"Socialist" Apologist for Scabbing (1996)

Workers Vanguard No. 637, 19 January 1996

David North, “Socialist” Apoologist for Scabbing

Four years ago, the organization known as the Workers League, led by one David North, decided to write off the trade unions, saying “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992; see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). Now, in the context of the defeated 17-month-long Caterpillar strike and the four-month battle by Liverpool dockers against union-busting, North & Co. have taken this formulation out of the realm of theory and shown it for what it really is: an open prescription for strikebreaking.

Early last month, as dock workers unions from North America to Australia announced their refusal to handle ships loaded in Liverpool by scabs, North’s followers in the British International Communist Party (ICP) wrote a scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), calling this basic declaration of solidarity a “fraud.” Yet some two weeks later, American trade unionists of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) turned back a scab Atlantic Container Lines ship from three U.S. ports by honoring picket lines put up by dock workers who had flown in from Liverpool, giving a huge boost to their strike.

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North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
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As a cover for their anti-internationalist, anti-working-class line, the Northites point to the ILA’s “history of working with the U.S. State Department and CIA backed operations abroad.” This is pretty cheeky coming from these political bandits, who took up the cause of every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet movement from the Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin reactionaries. North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.

The link between the Northites’ current anti-labor line and their historic anti-Sovietism was captured in a recent appeal by ICP National Secretary David Hyland to the deeply reformist Militant Labour group for a “mass socialist party,” Openly calling to “destroy the influence and control of the old unions,” Hyland offers as proof that any “trade union perspective” is bankrupt… “the example of Solidarność in Poland” (IWE, 11 September 1995). Solidarność, in fact, was a counterrevolutionary political movement masquerading as a “union” on behalf of its CIA and Vatican bankrollers, which was cheered by the Northites as it organized Polish workers behind a program of capitalist restoration.

Never ones to differentiate the trade unions from the pro-capitalist bureaucracy that keeps them chained to the exploiters and their state, North & Co. have now become lawyers for scabbing. Reporting on the Caterpillar UAW strike, which was betrayed outright by the UAW bureaucracy, their American newspaper writes, “UAW officials have attempted to absolve themselves of blame for whar has happened by diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines” (International Workers Bulletin, 18 December 1995). Putting quotation marks around “scab” is no slip. In fact, the article justifies scabbing, claiming that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union. Most simply recognized the futility of the policies being pursued by the UAW, which had, after all, abandoned the previous strike.” Now that corporations are shelling out billions every year to hire union-busting law firms and private police, are the Northites offering themselves as PR agents for the growing army of strikebreakers?

The “hot-cargoing” of scab shipping by dockers internationally is an example of the kind of genuine solidarity in action which can fortify the unions against the worldwide capitalist offensive. Our perspective is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. This requires a hard political struggle to drive out the sellout bureaucracy — the “labor lieutenants” of the bosses — that is undermining and destroying the unions. That fight must also be waged against scab “socialists” like the Northites, who spit on the best traditions of working-class struggle as they stand on the side of the capitalist union-busters.

WL Scabs on Defense of W. Virginia Miner (1994)

Workers Vanguard No. 607, 30 September 1994

Workers League Scabs on Defense of West Virginia Miner

With United Mine Workers (UMWA) member Jerry Dale Lowe now sentenced to nearly eleven years in federal prison, on an anti-union frame-up, it is urgent for all supporters of labor to redouble their efforts in fighting for his freedom. That includes raising the large sums of money needed to carry out a legal appeal to overturn his conviction. As part of our efforts to defend Jerry Dale Lowe and seven other Logan County, West Virginia strikers, Workers Vanguard has warned miners and other supporters of his cause to beware that “a dubious outfit called the Workers League has tried to stop money from going to Lowe’s defense fund” (WV No. 603, 8 July).

Now this “Workers” League — which publishes its newspaper without a printers’ union label — has confirmed its scabby role in the case of Jerry Dale Lowe. A smear piece in the WL’s International Workers Bulletin (18 July) accuses us of being “accomplices” of the UMWA bureaucracy, because we call on our readers to send contributions to the place Jerry Dale Lowe wants them to go, the UMWA Region II Defense Fund. This, according to the Workers League, is “How the Spartacist League Aids the Frame-up of a Miner”!

The Workers League has written several articles on the outrageous frame-up of Jerry Dale Lowe. So why are they going out of their way to stop contributions being sent to his legal defense? An article in their 9 May Bulletin says that any money sent to the union defense fund would be used “for the purpose of further isolating the Logan County miners and ensuring their conviction.” Yet that is where Lowe himself has asked that donations for his defense be sent. The Workers League offers no alternative for how to raise money for his defense and dismisses any attempt to mobilize the union to free this victimized striker.

Why? The Bulletin (4 July) writes that Lowe’s case demonstrates the “transformation of the UMWA and the entire AFL-CIO into agencies of big business and the capitalist state.” Union members who have seen their wages slashed, their working conditions destroyed, their jobs decimated and their strikes sold out, are increasingly and painfully aware that their union “leaders” operate as the labor lieutenants of the bosses in enforcing the capitalist status quo. But the Workers League openly declares that it does not defend the UMWA or any other union against the bosses and their government — because it equates the unions with the bosses and government. The WL tells workers to “break with this apparatus and build new organizations of struggle.” But far from promoting class struggle, these appeals for workers to junk their unions neatly dovetail with those of the union-busting bosses.

The Spartacist League defends the unions as elementary defense organizations of the workers, while fighting to get rid of the pro-capitalist misleaders. Every strike brings home the fact that a new, class-struggle leadership is needed for labor to get off its knees and fight. But you can’t win any labor battles by scabbing on defense of the unions.

The Workers League willfully ref uses to distinguish between the unions and the sellout bureaucrats. So they attack us as “accomplices” of the bureaucracy and claim that we “promoted the lie that the UMWA bureaucracy was defending Lowe.” Let’s see who’s lying. When Lowe and seven other miners were indicted last year, we denounced UMWA president Trumka for his statement that violence “has no place in the coal fields” and his pledge to aid the frame-up by giving “whatever support and assistance we can give in that investigation.” At the same time we demanded:

“The Mine Workers union must mobilize its strength to defend these victimized union men. But that will take a sharp fight inside the UMWA against the leadership that has sold out union conditions, sold out union militants and presided over the decimation of a union that was once proud to be the shock troops of American labor.”
— WV No. 589, 3 December 1993

Who does fit the description of “accomplices” to the UMWA bureaucracy? When Arnold Miller and his “Miners for Democracy” invited the capitalist government’s Labor Department to “clean out” the UMWA in the early ‘70s, a betrayal which led to decisively weakening the union, nobody cheered louder than the Workers League. The WL’s Bulletin (11 December 1972) called or “all miners to vote for the Miners for Democracy slate,” hailing it as “a real alternative to the Boyle leadership” (see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). In contrast, Workers Vanguard (No. 17, March 1973) headlined: “Labor Department Wins Mine Workers’ Election.” A few years later, miners were burning effigies of Miller in the 1978 coal strike, as the WL’s “real alternative” knuckled under to strikebreaking Taft-Hartley injunctions and tried to shove giveback contracts down the miners’ throats.

And when it comes to financial shenanigans, why should anyone believe the Workers League? In 1991 the WL’s phony “International Labor Defense Committee” launched a “Vorkuta Miners Relief Fund,” supposedly to raise money for medical supplies for workers in northern Russian coal fields. (Curiously, the “Vorkuta miners” had well-documented links to the CIA through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy and the AFL-CIO, which had itself just set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners.) In April 1992, the WL’s affiliate in Australia declared that “more than $40,000 worth” of supplies had been sent to Vorkuta. Yet one month later, the WL’s paper admitted that they never delivered anything to the miners. The supplies ended up instead with a doctor in the Ukraine… or so their story goes (see “Workers League’s ‘Vorkuta’ Fund,” WV No. 563, 13 November 1992). The WL has given no public accounting of donations to its “relief fund.”

Whether tailing the pro-capitalist union misleaders or undermining defense of unions in the face of capitalist assault, the political bandits of the Workers League are always up to something dirty. The WL’s undermining of Jerry Dale Lowe’s defense is one more treacherous example. And the next time these fake-socialists pop up, ask them where is the union label on their IWB rag.

Walesa’s “Left” Fans Run for Cover (1990)

Workers Vanguard No. 493 (12 January 1990)

As Solidarność Cracks the Whip against Polish Workers…

Walesa’s “Left” Fans Run for Cover

Eight years ago, almost every self-declared “Trotskyist” organization in the West took the imperialists’ Cold War rallying cry of “Solidarity with Solidarność” as their own. They heralded Solidarność as a glorious uprising of the Polish working people against Stalinist “totalitarianism,” as an example for the American labor movement, as the inspiration for revolutionary struggle around the globe, ad nauseam. The international Spartacist tendency (now International Communist League [Fourth Internationalist]) stood virtually alone in recognizing Solidarność for what it was - “a company union for the CIA and bankers.”

Walesa & Co. hardly kept their program for capitalist restoration a secret. At its first national congress in September 1981 Solidarność opposed any mention of “socialism” in its constitution, while taking up the CIA call for “free trade unions” and “free elections” in the Soviet bloc and demanding that Poland join the bloodsucking International Monetary Fund. Lane Kirkland, the hardline Cold Warrior who heads the AFL-CIO, was invited to attend. So was Irving Brown, the CIA’s main “labor” operative in smashing Communist-led unions in Europe after World War II.

A month after the Solidarność congress, Lech Walesa secretly met with top American corporate executives at a posh restaurant outside Paris (see “Friends of Lech Walesa, Inc.,” WV No. 296, 8 January 1982). Meanwhile Solidarność was getting millions through various CIA conduits, including the German Social Democracy and the AFL-CIO “International Department” (see “‘AFL-CIA’ and $olidarność,” WV No. 490, 24 November 1989). The tapes of the secret Radom leadership meeting in December 1981, publicly broadcast by the Jaruzelski regime, exposed Solidarność plans for a counterrevolutionary coup.

Our call to “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!” provoked howls of outrage from the left. Now Walesa openly brags, “We are setting out... to return to the prewar situation when Poland was a capitalist country, after having gone through a long period of socialism” (Il Messaggero, 22 August 1989). Cracking the whip for Western bankers the Solidarity-led government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki has begun to slash wages and subsidies for food, housing and social services – the price of coal for home heating has already been jacked up by 600 percent! Whole industries are to be dismantled, with up to one million workers laid off. If Walesa, Mazowiecki & Co. got their way, conditions of life in Poland would make Ceausescu’s Romania look tame by comparison.

So now Walesa’s former “left” fans are trying to bury their years of cheer-leading for Solidarność. Not surprisingly the award for the most consummate hypocrisy and cynicism in this endeavor has to go to David North’s Workers League.

An editorial in the Bulletin (15 December 1989) entitled “Eastern European Revolutions Threaten World Capitalism” warns against the “program of capitalist restoration and mass impoverishment... imposed through the joint collaboration of the sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialist stooges like Lech Walesa.” But a few years back, under the heading “Lech Walesa Speaks,” the Bulletin (2 January 1981) rhapsodized over this imperialist stooge as a veritable working-class savior: the “son of a carpenter,” who “had to live in a tiny two-room flat...with his wife and five children” but now “leads of [sic] union of 10 million workers which has... the bureaucracy trembling in its boots.”

Today Walesa’s program is “capitalist restoration and mass impoverishment.” But when Solidarność decisively took the road of capitalist restoration at its first congress, the Bulletin (15 September 1981) crowed “Poland: On the Road to Political Revolution” and heralded “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement – the strongest in Eastern Europe – Solidarity.”

Now the Bulletin asks “What Is Lane Kirkland Doing in Poland?” and points out that “Kirkland’s specific assignment on behalf of the White House is to setup a CIA-run trade-union bureaucracy to brutally suppress the struggles of Polish workers.” But in 1981 they somehow “neglected” to mention that Kirkland was invited to the Solidarność congress. Even now the Northites’ German outfit, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, damns the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands for “slander[ing] the mass movement of the working class in Solidarność as a ‘company union for the CIA’” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 15 December 1989)!

Meanwhile the Australian Northite press is attacking United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel as “an agent of capitalist restoration” who is “absolutely hostile to questions of political principle” for his support to Solidarność! When the Northites talk about “political principle,” hold on to your wallet! The Workers League has consistently stood on the side of every and any force hostile to the Soviet Union from Walesa to the ayatollah Khomeini to the CIA’s Afghan mujahedin. Vitriolic Russia-haters, the Healy/ Northites hailed the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’athist regime in 1979, as only one among many of their paid services for a variety of Middle East despots.

The Pope’s “Trotskyists”

Of course the USec took a back seat to no one in its enthusing over Solidarność. Mandel called Walesa & Co. “the best socialists in the world,” while the U.S. Mandelites in Socialist Action were so inspired by Walesa that they took the Solidarność logo as the masthead for their paper. In a 1984 speech to commemorate the birth of Solidarność, Socialist Action’s Larry Cooperman declared, “For us, Polish Solidarity has been and is a reminder of the ‘socialism we want”‘ (Socialist Action, October 1984). Now we read that “Walesa steps in to direct attacks on Polish workers” (Socialist Action, September 1989).

In yet another American Mandelite group, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, support to Solidarność seems to be causing some friction today. In the December 1989 Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, an article by Samuel Adams chafes that FIT leader Steve Bloom “tends to make light of Solidarity’s rightward thrust.” “Let’s Not Forget the Role of the Masses,” replies Bloom, dismissing Solidarność’ program for capitalist restoration as “a purely abstract possibility raised by Mazowiecki in his public pronouncements”!

The bottom line for Walesa’s “left”enthusiasts was “ten million Polish workers can’t be wrong.” Like their support to the ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic revolution” – which they also now seek to deny – they couldn’t resist Solidarność because it too was a “mass movement.” Above all, support for Solidarność was the ideal calling card for getting hired on as waterboys by the anti-Communist U.S. labor bureaucracy.

Spouting revolutionary jargon does not a revolutionary make. Those incapable of swimming against the stream when the masses are intoxicated with backward consciousness will not be capable of leading them to victory when a revolutionary opportunity arises. As we wrote at the time of Solidarność first national congress:

“The choices facing revolutionaries over Poland in the absence of a mass Trotskyist vanguard are not attractive even if they are clear. Abstentionism is not a choice; it is backhanded support to counterrevolution. No less a danger is abandoning the perspective of struggle for the conscious factor in history, for the international proletarian vanguard.”
– Stop Solidarity’s Counterrevolution!” (WV No. 289. 23 September 1981)

Today there is an opening for common struggle between the workers who were the base of Solidarność and those in the much larger, formerly Stalinist-led trade unions against the unholy gang of Stalinist bureaucrats and Solidarność leaders who are controlled by the bloodsucking international capitalists of the IMF. While necessarily beginning around immediate economic demands for survival, what is posed implicitly is a working-class struggle for political power. What is desperately needed, as we wrote eight years ago, is a genuine Trotskyist leadership “reforged in a reborn Fourth International by revolutionaries who defended the gains of October when the danger was near, the situation complex and need for programmatic clarity and backbone urgent.”

Bulletin's Hormel Lies (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 403 (9 May 1986)

Bulletin’s Hormel Lies

We told it straight. “Hormel Strike Knifed,” declared our headline, adding “All Labor Will Pay for This Treacherous Defeat!” (WV No. 400, 28 March). For seven long months on the picket lines-against a union-busting company, backstabbing International union tops, a liberal Democratic governor and the National Guard-the Hormel meat-packers hung tough. But finally, in the face of this unholy alliance, the leaders of Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota decisively turned away from union action. Instead of a class-struggle program to clear the scabs out of the plant and win the strikers' jobs back, they called for a nationwide consumer boycott and announced they would sue the United Food and Commercial Workers. (UFCW) in the capitalist courts. “And so after a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed,” we wrote.

We knew we would hear soon from the fake-left and others, whose program of tailing after the labor bureaucracy prevents them from saying what is. Sure enough, on April 1, the Bulletin, newspaper of David North’s Workers League (WL), ran a full-page polemic titled, “'Workers Vanguard Buries the Hormel Strike.” The article, by Bulletin editor Martin McLaughlin, labels the Spartacist League “dyed-in-the-wool defeatists” and claims:

“For all the rhetorical denunciations of the betrayals of the UFCW International, the resolution and the entire analysis of Spartacist AGREE with the position of the UFCW that the strike is over and it is time for a post-mortem.”

It’s not surprising the Bulletin resorts to this lying amalgam, a smear tactic from Stalin’s arsenal, equating the SL’s call for class-struggle unionism with the UFCW International’s scabherding. The entire resolution he refers to, by Spartacist supporter Stan Gow in the West Coast dock union (ILWU), is a bitter attack on the labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement for having “deliberately isolated and stabbed in the back” the Hormel strike.

The professional con artists of the Workers League don’t have to bow to the Stalinists when it comes to cynical lies: having signed up as press agents for local president Jim Guyette and his adviser Ray Rogers of Corporate Campaign, Inc., the WL simply declares that P-9’s “decision to defy the International” was an “enormous advance” and a “great step forward for the entire labor movement.” So-presto! – the workforce of more than 1,000 scabs who have been working in the Austin plant for more than two months now is simply disappeared! What is this act of “defiance” North's WL praises so highly? They’re not talking about a plant seizure, mind you, or militant mass picketing (as opposed to symbolic “civil disobedience”) to drive out the Guard, stop the scabs, shutthe plant down and keep it shut until the strike wins. Guyette and Rogers accept the government's claim that such class-struggle tactics would be “violent” and therefore unacceptable. No, what they are referring to is taking the UFCW International union to court. The Bulletin article explicitly states that “the P-9 lawsuit is perfectly justifiable as a defensive measure....”

In 1979, when a WL agent, Alan Gelfand, was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, North & Co. sued the SWP in federal court. Thus the Northites were calling on the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization! And as part of this provocation, the WL called on the court to pry into the SWP's minutes, finances-in short, every aspect of its functioning. Gerry Healy, North's British boss until recently (when Healy was blown out of the water in a scandal involving Libyan gold, fingering Iraqi Communists and allegations of sexual importunities with young women), would have leftist opponents beaten up by his goons, then sue them when they complained about it in print.

The Workers League has always had great faith in bourgeois justice. Remember their notorious support for the 1971 NYC police “strike,” moreover at a time when the racist cops were flexing their bonapartist muscles for more leeway to go after the Black Panthers! Until recently virtually the entire British left shared with the Healyites the idea that cops were incipient “comrades.” But the British miners strike, when the cops beat heads and tear-gassed strikers for 12 solid months, taught the British workers a lesson in the nature of the state and discredited the cop-loving Healyites in the eyes of militants.

For Marxists it is axiomatic that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. The behavior of the , cops, courts and National Guard during the Hormel strike has dramatically proved this again. What P-9er expects to get justice in the courtroom of Judge Bruce Stoner, whose injunctions have made real picketing illegal? Experience from the United Mine Workers to the NYC hospital union has shown over and over that when the government intervenes in the internal affairs of labor, the workers always end up paying. Rather than being a weapon for the Hormel strikers against the company and the treacherous UFCW bureaucrats, this suit will only help the bosses hamstring and control the union movement.

The Bulletin article promises to be the first of a series on “The Politics of the Spartacist League.” An introduction describes the SL as “imbedded . . . deeply into the sewers of middle-class radicalism,” and other uncomplimentary phrases. (This is a comedown, of sorts - last year the WL was labeling us “racist” and even “fascist.”) To back up such charges, it claims that the SL last year “hailed” the NYC “subway vigilante,” Bernhard Goetz, and “denounced” black revolt in South Africa, supposedly saying that armed struggle against apartheid was “hopeless.” Anyone who has read Workers Vanguard or is familiar with the politics of the Spartacist League knows that these are patent lies. We have refuted them, exhaustively, in our article “Smash Fascist Smear of SL” (WV No. 379, 17 May 1985). But North, McLaughlin et al. have fed well at the Healyite trough, and figure that they can dish out any amount of hogwash and get away with it.

The Bulletin lies about what we say on the Hormel strike; they lie about the SL's position on South Africa and the black question in the U.S. Aren't they afraid of getting caught out? The purpose of such obvious falsehoods is not to win over any independent worker or radical who comes in contact with the Spartacists. (In fact, anyone who does admit having talked to the SL is immediately given an ultimatum – break off all contact with “the Sparts,” or else.) Rather, these deliberate lies are a political straitjacket, to imprison their own members, morally and programmatically. Either you accept and defend them – all of them – or you're out of the Workers League. And once you've prostituted yourself peddling this crap, you’ve signed away your right to differ on anything: you are a proven liar.

There is one industry in the country where the WL is active and their work can be compared with that of Spartacist supporters: New York City transit. Recall that the Bulletin declared Bernhard Goetz a racist would-be killer on the sole grounds that he was a white man who shot some black youths; whether or not Goetz faced or feared a mugging was irrelevant to them, because in their legalist view only the “authorities” should have guns. The Goetz case was ambiguous, and we s aid so at the time. But recently a clear-cut case of self-defense has arisen, of black subway token clerk James Grimes, who shot robbers threatening his life in a hold-up attempt. Spartacist supporters together with token clerks and other transit workers have taken up Grimes’s case, seeking to mobilize broad union support. But the WL has done nothing to defend Grimes against management discipline and attempts by the D.A. to railroad him to jail on gun possession charges or worse. The Bulletin has not mentioned this case once. This group which hailed the 1971 NYC cop “strike” won’t defend a black man with a gun.

The WL's brand of “colorblind,” legalistic unionism shares the fundamental values of the racist pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which is why the Bulletin kept calling on every sworn enemy of P-9, from the AFL-CIO, and UFCW tops on down, to aid the Hormel strike. The Spartacist League, in contrast, put forward a program to mobilize the ranks of labor in militant class struggle. It is not “defeatism” to recognize a defeat when it is staring you in the face. No doubt many Hormel workers will find this hard to take. But revolutionary politics is not a popularity contest: it's a matter of providing leadership. According to the Bulletin, things are getting better and better – all you have to do is believe. But Hormel workers aren’t Peter Pans, and David North sure as hell isn’t Tinkerbell.

As Trotskyists we prefer to face the facts, in order to forge a party that can lead a winning fight. As Stan Gow's motion in the ILWU said of the Hormel strike, “All American workers are going to pay for this treacherous defeat. Next time there had better be a massive show of force by the labor movement to smash the union-busters.”

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper? (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 395 (17 January 1986)

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper?

Workers Vanguard reporters and salesmen at the January 4 union rally in solidarity with the Chicago Tribune strike found the militant Trib workers to be quite interested in socialist literature. We also noticed that supporters of the recently Healyite Workers League were skulking about, curiously unaggressive in pushing their raison d’etre, the twice-weekly Bulletin.

Meanwhile, a WV salesman was approached by several strikers who, misinformed, protested that he was distributing a publication printed by non-union labor. The WV salesman immediately showed the union “bug” prominently displayed in our masthead and, reassured, each of the striking workers bought a copy of the paper. We concluded that this misunderstanding arose because some fake-left outfit was, grotesquely, handing out literature without a union label at the rally – an intolerable insult to the strikers whose struggle is one for the survival of unionism in the printing industry. Recalling the WL’s furtive behavior at this rally, we checked out the Bulletin and, sure enough, found no union bug. Is the Bulletin a scab newspaper?

Tempest in a Cracked Pot (1978)

Workers Vanguard No. 194 (24 February 1978)

Tempest in a Cracked Pot

In the throes of a paranoid fantasy worthy of the crackpot Fuehrer of the U.S. Labor Party, Lyndon LaRouche (a.k.a. Lyn Marcus), the sectarian opportunist Workers League has proclaimed that the recent blizzard was actually a “cover for military maneuvers” (“State of Siege in Boston,” Bulletin, 14 February 1978)!

The article, reverberating with Sturm und Drang and Healyite crisis mongering, interprets the removal of snow from Boston streets by the National Guard as a military takeover and a “virtual state of siege for millions of residents.”

While the National Guardsmen, who are serving as armed thugs of the capitalist state against striking miners in southern Indiana, were undoubtedly guilty of abuses, clearing roads, arresting looters and even riding around in “jeeps, trucks and bulldozers as tall as a house” do not add up to a military coup - not even if they shovel the snow in uniform.

In the hysterical view of the Workers League, the street-cleaning operation was:

“a dress rehearsal aimed at disciplining the working class. Its main fear is not a snow storm but the power of the organized working class expressed in the miners strike.”

The state does indeed fear the power of the organized working class and it will respond to threats to its authority with military force - real military force, not tractors and dump trucks! It is genuinely pathetic that the Workers League cannot tell the difference between a military maneuver and a clean-up operation.

Incidentally, the National Guard was also used to clean snow from the streets of New York. At one point, 15 military vehicles were massed in front of the national headquarters of the Spartacist League. What does the Workers League make of that?

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:

“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.