Workers Vanguard No. 137 (10 December 1976)
Workers Democracy Defended in Los Angeles
WL Goon Assault Backfires
LOS ANGELES, December 4 - Spartacist League reporters and salesmen were wantonly attacked today by club-wielding Workers Leaguers outside the WL's poorly attended “Fifth Anniversary Conference and Disco” held at the Twilight Zone Bar in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles. The WL's Healyite goons were courageously repulsed by defenders of workers democracy. Finally the frustrated WLers took refuge behind the “protecting” mantle of the racist L.A. cops.
The incident began as SL supporters outside the bar were selling WV and Australasian Spartacist detailing Healyite thug attacks on Spartacists and other leftists in Australia (see WV No. 134, 19 November). Anticipating possible trouble from the notorious political bandits of the WL, who have repeatedly provoked similar confrontations in L.A. and elsewhere, the WV salesmen were accompanied by SLers and others who support the right of working-class tendencies to distribute their literature and who oppose thug violence within the workers movement.
Shouting “we don't want your cameras here,” a frenzied WL goon lunged at a WV photographer. Then a gang of WL thugs brandishing wooden clubs and jagged broken pool cues attempted unsuccessfully to assault the photographer. After a brief scuffle during which a plate glass door was broken, the Healyite goons were repulsed and retreated into the bar. The SL supporters resumed selling their literature. Then “somebody” called the cops. Four squad cars arrived, accompanied by a police helicopter overhead. Recent WL congressional candidate Sheila Leburg brazenly accused the SL of attempting to “disrupt” the meeting.
Not even hiding behind the cops can the WL shield itself from the revolutionary criticism of the Spartacist League. Working-class militants must continue to instruct the WL hooligans in the principle of workers democracy. Stalin-style gangsterism and attempts to suppress the expression of political views must be expunged from the workers movement!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Protest Healyite Thuggery (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 130 (27 October 1976)
Vicious Attack on SL/ANZ, SWP in Australia
Protest Healyite Thuggery
SYDNEY, October 18 – A rampage of thuggery by the Healyite Socialist Labour League (SLL) here yesterday left supporters of the Australian Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) seriously injured. Under direct supervision of SLL national secretary Jim Mulgrew, the Healyite goons launched two brutal premeditated assaults outside a “public” SLL forum at the Sydney Trades Hall. The Spartacist supporters were selling literature and protesting the Healyites’ exclusionist practices, while SWPers were distributing a statement in reply to the Healyites’ slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack. Several SL and SWP members were bruised and bloodied, and one SWPer required hospital treatment after numerous punches and kicks to the head and body.
Healyite gangsterism is no news to the workers movement. But yesterday’s attacks indicated a deliberate attempt to maim members – in particular leading members – of opponent tendencies.
No sooner had the Spartacists approached the Trades Hall than SLL honcho Mulgrew began threatening an Australasian Spartacist photographer. The reason for Mulgrew’s concern with photographs became clear an instant later as, with SWPers looking on, he directed several of this thugs to jump SL national chairman Bill Logan, shrieking “get Logan, get Logan!” SLers who sprang to their comrade’s defense were slugged and pummelled, one receiving a bloody nose.
Unable to dislodge the SLers without exposing the seamy side of Healyism before untutored SLL ranks and others coming into the hall, Mulgrew pulled his hoodlums back, restricting them to personal and sexist insults, threats, physical harassments and provocations against the SLers an SWPers who were still arriving.
But when the bulk of their youth had been shepherded inside, the Healyite goons shoved and jostled an SWP supporter handing out material to people going in. Mulgrew and his hooligans then surrounded a leading SWPer, John Percy, who was attempting to photograph the incident. After smacking him on the face, they proceeded to indiscriminately assault SL and SWP supporters coming to his defense. As Mulgrew retreated to safety, the goons launched a barrage of kicking and punching in the middle of the street. One SLer received a severe blow to the head and SWP youth leader David Deutchmann, who had vigorously protested the earlier assault on the SL, was singled out by the enraged Healyites who punched him to the ground and continued to stomp and kick him as he lay.
Healyite gangsterism against the Trotskyist criticism of the SL has a long history. SL/ANZ supporters were subjected to a similar, though less brutal, attack at the same site a year ago when Healy himself came to Sydney on a speaking tour. But with the initiation of their international slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack – which has driven the Healyites further into self-imposed disrepute and paranoid insularity – their thuggery has become more frequent. At a May Day march in Sydney this year, the Healyites not only kept Spartacist literature a “safe” distance from their closely guarded contingent (going so far as to call the cops to prevent an SL supporter from distributing leaflets), but they even accosted a salesman of the Socialist, paper of the ossified, ultra-reformist pro-Moscow Stalinists. This was followed by a series of incidents with salesmen of other left papers.
In July, a gang of Healyites disrupted a forum in Sydney by American SWP vice-presidential hopeful Willie Mae Reid. The SLLers, shouting and waving their “indictments” of Hansen and Novack during the discussion period, prevented Reid from speaking. The reformist SWP used the incident to ban the SLL from attending all SWP public forums. The SWP has had a longstanding ban against allowing Spartacist supporters at forums as well, thus displaying that its main concern is the suppression of left criticism of its rotten politics.
The Spartacist tendency has from the start taken an active principled stand in combating the Healyite slander campaign against Hansen and Novack and in defending the SWP against SLL disruptions and physical attacks. This is more than can be said for the SWP’s Australian partner in the “United” Secretariat (USec), the crumbling Mandelite Communist League (CL). While Bill Logan on behalf of the SL/ANZ signed the American SWP-initiated statement against the slanders, the CL was conspicuously absent from the list of Australian signatories. In fact it has bolstered the Healyite campaign by supporting their demand for an “inquiry” into the bizarre charges – an act not entirely unconnected with a certain parallelism between the SLL’s slogans and appetites toward militant Labourism and those of the CL.
The Healyites’ paranoid concern with police infiltration in the workers movement – the ostensible justification for the frenzied campaign to slander Hansen and Novack as “accomplices” in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky – is exposed as hollow by their own practice. Their wilful provocation of thug violence opens up the workers movement to repression by the cops at any time. The short step between this Stalinist gangsterism and calling upon the cops to suppress leftist opponents is one which the Healyite political bandits made a decade ago. From the beating of USec supporter Ernest Tate in 1966, and the subsequent appeal to the bourgeoisie’s courts against Tate, to the present day the Healyites have repeatedly invoked the capitalist cops and courts against left-wing opponents. Yesterday Mulgrew boasted, “If the police come, we’ll get them to arrest you all.”
“Cop”-baiting slander and gangster violence are deliberately employed by the Healy tendency as obstacles to debate and political clarification within the workers movement. Open political debate would expose, for example, the SLL’s adaptation to the protectionist hysteria sweeping the Australian ship-building industry, threatened by overseas competition (the SLL has failed to criticize the chauvinist character of Australian shipyard workers’ occupation of Japanese ships, even though an SLL supporter is shop steward in one of the yards most active in the occupations). It would expose the SLL’s consistent catering to social-democratic illusions through its campaign to “Force the Liberals to Resign.”
We can assure Mulgrew, Healy and their gang of one thing: their gangster tactics will not prevent their exposure in the course of the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International.
Vicious Attack on SL/ANZ, SWP in Australia
Protest Healyite Thuggery
SYDNEY, October 18 – A rampage of thuggery by the Healyite Socialist Labour League (SLL) here yesterday left supporters of the Australian Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) seriously injured. Under direct supervision of SLL national secretary Jim Mulgrew, the Healyite goons launched two brutal premeditated assaults outside a “public” SLL forum at the Sydney Trades Hall. The Spartacist supporters were selling literature and protesting the Healyites’ exclusionist practices, while SWPers were distributing a statement in reply to the Healyites’ slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack. Several SL and SWP members were bruised and bloodied, and one SWPer required hospital treatment after numerous punches and kicks to the head and body.
Healyite gangsterism is no news to the workers movement. But yesterday’s attacks indicated a deliberate attempt to maim members – in particular leading members – of opponent tendencies.
No sooner had the Spartacists approached the Trades Hall than SLL honcho Mulgrew began threatening an Australasian Spartacist photographer. The reason for Mulgrew’s concern with photographs became clear an instant later as, with SWPers looking on, he directed several of this thugs to jump SL national chairman Bill Logan, shrieking “get Logan, get Logan!” SLers who sprang to their comrade’s defense were slugged and pummelled, one receiving a bloody nose.
Unable to dislodge the SLers without exposing the seamy side of Healyism before untutored SLL ranks and others coming into the hall, Mulgrew pulled his hoodlums back, restricting them to personal and sexist insults, threats, physical harassments and provocations against the SLers an SWPers who were still arriving.
But when the bulk of their youth had been shepherded inside, the Healyite goons shoved and jostled an SWP supporter handing out material to people going in. Mulgrew and his hooligans then surrounded a leading SWPer, John Percy, who was attempting to photograph the incident. After smacking him on the face, they proceeded to indiscriminately assault SL and SWP supporters coming to his defense. As Mulgrew retreated to safety, the goons launched a barrage of kicking and punching in the middle of the street. One SLer received a severe blow to the head and SWP youth leader David Deutchmann, who had vigorously protested the earlier assault on the SL, was singled out by the enraged Healyites who punched him to the ground and continued to stomp and kick him as he lay.
Healyite gangsterism against the Trotskyist criticism of the SL has a long history. SL/ANZ supporters were subjected to a similar, though less brutal, attack at the same site a year ago when Healy himself came to Sydney on a speaking tour. But with the initiation of their international slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack – which has driven the Healyites further into self-imposed disrepute and paranoid insularity – their thuggery has become more frequent. At a May Day march in Sydney this year, the Healyites not only kept Spartacist literature a “safe” distance from their closely guarded contingent (going so far as to call the cops to prevent an SL supporter from distributing leaflets), but they even accosted a salesman of the Socialist, paper of the ossified, ultra-reformist pro-Moscow Stalinists. This was followed by a series of incidents with salesmen of other left papers.
In July, a gang of Healyites disrupted a forum in Sydney by American SWP vice-presidential hopeful Willie Mae Reid. The SLLers, shouting and waving their “indictments” of Hansen and Novack during the discussion period, prevented Reid from speaking. The reformist SWP used the incident to ban the SLL from attending all SWP public forums. The SWP has had a longstanding ban against allowing Spartacist supporters at forums as well, thus displaying that its main concern is the suppression of left criticism of its rotten politics.
The Spartacist tendency has from the start taken an active principled stand in combating the Healyite slander campaign against Hansen and Novack and in defending the SWP against SLL disruptions and physical attacks. This is more than can be said for the SWP’s Australian partner in the “United” Secretariat (USec), the crumbling Mandelite Communist League (CL). While Bill Logan on behalf of the SL/ANZ signed the American SWP-initiated statement against the slanders, the CL was conspicuously absent from the list of Australian signatories. In fact it has bolstered the Healyite campaign by supporting their demand for an “inquiry” into the bizarre charges – an act not entirely unconnected with a certain parallelism between the SLL’s slogans and appetites toward militant Labourism and those of the CL.
The Healyites’ paranoid concern with police infiltration in the workers movement – the ostensible justification for the frenzied campaign to slander Hansen and Novack as “accomplices” in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky – is exposed as hollow by their own practice. Their wilful provocation of thug violence opens up the workers movement to repression by the cops at any time. The short step between this Stalinist gangsterism and calling upon the cops to suppress leftist opponents is one which the Healyite political bandits made a decade ago. From the beating of USec supporter Ernest Tate in 1966, and the subsequent appeal to the bourgeoisie’s courts against Tate, to the present day the Healyites have repeatedly invoked the capitalist cops and courts against left-wing opponents. Yesterday Mulgrew boasted, “If the police come, we’ll get them to arrest you all.”
“Cop”-baiting slander and gangster violence are deliberately employed by the Healy tendency as obstacles to debate and political clarification within the workers movement. Open political debate would expose, for example, the SLL’s adaptation to the protectionist hysteria sweeping the Australian ship-building industry, threatened by overseas competition (the SLL has failed to criticize the chauvinist character of Australian shipyard workers’ occupation of Japanese ships, even though an SLL supporter is shop steward in one of the yards most active in the occupations). It would expose the SLL’s consistent catering to social-democratic illusions through its campaign to “Force the Liberals to Resign.”
We can assure Mulgrew, Healy and their gang of one thing: their gangster tactics will not prevent their exposure in the course of the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Defend WL Against LA Cop Harassment! (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 125 (17 September 1976)
Defend WL Against LA Cop Harassment!
Late last month a southern California court announced that seven supporters of the Young Socialists (YS), youth group of the Healyite Workers League, will stand trial October 13 for “dancing without a permit” at a Workers League office in Huntington Park, California. The outrageous charge was made following a police raid on a July 10 YS social attended by 11 persons. Five youths were arrested and all 11 given citations carrying $50 fines. (Charges against four of the youth who were under 18 years of age have already been thrown out of court.)
At 9:30 p.m., before the dance had even begun, two policemen entered the office without a warrant, scanned the literature on display, harassed the occupants and left.
Thirty minutes after their departure, three club-wielding policemen entered the office, again without a warrant, one of whom demanded to see a license for the office and threatened to shut down the premises on the spot if one were not produced at once. After being shown a license, he demanded to know whether the YS had a permit to hold a dance. When asked if it were illegal to hold a dance, he and the other two left, but not without muttering that any of those present living in Huntington Park could expect a police visit at their homes.
Shortly afterward, three squad cars arrived on the scene, with a fourth stationed down the street. The same three cops barged through the door, knocking over one person and threatening another with a felony charge and a $1,000 fine for touching a policeman.
Everyone was ordered to move up against a table, and five of those present were handcuffed and taken to the police station. The cops refused to show anyone a copy of the law under which the citations were issued and failed to inform the five who were arrested of their rights. One woman was struck on the side of the head, and one officer was overheard to ask his sergeant: “Can I choke this black bitch?”
This outrageous attack on an office of the Workers League must be understood as an attack upon the entire working-class movement. The Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League and Partisan Defense Committee protest this cop harassment and demand that all charges against those attending the YS dance be dropped immediately!
The Workers League has requested that letters, telegrams and messages of protest regarding this incident be sent to: Mayor Herb A. Hennes. Jr. 6550 Miles Avenue, Huntington Park, CA 90255
Defend WL Against LA Cop Harassment!
Late last month a southern California court announced that seven supporters of the Young Socialists (YS), youth group of the Healyite Workers League, will stand trial October 13 for “dancing without a permit” at a Workers League office in Huntington Park, California. The outrageous charge was made following a police raid on a July 10 YS social attended by 11 persons. Five youths were arrested and all 11 given citations carrying $50 fines. (Charges against four of the youth who were under 18 years of age have already been thrown out of court.)
At 9:30 p.m., before the dance had even begun, two policemen entered the office without a warrant, scanned the literature on display, harassed the occupants and left.
Thirty minutes after their departure, three club-wielding policemen entered the office, again without a warrant, one of whom demanded to see a license for the office and threatened to shut down the premises on the spot if one were not produced at once. After being shown a license, he demanded to know whether the YS had a permit to hold a dance. When asked if it were illegal to hold a dance, he and the other two left, but not without muttering that any of those present living in Huntington Park could expect a police visit at their homes.
Shortly afterward, three squad cars arrived on the scene, with a fourth stationed down the street. The same three cops barged through the door, knocking over one person and threatening another with a felony charge and a $1,000 fine for touching a policeman.
Everyone was ordered to move up against a table, and five of those present were handcuffed and taken to the police station. The cops refused to show anyone a copy of the law under which the citations were issued and failed to inform the five who were arrested of their rights. One woman was struck on the side of the head, and one officer was overheard to ask his sergeant: “Can I choke this black bitch?”
This outrageous attack on an office of the Workers League must be understood as an attack upon the entire working-class movement. The Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League and Partisan Defense Committee protest this cop harassment and demand that all charges against those attending the YS dance be dropped immediately!
The Workers League has requested that letters, telegrams and messages of protest regarding this incident be sent to: Mayor Herb A. Hennes. Jr. 6550 Miles Avenue, Huntington Park, CA 90255
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Where is the Class Line in News Line? (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 114 (17 June 1976)
Where's the Class Line in the News Line?
LONDON, May 6 – “At first glance it looks like the Daily Mirror,” writes the weekly London entertainment guide Time Out, comparing to the British equivalent of the New York Daily News and National Enquirer the Workers Revolutionary Party's latest desperate maneuver - a “popular” daily paper featuring big pictures, a “full racing card” and very little politics. The logo is indeed a deliberate imitation of that used by the sex-and-scandal British gutter press.
It looks like the Daily Mirror at second glance, too. The sympathetic article in Time Out notes, “despite appearances, The News Line is closely associated with the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party,” commenting approvingly that most of the WRP’s political views have been removed from the new publication. Most of the news is “straight” reportage; thus News Line reports without comment that General Carvalho is being run for Portuguese President, or that the Italian Communist Party has proposed a grand coalition.
The WRP's daily Workers Press folded in February (see WV No. 97, 20 February 1976). Evidently concluding that even the fake-mass Workers Press had been too political to gain a wide readership, the WRP has now staked its hopes on trying to compete with the bourgeois press on its own terms. The accent is on sensationalism: spy scares, government sex scandals; tidbits of “human interest.”
Even the sports news in News Line is banal. The racing tips are mostly carefully hedged predictions on favourites – and the track record so far is not outstanding.
Once again the WRP’s antics provide fuel for the opponents of Trotskyism. The introduction to an anti-Trotskyist polemic (by Stalinist Monty Johnstone) notes with glee that the WRP “had also bitterly attacked the [CP's Morning] Star for having changed its name from the Daily Worker – only themselves now to adopt one which has not the slightest hint of a connection with working-class traditions and aspirations.”
Desperation
The WRP took the opportunity in the interim between dailies to retire general secretary Gerry Healy, renowned for his political banditry and organizational thuggery, whose place has now been taken by the equally notorious Michael Banda. The Healyites’ organisational fortunes have continued to decline markedly, both in Britain and internationally. The WRP May Day march was claimed to have 2,000 participants, but WV observers counted at most 560, including a large number of children.
Perhaps in desperation, the Healyites have pushed their techniques of “mass recruitment” to bizarre lengths. For instance, the 1 May issue of the Healyite Young Socialist trumpets “200 Members Join Hull YS.” And how did the Hull Healyites “recruit” 200 new members to their Young Socialist branch?
Simple. They just held a disco (dance with records) and “everyone who attended the disco was signed up as a YS member”! Another article on the same page further amplifies the recruitment technique. It explains with an apparently straight face that at a YS “football rally” recently a discussion was precipitated by the arrival of a group of youth wearing swastikas. “In the end,” the article placidly concludes, “it was agreed that such signs could not be worn in a Young Socialists disco and they were taken off.”
By all rights the British ostensibly Trotskyist organisations who mourned the demise of Workers Press should be hailing its rebirth as News Line. If the closing of Workers Press was a “loss” as the International Marxist Group's Red Weekly said, surely News Line is a “gain”? And if, the Workers Socialist League (whose core was expelled from the WRP in 1974) was correct in calling the liquidation of Workers Press “A Blow to Trotskyism” then why is not News Line a “blow for Trotskyism”!
The WSL's assessment of Workers Press showed its failure to draw the proper balance sheet of Healyism, attacking only the organisational sectarianism of the WRP and not its opportunist political practice. The outstanding trait of the Healyite “method,” the pretense at a mass base (a “base” built on discos and not Marxism) was strikingly revealed in the failure of its “mass paper,” which never had any significant support in the working class.
Moreover, the Healy tendency's degeneration into anti-Trotskyist political banditry occurred many years before the expulsion of the WSL. The disorientation of the WSL, and its leanings towards rightist conciliation of the Labour Party, are shown in its insistence that the WRP should never have stood candidates against the Labour Party – at the same time as the WSL insists that the WRP had enough mass support among advanced workers to sustain a daily paper! You cannot have it both ways.
The liquidation of the Workers Press removed a barrier in the fight to create a Trotskyist Party in Britain. The News Line is a last wild gamble that will not succeed. The hoped-for advertising, which was supposed to provide the financial support for the new paper that would enable it to succeed where Workers Press could not, has not materialised, with only a handful of theatres and bookstores taking out classified ads. The modest fund drive goal of £4,000 a month was just barely reached in the first month, and the needed circulation of 30,000 copies a day will not be reached on newsstand sales. The new paper, having effectively liquidated such political face as the WRP has, will carry general secretary Banda and his gang of political bandits down to disaster.
Where's the Class Line in the News Line?
LONDON, May 6 – “At first glance it looks like the Daily Mirror,” writes the weekly London entertainment guide Time Out, comparing to the British equivalent of the New York Daily News and National Enquirer the Workers Revolutionary Party's latest desperate maneuver - a “popular” daily paper featuring big pictures, a “full racing card” and very little politics. The logo is indeed a deliberate imitation of that used by the sex-and-scandal British gutter press.
It looks like the Daily Mirror at second glance, too. The sympathetic article in Time Out notes, “despite appearances, The News Line is closely associated with the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party,” commenting approvingly that most of the WRP’s political views have been removed from the new publication. Most of the news is “straight” reportage; thus News Line reports without comment that General Carvalho is being run for Portuguese President, or that the Italian Communist Party has proposed a grand coalition.
The WRP's daily Workers Press folded in February (see WV No. 97, 20 February 1976). Evidently concluding that even the fake-mass Workers Press had been too political to gain a wide readership, the WRP has now staked its hopes on trying to compete with the bourgeois press on its own terms. The accent is on sensationalism: spy scares, government sex scandals; tidbits of “human interest.”
Even the sports news in News Line is banal. The racing tips are mostly carefully hedged predictions on favourites – and the track record so far is not outstanding.
Once again the WRP’s antics provide fuel for the opponents of Trotskyism. The introduction to an anti-Trotskyist polemic (by Stalinist Monty Johnstone) notes with glee that the WRP “had also bitterly attacked the [CP's Morning] Star for having changed its name from the Daily Worker – only themselves now to adopt one which has not the slightest hint of a connection with working-class traditions and aspirations.”
Desperation
The WRP took the opportunity in the interim between dailies to retire general secretary Gerry Healy, renowned for his political banditry and organizational thuggery, whose place has now been taken by the equally notorious Michael Banda. The Healyites’ organisational fortunes have continued to decline markedly, both in Britain and internationally. The WRP May Day march was claimed to have 2,000 participants, but WV observers counted at most 560, including a large number of children.
Perhaps in desperation, the Healyites have pushed their techniques of “mass recruitment” to bizarre lengths. For instance, the 1 May issue of the Healyite Young Socialist trumpets “200 Members Join Hull YS.” And how did the Hull Healyites “recruit” 200 new members to their Young Socialist branch?
Simple. They just held a disco (dance with records) and “everyone who attended the disco was signed up as a YS member”! Another article on the same page further amplifies the recruitment technique. It explains with an apparently straight face that at a YS “football rally” recently a discussion was precipitated by the arrival of a group of youth wearing swastikas. “In the end,” the article placidly concludes, “it was agreed that such signs could not be worn in a Young Socialists disco and they were taken off.”
By all rights the British ostensibly Trotskyist organisations who mourned the demise of Workers Press should be hailing its rebirth as News Line. If the closing of Workers Press was a “loss” as the International Marxist Group's Red Weekly said, surely News Line is a “gain”? And if, the Workers Socialist League (whose core was expelled from the WRP in 1974) was correct in calling the liquidation of Workers Press “A Blow to Trotskyism” then why is not News Line a “blow for Trotskyism”!
The WSL's assessment of Workers Press showed its failure to draw the proper balance sheet of Healyism, attacking only the organisational sectarianism of the WRP and not its opportunist political practice. The outstanding trait of the Healyite “method,” the pretense at a mass base (a “base” built on discos and not Marxism) was strikingly revealed in the failure of its “mass paper,” which never had any significant support in the working class.
Moreover, the Healy tendency's degeneration into anti-Trotskyist political banditry occurred many years before the expulsion of the WSL. The disorientation of the WSL, and its leanings towards rightist conciliation of the Labour Party, are shown in its insistence that the WRP should never have stood candidates against the Labour Party – at the same time as the WSL insists that the WRP had enough mass support among advanced workers to sustain a daily paper! You cannot have it both ways.
The liquidation of the Workers Press removed a barrier in the fight to create a Trotskyist Party in Britain. The News Line is a last wild gamble that will not succeed. The hoped-for advertising, which was supposed to provide the financial support for the new paper that would enable it to succeed where Workers Press could not, has not materialised, with only a handful of theatres and bookstores taking out classified ads. The modest fund drive goal of £4,000 a month was just barely reached in the first month, and the needed circulation of 30,000 copies a day will not be reached on newsstand sales. The new paper, having effectively liquidated such political face as the WRP has, will carry general secretary Banda and his gang of political bandits down to disaster.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 109 (14 May 1976)
Shocked WL Supporters Pull Off Ex-National Secretary
Fred Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant in Cleveland
At a Cleveland shopping center last week, Fred Mazelis, former national secretary of the disintegrating Workers League (WL), physically assaulted a WV salesman. While WL thuggery is far from unprecedented, the frenzied attack so startled several of Mazelis' shocked supporters standing nearby that they rushed forward to restrain him and drag him away.
Mazelis initially appeared reasonable enough and bought a copy of WV. But when asked why he was no longer WL head and why the WL had changed its leadership so often in the past couple of years, Mazelis denounced the Spartacist supporter for starting a "non-political" argument.
Responding to another question, Mazelis defended the WL's political support to the petty-bourgeois nationalist MPLA. But when pressed about the MPLA's strike-breaking activities, Mazelis without warning put down his bundle of Bulletins, grabbed the SLer by the throat and began hitting him in the face. The SLer struck back effectively in self-defense and three WLers intervened to stop Mazelis' unprovoked attack. Mazelis began shouting to his comrades, “No, no! This is important!” Clearly beside himself, he told the SLer: “We kicked your ass in Los Angeles too.... This is just the beginning!”
Workers League gangster violence within the workers movement erupted several times recently in Los Angeles. On March I the WL held a meeting at Cal. State L.A. to publicize its shameful campaign to smear leaders of the reformist Socialist Workers Party as "accomplices of the GPU" in the Stalinists’ assassination of Trotsky. When members of the Spartacus Youth League appeared at this “public” meeting, they were physically threatened and one was assaulted and choked. A supporter of the WL's Young Socialists told a campus employee to have the university police eject the SYLers on the grounds that not all of them were students.
The next week, when the same presentation was made at UCLA, an enraged David North, current WL national secretary, attacked a photographer and ripped her camera out of her hands.
Then two weeks later at a March 21 meeting of TUALP, the WL's fake trade-union front, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Spartacist supporters were excluded, as were members of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME Local 2070, a class-struggle opposition within the public employees union. When one Militant Caucus member insisted on his right to attend, he was set upon by WL goons and struck in the face. As before, the WL enlisted the aid of the Convention Center management to expel the SL and Militant Caucus members, and the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to lend a hand.
These Stalinist hooligan tactics are completely alien to the Trotskyism which the WL pretends to uphold. They are the tactics of an impotent, paranoid sect which cannot defend its politics and is terrified of losing control of its membership. Labor militants and supporters of all left-wing political tendencies, must defend the principle of workers democracy by repudiating the Workers League's despicable gangsterism and expunging such practices from the workers movement.
Shocked WL Supporters Pull Off Ex-National Secretary
Fred Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant in Cleveland
At a Cleveland shopping center last week, Fred Mazelis, former national secretary of the disintegrating Workers League (WL), physically assaulted a WV salesman. While WL thuggery is far from unprecedented, the frenzied attack so startled several of Mazelis' shocked supporters standing nearby that they rushed forward to restrain him and drag him away.
Mazelis initially appeared reasonable enough and bought a copy of WV. But when asked why he was no longer WL head and why the WL had changed its leadership so often in the past couple of years, Mazelis denounced the Spartacist supporter for starting a "non-political" argument.
Responding to another question, Mazelis defended the WL's political support to the petty-bourgeois nationalist MPLA. But when pressed about the MPLA's strike-breaking activities, Mazelis without warning put down his bundle of Bulletins, grabbed the SLer by the throat and began hitting him in the face. The SLer struck back effectively in self-defense and three WLers intervened to stop Mazelis' unprovoked attack. Mazelis began shouting to his comrades, “No, no! This is important!” Clearly beside himself, he told the SLer: “We kicked your ass in Los Angeles too.... This is just the beginning!”
Workers League gangster violence within the workers movement erupted several times recently in Los Angeles. On March I the WL held a meeting at Cal. State L.A. to publicize its shameful campaign to smear leaders of the reformist Socialist Workers Party as "accomplices of the GPU" in the Stalinists’ assassination of Trotsky. When members of the Spartacus Youth League appeared at this “public” meeting, they were physically threatened and one was assaulted and choked. A supporter of the WL's Young Socialists told a campus employee to have the university police eject the SYLers on the grounds that not all of them were students.
The next week, when the same presentation was made at UCLA, an enraged David North, current WL national secretary, attacked a photographer and ripped her camera out of her hands.
Then two weeks later at a March 21 meeting of TUALP, the WL's fake trade-union front, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Spartacist supporters were excluded, as were members of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME Local 2070, a class-struggle opposition within the public employees union. When one Militant Caucus member insisted on his right to attend, he was set upon by WL goons and struck in the face. As before, the WL enlisted the aid of the Convention Center management to expel the SL and Militant Caucus members, and the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to lend a hand.
These Stalinist hooligan tactics are completely alien to the Trotskyism which the WL pretends to uphold. They are the tactics of an impotent, paranoid sect which cannot defend its politics and is terrified of losing control of its membership. Labor militants and supporters of all left-wing political tendencies, must defend the principle of workers democracy by repudiating the Workers League's despicable gangsterism and expunging such practices from the workers movement.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Healy “Assimilates” Angola (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 102 (26 March 1976)
Editorial Note
Healy “Assimilates” Angola
For almost a decade Gerry Healy's so-called “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC) has combined ritual denunciations of Pabloist revisionism with opportunist tailing after various non-proletarian forces, from Nasser’s “Arab Revolution” to Mao's Red Guards. The latest recipient of the Healyites’ cynical hosannas has been the People’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA, we are told, is “a mass movement of the Angolan working class and peasantry which is inseparably linked to the new stage of revolutionary struggles that has opened up in every country.” Its victory, gushed the newspaper of the IC's American supporters, would “take forward the world socialist revolution” (Bulletin, 28 November 1975).
For those of his followers who might have been confused by the IC’s alternately “critical” and “unconditional” (but always rhapsodic) support of the MPLA, Gerry Healy recently put his distorted parody of dialectics to work cooking up a bizarre explanation (“SWP: Apologist and Defender of Imperialism,” Bulletin, 5 March). The IC uses as a foil the Socialist Workers Party's neutrality in the civil war between the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA and the CIA/ South Africa/ Portuguese colonialist/ FNLA/UNITA bloc, in order to put forward an anti-Leninist position of political (as opposed to military) support for the petty-bourgeois nationalist People's Movement.
This incredibly muddled IC “Statement” strings together lengthy quotations from a hodgepodge of sources to advance two self-contradictory arguments for politically backing the MPLA: that bourgeois nation-building is historically progressive and (at least implicitly) that an MPLA regime in Angola will result in the creation of a deformed workers state.
While making some ritual genuflections in the direction of “independence of the working class,” the polemic's main thrust is to build political confidence in the MPLA which, we are told, is the “only authentic bourgeois nationalist movement in Angola,” has “called for a fight to the finish” against the U.S. and South Africa, struggles against tribalism and “reactionary separatism” and is backed by “the majority of the independent African nations.” Moreover, its struggle “is an historically progressive struggle involving the Angolan nation and not just the bourgeoisie against U.S. imperialism.” To build this case, the IC must deny that the other groups had ever fought the Portuguese and must ignore the MPLA's record of collaboration with the Portuguese military, its narrow and partially tribally circumscribed base of support among the Angolan peoples and its demonstrated willingness to smash the nascent organizations of the working class.
The MPLA is described as if it were an emergent bourgeois class building a nation in the epoch of capitalist expansion. In fact, the national boundaries the MPLA-led People's Republic of Angola (and the IC) defends are but the arbitrary divisions imposed on the African continent by plundering imperialist powers. The Healyites – who demonstrated their abject insensitivity to national oppression when they “critically supported” the Nigerian government's genocidal slaughter of the Ibo (Biafran) people in 1967 – now pass over in silence the division of the Bakongo people between northern Angola and Zaire in order to present the MPLA as about to resolve the national question.
The IC's enthusiasm for bourgeois nation-building is a back-handed acceptance of the Menshevist/ Stalinist “theory of stages”: “first” the bourgeoisie kicks out imperialism and establishes capitalist democracy, “later” the proletariat conquers state power and institutes socialism. In one article, the American Healyites explicitly lay out the stagist conception behind their effusive outpourings for the People's Movement: “We support unconditionally the MPLA's fight for national liberation and independence and recognize that it is only through this necessary struggle that the conditions can be created for a new stage of class struggle in all the African countries” (Bulletin, 30 January).
One of Trotsky's crucial extensions of Leninism was the theory of permanent revolution, which explained that in the epoch of imperialist decay the unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks of the underdeveloped countries could not be undertaken by a weak capitalist class, which is inevitably subservient to imperialism. Trotsky insisted that only the proletariat, in the process of consolidating the victorious socialist revolution, could seriously address the unsolved bourgeois-democratic tasks (including the elimination of national oppression) in the context of proletarian property relations. Thus the Healyites, in jumping on the MPLA bandwagon, once again leave their pretended Trotskyism behind.
The IC “Statement” simultaneously dishes out another unsavory mess from Healy's greasy spoon: the proposition that an MPLA victory equals the destruction of capitalism and the constitution of a deformed workers state. This argument is advanced through some inapplicable historical analogies and a string of quotations whose purpose in this article would otherwise be perfectly inexplicable.
The 1C “completely opposes the SWP's opportunism and follows Trotsky's position of defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories, while condemning, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the suppression of dissident opinion in the CP and the working class.” These admirable sentiments are followed by no less than twenty paragraphs from Trotsky's lucid polemic, In Defense of Marxism, explaining that the Russian bureaucracy would be compelled to destroy capitalist property relations in eastern Poland before incorporating the territory into the USSR.
What is the application of Trotsky's analysis of Poland at the time of the Second World War to the situation in Angola today? Like Henry Kissinger, Healy seems to believe that Soviet weaponry equals the uprooting of capitalist property relations. This same “method” was the main theoretical vehicle whereby a revisionist current in the Fourth International, led by one Michel Pablo, in the 1950's turned the majority of the Trotskyist world movement toward centrist accommodation to Stalinism and other petty-bourgeois forces. Pablo propounded a “new world reality” in which the power bloc led by the USSR would against its will become the ally of all progressive movements, which would thereby find themselves swept along by the onrushing “world revolution” and compelled to establish deformed workers states.
The only possible conclusion from the IC's rhetoric about “defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories” is that Healy & Co. believe that what is taking place is the transformation of Angola into a deformed workers state (presumably by a process of “structural assimilation”). One hilarious little wrinkle is that the Healyites presumably still hold to their idiot position that Cuba – whose troops in Angola are presumably doing the “extending of nationalized property relations” – is a capitalist state.
The implication that Angola is becoming a deformed workers state is a characteristic Healyite gyration. Even before its headlong degeneration into outright political banditry, the Healy tendency showed itself unable to oppose the Pabloists’ political accommodation to Stalinism by anything other than an alternation between know-nothing anti-Pabloism (Cuba) and archtypically Pabloist softness toward militant Stalinist guerrillaism (Vietnam).
The current Angola polemic, whose main purpose seems to be to provide copy to fill the dreary pages of the Bulletin, also somehow manages to incorporate the IC's latest hobby horse – a slanderous campaign against the SWP’s Joseph Hansen and George Novack as “accomplices of the GPU” in the 1940 Trotsky assassination:
Substituting cop-baiting for political struggle, the IC is an invaluable tool for the SWP leadership in seeking to reassure its ranks that consistent reformism provides a far more secure political niche than the wild-eyed incoherence of Healy's “anti-Pabloists.” The international Spartacist tendency has uniquely put forward the policy of warning the working class against placing any political confidence in the strikebreaking MPLA, while giving military support to the latter against imperialist-led attack. As the last South African troops withdraw and the bourgeois People's Republic of Angola consolidates its position, the defense of the Angolan workers against their new capitalist rulers becomes more urgent than ever. Yet the IC continues to praise the “revolutionary” MPLA.
As the IC digs itself deeper into the grave of irrelevance, the growth and programmatic cohesiveness of the international Spartacist tendency uniquely demonstrate that principled struggle against Pabloist revisionism is the means for the reforging of the Fourth International.
Editorial Note
Healy “Assimilates” Angola
For almost a decade Gerry Healy's so-called “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC) has combined ritual denunciations of Pabloist revisionism with opportunist tailing after various non-proletarian forces, from Nasser’s “Arab Revolution” to Mao's Red Guards. The latest recipient of the Healyites’ cynical hosannas has been the People’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA, we are told, is “a mass movement of the Angolan working class and peasantry which is inseparably linked to the new stage of revolutionary struggles that has opened up in every country.” Its victory, gushed the newspaper of the IC's American supporters, would “take forward the world socialist revolution” (Bulletin, 28 November 1975).
For those of his followers who might have been confused by the IC’s alternately “critical” and “unconditional” (but always rhapsodic) support of the MPLA, Gerry Healy recently put his distorted parody of dialectics to work cooking up a bizarre explanation (“SWP: Apologist and Defender of Imperialism,” Bulletin, 5 March). The IC uses as a foil the Socialist Workers Party's neutrality in the civil war between the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA and the CIA/ South Africa/ Portuguese colonialist/ FNLA/UNITA bloc, in order to put forward an anti-Leninist position of political (as opposed to military) support for the petty-bourgeois nationalist People's Movement.
This incredibly muddled IC “Statement” strings together lengthy quotations from a hodgepodge of sources to advance two self-contradictory arguments for politically backing the MPLA: that bourgeois nation-building is historically progressive and (at least implicitly) that an MPLA regime in Angola will result in the creation of a deformed workers state.
While making some ritual genuflections in the direction of “independence of the working class,” the polemic's main thrust is to build political confidence in the MPLA which, we are told, is the “only authentic bourgeois nationalist movement in Angola,” has “called for a fight to the finish” against the U.S. and South Africa, struggles against tribalism and “reactionary separatism” and is backed by “the majority of the independent African nations.” Moreover, its struggle “is an historically progressive struggle involving the Angolan nation and not just the bourgeoisie against U.S. imperialism.” To build this case, the IC must deny that the other groups had ever fought the Portuguese and must ignore the MPLA's record of collaboration with the Portuguese military, its narrow and partially tribally circumscribed base of support among the Angolan peoples and its demonstrated willingness to smash the nascent organizations of the working class.
The MPLA is described as if it were an emergent bourgeois class building a nation in the epoch of capitalist expansion. In fact, the national boundaries the MPLA-led People's Republic of Angola (and the IC) defends are but the arbitrary divisions imposed on the African continent by plundering imperialist powers. The Healyites – who demonstrated their abject insensitivity to national oppression when they “critically supported” the Nigerian government's genocidal slaughter of the Ibo (Biafran) people in 1967 – now pass over in silence the division of the Bakongo people between northern Angola and Zaire in order to present the MPLA as about to resolve the national question.
The IC's enthusiasm for bourgeois nation-building is a back-handed acceptance of the Menshevist/ Stalinist “theory of stages”: “first” the bourgeoisie kicks out imperialism and establishes capitalist democracy, “later” the proletariat conquers state power and institutes socialism. In one article, the American Healyites explicitly lay out the stagist conception behind their effusive outpourings for the People's Movement: “We support unconditionally the MPLA's fight for national liberation and independence and recognize that it is only through this necessary struggle that the conditions can be created for a new stage of class struggle in all the African countries” (Bulletin, 30 January).
One of Trotsky's crucial extensions of Leninism was the theory of permanent revolution, which explained that in the epoch of imperialist decay the unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks of the underdeveloped countries could not be undertaken by a weak capitalist class, which is inevitably subservient to imperialism. Trotsky insisted that only the proletariat, in the process of consolidating the victorious socialist revolution, could seriously address the unsolved bourgeois-democratic tasks (including the elimination of national oppression) in the context of proletarian property relations. Thus the Healyites, in jumping on the MPLA bandwagon, once again leave their pretended Trotskyism behind.
The IC “Statement” simultaneously dishes out another unsavory mess from Healy's greasy spoon: the proposition that an MPLA victory equals the destruction of capitalism and the constitution of a deformed workers state. This argument is advanced through some inapplicable historical analogies and a string of quotations whose purpose in this article would otherwise be perfectly inexplicable.
The 1C “completely opposes the SWP's opportunism and follows Trotsky's position of defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories, while condemning, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the suppression of dissident opinion in the CP and the working class.” These admirable sentiments are followed by no less than twenty paragraphs from Trotsky's lucid polemic, In Defense of Marxism, explaining that the Russian bureaucracy would be compelled to destroy capitalist property relations in eastern Poland before incorporating the territory into the USSR.
What is the application of Trotsky's analysis of Poland at the time of the Second World War to the situation in Angola today? Like Henry Kissinger, Healy seems to believe that Soviet weaponry equals the uprooting of capitalist property relations. This same “method” was the main theoretical vehicle whereby a revisionist current in the Fourth International, led by one Michel Pablo, in the 1950's turned the majority of the Trotskyist world movement toward centrist accommodation to Stalinism and other petty-bourgeois forces. Pablo propounded a “new world reality” in which the power bloc led by the USSR would against its will become the ally of all progressive movements, which would thereby find themselves swept along by the onrushing “world revolution” and compelled to establish deformed workers states.
The only possible conclusion from the IC's rhetoric about “defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories” is that Healy & Co. believe that what is taking place is the transformation of Angola into a deformed workers state (presumably by a process of “structural assimilation”). One hilarious little wrinkle is that the Healyites presumably still hold to their idiot position that Cuba – whose troops in Angola are presumably doing the “extending of nationalized property relations” – is a capitalist state.
The implication that Angola is becoming a deformed workers state is a characteristic Healyite gyration. Even before its headlong degeneration into outright political banditry, the Healy tendency showed itself unable to oppose the Pabloists’ political accommodation to Stalinism by anything other than an alternation between know-nothing anti-Pabloism (Cuba) and archtypically Pabloist softness toward militant Stalinist guerrillaism (Vietnam).
The current Angola polemic, whose main purpose seems to be to provide copy to fill the dreary pages of the Bulletin, also somehow manages to incorporate the IC's latest hobby horse – a slanderous campaign against the SWP’s Joseph Hansen and George Novack as “accomplices of the GPU” in the 1940 Trotsky assassination:
“The SWP's veiled support for the CIA-financed organizations and their overt hostility to the MPLA is inseparably tied up with the gross betrayal of Trotskyism which is expressed in the refusal of SWP leaders Novack and Hansen to answer any of the charges made against them by the International Committee of the Fourth International on the question of security and the Fourth International. Their consistent refusal to do anything to rid the movement of the stigma of GPU intrigue and provocation today renders them just as vulnerable to the pressure of the CIA.”The IC makes unsupportable charges, echoing the Stalinists, that SWP leaders were implicated in the GPU's murder of Trotsky, and then brazenly bemoans “the stigma” which Healy himself is working wildly to create! In the delirium tremens of the disintegrating IC, the reformist leadership of the SWP has become a kind of collective Herbert Philbrick, “leading three lives”: as ostensible socialists, GPU agents and now witting CIA pawns. The SWP's degeneration is “explained” by the absurd comparison to a double agent who, having allegedly been an “accomplice” for the KGB, thereby becomes “easy pickings” for the CIA.
Substituting cop-baiting for political struggle, the IC is an invaluable tool for the SWP leadership in seeking to reassure its ranks that consistent reformism provides a far more secure political niche than the wild-eyed incoherence of Healy's “anti-Pabloists.” The international Spartacist tendency has uniquely put forward the policy of warning the working class against placing any political confidence in the strikebreaking MPLA, while giving military support to the latter against imperialist-led attack. As the last South African troops withdraw and the bourgeois People's Republic of Angola consolidates its position, the defense of the Angolan workers against their new capitalist rulers becomes more urgent than ever. Yet the IC continues to praise the “revolutionary” MPLA.
As the IC digs itself deeper into the grave of irrelevance, the growth and programmatic cohesiveness of the international Spartacist tendency uniquely demonstrate that principled struggle against Pabloist revisionism is the means for the reforging of the Fourth International.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
WL Slander-Fest Picketed in NYC (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 99 (5 March 1976)
“Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”
WL Slander-Fest Picketed in NYC
NEW YORK, February 28 – “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” The Spartacist League (SL), protesting its exclusion and demanding a stop to the Workers League (WL) slander campaign, picketed a WL “public” meeting on “How the GPU Killed Trotsky” held tonight at New York University. The meeting was the first in a nationwide series planned by the WL to propagate its scurrilous and totally empty charge that Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leaders Joseph Hansen and George Novack were “accomplices” of the Stalinist secret police in the 1940 assassination of Trotsky. The inspiration for the smear campaign emanates from the WL's sinister mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), who has evidently appointed himself the Vyshinsky of the WL/WRP's ersatz Moscow Trials..
Arriving at the meeting the 50 SL supporters found, as anticipated, that their entry was blocked by a WL goon-squad. The SLers proceeded to set up a picket line chanting “Trotsky Died Fighting Stalinist Lies, Healy's Slanders Must Not Get By!” SL signs demanded “Fight Hansen's Reformism Politically, Not with Stalinist Slanders,” "Workers League 'Method’ – Anti-Democratic Exclusions and the Big Lie” and "For the Rebirth of the Fourth International.”
The WL had cynically misled the socialist public about the meeting, which was advertised in the Village Voice as an apparent expose of the GPU's murder of Trotsky. Ads in the WL's Bulletin announced the real topic: “Joseph Hansen and George Novack, Accomplices of the GPU Unmasked.” The WL ranks had been closeted inside the auditorium early to prevent their exposure to the SL demonstration. But others got a taste of what the WL/WRP calls “Security and the Fourth International” as the paranoid WL interrogated everyone unknown to them to root out suspected “secret-Sparts.”
Inside the sanitized forum (in which no time was allotted for floor discussion in any case), Bulletin editor Jeff Sebastian and new WL national secretary David North proceeded to regurgitate endless fake-factual minutiae and insinuations about Trotsky's assassination designed to convince the naive that, incomprehensible though it all seems, it must prove something. In fact the WL has produced not one shred of evidence against Hansen or Novack. A leaflet distributed outside by the SL noted that “Hansen's current role as chief ideologue for the reformist program of the no-longer-revolutionary SWP in no ways alters this simple fact: the WL/WRP have produced exactly nothing to call into question this man's fundamental integrity as a Trotskyist in 1940.”
The featured speaker - one Harold Robins, former head of security at Trotsky's house in Coyoacan, Mexico – carefully avoided backing up the WL on allegations pivotal to the WL's slander barrage. At no time did Robins state or infer that Hansen or Novack were “accomplices of the GPU.” Nor did he echo the WL's insinuations about Robert Sheldon Harte, an SWP member and Coyoacan guard who was killed in an earlier GPU machine-gun raid on the house. Throughout his long and rambling remarks, Robins was clearly most concerned to protect himself from any charges of negligence. For Robins to lend himself to a campaign whose central thrust is to libel Hansen, apparently without endorsing the accusations against Hansen, demonstrates either criminal cynicism or incredible political malice – or perhaps both.
At the forum, North read from the SL leaflet which protested the Stalin-style slanders. He accused the SL of being the SWP's attorney. But it is no accident that the SWP turned down the SL's invitation to join a demonstration against the despicable vilification of the SWP's own leaders. It falls to the Spartacist League to defend the revolutionary history of the SWP, the party which at the time of Trotsky's death was the revolutionary U.S. section of the Fourth International.
The SL leaflet noted that the WL's mud-slinging is an attack not only against Hansen and Novack, “but at bottom against the revolutionary SWP of 1940, against Trotsky and the Fourth International. At the time of the assassination it was the Stalinists who charged that Trotsky had been killed by one of 'his own' in a falling out among thieves. The attempt to portray the FI as a morally degenerate gang was part and parcel of Stalin's central task: to discredit Trotsky and the FI as the legitimate continuators of the revolutionary tradition of Lenin. Now the WL has made itself an 'accomplice' of this despicable method.”
“Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”
WL Slander-Fest Picketed in NYC
NEW YORK, February 28 – “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” The Spartacist League (SL), protesting its exclusion and demanding a stop to the Workers League (WL) slander campaign, picketed a WL “public” meeting on “How the GPU Killed Trotsky” held tonight at New York University. The meeting was the first in a nationwide series planned by the WL to propagate its scurrilous and totally empty charge that Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leaders Joseph Hansen and George Novack were “accomplices” of the Stalinist secret police in the 1940 assassination of Trotsky. The inspiration for the smear campaign emanates from the WL's sinister mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), who has evidently appointed himself the Vyshinsky of the WL/WRP's ersatz Moscow Trials..
Arriving at the meeting the 50 SL supporters found, as anticipated, that their entry was blocked by a WL goon-squad. The SLers proceeded to set up a picket line chanting “Trotsky Died Fighting Stalinist Lies, Healy's Slanders Must Not Get By!” SL signs demanded “Fight Hansen's Reformism Politically, Not with Stalinist Slanders,” "Workers League 'Method’ – Anti-Democratic Exclusions and the Big Lie” and "For the Rebirth of the Fourth International.”
The WL had cynically misled the socialist public about the meeting, which was advertised in the Village Voice as an apparent expose of the GPU's murder of Trotsky. Ads in the WL's Bulletin announced the real topic: “Joseph Hansen and George Novack, Accomplices of the GPU Unmasked.” The WL ranks had been closeted inside the auditorium early to prevent their exposure to the SL demonstration. But others got a taste of what the WL/WRP calls “Security and the Fourth International” as the paranoid WL interrogated everyone unknown to them to root out suspected “secret-Sparts.”
Inside the sanitized forum (in which no time was allotted for floor discussion in any case), Bulletin editor Jeff Sebastian and new WL national secretary David North proceeded to regurgitate endless fake-factual minutiae and insinuations about Trotsky's assassination designed to convince the naive that, incomprehensible though it all seems, it must prove something. In fact the WL has produced not one shred of evidence against Hansen or Novack. A leaflet distributed outside by the SL noted that “Hansen's current role as chief ideologue for the reformist program of the no-longer-revolutionary SWP in no ways alters this simple fact: the WL/WRP have produced exactly nothing to call into question this man's fundamental integrity as a Trotskyist in 1940.”
The featured speaker - one Harold Robins, former head of security at Trotsky's house in Coyoacan, Mexico – carefully avoided backing up the WL on allegations pivotal to the WL's slander barrage. At no time did Robins state or infer that Hansen or Novack were “accomplices of the GPU.” Nor did he echo the WL's insinuations about Robert Sheldon Harte, an SWP member and Coyoacan guard who was killed in an earlier GPU machine-gun raid on the house. Throughout his long and rambling remarks, Robins was clearly most concerned to protect himself from any charges of negligence. For Robins to lend himself to a campaign whose central thrust is to libel Hansen, apparently without endorsing the accusations against Hansen, demonstrates either criminal cynicism or incredible political malice – or perhaps both.
At the forum, North read from the SL leaflet which protested the Stalin-style slanders. He accused the SL of being the SWP's attorney. But it is no accident that the SWP turned down the SL's invitation to join a demonstration against the despicable vilification of the SWP's own leaders. It falls to the Spartacist League to defend the revolutionary history of the SWP, the party which at the time of Trotsky's death was the revolutionary U.S. section of the Fourth International.
The SL leaflet noted that the WL's mud-slinging is an attack not only against Hansen and Novack, “but at bottom against the revolutionary SWP of 1940, against Trotsky and the Fourth International. At the time of the assassination it was the Stalinists who charged that Trotsky had been killed by one of 'his own' in a falling out among thieves. The attempt to portray the FI as a morally degenerate gang was part and parcel of Stalin's central task: to discredit Trotsky and the FI as the legitimate continuators of the revolutionary tradition of Lenin. Now the WL has made itself an 'accomplice' of this despicable method.”
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