Healy's Workers Press Folds (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 97 (20 February 1976)

Editorial Note

Healy's Workers Press Folds

LONDON, February 14 – The English radical movement is buzzing over the news that Workers Press, daily newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy, is going under. The bourgeois press yesterday broke the story, followed by the publication in today's Workers Press of a front-page “Final Edition” statement which salutes “the continuous daily publication” of Workers Press as “a magnificent achievement” but presents no plan for the resumption of any public organ, daily or otherwise.

A brief report in the Daily Telegraph (13 February)stated that Workers Press would

“cease publication after tomorrow due to severe financial difficulty, it was announced last night. Mr. Alex Mitchell, editor, said the paper had to close because its printer, Plough Press Ltd., would cease trading from midnight tonight. He emphasized that theprinters were not going into liquidation, and all financial obligations will be met in full. Workers Press... began daily publication in September 1969 as a competitor with the Communist Morning Star. Since last September it has been losing an average of £6,500 amonth.”

A somewhat longer story in the Manchester Guardian (13 February) noted that the WRP “has never fully recovered front the defection last year of Alan ‘The Mole’ Thornett [now head of the Workers Socialist League (WSL)], one of its key supporters in the trade unions. The £50,000 crisis appeal which the WRP launched last year to keep the newspaper afloat is still £ 14,000 short of its target.”

The financial crisis of the WRP/ Workers Press/ Plough Press is political in nature. The Healyites' unsavoury reputation for political chicanery extends into the financial arena, and rumours of-the most lurid sort are rampant. But at bottom the ignominious debacle of the self-baptised “first Trotskyist daily in the world” is a linear product of the much-vaunted Healyite “method”. This method can be roughly summarized as: pretend you're a mass party, dupe as many people as you can into believing it and you will become one. After all, nothing succeeds like “success.” (Even the claim to be “first” is a phony. To our knowledge, the first Trotskyist daily newspaper was the Vietnamese-language Tia Sang published in Saigon by the Internationalist Communist League in the late 1930's.)

The collapse of the WRP's Potemkin Village merely demonstrates once again the fallacy of get-rich-quick charades. Workers Press editor Mitchell himself described the paper's circulation as never having exceeded 20,000 (Guardian, 13 February). It should be recalled that the American Communist Party required a fund of at least a million dollars before launching its Daily World in 1968, recognizing that only such a fund (and several thousand guaranteed subscriptions from Soviet libraries) could cushion the financial drain of a daily paper not supported by a mass base.

The Healyite organization simply does not have the cadres, resources or influence among the advanced workers to sustain a daily press financially or to justify such an undertaking politically. When a party has deep roots in the. workers movement and the advanced workers daily look to it for leadership in their struggles, then a daily newspaper becomes not merely justified, but obligatory. But for an organization of the WRP's modest size to seek to sustain a daily on the basis of the “unstinting devotion and sacrifice of its readers, supporters and subscribers” (Workers Press, 14 February) is consummate cynicism.

The essence of Healy’s “method” has always been to use crisis-mongering combined with appeals to revolutionary voluntarism to wring every last ounce of energy (and shilling) out of his supporters, tossing aside the burnt-out and bitter shells. But pyramid swindles (an old financial con game, in which the investments of new clients are used to pay dividends to the old ones) are dependent upon an ever-expanding base, and always collapse in the end.

The abrupt suspension of Workers Press seems to have caught Healy's international co-thinkers by surprise. The U.S., Workers League (WL), always secure in the knowledge that the best way to please Gerry is to imitate his every gyration, announced less than two weeks ago its intention to launch “the first daily Trotskyist newspaper in the United States in 1977” (Bulletin, 6 February 1976); the Australian Healyites are already on record singing a similar tune. The grandiose pretensions of the American grouping are typically out of phase with its real situation: having purged its founding head, Tim Wohlforth, the WL has just recently made another switch in National Secretary, with David North taking over after Fred Mazelis’ brief moment in the sun.

A thought-provoking sidelight on the Workers Press affair is the concomitant escalation of the Healyites’ campaign of slanders against Joseph Hansen, ideologue of the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the U.S. The WRP’s descent into paranoid, witchhunting began somewhat earlier, with Healy's personal instigation of the “Nancy Fields case” which succeeded in driving Wohlforth out of his WL in solidarity with his friend Fields. Healy accused his long-time American lackey of deliberately covering up Fields’ alleged family connections with the CIA. After the ensuing dogfight (whose outcome was never in doubt) the pages of Workers Press and the Bulletin were filled with veiled accusations against Fields. In typical Healyite fashion, the articles were careful to note that the WL inquisition had found Fields innocent of any involvement with the CIA – thereby protecting against any possible legal action for slander – then proceeded to pile on paragraph after paragraph of insinuations.

In recent months the WRP and its international claque have been indulging in a disgusting orgy of slanderous personal vilification directed at long-time SWP spokesman Joseph Hansen. Entitled “Security and the Fourth International,” a seemingly endless series of Workers Press centerfolds has sought to smear Hansen as possessing guilty knowledge of the assassination of Trotsky by the GPU in 1940. The technique is to present masses of both true and unproven factual minutiae about the circumstances of the assassination followed by a series of rhetorical questions directed at Hansen; the implication is that Hansen deliberately covered up facts in his possession and misdirected those who sought to protect Trotsky and then to unmask the GPU network which had murdered him. As in the Fields case, Workers Press craftily avoided direct statements, contenting itself with the sheer bulk-of the campaign and the cleverly worded “question” to convey the slanderous content. But in the last weeks, the WRP has thrown caution to the winds. It has been mass distributing a throwaway. reprinted from Workers Press, which leaves little to the 'readers' imagination. The two articles reprinted in the handbill, “We Challenge the IMG” (Workers Press, 3 February) and “We Challenge the WSL (Thornett Group)” (Workers Press, 4 February), publish photos of Hansen and a rather less prominent SWP spokesman, George Novack, provocatively captioned in bold letters: “Accomplices of the GPU.”

The WRP knows full well that the reformist SWP would not in principle shrink from using the bourgeois courts against left-wing opponents (indeed, the Healyites have crossed the class line in such a fashion on at least one occasion). Perhaps as Workers Press’ parting shot, Healy has committed this outrageous and criminal libel, figuring that now he’s got no press left to lose! In view of the years-long political banditry of the Healy tendency, the present slander campaign and its current escalation are a not inappropriate swan-song for Workers Press.

As of now, there is no basis for speculation about the future press plans of the WRP. But there can be no doubt that the suspension of Workers Press is a grave blow to the organizational pretensions of the Healyites both in England and internationally. Just as Stalinists glory in their identification with a bureaucracy administering state power, so have the Healyites flaunted the WRP's daily, their crown jewel.

We do not want to gloat over the spectacular failure of the WRP's financial/political adventure. Revolutionary politics is not a safe “business,” and there are many mishaps that can befall an organization even in normal times. Bourgeois legal repression, ebbs in the class struggle, honest miscalculations of the economic and political conjuncture can have disastrous consequences for a socialist organization. But there is little similarity between the wrenching leaps that a serious Marxist organization finds itself compelled to undertake and the cynical contortions into which the Healyites propelled themselves when they launched the daily Workers Press. An authentically Trotskyist daily newspaper – an undertaking which awaits the future mass proletarian party, whose nucleus we are today struggling to build – will have little in common with Workers Press.

Whatever Happened to the Workers League? (1974)

Workers Vanguard No. 53 (27 September 1974)

Whatever Happened to the Workers League?

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?
– Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One

Tim Wohlforth's Workers League, which for years has attempted to conjure up a mass party by simply putting out a fake mass press, appears to have fallen on hard times. WL activity in the unions has recently dwindled to nearly zero. Its "Trade Union Alliance for a Labor Party" (TUALP), never more than a paper organization, was unable to bestir itself even to support last winter's British miners' strike, one of the most significant class battles of the present period.

At the same time the WL has apparently given up on any perspective of struggling against the other ostensibly revolutionary organizations either in the trade unions or anywhere else. Thus the WL has abstained on the struggle to defend left-wing Chilean militants held by the reactionary junta, not participating in or initiating a single demonstration in their defense, instead preferring to limit its confrontations with the reformist SWP and CP to the pages of the Bulletin. Instead of seeking to do battle with the revisionists in the real arenas of political and class struggle, Wohlforth and Co. have retreated to a liquidationist perspective limited to peddling their twice-a-week "mass paper" and engaging in apolitical community youth work.

This political liquidationism is clearly expressed in the pages of the Bulletin, the WL's organ of Wohlforthite revisionism. Stories of concrete struggles by WL and/or TUALP supporters against the labor bureaucracy and Stalinists are few and far between. Reflecting the empty-shell character of the WL, most Bulletin coverage of the labor movement is either second-hand or empty posturing, consisting of rewrites from the New York Times or photo stories of Bulletin salesmen posing at some plant gate.

The other side of the same coin is the Bulletin's "no comment" posture toward the major political struggles that are fracturing various fake-left organizations. The recent split of the Progressive Labor Party; the splitting of the left-Shachtmanite RSL away from the American IS; the expulsion of the pro-Mandel Internationalist Tendency from the SWP – all these events have been passed over in silence by the WL. Further, the major fight within the Pabloist United Secretariat, between the SWP and the forces grouped around Mandel/Maitan/Frank, has received very scant attention from Wohlforth. Instead the reader of the Bulletin is treated to endless turgid, hackneyed tracts by Wohlforth and Fields (e.g., on the 19th-century American utopians) and "sensational" exposes (a little late, though) of the "crimes of Chappaquiddick."

This indifference to political developments in the camp of the Maoists, social democrats and Pabloists reflects a profound political incapacity and is simply the literary expression of the WL's flight from political struggle to neighborhood-oriented youth work. Put another way, over the last several years the WL has been unable to regroup with a single authentic left current breaking from Maoism, left social democracy or Pabloism in the direction of Trotskyism.

These recent difficulties do not arise out of a sudden political turn on the part of the WL leadership. They represent the morbid effects of a political cancer that has been gnawing at the mangy WL for years.

The difficulties facing the WL have been recently and duly noted by Tim Wohlforth himself. Reviewing the Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930-31), Wohlforth comments:

"There is another valuable lesson to be learned from that period [the early years of the International Left Opposition] – the very careful attention Trotsky paid to the training of cadres themselves. This concern with training only increases in urgency the more outward developments allow for an outward turn of cadres."
– Bulletin, 12 September

Wohlforth's brooding sense of urgency over the training of "cadres themselves" is apparently well grounded. For it seems to be the case that a large fraction of the tiny pool of experienced and able (albeit cynical, trained in the principle of having no principles) individuals whom Wohlforth had relied upon to run his operation have quit the WL over the past year. Several ex-WLers interviewed by Workers Vanguard have alleged that among those leading cadres who "voted with their feet" and left the organization are included: Lucy St. John, Dennis O'Casey, Karen Frankel, Dan Fried, Pat Connally, Marty Jonas, Juan Farinas, Ed Smith, Ronnie Roberts, Alex Steiner, Bruce McKay, Diane Isaacs, Debby Goldstein, Abby Rodriguez, Irving Hall, Ernie Lewis and Kiki Mendez. This is merely the bulk of the WL central leadership. These allegations tend to be corroborated by the disappearance of these names from the pages of the Bulletin and Young Socialist. Prudently, instead of listing the new editors (who will be left next week?), both papers have gone for months without listing an editorial staff.

It is alleged that most of this exodus occurred in an individual fashion, being more an expression of poor working relations with Wohlforth and acute personal demoralization (growing out of the WL's frenzied attempt to posture as a mass party) than a reflection of overt political differences with the WL's opportunist line. Reportedly this mass desertion has greatly alarmed Gerry Healy, who, so the story goes, has intervened to amnesty the shell-shocked dropouts, hoping to reintegrate them into the WL central leadership. Although it is reported that a few of the dropouts (e.g., Marty Jonas) have returned, how successful this attempt at retreading will be remains to be seen, as indeed does the question of Wohlforth's future role in the WL.

(A number of the dropouts, while recoiling from Wohlforth, still politically embrace Gerry Healy. But while Dr. Frankenstein may be superior to his run-amok creature; he does bear the real responsibility for creating his abomination.)

For Wohlforth, the exit of most of the central WL leadership and of many of the more able youth the WL has managed to recruit over the past period is a stunning personal and political defeat. For the Spartacist League, and for the struggle to construct an authentic Trotskyist party in the U.S., section of a reborn Fourth International, the current anemic condition of the WL is most satisfying and a confirmation of our political evaluation of the liquidationist course of Healy, Wohlforth and the WL.

A Bolshevik organization cannot be created upon a foundation of lies and political banditry, upon the methodology of subordinating program and political principles to the pursuit of transient organizational opportunities. Wohlforth's conceptions that he could construct a mass party by publishing a phony "mass paper" out of all line with the WL's influence in the class; that he could avoid the long and arduous task of constructing communist fractions in the labor movement, instead turning the Pabloist dictum on its head and going from "the center to the periphery" with his apolitical neighborhood youth work; that it is somehow possible to avoid a direct struggle with the revisionist currents within the working-class movement – all these "get-rich-quick" nostrums have come to naught.

As Trotsky so aptly points out:

"What critically thinking left workers, not only outside the party but inside it as well, demand at present of the leadership, above all, is not political infallibility – this is impossible – but revolutionary devotion, personal firmness, revolutionary objectivity, and honesty."

With such a leadership it is possible to forge a cadre that will

"...not leave unpunished toying with principles, journalistic lightmindedness, moral looseness, and pseudo 'irreconcilability' – in the name of personal caprice. Only in this manner can the organization be secured against catastrophic surprises in the future."
– "The Crisis of the German Left Opposition," 1930

Wohlforth and Healy are capable only of producing cynics, not cadre. With such leadership and methods it is not possible to create an organization able to carry the class struggle forward to victory. For those who have not yet abandoned ship, and the gullible souls who are tempted by Healy's promises of a fair deal, we warn: expect to be fed a lot more of the same old garbage in the same old pails. Nothing less than a fundamental break with the whole corpus of Healyism and a return to the principled struggle for the Trotskyist program, as currently represented by the international Spartacist tendency, can provide a way out of the impasse.