David North: Joseph Hansen's Natural Son (1988)

Workers Vanguard No. 456 (1 July 1988)

Anatomy of a Healyite Russia-Hater

David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son

Workers League leader David North has made no small effort to ensconce himself as the undisputed “leader” of the shattered remnants of Gerry Healy’s corrupt International Committee (IC). To do so of course requires that North declare all of the other former leading lights of Healyism (including the “founder-leader” himself) to be hopeless “renegades.” Never mind that North was trained, tutored and installed as a leader by the same crew he now denounces in order to proclaim himself to be the sole surviving repository of Healyite “orthodoxy.”

One of the most recent installments of this cynical charade is North’s book The Heritage We Defend. Ever so modestly described as “A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International,” in reality it is a 500-page treatise against Healy’s longtime hatchet man Michael Banda. Against Banda’s ignorant, anti-Trotskyist “Twenty-Seven Reasons Why the IC Should Be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built” – a way station on Banda’s road to becoming a Stalinist PR man – North attempts to claim as his own the revolutionary heritage of James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party. This is really egregious considering that the Workers League published hundreds of pages written by their former leader Tim Wohlforth, sneering that Cannon was a barely Marxist, vulgar “window smasher.” This was Wohlforth’s way of making himself out to be, in effect, the first real American Marxist.

As for North, he was specially chosen by Healy to be the WL “leader” as a reward for his eager services as mouthpiece for Healy’s obscene “Security and the Fourth International” campaign – a psychotic smear job impugning the integrity of the old, revolutionary SWP and Trotsky himself. Slandering the SWP’s Joseph Hansen as a conscious agent of the FBI and the Russian secret police, and an accomplice in the murder of Trotsky, the Northites have for over a decade echoed the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of his own.

“Security and the Fourth International” grew straight out of Gerry Healy’s own particular combination of years of political banditry and paranoid megalomania. It was Healy’s way of “explaining” his International Committee’s failure to definitively expose and defeat Pabloism, the revisionist current originated by Michel Pablo which in the early I950s abandoned Trotskyism with the perspective of liquidation into the mass Stalinist and social-democratic parties. In the 1960s Joseph Hansen became the main spokesman of the Pabloite degeneration of the SWP as it abandoned the struggle for an independent proletarian vanguard. But instead of political struggle the Healyites concocted their devil theory that Hansen had been hired by the U.S. government and the Kremlin Stalinists to destroy the SWP.

Declaring themselves to be the Fourth International, Healy’s IC kept up a vicious vendetta against the long-since reformist SWP, including the use of the capitalist courts. This is not the only time they crossed the class line. A secret report (which surfaced as part of the fallout from the Healyites’ spectacular implosion) by an IC Commission to investigate “the corruption of G. Healy” details payoffs that were received for services rendered to a variety of oil-rich Arab despots. This included supplying photographs to the Iraqi embassy of a demonstration of opponents of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq. The report of the IC investigation says that while the “Commission has not vet been able to establish all the facts... a receipt for £1,600 for 16 minutes of documentary footage of a demonstration is in the possession of the Commission.” An indisputable and monstrous fact is that the Healyites hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi Communists by Ba’ath rulers in 1979. Healy’s payoff was blood money!

As the Spring 1988 issue of Solidarity, a British journal of “libertarian socialism” which leaked the secret IC report, notes: “It is certain that the anti-Healy camp know far more about the dirtier aspects of the WRP’s past than they have so far publicly admitted.... These include North, who has resolutely chosen not to make public even the skeletal information we publish....” Of course he hasn’t. Of all Healy’s former lieutenants, North is uniquely the one who clings to the real “heritage” of Healyism – in particular the scandalous “Security and the Fourth International” campaign.

“Counterrevolutionary Through and Through”

But North could well be hoist on his own petard. In The Heritage We Defend he writes that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘counterrevolutionary through and through’....” One can look through everything Trotsky ever wrote and never find this falsely and stupidly one-sided formulation. On the contrary, as he said in “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933): “Whoever fails to understand th[e] dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has understood nothing.” The formulation “counterrevolutionary through and through” which North embraces was the work of... none other than the devil incarnate of Healyism, the arch-agent himself – Joseph Hansen.

It first issued from the big and unwise mouth of Dave Weiss (D. Stevens) during the 1952-53 fight against the pro-Stalinist liquidators in the Cochran-Clarke faction in the SWP. And it was Hansen who landed the assignment of defending Weiss’ statement. This Hansen did with his usual quite capable vigor, including the amplification that the Kremlin Stalinists were not only “counterrevolutionary through and through” but “to the core” (“What the New York Discussion Has Revealed,” Joseph Hansen, SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 4, February 1953). Indeed Hansen was the biggest exponent, if the number of pages count, of the view North falsely ascribes to Trotsky. Yet who in the Soviet Union could be characterized as “counterrevolutionary through and through”? Only an out-and-out Great Russian fascist, something out of the present-day Pamyat or perhaps a CIA mole in the KGB could fit this bill. But this certainly doesn’t describe the Stalinist bureaucracy. A conservative nationalist caste resting on the proletarian property forms established by the Russian Revolution, the Kremlin bureaucracy is the product of and reflects the contradictions of a bonapartist regime issuing from the degeneration of a workers revolution in a backward country surrounded by imperialism.

In “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937), Trotsky explained:

“The proletariat of the USSR is the ruling class in a backward country where there is still a lack of the most vital necessities of life. The proletariat of the USSR rules in a land consisting of only one-twelfth part of humanity; imperialism rules over the remaining eleven-twelfths. The rule of the proletariat, already maimed by the backwardness and poverty of the country, is doubly and triply deformed under the pressure of world imperialism....

“In its capacity of a transmitting mechanism in this struggle, the bureaucracy leans now on the proletariat against imperialism, now on imperialism against the proletariat, in order to increase its own power. At the same time it mercilessly exploits its role as distributor of the meager necessities of life in order to safeguard its own wellbeing and power. By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism of transmission of the oppression – the bureaucracy.

“If in the words ‘a ruling and at the same time an oppressed class’ there is a contradiction, then it flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very situation of the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the theory of socialism in one country.”

Far from characterizing the bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through,” in the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote that “all shades of political thought are to be found among the bureaucracy: from genuine Bolshevism (Ignace Reiss) to complete fascism (F. Butenko)” The dual nature of the Kremlin oligarchy is fundamental to the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union combined with the call for political revolution to oust the bureaucracy.

Trotsky presented his fullest analysis of the contradictory nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the last political battle of his life, against the repudiation of Soviet defensism by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman/Burnham opposition in the SWP in 1939-40. Even in the context of some of the most heinous counterrevolutionary crimes of the Soviet government – the destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the strangulation of proletarian revolution in Spain by the Kremlin bureaucrats, the beheading of the Red Army – Trotsky never characterized the bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through.” But Shachtman certainly did.

Defending Baron von Mannerheim’s Finland against Soviet intervention, Shachtman argued that in Poland the Red Army had acted only as a “counterrevolutionary force.” Trotsky, who saw the possibility for a social transformation in Finland coming with the Red Army intervention, pointed to the expropriation of the capitalists and large landowners in Eastern Poland which took place despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state. Against Shachtman he argued:

“the Kremlin with its bureaucratic methods gave an impulse to the socialist revolution in Poland.... This impulse in the direction of socialist revolution was possible only because the bureaucracy of the USSR straddles and has its roots in the economy of a workers state.”

As Trotsky noted, the seizure of Eastern Poland was both “a pledge of the alliance with Hitler” and “a guarantee against Hitler” through the nationalization of semi-feudal and capitalist property. To understand this means understanding real dialectical materialism as opposed to the cynical shell game of “dialectics” employed by the Healyites. For years they were distinguished by obfuscating, idealist lectures on the ever-mystical “dialectic” which nobody could understand – except Healy. Only the self-declared “founder-leader” was meant to understand, just as only he could determine “security” clearances. “Dialectics” and the “Security” slanders were the underpinnings of the Healy cult, designed to keep the membership completely confused and above all intimidated by their omnipotent leaders.

David North: A Joseph Hansen of the Second Mobilization

But just how is it that David North has come to embrace the politics of Joseph Hansen – a man he has reviled as the sinister arch-nemesis of Trotskyism and slandered as the number one agent responsible for the supposed infiltration and takeover of the SWP by the U.S. government? Applying the demonology of Healyism to North himself one can only ask: can he be far behind? Not subscribing to the paranoid conspiracy theories that are the stock-in-trade of Healyism against their opponents, we can trace the political genealogy of Hansen/North’s shared anti-Soviet revisionism back to the source. In his 1953 document “What the New York Discussion Has Revealed,” Hansen proclaims,

“I trace the current differences back to the discussion on Eastern Europe....
First of all, in taking the position that Stalinism had brought about an overturn in property forms in these countries, I raised the question myself as to how this affected our estimate of the political character of Stalinism. My answer was that the power to make such changes did not require us to revise the concept of Stalinism developed by Trotsky. Stalinism still remained counterrevolutionary to the core.”

Leaving aside Hansen’s wrongful attribution to Trotsky the view that the Kremlin bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary to the core,” his analysis of the differences that developed within the SWP and the Fourth International are quite to the point. The SWP had a very hard time for a couple of years explaining how deformed workers states were created in Eastern Europe. So did the leadership that emerged at the head of the Fourth International in Europe where the most promising cadres had been killed by war and by fascist and Stalinist repression. As we noted in “Genesis of Pabloism” (Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), they were confronted with the question:

“...is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the
victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism.”

Empirical evidence tore a gaping hole through the Trotskyists’ post-WW II attempt at wooden orthodoxy. The impressionistic Pablo simply threw overboard “the old Trotskyism” and declared that the Stalinists could play an “objectively revolutionary” role; his conclusion was deep entrism into the Stalinist and mass reformist parties in Europe. During 1951-53, Pablo’s liquidationism led to the destruction of the Fourth International. The SWP (with Healy in tow) waged a belated and partial fight against Pabloism, splitting out the anti-liquidationist International Committee. But a few years later over the Cuban Revolution the SWP followed suit and Joseph Hansen was the main theoretical apologist. The need for a Trotskyist party was dropped as Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrillas were embraced as the modern-day equivalent of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.

In the name of combatting Pabloite revisionism the Healyites reacted by simply putting a minus where the SWP put a plus. Making a caricature of the sterile, formal “orthodoxy” that had characterized the post-World War II SWP, the Healyites argued that since there was no Trotskyist party in Cuba no social transformation had taken place – in short they stood Pabloism on its head. In contrast the Spartacist delegation to the 1966 conference of Healy’s international Committee argued:

“...the petty-bourgeois peasantry under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable could achieve no third road, neither capitalist, nor working class. Instead all that has come out of China and Cuba was a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counter-revolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the degeneration of the October. That is why we are led to define states such as these as deformed workers states. And the experience since the Second World War, properly understood, offers not a basis for revisionist turning away from the perspective and necessity of revolutionary working-class power, but rather it is a great vindication of Marxian theory and conclusions under new and not previously expected circumstances.”
– ”Spartacist Statement to International Conference,” Spartacist No. 6, June-July 1966

The Healyites’ opposition to the SWP over the Cuban Revolution had little to do with fighting the Pabloist liquidation of Trotskyism. In fact Healy’s line was that the Fourth International had been rebuilt, the International Committee was it, and Pabloism was simply proto-Stalinism. In contrast the Spartacist delegation to Healy’s 1966 IC conference argued that the actual reconstruction of the Fourth International could only he achieved through completely rooting out this revisionism: “Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites: the impact of events alone, no matter how favorable objectively or devastating to revisionist doctrines, will not do the job.” As we pointed out: “The ‘orthodox’ movement has still to face up to the new theoretical problems which rendered it susceptible to Pabloism in 1943-50 and gave rise to a ragged, partial split in 1952-54.” This was borne out in the Healyites’ embrace of various “Third World” Stalinists like Ho Chi Minh and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.”

For daring to raise our political differences openly in 1966, we were denounced by Healy as petty-bourgeois American chauvinists, and expelled for refusing to confess to the charge. False confessions were a matter of “discipline” in the political cult of the megalomaniac Gerry Healy, the man whose shoes David North is desperate to fill. Almost two decades later Healy himself was ousted amidst lurid charges of moral turpitude leveled by his former lieutenants. In an interview “On the 1966 Split” in Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) covering the subsequent rather spectacular implosion of Healy’s British Workers Revolutionary Party, comrade James Robertson commented:

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

The “Principles” of Political Bandits

The Healyites had no such compass. Despite their inverted Pabloism over Cuba, denying that a social revolution ever took place, Healy’s International Committee had a perfectly Pabloite tailist line toward the Vietnamese Stalinists and went on to herald Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” It was their support to the mythical “Arab Revolution” in 1967 that provided the theoretical preparation for their various forays across the class line, some of which have come home to haunt them. And it was under the cover of “anti-Stalinism” that the Healyites hailed the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’athist regime.

While they lined their pockets with Arab gold and availed themselves of the forces of the bourgeois state against leftist political opponents, the Healyites would still invoke Leninist “orthodoxy” when it suited their purposes. Last year saw North screaming foul at the SWP for using the capitalist courts against the workers movement, to wit wing the Workers League for costs in North’s years-long court suit against the SWP (see “David North and the Law,” WV No. 430, 12 June 1987). More recently, witness the 1988 “Election Manifesto” of the Workers League’s candidates for president and vice president. The call to “establish the political independence of the American working class from the capitalist class” is rather remarkable from an organization which continues to drag leftists through the bosses’ courts.

The WL’s election manifesto also demands that “The working class must defend the Soviet Union.” But repeatedly over the past two decades North’s Workers League has taken the side of virulently anti-Soviet forces – with Khomeini’s mullahs in Iran, with the CIA’s company union Solidarność in Poland, with U.S. imperialism’s Islamic cutthroats in Afghanistan. To cover for their anti-Sovietism the WL has invented a global conspiracy between Washington and Moscow. Or rather they borrowed it from Pierre Lambert Healy’s one-time bloc partner, who regularly vituperates against a “counterrevolutionary Holy Alliance, sealed a Yalta,” supposedly uniting the White House and the Kremlin. They just leave out the Cold War, and for a reason.

“Down with Imperialism and Stalinism! Unite Soviet and American Workers” was the front-page headline of “Workers League Political Committee Statement” in the 27 May Bulletin. This slogan, equating the bureaucratic misleaders of the degenerated/deformed workers states with the capitalist class enemy, comes straight out of Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste. “Long live the struggle of the youth against the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialism!” was the clarion call for the Lambertistes’ 1971 Essen Conference. The OCI’s Stalinophobia led straight into the camp of the most right wing Cold War social democrats. For example, several dozen of the OCI members, including Lambert himself served as paid functionaries of the French social-democratic union Force Ouvrière, which has been linked to the notorious CIA operative Irving Brown going back to 1947.

Applied to the U.S. the Northites’ resurrection of this slogan leads straight to the State Department “socialism” of Norman Thomas and Max Shachtman in his later years. The Bulletin writes that “Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) are the road to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the transformation of Stalinist bureaucrats into capitalists.” Evidently, for the Northites, no counterrevolution to overthrow the remaining gains of the October Revolution would be required, just a cold transformation of the Soviet degenerated workers state into a capitalist state imposed from the top. As Trotsky argued, this is to run the film of reformism in reverse, positing a peaceful transition from a workers state to capitalism.

The Northites’ “analysis” of where Gorbachev’s Russia is going is unmitigated Third Campism, which parenthetically is a quintessential expression of petty-bourgeois American chauvinism – the charge which Healy came up with and North continues to trumpet against the Spartacist League. North’s view is reality seen through the prism and under the pressure of U.S. imperialism. As Trotsky argued against Shachtman and Burnham in “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party”:

“A vulgar petty-bourgeois radical is similar to a liberal ‘progressive’ in that he takes the USSR as a whole, failing to understand its internal contradictions and dynamics. When Stalin concluded an alliance with Hitler, invaded Poland, and now Finland, the vulgar radicals triumphed; the identity of the methods of Stalinism and fascism was proved! They found themselves in difficulties however when the new authorities invited the population to expropriate the landowners and capitalists - they had not foreseen this possibility at all!”
– L. D. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism

Healy and North also charged the Spartacist League with ‘being “agents” of Joseph Hansen because we were among the first to protest Healy’s despicable “Security and the Fourth International” slanders. In protest demonstrations outside Workers League meetings we defended Hansen as “an honest revisionist.” That’s more than we can say for North and his gang who have grievously crossed the class line so many times that who, what or where they are is forever a subject for debate.

We waged a relentless political struggle against Hansen’s anti-Trotskyist revisionism. Healy could never have done so because it would mean confronting his own politics. So he “explained” the SWP’s degeneration by slandering Hansen as a government agent who was hired to infiltrate and destroy the SWP. Yet here is North peddling Hansen’s “counterrevolutionary through and through” line. Any of the WL leader’s acolytes who accept the demented logic of his “Security” scam ought to be asking some nervous questions. How did it happen? Did Hansen secretly recruit North? And who will the next “great leader” be?

Consider the fate of North’s former lideres máximos. Yesterday’s self-declared “founder-leader” Gerry Healy is today’s KGB agent, according to the Bulletin. In North’s eyes, every one of Healy’s lieutenants (except North him self, of course) has become a demoralized renegade - from Banda to Cliff Slaughter, the longtime “theoretical” mouthpiece for Healyite crimes, who now admits that the “Security” slanders were a fraud. And let’s not forget Tim Wohlforth, Healy’s former hapless American toady, who warmed the seat North now occupies at the head of the Workers League. Wohlforth was axed amidst allegations of CIA connections through the family of his girlfriend Nancy Fields. Actually, to say he was axed is unfair to the real character of Wohlforth-he even voted for his own expulsion. Truly the son of “the god that failed,” in 1981 Wohlforth resurfaced in the pages of New Left Review in the role of saved-again social democrat denouncing Soviet totalitarianism.

Stalin never claimed that all the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the October Revolution were counterrevolutionary spies and traitors. Exempted were Lenin, a few who died early and a couple who lucked out and died a natural death at old age. David North, the new boy of the IC leadership, declares that every well-known leader of the British Healyites (SLL/WRP), and not least the leading American satellite, Wohlforth, are degenerate if not deeply flawed or downright wrong from the beginning. Thus North claims that he is the legitimate heir to what? At least Stalin, by hiding Lenin’s break with him, could claim the great Lenin. Moreover, Stalin could cite himself as an “Old Bolshevik.” But North, until the final implosion of the WRP, was a self-confessed toady to the “great” Gerry Healy and the heir to Tim Wolhforth.

Only someone who wanted to be “the leader,” no matter of what, would be so desperate to claim the heritage of authentic Healyism. To any rational elements in North’s WL and IC we can only say: Your organization is rotten through and through and to the core! North is attempting to secure his position at the head of an organization with a heritage of corrupt links with various murderous Arab colonels and sheiks. That this is not a suitable vehicle for the socialist liberation of mankind is a vast understatement.

Workers League Crumbles (1974)

Workers Vanguard No. 56 (8 November 1974)

SL Goes Forward

Workers League Crumbles

Crisis Comes, Wohlforth Goes

Amidst the desultory fanfare of celebrating "Ten Years of the Bulletin," the Workers League slid its former leader of more than a decade, Tim Wohlforth, into oblivion without a word of lamentation, jubilation, or even excuse.

An apathetic audience of about 180 listened as the WL's October25 "Tenth Anniversary" public meeting in New York introduced Fred Mazelis as WL National Secretary, confirming the rumors that Wohlforth had been deposed as WL head. (We print below the text of our leaflet distributed at that meeting.)

The ouster of Wohlforth represents a tremendous setback for Healyism internationally. The Workers League is the oldest and largest Healyite colony, and Wohlforth had been its leader, pretentious propagandist and public spokesman from the outset. As befits the WL's razzle-dazzle operation, Wohlforth had at least a certain, albeit tawdry, presence. His replacement by the colorless and slimy Fred Mazelis is apparently a last-ditch attempt to stem the WL's hemorrhaging of its small core of cadre.

For years the WL sought to drive its young supporters to ever greater frenzies of work and self-sacrifice in executing an opportunist line with promises that The Crisis would catapult the WL's Potemkin Village into the big time. With unintentional irony, one young WL supporter told a WV reporter that the bureaucratic and sectarian Wohlforth finally had to go, now that The Crisis has come.

Whether Wohlforth will reappear in the course of some future WL gyration, opposition or palace coup, only time and possibly Healy can tell. But this much is clear: Wohlforth has no future in ostensibly socialist politics outside the Workers League. Even among the most demoralized of the degeneration products of Trotskyism, he is notorious as a demagogue and a fraud.

Only the consummate cynics of the WL would try to disappear their founding leader without one word of denunciation, self-criticism or comment. It might have been wiser, though, to have announced that poor Wohlforth had come down with a bad case of phlebitis.

The pages of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist and individual leaflets have over the years devoted sufficient attention to Tim Wohlforth and the Workers League. We have exposed the WL's shamefully opportunist and self-contradictory positions (most grotesquely, managing in one issue of the Bulletin to simultaneously hail the alleged turn of the corrupt black nationalist Newton wing of the Panthers to "dialectics" and [to support] the striking New York cops). We have exposed the WL's accompanying lies, dishonesty, duplicity and bombastic pretense, centered on the WL’s fake-popular "agitational" newspaper. We have exposed the WL's shameless disregard for the principle of workers democracy. The cynics who have made up the core of the WL either ignored or even agreed with these characterizations and shrugged them off with a "so what? that's how we're going to get ahead."

But the WL's attempt to adapt the usual practices of big-time bureaucratic and revisionist parties to the few hundreds in the WL has been a disaster, as indeed such a one-sided sellout must be. The WL is hopelessly cut off from recruiting militants from any part of the existing left, where everyone who cares knows the WL as a dirty word. The only source left for WL recruitment is raw, semi-political youth, whom the WL tries to turn from would-be socialists into corrupted WL cynics. But the real all-sided irrelevance and isolation of the WL from social or political struggles lead to enormous turnover, for the WL can deliver neither social struggle nor even any real payoff for corruption. So these often serious, if naive, youth just go away, embittered and anti-socialist. The internal life of the WL mirrors its publicly expressed fakery and scumminess. So except for the very narrow central clique, even the most cynical and degenerate WL cadres can only be the recipients of the same endless stupid abuse and lying which the WL tries to dump on the world at large. The political life of a WL member is indeed nasty, brutal and above all short. The WL's basic method of "short-cuts" in principle and endless demagogy is a losers' strategy.

Healy

The WL's creeping crisis of cadre loss appears to have reached Tim Wohlforth himself. The main story going around is that he has been deposed as central leader. For all we know he's still covertly the American boss, or perhaps the disappearance of his name in recent Bulletins reflects his expulsion. If the latter is the case this makes Wohlforth a three-time loser as central leader: in 1962 the Spartacist tendency took a majority in the then-common faction away from him; in 1964 his then-buddies, the Phillips state capitalist group, broke with him and took a majority with them; now three quarters of his cadre has walked out on him over the last 18 months, and Gerry Healy appears to have dumped him.

While Wohlforth has preened himself as a master theoretician, parading in his "The Struggle for Marxism in the U.S." as the first real American Marxist and proud author of the eccentric work "Theory of Structural Assimilation" (an embarassed WL disappeared that one several years ago), his main contribution has been to turn crucial aspects of Marxism – "theory," "method" and "dialectics" – into empty mystification in order to peddle political garbage.

The WL has always been a satellite of Gerry Healy's British group and is the product of steady pressure to conform to Healy's imaginings of what an American version of the British WRP ought to look like. Remember that the idiot opportunist WL line of a couple of years ago that "the road to the American working class is through the YSA" was admittedly dictated to the WL in Britain. The WL as it has become is, together with the interchangeable Australian and West German Healyite groups (the only other two visible Healyite groups outside Britain), the foreign face of the British Healy/Banda operation.

To blame Wohlforth and not Healy for the present sad state of the WL would be like blaming William Z. Foster and not Stalin for the crimes of the American CP, and in no case could an Earl Browder/Freddie Mazelis set things right.

Trotskyism

Unlike the Healyite shambles, the international Spartacist tendency and its American section, the Spartacist League, have leaped forward, making great gains because of its fidelity to the Trotskyist program and its energetic assault upon crisis-ridden revisionists in a dozen countries. The Spartacist is published in four languages, while the SL/U.S. produces a bi-weekly Workers Vanguard on the road to becoming a weekly, a monthly Young Spartacus and the journal Women and Revolution. In the United States a communist cadre is being forged in the labor movement, through hard-hitting trade-union fractions, and elsewhere.

It is the Spartacist League, not the Workers League, which has been able to win revolutionary elements from Maoism, labor reformism, the SWP and its international bloc partners, and the left social democracy. While the WL press makes wild claims to having brought down Nixon and then warns of resulting iminent fascism which only the WL can stop, the SL and Spartacus Youth League have undertaken real campaigns and struggles: in solidarity with the British miners' strike; around the agricultural workers; stopping the loading of ships to Chile; for the jailing of Nixon; for strikes against anti-labor legislation; for mass united front demonstrations to defeat the racist anti-busing forces. This is why the Spartacist League is undergoing all-sided growth – geographical, among workers and into new industries, among black and student youth

Don't wait for cynicism and burnout, the sure fate of those who stay overlong with the Workers League: like many other fake "revolutionary" organizations, the ranks are better than the counterfeit cause they try loyally to serve. Look to the Spartacist League for Marxist leadership!
To those who cling to the demonstrated bankruptcy of the Workers League's opportunism and deceit, we can only say along with Trotsky: "To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one's program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth International" (Transitional Program, 1938).

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.

Wohlforth Brings "The Method" to Buffalo (1972)

From Revolutionary Communist Bulletin No. 1, "Documents of the Buffalo Marxist Collective" (January 1973)

Wohlforth Brings "The Method" To Buffalo:

WHY WE DIDN'T JOIN THE WL/YS

The Buffalo Marxist Collective (BMC) is a group of 30 youth, primarily students, formed by the determination to break with class-collaborationist popular-front strategies and to aid in the formation of a Leninist party in the United States. We have recently entered into a period of fusion negotiations with the Revolutionary Communist Youth, youth section of the Spartacist League. During the past summer the BMC resolved to break with the circle spirit of its subjective Leninism, and its confused and ineffectual centrist practice through a study of Trotskyism and the historical development of the world Trotskyist movement.

Some of us had broken with the confrontation politics of the New Left, while others (in and around-he Progressive Labor Party) had found themselves politically adrift after PL's ultra-left oscillation in the summer of '71, Road to Revolution III. Breaking with political infantilism from two directions, but without roots in the Trotskyist movement, we were easy pickings for the social-democratic charlatans of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, as 7 of our members split after sampling a little of Dr. Marcus's reformist cure-alls, the "common-interest program" for the "political working class ,' to 'lick depression in a day." Our conscious rejection of the NCLC led up to intensive political contact with both the Workers League and the Spartacist League. Many of us, convinced that the International Committee (led by Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League in Britain) represented the "historic continuation of the Trotskyist movement, almost joined the WL. Yet, after protracted struggle with comrades of the RCY, we rejected the Workers League. Why? Their opportunist toadying to the labor bureaucracy, their abstention on the woman question and their cynical mystification of the dialectic to justify every error, every appetite and every capitulation, persuaded us that their proud "internationalism " must be hollow, without foundation, a form without content, a fake. We felt that it was not possible that a group with such profoundly anti-Marxist positions could, somehow be right on the question of the Fourth International, and later examination of this did indeed coincide with the WL's cynical opportunism on other political issues.

WE TALK WITH THE WORKERS LEAGUE

Unable then to transcend the historic left, we renewed our study of Marxism, not however as a collection of classic texts, but as the history of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International in its struggle to construct the vanguard party on the basis of the Transitional Program. After our first exposure to the Workers League, several of us went down to New York and spoke with Lucy St. John, raising in a private discussion collective doubts and criticisms about the nature of their work in the SSEU, their notorious support of the New York police strike and their abstention on the woman question. St. John's answers, however, were not particularly clarifying, but we felt at the time that this was not decisive, and were assured that it would all be "straightened out" in further discussion. All that counted, we were told, was our agreement that the IC represented the historic continuation of the Fourth International.

The magnet of the Transitional Program exerts a powerful attraction. The comrades of the BMC were drawn to the Workers League for precisely the reasons that propelled us a few weeks later into fusion discussions with the RCY. Therefore, although comrade Wohlforth's presentation at the WL's Arrow Park Educational was dull and uninstructive, reflecting a tendency to abstract methodology from the fight of the party for its program in the class, we did not dwell on this. Although many of the comrades in the workshops seemed to be mechanically reciting the. formulas which the presentation provided, we made on the whole a favorable report to the BMC expecting all our questions to be answered in forthcoming discussions. The dishonesty of Wohlforth's method and the "practical Trotskyism" of his trade union work were not yet apparent. And the Stalinism of his organizational practice had not yet emerged from dim existence and rumor. We arranged for a visit of comrades Wohlforth and St. John to Buffalo.

ENTER THE SL/RCY

Since we had made a collective decision to thoroughly investigate the Trotskyist left we invited two members of SL/RCY to make a presentation. While at first we were hostile to the SL based on WL statements about SL "abstentionism" in the class struggle, we found that we could not defend political points that we advanced from the WL perspective. This was brought to a focus around the WL's "mass press." The Bulletin, the RCY argued, did not reflect the limited reality of the WL's work in the trade unions which was confined primarily to one white collar union. Most of the articles are written from the outside, many of them re-writes from the bourgeois press, while the centerfold features destined for the Bulletin pamphlet series are reserved for methodological profundities. To this conception of a "Bolshevik" press SL counterposed its own: They demonstrated the way in which Workers Vanguard was an organizing tool, directly related to the tactic of posing themselves as a pole of communist attraction in the trade unions on the basis of a full program. Workers Vanguard did not pretend to be the mass organ of a mass party.

Things must be called by their right names. Rather, Workers Vanguard was mainly directed towards advanced workers with whom SL had contact through implantation in the trade unions, and towards ostensibly revolutionary organizations, students and intellectuals. Polemics were directed against other left tendencies SL intersected in its actual trade union work, work on campus and in political events on the left, and was thus connected with SL's Leninist perspective of regroupment through splits and fusions. The SL compared the Bulletin to PL's Challenge, pointing out that real mass work was the penetration of the working class through its most advanced layers, not tailing the class at its present level of consciousness. Trotsky's comments on communist press policy are very much to the point:

“What is a ‘mass paper’? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the ‘mass paper.’ It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a "mass paper" to have the masses accept it in reality. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which transforms itself easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, lighten our slogans--in short, to throw out the ballast. Basically this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but must correspond to subjective appreciations (extremely superficial and inadequate) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans which prove themselves correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal appreciation.”
-- "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36, pp. 58-59

After the SL/RCY comrades left, we called the WL offices in New York and told them that we had spoken with SL and were unable to answer SL's criticisms. When the WL delegation arrived, Wohlforth's first remark was that he was speaking to us under protest, and that after our discussions any further contact with SL would mean a break in our relations with them. Wohlforth refused to answer any of our questions about Bangladesh, women, Cuba and what we had come to believe was the reformist and disorienting nature of their work in the SSEU -- forming an electoral bloc with a section of the union bureaucracy, after having previously characterized them as sellouts in the pages of the Bulletin.

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As for women's liberation, screamed Wohlforth, "the working class hates faggots, women's libbers and hippies, and so do we!" The WL hates McGovern because he likes "faggots, women's libbers and hippies." We found this strange, since we hated McGovern because he is a representative of the ruling class.

___________________________________

Refusing to deal with our questions, Wohlforth resorted to verbal intimidation and smokescreen arguments about "method." We were, he shrieked, nothing but a small circle of friends who "hated the working class" and were only interested in "picking" at the authority of the "Fourth International (i.e., the IC). We replied that our reason for contacting the WL in the first place was precisely our desire to overcome the limitations of our localism, and we insisted that our questions were serious and legitimate. "Pick, pick, pick," Wohlforth answered. Did we agree with the IC on the '53 letter and the '63 reunification? -- that was all that mattered. Being Marxists we rejected this merely documentary claim to represent the continuity of the Fourth International. We asked Wohlforth how his "correct" evaluation of '53 and '63 led dialectically to his position, for instance, on the police strike.

From this point on, Wohlforth's only tactic was intimidation and slander, abandoning completely "Trotskyist " principle for Stalinist practice. As for women's liberation, screamed Wohlforth, "the working class hates faggots, women's libbers and hippies, and so do we!" The WL hates McGovern because he likes "faggots, women's libbers and hippies." We found this strange, since we hated McGovern because he is a representative of the ruling class. This tirade we felt was a reflection of, and a capitulation to, the most backward prejudices of the working class. Wohlforth argued that our attraction to the SL/RCY represented a petty-bourgeois desire to sit around and talk about politics, and that if we really wanted to be "hard communists" we would join the WL. We rejected the WL's anti-Marxist attitude toward political debate ands clarification and their slanders about "discussion-group" behavior against the SL, whose trade union work is both politically principled and real, unlike the WL's. We subsequently broke off all relations with the WL.

DIALECTICS

Wohlforth's claim to "historic continuity" and the asserted correctness of his "dialectical method" is loose talk--dangerous and disorienting. How is it that the WL/YS has supported the police strike, the Indian invasion of Pakistan, the Newton wing of the Black Panther Party, etc.? "Impressionists" and "empiricists" might ask: What is the "process" by which cops become workers, the Indian army becomes liberators and Huey Newton takes up Marxism (prior to taking up black capitalism)? Here is the answer: Dialectics. Congratulations, comrade Wohlforth! Fortunately, Lenin rejected this sort of rubbish:

"But the great Hegelian dialectics which Marxism made its own, having first turned it right side up, must never be confused with the vulgar trick of justifying the zig-zags of politicians who swing from the revolutionary to the opportunist wing of the party, with the vulgar habit of lumping together particular statements, and particular developmental factors, belonging to different stages of a single process. Genuine dialectics does not justify the errors of individuals, but studies the inevitable turns, proving that they were inevitable by a detailed study of the process of development in all its concreteness. One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as an abstract truth, truth is always concrete And one more thing, the great Hegelian dialectics should never be confused with that vulgar worldly wisdom so well expressed by the Italian saying: Mettere la coda dove non va il capo(sticking in the tail where the head will not go through)."
-- "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, " Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 437.

For Lenin dialectics is more than a few impressions of disconnected aspects of development, but is a totalistic understanding of an object or a process "in all its sides, connections and mediations." Wohlforth's pronouncements about "developing the Marxist dialectic " represent a qualitative regression into the Joseph Stalin-Mao Tse-Tung school of dialectical hocus-pocus, whereby bureaucrats and Stalinist misleaders become "objectively revolutionary " since "objective conditions" that hover above the class struggle turn "bad things into good things" (as Mao so aptly put it).

Wohlforth is also proud of the fact that the "Workers League takes sides," as in the police strike and the India-Pakistan War. SL's Leninist position of revolutionary defeatism in regard to the Indian invasion of Bangladesh was labelled "abstentionist" by the Bulletin. When, however, SL/RCY raised the question of excluding the bourgeoisie at NPAC/SMC conferences, the WL has abstained on the vote!

We believe in taking sides too, that is, picking the right side of the class line.

LABOR PARTY

Two recent examples of "bad things turning into good things" are George Meany and I. W. Abel, formerly bad, now good. Joyfully touting Meany's and Abel's right-wing maneuvering vis-a-vis the Democratic Party, the Bulletin proclaims this to be genuine evidence of Labor's imminent move towards political independence. Uncritically reporting Abel's remarks at the Democratic Convention, the WL enthuses over Abel's disgruntled chatter about a labor party, failing to add that these remarks were made in a nominating speech for Henry Jackson!

The methodological premise underlying this bureaucratic vanguardism is the conception that the forward movement of the class can push the Meanys and Abels in a revolutionary direction. This is a fundamental revision of the Leninist thesis that the bureaucracy must be overthrown in political struggle through the intervention of communists in the trade unions. It is, rather, typical of Pabloist methodology. As Marxists, we recognize the contradictory nature of the union bureaucracy. On the one hand, the bureaucrats are the conscious agents of the capitalist class in the labor movement; on the other hand, their base of power is the mass organizations of the working class, organizations built through years of militant struggles. The question of calling upon union bureaucrats to form a labor party, as the question of whether or not to extend critical support to a Labor Party or Communist Party electoral candidate, revolves around the question of making or breaking illusions in the working class about its "leadership. " It was in this manner that Lenin explained "critical support, " likening it to the way in which a rope supports a hanged man. If a left-talking bureaucrat with real influence in the rank and file has been paying lip service to the need for a labor party, we would try to expose him by calling upon him to act concretely on his words -- i.e., initiate campaigns in other unions toward calling a congress of labor to construct its own party -- all the while pointing out that we do not expect him to do it, and publicizing his real record of betrayal of the ranks. To uncritically tail the actions of the most reactionary section of the union bureaucracy and to put leftist meanings into the words of Meany et al. is nothing but cynical maneuvering, treacherously bolstering the sagging credibility of these fossils in the eyes of the rank and file. If successful, the result is precisely the creation of new illusions, new false consciousness in the working class, rather than the breaking of illusions and the building of class, and socialist, consciousness among workers.

Thus the WL has given up any semblance of communist opposition in the unions to become yet another of many centrist and reformist groups competing for the role of left pressure group on the bureaucracy.

INTERNATIONALISM

And what of that much-vaunted internationalism of Wohlforth/Healy? The recent OCI-SLL split in Healy's "International" demonstrates the hollowness of this claim, proving the IC since Cannon's '53 Open Letter to be nothing more than a mutual non-aggression pact between national parties desperately clutching their "spheres of influence" and unable to wage a thoroughgoing international struggle against Pabloism. The IC (since the OCI split) has acknowledged the incompleteness of the 1953 split, done a 180-degree turn on their evaluation of Cannon, now arguing that Cannon's Open Letter was not a reflex of "American pragmatism" (their old position) but a great act of internationalism!

The SLL finds itself able to maintain its international credentials only through a combination of Stalinist-like hooliganism and active myth-making--such as Wohlforth's statements at a meeting with the BMC: "I loved that man Cannon, I loved him!" Wohlforth has never given the reason for the change from his 1965 position, when he 'stated: "We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism. " (Conversations with Wohlforth, Marxist Bulletin No. 3, part iv-1965, published by Spartacist, 3rd session, 9 July 1965)

WL/YS: A DEAD END - JOIN THE RCY!

To the comrades of the YS we say: You were recruited into a cynical and opportunist organization. Healy's and Wohlforth's "internationalist" pretensions notwithstanding, the WL/YS is the most deceitful of dead ends, irrevocably incapable of providing Leninist leadership for the working-class movement, a "Trotskyist" outsider having nothing in common with the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and the first four Congresses of the Communist International.

We, members of the Buffalo Marxist Collective, have consciously and definitively rejected the WL/YS and are presently engaged in discussions leading to fusion with the RCY. Unlike the WL which pretends to be leading the working class through get-rich-quick schemes like the "Labor Party Now" conference and has proved totally incapable of consistently upholding Leninist principles, the SL/RCY is constructing the nucleus of a mass vanguard party in the United States, and struggling for the rebirth of the Fourth International through splits and fusions based on principled programmatic agreement. We have made a decision to be part of that struggle and we call on all serious revolutionaries in the YS to do the same.

--Buffalo Marxist Collective, 20 October 1972

(Distributed to WL "Labor Party" Conference, Chicago, 21-22 October 1972)

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.)