Healyites Blow Up (1985)

Workers Vanguard No. 391 (15 November 1985)

Banda/Slaughter vs Healy/Redgrave

Healyites Blow Up

The spectacular explosion of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is a sweet moment of revenge for a wide swathe of Trotskyists, ostensible and others who have been abused and slandered by the Healy/Banda machine of political bandits over the course of decades. The story broke late last month when two warring wings – one led by Gerry Healy and actress Vanessa Redgrave, the other led by Healy’s long time hatchet man Michael Banda and above-the-battle intellectual Cliff Slaughter – expelled each other. The ostensible basis was the rather remarkable charge that the 73-year-old Healy had been sexually abusing woman comrades for the last 19 years or so. What gives the event its prurient and vicious British bourgeois press but the fact that Healy’s role in the WRP roughly mimicked that of Stalin in the CPSU. The WRP’s supreme organizational principle was keeping the ranks in line by a combination of simple physical gangsterism and the cult of Healy as unique interpreter of the twin mystifications, “security” and “dialectics.”

As we continue collecting and evaluating the information, we think WV readers will find informative the article reprinted below from Socialist Organiser No. 251, 7 November 1985. The article, titled “The WRP Proves Us Right,” appeared under the byline of Sean Matgamna, a sharp-tongued British centrist. Matgamna and his Socialist Organiser know whereof they speak. And they surely have earned the right to enjoy the WRP’s downfall, having been hauled into the capitalist courts by Healy/Banda for having published “libelous” statements about the WRP which were manifestly true.

Matgamna’s article presents, from his own political standpoint, as good an interpretation of the split as we are likely early to encounter. And he nails the whole WRP cabal for its most corrupt political act – the explicit justification of the execution of Iraqi Communist militants by the Ba’ath military regime. “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi” was WV’s headline in 1979 when the WRP thus took to the loathsome logical conclusion its corrupt press agentry for murderous bourgeois-nationalists like Libya’s Qaddafi, Iran’s Khomeini and the PLO’s Arafat.

In bringing Matgamna’s article to the attention of WV readers we of course are not endorsing Matgamna’s centrist political views, particularly his stance toward the Labour Party – from which, we think, he also derives the characterization of Healy as a revolutionary in the immediate postwar period and the evaluation presented of the alignments in the British Trotskyist movement at that time, i.e., around the demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

REPRINTED FROM SOCIALIST ORGANISER NO. 251, 7 NOVEMBER 1985

By Sean Matgamna

Kennington Park Road, South London, last Saturday, 2nd. Four people are selling “Newsline” as they wait for the anti-apartheid march to come by. Two men and two women; all of them are in their late 20s or early 30s.

Suddenly a half-brick comes whizzing through the air from the other side of the road and lands at their feet. It has been thrown by a burly man, also about 30.

The brick is only the start. A steady rain of stones follows the brick across the road, and soon the intrepid four take refuge in the rhododendron bushes.

Triumphantly, the bombardier then jumps on a wall, raises both hands above his head after the fashion of football fans, and chants “Healy! Healy! Healy!” Then he drops back into the housing estate.

After the events of the WRP’s week, it’s a wonder they haven’t been going for each other with guns and knives! The picture of what has happened in the WRP is now reasonably clear.

The organisation has split down the middle. The Healy faction’s claim that they have the majority of the members of the old organisation on their side may even be true. The bourgeois press credits the old WRP with five to seven thousand members, but it was probably not more than one-tenth of that. So when the Bandaites jeer that Healy only has 250 supporters, they are admitting that he has something like half the organisation.

The Healyites have declared their expelled Central Committee minority to be the WRP, and claim to have held a special conference which “rejected” Gerry Healy’s expulsion and instead expelled Michael Banda and the other “conspirators” who raised their hands against the great leader.

Their resolution explicitly gave Healy a special place in the WRP, making it an article of faith to believe Gerry Healy to be “the outstanding leader of the world Trotskyist movement in the post-war period.” They have brought out one issue of their own “Newsline” (eight pages and without any sports section hich undoubtedly points to a propagandist deviation by them away from mass work) and an issue of “Young Socialist.” They have launched an appeal for £250,000 to bring out their “Newsline” daily from next January.

Gerry Healy is accused of sexual abuse of 26 and more women. This salacious “red-in-the-bed” stuff has been spread all over the tabloid press for the last week. But by far the most important and interesting developments have been the other charges that the Bandaites have laid against Healy and implicitly against their own organisation and its entire history.

In “Newsline” and in interviews with the bourgeois press, WRP general secretary Michael Banda has repeated SO’s [Socialist Organiser] comments on the WRP phrase for phrase and sometimes word for word.

Banda has:

1. Denounced Healy’s followers such as the Redgraves as people who have the attitude of religious cultists towards their “guru” Healy. We were sued for saying that.

2. Denounced Healy for systematic and routine violence and brutality against members of the organisation. We were sued for saying that.

3. Denounced Healy for using pressure, intimidation and violence to coerce young women comrades, into sexual activity with him. We were sued for saying that the organisation “exploited” raw young people.

4. Newsline now denounces the Healy faction for hiving a morality of “anything goes for the organisation.”

5. They challenge the Healy-Redgrave faction to sue them if what they say is not true. “In the days when they, dominated the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, newspapers, political opponents, trade unionists and individuals who happened to cross them were showered with writs” (“Newsline” 5.11.85). You can say that again!

Paranoid

6. Banda describes Healy as “a classic case of schizoid paranoia.” Classic case or not, he has been publicly paranoid for at least a quarter of a century.

7. Banda denounces Healy’s works on dialectical materialism, long the bible on which WRP members were trained, as “an outrageous piece of charlatanism.”

8. Banda denounces Healy for justifying the execution of Communist Party members by the vile Ba’athist regime in Iraq. Reports have appeared in one bourgeois paper that militants from Iraq who came to the WRP school were later turned over to the Iraqi regime, which killed them. Banda is quoted as saying that the motive was to get “bags of money.” It is not clear whether this is true or not, though people within the WRP claim to have evidence that at least one person was so denounced to the Iraqi government.

Explosion

There are also some political shifts by the Bandaites, adding up to a small move away from the lunacy of Healy and towards a slightly more realistic appreciation of the world they actually live in. It is still too early to assess this, because many things are obviously being said for effect, and the anti-Healy WRP has not settled down politically yet.

The probable reasons for the explosion and its dynamics are now pretty clear also: Healy had agreed to take a back seat or retire, no doubt under pressure, but apparently with the agreement of some who are now his supporters. But Healy is a half-crazy – and sometimes completely crazy – old man, who would not find that congenial.

There may have been political differences or nuances in play, but that would have had no autonomous weight. Healy seems. to have been forced to sign a written agreement to retire. But the Political Committee bloc that had pushed for his retirement then began to break up.

Two prominent WRP leaders, Mitchell and Torrance, seem to have changed sides, and perhaps others did too. The Political Committee reversed the decision that Healy would retire. A minority led by Banda revolted and appealed to the Central Committee, whose majority backed them. They decided on drastic action against Healy, and grabbed the weapons to hand. Hence the charges.

For the Bandaites it was probably a matter of survival. Theirs is a world where nobody has the right to disagree with the caliph, where disagreement is heresy against the leader in his capacity as pontiff and treason against him in his capacity as monarch. To “conspire” and lose, or to usurp and be overthrown, is to lose your head.

Healy has politically “executed” other long-time associates for a lot less than forcing him to retire. For example, Tim Wohlforth, leader of the U.S. clone group for a dozen years, was purged because he was slow to join Healy when Healy denounced Wohlforth’s wife as a CIA agent.

If Healy regained control, his defeated opponents would not have lasted long. So Banda and his allies acted as Healy had long taught them to act: brutally and without concern for decency, credibility or consistency.

The WRP’s atmosphere was saturated with incipient or actual violence, intimidation and terror. The organisation was a cult, built on the leader principle around Healy. Within it Healy did more or less what he liked.

It is as certain as anything is that in that organisation sexual exploitation, and where necessary harassment, intimidation, or ‘worse, would be part of the great leader’s way of life.

In one notorious case – I know the people involved – Healy beat up a woman comrade, a full-time organiser, because she wanted an abortion rather than to have his baby. (This is probably the case that got to the Control Commission in 1964 – she had two brothers and a husband in the organisation, one on the Central Committee.) But nevertheless it is also true that a considerable part of the ballyhoo against Healy’s sexual antics is both frame-up and an appeal to backwardness. Insofar as anything was voluntary in the WRP, many, of the “harem 26” must have acted voluntarily.

Revolutionary

Despite the political and personal weaknesses and inadequacies that over 20 years ago turned Gerry Healy into a bitter enemy of the Trotskyism he set in his youth to fight for, Healy was once a revolutionary. He was one of a small group at the end of the ‘40s and the beginning of the ‘50s who had the courage to set out to rebuild the Trotskyist movement when it collapsed and fell apart under the leadership of Ted Grant and Jock Haston.

If today there is poetic justice in his treatment at the hands of his pupils, as well as essential truth in what they say against him, that is the measure of how degenerate Healy had become.

Machiavelli might draw the lesson for him thus: “He who rules by fear and terror should not live to get old and feeble.” Politically the Bandaites are in a hopeless situation. Everything they say against Healy condemns them too. They were not rank and file activists or raw youth, but Healy’s close associates for many, many years.

And what WRP tradition exists apart from the one Gerry Healy made and shaped for three decades? What do they know about politics except what he taught them? What have they ever been but Gerry Healy’s stooges, deferring when they felt inclined to take a view different from his?

Teeth

Some of them may have gritted their teeth at various times – but if so, that’s all they did. Whether or not the WRP turned would-be communists over to the Ba’athist execution squads in Iraq, the WRP’s public justification of the execution of CPers by the Iraqi government was there in black and white-in “Newsline.”

And “party discipline” is no excuse for going along with Healy and the WRP across the class line – in glorifying the Iraqi regime, or Gaddafi for example.

Banda’s attempt to “blame Healy” is already going to preposterous lengths. Did Michael Banda and others beat up a Central Committee member in the north-west last June? Yes. “But Healy told me to,” says Banda! Nobody who went through Healy’s “machine for maiming militants” will fail to find some satisfaction in the present explosion. Public vindication for Socialist Organiser’s stand against the WRP is, of course, satisfying.

But if the Healyites and Bandaites eat each other up like the Kilkenny cats, that won’t undo the damage they have done to the Marxist movement and to the name of Marxism in the British labour movement.

We can only undo the damage by building the Marxist movement.

Honest members of the WRP can take the word of the Banda faction leaders for nothing. They should study the record, debate the issues that have divided the WRP from other leftists – like those who support Socialist Organiser – and break out of the WRP ghetto and into discussion with other socialists.

Organization for Hire 1 (1985)

Workers Vanguard No. 379 (17 May 1985)

Smash Fascist Smear of SL

[Part 1]

Imagine that you open up a presumably left-wing paper and see this headline: “Fascists Lead 5,000 Black Workers to Stop Klan in Washington.” You might think you fell asleep and woke up in Alice in Wonderland. What kind of “fascists” would lead thousands of militants, drawn mainly from predominantly black unions, to stop a KKK provocation? On 27 November 1982 the Spartacist League mobilized the vanguard of the black working class to deal a big defeat to the racist terrorists who, emboldened by Reagan reaction and by the broad-daylight “Greensboro massacre” of five leftist union and civil rights activists in North Carolina, were seeking to march in the nation’s capital for the first time since 1925. Now somebody wants you to believe that the organization which led the labor-based action that stopped the Klan is “racist” and “fascist.” These characterizations of the SL appeared in the March 1 Bulletin, newspaper of the Workers League. And if the Bulletin did not print the headline we have imagined for them about November 27, it’s only because the WL rarely mentions the existence of the mobilization - the largest labor-based anti-fascist action since the 1939 anti-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, also led by Trotskyists-except to bait it as a “provocation.”

The WL is the sinister American incarnation of Thomas Gerard Healy (aka “Gerry”), a corrupt plebeian political adventurer who, as sort of an illegitimate stepchild of Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch and Ian MacGregor, runs a considerably larger operation in England. The Bulletin article, ostensibly a response to our coverage of the case of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called “New York subway gunman,” claims that our articles are “explicitly racist” and establish the completion of “the evolution of the Spartacist group toward fascism.” Later it defines us as "a middle-class cult group” and expounds on our political origins in the typical Healyite style which combines deliberate slander with a bizarre paranoia. The article launched in they U.S. was picked up and reprinted by Healy’s papers in England and Australia and, in Sinhalese translation, in Sri Lanka.

Then on April 19 a new Bulletin article appeared headlined “Spartacist Opposes Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” charging us with “demoralization, cynicism and racism” and terming us "petty-bourgeois reactionaries.” Both articles carry the by-line of David North, head of the local American Workers League. The basis for Healy’s charges of Spartacist “racism” and “fascism” boils down to two things: l) that we object to the Healyites’ view that people, as opposed to the state, have no right to bear arms; 2) that we say that nothing short of proletarian revolution can win freedom for the black masses of South Africa. But what’s really going on here has little to do with Goetz or South Africa, and everything to do with the British miners strike, as we shall see.

Gerry Healy has a problem. His problem is that a lot of people just learned some things in the heat of sharp class struggle in Britain. And they saw Gerry Healy and his gang fronting for the redbaiters and union-busters, screaming for the blood of miners union leader Arthur Scargill.

The British miners strike was 12 months of class warfare in the coal fields, a militant struggle which shook Margaret Thatcher’s Britain to its foundations and pointed toward the question of which class shall rule. Confronted with the deliberate treachery of the pro-capitalist Labour Party Trades Union Congress tops who, all in the name of “unity” of course, herded scabs and isolated the miners to face Thatcher’s fury, the militant miners, winning to their side the best elements of the oppressed and exploited, held out for a year and spiked the Tories’ effort at wholesale destruction of the union.

All of the English fake-left stands pretty exposed by their gutless behavior. Flinching from the hard battle against the hated “Iron Lady,” they mostly made outright apologies for scabbing, and all espoused “unity” when what was needed was a sharp break with the TUC/ Labour tops’ stab in-the-back refusal to spread the miners strike. But even among this sorry lot, Healy’s gang was distinguished by very special treachery.

Fingerman for TUC Cold Warriors

Healy made his loathsome “contribution” to the British miners strike before the strike began, at the Trades Union Congress meeting at Blackpool in September 1983. The order of the day there was to draw the line in support of the Cold War politics of Reagan/Thatcher and to impose on the unions the policies of the TUC right wing, including operation with the Tories over anti-union legislation and conciliation toward the rightist, pro-American split from the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party. The key task for the likes of Frank Chapple, Bill Sirs & Co. was to isolate leftist union leaders, and in particular to witchhunt (miners union head Arthur Scargill, so that this militant union should face all alone the anti-union assault that Thatcher was already preparing.

The Blackpool TUC opened by solidarizing with Reagan’s barbarous Korean Air Lines Flight 007 war provocation against the Soviet Union, which sent over 200 innocent people to their deaths. Not surprising, given that Chapple, Sirs and others of the TUC leaders are open sponsors of the CIA-backed “Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding,” mouthpiece ,in the labor movement for Thatcher’s NATO-loving line. In the midst of this carnival of the Labour rights, on the third day of the TUC, the Healyites dropped a carefully aimed bombshell: their News Line published a letter by Arthur Scargill in which he correctly castigated Polish Solidarnosc as “an anti-socialist organisation” seeking the overthrow of the Polish state. Healy had waited seven weeks to publish Scargill’s letter at the optimal moment. It was a bonanza for the Tory rags of Fleet Street and became the centerpiece of the TUC right’s wholesale red baiting attack on Scargill. The Healyites were so proud that they issued a pamphlet about their role in the anti-Scargill witchhunt.

The British miners strike – which side were you on? This is the defining question for the left in England right now. And where was Healy? - the fingerman for the most right-wing agents of British capitalism in the labor movement, at the very moment that the lines were being drawn for the biggest class battle in more than half a century. The South Yorkshire miners who reportedly canceled their order for News Line after Blackpool expressed the contempt for Healy and his whores which has certainly become generalized in the miners’ communities.

We’re Marxists, defenders of the working class. We vigorously supported the miners strike, by raising the strategy and tactics we believe were necessary to win the struggle, including by seeking where we could to spread the , strike to other unions (our supporter Patrick Sliney was tacked because he fought for active solidarity by his own union). American Spartacists, through the Partisan Defense Committee, raised over 620,000 for the British miners from American workers, against the active opposition of the AFL-CIO tops who refused to lift one little finger for a militant British union which is led by “reds" like Scargill. We have our criticisms of the miners’ leadership; indeed neither we nor Scargill have been quiet bout our differences, but over this crucial class battle there as a unity of action, albeit a very lopsided one. And Scargill ran the miners strike about as well as any labourite bureaucrat could-that is, showing the limitations and underlying weakness of the best-intentioned “Labour left” reformist.

Meanwhile, some of the best elements among the miners have started paying attention to the Spartacist League of Britain. They think the Spartacists had the right strategy to win the miners’ struggle: pull in a couple of the other key unions to “shut down the country.” Alone among the British left papers, our Workers Hammer told the truth: the need for a fighting workers leadership not afraid to confront the capitalist state in a struggle which poses the question of class power; the essential role of a revolutionary party forged by splitting the militant ranks of labor from the traitorous tops, uniting the vanguard fighters on behalf of all the oppressed of capitalism. That’s why slandering the Spartacists has suddenly become urgent business for the Healy gang once again. England is Healy’s home base, and he even used to aspire to a following among the miners. So the American Healyites in their remote bunker got their orders to do a smear job on the Sparts.

The opportunist British left, and Healy the counterfeit leftist, are eager for the working people to forget the lessons of the hard-fought strike, which was a profound exposure of the slavish Labour “leadership.” The social consciousness of the miners was altered as they found that the specially oppressed, from blacks and Asians to homosexuals, were a solid base of outside support for the strike. The miners got a concentrated education in the nature of the bosses’ state and the cops. And they learned about Healy. In the normal course of things, lessons pretty quickly become eroded or submerged in defeat, as political life flows back into the usual channels – i.e., the reformist channels of the Labour Party. But the miners union has a long memory, and it’s our job to see that the lessons of this struggle are not forgotten. Of course all the “left wing” fakers have a stake in the idea that most betrayals should be forgotten, forgiven, accepted as “necessary” or inevitable. But for Healy it as a priciple that there must be no memory in political life. The determination to glory in lies, to wage war on consciousness, is perhaps the most consistent feature of Healy's loathsome political career.

Healyites: An Organization for Hire

When we first encountered the Healyites many years ago, they had begun espousing orthodox, anti-revisionist Trotskyism. (Indeed they still try to do so when it suits them, except that they come close to posing Trotsky as Stalin’s agent - a fairly unique paranoid delusion.) But they do not have inherent politics of their own nor have they had any for a long time. For nearly two decades, they have done their best to be simply an organization for hire.

Healy’s appetites came to fruition when the Healy gang became the most unashamed devotees of assorted gangs of Near East murderers, vicious reactionary militarist regimes like Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Islamic fanatics in Libya. The Healyites have been among the world’s most fulsome supporters of the ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the most grotesque champions of the “unity” of Arafat’s PLO. In 1979 they explicitly justified the Iraqi Ba’ath regime’s execution of 21 members of the Stalinist Communist Party, historically the leadership of the militant, strategic oil workers. Healy’s embrace of these murderous capitalist regimes was prepared by years of cynical adulation of the so-called “Arab Revolution,” a classless and entirely disembodied notion whose function is to permit those who are so inclined to justify anything in the name of “anti-imperialism.” But more than ideology is involved in Healy’s posture; the deal was consummated with something a lot more solid than the collected works of Colonel Qaddafi. Healy’s embrace of Qaddafi coincided with the reappearance of a Healyite daily paper, News Line, in England two months after his previous daily, Workers Press, had folded.

Hence the Healyites, as corrupt press agents for some of the world’s most unappetizing capitalist regimes, are hardly acting as a part of the workers movement. But then they have always been distinguished by an incredible programmatic instability and a cynicism which boggles the mind, as well as a penchant for physical gangsterism against dissident members and political opponents. They are characterized by slavish Labourite reformism, which in the U.S. is expressed in the most grotesque catering to the white labor aristocracy, at the same time as they seek to appeal to restless youth with the most ultra-“revolutionary,” not to say bloodthirsty, rhetoric. The Healyites are a professional cheering section for Third World nationalism and worse, at the same time as they are marked closer to home by the most cringing legalism. Out of this dichotomy comes the attachment to frenzied slander and violence and the insistence that nobody should remember what was written yesterday and the day before.

From their earliest days the American Healyites have been on the market for an influential patron to sell themselves to. When they’re not practicing the world’s oldest profession on behalf of Near Eastern despots, they are sucking up to the labor bureaucrats at home. In 1967, at the very moment when millions of youth were being radicalized by the imperialist war against Vietnam and the movement for black freedom, the Bulletin put forward a program for a “labor party” that only George Meany could love. Meany, who headed the AFL-CIO at the time, was part of the Cold War labor “leadership” installed after the American labor movement was beheaded by the anti-“red” purges which drove out the communists and militants after World War II. Meany & Co. supported U.S. imperialism’s war against Vietnam even after most capitalist politicians had given it up as a losing cause.

Take a look at the WL’s five-point “labor party” program, which we reproduce [on page 34] from the Bulletin’s front page. For the WL, the war and black people just didn’t exist. A program for labor? This was a program for the bureaucratic fat-cats whose conservative, openly racist and pro-government line makes the AFL-CIO a bastion of sellouts at home and a witting cover for the CIA’s anti-labor machinations all over the world. Now almost 20 years later, George Meany himself couldn’t have done a better job than Healy did at Blackpool to spearhead the Cold War witchhunt of Scargill to facilitate “Iron Lady” Thatcher’s union-busting.

Catering to the labor bureaucracy means mimicking every aspect of racial insensitivity and political backwardness. And so the WL displays a recurring fondness for cops and prison guards as an alleged part of the labor movement; in 1971 the Bulletin’s approving front-page article on a bonapartist “strike” by New York cops was headlined “New York Labor Explodes.”

An undated Bulletin supplement issued in about March of this year perfectly illustrates this profile. The supplement is by Ed Winn, a Black transit worker identified as the “Workers League candidate for President of the United States in the 1984 elections.” Addressed to the members of the New York transit workers union - a strategic union with a militant history and a high proportion of black, Spanish-speaking and immigrant workers - the supplement runs two full pages of newsprint, mainly on the upcoming transit contract and the perennial WL call for a “Congress of Labor,” without ever mentioning one single word about black people in any connection. What kind of program for city labor can exclude the central necessity of a labor-led fight against racist oppression, against cop brutality, against killer cutbacks, against the resurgent racist reaction of Reagan's America? The WL calls for ... a Labor Party, obviously one that won't mention blacks even when addressing a largely black union which ought to be the powerful fist behind the demands of the impoverished ghetto masses. Even where the WL suggests as its own eventual goals “a workers government,” “socialist policies, “revolutionary struggle” etc... there is clearly no place in such “policies” for black struggle and no hint that socialists are committed to utterly smashing racism as a vital necessity to win the communist road to human freedom.

This is all of a piece with the Bulletin headline “Black Caucuses Are Reactionary,” the constant sneering at women’s liberation which perfectly reflects the Healyites’ consistent hostility to all questions of fighting special oppression.

But at the same time that the Healyites are sucking up to the labor aristocracy, they’re also working the other side of the street (or you could say that they’re crippled on two legs). To obtain a “base,” they spout a lot of militant rhetoric intended to appeal to restless, alienated unemployed young people. This provides a pool of semi-lumpenized kids to serve as cannon fodder under the direction of a totally cynical and corrupt cadre. The emphasis on youth also has another advantage: it’s important to Healy that nobody know what he said yesterday, and kids are good for that.

But this system, transplanted into the U.S. by the Workers League, has a problem which is reflected in the exaggeratedly schizophrenic profile apparent in every issue of the Bulletin. In England, the Iumpen youth and the working class are mainly of the same ethnicity. The 16 year-old white kid that joins Healy’s Young Socialists out of desperation at the conditions of life under decrepit British capitalism normally partakes of the same general outlook as his older brother - he is aware that there is a working class and a capitalist class and sees the Labour Party as immutably the vehicle for protecting working class interests, however impatient he may be with the old men who run it. He can enjoy the endless youth marches and the revolutionary rhetoric in the spirit in which they are intended: as pressure tactics in the framework of the tired old reformist perspective toward the Labour Party, “make the Lefts fight.”

In America, the counterpart to these unemployed white youth are a lot harder to handle. They are mainly black and, under the American conditions of negligible class consciousness in the whole working class, they can by no means be presumed to be pro-union, and will not be kept In line by the exciting prospect of a labor party, particularly the pro-cop, anti-black “labor party” favored by the WL – so the Healyites have some problems as they run around depressed inner cities like Detroit seeking a base by posing as defenders of black folk and “racist”-baiting anyone who intrudes on their turf.

Not all their problems are political, either. The schema worked out by Healy for the English social reality and loyally applied by the WL here has had some unexpected consequences. As you may know, every issue of the Bulletin since October 1977 has carried a front-page call: “Investigate the Murder of Tom Henehan.” From the facts as the WL presents them, we have to assume that Henehan, a Healyite cadre who was on duty at a WL dance when he was shot, was probably just applying the normal Healyite techniques of cajoling and strong-arming kids looking for a good time, in order to get them onto the buses for a conference somewhere, or into a contingent for a youth march, or into a dance hall for a Healyite festivity, and then to keep them there. Only this time, unfortunately for Tom Henehan, some of the kids the WL was manhandling evidently had big brothers. Of course this rather simple explanation is far from sufficient for the WL, which insists that the two men who were convicted of shooting Henehan were paid political assassins, and insinuates they were working for the Socialist Workers Party, laying heavy stress on “the role of confessed FBI informant Edward Heisler within the leadership of the SWP during the months that the assassination of Tom Henehan was prepared....” Healy uses his paranoia as a kind of justification for fleeing Trotsky’s revolutionary Marxism, coupling it with an ever so abstract and arid manipulation of a mystified “dialectics” where only Gerry gets to know which “opposites to hold fast to.”

Anti-Trotskyist Slander Machine

The Henehan affair is part of a multi-year slander campaign which the Healyites call “Security and the Fourth International,” aimed at the SWP, now a reformist shell but formerly the Trotskyist party in this country. Healy’s chief target is veteran SW P leader Joseph Hansen, who died in 1979. Hansen presided as “theoretician” over the SWP’s reformist degeneration in the 1960s. Running the SWP at the time was Farrell Dobbs, with present SWP head Jack Barnes (not, as WV readers know, one of our favorite people) waiting in the wings. Healy, in successive waves of escalating wild slanders, posited that Hansen was a long-standing agent of the FBI and of the Russian secret police as well. Healy claims that Hansen had, as part of Leon Trotsky’s entourage in Mexico, set up Trotsky’s assassination by the Stalinist GPU. Thereby Healy echoes the discredited Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by his “own people.” And from the claim that Hansen was an operative of the Stalinist and capitalist secret police, it’s a short half-step from Hansen to Cannon to Trotsky.

A dozen years ago the SWP, even as a fully reformist party with no programmatic attachment to Trotskyism, was interested in and capable of defending its veteran comrades. For our part, the Spartacist League, in addition to signing the SWP's united front defense statement, campaigned vigorously against Healy's lies with our own demonstrations and articles raising slogans like “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” and “Joseph Hansen Is an Honest Revisionist.”

With the death of Hansen and the accelerated purges by Barnes of virtually every element of organizational and human continuity with the old SWP, Barnes' party became unwilling or totally unable to defend the name of the old Fourth International against the Healyite slander machine. A couple of years ago the American Healyites brought suit in federal court against the SWP for having expelled one Alan Gelfand. Thus they invoked the U.S. government as arbiter, supposedly to return the SWP to the revolutionary road! Legally Gelfand’s case centered on demanding that the U.S. court should intervene in the running of voluntary organizations of the left and determine who is and who isn't a member. Propagandistically the suit - charging the SWP was FBI-controlled through the SWP leadership - was a vehicle for re-raising the ludicrous slanders against Hansen. But the SWP shamefully ducked the whole issue of Hansen as a supposed accomplice to the Trotsky murder, while keeping the very existence of Gelfand’s outrageous challenge to workers organizations' rights secret from the public as long as possible.

Healy Loves the Law

Taking workers organizations to the capitalist courts is a hallmark of Healyism. For at the same time that the Healyites are violent, they’re very legalistic, and indeed Healy just loves the law. In 1966 the Healyites strong-armed Ernie Tate, an SWP supporter, when he was trying to sell literature on the sidewalk outside a Healyite political dent in London, then brought charges against him in court. In 1981 the British Healyites’ Vanessa Redgrave brought a libel suit against Socialist Organiser editor Sean Matgamna after Matgamna published an expose of these political bandits. (Interestingly, Redgrave’s suit conspicuously chose not to contest Matgamna’s allegation that Healy & Co. have received material aid from Qaddafi’s Libya.)

Healy’s love for the law brings us straight back to the Goetz case. For the Healyites’ basic thrust on the Goetz case is, simply, that only duly constituted authority should carry guns. All the cheerleading for “revolution” abroad notwithstanding, nobody beats Healy for legalism close to home.

Last December 22 a skinny white guy, Bernhard Goetz, shot four young black men during an apparent shakedown on the IRT subway, and the case of the “subway vigilante” began. We have written about the Goetz case, a fable of our time, illuminating the desperately sharply posed conditions of life in Reagan's America. It's an ambiguous situation, and we said so.

What the Healyites have to say about our approach to the Goetz case bears, as might be expected, little relationship to reality. Thus:

“However, there is another newspaper that has joined [Post publisher Rupert]Murdoch in the adulation of this fascist psychotic - the so-called Workers Vanguard published by the political sect known as 'Spartacist.' It has devotedtwo lengthy articles supporting Goetz's shooting of the four black youth in terms that are explicitly racist... This article clearly establishes the evolution of the Spartacist group toward fascism, completing the process of political putrefaction which will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the history of this group.”

The Bulletin goes on to define us as “a middle-class cult group set up around the person of James L. Robertson,” who, it says, has functioned since the early 1960s “as a behind the scenes operator for [you guessed it] the FBI agent then leading the SWP, the late Joseph Hansen.”

Probably the Healyites are counting on the indisputable shock value of the Goetz affair itself for the distant reader. Even many Americans, if they aren’t vividly aware of the New York subways, will just be put off by the idea of people shooting people. Middle-class Britishers who think their own cops never carry guns are probably utterly bewildered by the American social reality. It’s hard for them to know what it means to be approached by four young black strangers in the IRT (the South African legal code, perhaps derived from the British, has a precise phrase for what New Yorkers know as a shakedown: “demanding with menaces”). English readers might consider how it feels to walk into a railroad car full of crazed soccer fans. Or try walking down Shankhill Road at high noon wearing a crucifix. Brother, your ass is grass. What is “racist” about saying, as the Healyites quote from Workers Vanguard, “Marauding by black youths on the NYC subways is a mass phenomenon”? That is a fact, which black people are especially aware of, because they are the most frequent victims.

To convey a sense of the American social reality, more specifically the violence that racism and desperation breed, in our original articles on Goetz we quoted from Manchild in the Promised Land, a work by a black writer which is eloquent and prcise on the subject of lumpen crime. This time, in deference to the WL's ultra-philistinism, we will put literary sources aside and simply quote in full a title story from the New York Times:

“A group of four teenagers robbed three men on the IRT No. 2 elevated subway line in the Bronx early yesterday, stabbing two victims and beating the third, the police said.
“Two of the victims, from the Bronx, wre asleep when the gang attacked them, according to a spokesman for the transit police, Edward Silberfarb.
“The first incident occurred at 2 A.M. when Joseph Lee, 33 years old, was attacked by the group on a southbound train entering the Gun Hill Road station. He told police he had been punched, kicked and robbed of $20. He was treated at Jacobi Hospital for minor injuries.
“An hour later, the youths chased Warren Kendrew, 30, from the 219th Street platform, stabbed him and took his wallet with $15, Mr. Silberfarb said.
“Then the youths assaulted Carl Thorpe, 39, on a northbound train. He told the police that a youth had cut his right leg with a knife and that the gang had stolen his wallet with $70.
“Mr. Kendrew and Mr. Thorpe were listed in serious condition at Misericordia Hospital.”
- New York Times, 20 April

The Times, by neglecting to mention the race of either the four assailants or their three victims, will have made it impossible for the WL to evaluate the above incident. To us, it makes no difference whether these were black youth attacking whites, white youth mugging blacks, Puerto Rican youth mugging whites and blacks, or any other variant. Nobody, oppressed or not, has a license to prey opon the people. Kids with no jobs and no prospects want to eat potato chips and look at TV like everyone else, so they need money, but it's still pretty terrifying when they get it by mugging you on the subways.

The Goetz case is contradictory, and so is the outcry it has produced. It is being used simultaneously to whip up racist “backlash” sentiment and to push gun control. Central to everything we have written on Goetz is the understanding that in this violent racist country there is a huge congruence between the fear of lumpen crime and racism, and thus vigilantism necessarily acquires a fascistic political coloration. But we have also pointed out the desperation of hostile, mutually terrorized populations in the big cities, who know the capitalist “justice” system “isn’t working.” So a lot of working people - and when we say “working people” we, unlike the Healyites, don’t just mean white working people - initially responded to the Goetz case by observing that people might be better behaved if they were reminded that the skinny white guy with glasses, the black grandfather sitting next to him or the Hispanic mother across the aisle might just be “packing” a gun. This response was particularly marked among black people.

Integral to this widespread attitude is fear, and not just the often justified fear of random, casual crimes of violence by lumpen youth with little to lose, but also the eminently sensible fear of the cops. Nobody thinks the cops – being too busy sitting around getting drunk when they are not out dealing drugs or choking black kids to death – will protect them. Particularly in the social matrix of New York City, a cop is: 1) a psycho, 2) a racist and 3) not too fond of the big boys who really are on top. (Of course, the Healyites don’t share this view, instead embracing the cops as a purported part of the union movement.) The real problem in New York today isn’t one “subway vigilante” but the systematic police torture and murder of dark-skinned people, a daily occurrence in today’s “fear city.” Seeking to hide this fact, the WL puts itself right up there with [New York mayor] Ed Koch in alibiing cop terror against the working people.

Meanwhile, the reformist groups in this country, who are at bottom mainly just guilty liberals, don’t dare touch the explosively interlocked questions of crime and race. They must therefore paper over the contradictions of the Goetz case with simplifying mythology. Here the WL is absolutely indistinguishable from the common variety of reformist leftists (though as we have said, they are far from being merely this). Thus, for the Bulletin Goetz is simply a “fascist.” The Communist Party, similarly, has suggested that Goetz was some kind of German, in other words a Nazi. (Indeed, Goetz was some kind of German – his mother was a German Jew who fled Germany.) The reformist press symmetrically presents the black kids (who already had criminal records) as if they were on their way to a church social. The recourse in simplifying invention is the tip-off that they’re hiding something.

They’re hiding how hard it is in this country. The masses are being attacked in every imaginable way by a vicious Reaganite bourgeoisie on top while being eaten from below by despairing lumpen youth. And these moods do tend to a polarization - ultimately, fascism or workers revolution. And the reformists are in the business of pretending that things will get all better if only we bring back the capitalist Democratic Party (in Britain, the sellout Labour Party). For there to be any illusion of reasonableness to this “solution,” it is necessary to minimize the problem. If things were not so raw, if racism were not so integral to the fabric of capitalism, if injustice and oppression were not fundmentally rooted in the social order, indeed we wouldn't be for socialist revolution, a cataclysmic historical event frequently accompanied by very bloody savagery from the ruling class, and it's not just the ruling class of South Africa that we’re talking about.

Organization for Hire 2 (1985)

Workers Vanguard No. 379 (17 May 1985)

Smash Fascist Smear of SL

[Part 2]

Healyites’ Message: Trust the State

What keeps drawing the establishment press, the glossy news magazines and the TV types back to the Goetz case, as a tongue is drawn to a hurting tooth, is their incomprehension that so many people of all backgrounds don’t think the answer to crime is the cops. As Marxists, we oppose the monopoly of the means of violence in the hands of the capitalist state: gun control means nobody will have guns except the racist cons. the criminal elements which capitalism spawns, and let’s not forget the Times editors with their pistol-packin’ chauffeurs. When the Times’ Sulzberger lectures that everything would be okay if people would just be reasonable and the cops would act responsibly, he knows he’s got his armed men downstairs and his pistol in his desk drawer. So the bourgeois press just can’t stand the widespread alienation from the capitalist “justice” system and cops. Their line boils down to: in the interests of social orderliness, the citizens must rely on the cops no matter what. Nobody is more explicit on this than William Safire, the former Nixon press agent who is now the house ultraconservative for the New York Times. In his Times column on April 8, Safire wrote:

“The only way to stop crime is to uphold the law. If you are carrying a handgun without a license in New York State, you are breaking the law. Don't do it and don't condone it. If you start to make exceptions for people who are especially frightened, you undercut the authority of the police.
“If you are menaced by someone who demands your property, give it to him, remembering his face or voice: only if you are reasonably sure he means to kill you, and you happen to be legally armed, should you give it to him in the more vigorous sense. Most of us are not legally armed, nor should we be; in those cases, our anti-crime responsibility is to be noisy and observant victims.
“Certainly victims have rights, and all too many innocent people are
terrified by punks; that is more reason for law-and-order hard-liners to keep the amateurs out of the job that must be done by professionals.
“Become involved with law enforcement: bear witness; but leave lethal counterforce to the people we authorize to wear their guns on the outside.”

Safire, who sees himself as a conscious agent for the capitalist state, thinks that unless you happen to be legally armed, you should die for the higher good of the state. This, curiously enough, doesn’t satisfy most people. But at least Safire is consistent; he knows he’s a particularly right-wing mouthpiece for America’s rulers. His line is: trust the state. And so is Healy’s. For Healy too, only duly constituted authority should have guns. The corollary is that the British cops had the right to do anything they wanted to the striking miners. We say no, everybody has the tight to carry and to be accountable for their deeds. Which in the case of Goetz is a moot point, for the “subway shooting” was an ambiguous situation: a disturbed, possibly racist, previously victimized, armed man and four menacing criminal youth, one of whom may now be paralyzed for life.

In the British Isles everybody (with the conspicuous exceptions of the IRA and the British government) believes that firearms are a bad business. Well, we have to observe that great questions are generally resolved with guns, and sometimes daily individual existence also involves this question. In this racist society, blacks have been terrorized since the beginning of slave times; the gravest offense for them has been the mere possession of a firearm, just as for the Irish Catholics in Ulster. Those who intend to engage in social struggle cannot afford to be principled pacifists. We continue to feel keenly and bitterly the Greensboro massacre, where a well-organized cabal of Klansmen and Nazis with the assistance of the cops and FBI opened fire on a peaceful anti-KKK demonstration and selectively assassinated five supporters of the leftist Communist Workers Party. We wish that we could have been part of an effective security squad protecting those anti-racist demonstrators. And through our strategy of mobilizing the organized power of labor and blacks against fascist terror we assisted the black unionists and youth of Washington, D.C. in stopping the emboldened Klan in the streets.

On the level of individual existence too, one had better have a calculus of violence. Consider three cases: the crucial Willie Turks case, the tangential Tom Henehan case, and the dubious Bernhard Goetz case. Willie Turks was a black transit worker whose job took him to the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, an enclave of ethnic white losers. For the crime of wanting to buy a bagel on Avenue X late at night after getting off work, Willie Turks was beaten to death by a gang of racist punk kids. We think Turks should have been carrying; we think he should have had a fighting chance at self-defense. Following his murder we agitated that the Transport Workers Union should mobilize a massive demonstration of unionists on flatbed trucks through Gravesend to serve notice that Willie Turks: had thousands of union brothers who intend to protect the rights and lives of black working people. That’s the kind of law and order we support. But not Healy: he is for the absolute monopoly of armed force by the previously authorized gunmen of the capitalist state, which is of course presumed to be colorblind and class-neutral.

To recognize the ambiguity of the Goetz case means to defend the idea that Willie Turks ought to be alive. And that the Klansmen and not the anti-Klan radicals at Greensboro should be in the ground, like their comrades at Bitburg. Self-defense for Willie Turks is the individual unit of what, collectively posed, is simply the right to engage in social struggle: the right to demonstrate against the Klan, and ultimately the right of a Workers party to organize for power. Marxists understand that bourgeois democracy operates in this country, up to the point that the ruling class begins to feel itself threatened; at that point, the couple of communist representatives that we will have managed get elected to the bourgeois parliament get hauled off and shot. Whether or not you can abjure the use of force on principle depends on your aims. It’s not that Healy has flunked Lenin on the nature of the state, force and violence. No, it’s just that what he seeks is not socialist revolution but cooption, whether it’s in the government barracks in Tripoli, Libya or Baghdad, Iraq, or at home in England’s Buckingham Palace.

A Short Course in American History

The Bulletin article was written for foreign consumption. Healy intends it to be read by suckers who are moreover ignorant of American reality. Today in America near half our homes have firearms – long arms, handguns, often both. This is not generally known in countries with strong states that emerged to institutionalize the oppression of their own people, unlike America, created by European settlers pushing the frontier westward over the continent’s indigenous inhabitants.

According to the Nationals Rifle Association, every recent study shows that between 45 and 50 percent of American households have guns: the “Decision Making Information Survey” in 1978, for instance, put the figure at 47 percent. Furthermore, the guns are spread fairly evenly throughout the population; there are regional differences, but the only disparity between blacks and whites is that the weapons blacks own are usually less expensive. And it’s good for the cops that when they go to the shooting range they get to pass rows and rows of expert marksmen who are women, kids, blacks, Asians, you name it.

Formal legal equality for blacks, obtained only after World War II for the most part, includes the right to bear arms, and black Americans cherish that right no less than whites. Indeed, turning this point around, a powerful impetus to the civil rights movement was returning black soldiers who, having risked their lives in World War II and especially Korea, were not about to submit passively to the degradations of Jim Crow racism when they got back home.

The right to bear arms in America was established in a reactionary context: a frontier society murderously subduing the continent’s aboriginal peoples and controlling a laboring population consisting largely of black slaves, indentured servants, etc. But it became part of the formal legal doctrine of this country and is protected in the U.S. Constitution. Now there is a faction fight going on over this question: the right to possess a gun is mostly protected, but the right to carry is under fire. The purposes behind the gun control campaign, and its intended bloody consequences, are nowhere clearer than in the case of the martyred Malcolm X. As the most prominent militant champion of black rights and an outspoken advocate of self-defense against racist attack, Malcolm X was, in his own words, “a marked man.” Naturally the cops had less than no interest when he got death threats and his house was bombed. But when it became known that Malcolm was carrying a .30 caliber carbine in his car, the New York City Council zipped through legislation against carrying rifles or shotguns in public. And then when Malcolm X was shot down in the Audubon Ballroom, the man who was immediately arrested was one of Malcolm’s bodyguards who had managed to wound one of the assassins. Indeed the state, William Safire and Gerry Healy are very tender on the right of self-defense. In the face of deadly danger, they insist, you should just die, because it strengthens the state.

So Americans have guns, and want to keep them. This is a sociological fact of life in America, and will be a useful fact when the mass of the American population feels immediately and overtly threatened by a tyrannical government. As Marxists, we have campaigned consistently for the right of self-defense and against gun control. In reporting on our first electoral campaign, for Berkeley city council, we cited in our first paragraph our “support to the right of American Negroes to armed self-defense in the face of racist violence.” (Spartacist, May-June 1965).

In our article on the 1964 cop riot against the masses of Harlem, we called for neighborhood block councils to organize the ghetto struggles, wage rent strikes against slumlords, and oppose cop brutality: “Moreover, such councils form a natural basis for the organization of defense patrols to protect the community against future police riots-and such patrols are the embryo of that workers militia which will defend the coming American Revolution” (“Harlem Riot and After,” Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965). A major document adopted at the SL’s Founding Conference in 1966 calls for revolutionary ghetto organizations: “One of the most important functions of such representative popular organs would be the organization and direction of effective self-defense against police and racist violence. The potential for rapid growth by the American fascist movement adds to the seriousness of this task...” (“Black and Red: Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967).

A leaflet which we mass-distributed in Newark following the 1967 ghetto upheaval contained the call to “Defend the Black Ghettoes – every serious and responsible working man should exercise his right to own a gun.”

In every one of the election campaigns our general outlook is to agitate, under particular, appropriate, urgent circumstances, for an armed popular militia independent of the established state power. There is a long historical tradition behind this. Concretely, where the armed forces of the state are seen as immediately illegitimate and abusive, the effective call for and creation of such a militia can be a springboard for dual power. In Russia such a formation was called the Red Guards. But of course England, already under Charles II, wiped away such ideas after the English Revolution. And the English parlour pinks, masquerading only sometimes in red wolf’s clothing, have gone but a very little way to undo that counterrevolution. And Gerry Healy is of that legally fetishistic English pinko ilk. But he is also specially dangerous, because he imposes this kind of nasty English authoritarianism on his followers in very different circumstances around the world where the question of social power is active and immediate. He is a racketeer in the “revolution” business.

Healyites Set Up South African Masses

Turning now to the Bulletin’s sinister article on South Africa, we find ourselves castigated for “the demoralization, cynicism and racism which characterizes the political attitude of declassed anti-Marxist radicals toward revolutionary struggles of the working class and the oppressed colonial people.” The Healyites derive this from our article “South Africa on the Razor’s Edge,” WV No. 376, 5 April, which calls for the building of a revolutionary proletarian party which counterposes to popular frontism and nationalism “the program of permanent revolution, for the emancipation and reconstruction of the oppressed nation under the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Our article warns that unless the apartheid state is smashed and the racist rulers expropriated by workers revolution, the South African butchers are fully capable of unleashing massacres like Sharpeville and Uitenhage many times over.

The Healyite polemic considers that our call for black-centered workers republic and our statement that “the white population must have a place in an anti-racist society” constitute “an ultimatum directed against the black masses.” And they say that “In its call for a 'multiracial working-class vanguard,' Spartacist takes the side of that elite section of the South African working class which Leon Trotsky described as the 'privileged, arrogant caste of whites'.” Of course, in order to portray us as some kind of white-lovers, the Healyites have to drop right out of the South African reality nearly a million Indians and two and a half million people of mixed race.

What is the situation of the South African struggle today? The black masses have repeatedly displayed the most courageous defiance of the racist regime. The country appears to be seething on the brink of a widespread, open insurrection. Only the apartheid regime is not on the brink of collapse, though it may be scared enough to unleash an orgy of bloodletting against the defenseless people. Those who think the South African apartheid regime is about to collapse are counting, naively or cynically, on the notion that the apartheid butchers can be restrained by world public opinion. Thus the whole perspective of “divestment,” which posits an international strike of capital led by the U.S., whose ruler, the terror-bombers of Vietnam and Hiroshima, are seen as somehow more moral than their allies in Pretoria. In the very same issue of the Bulletin which attacks us as “defeatist,” an account of the U.S. campus anti-apartheid protests gives pride of place to a Columbia student whose quoted remarks begin: “It has been really going well. We have had support from Bishop Tutu and Jesse Jackson...” Indeed the Healyites, when they are not mouthing slogans of “People’s War” for the consumption of militants, take a completely uncritical approach to those who believe that the decisive factor in South Africa will be the intervention of the Jesse Jacksons and Teddy Kennedys.

As for the black militants of South Africa, and those like us who stand in defense of their rights, we don't have to love the South African whites, we just have to deal with them, because are there and have no intention of going anywhere else. Of course the Bulletin article makes no effort to answer the questions we have raised in our press, because they are concerned above all to make sure that no hint of what the Spartacist League is talking about escapes from the columns of the Bulletin. For the Healyites, the whites are a non-question; obviously, the answer is to drive them into the sea. Only there are four to five million of them and they have all the guns. What works on a thin slice of white settler colony in Rhodesia won’t work here.

In South Africa one race sits on top of another. This means that the whole white population partakes of the super-exploitation of black labor, living at five or ten times the standard of living of the blacks. This in turn means that white labor will in the main be violently hostile to black rights, tending to resist to the last man, at an unspeakable cost of black lives. It also means that the whites comprise a technical elite with an overwhelming share of crucial skills. Thus we wrote that:

“The white population must have a place in an anti-racist society: the model is how Trotsky offered thousands of tsarist officers a job to do, placing their skills at the disposal of the new Bolshevik regime and the Soviet peoples, South Africa’s two and a half million coloureds, who compromise a strategic part of the Cape proletariat, and the nearly one million Indians, mainly a commercial population, are no less a vital component... . South African whites are an oppressor people who can easily and guiltily envision the terms of oppression reversed, and are determined not to be on the receiving end. That makes them dangerous.”

Though we do not envision the apartheid regime agreeing to dismantle itself after being shamed by international finger-wagging (that being a variant of Reverend M.L. King’s line, shared by Bishop Tutu, that if the oppressed show how nobly they can suffer, the slavemasters will have to grant them freedom). We see the fracturing of that society on the basis that in South Africa there has been created, in the mines and factories, a concentrated and increasingly organized core of five million black proletarians, the gravediggers of apartheid. Still the cost will be great for proletarian revolution to triumph against a murderous police-state regime with its awesome military machine. But the revolution in South Africa will be a profound liberating blow for the whole continent of sub-Saharan Africa, where world socialist revolution is the only alternative to continued mass starvation under conditions of imperialist-enforced backwardness and oppression.

The Bulletin article includes a couple of beautiful quotes from Trotsky, used in the standard Healyite manner. That is, they counterpose to the Spartacists’ views citations from Trotsky which are in no way countperposed to the Spartacists’ views. Thus Trotsky says:

“The revolutionary party must put before every white worker the following alternative: either with British imperialism and with the white bourgeoisie of South Africa or with the black workers and peasants against the white feudalists and slave owners and their agents in the ranks of the working class.”

This squares nicely with our insistence on the need to seek to win over whites to the side of the oppressed, and not at all with Healy’s vicarious nationalist line, which simply dismisses as “racist” the idea of any place for whites in South Africa.

Another wonderful Trotsky quote in the Bulletin restates the theory of permanent revolution, that the proletariat must assume the leadership of the national struggle. Or, as we put it, we do not see that the democratic struggle against apartheid can triumph short of the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class by the proletariat leading all the oppressed. This is not at all the perpsective of the nationalist leaders of the South African struggle, even the best and most corageous of them. Since the rise of the black unions, the weight of the working class is acknowledged, but not programmatically; the proletariat is seen as a vehicle to haul the ideological cart of nationalism and not as the basis for reconstructing South Africa as a workers state.

Nationalism is the ideology appropriate to a petty-bourgeois stratum which looks forward to its emergence as a new black ruling elite to oppress its “own” black workers in a capiatlist state on the “African socialist” model. If this schema could be carried out, it would mean a new exploitative regime resting on an ever-narrowing ethnic base: first go after the whites, then the Indians, the coloureds, finally ushering in fratricidal conflict along tribal-linguistic lines. For Healy, since the Spartacists are not black nationalists, they must therefore be white-lovers. Well, we are neither nationalists nor white-lovers, but Healy, oddly enough, is both. For while he is quite capable in the present polemic of baiting the Spartacists by assuming a black nationalist posture, in South Africa, those who are influenced by Healy espouse the same colorblind line we are already familiar with from Healyites elsewhere: hooray for the working class and not one word about the fact that certain South African workers (whites) benefit from the superexploitation of others and therefore back the apartheid state which deprives these latter of the most elementary democratic rights.

Healy’s sole purpose in quoting Trotsky on South Africa is, simply, to totally confuse the reader: counterpose to one another two things which say the same thing and hopefully the reader will figure that Healy must be smarter than the poor reader, and will take his word for it. Those who can think their way through the muddle and come out the other side Healy doesn’t want anyway.

In fact, anybody who doesn’t see bloody dangers in South Africa just isn’t living in this world, and mainly willfully. The Healyites have no response to our urgent warning to South African militants, and think none is needed. Once again they have precisely the attitude that all the reformists have: the people united will never be defeated. But modern history abounds with piles of corpses of militants whose leaders have “united” them under the hegemony of the class enemies of their liberation. And the Spartacists are not enthused at the military prospects for the “People’s War,” whatever the WL means by that exactly, against the apartheid state, then this proves, according to the Bulletin, that we “oppose the arming of the black masses” and positively enjoyed the slaughter of the defenseless blacks at Uitenhage. “People’s War” indeed - this from people who at Columbia are for Jesse Jackson and Bishop Tutu. But so long as you’re sufficiently far away from London's Clapham Common, they urge you to fight to the last man.

Classless Demagogues

The Healyites are intellectual thugs for hire, and not all that intellectual. They always have a simple answer for everything, but it’s isolated from reality, and not accidentally. It’s a bad thing to merchandize a counterfeit world, to know and to ignore, the essence of cynicism. The Healyites know that “Trotskyism” doesn't mean spreading the filthy lie that Trotsky surrounded himself with FBI/GPU agents in Mexico, they just don’t care. They know that a political revolution doesn’t proceed from the embrace of capitalist-restorationist Solidarnosc, but they will never let that stand in the way of achieving oneness with the anti-Soviet Labour statesmen. They believe, to use a famous phrase attributed to Stalin, that paper will take anything that’s written on it, and that nobody ever remembers anything, only they do have a little problem just now in the British coal fields.

And what about “fascism”? Well, we could say that for some of the regimes the Healyites support, fascism’s big problem is that it’s an enemy of Allah. That would be the snotty response, but we want to be serious. The Healyites have done their best to be an organization for hire. They’ve found their niche as kept creatures of various gangs of oil-rich nationalist murderers, whose slaughter of communist workers they extol. Thus they are classless demagogues, all-purpose mock extremists whose radicalism has nothing in common with socialist struggle. Of course Hitler was a radical too. As opposed to the old-time German conservatives, who merely wanted the Kaiser back, Hitler wanted a “New Order.” And he was a nationalist; he wanted to do away with all communists, Jews, the Pope – indeed anything trans-national.

Make no mistake about it, there is a real fascist potential here. What is Healyism? It’s mindless extremism even in pursuit of the most trivial aims and an unbounded admiraton for power in the hands of Third World strongmen. It’s baiting as “fascists” the revolutionary Marxists because we did our earnest, modest best to aid the miners’ struggle while Healy was going all out to stab the union in the back. It’s a social base that presently consists of lumpenized youth along with a thin layer of TV and cinema personalities leading a gilded existence and whose view of social reality comes through a camera lens. It’s an organizational “method” of lies, gangsterism and anti-knowledge. Indeed the Healyites have the potential to become just about anything. Winston Churchill is said to have remarked once regarding a prominent fellow MP, “Oh, that’s the chap who gives degeneracy a bad name.” Add to degeneracy wild vituperation devoid of any class basis or connection to social reality and you have... Gerry Healy and his Workers League.

Healyite Slanders, SWP Cowards (1983)

Workers Vanguard No. 321 (14 January 1983)

The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand

Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards

We reprint below and exchange of correspondence between the Spartacist League (SL) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP was for 35 years the Trotskyist organization in this country, but in the early 1960s it abandoned Trotskyism in all but name and, passing rapidly through centrism, transformed itself into and eccentric reformist formation.

In our last issue, WV explored the internal wrangling now at an advanced stage in the SWP (see “Barnestown, U.S.A.” WV No. 320, 31 December 1982). We laid particular emphasis on SWP head Jack Barnes’ ongoing purge of survivors of the old revolutionary party, noting that the SWP’s decisive break from Trotskyism did not automatically expunge all aspects of human and organizational continuity with the old party.

“Long after the Trotskyist content was gone, some elements of basic
organizational competence and professionalism still functioned... something that could still organize a demonstration, write a polemic, co-opt an opponent, run a defense case... ”

We noted that the “age purge” process unleashed by Barnes, particularly following the death of SWP revisionist theoretician Joseph Hansen in 1979, had systematically destroyed those residues, citing in particular, “the very strange case of Alan Gelfand” as a demonstration of the hard-to-believe ineptness of todays SWP.

Alan Gelfand is a lawyer and a political agent of the Gerry Healy group, an unstable and sinister British-based tendency which after years of shamelessly opportunist political banditry jumped from the ranks of the workers movement into the political service of certain Arab governments. In 1979 Gelfand sued the SWP in Federal court.

The very strange case of Alan Gelfand began in 1977 when Gelfand surfaced in the Los Angeles SWP as a mouthpiece for Healy’s “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against the SWP. The campaign, launched in the Healyite press in 1975, claimed that the central leaders of the SWP were actually long-time agents of the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. In particular, the slander campaign targeted Joseph Hansen, who had served as secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky by the Stalinist GPU in 1940.

Healy’s loathsome lies – echoing the discredited Stalinist tales that Trotsky’s murder was carried out by his own people – were an assault not only against the SWP of today but against the revolutionary past of the SWP whose Trotskyist work we claim as part of our own history. So the Spartacist League campaigned actively against Healy’s slanders, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs demanding, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”

Much of Healy’s smear campaign centered on Hansen’s role as a main SWP contact with the bourgeois authorities in the investigation of Trotsky’s murder. This confidential work, testifying to Hansen’s position of trust in the Trotskyist movement, constituted the core of Healy’s “evidence.” In 1975-76 Hansen published point-by-point refutations of Healy’s claims as well as statements of support from prominent left political spokesmen (including Spartacist national chairman James Robertson), veterans of the Trotskyist movement of Trotsky’s time, etc. These materials effectively laid Healy’s baseless slanders to rest.

Indeed, Healy's “evidence,” where there is any, itself refutes Healy’s claims. For example, prominently featured in the Healyites’ press was a letter from Hansen to the American Consul in Mexico City (regarding the Trotskyists’ attempts to unravel the identiy of Trotsky’s assassin). Healy claims that this shows secret contact between Hansen and the FBI behind the backs of the SWP. Unfortunately for Healy, Hansen’s letter gives as his return address 116 University Place in New York – which was at the time the SWP’s own national headquarters.

The Gelfand lawsuit is the latest round in Healy’s scurrilous, paranoid vendetta. In January 1979 the SWP discovered to its horror that Gelfand had filed a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s own lawsuit against the FBI. Gelfand was hastily expelled from the SWP on January 11. He then brought suit against the SWP charging the expulsion resulted from FBI control of the party, and citing all of Healy’s crazy lies to “prove” it. Gelfand's suit claims the government has the right to intervene in the internal life of left organizations, ostensibly to enforce their adherence to their own rules. It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to “regulate” the internal life of working-class organizations. That in this case the disgruntled ex-“member” was from the outset evidently a Healyite plant only adds insult to injury.

Nothing to Cover Up, But SWP Covers Up Anyway

The uninformed observer might imagine that the SWP, in elementary self-defense, would seek broad support for its rights and its good name in this important legal case, much as Hansen did when Healy’s “accomplice” smear first started. But the uninformed observer would be reckoning without Jack Barnes’ singular capacity for political stupidity. Incredibly, the SWP’s public press has said not one single word about the Gelfand case since it began! Apparently Barnes & Co. made a deliberate decision to treat the lawsuit as some kind of guilty secret – as if Healy’s threadbare lies were impossible to answer. This is a crime not only against the members of the SWP but against the late Joe Hansen and all the founding Trotskyist leaders whose reputations are being dragged through the mud. The SWP’s failure to mount a vigorous public counterattack aimed at mobilizing support against Gelfand’s provocation is equally a crime against all working-class organizations, who have the right and the duty to smash Gelfand’s precedent for government snooping and witchhunting against the left.

In August 1982, the newspaper of the American Healyites, the Bulletin, gleefully reported that the SWP’s motion for summary judgment in the Gelfand case had been denied. In October 1982, Rachel Wolkenstein on behalf of the SL wrote to the SWP asking for information enabling us to cover the lawsuit in our own press. We think the letter speaks for itself, as does the SWP’s two-sentence reply to us.

The SL’s expressed interest in the case probably helped the SWP to figure out that the issue could not be buried forever. In any case, the SWP National Committee plenum held in December was embarassedly self-critical about the public silence. The SWP finally made some public acknowledgement of the case at the convention of its youth group in Chicago over New Year’s. But incredibly, the report did not mention the Healyites at all, much less their year-long slander campaign against Hansen. If ever a policy were guaranteed to lend credence to Healy’s baseless slanders, this is it.

Instead of covering over the “Healy connection,” the SWP should acquaint the American radical public with Healy’s long and sordid history of going to the capitalist courts against his political opponents. In England right now, Healy is pursuing a vicious two-year legal effot to muzzle and bankrupt a small socialist current on the fringes of the Labour Party, the “Socialist Organizer” grouping of Sean Matgamna. Taking exception to some hostile political characterizations of the Healy organization which appeared in a January 1981 Socialist Organizer article, Healy simply sued for “libel” under Britain's draconian libel laws. When Matgamna complained, the Healyites gave the rich man’s answer, coyly suggesting the little group should hire itself sime good barristers.

The SWP is unfortunately not unique in its criminally sectarian refusal to mount an aggressive public defense against legal provocation. Progressive Labor (PL), the target of a vicious civil suit by the Los Angeles police, similarly rejects the support of other left organizations, all of whom have a stake in a PL victory over this assault on their existence and rights.

One doesn’t have to agree with or even like the SWP or PL to recognize the need for substantial and urgent support in these important cases. In this spirit, we are publishing the Wolkenstein letter and the SWP’s reply for the information of our readers.

__________________________

Rachel H. Wolkenstein
Attorney at Law
299 Broadway
New York, New York

October, 1982

Shelly Davis
Attorney at Law
Socialist Workers Party
410 West Street
New York, New York


Dear Ms. Davis:
In my telephone conversation with you on 5 October 1982 I requested access to and a coy of the public court record of Gelfand vs. SWP, et al. This request was made on behalf of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the international Spartacist tendency (iSt). Although this record is available to the public from the federal court clerk in Los Angeles, California, given the location and volume of the file, I thought it expeditious to try to secure access to and a copy of the court recourd from your office. Additionally, I have since learned that permission is needed from one of the attorneys on the lawsuit to gain access to the depositions taken of the Socialist Workers Party defendants. Of course, I offered to pay all costs for copying.

Your response, after consultation with your client, was to inform me that the request must be “made in writing, on official letterhead, containing the reasons for the request.” Since those reasons were given to you in our phone conversation, I am perplexed as to the rationale for this prerequisite to determining whether you will assist th Spartacist League/iSt in obtaining access to the Gelfand court record. However, because of the seriousness of the issues posed by this lawsuit, compelling the Spartacist League/iSt to take a stand, the reasons for this request are restated herein.

The Spartacist League/iSt became aware of the gravity of this lawsuit after the appearance of an article in the August 6, 1982 issue of the Bulletin stating that a Federal District Court judge denied the Socialist Workers Party defendants’ motion for summary judgment. Reportedly, the court held this case for trial after finding factual suport for Gelfand’s claim that his expulsion from the SWP was due to government manipulation and control of the SWP.

It is apparent that Gelfand’s case was instituted and is financed by the Workers League/ Workers Revolutionary Party/ International Committee of the Fourth International. This lawsuit is a continuation of Gerry Healy’s vicious slander campaign against Joseph Hansen, accusing him of having been an agent of the GPU/FBI, implicated in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. It has been and continues to be the position of the Spartacist League /iSt that those charges are manifestly groundless. This slander campaign against Joseph Hansen constitutes and attack on the entire SWP leadership around Trotsky and Cannon, posing directly the question of Healyism versus Trotskyism.

The Spartacist League/iSt is publicly on record in vehement opposition to these slanders. James Robertson, National Chairman of the Spartacist League signed a statement circulated by the SWP in 1976 entitled, “A Shameless Frame-Up.” Since 1975 the Spartacist League /iSt has held demonstrations against the Workers League/RWP asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” Thus it is with the utmost concern and outrage that the Spartacist League/iSt views this most recent addition to the Healyite frame-up campaign, this time invoking the government’s courts against the Socialist Workers Party.

While the Spartacist League/iSt takes no position on the question of whether Gelfand’s rights as a member of the SWP were violated in the expulsion process, it is clear that asking the courts to make that determination is a violation of workers democracy. The case presents a dangerous precedent for all working class organizations.

The Spartacist League/iSt believes that a vigorous, aggressive counter-attack must be made against the Gelfand lawsuit. However, to date, the available information on this case has been in the press of the Workers League. There does not appear to have been any information on or excerpts from this lawsuit in the pages of the Militant or Intercontinental Press.

The Spartacist League/iSt is necessarily interested in examining the “evidence” submitted by Gelfand in support of his allegations of government dominion over the Socialist Workers Party as well as examining the development of the legal defense and counteroffensives taken by the SWP defendants. To the extent the Spartacist League/iSt has concrete information in hand, particularly the court record, then to that extent it will be able to be more categorical in publicly dealing with the vital issues of workers democracy involved. The deliberate introduction of the bourgeois state into the life of private political organizations does have a history; this has been used in England by racist/fascist organizations during their quarrels and splits. Is it now to be imported into socialist organizations in the United States? This must be fought.

I trust that an expeditious reply will be given to this request (in writing).

Yours truly,

Rachel H. Wolkenstein
cc Spartacist League/iSt

* * *
October 28, 1982

Spartacist League
c/o Rachel Wolkenstein
299 Broadway
New York, N.Y.

This is in response to your letter, postmarked October 21, which has been referred to me for reply.

The Socialist Workers Party will not provide any assistance to the Spartacist League.

Craig Gannon
Socialist Workers Party

Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi! (1981)

English Language Spartacist No. 31-32 (Summer 1981)

Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi!

Healyite Libel Suit: An Attack on Workers Movement

We reprint below material documenting the attempt by the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy and Michael Banda to silence, through the bourgeois courts, Socialist Organiser (SO), a fortnightly newspaper of a tendency within the British Labour Party initiated by and politically identified with Sean Matgamna’s Workers Action grouping. The WRP (formerly the Socialist Labour League) had long been notorious for seeking to bludgeon left-wing critics into silence through physical gangsterism and use of the agencies of the bourgeois state. After more than a decade of political banditry of the most extreme sort, the Healyites decisively departed the ranks of the workers movement by 1978 by politically and materially subordinating themselves to a host of murderous Muslim dictatorships, most notably that of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, protector of Idi Amin and self-proclaimed apologist for Adolf Hitler. The current threat of libel action against SO (with the WRP’s Vanessa Redgrave fronting for them) represents a sinister attack against the right of political expression by the workers movement as a whole, and must he vigorously opposed by all tendencies of the left and labor movement.

To the best of our not uninformed knowledge, we affirm that, the charges and characterizations alleged against the WRP by SO are true. We emphasize comrade Matgamna’s observation that Redgrave’s attorneys conspicuously choose not to contest the allegation of the WRP’s ties with the oil-rich bloodthirsty bourgeois tyrant of Libya. In April 1979, we noted the WRP’s role as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” through its open support for the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party militants by the bourgeois nationalist Ba’ath regime:

“For a small propaganda group without a significant mass base, moreover, program is decisive in determining a group’s class character. In the case of the Healy/Banda organization, the contradiction between its ‘Trotskyist’ pretensions and the dictates of its Libyan patrons has repetitively come down in favor of the latter.”
– Workers Vanguard No. 230, 27 April 1979

We explained in the same article that this action, though decisive, was by no means isolated, but capped a long period of bizarre and venomous behavior, targeted in more than one brutal instance against supporters of the international Spartacist tendency:

“The Healy/Banda tendency has long had an extremely unsavory flavor. It combines idiot organizational sectarianism with the wildest gyrations of gross political opportunism to create an aura of extreme instability. Its penchant for elaborate conspiracy theories and its well-known readiness to employ physical gangsterism against left-wing opponents denote more than a trace of paranoia. But in the past couple of years the Healyites have added another clement to their political banditry: they have become the British press agents for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the fanatical dictator of Libya.”

In Spartacist (No. 9, January-February 1967) we publicized the savage beating of Canadian United Secretariat supporter Ernie Tate outside a Healyite meeting at London’s Caxton Hall which inflicted injuries so severe as to require Tate’s hospitalization. The Healyites then sought to cover their tracks, not by denying that they beat up Tate, but (as today) by instituting legal proceedings against him to stop the circulation of an open letter by Tate describing the thug attack. In fact, Healy succeeded in frightening two weak-kneed British left-wing publications into publishing retractions of Tate’s letter under threats of libel actions against them. Healy’s then-loyal American toad, Tim Wohlforth, shamelessly defended the vicious beating with typically convoluted Healyite “logic” (workers rightly beat up scabs, Tate was scabbing on the Healyite International Committee, (Q.E.D...).

As noted, the libel action against SO is taken in the name of performer Vanessa Redgrave, the most well known, of the WRP’s dwindling constellation of supporters and “angels” within the entertainment industry. Though it is common practice under British libel law to set up a personality to pursue a libel suit (organizations generally have a very difficult time pursuing a libel case), the use of Redgrave’s name and money against a working-class tendency is particularly scandalous. Nor is it the first time they have done this. In 1975 Redgrave dragged former Healyite Alan Thornett, a car worker, into court over an outstanding personal loan. This action against Thornett was taken by one who, as we noted at the time, has a lifestyle which would do no shame to Princess Grace of Monaco or Princess Ashraf, lately of Iran.

Since the material we are reprinting below came in hand, five writs, used to secure prior censorship through vicious and punitive methods, have been served against SO, its printing firm and the secretary of the defense committee. Indeed, one of those writs was used to prevent publication at the last minute of an article in Socialist Press, weekly paper of Thornett’s Workers Socialist League (WSL), which is printed at the same firm (which also prints a number of other left-wing papers in Britain). Some clients have already been intimidated into withdrawing their business from this printer.

Every working-class militant should look forward to the day when the Healy/ Banda gang is politically removed as a menace to the left and labor movement. A victory by SO against this attack would constitute a step toward that goal and we are therefore compelled by basic class principle to offer such resources as we can to assist in the defense of this case, including fund-raising and publicity, not least internationally. (The very English Healyites have a few shriveling international connections known as the “International Committee of the Fourth International.”) We offer as well to make available our extensive files documenting the Healyites’ history of slander, internal intimidation and violent hooliganism. We urge our readers to likewise support this important defense of the workers movement.

* * *

SOCIALIST ORGANISER,
c/o 214 Sickert Court,
London N1 2SY.

2nd March 1981.

The Editor,
Spartacist Publications,
26
Harrison St.,
London W.C.1

Dear Friend,
Socialist Organiser appeals for support to the left wing and labour movement press
against the attempt by the WRP to stifle accurate reporting and fair comment
about them. The enclosed documents give the details of the WRP’s threatened
legal action and the case which looks likely to go to court.

I draw your attention to the curious fact that the WRP have not chosen to regard as
libellous the statements about their relationship with Colonel Gaddafi, and to the proposals that were made at the end of Sean Matgamna’s letter of 26th February 1981, including for a jointly agreed working class movement inquiry on the issue.

Yours fraternally,
John Bloxam. Secretary.

____________________________

5th February, 1981

Sean Matgamna, Esq.,
Socialist Organiser,
5 Stamford Hill,
London, N.I6.

Dear Sir,

We are instructed by our Client Miss Vanessa Redgrave
a well known member of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party
(WRP). The WRP is referred to on page 10 of the issue of Socialist
Organiser No. 33 dated January 24, 1980, and in particular in an article at
the bottom of page 10 under your name, with the headline “GADDAFI’S FOREIGN
LEGION TO KNIGHT’S RESCUE”. The Knight in question is Ted Knight and your
article referred to the support by the WRP for Lambeth Council’s rent and rate
rises discussed, on January 17, 1981, at the second “Local Government in Crisis”
conference. It is therefore obvious that this issue of Socialist Organiser should have been dated 1981 and not 1980.

In view of her widely known association with the WRP our Client regards the attack on the WRP in your article in this issue of Socialist Organiser as a libel on her as well
as on the Party itself. While we understand that the article contains very many
untrue and defamatory statements and implications (for instance by the headline
quoted above) about the WRP we are instructed to call upon you to undertake to
publish an unequivocal withdrawal of certain of those statements which constitute particularly gross libels. These are contained notably in the second and third full paragraphs of the second column where you state that the WRP:

“is a pseudo-Marxist gobbledegook-spouting cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult which committed mass suicide in the Guyana jungle three years ago.
It recruits and exploits mainly raw, inexperienced, politically socially and psychologically defenceless young people. It employs psychological terror and physicalviolence against its own members (and occasionally against others).”

At the end of the above second paragraph there is an asterisk which refers
to a footnote naming “The Battle for Trotskyism” published by the Workers
Socialist League “For an account of its (i.e. the WRP’s) internal life”. We are
instructed that the publication in question most certainly does not substantiate
the allegations made in the said paragraph which have been completely refuted in
WRP publications published subsequently, e.g. in “The Thornett Clique Exposed”.

As you must know, the WRP bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
Moonies, the Scientologists or the Jones Cult. Nor does it exploit young people
or anyone else amongst its recruits. Further, it not only does not employ
psychological terror and physical violence against its own members or against
anyone else but has gone on record repeatedly to dissociate itself from any
policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims.

If any future issue of the Socialist Organiser is to be published we would ask you to let us hear from you in immediate reply to this letter, that is within seven days of its date, as to the intended or proposed date of such publication and the date when it should go to press, together with the names of the paper’s Editor or members of its editorial committee and its proprietors. We learn that Socialist Organiser is not registered as a business name and note that, contrary to the law, its printer’s name and address do not appear anywhere in its pages, as to which your explanation is awaited. Our Client’s primary concern at this point is to have your undertaking that, with appropriate prominence to be agreed, a disclaimer and apology in the following terms will be published in the next issue of Socialist Organiser or in such other publication as may replace it as the newspaper put out by the publishers of Socialist
Organiser, whoever they may be, or in any such other publication to which you are contributing:

Vanessa Redgrave and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party

”Sean Matgamna and the Editor and Publishers of Socialist Organiser acknowledge that the terms in which they referred to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP)in their issue of the 24th January last contained wholly unwarranted suggestions that the WRP is a ‘cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult’ or bears a material resemblance to those non-political, non-Marxist organisations. Further, it is acknowledged that the WRP does not, as falsely stated in Sean Matgamna’s article, recruit and exploit ‘mainly raw, inexperienced, politically, socially and psychologically defenceless young people’ or, indeed, exploit anyone; nor does it employ ‘psychological terror and physical violence against its own members’ or others, being on record repeatedly as condemning violence in support of its aims. We apologise to the WRP and to Vanessa Redgrave, who is in particular associated with it, for having published wholly unwarranted and grossly libellous matter which we now expressly withdraw.”

While we await your undertaking as to the arrangements to be made to publish the above disclaimer and apology and your response to our above request for information, we must also ask you to acknowledge receipt of this letter within seven days of its date and to undertake not to repeat the same or any other libels on the WRP or on our Client in the future.

Pending a fully satisfactory reply to this letter our Client’s full rights in the matter are reserved.

Yours faithfully,
Rubinstein Callingham

cc: Morning Litho Printers

* * *

Socialist Organiser
c/o 214 Sickert Court, London NI 2SY.

Your
reference: MR/AS.
26th February 1981.

Rubinstein Callingham, Solicitors,
6 Raymond Buildings, Grays Inn,
London WCIR 5BZ.

Dear Sirs,
I am in receipt of your curious letter of 5th February 1981, which is in fact more an attempt at a political polemic than a normal legal communication.

I hereby formally acknowledge sole responsibility for Socialist Organiser, and declare myself to be the publisher and political editor of the paper. The printer’s name was inadvertently left off Socialist Organiser no. 33, but there was a name and address on the paper. The printer’s name and address has appeared on previous issues. There was therefore no intention of evading legal responsibility. I owe you no explanation, and that section of your letter reads like a rather feeble attempt to intimidate the printer. I do offer you the assurance that our relations with the printer are proper commercial relations, without benefit of subsidies from the Arab or any other bourgeoisies.

I note that your letter refers to the headline of my article ‘Gaddafi’s Foreign Legion to Knight’s Rescue’, alleging that it is “one of the very many untrue and defamatory statements and implications about the WRP”, and goes on to contrast it with what you say are “particularly gross libels” and for which you demand a public apology. You make no reference to the clear statements in the text which clearly imply that you are subsidised by the Libyan Government, and perhaps other Arab Governments. Can it be that Ms Redgrave and the organisation for which she is in this affair acting as a front do not consider important what the labour movement believes about their relations with Libya? The implication is inescapable that your client knows that she must treat this as not libellous because it is true and, moreover being true, not something disreputable nor something which places the WRP outside the ranks of the labour movement because they have every appearance of acting as agents within that movement of the bourgeois Libyan Government. The implied admission in your client’s letter is therefore a valuable, if inadvertent, step to admitting the truth and to enlightening the labour movement on matters that concern it.

As regards your client’s reputation, although my article names three prominent leaders of the WRP organisation (Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter, Michael Banda) it makes no reference to Vanessa Redgrave. In my view, our readers would not be likely to consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP. In fact, the invocation of Ms Redgrave’s reputation, such as it is, is a transparent hypocrisy. Those who have decided to threaten a legal action obviously regard Ms Redgrave’s reputation, like Ms Redgrave’s money and her publicity value, as an expendable asset. The attempt to invoke the courts against a labour movement publication, like Socialist Organiser, can only tarnish Ms Redgrave in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of labour movement activists who consider it a fundamental breach of principle to involve the bourgeois state in the affairs of the labour movement. In fact, Ms Redgrave’s threatened action will provide topical illustration to show even more clearly that the WRP has, as my article asserted, ceased to be part of the labour movement.

In fact, my article in Socialist Organiser no. 33 (which was written in response to the Newsline editorial of Monday 19th January 1981 which attempted to brand the entire left at the second ‘Local Government in Crisis’ Conference as agents of Thatcher) contains not one single untrue statement or implication about the WRP. Every single statement in the passage you complain of is either true or fair comment and reasonable construction on the stated facts, or both. I would not choose to go to court with you over this. That decision is yours. In the event, however, that you force it on me, I will have no inhibitions or qualms about bringing into court some of the mass of evidence which has accumulated in the labour movement in order to establish that my article was in no way untrue or unfair to the WRP.

In your letter you make the absurd claim that your client’s organisation has “completely refuted” the account of the WRP contained in the publication ‘The Battle for Trotskyism’. This is laughable. One of the prime examples of the mental world of the WRP is the latest pamphlet ‘The Thornett Clique Exposed’ dealing with it. Here I draw your attention to the fact that the cover of that publication consists of a photostat of a document stolen, together with a filing cabinet full of other documents, in a burglary of a house in Oxford in 1977. This burglary was on Alan Thornett’s house. I would be interested in your client’s explanation of where they got this document.

You say that the WRP has gone on record “repeatedly to dissociate itself from any policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims”. This is disingenuous. I know very well that the WRP has publicly disavowed in the courts, during the ‘Observer’ libel case, the Marxis teaching on violence-which is essentially that the bourgeoisie, if faced with defeat by the majority of the people, will impose on the working class the choice to either defend itself and secure its interests by defensive violence or to peacefully accept the alternative which is bloody counter-revolution. My article clearly refers to the internal regime of the WRP. What it said about that regime is, as stated above, factually true and can be substantiated with oral evidence and documents. I want to add here, however, that anything the WRP says, whether by way of denial or affirmation, has little credibility in any existing section of the labour movement which is even slightly familiar with the WRP. That organisation has lied systematically and to a degree never paralleled (except by the Stalinists in the 30s, 40s and 50s) in the entire history of the labour movement, of which the WRP was part until 4 or 5 years ago.

My approach to this matter is governed by the responsibility to tell the truth to the labour movement and to call things by their right names where the WRP is concerned. While I am determined to discharge that responsibility, I nevertheless would not choose to go to court. There can however be no question of gainsaying what I know to be true or of publicly lying for the WRP according to the terms of your proposed letter of apology. I make the following proposals to you however.

1. As I said above, I would be willing publicly to explain that I do not consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP and its policies, with the precise wording of such an explanation to be agreed between us.

2. I would be willing to publish a reply of the same length as my article in Socialist Organiser by Ms Redgrave or even by “the leadership”, namely Mr Gerry Healy. They could probably have had that for the asking, as Socialist Organiser is an open and democratic newspaper. It is offered now, however, only in exchange for one of the following:

(a) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by Alan Thornett of the Workers Socialist League, to explain to the readers of Newsline how 20 members of the WRP came to Oxford 2 weeks ago and made a mass distribution at British Leyland’s Cowley plant of a printed broadsheet which, among other things, implied that he was a police agent and was clearly aimed, for the WRP’s own sectarian and. vindictive reasons, to help Michael Edwardes to discredit and then smash the militant rank and file leadership in the Cowley plant;

(b) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by George Novack, on behalf of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, to reply to the WRP’s campaign of libel;

(c) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by the Stalinist Iraqui Communist Party, the slaughter of whose
members Newsline has publicly justified;

(d) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by myself, discussing the recent statement by Colonel Gaddafi calling for the rehabilitation of Hitler and Nazism.

3. I do not consider the WRP to be part of the labour movement any longer. The WRP however pretends that it is. I propose that a working class movement inquiry be set up to investigate the statements in my article and contribute to the public debate on the issue, with the composition and other details of the inquiry to be agreed between us.

4. I would be willing to publish a clarification about the point on violence, explaining clearly that for anyone who knows the WRP the idea that the “leadership” would contemplate violence against the bourgeois state is an absurdity. That, however, would he done in such a way as to make our own Marxist views clear.

Yours faithfully, Sean Matgamna.