Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 158 (20 May 1977)

Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi

Something stinks in News Line, daily garbage organ of the British Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) -and it's not simply that it continues these political bandits’ unsavory record of sectarianism, Stalinist gangsterism and egregious opportunism. Ever since News Line’s inception on May 1976, it has been a mouthpiece for the megalomaniacal ravings and “people's democracy” pretensions of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Month after month articles in News Line have lauded the dictator in weirdly shameless fashion, hailing his “agricultural revolution,” his support to the “Arab Revolution,” detailing his every attack on the “high treason” of Egypt's Anwar Sadat, and so forth.

Thus a brief article in the 26 February News Line hailed the London publication of the Libyan strongman's Green Book as “an uncompromising rejection of parliamentary democracy in favour of ‘the authority of the people’.” Two Labour MP's who pushed the book were taken to task for giving it “a patronizing send-off”; their praise of the Green Book as “challenging, stimulating, moral” is evidently insufficiently fulsome for the WRP’s taste. Qaddafi’s Healyite press agents complain that his “writings and his drive towards people's democracy hardly received the attention they deserve.”

The WRP has in the last year been making up for that with a vengeance. Over 20 articles on Libya have appeared in News Line, not to mention a considerable increase in “special reports” from Tripoli and attacks on Sadat’s Egypt. News Line's castigation of Egypt, described as “near bankruptcy,” for its repression of leftists is completely in accord with Qaddafi's feud with Sadat – and contrasts sharply with the Healyites’ silence on repression in Libya.

An article in the 14 October 1976 News Line, for instance, discussed a BBC television interview with Qaddafi and dismissed the interviewer's inquiry into political prisoners in Libya as one of the bourgeois media’s “stock-in-trade questions.” News Line smugly added, “Gaddafi was unmoved, saying that they were ‘enemies of the revolution’.” The Healyites praised the program for having “broken at least part of the Gaddafi enigma and answered some of the US State Department and Zionist lies,” but complained that the interview was not shown on prime time:

“Miss Kewley's profile rightly belonged in the BBC’s prestige slot, ‘Panorama’.
“It is a measure of the censorship on television that it was squeezed into
the ‘religious programmes’ department where it could not do justice to the subject of Islam or its leading advocate.”

What is perhaps most curious is that Workers Press, the previous Healyite daily –which folded in February 1976 with the presumption of “lack of funds” – paid little or no attention to Qaddafi and his so-called “Revolutionland.” In the six months prior to its collapse, we could locate only one article in Workers Press dealing specifically with Libya, and this was implicitly critical of Qaddafi, reporting a protest by Libyan students in London against the police slaughter of “at least 16 students” at a demonstration at Libya’s Benghazi University (Workers Press, 14 January 1976). On 8 September 1976 News Line carried a centerfold spread on Tripoli’s “anniversary celebration” of Qaddafi’s military coup. Boasting huge photos and snide comments about the bourgeois press’ lack of coverage of the glorious event, News Line’s spread on “Libya's Day” was a sharp departure from the silence of Workers Press the year before. Something has changed, and it wasn’t the Qaddafi regime.

“Revolutionland”

We are more than happy to give Qaddafi’s policies “the attention they deserve.” Qaddafi is fanatical in his devotion to the Koran, which sanctifies the feudal enslavement of women and prescribes legal punishments such as cutting off the tongues of liars and the hands of thieves. At least 700 political prisoners have been reported held in Libyan jails. Regarding one trial of 17 prisoners (acquitted in 1974) against whom Qaddafi personally intervened to impose new sentences of life imprisonment and death, Amnesty International recently noted: “The accused were allegedly Marxists, Trotskyists, and members of the Islamic Liberation Party” (Intercontinental Press, 4 April I977). Qaddafi's 1973 “cultural revolution" laid out his “Five Principles,” including:

“We must purge all the sick people who talk of Communism, atheism, who make propaganda for the Western countries and advocate capitalism. We shall put them in prison.”

And:

“We live by the Koran, God’s book. We will reject any idea that is not based on it. Therefore we enter into a cultural revolution to refute and destroy all misleading books which have made youth sick and insane.”
– New York Times, 22 May 1973

Qaddafi’s idea of “refutation” is simple: he ordered “the burning of books that contain imperialist, capitalist, reactionary, Jewish or Communist thoughts” (New York Times, 18 April 1973).

Grotesque

The sordid history of the Healyites is replete with examples of slavering enthusiasm for left-talking “Third World” nationalists and Stalinists. Workers Press gratuitously proffered “leftist” cheerleading to assorted petty-bourgeois anti-working-class formations, from the Maoist Red Guards to the Angolan MPLA. But the WRP’s pandering to Qaddafi is surely a new low.

Perhaps the most disgusting was a full-page “special News Line interview” with Hamied Jallud, general secretary of the “Libyan trade union federation, equivalent of the British TUC” (14 September 1976). To News Line questions about collective bargaining and the right to strike, the Qaddafi bureaucrats replied, “The role of the trade unions in socialist countries is completely different from capitalist countries”! After all, “the responsibility of the trade unions is to educate the workers and increase production”; Qaddafi's “General People's Congress” will look after the workers' interests. The WRP’s shameless presentation of Qaddafi's repression of the Libyan working class leaves no doubt of its utter subjugation before this capitalist dictator.

News Line hailed the “General People's Congress” held in early March in Shebha, a small desert village distinguished by Qaddafi’s having gone to school there. Fidel Castro was the guest of honor as the “Congress” renamed Libya the “People's Socialist Libyan Arab Public” (sic) and kicked off Qaddafi's “Third Universal Principle” which he modestly claims solves “the problem of democracy.”

The Healyites have had some “problems” with “democracy” themselves; their solution has generally been to beat up political opponents. Qaddafi, who-unlike the WRP-holds state power, has worked out a more elaborate schema. His little Green Book explains that “both administration and supervision become popular” through “committees everywhere” – while Qaddafi becomes head of the “General People's Congress” which runs everything and is so “popular” that it meets once a year. The sinister meaning of this “solution” comes out in the slogans pasted up around Shebha: “Parliaments are defunct.” “representation is a fraud” and “Parties are treason” (London Guardian, 3 March 1977).

“Parties are treason” – what about the Workers Revolutionary Party? In this “People’s Public” where communists are to be jailed and butchered and their books burned, ostensible leftists would have to do some pretty peculiar things to survive – and News Line has made it clear the WRP would be more than willing to do them. The London Times (6 September 1976) reported:

“The repression... in Libya has not, of course, weakened the interest of
left-wing groups in other countries. Representatives of Miss Vanessa Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party, for instance, have visited Libya three times in the past twelve months. Nor has it diminished the affection of those countries like Malta, which feel, with some reason, that Colonel Qaddafi has proved to be their only friend.”

Malta’s reasons are obvious. About to be impoverished by the closing of NATO bases, Malta is now dependent on Qaddafi's aid to remain solvent. The mendicant guerrillas who flock to Tripoli seeking Soviet-made arms and Libyan oil money reportedly have included Muslim secessionists from the Philippines and Ethiopia, opponents of anti-Qaddafi Arab regimes (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco), the Provisional IRA and various Palestinian organizations. Naturally, such groups do not bite the hand that feeds them and have accorded Qaddafi a high place in the pantheon of “anti-imperialist” leaders.

Corrupt

Workers Press, which folded on 14 February 1976, titled itself the “Daily Organ of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party.” Heavy publicity in the preceding months for the paper’s “Crisis Fund” and dire warnings that “the future of the paper is in doubt” would lead to the presumption that it closed up shop for lack of funds. Yet the “Final Edition” Editorial Board statement does not explicitly say so; instead, the Healyites tersely announce that their printing firm, Plough Press, will cease operations.

The Healyites, normally so fond of denying inconvenient reports on the grounds of their bourgeois sources, hid behind an abstract and irrelevant set of statistics from one of the great bourgeois interests, the British Printing Industrial Federation, on “rises in general expenses” increasing printing costs. For two and a half months no Healyite newspaper appeared. Then News Line sprang to life – but not as any kind of party organ – with a format which included paid advertising. At about that same time Healy was replaced by Mike Banda as WRP general secretary.

The WRP ranks have been kept busy with the usual treks across England – and lately the “Children's Crusade” across Europe – designed in part to keep them too exhausted to notice their corrupt leaders’ maneuvering. But even a cursory look at News Line’s year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.

Where is the Class Line in News Line? (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 114 (17 June 1976)

Where's the Class Line in the News Line?

LONDON, May 6 – “At first glance it looks like the Daily Mirror,” writes the weekly London entertainment guide Time Out, comparing to the British equivalent of the New York Daily News and National Enquirer the Workers Revolutionary Party's latest desperate maneuver - a “popular” daily paper featuring big pictures, a “full racing card” and very little politics. The logo is indeed a deliberate imitation of that used by the sex-and-scandal British gutter press.

It looks like the Daily Mirror at second glance, too. The sympathetic article in Time Out notes, “despite appearances, The News Line is closely associated with the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party,” commenting approvingly that most of the WRP’s political views have been removed from the new publication. Most of the news is “straight” reportage; thus News Line reports without comment that General Carvalho is being run for Portuguese President, or that the Italian Communist Party has proposed a grand coalition.

The WRP's daily Workers Press folded in February (see WV No. 97, 20 February 1976). Evidently concluding that even the fake-mass Workers Press had been too political to gain a wide readership, the WRP has now staked its hopes on trying to compete with the bourgeois press on its own terms. The accent is on sensationalism: spy scares, government sex scandals; tidbits of “human interest.”

Even the sports news in News Line is banal. The racing tips are mostly carefully hedged predictions on favourites – and the track record so far is not outstanding.

Once again the WRP’s antics provide fuel for the opponents of Trotskyism. The introduction to an anti-Trotskyist polemic (by Stalinist Monty Johnstone) notes with glee that the WRP “had also bitterly attacked the [CP's Morning] Star for having changed its name from the Daily Worker – only themselves now to adopt one which has not the slightest hint of a connection with working-class traditions and aspirations.”

Desperation

The WRP took the opportunity in the interim between dailies to retire general secretary Gerry Healy, renowned for his political banditry and organizational thuggery, whose place has now been taken by the equally notorious Michael Banda. The Healyites’ organisational fortunes have continued to decline markedly, both in Britain and internationally. The WRP May Day march was claimed to have 2,000 participants, but WV observers counted at most 560, including a large number of children.

Perhaps in desperation, the Healyites have pushed their techniques of “mass recruitment” to bizarre lengths. For instance, the 1 May issue of the Healyite Young Socialist trumpets “200 Members Join Hull YS.” And how did the Hull Healyites “recruit” 200 new members to their Young Socialist branch?

Simple. They just held a disco (dance with records) and “everyone who attended the disco was signed up as a YS member”! Another article on the same page further amplifies the recruitment technique. It explains with an apparently straight face that at a YS “football rally” recently a discussion was precipitated by the arrival of a group of youth wearing swastikas. “In the end,” the article placidly concludes, “it was agreed that such signs could not be worn in a Young Socialists disco and they were taken off.”

By all rights the British ostensibly Trotskyist organisations who mourned the demise of Workers Press should be hailing its rebirth as News Line. If the closing of Workers Press was a “loss” as the International Marxist Group's Red Weekly said, surely News Line is a “gain”? And if, the Workers Socialist League (whose core was expelled from the WRP in 1974) was correct in calling the liquidation of Workers Press “A Blow to Trotskyism” then why is not News Line a “blow for Trotskyism”!

The WSL's assessment of Workers Press showed its failure to draw the proper balance sheet of Healyism, attacking only the organisational sectarianism of the WRP and not its opportunist political practice. The outstanding trait of the Healyite “method,” the pretense at a mass base (a “base” built on discos and not Marxism) was strikingly revealed in the failure of its “mass paper,” which never had any significant support in the working class.

Moreover, the Healy tendency's degeneration into anti-Trotskyist political banditry occurred many years before the expulsion of the WSL. The disorientation of the WSL, and its leanings towards rightist conciliation of the Labour Party, are shown in its insistence that the WRP should never have stood candidates against the Labour Party – at the same time as the WSL insists that the WRP had enough mass support among advanced workers to sustain a daily paper! You cannot have it both ways.

The liquidation of the Workers Press removed a barrier in the fight to create a Trotskyist Party in Britain. The News Line is a last wild gamble that will not succeed. The hoped-for advertising, which was supposed to provide the financial support for the new paper that would enable it to succeed where Workers Press could not, has not materialised, with only a handful of theatres and bookstores taking out classified ads. The modest fund drive goal of £4,000 a month was just barely reached in the first month, and the needed circulation of 30,000 copies a day will not be reached on newsstand sales. The new paper, having effectively liquidated such political face as the WRP has, will carry general secretary Banda and his gang of political bandits down to disaster.

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.