Spartacist No. 38-39 (Summer 1986)
Letters
What Happened to Peter Fryer
London, December 17, 1985
Editorial Board
Spartacist
New York, NY
Dear Comrades,
I have just read with great interest the account in your Winter 1985-86 issue of what you aptly term the implosion of Healyism. You include on page 27 some friendly, and, I fear, unduly flattering references to me. I hope you have space for a few corrections and amplifications.
“Healy and Fryer had some kind of falling-out.” In fact, after two and a half years' close daily work with Healy. I had reached the conclusion that he was a gangster and that I could no longer continue to associate with him. So I quite the Socialist Labour League giving my reasons in an open letter to the members which was issued in the autumn of 1959.
No doubt it would have been better to stay in nd fight. But I had been exhausted by the bitter struggle in the Communist Party - my expulsion and unsuccessful appeal - and the gruelling work of building The Newsletter and the SLL. I simply didn't have the stomach, or the energy, or the appetite for a further bitter fight against a further set of of cynical and unscrupulous opponents. And I frankly admit, I was more than a little afraid of Healy, whose favourite method with dissenters was, in those days, a knock on the door by him and his thugs at two o'clock in the morning.
But I didn't go to Portugal to run away from Healy. Nor was I accompanied by my wife and my mother. I went with my then companion, Patricia McGowan Pinheiro, and our purpose was to write a book together. That book, Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar's Portugal, was published in 1961.
I have never written a book with the title The Anthropology of Sex Through the Ages, or anything remotely resembling it. My books “on sex” were the following: Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (1963), a social history of contraception; and Private Case - Public Scandal (1966), an attack on the censorship at that time practised in the British Museum Library.
James Robertson asks: “What happened to Peter Fryer?” I'll tell him. My most recent book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, was published by Pluto Press in 1984. I am still working in the field of black history, and I have two projects in hand: a history of black people in the British Empire; and an anthology (which I am compling in collaboration with Rozina Visram) of black writing in Britain since the eighteenth century.
In general, I think your account of the events of 1956-59 grossly overestimates my personal role and contribution. But, leaving that aside, the portrait of Healy that emerges is instantly recognizable to all honest people who have ever had dealings with him.
Yours fraternally,
Peter Fryer
Spartacist replies: We thank comrade Fryer for his information and comments regarding Spartacist No. 36-37, “Healyism Implodes."“ ”
Showing posts with label Socialist Labour League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialist Labour League. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Protest Healyite Thuggery (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 130 (27 October 1976)
Vicious Attack on SL/ANZ, SWP in Australia
Protest Healyite Thuggery
SYDNEY, October 18 – A rampage of thuggery by the Healyite Socialist Labour League (SLL) here yesterday left supporters of the Australian Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) seriously injured. Under direct supervision of SLL national secretary Jim Mulgrew, the Healyite goons launched two brutal premeditated assaults outside a “public” SLL forum at the Sydney Trades Hall. The Spartacist supporters were selling literature and protesting the Healyites’ exclusionist practices, while SWPers were distributing a statement in reply to the Healyites’ slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack. Several SL and SWP members were bruised and bloodied, and one SWPer required hospital treatment after numerous punches and kicks to the head and body.
Healyite gangsterism is no news to the workers movement. But yesterday’s attacks indicated a deliberate attempt to maim members – in particular leading members – of opponent tendencies.
No sooner had the Spartacists approached the Trades Hall than SLL honcho Mulgrew began threatening an Australasian Spartacist photographer. The reason for Mulgrew’s concern with photographs became clear an instant later as, with SWPers looking on, he directed several of this thugs to jump SL national chairman Bill Logan, shrieking “get Logan, get Logan!” SLers who sprang to their comrade’s defense were slugged and pummelled, one receiving a bloody nose.
Unable to dislodge the SLers without exposing the seamy side of Healyism before untutored SLL ranks and others coming into the hall, Mulgrew pulled his hoodlums back, restricting them to personal and sexist insults, threats, physical harassments and provocations against the SLers an SWPers who were still arriving.
But when the bulk of their youth had been shepherded inside, the Healyite goons shoved and jostled an SWP supporter handing out material to people going in. Mulgrew and his hooligans then surrounded a leading SWPer, John Percy, who was attempting to photograph the incident. After smacking him on the face, they proceeded to indiscriminately assault SL and SWP supporters coming to his defense. As Mulgrew retreated to safety, the goons launched a barrage of kicking and punching in the middle of the street. One SLer received a severe blow to the head and SWP youth leader David Deutchmann, who had vigorously protested the earlier assault on the SL, was singled out by the enraged Healyites who punched him to the ground and continued to stomp and kick him as he lay.
Healyite gangsterism against the Trotskyist criticism of the SL has a long history. SL/ANZ supporters were subjected to a similar, though less brutal, attack at the same site a year ago when Healy himself came to Sydney on a speaking tour. But with the initiation of their international slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack – which has driven the Healyites further into self-imposed disrepute and paranoid insularity – their thuggery has become more frequent. At a May Day march in Sydney this year, the Healyites not only kept Spartacist literature a “safe” distance from their closely guarded contingent (going so far as to call the cops to prevent an SL supporter from distributing leaflets), but they even accosted a salesman of the Socialist, paper of the ossified, ultra-reformist pro-Moscow Stalinists. This was followed by a series of incidents with salesmen of other left papers.
In July, a gang of Healyites disrupted a forum in Sydney by American SWP vice-presidential hopeful Willie Mae Reid. The SLLers, shouting and waving their “indictments” of Hansen and Novack during the discussion period, prevented Reid from speaking. The reformist SWP used the incident to ban the SLL from attending all SWP public forums. The SWP has had a longstanding ban against allowing Spartacist supporters at forums as well, thus displaying that its main concern is the suppression of left criticism of its rotten politics.
The Spartacist tendency has from the start taken an active principled stand in combating the Healyite slander campaign against Hansen and Novack and in defending the SWP against SLL disruptions and physical attacks. This is more than can be said for the SWP’s Australian partner in the “United” Secretariat (USec), the crumbling Mandelite Communist League (CL). While Bill Logan on behalf of the SL/ANZ signed the American SWP-initiated statement against the slanders, the CL was conspicuously absent from the list of Australian signatories. In fact it has bolstered the Healyite campaign by supporting their demand for an “inquiry” into the bizarre charges – an act not entirely unconnected with a certain parallelism between the SLL’s slogans and appetites toward militant Labourism and those of the CL.
The Healyites’ paranoid concern with police infiltration in the workers movement – the ostensible justification for the frenzied campaign to slander Hansen and Novack as “accomplices” in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky – is exposed as hollow by their own practice. Their wilful provocation of thug violence opens up the workers movement to repression by the cops at any time. The short step between this Stalinist gangsterism and calling upon the cops to suppress leftist opponents is one which the Healyite political bandits made a decade ago. From the beating of USec supporter Ernest Tate in 1966, and the subsequent appeal to the bourgeoisie’s courts against Tate, to the present day the Healyites have repeatedly invoked the capitalist cops and courts against left-wing opponents. Yesterday Mulgrew boasted, “If the police come, we’ll get them to arrest you all.”
“Cop”-baiting slander and gangster violence are deliberately employed by the Healy tendency as obstacles to debate and political clarification within the workers movement. Open political debate would expose, for example, the SLL’s adaptation to the protectionist hysteria sweeping the Australian ship-building industry, threatened by overseas competition (the SLL has failed to criticize the chauvinist character of Australian shipyard workers’ occupation of Japanese ships, even though an SLL supporter is shop steward in one of the yards most active in the occupations). It would expose the SLL’s consistent catering to social-democratic illusions through its campaign to “Force the Liberals to Resign.”
We can assure Mulgrew, Healy and their gang of one thing: their gangster tactics will not prevent their exposure in the course of the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International.
Vicious Attack on SL/ANZ, SWP in Australia
Protest Healyite Thuggery
SYDNEY, October 18 – A rampage of thuggery by the Healyite Socialist Labour League (SLL) here yesterday left supporters of the Australian Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) seriously injured. Under direct supervision of SLL national secretary Jim Mulgrew, the Healyite goons launched two brutal premeditated assaults outside a “public” SLL forum at the Sydney Trades Hall. The Spartacist supporters were selling literature and protesting the Healyites’ exclusionist practices, while SWPers were distributing a statement in reply to the Healyites’ slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack. Several SL and SWP members were bruised and bloodied, and one SWPer required hospital treatment after numerous punches and kicks to the head and body.
Healyite gangsterism is no news to the workers movement. But yesterday’s attacks indicated a deliberate attempt to maim members – in particular leading members – of opponent tendencies.
No sooner had the Spartacists approached the Trades Hall than SLL honcho Mulgrew began threatening an Australasian Spartacist photographer. The reason for Mulgrew’s concern with photographs became clear an instant later as, with SWPers looking on, he directed several of this thugs to jump SL national chairman Bill Logan, shrieking “get Logan, get Logan!” SLers who sprang to their comrade’s defense were slugged and pummelled, one receiving a bloody nose.
Unable to dislodge the SLers without exposing the seamy side of Healyism before untutored SLL ranks and others coming into the hall, Mulgrew pulled his hoodlums back, restricting them to personal and sexist insults, threats, physical harassments and provocations against the SLers an SWPers who were still arriving.
But when the bulk of their youth had been shepherded inside, the Healyite goons shoved and jostled an SWP supporter handing out material to people going in. Mulgrew and his hooligans then surrounded a leading SWPer, John Percy, who was attempting to photograph the incident. After smacking him on the face, they proceeded to indiscriminately assault SL and SWP supporters coming to his defense. As Mulgrew retreated to safety, the goons launched a barrage of kicking and punching in the middle of the street. One SLer received a severe blow to the head and SWP youth leader David Deutchmann, who had vigorously protested the earlier assault on the SL, was singled out by the enraged Healyites who punched him to the ground and continued to stomp and kick him as he lay.
Healyite gangsterism against the Trotskyist criticism of the SL has a long history. SL/ANZ supporters were subjected to a similar, though less brutal, attack at the same site a year ago when Healy himself came to Sydney on a speaking tour. But with the initiation of their international slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack – which has driven the Healyites further into self-imposed disrepute and paranoid insularity – their thuggery has become more frequent. At a May Day march in Sydney this year, the Healyites not only kept Spartacist literature a “safe” distance from their closely guarded contingent (going so far as to call the cops to prevent an SL supporter from distributing leaflets), but they even accosted a salesman of the Socialist, paper of the ossified, ultra-reformist pro-Moscow Stalinists. This was followed by a series of incidents with salesmen of other left papers.
In July, a gang of Healyites disrupted a forum in Sydney by American SWP vice-presidential hopeful Willie Mae Reid. The SLLers, shouting and waving their “indictments” of Hansen and Novack during the discussion period, prevented Reid from speaking. The reformist SWP used the incident to ban the SLL from attending all SWP public forums. The SWP has had a longstanding ban against allowing Spartacist supporters at forums as well, thus displaying that its main concern is the suppression of left criticism of its rotten politics.
The Spartacist tendency has from the start taken an active principled stand in combating the Healyite slander campaign against Hansen and Novack and in defending the SWP against SLL disruptions and physical attacks. This is more than can be said for the SWP’s Australian partner in the “United” Secretariat (USec), the crumbling Mandelite Communist League (CL). While Bill Logan on behalf of the SL/ANZ signed the American SWP-initiated statement against the slanders, the CL was conspicuously absent from the list of Australian signatories. In fact it has bolstered the Healyite campaign by supporting their demand for an “inquiry” into the bizarre charges – an act not entirely unconnected with a certain parallelism between the SLL’s slogans and appetites toward militant Labourism and those of the CL.
The Healyites’ paranoid concern with police infiltration in the workers movement – the ostensible justification for the frenzied campaign to slander Hansen and Novack as “accomplices” in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky – is exposed as hollow by their own practice. Their wilful provocation of thug violence opens up the workers movement to repression by the cops at any time. The short step between this Stalinist gangsterism and calling upon the cops to suppress leftist opponents is one which the Healyite political bandits made a decade ago. From the beating of USec supporter Ernest Tate in 1966, and the subsequent appeal to the bourgeoisie’s courts against Tate, to the present day the Healyites have repeatedly invoked the capitalist cops and courts against left-wing opponents. Yesterday Mulgrew boasted, “If the police come, we’ll get them to arrest you all.”
“Cop”-baiting slander and gangster violence are deliberately employed by the Healy tendency as obstacles to debate and political clarification within the workers movement. Open political debate would expose, for example, the SLL’s adaptation to the protectionist hysteria sweeping the Australian ship-building industry, threatened by overseas competition (the SLL has failed to criticize the chauvinist character of Australian shipyard workers’ occupation of Japanese ships, even though an SLL supporter is shop steward in one of the yards most active in the occupations). It would expose the SLL’s consistent catering to social-democratic illusions through its campaign to “Force the Liberals to Resign.”
We can assure Mulgrew, Healy and their gang of one thing: their gangster tactics will not prevent their exposure in the course of the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
1966 London Conference 2: Defeat for World Trotskyism
Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)
Defeat for World Trotskyism
Defeat for World Trotskyism
It is a bitter irony that the Newsletter (organ of the British Socialist Labour League) headlined its article on the April Conference of the International Committee "Rebuilding the Fourth International." The signal accomplishments of the conference: the Voix Ouvriere (a French Trotskyist group previously unconnected to either the I.C. or the United Secretariat) was driven away and Spartacist expelled. Thus the Fourth International was "rebuilt."
The break with Spartacist was accomplished over a transparent organizational pretext. Spartacist editor James Robertson, a delegate to the conference, excused himself from one afternoon session, and refused later to “confess” that his absence was either a violation of principle or the expression of “petty-bourgeois American chauvinism.” His failure to make the “proper apology” was deemed a departure from democratic centralism. It was grotesque that an international split should be precipitated by an undeclared rule on attendance which was applied only to the Spartacist delegation; so grotesque, in fact, that no section of the I.C. has yet found the courage to make this fact public. On the contrary, the American Committee for the Fourth International, which had formerly proclaimed itself an ardent advocate of unity, has suddenly "discovered" that the positions of Spartacist are incompatible with participation in the I.C., fabricating a smokescreen of political accusations in the ACFI Bulletin of 9 May 1966, to explain the unexpected break.
A Critical Review
Since all supporters of a principled unification among revolutionary Trotskyists must be surprised and confused at this about-face, it is necessary to review critically the political contributions and events at the London Conference, in order to determine what precipitated the split.
The major report of the conference was given by Cliff Slaughter, secretary of the IC, on "Rebuilding the Fourth International," the international resolution before the Conference. Incorporated in the summary by Slaughter was a vehement attack on the political activity and character of Spartacist and a special attack upon Robertson, as noted above. While our delegation voted in support of the resolution, they perforce abstained on the vote on the Slaughter report.
Where We Stand
Spartacist came to the conference because we were in basic political agreement with the main positions published by the International Committee. We remain in basic political agreement with the I.C. Resolution, despite particular exceptions.
Comrade Slaughter characterized the present objective context as one of “deepening crisis of imperialism,” especially since 1956. He saw the working class as both increasingly restive the world over, and rapidly exposing and rejecting the traditional labor bureaucracies. He described the rise of Pabloite revisionism as the reflection of conscious effort by the bourgeoisie to disorient and bridle the vanguard of the working class. Nevertheless, he declared, Pabloism has now been defeated decisively, and the struggle for leadership of the working class is the immediate task. The superiority of the I.C., he asserted, lies in its understanding of "Leninist methods of party-building and in Marxist theory."
The V.O. group stated a counter position that Pabloism his been the reflex of the petty-bourgeois composition of the Fourth International since World War II.
On the third morning of the Conference, Comrade Robertson's turn on the speakers' list was reached. He expressed Spartacist's fundamental agreement with' the line of the International Resolution and of the report, but he took the opportunity to make clear certain differences. (His remarks are printed in this issue, below.) Comrade Robertson then missed the session which followed the delivery of his remarks. Although three members of the Spartacist delegation were in attendance at the session, fully empowered to take part in the discussion, this absence by Comrade Robertson was made the excuse for a violent attack upon our organization.
Spartacist Expelled
During the session missed by Robertson, Michael Banda of the SLL chose as his comment on the Slaughter report a sharp political attack upon Spartacist’s positions. In the evening session which followed organizational issues of "indiscipline" were raised.
Attacks upon Spartacist continued for a twenty-four hour period during which the Healy group tried to create some political pretext for the expulsion. Finding none, they were left with the original shabby organizational pretext.
It should be noted that Robertson had informed Comrade Healy (National Secretary of the SLL) of his intended absence, and that furthermore upon returning to the conference he explained to the assembled delegates that he had known of no rule demanding his attendance, that he had had no intention of not following protocol and would certainly adhere to all rules in the future.
ACFI's Feeble Effort
What was the reason for this vehement assault? The Bulletin makes a feeble effort to provide some motivation. Thus: "Robertson stated that he was in general agreement with the report (of Cliff Slaughter) but showed that he had no understanding and in reality no agreement with its fundamental method and line." In evidence for this fantastic interpretation, the Bulletin, points to Spartacist's evaluation of the short-run stabilization of capitalism in the colonial world after the recent defeats sustained by the working class in the backward nations. Because Robertson has noted this temporary set-back for working-class forces, he is blind to the "unity of the crisis." If by unity of the crisis it is meant that despite interim advances the capitalist class cannot resolve or suppress the contradictions in society, then Spartacist vigorously concurs. But if the Bulletin and the I.C., whose line it represents, desires to- translate every defeat into a victory, to treat the crushing reversal, say, in Indonesia, as a new, higher stage in the struggle for socialism, that is another matter: so the Comintern in 1933 viewed Hitler's rise to power as the springboard for the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary conviction of Spartacist is based, not on euphoric optimism, but on confidence in the working class with the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party to become conscious of its mission to liberate society from the stranglehold of capital.
Negro Question
In a similar vein, the Bulletin article suggests that Spartacist's special approach to the Negro question disparages the white working class. This is especially dishonest of our ACFI comrades since it is they who went along with the SWP abdication to Black Nationalism in 1963. Spartacist comrades, then known within the SWP as the Revolutionary Tendency, voted for a revolutionary integrationist counter-resolution and have maintained a consistent position since then on the need for a class rather than national analysis of the Negro question.
To be fair, ACFI has since modified its line on this question, publishing in its Bulletin a revised position which characterizes the Negro people as a people-class, in analogy to A. Leon's characterization of the Jewish people as a people-class. Strangely, the ACFI delegation in London remained silent while Spartacist was denounced by Greek and French delegates for having an ACFI-like people-class line on the Negro question.
Why this sudden switch in line by ACFI, this insensitivity to the special position of Negroes in the U.S.? Because ACFI, like puppets on a string, must now view American questions in British terms.
Propaganda OR Agitation?
With "inexorable logic," the Bulletin article plods to the inevitable conclusion: Spartacist is only a propaganda group, incapable of fusing theory with action. Yet Tim Wohlforth, the uneasy ACFI leader, missed his signals and submitted to the London Conference a revealing document, "Some Comments on Perspectives for the Fused Movement," which concluded : "The Spartacist comrades, while insisting on a propagandistic course, have done more to break out of an exclusive propagandistic existence than we have." While Spartacist comrades have been arrested some twenty times over the past three years as a result of our active participation in the civil-rights movement, we have yet to hear of one single ACFI member facing similar persecution! This striking difference reveals the truth.
The final argument, all others failing, is that Robertson "did not agree that the I.C. and only the I.C. represents the continuity of the movement." If the Spartacist comrades did not believe that the I.C. was a political heir of Trotskyism, why have they sought unity within a disciplined International? The Bulletin intends something more: servile subordination is demanded.
No Bolshevik Discipline!
Most ironical: the I.C. is not an International: it has no discipline, at least not for the privileged British and French sections. The I.C. has instead accepted the position that "The only, method of arriving at decisions that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity." Yet it demands complete, unquestioning "discipline" from its sympathizers, even on the level of organizational trivia. Our friends in ACFI recently refused debate with us without first "clearing it."
For Robertson to have "apologized" in London would have meant that Spartacist would have accepted ACFI's puppet role in the international movement. This kind of subordination is political suicide.
It remains to answer why the Healy group in the I.C. chose to wreck the immediate prospects for rebuilding the Fourth International by driving out the V.O. group and expelling Spartacist. In the light of this how shall we evaluate the revolutionary potential of the Socialist Labour League despite its obvious achievements?
Behind the Split
In one sense, the remarks of Comrade Robertson did bring on the split. Clearly the I.C. felt unable to tolerate a disciplined but vigorous and independent tendency within its ranks. This is the organizational reality behind the. expulsion, behind the lies and distortions in the Bulletin. But what, in turn, is the political explanation for the monolithic bureaucratism of the I.C. and especially of its chief section, the SLL of Britain?
Rigid bureaucracy in a workers' movement always reveals fundamental lack of confidence in party members and ultimately in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. The Healy group has demonstrated a fundamental, incapacity to build a world revolutionary movement. It is up to Spartacist along with other sections of the International Committee to construct a leadership to that end.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Conversations with Wohlforth - Preface
Marxist Bulletin No. 3 (Part IV - 1965)
PREFACE
The 8 sessions of unity negotiations between Spartacist and the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) took place from 18 June to 8 October 1965. The minutes, taken by the secretary in shorthand, are correct and complete almost to the word; the first six sets of minutes were adopted by the two negotiating committees during the course of the talks.
As transcripts of the spoken word, the minutes may be somewhat confusing to the reader, to whom the specific incidents debated may not be common knowledge. Other numbers of our Marxist Bulletin series provide explanation and documentation of the earlier history of relations between Spartacist and ACFI. To summarize briefly here: The two groups were originally a united Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and both looked for political leadership to the International Committee for the Fourth International (IC) whose leading section was the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). In 1962, while still inside the SWP, two leaders of the RT, Tim Wohlforth and Art Philips, under the guidance of the SLL's Gerry Healy, deliberately forced a split in the RT ostensibly over the dispute within the RT over the nature of the SWP. Because of the fraudulent nature of the split and the organizational atrocities of Wohlforth-Philips, the majority of the RT comrades refused to be part of Wohlforth's "Reorganized Minority Tendency" (RMT). In 1963-4 the Wohlforthites were instrumental in deliberately bringing about the expulsion of the RT from the SWP. Shortly thereafter the RMT (having split internally, the unstable bloc with Philips having blown up) engineered its own expulsion from the SWP. The former RT majority around Robertson-White-Mage organized around the publication of the Spartacist and later became the Spartacist League. The RMT changed its name to ACFI, publishing the Bulletin of International Socialism; this tendency now calls itself the Workers League.
Negotiation and Its Aftermath
The negotiating sessions themselves have something of an abstract quality. To the Wohlforthites they were just a game, as Wohlforth did not seriously intend to unify. The negotiations were begun at the insistence of Spartacist on the basis that the formal political positions of the two groups were too similar to justify separation on organizational grounds. ACFI replied by attempts at fraternization which were no more and no less than an attempted raid, while refusing to state that unity was possible or principled. It was not until the 5th session that Wohlforth made this admission, and throughout, the ACFI negotiators continued to insist that splitting the RT in 1962 had been "principled". Relations between the two groups deteriorated visibly throughout the last few negotiating sessions, culminating in a frank show-down in the 8th meeting over the 1962 split and the wretched record of ACFI. Logically, this might well have meant the cessation of all attempts to unify. At this point, Gerry Healy instructed ACFI to proceed with unity forthwith. In this sense, the negotiations are unreal: they actually had little to do with bringing about the Northern (Montreal) joint unity conference which followed them. The Spartacist side had from the start been willing to unite; ACFI had no control over its policies, having as an article of faith entrusted absolutely and in advance all decision-making to the British.
Following the Northern conference, both groups sent delegations to the April 1966 IC Conference in London at which the united U.S. section was to have been set up. At that Conference, however, occurred what is undoubtedly one of the most hilarious organizational atrocities ever: James Robertson, Spartacist's senior delegate, was expelled from the Conference ostensibly for failing to apologize for missing a session (see Spartacist #6). What lay behind the facade was that the Spartacist delegation had presented to the Conference, in the context of general political agreement and willingness to accept international democratic centralism, our differences with the SLL's position on Cuba, the roots of Pabloism, etc. As had been shown earlier by the 1962 split, the IC leadership would not permit U.S. Trotskyists to fight for their political positions inside the IC. Following the IC Conference, the political deterioration of the IC line (its embracing of Mao's "Cultural Revolution" purge and of the Arab militarists of Egypt and Syria as leading an undefined "Arab Revolution") rapidly reached the point that seeking to heal the organizational rupture was no longer posed.
History is Bunk?
Throughout the negotiations, Spartacist's careful and scrupulous attitude toward our record is belittled by ACFI as "bookkeeping", "archaeology", etc. Their own attitude seems to be a kind of learn-by-doing, as an excuse for their history of opportunist zigzags and political gutlessness. "The net effect from all this is to learn once again it is not very worthwhile to go over old documents," Wohlforth (who, by the way, likes to style himself a theoretician!) says in the 4th session. Confronted with ACFI's vacillations, Mazelis replies: "we're very proud of the fact that what we're saying now is not what we said then. We have developed, there's nothing wrong with that." (8th session) The opposite approach characterized the Spartacist negotiators. In the words of Al Nelson:
"'If you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.' This is the basis for our raising "old" questions (they aren't old).... You said there are formulations in our '63 documents we should both forget. No indeed! The truth is that on almost every major point and tactic in dispute between us over the last years, you have been in error -- mostly by your own admission: on the youth question, nature of the SWP (which resulted in our split), on PL, on your assessment of the level of struggle and tasks of the revolutionary party. In '63 you supported the party majority on Black Nationalism and submitted only an action amendment. On the American question your position was that now was the time for the conquest of the masses. We have to agree on what the mistakes were in order to come to a position now." (4th session)
It is because our actions and positions have stood the test of time that we have brought out the actual documents of both sides in the 1962 split (Marxist Bulletin #2 "Nature of the SWP--Revolutionary or Centrist?--Discussion Material of the RT"; and #3 Part I "The Split in the Revolutionary Tendency") while Wohlforth cringes and hopes nobody will notice.
1962 Split
The Wohlforthites sought to justify splitting the RT by alleging its majority intended to quit the SWP. Their claim is given the lie by the fact that we remained in the SWP -- until the RMT framed up and then informed on our comrades and continued to act as the attorney for the party Majority in expelling the RT from the youth (for a scathing and accurate account, see Nelson's remarks to the 5th session, pages 4-5). In the same session Wohlforth admitted he forced the split to avoid abiding by RT decisions: "We and the British came to a common judgment at the time of our split. We had no intention of carrying out your line."
Several salient facts about the 1962 split are dealt with elsewhere. The issue, whether the SWP was still a revolutionary party or had become centrist (see M.B. #2), is now clearly resolved in our favor. The organizational atrocity resorted to by Healy-Wohlforth is discussed in detail in M.B. #3. Neither of these points (i.e., the nature of the SWP Majority, the mechanics of the split ultimatum) is debated much in the negotiating sessions. What is discussed herein is who "struggled" inside the SWP. It must be understood that the practical result of Wohlforth's insistence that the SWP was still a solidly revolutionary party and possessed a "proletarian core" was to justify his bloc with the Pabloist central party leadership of Dobbs and Co., defining the largely impotent right-wing oppositions (Weiss, Swabeck) as the main enemy. That this analysis of the party was a cynical fabrication became clear almost immediately, when the ACFI group left the SWP and proceeded to deny that it had ever been a truly revolutionary party at all! As Robertson pointed out: (8th session)
All through 1962 Wohlforth oscillated back and forth, doing something very peculiar to the word "centrist". "Centrist" means nothing if not flux, change, motion, heterogeneous elements lumped together. You insisted that centrism was a finished category, and to say the party is centrist is to say it's finished, that everyone in it is a centrist. Yet centrism means that in the minds of the members are all sorts of contradictory ideas. You made a mockery of the meaning of centrism for the sake of polemical convenience, at the same time carefully avoiding comrade Dobbs. You labelled Weiss and Swabeck the main enemy in the SWP, aided and abetted by the hirelings Hansen and Warde, but not the central party leadership, not Cannon and Dobbs. You worked this angle for only a little while, until the fall of 1963. Since nothing happened in the SWP between the spring and fall of '63 you became dispirited and ready therefore to walk out of the party (maybe you decided the party didn't have a proletarian core after all)....
The Wohlforth tendency continued to exhibit its characteristic lack of backbone and principle at the 1963 SWP Convention. The main issue facing the SWP was Black Nationalism; their capitulation to it was the first application of their Pabloism to the terrain of the domestic class struggle. The SWP defined itself as a "white party" which could have little role in the recruitment of Blacks to revolutionary consciousness. At the 1963 Convention the SWP started on the course of enthusiastically tail-ending the Black Nationalists from Elijah Muhammed to Rhody McCoy. In these negotiating sessions ACFI constantly insisted that the "American Question"--divorced from the Black question, a separation which is artificial in any case-was the important fight. The RMT's long counter-resolution on the American Question declared that the trouble with the SWP was that it had lost contact with the American proletariat, predicted imminent economic crisis and insisted now was the time for the conquest of the masses. In their analysis they were, of course, hopelessly disoriented. But more importantly, what the Wohlforthites would love to overlook now (with their present oversimplified, grossly insensitive position toward Black oppression) is that in 1963 they supported Black Nationalism. Were it not for the fake super-proletarianism of their British mentors, they would probably be supporting it still.
Admits Left/Right Difference
For even when our political similarities were most striking, differences between ACFI and Spartacist tended to follow a pattern: Spartacist showed political seriousness, principle and spine, while ACFI caved in at any opportunity. In the 8th session ACFI spokesman Mazelis expounded a policy of conciliation:
We would have no objection as part of a struggle in a living movement to distribute this welfare workers committee leaflet, calling for negotiations or indicating some confidence in the U.N., as part of a struggle, making it clear where we stand but not refusing to go along with these people. The same thing goes in part for the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade next week. The same thing goes for PL.... You take an Oehlerite line on tactics.
In the same session he was forced to admit that the Spartacist tendency was discernibly to the left of ACFI.
As part of our continuing insistence that a Leninist organization must take responsibility for its past, we are publishing these minutes. In the long run, opportunist, unprincipled conduct will hang its perpetrators by their own rope.
24 April 1970
PREFACE
The 8 sessions of unity negotiations between Spartacist and the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) took place from 18 June to 8 October 1965. The minutes, taken by the secretary in shorthand, are correct and complete almost to the word; the first six sets of minutes were adopted by the two negotiating committees during the course of the talks.
As transcripts of the spoken word, the minutes may be somewhat confusing to the reader, to whom the specific incidents debated may not be common knowledge. Other numbers of our Marxist Bulletin series provide explanation and documentation of the earlier history of relations between Spartacist and ACFI. To summarize briefly here: The two groups were originally a united Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and both looked for political leadership to the International Committee for the Fourth International (IC) whose leading section was the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). In 1962, while still inside the SWP, two leaders of the RT, Tim Wohlforth and Art Philips, under the guidance of the SLL's Gerry Healy, deliberately forced a split in the RT ostensibly over the dispute within the RT over the nature of the SWP. Because of the fraudulent nature of the split and the organizational atrocities of Wohlforth-Philips, the majority of the RT comrades refused to be part of Wohlforth's "Reorganized Minority Tendency" (RMT). In 1963-4 the Wohlforthites were instrumental in deliberately bringing about the expulsion of the RT from the SWP. Shortly thereafter the RMT (having split internally, the unstable bloc with Philips having blown up) engineered its own expulsion from the SWP. The former RT majority around Robertson-White-Mage organized around the publication of the Spartacist and later became the Spartacist League. The RMT changed its name to ACFI, publishing the Bulletin of International Socialism; this tendency now calls itself the Workers League.
Negotiation and Its Aftermath
The negotiating sessions themselves have something of an abstract quality. To the Wohlforthites they were just a game, as Wohlforth did not seriously intend to unify. The negotiations were begun at the insistence of Spartacist on the basis that the formal political positions of the two groups were too similar to justify separation on organizational grounds. ACFI replied by attempts at fraternization which were no more and no less than an attempted raid, while refusing to state that unity was possible or principled. It was not until the 5th session that Wohlforth made this admission, and throughout, the ACFI negotiators continued to insist that splitting the RT in 1962 had been "principled". Relations between the two groups deteriorated visibly throughout the last few negotiating sessions, culminating in a frank show-down in the 8th meeting over the 1962 split and the wretched record of ACFI. Logically, this might well have meant the cessation of all attempts to unify. At this point, Gerry Healy instructed ACFI to proceed with unity forthwith. In this sense, the negotiations are unreal: they actually had little to do with bringing about the Northern (Montreal) joint unity conference which followed them. The Spartacist side had from the start been willing to unite; ACFI had no control over its policies, having as an article of faith entrusted absolutely and in advance all decision-making to the British.
Following the Northern conference, both groups sent delegations to the April 1966 IC Conference in London at which the united U.S. section was to have been set up. At that Conference, however, occurred what is undoubtedly one of the most hilarious organizational atrocities ever: James Robertson, Spartacist's senior delegate, was expelled from the Conference ostensibly for failing to apologize for missing a session (see Spartacist #6). What lay behind the facade was that the Spartacist delegation had presented to the Conference, in the context of general political agreement and willingness to accept international democratic centralism, our differences with the SLL's position on Cuba, the roots of Pabloism, etc. As had been shown earlier by the 1962 split, the IC leadership would not permit U.S. Trotskyists to fight for their political positions inside the IC. Following the IC Conference, the political deterioration of the IC line (its embracing of Mao's "Cultural Revolution" purge and of the Arab militarists of Egypt and Syria as leading an undefined "Arab Revolution") rapidly reached the point that seeking to heal the organizational rupture was no longer posed.
History is Bunk?
Throughout the negotiations, Spartacist's careful and scrupulous attitude toward our record is belittled by ACFI as "bookkeeping", "archaeology", etc. Their own attitude seems to be a kind of learn-by-doing, as an excuse for their history of opportunist zigzags and political gutlessness. "The net effect from all this is to learn once again it is not very worthwhile to go over old documents," Wohlforth (who, by the way, likes to style himself a theoretician!) says in the 4th session. Confronted with ACFI's vacillations, Mazelis replies: "we're very proud of the fact that what we're saying now is not what we said then. We have developed, there's nothing wrong with that." (8th session) The opposite approach characterized the Spartacist negotiators. In the words of Al Nelson:
"'If you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.' This is the basis for our raising "old" questions (they aren't old).... You said there are formulations in our '63 documents we should both forget. No indeed! The truth is that on almost every major point and tactic in dispute between us over the last years, you have been in error -- mostly by your own admission: on the youth question, nature of the SWP (which resulted in our split), on PL, on your assessment of the level of struggle and tasks of the revolutionary party. In '63 you supported the party majority on Black Nationalism and submitted only an action amendment. On the American question your position was that now was the time for the conquest of the masses. We have to agree on what the mistakes were in order to come to a position now." (4th session)
It is because our actions and positions have stood the test of time that we have brought out the actual documents of both sides in the 1962 split (Marxist Bulletin #2 "Nature of the SWP--Revolutionary or Centrist?--Discussion Material of the RT"; and #3 Part I "The Split in the Revolutionary Tendency") while Wohlforth cringes and hopes nobody will notice.
1962 Split
The Wohlforthites sought to justify splitting the RT by alleging its majority intended to quit the SWP. Their claim is given the lie by the fact that we remained in the SWP -- until the RMT framed up and then informed on our comrades and continued to act as the attorney for the party Majority in expelling the RT from the youth (for a scathing and accurate account, see Nelson's remarks to the 5th session, pages 4-5). In the same session Wohlforth admitted he forced the split to avoid abiding by RT decisions: "We and the British came to a common judgment at the time of our split. We had no intention of carrying out your line."
Several salient facts about the 1962 split are dealt with elsewhere. The issue, whether the SWP was still a revolutionary party or had become centrist (see M.B. #2), is now clearly resolved in our favor. The organizational atrocity resorted to by Healy-Wohlforth is discussed in detail in M.B. #3. Neither of these points (i.e., the nature of the SWP Majority, the mechanics of the split ultimatum) is debated much in the negotiating sessions. What is discussed herein is who "struggled" inside the SWP. It must be understood that the practical result of Wohlforth's insistence that the SWP was still a solidly revolutionary party and possessed a "proletarian core" was to justify his bloc with the Pabloist central party leadership of Dobbs and Co., defining the largely impotent right-wing oppositions (Weiss, Swabeck) as the main enemy. That this analysis of the party was a cynical fabrication became clear almost immediately, when the ACFI group left the SWP and proceeded to deny that it had ever been a truly revolutionary party at all! As Robertson pointed out: (8th session)
All through 1962 Wohlforth oscillated back and forth, doing something very peculiar to the word "centrist". "Centrist" means nothing if not flux, change, motion, heterogeneous elements lumped together. You insisted that centrism was a finished category, and to say the party is centrist is to say it's finished, that everyone in it is a centrist. Yet centrism means that in the minds of the members are all sorts of contradictory ideas. You made a mockery of the meaning of centrism for the sake of polemical convenience, at the same time carefully avoiding comrade Dobbs. You labelled Weiss and Swabeck the main enemy in the SWP, aided and abetted by the hirelings Hansen and Warde, but not the central party leadership, not Cannon and Dobbs. You worked this angle for only a little while, until the fall of 1963. Since nothing happened in the SWP between the spring and fall of '63 you became dispirited and ready therefore to walk out of the party (maybe you decided the party didn't have a proletarian core after all)....
The Wohlforth tendency continued to exhibit its characteristic lack of backbone and principle at the 1963 SWP Convention. The main issue facing the SWP was Black Nationalism; their capitulation to it was the first application of their Pabloism to the terrain of the domestic class struggle. The SWP defined itself as a "white party" which could have little role in the recruitment of Blacks to revolutionary consciousness. At the 1963 Convention the SWP started on the course of enthusiastically tail-ending the Black Nationalists from Elijah Muhammed to Rhody McCoy. In these negotiating sessions ACFI constantly insisted that the "American Question"--divorced from the Black question, a separation which is artificial in any case-was the important fight. The RMT's long counter-resolution on the American Question declared that the trouble with the SWP was that it had lost contact with the American proletariat, predicted imminent economic crisis and insisted now was the time for the conquest of the masses. In their analysis they were, of course, hopelessly disoriented. But more importantly, what the Wohlforthites would love to overlook now (with their present oversimplified, grossly insensitive position toward Black oppression) is that in 1963 they supported Black Nationalism. Were it not for the fake super-proletarianism of their British mentors, they would probably be supporting it still.
Admits Left/Right Difference
For even when our political similarities were most striking, differences between ACFI and Spartacist tended to follow a pattern: Spartacist showed political seriousness, principle and spine, while ACFI caved in at any opportunity. In the 8th session ACFI spokesman Mazelis expounded a policy of conciliation:
We would have no objection as part of a struggle in a living movement to distribute this welfare workers committee leaflet, calling for negotiations or indicating some confidence in the U.N., as part of a struggle, making it clear where we stand but not refusing to go along with these people. The same thing goes in part for the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade next week. The same thing goes for PL.... You take an Oehlerite line on tactics.
In the same session he was forced to admit that the Spartacist tendency was discernibly to the left of ACFI.
As part of our continuing insistence that a Leninist organization must take responsibility for its past, we are publishing these minutes. In the long run, opportunist, unprincipled conduct will hang its perpetrators by their own rope.
24 April 1970
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