothed and determined and beady-eyed and saying, “Sure, parity in all committees, absolutely. You want the paper, you got the paper. Half the central committee, of course.” We knew we were going to gobble them up. There was also a middle layer; we used to call them “November Bolsheviks.” They wouldn’t join either group, they were going to join the fused group, and they went away after the ’66 split.

So Jim called up and said there’s been a split, break off all contact and stop selling their paper. We laid out the tactics and we moved fast, setting up meetings right away with all of the pro-unity Wohlforthites we could find. On our side, when the delegation came back. Turner was the only one on the Political Bureau that was soft. I remember he raised a motion, he said we should have apologized. Jim said, “But I did, Harry.” He said, “Well you should have really apologized.” Jim said, “You mean I should have said what Healy wanted me to say.” (And Turner did try running to Healy, a couple of years later.)

SPARTACIST: What were our relations with the ACFI — subsequently the Workers League — in this country?

Robertson: Our relations were that the Wohlforthites wanted violence against us. Wohlforth was zealous in seeking the maximum of physical destruction for our people. At the NPAC [National Peace Action Coalition] Conference where SWP and CP goons violently excluded us and Progressive Labor to keep their keynote speaker, a U.S. Senator, from having his feelings hurt. Tim Wohlforth personally led one of the goon squad charges. He was out for our blood. Harry Ring in the SWP’s Militant praised the Wohlforthites for their loyal services.

Then later, they got some lumpen youth around them, mainly Hispanics and blacks. They programmed these kids for deadly violence against our people. They called us agents of the FBI and CIA and cops and tried to work these youth up to the point of murder. And at the same time Wohlforth was perfectly clear that when there were a few murders of our people, the kids who had done them would be immediately disavowed.

So we pulled back from selling at WL events in New York while continuing elsewhere to try to intersect them politically. They countered with a campaign of violent attacks on us in a number of places — Toronto and Los Angeles come particularly to mind. And we defended ourselves. And then we got this exquisite letter from David North, who was head of the WL by then: please stop your campaign of violence against us. To which we replied: we will always defend your democratic rights, we’re glad you want to stop this shit. This exchange was published in our paper.

SPARTACIST: What were the differences with Wohlforth over Cannon?

Robertson: Wohlforth got hold of Shachtman’s account in the New International of the fight between Cannon and Shachtman in the CLA [Communist League of America-forerunner of the SWP] in 1933. I remember arguing with Wohlforth, who said, “You know, Trotsky was really against Cannon.” And I said, “Well, that’s really interesting, Tim. Where is this?” And he said. “Oh, it’s well known.”

Well, 15 years later I got hold of the CLA internal bulletins and the material that never got into the bulletins, and I can speak chapter and verse on the triad of Cannon and Shachtman and Trotsky. But it took a major research project mounted over many years to get all that material. Cannon owes a lot to Trotsky. At some point Trotsky did indeed have something resembling an organizationally third-camp position on the CLA dispute, but not for long. And Cannon said (I came across it just lately in the SWP’s newest Cannon volume), referring to his own experience as a leftist CPer (Fosterite), “You know, before Trotsky got hold of me I was a very highly trained professional factional hooligan.”

But when it came right down to it, there was no question about what the relationship between Cannon and Trotsky was.

But Wohlforth — lacking any documentation, with no knowledge except having read Shachtman’s account 20 or 30 years later in the NI — Wohlforth instantly embraced Shachtman’s contention: Trotsky was against Cannon, Cannon was never really a Trotskyist. This was on the road to discovering that the first good American Trotskyist leader was... Wohlforth.

Nelson: During the unity negotiations in 1965 Wohlforth took great exception when Jim said that the SWP had been badly damaged because they lost all their intellectuals with the Shachtman split. And Wohlforth got all bent out of shape and said, “how dare you say that, it was a principled split,” which it was. Wohlforth didn’t want unity with us, so he was coming out with all kinds of things, and then he and Marcus cooked up this line that Cannon was just a Third Period window-smasher — that was supposed to stick in our craw, which it certainly did.

SPARTACIST: In 1981 we supported Sean Matgamna’s Socialist Organiser group in their defense against Healy’s libel suit.

Robertson: There was Healy using the courts again, to bankrupt a small organization and shut everybody up. And we published Matgamna’s letter and were planning to feed him a thousand pounds and any information we thought would help him fight the case that Gerry had brought against him.

Except that Matgamna returned our initial check, thereby insinuating that we were some kind of CIA agents, because first Matgamna appealed to the socialist public for support and then wouldn’t take our money. What was really going on then was that Matgamna was playing footsie with Thornett, who was a right-wing split from Healy and specially hated our guts. Of course Healy always does this to opponents — calls them CIA agents.

SPARTACIST: In the Socialist Organiser article that we reprinted in WV No. 391, Matgamna said that Healy played a revolutionary role after the Revolutionary Communist Party “collapsed” under the leadership of Jock Haston and Ted Grant.

Robertson: I remember when I first heard the name Gerry Healy. An old guy, a soft SWP sympathizer in San Francisco, came back from England and said he’d seen this marvelous man — he has great weight on the docks and is a personal friend of Nye Bevan, has three MPs in his pocket — his name was Gerry Healy, he was on the inside of everything. Well, his great weight on the docks was with the “blue union” that was fighting General Transport, and Gerry was right in there with a split away section of the bureaucracy in the out-of-London ports. And I was having a fight in the Shachtmanites over “What is the theoretical limit of nationalizations? Why can’t Parliament every year just nationalize more and more until they’ve nationalized the most profitable sectors and undercut the economic foundations of the British ruling class?”

About the RCP we presently have to be pretty agnostic, because any time any three old members of the RCP get together in a pub, all the old wars start again. But I think that, whatever a madhouse the RCP was, this was the seminal period for British Trotskyism. And I think it was done to death by the International, a bloc between Cannon and Pablo with Healy as the local accomplice. I think they made a decision to destroy this organization.

Now Matgamna thinks that Healy’s emergence at that time as the central figure proves that he was once a real revolutionary. When I look at what he did immediately afterward to become the underground wing of Aneurin Bevan’s section of the Labour Party (while hundreds of then-Trotskyist cadres were dumped out into the wilderness) I remain a deep skeptic, without sufficient information. And very possibly, comrades, reflecting the fact that there was a lot I liked about Max Shachtman, who liked Jock Haston.

Now Haston had kind of an odd line on Russia, and maybe a sterile line on Labour. But instead of saying “you guys should have a more flexible line on Labour” the international leadership used a sledgehammer on the RCP, and Healy was the hammer man. Healy’s line was not just entrist — Nye Bevan set up some kind of think tank which Healy participated in until the LP executive tumbled to the operation and got rid of it.

The RCP came from a fusion of two groups, each with multiple factions, that emerged in Britain in the late ’30s, after a number of false starts. One of them turned up in 1938 at the founding conference of the Fourth International and the other didn’t. Healy happened to be in the one that didn’t. Cannon went to England at the time and was very impressed with Healy. But Haston was the principal leader of this cascade of six or eight factions. And they were rammed together by the international to form the RCP.

The Labour Party during the war was a junior partner with the Tories under Churchill. And the RCP began to become quite sensational and they picked up cadres. As the war ended and the Labour Party competed and won an enormous electoral triumph in 1945, Cannon and also Pablo were very much on the RCP’s case, and Healy was their local inside man. I don’t know all the rights and wrongs but I do believe that they did not try to reshape the RCP, but successfully destroyed it. And so far as I know that was the last Trotskyist organization in Britain, the SLL in the period from 1957-67 proving to be hollow.

Now this history happened, but it is certainly not clear to me that it had to happen that way. “Did he fall or was he pushed?” I think the RCP was pushed right out the window and went splat. Was it necessary? I don’t know, sometimes you need to break up an organization, but I remain skeptical. And when it went splat, of course, its fragments turned up everywhere.

It’s true the RCP was horribly disoriented by the Labour Party electoral victory. Their conception I think was a linear one — analogous to Cannon’s “The Coming American Revolution” [1946], which tended to ignore the CP, the unions, the blacks, suggesting instead that what was going to happen was a massive linear extension of the SWP which when it got big enough would come to power. The RCP’s perspective of steady linear growth came to a screaming halt one day, when little Major Attlee took over after Churchill, and furthermore the Labour Party actually carried out some nationalizations.

By the way, the RCP analysis on the Russian question wasn’t that bad, it was just too simplistic. It certainly beat Wohlforth’s and most everybody else’s. It was simply that wherever the Russian Army arrived has become part of the Russian workers state, which as a first approximation had a certain merit.

On the Labour Party question, I think that from the end of the war and the general elections that immediately followed, up through the present time, developments in Britain in the working class have been linear—not a straight line, but a smooth curve. They went up a bit, largely as a result of the Labourites heavily increasing the taxes on beer and tobacco to subsidize the social security program that came in, and during the period of recovery when British industry functioned a bit. And now they’ve gone steadily downhill for a long time. But there have been no real major discontinuities. There was one opening of a modest sort at the juncture recently when the SDP [Social Democratic Party]—the CIA wing, pro-American wing of the Labour Party — split away.

Now, in that time Gerry has blown hot and cold on the Labour Party — always some new revelation. But there aren’t any new revelations. Wohlforth did a memo on shallow entry; the Pabloists in Europe went wild, saying “that’s not a scientific Marxist term.” Shallow entry — you can’t ignore the Labour Party, and you better not immerse yourself in it. And I don’t mean that you should have a split in your group, one side going into the LP with illusions and the others being hard sectarians who say the LP is a protofascist organization that you throw rocks at. No, you need a unitary organization which tries to play the Labour Party question the way you would an organ. And I’ve had that position since the fight in the Shachtman organization in 1952 over Bevan.

I would hope that all of our members are more or less members of the Labour Party, and I think often it’s very unimportant. What are the tactics? Well, we would love to have a miner stand for election openly against Neil Kinnock. Simultaneously, in other places, there is the tactic of conditional support to LP candidates: here’s where we Spartacists stand on issues; will you, selected Labour leftists, accept our support? And then get into the constituency campaigns and really support those that we think might exacerbate the situation inside the Labour Party.

A somewhat detached attitude, which does not ignore the Labour Party but recognizes that it must sooner or later be deeply split. This is very different from what Healy did then (and Grant [the Militant group] tries to do now): rah, rah, all the way with the Labour Party, which will, by a series of internal transformations, become the instrument for socialism in Britain.

SPARTACIST: And the earlier period of British Trotskyism, you called it “false starts”?

Robertson: There were no beginnings to British Trotskyism; it had to be imported. And it didn’t take root right away. And it had no history. It was not like in Poland or Bulgaria or the United States, or even Germany or Belgium or France, where you had Trotskyists coming into existence at the time the Stalin-Trotsky fight began to unfold in 1925.

The first British Trotskyists are supposed to be the “Balham group.” Know what they were like? “Well we went over to France and we spent our time above the pub. And we had mass unemployment in Britain and all those foreigners were screaming that some dictator had come to power in Germany. We couldn’t imagine anything more irrelevant so we went back to good British soil.”

So we had to implant in Britain, starting finally around ’36 I think, and then under pressure two successive waves of unification were imposed, first around the time of the Fl founding conference in ’38 and then culminating in ’44 with the RCP—a hothouse plant that needed very tender care. They ran into the very sharp objective change, from the Labour Party as a junior partner in imperialist war to a Labour government. The international did not help, it destroyed. And then you have fragmentation, and then that literarily brilliant decade of Healy, when he got the numbers from the youth group and the brains out of the CP.

We’re just lucky we come from a country that had Trotskyist nuclei, admittedly late, and a continuous documented history. The internal bulletins and the volumes of the Cannon writings are available to us all. There’s nothing specially American about that—we’re just lucky to come from a protected enclave, unlike the Bulgarians or the Chinese or Vietnamese, the Russian Left Opposition, or the fragile European Trotskyist nuclei whose slender threads of human continuity with the Fourth International were simply physically wiped out by fascism and the war.