Confessions of a Renegade (1975)

Workers Vanguard No. 61 (31 January 1975)

Wohlforth Terminated

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

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

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

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

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

The Horse's Mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healy as Big Daddy

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

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

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

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

Wohlforth as Huey P. Newton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ax Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Method in Healy's Madness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Tears for Wohlforth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wohlforth Embraces Pabloism (1973)

Workers Vanguard No. 22 (8 June 1973)

NYC Workers League Class Series

Wohlforth Embraces Pabloism

This is the second of two WV articles dealing with the issues raised in the recent Workers League public class series in New York City.

The Workers League's pretensions to internationalism and the continuity of the Fourth International are just as phony as the pseudo-dialectics which Wohlforth prates about in order to obscure any consideration of program. Thus the WL systematically betrays the program of the Fl by, among other things, its constant chasing after militant-talking Stalinists (Mao Tse tung or Ho Chi Minh) and leftist nationalists (such as Huey Newton), its "critical" support for aspiring labor fakers (Morrissey in the NMU), its adaptation to even the most reactionary elements of the labor bureaucracy (Meany and Abel) and its refusal to fight in the unions for solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution. Now it abandons the Transitional Program explicitly with the line that wage demands are inherently revolutionary, and transitional demands therefore unnecessary and sectarian.

IC Fiction

But even organizationally, the “internationalism" of the WL is a fiction. Wohlforth equates internationalism with abject subservience to the Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, in much the same manner as Earl Browder's Communist Party slavishly capitulated before every twist and turn ordered by Stalin. The Healyite "International Committee" has always been an empty form without content - a rotten bloc between the British SLL and the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste in which each pursued its own policies (often sharply at variance with one another) and divided up the rest of the world as spheres of influence (Healy getting the English-speaking countries, while the OCI received the rest of Europe and South America).

A carefully preserved secret until 1966 was the fact that there was no discipline in the International Committee, the only basis for decision-making being unanimity. Thus the repeated demands by Healy from 1962 to 1966 that the Spartacist tendency subordinate itself to "international discipline" (which in every case we stated we would do, while refusing to sign, as was the fashion of the Stalintern, documents which amounted to a repudiation of our positions or else simply apolitical demonstrations of servility) were nothing but the capricious whim of a would-be petty dictator. In the fifth class Wohlforth explained this fraud by saying, well, nobody's perfect. But to speak of a federated international bloc as the "International" is no less absurd than to profess that a federated national grouping which does not "yet" have democratic centralism can be a vanguard party. At the class on Spartacist Wohlforth denounced SL National Chairman James Robertson for alleged "anti-internationalism" because at the 1966 IC Conference Robertson had unwittingly violated an unannounced conference "rule" by missing a session. Wohlforth's demagoguery only revealed the WL's boundless hypocrisy, for the SL had just distributed to the class participants material showing that Wohlforth himself – in direct violation of a categorical instruction from Healy – did not bother to attend the conference at all.

Behind the question of organizational structure (itself a crucial programmatic aspect of Leninism) stands the question of the very nature of the IC as an unprincipled political bloc. For years the SLL and OCI held sharply counterposed positions on central questions – even on the very nature of the party. Thus the OCI has maintained that the basis of the party is program, while to the SLL, the basis of the party is "Marxist philosophy." Similarly, the OCI held the view that the Fourth International had been destroyed by revisionism and needed to be reconstructed, while the SLL proclaimed that the IC is the Fourth International. Nor was there agreement on issues such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (over which the OCI took a revolutionary defeatist position for both sides while the SLL supported the "Arab Revolution"), or the united front (which the SLL sees as a tactic while the OCI supports a "strategic united front").

In his presentation at the seventh class (on the split with the OCI) Wohlforth presented an elaborate fairy-tale history of the IC, explaining that there were, of course, differences, but they had to be discussed instead of precipitously splitting. As revealed by documents published by the SLL and OCI after the split, the actual "discussion" in the IC had the character of two ships passing in the night.

A perfect example was the true story of the “split in the IC at the Essen youth conference." According to the WL/SLL the prime sin of the OCI, its failure to recognize the absolute centrality of the struggle for dialectics, was revealed by the OCI's document for the June 1970 London pre-conference of the IC. However, that document was published in late 1969, yet nine months later the SLL had no alternative to offer to the meeting; it also refused to vote on the document. Another twelve months pass and the SLL delegation arrives at the Essen youth conference to be faced with an OCI-written document which had the same line as the previous one; in the meantime, of course, Healy and Co. sill had not produced an answer. But this was apparently too much, so in typical Healyite fashion the English delegation offered an amendment-ultimatum on "dialectics" which was voted down by the French-dominated delegates assembly. The SLL now maintains that this is when the IC really split. However, at the time the SLL delegation not only did not take their amendment onto the floor of the conference to fight it out, but they then went on to give the conference enthusiastic coverage in their press; the "already split" IC continued to appear in the pages of the Bulletin as the continuity of the Fl.

OCI Centrists and SLL Political Bandits

The formal split came when the OCI handed Healy a nice factional club by supporting the centrist policies of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, which in the 1971 Bolivian events took a line similar to that of the POUM during the Spanish civil war. To avoid being tarred with the same brush Wohlforth claimed that Lora [head of the POR] had never been in the International Committee and he never would have been admitted to it without a full discussion on his political history. But, as an SL spokesman pointed out at the class, the Healyites themselves had been very happy to take credit for the influential POR as recently as one month before the military coup (see the uncritical article which hailed the POR as "the Bolivian section of the International Committee" in the Bulletin of 19 July 1971)!

At the time of the split, Healy was able to capitalize on the OCI's centrist positions of support for the POR and a "strategic united front" in order to pose as the principled left wing of the IC. But the history of the SLL and WL reveals that they have wallowed in every opportunist deviation for which they now denounce the OCI. Thus, while the OCI accommodated to the French Stalinists by calling for votes to the CP in the recent elections (in spite of the fact that the CP was part of a popular front),the Workers League flatly supported the pop front: "The illusions of the workers can only be exposed by first electing the Left Union in the second round... " (Bulletin, 12 March 1973).

The SLL/WL's 'left" criticisms of the OCI are fraudulent. But no less fraudulent are the Healyites' pretensions to anti-revisionism. The SLL/WL posture toward the Pabloists has always been that of an estranged spouse alternating vituperation with reconciliation. Thus the 20 July 1970 Bulletin reported Healy's overtures to the United Secretariat with a proposal for political discussions and common work, hopefully to result in a "joint international conference" between the IC and the Pabloists. An internal WL directive dated 15 March 1970 earnestly explained the need to tone down criticisms of the SWP/YSA because:

"The perspectives document agreed to in England proposed that the road to the American working class is through the YSA and it meant just that."

The whole thrust of the Healyite overture was to legitimatize the Pabloist cabal of Mandel, Frank, Hansen and Co. at precisely the moment that the USec was becoming markedly unstable and left currents were beginning to develop in several sections. The symbiosis between the USec Pabloists and the IC "inverted Pabloists" was clearly revealed here again, and the USec leadership was enabled to adopt a "principled" facade by turning the Healyites down.

When the OCI and SLL came to a parting of ways in 1971, this finally stripped naked the facade of internationalism of the "International Committee." A true International is composed of tendencies which are defined by program, not geography. (Even in the badly degenerated Socialist Workers Party, whose international ties to the IC had long been merely formal, the motion toward reunification with the Pabloists caused enough concern among some elements to precipitate the formation of an anti-Pabloist faction.) But the 1971 IC split had no ramifications in either of the leading national organizations: Apparently the entire SLL was in agreement with the "British line" and the entire OCI with the "French line."

Cuba and Inverted Pabloism

The WL class series was an instructive lesson in the methodology of Pabloism. The class on Cuba demonstrated Wohlforth's total confusion about the process of the Cuban revolution which, under petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership, uprooted capitalist property relations and established a deformed workers state. Duplicating in its essentials the Chinese revolution, Cuba illuminated the problem which had faced orthodox Trotskyists following World War II: how could capitalism have been overturned in Eastern Europe, and then China, without proletarian revolutions under Trotskyist leadership? Did this mean our evaluation of Stalinism was wrong? Unable to creatively extend orthodoxy to explain these transformations, the postwar Trotskyist movement's inability to solve this problem opened the road to a revisionist answer: Pablo's 1951 theory that under the pressure of a new objective reality Stalinism could become revolutionary, and thus the Trotskyists had no further function except as a pressure group to aid this. "blunted instrument" to realize its new-found revolutionary potential.

The orthodox Trotskyists could only reply by pointing in horror at the necessary consequence: if Pablo's theory were , correct, the very founding of the Fourth International was a mistake. Seeking to resist Pablo's liquidationist conclusions, they sought to deny reality until it overwhelmed them (the SWP did not officially characterize China as a deformed workers state until 1955). The response of the Healy tendency to the Cuban revolution was the same: according to the WL/SLL, Cuba is still a capitalist state.

Spartacist spokesmen at the class pointed out that this response accepts the method of Pabloism while seeking to reject its conclusions. At the heart of both is the acceptance of the deformed workers states as being only quantitatively different from healthy workers states. Thus the SWP justified its uncritical accommodation to Castro, saying Lenin's Russia was a very good workers state; Stalin's Russia was a very bad workers state; Castro's Cuba is a pretty good workers state (getting better all the time), and after all, so long as it's a workers state, that's good enough. Healy argues that if a petty-bourgeois leadership could establish a deformed workers state (which, for him, is just another workers state) then the Transitional Program is wrong in claiming that a Trotskyist working class leadership is necessary for successful proletarian revolution: therefore, Cuba is not a workers state.

Confronted with this analysis, Wohlforth vehemently insisted that indeed there "is no qualitative difference" between a healthy and deformed workers state. In this one statement, Wohlforth reveals his fundamental kinship with the Pabloists and sweeps aside the achievement of Trotsky in recognizing in 1933 that a qualitative change had taken place as a result of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Third International. The consolidation of power in the hands of a petty-bourgeois stratum (the bureaucracy) made necessary a new international party to struggle for political revolution in the Soviet Union as well as for social revolution against capitalism.

As one could expect by now from the fabled Healyite "dialectics,” the SL's position (that Cuba is a deformed workers state) was termed by Wohlforth (who considers Cuba to be capitalist) as "Shachtmanism"! Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the positions of Shachtman (who split from Trotskyism in denying that Russia was a degenerated workers state) can easily understand the absurdity of such an accusation.

Vietnam: Pabloism and Social Patriotism

Healy/Wohlforth's contortions over Cuba are nothing, however, in comparison with the blatant and disgusting Pabloism of the WL on the question of Vietnam. In a positively obscene laudatory obituary (Bulletin, 22 September 1969) for Ho Chi Minh, the murderer of the Indochinese Trotskyists, the WL refers to him as an "instinctive" fighter against imperialism (akin to Hansen's description of Castro as a "natural" Marxist). Some of the articles of the Healy/ Wohlforth tendency on Vietnam could be set side by side with those of the arch-Pabloist Ligue Communiste and even a careful reader would have trouble figuring out which was which(for example, the reference to the "transcendental power" of "peoples war" in the February 1968 Fourth International).

Wohlforth's class presentation on Vietnam was a textbook example of Pabloist method. To begin with, the Vietnam struggle of the 1960's was essentially a "movement of the colonial peoples under Stalinist leadership." It was under Stalinist leadership, but "for 20 years Stalinism could not compromise the movement as it wished to"! And, of course, there are different wings of the Stalinists and "the North Vietnamese have time and time again come into conflict with the Soviets; the latest time was last December." To top it all off was a little bit of spicy orthodoxy, claiming that "our position is for victory of the NLF against the U.S. imperialists."

Wohlforth pointed out the fundamental unity of the WL position on Vietnam and its support for the "Arab revolution" and for the bourgeois Indian army in the 1971 war with Pakistan over Bangla Desh. (At the time, the Bulletin, 20 December 1971, gave "critical" support to Indira Gandhi. In the class Wohlforth revealed what "critical" support means to the WL, saying "we were 1,000 percent for the victory of the Indian army.") He also emphasized several times that "the colonial revolution is not simply a workers revolution."

To begin with, the term "colonial revolution" has been given circulation in the "Trotskyist" movement by the Pabloists who, with their theory of "epicenters" and "blunted instruments," wish to deny the world-wide unity of the permanent revolution. Trotskyists do not call for a "colonial" revolution,” Brother Wohlforth, but for a proletarian (yes, workers!) revolution in the backward countries (such as Russia), leaning on the peasantry, to successfully carry through even the democratic tasks of national liberation and agrarian revolution. Like the Pabloists of the United Secretariat the WL used the label "colonial" revolution to justify political support to various left-talking nationalists.

The "method" of the Healyite Workers League is thus ultimately that of Pabloism. No longer believing in the possibility of proletarian revolution under Trotskyist leadership, the Pabloists seek to construct a rationale for tailing non-proletarian strata (e.g., petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, "left" Stalinists, out-bureaucrats in the unions), on the grounds that the "objective situation" compels even a "blunted instrument" (e.g., the Stalinist NLF in Vietnam) to make the revolution. In contrast to those "purists" or "sectarians" who insist that only the proletariat, under Trotskyist leadership, can create a healthy workers state and open the road to socialism, the WL in truly Pabloist fashion embraces the most “left" of what is, instead of undertaking the arduous task of building the Trotskyist party, the embodiment of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International.

To Wohlforth's apology for the Vietnamese Stalinists, SL supporters at the fifth class counterposed the Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the deformed workers states against imperialism and political revolution against the bureaucratic misleadership which sabotages that defense and the further progress of the socialist revolution. To this Lucy St. John, editor of the Bulletin, counting on the ignorance or cynicism of WL members, made the fantastic charge that "Spartacist refuses to call for military defense of the Vietnamese workers." On the basis of this flat lie, WL supporters proceeded to accuse the SL of "Shachtmanism" on Vietnam. In the fashion of all Stalinist apologists, the WL seeks to link authentic Trotskyism with those, like Shachtman, whose anti-Stalinism proceeds from their motion toward reconciliation with the bourgeoisie.

Anyone remotely familiar with the history of the Spartacist League knows that the SL has consistently fought for military defense of the Vietnamese revolution, for the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the antiwar movement and for working-class strike action against the war. The SL is the only tendency which has consistently raised the Vietnam war in its trade-union work, calling for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution. In contrast, the WL has time after time capitulated on the defense of the Vietnamese revolution in order to pursue its opportunist appetites.

SL speakers at the class on Vietnam cited as examples the 1971 program of the WL youth group (Young Socialists) which did not mention this demand; the refusal of the WL's short-lived "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party" front group to include any mention of the war or racial oppression in its program (Bulletin, 18 December 1967); the WL's support for U.S. Senator Vance Hartke and the SWP in the brutal physical expulsion of SL and Progressive Labor supporters who were demanding the ousting of the bourgeoisie from the July 1971 NPAC conference.

At the fourth class the SL distributed to those attending copies of a 1965 leaflet signed by Tim Wohlforth (along with all the pacifist social-patriots, Stalinists, SWP, PL, etc.) which demanded simply "Stop the War in Vietnam Now!" and continued:

…The war in Vietnam is not necessary for national security. The United States is the richest, most powerful, most heavily armed nation in the world. A continuation of the conflict cannot enhance the honor of the American people...." [emphasis in original]

Meany as "Blunted Instrument"

It is in its policies toward the union movement that the Workers League has demonstrated in the grossest fashion its fundamentally Pabloist method. The WL has always conceived of its role as that of a left pressure on the existing Meanyite bureaucracy, which the WL claimed would be forced to build a labor party by the mounting unrest in the union ranks. Wohlforth has heralded every cynical and empty "labor party" threat by the bureaucrats, deliberately masking the fact that these statements were designed as back-handed support to Nixon by a labor bureaucracy so reactionary that it could not swallow the 'radical' McGovern.

For example, the 17 July 1972 Bulletin front-page banner headline proclaimed, 'AFL-CIO Tops Threaten Labor Party at Miami.' The 25 September 1972 Bulletin front page crowed "Steel Convention Lambasts Democrats" and triumphantly hailed Meany's overture to Nixon as if it were a step toward a break with bourgeois politics in favor of a workers party:

"Meany made it even more clear than before that the fundamental question was not just McGovern but was indeed the support of labor for the Democrats which has gone on for some 36 years and today is at the breaking point."

One issue of the Bulletin featured a cartoon showing a locomotive (the working class) driven by an uneasy Meany rolling over the capitalists. The implication is clear: Meany is, the 'blunted instrument" who can be pushed, unwillingly to be sure, into leading the workers against the class enemy. This cartoon is the epitome of Pabloism. Reflecting the objectivism which lies at the heart of the Healyite method, this cartoon denies Trotsky's statement that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership, instead investing the present leaders of the class with the power to fight for the workers' interests. The crisis of leadership becomes irrelevant.

In order to climb in bed with the labor bureaucrats the WL has always pursued the most shameless economist policies in its relatively sparse trade-union work. Hence the constant calls for a labor party formed by the bureaucrats (and based on the bureaucrats ' anti-communist program); hence the deliberate omission of the war and race, questions from the 1967 TULP program; hence the "critical support" to out-bureaucrats like Hill of the SSEU and Morrissey of the NMU.

A highlight of the class series was the intervention by members of the Militant-Solidarity Caucus of the NMU who pointed out that the WL's real appetites were revealed by the Bulletin's support to Morrissey, whose entire program consists of vague promises of democracy and a policy of suing the union in the capitalist courts (which the WL claims to oppose). In contrast to Morrissey, the M-SC is based on a full program which includes the demand for a labor party to fight for a workers government and international class solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution. Also unlike Morrissey, the M-SC has waged a determined fight against the discriminatory job-trusting "group system," called for building an international union instead of protectionist legislation and campaigned for the release of WL supporter Juan Farinas (who was jailed after a frame-up conviction for "draft evasion"). In a classic statement of the totally reactionary implications of WL policies in the unions, Wohlforth remarked at the fifth class:

“Our policy in the NMU, in the Mine-workers, in the SSEU, is to support left bureaucratic layers in the elections, and then criticize them. We support Morrissey 100 percent in the elections and criticize him down the line.... The Militant-Solidarity Caucus is just a showpiece and goes against the movement of the working class.... Morrissey is just a bastard:-but he's an out-bastard: We will support the out-bastards against the in-bastards every time, just as long as we get a little room to breathe in the unions."

So, according to Wohlforth, the demand for a labor party, the struggle against the special oppression of youth through the “group system, even defense of the WL cause celebre Farinas – all this "goes against the movement of the working class." To grasp the incredible cynicism of the WL, one need only recall that Wohlforth referred to the 1971 NYC police strike as an. expression of the movement of the working class. That is the result of WL Pabloism: support for cops and bureaucrats and opposition to real class-struggle politics:

The "Final" Crisis

Behind Wohlforth's rejection of Trotskyist trade-union work as an “empty showpiece" lies his unsated appetite for a 'left" section of the trade-union bureaucracy to tail-end. (Similarly Healy, who claims to have broken with Pabloism in 1953, has never repudiated his policies of the 1940's and I950's, when he was deeply submerged in the "Labour left' in a classic example of Pabloist "entrism sui generis" which lasted more than a decade.) In order to fulfill this appetite Wohlforth must, however, have something to bargain with, and this means building a movement with at least some pretense to revolutionary aspirations. Such a movement will inevitably be composed of human beings, and Wohlforth must therefore reckon with the possibility that at least occasionally some of his followers will feel the need to explain to themselves the bizarre flip-flops in WL policies. To handle this "unfortunate" eventuality one needs a "theory" which explains why selling out the rank and file to the bureaucrats is really an "expression of the movement of the working class." This is the purpose of the crisis-mongering of the Workers League.

The essence of the Healyite "economic analysis" is the contention that the “post-war boom" has been brought to an end by the international financial crisis: Since gold reserves can only cover at best around 10 percent of the value of world trade, the capitalist system must inevitably collapse. In other words, we have here the keystone to all objectivist theories -- the final crisis. Exaggerated? Let the SLL/WL speak for themselves:

"Ever since 1914 the capitalist system has been gripped by contradictions that could only be solved by slump or war. Now its corpse – bloated by the postwar inflation-has burst. And the system is turning to dust.... "
-- "Capitalism Hits the Dust as Nixon Puts the Boot In," Workers Press, 15 February 1973

"The latest moves by the Nixon administration in devaluing the dollar mark a rapid acceleration of the capitalist system towards a breakdown and crisis deeper than at any time in its history." [emphasis in original] "Development of the Post-War Economic Crisis -- Draft Resolution of the Socialist Labour League." Workers Press, 24 February 1973

"The most frantic gold rush in modern history... is a warning to the working class that the latest dollar devaluation is a direct prelude to the complete collapse of the world economic system." [emphasis in original] "Gold Price Soars to New Heights," Bulletin, 5 March 1973

If such a crisis is so severe that it can destroy the economic base of capitalism, the bourgeoisie will be inexorably driven to fascism while the labor bureaucrats (in the WL's cloud-cuckoo-land of economic determinism) must therefore fight for the interests of the working class.

"The next Nixon government will not compromise with the working class as past administrations – including his own – have. Rather, he plans to run the equivalent of a war-time government that will confront the working class head-on, seek to smash its unions and living conditions, and establish a naked dictatorship that will whip American workers into submission.

"These remarks by Nixon must be seen in the light of the deepening economic crisis which has destroyed the basis for compromise. There is no way that a decisive collision between the government and the working class can be avoided.”
-Bulletin, 4 December 1972

Thus, you see, it is all right to call on the arch-reactionaries Meany, Abel or Van Arsdale to form a labor party, since the terminal crisis makes a decisive collision "unavoidable." And, of course, what need is there for the Transitional Program, since even "simple trade union demands are today so profoundly revolutionary" (Bulletin, 16 April 1973)?

In contrast with the SL, which sees recurring cycles of booms and crises in a world capitalist system that has been decaying at least since 1914, Wohlforth proudly proclaims that his tendency has recognized the imminence of The Crisis "since 1962." The absurdity of this stance is obvious: even if the world capitalist economy were to collapse tomorrow into the worst depression of all time, to take credit for prescience on the grounds that one has spent the last eleven years predicting its imminent arrival is akin to crying all week that Monday is coming and then patting oneself on the back when it finally arrives. Periodic crises are inevitable for the bourgeois order, and at some point the WL's crisis-mongering will undoubtedly intersect reality.

However, so far Wohlforth shows a remarkably poor sense of timing: The post-war boom is supposed to have lasted until 1961, ending around the time of the Belgian general strike. But even Mandel, author of the Pabloist theory of "neo-capitalism," recognizes recessions in 1948-49, 1953-54, 1957-58 and 1960-61. And in the U.S. 1962 marked the beginning of a massive capital investment boom (investment increased an average of 11 percent per year during 1962-66)! Currently the WL claims we are in the midst of the worst crisis ever, which has driven the profit rate to 'below the level of zero percent" (Bulletin, 12 February 1973), when in fact we are in the middle-to-late stages of a boom which sent profits up more than 25 percent during the first quarter of 1973.

Healy's Cross of Gold

One of the more peculiar aspects of the Healyite economic theories is the explanation of "The Crisis" as being caused by the insufficient supply of gold, thereby placing the SLL/WL in a long line of monetary quacks, beginning with Proudhon and running through William Jennings Bryan, de Gaulle and Lyn Marcus. According to the SLL:

"While prices, stimulated by government inflationary policies, have risen five or six times on their pre-war level, gold, was held down in price for 37 years.

"It is in this crisis that gold is enacting its revenge for all these years in which the Keynesians tried to tamper with the law of value....

"Without gold, products cannot enter circulation and become commodities. The rush into gold and the flight from all forms of paper-the feature which now overshadows everything In the crisis-means a collapse of commodity production for the world market.... "
-"The Dollar Crisis" (Bulletin pamphlet, 1973), p. 23

This approach is totally counterposed to Marxist economic science. As an SL supporter pointed out in the sixth class, Marx insisted that the basis of economic crises was in capitalist production, not circulation. The root cause of all crises is that capital expands faster than the surplus value that it generates (i.e., the rate of profit falls). Marx dismissed credit theories of crisis out of hand:

"In investigating why the general possibility of crisis turns into a real crisis... it is therefore quite superfluous to concern oneself with the forms of crisis which arise out of the development of money as means of payment.” [emphasis in original]
- Theories of Surplus Value, Ch. 17

Perhaps the most striking departure from Marxism by Healyite economic theory is the argument that inflation has (only temporarily, of course) suspended the law of value. According to the SLL's monetary "expert" Peter Jeffries, "The operation of the law of value has... been 'suspended' or 'avoided' throughout much of the boom period" (Newsletter, 30 March 1968). In the first place, there was no such "post-war boom" in the sense of a qualitatively different period (if the law of value was "denied" for "27 years," as the 28 May Bulletin alleges, that certainly would be a qualitative change). Following World War II we have experienced a period of succeeding booms and recessions, with overall growth rates for the major capitalist nations which were well within (and sometimes below) historical norms.

Equally important, the idea of a post-war boom period is the cornerstone of the Mandelian theory of "neo-capitalism." Like Mandel, the SLL/WL links this "boom" to inflation caused by government deficit spending, i.e., Keynesianism; and like Mandel, Healy/Wohlforth believe that this is/was a period in which the bourgeoisie is successfully able to grant reforms substantially benefitting the working class. Trotsky insisted this was impossible during the epoch of decaying capitalism, and concluded that reform demands were inadequate and had to be replaced with transitional demands which point to the only real solution for the working class, socialist revolution. For Mandel and Healy/Wohlforth it was not only the law of value which was suspended in the neo-reformist period of the "boom" – it was also the Transitional Program. (And now, with the 'final crisis' at band, transitional demands are likewise unnecessary, since wage demands are revolutionary according to the WL.)

The Crisis of Leadership

The post-war stabilization of capitalism was not, as the WL claims, the result of the Bretton Woods monetary agreement of 1944, but rather the product of the tremendous destruction of capital accomplished by World War II and the defeat, due to the absence of revolutionary leadership, of the general strikes and revolutionary upheavals which swept the European working class after the war. These upheavals could have meant the end, not only of a period of stabilization, but of capitalism itself. They were defeated because of the betrayals of the Stalinists (and the Pabloists). Thus the question of economic stability in the imperialist epoch is fundamentally a political question, or as Trotsky put it, the fundamental crisis in this epoch. lt is the crisis of proletarian leadership.

In Trotsky's "Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International" to the Third Congress of the CI, he began not with the expansion of credit (which accompanies every boom), but with the defeats of the European revolution which laid the basis for a temporary period of capitalist recovery. As for the myth of the "final crisis," in the same Speech Trotsky comments:

"So long as capitalism is not overthrown by the proletarian revolution, it will continue to live in cycles, swinging up and down. Crises and booms were inherent in capitalism at its very birth; they will accompany it to its grave....
"It might be asked whether the great struggles over wages... will automatically lead to the world revolution, to the final civil war and the conquest of political power.... We have no automatic guarantees of development."

After the Congress, Trotsky wrote concerning the controversy with the proponents of the "theory of the offensive":

"There was a rather indefinite grouping whose contention it was that the commercial and industrial crisis – and it was extremely acute – …constituted the final crisis of capitalist society, and that this final crisis of capitalists society would inexorably worsen right up to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This conception of the revolution is completely non-Marxist, non-scientific, mechanistic."
-The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. II, p. 60

In contrast to the monetary crank theories of the SLL/WL, and in answer to Wohlforth's absurd charge that the SL does not recognize any changes since 1914, at the sixth class Spartacist League National Chairman James Robertson read the opening paragraph of the current SL perspectives document as an example of a Marxist evaluation of the current period:

"1. The tasks facing the Spartacist League and the capacity of the SL as a revolutionary Marxist organization have both been qualitatively transformed through an interacting process. The crisis and breakdown of the post-World War II configuration of the world capitalist system, dominated by American imperialism, has been marked by the catastrophic consequences of the American involvement in Vietnam, the French general strike of 1968 and the definitive collapse of the 'American century' with Nixon's new fiscal and economic policies, which mark the forced abdication by the U.S. of the role of world policeman and the reversion of American imperialism to merely the strongest of several competing units. These developments have of course also been conditioned and paralleled by the political decomposition of the deformed workers state bloc, above all the Russia/China split."
– "Memorandum to the CC on the Transformation of the SL," Marxist Bulletin No. 9, Part III

Philosophical Objectivism and Political Opportunism

The most striking characteristic of the Workers League since its very inception as a tendency has been its constant shifting of positions. When talk is cheap the WL affects a principled Trotskyist stand, but when it smells a chance for an opportunist link-up then principles are thrown out the window (or, more accurately, shelved to be used again next month) as they rush to support the existing more powerful forces – Healy, SWP majority, black nationalism, the labor bureaucracy, French popular front, etc. It is the constant gyrating that we refer to in calling them "political bandits."

Yet beneath the grotesque zig-zags, an underlying method can be discerned. It was the exposition of this method that highlighted the recent NYC class series. After hours of obfuscating verbiage about an abstract "fight for dialectics" (the purpose of which is to avoid any consideration of program), Wohlforth felt constrained to demonstrate the consistency of supporting Mao Tse tung, Ho Chi Minh, Mujibur Hallman, Huey Newton, Stanley Hill and James Morrissey and `ignoring the Transitional Program in the trade unions. In doing so he revealed the heart of Healyite "theory" as philosophical objectivism, the belief that the overwhelming economic crisis eliminates the crisis of leadership: wages are a revolutionary issue and Meany/Abel are an adequate leadership.

It is this objectivism that permits Wohlforth to give political support to, for instance, the Vietnamese Stalinists with the justification that "objective conditions" have "forced [them] into a fight with imperialism under conditions where there can be no compromise"[emphasis in original] (Bulletin, 14 May 1973).

As Pablo in the early 1950's launched his campaign to liquidate the Trotskyist movement into the Stalinist parties; he made clear the role of philosophical objectivism as the fundamental justification for the abandonment of the principles and program of the Fourth International. The "Theses on International Perspectives" of the "Third Congress of the FI" (1951) states:

"The objective conditions determine in the long run the character and dynamic of the mass movement which, taken to a certain level, can overcome all the subjective obstacles in the path of the revolution. This conception continues to be the base of our revolutionary optimism and clarifies our attitude towards the Communist parties."
- Quatrieme International, August-September 1951

It is this theory which is characteristic of Pabloism in all its variants. But Pabloism itself is only a "theoretical" justification for something far more fundamental: the abject fear of the petty bourgeois faced with the task of leading the proletariat in struggle for socialist revolution, and the resulting overpowering desire to find shelter in the warm embrace of the traditional leaders of the working class, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the most direct expression of what is, as opposed to what will be.

Phony “Dialectics” and Impotent Opportunism (1973)

Workers Vanguard No. 19 (25 May 1973)

Phony “Dialectics” and Impotent Opportunism

In a desperate attempt to harden up his organization against the impact of Spartacist League criticism, Wohlforth of the Workers League has been holding over the past two months a class series in New York centered almost exclusively on the SL. In an unprecedented reversal of WL policy, Wohlforth has permitted supporters of the SL to attend the public series and to speak even in several instances granting SL spokesmen extended floor time to make brief presentations. SL supporters have actively intervened in the classes and have succeeded in turning them into sharp political confrontations – of course, on unequal terms, with Wohlforth making presentations of one to one and a half hours and having the only summary. The SL has continued to press for a real, equal-time debate between the two organizations, but without success.

If the WL had ever maintained even lip service to the principle of workers democracy, its observance of standard democratic discussion procedure in this class series would be unremarkable. But the WL has a long history of excluding opponent tendencies (especially the SL) from its "public" meetings; in fact, only the night before the fifth WL class was held in New York, the SL was excluded from a public meeting called by the WL in the Bay Area.

Even the temporary suspension of the WL's usual exclusionism in the New York classes proved too much for Wohlforth to sustain. At several of the sessions SL supporters were prevented from entering the building by a WL goon squad until all WLers had been ad mitted. Inside the hall the atmosphere resembled a miniature deformed workers state, with Wohlforth revelling in his total power: Any protest by SLers to even the most vicious slanders (such as the accusation at the fourth class that a former member of the SL was probably now working for the CIA) was met with threats of immediate forcible expulsion. At the end of every session SL supporters were instantly herded into the elevator and every conversation with WL supporters cut off by the goons. At one point Wohlforth called on his thugs to "sit down" a member of the audience who simply wished to go to the bathroom. Then, at the end of the sixth class, after refusing in typical fashion to answer the numerous criticisms raised by SLers during the discussion period, instead devoting most of his summary to reading aloud for a half hour from Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, Wohlforth flew Into a rage when two SL supporters were detected reading the Bulletin instead of respectfully paying attention to this force-feeding. He proclaimed that, as punishment, these ingrates would be excluded from subsequent meetings, and, when the SL supporters at that point indignantly rose in protest to leave the hall, they were physically prevented from doing so.

Is Workers Democracy "Stupid"?

Wohlforth's fundamental stand on the crucial question of workers democracy was made crystal clear at the fifth session of the New York class. He shrilly denounced the Bay Area SL comrades for picketing in protest of their exclusion from the WL San Francisco meeting, terming the action “anti-communist,” and repeatedly made implicit but unmistakable threats of physical violence any time our comrades again publicly protest the WL's exclusionism. Going so far as to allege that the SL's protest demonstration had been intended to get the WL barred from the future use of public meeting hall facilities, Wohlforth stated that the WL had also often been kept out of similar meetings called by other organizations and that exclusionism is to be expected. He then went on to make the astounding remark that if the SWP is stupid enough to let us into a meeting, we will use the opportunity; if they are smart enough to keep us out we will never picket them. This revealing remark-delivered with appropriate pounding on the table-shows the real "method" of the Wohlforth tendency: sneering at Trotsky's fight for proletarian democracy, the WL considers exclusionism (like opportunism in general) “smart.”

To the Workers League, principles are “stupid” because they get in the way of temporary organizational appetites. The entire history of the WL demonstrates that it has never been restrained in pursuing its shameless opportunist zigzags by any consideration of elementary Marxist principle. To revolutionaries, however, it 'is opportunism which is stupid because it subordinates the historic interests of the international proletariat to short-term parochialism. Proletarian morality is not based on bourgeois moralism but rather on the understanding that only a conscious working class can make the proletarian revolution. Opportunism may "build" an organization like the WL, but it can never build an authentic working-class vanguard party. Thus the practice of exclusionism, preventing the open confrontation of different political programs, enables the misleaders to strengthen their hold over their followers and is inherently a weapon of the reformists and centrists against the revolutionists.

What has apparently prompted Wohlforth to permit even these limited and stacked debates with spokesmen of the Spartacist League has been the WL's inability to continue to seal off its membership from SL politics. Finally forced to confront the SL after years of relying solely on slander (such is his infamous "What is Spartacist?" pamphlet), Wohlforth wants to take his followers from, naive acceptance of his characterizations to hardened cynicism – to weed out any who might be disturbed by the exposure of their organization's abandonment of Marxism and to make of the rest fully corrupted opportunists who do know what authentic Trotskyism is-and simply don't care.

Organizational Stalinism

The purpose of these carefully controlled political confrontations with the SL (a full discussion of the issues raised in the WL class series will follow in the next issue of WV) is to harden up the membership of the Workers League/Young Socialists at a time when the organizational stagnation of the WL, combined with the recent striking growth of the SL, has rendered the Wohlforth organization vulnerable despite its characteristic use of typically Stalinist organizational methods intended to quarantine its members from authentic Trotskyist criticism. Recently, several New York WL/YS members were castigated as "SL agents" and summarily expelled (naturally without a trial) almost before they had time to investigate whether the SL does indeed offer the answer to their developing programmatic criticisms of the WL.

Through the liberal use of gross falsification of the positions of opponent organizations and the total suppression of internal democracy in the WL, Wohlforth has in the past been quite successful in preventing the emergence of any serious political opposition within the organization. Members of the WL are in practice denied the right of factional communication with other members, and are virtually prohibited from familiarizing themselves with the literature of other political organizations. As is also common in the Stalinist movement, the WL is divided up into "locals" which typically consist of half a dozen or ten members, so that any comrade with questions or differences can be effectively isolated and prevented from learning if there are other WL members who might share his views.

In the WL there is no real provision for the circulation of critical, let alone factional material to the general membership. Even members of the leading bodies of the organization have no real access to information, and their “rights” are mainly confined to the receipt of circulars which begin with pompous declarations of the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and end with exhortations about fund-raising or circulation drives. WL members who raise differences are immediately assigned to make “reports” on such items as Wohlforth’s big-lie “What is Spartacist?” pamphlet or the WL’s supposed continuity with the Fourth International, knowing that they must reaffirm the line of the WL on precisely the questions on which they disagree, or be summarily expelled. The holding of oppositional views on any significant question is likely to lead to immediate expulsion without recourse to trial.

Political education in the WL is systematically precluded by a frenzied level of deliberately mindless activity, which leaves the members almost no time for study, even of the written materials of the WL, let alone a chance to read Lenin or Workers Vanguard. Wohlforth's elaborate falsifications are the only version available to WL members of their own history – the actual documents of the formation of the Wohlforth tendency in the 1962 split or of the policies pursued by this tendency inside the SWP, for example, are not accessible to WL members except through the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin series. Even back issues of the WL’s own Bulletin are virtually inaccessible, not an unimportant precaution, since they are the skeletons in the closet which demonstrate incontestably that the WL has at various points in its history pursued diametrically counterposed lines on virtually every significant political question.

The fruits of this years-long practice of undermining the creation of cadres were apparent in the classes. SLers were able to dominate the discussion period due to the simple fact that, despite glares and prodding from meetings’ chairman, only a handful of WL supporters raised their hands and attempted to defend the line of the organization. Those who did dare to take the floor responded only with vague denunciations of the SL speakers exposures of the concrete opportunism of the WL over specific programmatic points. “SL hates the working class”, “SL is Pabloist”; “SL does not understand dialectical materialism”; ”SL rejects internationalism;” “SL has no economic analysis” – this was the litany. What was missing from the interventions and from Wohlforth’s summaries was any attempt to respond to any concrete programmatic points or to defend the WL’s wretched opportunist history.

Phony “Dialectics”

The “method" which Wohlforth constantly invokes like a talisman to ward of evil is precisely this: the systematic denial of the importance of program. Simply to proclaim oneself and anti-revisionist or a dialectician does not make it so. Trotskyism and internationalism are fine words, but the test is the concrete positions and practice of the organization and its consistency over time. Oh, Wohlforth will admit that the SL has “lots of positions” but refuses to discuss those positions – or the WL’s own positions.

The “method” of Wohlforth is completely counterposed to the method of Lenin and Trotsky, who struggled ceaselessly to draw the political lines over concrete programmatic issues. The basis for the foundation of the Communist International was not the vague protestations to solidarity with the Bolshevik revolution on the part of erstwhile revolutionists impressed by the accomplished fact, but the “Twenty One Points" by which Lenin attempted separate the real communists from centrists and reformists on the specific and overwhelming programmatic issues facing the working-class movement, in order to struggle concretely to overthrow the bourgeois order and to achieve socialism. And the founding document of the Fourth International was -- the Transitional Program!

The WL's pervasive "method" of' belittling program as a mere collation unimportant "bits and pieces" having no relationship to the organization's purported revolutionary capacity is all that stands between Wohlforth and disaster. When confronted with the wretchedly opportunist history of his tendency, Wohlforth takes cover beneath a barrage of idealism masquerading as dialectical materialism. Wohlforth's ultimate dodge for every concrete programmatic question raised by SL speakers at the classes was that the SL refused to recognize the primacy of “Marxist philosophy” over program. An SL spokesman who was granted extended floor time to present a position on “the Marxist method” began by citing SLL's own Cliff Slaughter, whose pamphlet “Lenin on Dialectics” explicitly attacks the view that Marxism be considered a philosophy as such:

"The science of society founded by Marx has no room for philosophy as such, for the idea of independently moving thought, with a subject-matter and development of its own, independent of reality but sometimes descending to impinge upon it."

The Slaughter pamphlet quotes Marx in The German Ideology: “When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.” And the pamphlet concludes that "we shall follow the path of Lenin in using theory as a guide to action, not as a system.”

Wohlforth is compelled to caricature Marxism as a closed “philosophy” unconnected to reality precisely in order to prevent consideration of the WL's history and program. It is certainly true that a grasp of the living method of dialectical materialism is vital to an organization's ability to preserve and creatively extend Marxism; it is equally true that there must be a relationship between theory and practice. The writings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on dialectical materialism certainly demonstrate that Wohlforth is no more a philosopher than he is a Marxist. But an exploration simply of the WL’s history on almost any political question would be sufficient to expose the Wohlforth leadership as cynically unprincipled political bandits.

Thus it does not require a knowledge of dialectics to understand that the WL's position on the 1971 New York police strike was a shameless betrayal of Marxism. The WL line that cops are in effect part of the working class (see WL Bulletin, 25 January and 15 February 1971) was an abandonment of the elementary Leninist position on the state, dictated by the WL's constant policy of sucking up to the labor bureaucrats (who, as usual, crossed the class line to hail the racist cops as their brothers). Every militant class-conscious worker should have been revolted by the WL's disgraceful capitulation. The purpose of Wohlforth’s constant abstract appeals to “the Marxist method” is precisely to dodge the political questions and drown any inchoate class instinct among his membership in a sea of mystical obscurantism.

“Philosophical” obscurantism and organizational Stalinism may be sufficient to prevent the development of any hard, cohesive or extensive oppositions in the WL, but they are not sufficient to insulate the WL from its inherent contradictions. Far from being able to build a mass Trotskyist party with these deliberately anti-consciousness methods, the WL is not even able to stave off disaster for its own little sect. Over the past year the WL/YS membership has been substantially contracting. The Potemkin Village-WL continues to shrilly proclaim the expansion of its apparatus – the acquisition of a new national office and an $88,000 press, the expansion to twice-weekly of its "mass" paper which (fortunately) is read by nobody and has no influence in the working class because the organization which it represents has none – but the reality behind the facade is becoming increasingly an empty shell.

The Old Shell Game

The WL has always pursued a policy deliberately counterposed to the creation of politically conscious cadre. Far from seeking to create a body of lifetime professional revolutionists who can acquire the theoretical knowledge and experience in struggle which enables them to develop authority among the workers as the carriers of the party's program, the WL has always pursued a burn-out policy which takes willing young revolutionaries and works them for a couple of years at fever pitch with promises that the revolution is around the corner, fully expecting that in a year or two they will drop out – politically uneducated, exhausted from the feverish make-work pace and demoralized by the empty promises of instant success – to become at best nonpolitical and at 'worst cynical anti-communists, having however in the meantime recruited two or three others to take their places. Those who do last must learn to accept and even glorify the WL's shameless opportunist zigzags and finally become as cynical as the WL leadership.

The operational motto of the WL has always been, “nothing succeeds like success.” The working class is presumed to be as cynical and non-political as the WL, to be won to “revolutionary” politics through admiration of a going concern and impressed by constant opportunist zigzags as “smart.” Thus the apparatus for a mass party – dozens of branches, a daily paper – will be established and the masses will roll. Like any group of cynical advertizng men, the WL leadership aspires to maintain a high profile at the expense of any real mass work. In 1968 the WL explicitly affirmed that there was no time to seek trade-union implantation and the consolidation of significant industrial fractions because the crisis of capitalism was imminent. Today the WL maintains virtually no trade-union presence with the exception of a couple of white-collar caucuses and a few scattered militants in industry whose sole purpose is to be featured in the newspaper. The organization is little more than a sales and promotional apparatus for the Bulletin, and the Bulletin' is nothing more than a radical rewrite of the bourgeois press. The WL's youth organization, currently named the “Young Socialists,” makes no attempt to train young militants as Trotskyists and future communist workers, but simply seeks to draw in, through various youth-culture activities, undifferentiated radical youth suitable for photographing for the paper.

Political Bandits

Behind this organizational charade, however, lies a-political method – the method of cynicism. Behind the WL's hysterical opportunist zigzags (which have included a nearly simultaneous chase after the Black Panthers and the New York City cops in 1971), certain features of the WL-have remained constant: crisis-mongering to keep the members going for another month or two (Wohlforth seems unaware of the absurdity of proudly proclaiming in one recent article that, unlike the SL – which recognizes ebbs and flows within the context of a world system which has been fundamentally unstable at least since 1914 – the WL has insisted that the final crisis of capitalism has been at hand since its inception as a tendency in 1962); crisis-mongering as the implicit excuse for the abandonment of the Trotskyist transitional program (the "logic" is that since the capitalist system has exhausted every option for maneuver and reform, therefore even the most purely reformist demands are revolutionary because they cannot be granted); an organizational practice which is a mockery of Leninist democratic centralism; the substitution of organizational apparatus for politics; the invocation of thoroughly phony “dialectics” to obscure political issues and explain away bizarre zigzags in line; the use of deliberately mystical appeals to “continuity” or “method” to substitute for the elementary Leninist understanding that the basis of the party is its program (thus Wohlforth's meaningless attack on the SL as “having lots of positions but no perspective” while dismissing crucial programmatic differences raised by SLers as “tertiary questions”); a subservience to the British Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, which has about as much in common with real internationalism as Browder's subordination to Stalin; gross capitulation to the Peking and especially the Hanoi wing of Stalinism, which reached its height (or depth) in an adulatory obituary for Ho Chi Minh, the murderer of the Vietnamese Trotskyists; the vilest trade-union opportunism, flowing out of appetites toward even the Meany wing of the racist and American-chauvinist trade-union bureaucracy, focused around endless empty campaigns for a "labor" party -deliberately stripped of Trotskyist programmatic criteria; the systematic use and defense of physical gangsterism within the working-class movement, exemplified by constant exclusionist “public” WL forums and the employment of incredible slander in the WL press.

Were it not for the destruction of subjectively serious revolutionary militants drawn to the WL by its professed “Trotskyism” only to be plunged into a cynical anti-Trotskyist whirlpool of fake “mass” activity and then discarded, we would be tempted to hail the WL's mushrooming organizational expansion – "Forward to the daily Bulletin!" – based on a declining pool of human material as inevitably hastening the collapse of this fraudulent pretender to the continuity of the Fourth International. A house of cards can only be built so high before it must inevitably topple. But as serious Marxists we can only deplore the political fact that the necessary destruction of the Workers League and other obstacles to the construction of the U.S. section of a reborn Fourth International means that the dedication and self-sacrificing work of many who began as subjectively revolutionary militants has served only to build a hideously deformed diversion which can play no role in the principled combat of the world working class for socialism.

Conversations with Wohlforth - 3

Marxist Bulletin No. 3 (Part IV - 1965)

SPARTACIST-ACFI UNITY NEGOTIATIONS

Third Session 9 July 1965

Present: Spartacist: Robertson, Turner, Stoute (Harper, secretary)
ACFI: Wohlforth, Mazelis, Michael (alternate for van Ronk)

Meeting convened at 8:10 p.m. Chairman: Stoute

Agenda:

1. SWP: (a) historical; (b) current;
2. Minutes;
3. Election Statements;
4. Social; Topic and time of next meeting

1. SWP Discussion:

(a) historical

Wohlforth: The essential feature of the American Marxist movement has been its failure to really develop theory, and while certain progress has been made in some periods toward coming to basic working-class consciousness, and even going beyond that in adherence to the world movement and later the Trotskyist movement, through its entire history it has never mastered the Marxist method. Rather it sought to build a movement with theory inherited from past leaders like Marx or worked out elsewhere and imported. Americans learned lessons rather than the method leading to those lessons. Cannon came out of the midwest fusion of the Populist Wobbly movement, and the Cannon-Foster faction within the CP (while the healthiest of the factions) was representative of that empiricism. Cannon learned from Zinoviev, etc., a way of treating political questions in an organizational way. Trotsky warned him against this, but this tradition has remained to this day. SWP was a bloc between Cannon and Trotsky in which Cannon took the political line of Trotsky but developed the SWP in his own way organizationally. The struggle of the SWP with Shachtman showed the failure of the SWP to develop theoretically. It was Trotsky that insisted the struggle center around questions of dialectics and method. Discussions between Trotsky and the SWP leadership revealed that Trotsky was anything but an uncritical supporter of Cannon, was worried about Cannon's adaptation to the liberal-trade-union sections and the incapacity and unwillingness of the Cannon people to break from that sort of collaboration. Cannon's conduct during the Minneapolis trials has been used as a precedent for today. In the post-war period Cannon failed to understand the international conjunctural situation and came up with the theory of inverted American exceptionalism. But world capitalism was restabilizing itself and the American struggle would thus retreat. The International never understood this fundamental turning point in world history (1946-47), but instead the line of Pablo was that this was a period of ascending socialist revolution. Cannon never confronted the problem of Stalinism in the post-war period, but felt that the SWP would be thrown into leadership. Degeneration of the SWP during the '50s was then not merely a simple reflection of negative conditions, though these accentuated the sickness of the party. Internal problems forced Cannon into an international bloc he never wanted, explained this on the basis of 'orthodoxy'. This was short-lived and prepared ground for growth of revision. The crisis of the SWP has been brewing for 20-25 years. The central cadre of the party was fashioned in this sick situation. Understanding the history of the SWP is related to our tasks of building the movement today. Are we simply to be a more orthodox copy of the SWP. or recognize the necessity of theoretical development, of applying the Marxist method, of going beyond 'orthodoxy'? Our tasks are essentially Iskra tasks, bring theory and consciousness to an economist movement. Study of the history of the SWP is essential to our own development and tasks.

Robertson: Your document was a good and serious effort to understand the SWP, but was best in its particular analyses. However, it would seem that you have loaded too much on American empiricism. Actually it is American exceptionalism to single out what happened in the U.S. alone as reason for the decline of the Marxist movement (though it is undeniably true that the American movement had a theoretical incapacity). To counterpose the sickness of the U.S. to the world movement would be good if objective development confirms, but it doesn't. In the U.S., the most significant failure was that of the American working class to develop any political movement of its own. You often talk about 'theory' and 'method' but are weak in definition. In order to deal with Marxist method it is necessary to understand it, not merely to refer to it - 'theory' by itself is an empty word. Theory is a sufficient simplification of reality that it can be shoved into our heads and give us an active understanding as participants of what is going on – that is, what we hold in our heads is also a factor. Program generates theory. What are decisive are programmatic questions. The SWP in post-war years had a theory that was inadequate on Yugoslavia, China, etc. Pabloism was a revisionist attempt to fill that gap in a way that turned the movement toward programmatic shift and opened up the whole world movement for degeneration. Largely for objective reasons the SWP moved into the post-war period deproletarianized, isolated and with an aging cadre; a qualitative transformation took place. It is important to appreciate what the main driving forces were in the degeneration of the SWP, for no party has ever performed anywhere in the world longer better than the SWP has and that includes the Bolshevik Party – no party has ever outlived the aging of its cadre. The SWP managed to hold a revolutionary line for some decades – the 50s was the worst period any movement faced anywhere. The entire world Trotskyist movement had developed an estimation of Stalinism which was developed on the basis of a single kind of experience – the pre-war role of the Stalinist parties in the face of working class mobilization in struggle. In the post-war years the SWP line had a ritual character. Program is decisive. Wohlforth's analysis is fine, but has an idealist streak. His 'theory' and 'method' have a categorical quality. Though. I have come down hardest on the critical side, I thought "Marxism in the U.S." was a good statement.

Turner: Wohlforth's document will be helpful for those who have not gone through the struggle in the SWP, though there is a tendency to oversimplify in the document. The subjective aspect of Cannon has been elevated and made into a factor beyond the normal weight that should be assigned. After all, the entire international movement failed to deal with the new situation that had arisen – the failure was not merely Cannon's, but that of the whole movement. In raising questions about the application of Marxist method, it would have been useful to concretely show method in application in terms of dialectics rather than just repeating the word 'method.'

Wohlforth: We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism.

Wohlforth: The points raised on the need for more concrete material on theory and method are quite welcome. As far as R.'s questioning my placing too much emphasis on American empiricism, failures of the whole international working class were obviously involved. I mentioned empiricism because this was the way the theoretical failure developed in the U.S., while in Europe, especially France, the failure was in the direction of formalism. As to the criticism that the document was weak in definition of theory and method, I wanted to show what they were through concrete analysis. The "Assimilation" document goes into it theoretically, and I consider it to be a complementary document, was how Marxist method should have been applied to the major problems of post-war period. Theory and method are not simple reflections of reality, but have an independent existence precisely because they are an abstraction from reality of the underlying process which may not be apparent through simple reflection. Theory seeks to reflect independent reality from beginning to end, not just present reality. The Pabloites had a theory that reflected a period of the expansion of Stalinism. Program does not generate theory; rather one comes to programmatic conclusions on the basis of theoretical understanding. There is an interaction between program and theory. Program in the concrete becomes part of the process and leads to theory; your mind is part of the reality. The weakness of the SWP would have failed in a good period in another way. It was headed for failure in 1946 by its false combination of sectarianism and opportunism, and would have led to the destruction of the SWP as a revolutionary party barring theoretical development. Can't say no party performed better than the SWP. It is to the Bolshevik panty we must return today, not to the SWP. Trotsky was the continuator of the Bolshevik party, but he was incapable given his time of creating a new formation that would be able to withstand his death. The Trotskyist movement was a failure but the Bolshevik movement was not. Bolshevism had within it greater revolutionary forces, more cadre who understood Marxist method, than any movement since. We will be playing only a transitional role. We don't come out of the old tradition; the SWP did not create a cadre capable of doing what Trotsky did in the world movement. It is not that the analysis of Stalinism developed in the 1930's is inadequate to explain current reality, but that they didn't understand the method by which that theory was arrived at. Stalinism is degenerative, not progressive. Cannon is a key person in the history of the SWP, and in essence Cannon is the SWP. The degeneration of the SWP is related to the degeneration of Cannon. We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism. Cannon subordinated politics to organization. Organizational questions should not have a life in and of themselves. Our role is not simply to gather together workers where we can find them but to take to the working class the theoretical understanding without which the working class is incapable of organizing itself into a force to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Must have a conjunctural analysis of the development of capitalism as a world system in order to supplant the bourgeoisie.

Robertson: On theory being a reflection of reality -- you have defined this as current reality. But that is impressionism. The greatest reality is during crises when superficial reality is stripped away. 1923 was such a turning point – that is how I used the word 'reality'. I don't like the word 'process' because it has an objectivist tone. Slaughter is the most outstanding Marxist theorist today because of his denial of the autonomy of 'facts' and his insistence that what we think is part of the process and part of the social outcome. We differ on program generating theory. If you sought to adhere to program at the time of failure of theory, you would either have to freeze or else seek a stronger guide to action, examining full reality, not just present nor just past. Only Cuba allowed one to finally make sense of the entire postwar problem; the problem was not solved historically until the Cuban developments. But anticipations were possible. Regarding Cannon's worth as a Trotskyist political leader, as late as 1948 his writings on the Wallace campaign were a model. Trotsky was not part of the old Bolshevik cadre but issued out of Bolshevism partly in opposition to the Bolshevik party which fell apart. The SWP has produced us. We are a link, for bettor or worse, from the Bolsheviks to Trotsky to SWP to us. Cannon was the best Communist Politician produced in this country. It is not a question of copying the SWP, but of going beyond. Future Trotskyists will have to meet the measure of Cannon's strengths as well as his weaknesses. This is a real challenge. We have to learn from him positively as well as negatively. Phillips's criticisms of your history project, some were correct, but basically he was making a Philistine response.

Turner: On the subjective factor of Cannon vs. the whole objective situation in which Trotskyism found itself – even in its most positive periods, Trotskyism existed in a context in which Stalinism as a world system looked and was large. The Trotskyist movement, even while Trotsky was alive, was not able to make a dent in the European Stalinist movement. The failure was not basically that of the individual, Cannon. While the individual can play an important role in all the processes of history, you cannot eliminate the objective forces. For example, in the degeneration of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky never considered the subjective to be the main factor.

Mazelis: It is wrong to say Trotsky did not come out of the Bolshevik party. He joined in 1917. This was qualitatively different from us coming over to the SWP. We came over to Trotskyism, not Cannonism. Our development must be viewed separately from the SWP. Trotsky came over to Leninism. What we learned in the SWP was not of the order of what Trotsky learned from Leninism. The British movement is already on a higher level than the SWP ever was here. We feel Cannonism was unable to develop Marxism, but this is not saying we and the British have developed it, but we have scratched the surface. The 'Assimilation' document was an extremely important contribution, and the international conference will make other contributions.

Michael: Robertson gives the impression that program yields theory, that you have a program that draws you into contact with events taking place and then cast about for theory. This view doesn't take into account the things one uses to construct a theory.

Robertson: The best way to look at these questions is in situo – truth is always concrete. In the first workers' movement in Russia a new problem was broached. The Bolsheviks and Lenin had an incorrect theory, a sufficient but not a correct theory, but up to the supreme moment they had the correct political conclusion of not making alliances with the liberals. In 1917 Lenin became a Trotskyist. In the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants, the proletariat must take the lead – there was something new in the Russian situation which cleared this up; the old experience was not enough. Trotsky made these predictions in 1905 without there yet being a party to carry out the program's content. The Bolsheviks remained steadfast to their program. None of the individuals or groups at the time had the whole truth.

Turner: The basis of Marxism is materialism. In the beginning was the deed. History, life, pose certain tasks which men must solve, so they project a construction. To the extent the construction is related to the reality, men solve the tasks. This is fundamental to Marxism. There can be no disagreement on this.

Wohlforth: You are mistaken. Theory is more than a reflection of reality, it is an active part of reality. We must get out of a mechanism which has almost destroyed the Marxist movement. Theory is an interacting part of reality itself. Cannon was not a communist politician because he was never a communist in that he never mastered the fundamental of communism which was necessary to combine theory with the building of the party. Cannon was the world's best factionalist. He kept control over the party but he destroyed the party – a criminal act. The best communist politician in the history of the SWP was Wright – he almost understood. There is a basic difference between us: The Spartacist group has yet to complete the theoretical break with the SWP and Cannonism while we have taken this step and have done it in large part under the urging of the SLL. It was they who urged us to take on the history project. They had already come to the understanding of the need to break with Cannon. On program begetting theory – this is completely wrong. We are fundamentally counterposed to that position. That is not Marxism. You must begin with reality not with program. Lenin was in no sense an empiricist. He sought to implement a theory which wasn't totally wrong. His program was an adequate reflection of his theory. Trotsky didn't develop the theory of the Permanent Revolution out of program. He started with the reality of the 1905 revolution which led to theoretical understanding which led to program. "Working out theory to explain program"... "In the beginning was the deed"... I'm not interested in this, this is nothing. In this discussion we are concretizing what we mean by theory and method. Read Lenin's Notebooks – he uses the word 'process' 500 times. Process is essential to dialectics. If Robertson rejects the concept of process, he rejects the dialectic. To ignore or refuse to accept process loses that which is central to the dialectic, the internal process of life and matter. Everything is always in process. We continue to have important theoretical and methodological differences. This, rather than barring unification and discussion, necessitates discussion, makes this dialogue and process between us more urgent.

Robertson: The question has been raised as to what is the program of a party. This is a class question, anticipation of the limits of what that class or section of the class can hope to achieve for itself, the codification of the possibilities of a class, for the workers a question of the victory of the socialist revolution--that is what program is. What is it that shapes theory? The appetites of men shape out their intervention. The SWP was not a bloc with Cannon -- that implies they had different programs which they did not. The SWP was the American branch of the world Trotskyist movement, it was not the SWP vs. the Trotskyist movement. Theory does not always grow and develop. We know less about the world now than was known at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. We know less of the world at present because we have less means to change the world. I did not say Lenin was an empiricist, but that there was a certain theoretical weakness in the program of the Bolsheviks which was shared by Lenin, a slight empiricism. Trotsky did not start with the Revolution of 1905 for the theory of the Permanent Revolution, but had seen the need 18 months before that for a labor dictatorship. Because of this Trotsky seized on the Soviets more quickly than the Bolsheviks. Internal contradiction is the heart of dialectics. The word 'process' grates on me, invoking an image of "process industries" such as the automated American oil refineries; hence I object ... because we (or our absence!) are part of the 'process'.

Turner: Wohlforth should avoid trying to score debating points, but consider what is being said, not take words out of context and try to give it some implied meaning. That is not a dialectical approach. Generally we have very unimportant and minor differences, as far as the discussion here reveals.

Robertson: We don't propose to take a vote on your document, on views on these historical questions and on methodology. We ourselves have a running internal discussion on method.

Mazelis: I disagree strongly with Comrade Turner, with his entire approach. We have very serious differences, as the discussion shows. But we shouldn't be afraid of differences, they should be thoroughly explored, and not avoided. As W. said, they are anything but a bar to unity. It's perfectly understandable that you wouldn't have a position on a particular document. It's another thing that it should be stated the way you stated it – you don't anticipate taking a position. There are important differences between us.

Wohlforth: You will take a position on method at your coming conference whether you want to or not. Marxist method will or will not be reflected in your documents. Spartacist will not be able to avoid taking a position on method.

(b) SWP – Current

Robertson: We are bringing out a series of Marxist Bulletins going into the history of our quarrels, so we will not bring it up now. We must have clarification on our own split, but will wait till the documents are fully at hand. A rotten bloc is in the making in the SWP. We are in favor of a bloc for party democracy, nothing else. Party democracy should be foremost the leadership's responsibility, not that of various minorities. Most of the present SWP minorities are to the right of the SWP leadership. Some, under pressure of events, have been hopping around. Miller has denied democratic centralism for a decade. To develop a bloc with a right-wing minority against the center is unprincipled. Unification must be on the basis of political program. We above all cannot cross class lines on domestic politics. The opposition to Black Nationalism on the West Coast is from the right -- the “jobs or income now” approach is to the right of a program of Black Nationalism which is fantasy of the SWP. There has been a recrudescence of Weissism, pro Maoism. However, we want to encourage all tendencies to demand the readmission of the expelled, and would repudiate that support only if it were put forward in a context that was a repudiation of democratic centralism.

Wohlforth: Our views are not the same. As we gather from SWP internal bulletins that have cane into our possession, within the various tendencies there is at least a small, conscious Trotskyist force which is around Lynn Marcus. We have 99% political and theoretical agreement with Marcus on all questions. He has submitted to the SWP convention a document that is a complete break with Cannonism – a more complete break than Spartacist has yet made. He and a group of some half-dozen represent a clear Trotskyist position. Within the mess of the SWP there are elements moving to the left and right. Kirk’s current document is better than his previous position; has an understanding that his previous documents never had of the coming conjunctural crisis of American capitalism. He is making a complete attack on and break with the party leadership. We see Kirk as evolving to the left, but highly confused. As far as Miller and Philips are concerned, they are evolving as one would expect -- they are empiricists. A bloc with them would be in principle, however, on the American question. The American class struggle is the key for blocs in the party. We can bloc on a class line in this country against the majority, while being split on international questions. Swabeck is finished.. Seattle finished. The SWP is going through acute throes. Our task is to bring theoretical clarity into this despite difficulties.

Turner: From what I saw of Marcus while in the SWP, he seemed to take a number of positions of the Weiss group and to be to the right of the SWP leadership.

Wohlforth: The Weissites were Pabloites.

Mazelis: Spartacist is not fully aware of Marcus's development, but we assure you it is no exaggeration to say we are in 99% agreement. We feel that his development has taken place under the influence of the Bulletin at least in part which is directed at people like him. Our constant hammering has paid off. Marcus seems to be taking a strong stand on all questions.

Wohlforth: On the St. Paul and Madison people, here we have the evolution of a group of old party members, some out of the party and others not too active. The Brusts who are with ACFI were on leaves of absence from the party for a year or two and have since resigned. Around them are other party comrades, some out, some in, and they have connections with some YSAers. There is the probability of building a Trotskyist group in Minneapolis, largely of workers.

Robertson: There must be a genuine political basis for the alliance of any two groups, not a left and right bloc against the center. Almost all minorities in the SWP at present are to the right. We would be willing to have a bloc with Philips on the basis of your last documents. For every bloc it is necessary to have documents, written evidence. We have friends still in the SWP. But they have been sealed off in good part. Some have been squeezed out. But some have been in the party a long time, are well known comrades. Our line on the current SWP oppositionists is to pick and choose allies on the basis of political questions, not "we'll get all comrades together against the party leadership."

Wohlforth: Spartacist friends in the SWP should consider supporting Marcus's documents if they find them politically acceptable.

2. Minutes:

The minutes of 27 June were accepted as corrected.

3. Election Statement:

Michael: The revised draft brought in by Henry hasn't incorporated the changes I suggested.

Disc: Robertson, Wohlforth, Robertson, Turner, Stoute

Michael will write up amendments and bring them back for approval. ACFI has not yet prepared the draft for the popular leaflet.

4. Party:

People should be appointed by each side to help clean up afterwards. ACFI is handling liquor, Spartacist is handling food.

5. Time and Topic of Next Meeting:

2 weeks from tonight, on the IC resolution.

6. Miscellaneous:

Turner: On your forum on Algeria. The fact that we have been meeting regularly and frequently makes it inexplicable that we were not notified you were having this forum. Our members received a mailing, but Robertson did not receive a copy. Smacks of united front from below tactics, a provocation.

Wohlforth: The decision to have a forum was made last Wednesday, didn't know we mailed to your membership. The mailing went to the Bulletin mailing list. No one in Spartacist who doesn't receive the Bulletin would have received a mailing. Spartacist can have their literature on our lit table should they wish.

Turner: Having been creating a unity atmosphere, this last minute approach smacks of a desire to by-pass the Spartacist leadership, and I felt it should be discussed.

Wohlforth: The idea came up at the last minute; we felt we should have a forum because of the Algerian discussion. We have in no way communicated with your rank and file.

Robertson: Here is the chronology from our end. I subscribe to the Bulletin but did not receive a mailing. This is the first public forum you have had. We were planning a joint activity where our contacts and periphery are being brought in by our mailing list and invitations. Then unannounced you set up your very first forum which to us looks as if designed to pull our ranks to your group's activities.

Mazelis: We are operating independently. It is you who have been reluctant to proceed jointly. We had hoped a number of Spartacist comrades would come to the forum and take the floor. I personally organized the mailing, which included Comrade Robertson. I can definitely assure everyone that this was sent, and any mixup was not our doing.

Wohlforth: If the Spartacist comrades would like to announce their class they may do so at the forum.

Turner: That was the way it looked to us. We should try to make every effort to proceed in a non-provocative manner.

Meeting adjourned at 11:35 p.m.

(Minutes of this session approved at the fifth session, 30 July, 1965.)