Workers League Vile Provocation (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 549 (17 April 1992)

Workers League Vile Provocation

The murder of our comrade Martha Phillips in Moscow has drawn the sinister attention of David North’s Workers League and other denizens of his self-styled “International Committee of the Fourth International.”

For more than 20 years this outfit has variously described the Spartacists as “racist” and “fascist,” the “main spokesman for the national interests of the American bourgeoisie,” “provocateurs in the service of Stalinism,” “the finger-man for the world capitalists,” “Finger Man for the FBI” and generally as the most decadent and unregenerate, “politically diseased” elements, motivated by “hatred of the working class.” Why would they care what happens to our comrades? Yet twice in the space of four weeks the Workers League’s Bulletin has carried articles dealing with the death of our comrade.

Their 28 February issue cites the “disturbing report” in Workers Vanguard (No. 545, 21 February) of Martha’s murder. They shed a few crocodile tears, although everyone who knows the Workers League knows full well that they would gleefully break open a bottle of champagne over news of an SL leader’s death. There soon follows a long list of dark and insinuating “questions” and innuendos about “sketchy” accounts of the murder, “hastily” organized memorial meetings, a “highly unusual” lack of any reports on the murder in the Moscow or U.S. press. The article asks darkly, “Could the killers have been known to Phillips?” Even more explicitly, a second installment on “The Murder of Martha Phillips” (Bulletin, 27 March) talks of “the unavoidable inference that Spartacist has something to hide.”

For Martha’s comrades, the agony of her brutal and untimely death has been compounded by the fact that we still do not know who murdered her. Describing — in the obituary the circumstances of the discovery of Martha’s body on the mom ing of February 9, we said:

“At the present time, the possibility cannot be ruled out that this hideous crime may have been politically motivated. The Moscow militia is carrying out an investigation in which our friends and supporters in Moscow are cooperating.”

Two weeks later, after we had managed with great difficulty to get some further details from the militia investigation, this was reported to a memorial meeting by SL/U.S. National Chairman James Robertson. Laying out the range of potential suspects, comrade Robertson concluded:

“I do not have any basis now to speculate. It could have been somebody within our milieu for personal or provocateur reasons. We’ve had altercations with Pamyat. The Kuzbass region independent mine workers union is run straight out of Washington by a Russian fascist and the CIA; we intervened and got in their way. There are many other possibilities. Moscow is hardly New York — that is, you don’t get knifed in the street in Moscow, although increasingly with impoverishment you can get robbed. But this was not that kind of murder at all. And the plain truth is, we do not know.”

North & Co. talk as though they do know more, or pretend to, claiming to find in our straightforward statement the “smell of political coverup.” They demand a “public accounting of the ‘milieu”‘ in which we intervene in the Soviet Union, reports of which appear regularly in Workers Vanguard. These virulent Stalinophobes point an accusing finger at the “political swamp of disintegrating Soviet Stalinism,” with which they attempt to put us in league. They find it expedient, to say the least, to ignore other suspects, such as the numerous “assets” of the CIA in the Soviet Union, or even the possibility of a simple criminal act.


The Bulletin remarks that the WV obituary has “no suggestion in the headline that Phillips was the victim of murder.” Perhaps they will next denounce Trotsky for titling his obituary of his slain son, “Leon Sedov — Son, Friend, Fighter.” And maybe they will go after Trotsky’s article as well for the fact that “the first mention of murder as the cause of death comes more than three-quarters of the way into the article.”


They cynically pick up on a call for a “commission of inquiry” raised in a very powerful letter of solidarity by a sympathizer of our organization (see WV No. 546, 6 March). They even cite Trotsky as a precedent. Yet the Dewey Commission was convened not to determine that it was Stalin who murdered Left Oppositionists in the 1930s, but to clear Trotsky’s name from the lies heaped on him by Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials.

As we wrote in reply to our supporter, “unlike in Stalin’s time, today it is not an easy task to identify the culprit(s).” The Workers League claims this statement is “so specious and flimsy that it invites suspicion.” What “invites suspicion” is that the Bulletin editors willfully ignore the many sinister and deadly forces we pointed to as potential suspects. We observed that “within the decomposing bureaucracy, several of its wings” could be implicated, but “equally there are those with considerable investment in Yeltsin or ties to Yeltsin,” as well as smaller forces who “may have seen our activities as a direct roadblock to their aspirations.” The Workers League certainly fits in this last category. Far from demanding a commission of inquiry, they should be worried about what an inquiry might reveal!

What do they really want, these people who have for years treated the Spartacists as deserving nothing more than to be shot down like mad dogs? They want to seize on a tragedy which has struck our organization, and use that tragedy to hurt the Spartacist League.

The SL has earned a reputation for telling the truth, no matter how bitter, just as the rules of Trotsky’s Fourth International instruct us, from warning against Solidarnosc counterrevolution back in 1981, when the bulk of the left (and .the Workers League) was cheering it on, to correcting errors in our press. We stand on our record, making available the indexed bound volumes of Workers Vanguard and Spartacist dating back to our first issue.

We tell our readers the truth, as it is known to us, when it is known to us. And when we don’t know, we say that too.


The Northites, on the other hand, specialize in the arts of fabrication, innuendo and anti-communist smear designed to bring forces far more powerful than their own down on those whom they target. In short, they are an organization devoted to committing provocations against the left. And go after the SL not least because they see in us all-purpose surrogates for their anti-Soviet venom.

This is not the first time they have expressed a macabre interest in our dead. Following the suicide of one of our cadres two years ago, the Northites raised this in an article on the New York Daily News strike, as they tried to weasel out of our exposure that the Bulletin is published by non-union labor. Several months later, they seized on the untimely death of another comrade from cancer to twist their gruesome knife again.

Take this ghoulish mindset, add the mercenary appetites of a poison pen for hire, and that gives you a rough approximation of the North gang. In exchange for petrodollars, the IC under North’s British mentor Gerry Healy served as press agents for anti-Communist repression by Near East dictators. They are notorious for assisting the bourgeois state in persecuting working-class militants, from the Healyites’ smear of British miners leader Arthur Scargill to North’s campaign to imprison American SWP trade-union activist Mark Curtis.

In November 1990, they seized on the attempted assassination of German SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine to go after our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany (SpAD), the only organization to unambiguously oppose the imperialist annexation of the DDR (East Germany). Ina vicious smear, whose only purpose could be to set us up as would-be “terrorists” in the eyes of the Fourth Reich’s agencies of repression, the German Northite BSA vituperated that “The hysterical language of the SpAD is directed at people who are in a mental state similar to that of the schizophrenic would-be assassin of Lafontaine.”

For years, the Workers League has been out to get us. Now they seek to use the tragic murder of our comrade who died at her post, fighting to defeat counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, for another of their insidious “campaigns.” Whose interests does the Workers League serve?

Poisoned Pens for Hire

The “International Committee” has a well-known history as a mercenary outfit. This is a matter of public record. By their own later admission, Healy’s IC received at least well over £1 million (over $2 million at the time) from a variety of Near East sheiks and bonapartist butchers over a period of years beginning in the mid-1970s (see “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March 1991). And this really was for services rendered.

Beginning with a 1976 deal with the Libyan government for £50,000 with which to buy a four-color web offset printing press, according to an IC Control Commission report, the IC received more than a half million pounds from the Qaddafi regime over the years, Among the services this money bought was turning Healyite publications into hagiographic press agents for the Libyan strongman, as well as supplying names of and intelligence on prominent “Zionists” in “finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere.”

Another £20,000 — and this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the “investigation” was carried out by the guilty parties themselves — came from Saddam Hussein. In exchange, the IC hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1978. They not only whitewashed the Ba’athist regime’s anti-Communist terror, they actively assisted it. Healyite provocateurs spied on anti-Saddam demonstrations in Britain, taking pictures of Iraqi leftists and turning them over to the Ba’athist regime.

North points to the IC “control commission” to claim innocence, protesting the WL never got any of the loot, But the entire IC carried out the political services required for this money over a whole period, and the fact that the Healyites were on the take was obvious to anyone who looked. In 1977 we ran an article, “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” concluding that “even a cursory look” at the IC’s “year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Three years later, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, was dragged by Healy into Her Majesty’s courts on libel charges. But the one charge that Matgamna raised which Healy didn’t contest was the central one, that the Healyites must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In 1985, when Healy was deposed by his lieutenants, the accusations of taking blood money from Arab bourgeois regimes became a big scandal in the IC. Why? Because by then the flow of money had dried up. When it was coming in, nobody complained (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86).

More than 20 years ago, we characterized the Healyites as unsavory “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic advantage. As they continued to degenerate, their ostensible politics, like their cheering for a mythical bourgeois “Arab Revolution,” became a front — basically dependent on who they were working for at any given time. The petrodollar connection was only one of their contracts. In Australia they took money to print a Vietnamese rightist emigre newspaper, the Bell of Saigon, which called on its fascist supporters to “exterminate” communists. Even when it isn’t exactly clear in whose employ they are at a given moment, like out-of-work gunslingers in the Old West they have continued to do their dirty work with the aim of serving somebody.

In the early 1970s, the Healyites began a decades-long vendetta against the reformist SWP entitled “Security and the Fourth International.” Resuscitating the vile Stalinist slander that Trotsky had been killed by “one of his own,” the Healyites tried to smear the entire SWP leadership — especially Trotsky’s secretary Joseph Hansen — as “FBI and KGB agents” and “accomplices” in the murder of Leon Trotsky. This slander, of course, also implicated SWP leader James P. Cannon and Trotsky himself. David North cut his teeth on that campaign.

The Workers League’s modus operandi in order to get left-wing opponents is to place themselves at the service of larger forces hostile to revolutionaries. In 1971, at a time when the bourgeoisie worried over growing radicalization, the SWP decided it was time to draw a blood line in the “antiwar movement.” At a meeting of the SWP’s “National Peace Action Coalition,” a popular front including prominent Democratic Party politicians, the WL rushed to join in a vicious thug attack led by SWP goons against Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League when we protested the presence of Senator Vance Hartke on the podium. And here they were acting as guard dogs for the same SWP which they now claim has been an FBI-controlled organization for decades. Within their own demented framework, what would that make the Workers League?

True to form, the main vehicle North & Co. have used in pursuing their vendetta against the SWP is the capitalist courts-appealing to the U.S. government to determine that the SWP is an organization of “government agents”! In 1979, when the SWP was engaged in a lawsuit against the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration, the Northites — using WL tool Alan Gelfand — took the SWP to court in order to force it to hand over Political Committee minutes.

Four years ago, the “Workers” League launched a big international campaign with the aim of sending SWPer Mark Curtis to prison (see “The Workers League and Mark Curtis,” WV No. 480, 23 June 1989). Curtis was an Iowa trade unionist who was getting in the way of the Swift Packing Co. He is currently serving a 25-year prison term after being railroaded on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. Whole paragraphs of the prosecutor’s summation at the trial that put Curtis behind bars were taken almost word for word from what the Bulletin had written a month earlier! As the headline of a subsequent WV article said, “Why Should Anyone Believe David North?”

What “Milieu” Does North Work In?

And that brings us back to the Northites’ grotesque insinuations concerning the murder of Martha Phillips in Moscow. We have sought to marshal whatever resources we can to press Moscow authorities to pursue all possible avenues of investigation with vigor and rigorousness. And we are taking other measures. Particularly given the chaos of the disintegrating Soviet Union since Yeltsin’s pro-imperialist countercoup last August, pursuing this investigation is fraught with difficulty. This is compounded by the fact that Martha was a Trotskyist, a Jew and an outspoken public opponent of Yeltsin counterrevolution. As we’ve said, at this point we have no way of knowing who killed our comrade and are in no position to exclude any possibility.

But as noted above, the Workers League has been quick to exclude certain possibilities, notably those connected to the CIA and the Yeltsinites. Why might that be? From opposing Soviet intervention against CIA-financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to hailing CIA-sponsored Solidarność in Poland. the Healy/Northites have been found on any side fighting against the Soviet Union.

Thus in Britain, when anti-Communist “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher was gearing up for a bloody showdown with the powerful National Union of Mine-workers, the Healyites put their support for Solidarność into service for the union-busting cabal. On the eve of the heroic 1984-85 miners strike, Healy’s press made a big play of scandalizing NUM leader Arthur Scargill for opposing Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” The scurrilous anti-Communist campaign was instantly picked up by the Labour Party/Trades Union Congress right wing and the Fleet Street tabloids with the aim of isolating the miners union and trying to crush it.

A few years later, the American AFL-CIO’s International Department (widely known as the “AFL-CIA”) sought to put together a new Solidarność by creating a layer of pro-imperialist “free trade unionists” in the Soviet Union. To this end, they tried to get the so-called Independent Union of Miners (NPG) to endorse slanders that Scargill had pocketed contributions by Soviet miners to the British miners strike. Our comrades’ intervention into the founding conference of the NPG in the Donbass in 1990 put a spike in this disinformation campaign. We gored the ox of these CIA-connected elements, and they have good cause to hate us.

Currently, the Northites are engaged in a fund drive for “aid to the Vorkuta miners,” who however are not presently engaged in any particular struggle. This was launched at a November Berlin meeting of North’s “IC,” supposedly on the basis of an appeal from the miners. Yet the appeal has not been published. Could this be related to the fact that a few months earlier the AFL-CIO set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners? This was reported in an article on Boris Yeltsin’s visit to AFL-CIO headquarters, where he was hailed for his “commitment to free unions.” Interestingly, the article talks of the “plight of the Soviet miners, who first struck in November 1989 in Vorkuta” (AFL-CIO News, 24 June 1991).

Now this is curious indeed, for the Soviet miners struck massively across the country in the summer of 1989. The later Vorkuta strike, however, was the first to openly raise anti-Communist demands. The WL’s Bulletin (8 December 1989) publicized an appeal by the “Vorkuta Workers' (Strike) Committee,” which included a demand for the “complete cutoff of the financial and economic help to the fraternal totalitarian regimes” — i.e., Cuba, Vietnam, etc. In introducing this appeal, the Bulletin explained that it had been “transmitted by telephone from Vorkuta to Leningrad and published there by the Democratic Union Party.” The Democratic Union is a pro-Western, anti-Communist outfit which has been financed by the American government through the notorious conduit of the “National Endowment for Democracy”!

One of the leaders of the Vorkuta miners is Nikolai Terokhin, who railed that “The Cubans receive this money out of our pockets and practically flip out under their beautiful sun” (taz, 18 November 1989). This same Terokhin, along with another Vorkuta miner, Sergei Masolovich, were brought to Britain in June 1990 by the fascistic NTS, which has been financed for decades by Western intelligence agencies. There they addressed the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” which was set up to destroy Arthur Scargill’s NUM. These two are also sponsored proteges of AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland, who have been highlighted in the pages of that other Bulletin, published by the AFL-CIO “Department of International Affairs.” Is this the “milieu” that North & Co. have been working? What’s in it for them, we wonder, and does it have anything to do with their interest in the murder of our comrade?

Hate the Soviet Union, Hate the Spartacist League

If there has been one political constant to North’s organization for the past couple of decades, it has been unadulterated anti-Sovietism. This is “theoretically” justified with the description of the Stalinist bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through” — which flatly denies Trotsky’s understanding of the dual nature of this parasitic caste sitting atop proletarian property forms. Hostile to defense of the gains of the October Revolution, now the Northites have joined Yeltsin in proclaiming the death of the Soviet Union. Under a headline trumpeting “The End of the USSR,” David North writes: “It is impossible to define the Confederation of Independent States as a whole, or any of the republics of which it is comprised, as workers states” (Bulletin, 10 January).

In his famous trade-union analogy, Trotsky compared the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule to a giant labor organization which must be defended against the capitalist enemy despite its bureaucratic misleaders. North inverts Trotsky’s analogy to write off the organized labor movement along with the Soviet Union. After years of groveling to the racist, pro-imperialist labor fakers to build a “labor party,” the Workers League now says, “to define the AFL-CIO as a working-class organization is to blind the working class to the realities which they confront.”

Only a few years ago, the WL denounced us for saying that the hard-fought Hormel meatpackers strike had been knifed by the “labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement.” North’s Bulletin (1 April 1986) claimed that this revealed our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism.” Now the Workers League writes off the unions along with the Soviet Union. This comes from an outfit which is notorious for hailing police “strikes,” a supposedly “working-class” group whose newspaper is produced with no union label, an ostensibly socialist organization which in this deeply racist society fulminates against SL-initiated anti-Klan actions as an “obsession with race.”

Other than providing a convenient excuse for scabbing on strikes, North’s pronouncement that the unions in the U.S. can no longer be considered working-class organizations reflects his líder maximo complex. In Berlin last November, North pompously declared: “The delegates today speak to the international working class as the authoritative representatives of the Fourth International” (Bulletin, 22 November 1991). From the “modest” start of crowning himself as Healy’s heir apparent at the top of the IC garbage heap, North is now assiduously trying to eliminate any perceived rivals to his new claim to be leader of the world proletariat.

In his Berlin speech, North declared that Ernest Mandel, leader of the United Secretariat, has “become, in the full sense of the word, a bourgeois politician.” He took Mandel to task for preparing “the ground for the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe,” in particular by supporting Polish Solidarność and its ideologue Jacek Kuron. He charged that “through the medium of Jacek Kuron, Lech Walesa himself is a political Frankenstein created by Man-del.” What chutzpah! When it comes to cheering Solidarnosc, the Northites took second place to no one, including the Mandelites. David North is a “political Frankenstein” created by Gerry Healy (and who knows who or what else).

Having now defined themselves as the sole representatives of the working class, where the megalomaniacal Northites go from here is anybody’s guess. We do know that they are capable of anything; they will work for just about anyone, and maybe they do.

The Workers League claims to be calling for an “inquiry” not “as a question for factional dispute,” but because “If Phillips was the victim of a political killing, her death is of concern not merely to the Spartacist League, but to the entire working class movement.” If Martha’s murder was politically motivated — which at this point we do not know — it is indeed a matter of vital importance and concern for the workers movement internationally. But such interests are of no concern to North’s organization, which has crossed over the class line with such frequency and ease that where it fits in relation to the workers movement is elastic, to say the least. The WL and its activities and associations do indeed warrant close scrutiny.

Martha Phillips was a proletarian internationalist, and as our most prominent spokesman in the Soviet Union she riled the counterrevolutionary nationalists who spearhead the drive to restore capitalist exploitation there. The very forces she fought against are the ones that are championed by the Workers League, from the reactionary Lithuanian Sajudis government to the “AFL-CIA” — backed “independent” miners, whose masters pull the strings from Washington. We know that there are powerful and sinister elements intent on stopping us from building the Leninist-Trotskyist party needed to lead the Soviet workers in a proletarian political revolution to defeat the counterrevolutionary onslaught.

As the capitalist-restorationists seek to consolidate a hold on power and uproot the foundations of the Soviet workers state, we honor our martyred comrade Martha by continuing the struggle to reimplant Bolshevism in the land of its birth, to return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.

Trotskyism: What it Isn't and What it Is! Part 1 (1990)

Spartacist Pamphlet (1990)

Trotskyism, What It Isn’t and What It Is!

Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encylopedia of Trotskyism On Line; full text: http://www.marx.org/history//etol/document/icl-spartacists/1990/trotskyism.html

[part 1]

This article was first published in Spartacist (German edition) No. 14, Winter 1989-90. There are two additions to the English text, one dealing with the “Trotskyist” revisionists as the political heirs of the London Bureau and the other with the role played by former American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth against the struggle for authentic Trotskyism in the U.S. Other minor changes and corrections have also been made.

To the workers of Germany, East and West,
and to European and other militants

In East Germany, what had seemed to be the most entrenched Stalinist regime in Eastern Europe is crumbling under mass opposition to its rule. We Trotskyists of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) stand with all those in the DDR who are seeking to establish genuine socialist egalitarianism, through breaking the repressive political apparatus of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

We stand with those members and ex-members of the SED who defend the gains the working people achieved through the overthrow of capitalism. We stand for the communism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party.

The “reformers” in the bureaucracy are promising “socialist renewal.” But Stalinism can’t deliver any kind of “renewal.” As an ideology Stalinism is simply an apology for the rule of the bureaucracy. Its slogans and “debates” are but arguments about how to put the best false face on the policies of betrayal. Without state power, Stalinist ideology is an empty shell, devoid of any relevance to the question of proletarian power.

The bureaucracy headed by J.V. Stalin arose from the devastation and atomization of the Russian working class in the Civil War and from the failure and defeat of the proletarian revolution internationally — particularly the 1923 German Revolution. Lenin’s program of proletarian internationalism — concretely embodied in the understanding that the survival of the October Revolution depended on its extension through working-class revolution, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries — was dumped and replaced by the Stalinist “theory” of “socialism in one country.”

To consolidate its rule the bureaucracy had to destroy the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party that had made the 1917 Russian Revolution. Millions of Communists were murdered. During the Moscow Trials false “confessions” were extracted from Stalin’s victims — not simply through sheer police-state terror but through the belief of many of the victims that in going along with Stalin’s monstrous accusations they were “serving the Revolution.”

In his memoirs Leopold Trepper — the founder and leader of the Soviet “Red Orchestra” espionage network in Nazi-occupied Europe, whose heroism was “rewarded” with ten years in Lubianka — damned “all those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine.” In answer to “who did protest at that time?” Trepper, who was not a Trotskyist but a Polish Jewish Communist, wrote:

“The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honor. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did....

“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profoundndistress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”
—The Great Game (1977)

The Trotskyists knew that Stalinism — the bureaucratic stranglehold over economic, political and cultural life in the Soviet Union, the betrayal of revolutionary struggle and appeasement of imperialism internationally—was not communism but its antithesis. And they knew that rather than “serving the Revolution” this parasitic bureaucratic caste endangered the very survival of the Russian Revolution.

Trotsky analyzed both the social conditions which led to the rise of Stalinism and the instabilities and contradictions inherent in the rule of this bureaucratic caste — which is simultaneously dependent on the collectivized property forms of the workers state and reflects and acts as the transmitting mechanism for the pressures of imperialism in undermining the workers state. Trotsky foresaw that this balancing act was inherently unstable; the contradiction must be resolved either in the direction of capitalist restoration, or by proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy to restore state power to the working class, organized on the basis of internationalist soviet democracy. In his work (most systematically in The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936) Trotsky analyzed the Stalinist deformation of Soviet society and proved scientifically that Russia was not “socialist” nor was it moving in that direction.

He demonstrated that wage differentials among the layers of the working people had sharply increased, and contrasted to the Marxist understanding of the gradual “withering away of the state” in the progress toward socialism the cancerous growth of Stalin’s monstrous apparatus of police-state repression. He castigated the social conservatism of the bureaucracy, documenting for example the reversal of Bolshevik policies aimed at securing for women equal participation in social and economic life. He analyzed the bureaucratic disorganization of economic life and the demoralizing effect on the working people of the display of the privileges of the bureaucratic elite and wrote:

“Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative — conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

And reasserting the once-common Leninist understanding that socialism is and must be an international system, Trotsky insisted that the looming Second World War and the prospect of social convulsions in the capitalist countries would also shake the brittle Stalinist regime to its foundations.

More than 50 years ago, Trotsky predicted the unraveling of Stalinist bureaucratic rule which is now being seen from Prague to Beijing. In Poland, decades of Stalinist economic mismanagement, corruption and stultifying bureaucratic repressiveness deprived the regime of any moral authority to combat the restorationist schemes of international finance capital and the Vatican; the bankruptcy of Stalinism in Poland has now resulted in the election of an openly counterrevolutionary Solidarność government. In East Germany, where a Tiananmen-style massacre was narrowly averted, members and former members of the SED have demonstrated in the streets under banners demanding “Return to Lenin,” but in other demonstrations ominous revanchist slogans have also made their appearance.

In the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev now faces opposition from miners and other workers resisting the effects of perestroika, the regime’s fostering of “market socialism” has unleashed deadly conflict between the republics, as the better-off areas seek to benefit at the expense of their neighbors; from the bloody conflicts in the Caucasus, to the Baltic nationalists who carry the flags of the “independent” imperialist-puppet interwar regimes, to the Great Russian chauvinists and anti-Semites of the sinister Pamyat, these forces threaten the dismemberment of the multinational USSR. In China, where “market socialism” has achieved its fullest expression accompanied by enormous social dislocation, the accumulation of vast private fortunes and a huge increase in the gap between rich and poor in the cities and countryside, it was the entry of discontented workers into the student-initiated pro-democracy protests that precipitated the government’s Tiananmen massacre.

Trotsky was a leader, together with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Revolution. He founded and led the Red Army that defeated the forces of counterrevolution during the Civil War. Decades of Stalinist lies and calumnies against Trotsky and the physical obliteration of his supporters in the Soviet Union ultimately did not succeed in burying this history. The Gorbachev bureaucracy of Stalin’s heirs today encompasses a substantial layer of “Western-oriented” intelligentsia, mainly the sons and daughters of the bureaucracy, which was getting pretty tired of sitting down to sip champagne with Western “academic Marxists” and U.S. State Department hacks only to be confronted with gibes about the yawning “blank spaces” of Soviet history. Thus glasnost—although intended centrally to facilitate perestroika against the resistance of bureaucratic conservatives as well as to rehabilitate Nikolai Bukharin, the leader of the Right Opposition whose policies in many ways prefigured “market socialism” — has also generated pressure toward removing the figure of Trotsky from the realm of demonology and restoring him to official Soviet history.

Of course it is a welcome turn of events if the heirs of Stalin are forced to try to rehabilitate themselves by acknowledging what “everybody knows” to be the truth. But Trotskyism isn’t just “history,” it is the program of struggle to preserve and carry forward the heritage of Leninism — the rule of the proletariat organized on the basis of Soviet democracy and the struggle for world socialist revolution—against the fierce resistance of the bourgeoisie and their social-democratic lackeys and against the perversion and betrayal of Leninism by the Stalinist usurpers.

While Stalinism was created as an ideology to justify the existence of a privileged bureaucratic caste and has survived solely on the material basis of holding state power, Trotskyism has a political vitality. As Trotsky wrote in the founding document of the Fourth International,

“its indestructible force stems from the fact that it expresses not only
revolutionary tradition but also today’s actual opposition of the Russian working class. The social hatred stored up by the workers against the bureaucracy—this is precisely what from the viewpoint of the Kremlin clique constitutes ‘Trotskyism’.”

With the 1945 victory of the Allied imperialists and Stalin’s Russia over Hitler, the postwar world took shape. The Communist parties in capitalist West Europe worked overtime to derail the possibility of socialist revolutions there, while in East Germany and throughout Eastern Europe capitalism was abolished by the Red Army from the top down. What was excluded in both cases was the revolutionary mobilization of the working people. Eastern Europe was freed from its pro-Nazi ruling classes and from capitalist exploitation, but the working class was politically padlocked and well aware that the Soviet military held the decisive levers of power. Today Gorbachev, impelled by his own internal problems, has turned the key and Eastern Europe is exploding with political ferment — from all quarters, in every conceivable direction from outright capitalist restorationists to anti-bureaucratic Communists.

Today, with everyone from Gorbachev on down willing to say bad things about “Stalinism,” there is a renewal of interest in Trotsky — although few really know what he stood for (since his life and work have been both hidden and lied about for decades in the “official” histories). Now seeking to intervene into the events in East Germany are numerous claimants to the mantle of Trotskyism hoping to trade on his revolutionary heritage. The question is: how are people who have been deprived of any knowledge of “Trotskyism” supposed to be able to tell the real thing as opposed to the fakers and pretenders? To assist we will offer a little history.

I. Leon Trotsky and the Coming of World War II

The Foundation of Trotsky’s Fourth International

In 1938, on the eve of World War II, Trotsky proclaimed the founding of a new revolutionary International in the urgent attempt to resolve the “crisis of leadership” that had left the international proletariat defenseless before fascism and imperialist carnage. Hitler’s Nazis had come to power in Germany unopposed by the Stalinists or the Social Democrats who overwhelmingly commanded the allegiance of the powerful German workers movement. That this crime did not provoke fights and splits within the Communist parties internationally led the Trotskyists to conclude there was no place for revolutionaries in the Stalinized Third International. This conclusion was compounded by the CI’s policy of the “People’s Front,” of allying the workers movement with the parties of so-called “democratic” imperialism.

The Transitional Program, the founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International, was the continuation and extension of the program that had led to the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. It upheld Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” which was confirmed in the course of the Russian Revolution — that in the epoch of imperialism in underdeveloped countries even the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks can only be accomplished by the working class taking power at the head of the oppressed masses.

Against the betrayal of proletarian struggle to the “People’s Front,” the Transitional Program reasserted the fundamental Marxist principle of the unconditional independence of the working class from its capitalist exploiters and oppressors. It was under this banner, embodied in the slogan “Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers! All Power to the Soviets!”, that Lenin and Trotsky led the proletariat to power in 1917.

The Trotskyists steadfastly stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, despite the Stalinist misrulers. At the same time the Fourth International understood that this defense also required a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats who had robbed political power from the working masses and whose hideously repressive, nationalist rule threatened the conquests of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky called for the return to the working people of their state through restoring the rule of Soviets (councils of workers and soldiers) and sought to mobilize the Soviet working masses against the bureaucracy on the basis of the socialist egalitarianism and revolutionary internationalism that were the foundation of the Russian workers state.

For all their youth, inexperience and episodic disorientation, the small forces of Trotskyist cadre fought with courage and audacity during the war to carry out this program. American Trotskyists risked their lives to sail on the Murmansk run to get their propaganda into the hands of Russian workers and soldiers. The 1945 Saigon uprising was led by Vietnamese Trotskyists. In the far-flung colonial empires of the Allies, particularly Indochina and the Indian subcontinent, currents identified with Trotskyism had a strong appeal to advanced workers and independence fighters, as against the Stalinist parties — bound to the bloc on a world scale with the “anti-fascist” colonial imperialist camp — which had to rein in mass struggles against the imperialist masters.

The Dutch Trotskyists struggled, with great capacity and few cadre, in illegality during the Nazi occupation of Holland. As early as 1943, with Germany already decisively defeated but with no Allied imperialist landings having taken place yet, they saw that it was a race against the clock between European working-class revolutions and an Allied-led counterrevolution leading to the division of Europe between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin which would work against the revival of the German workers movement at the war’s end.

There are more examples of the heroism of the forces of the Fourth International in the face of overwhelming odds. But by the end of the war, large numbers of Trotskyist cadre had been wiped out by war and repression. Many were murdered by the Stalinists.

The Defectors

The 4 August 1914 betrayal of the German Social Democrats, who in the face of war went over to the side of their “own” ruling class, has been repeated many times in the workers movement. In World War II. the Stalinist Communist parties allied with one gang of imperialist warmongers, opposing working-class struggle in the “Allied” countries as treason to the so-called “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.”

The Trotskyists recognized that the war was not a struggle between “democratic” imperialism and fascism but an interimperialist conflict aimed at the redivision of the world. Toward the imperialist powers the Trotskyists were, as Lenin was in World War I, revolutionary defeatist. At the same time, they called on the international working class to militarily defend the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, although on a smaller scale, the second imperialist war also produced deformations in and defections from the Trotskyist movement. In the U.S. party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact together with the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and the invasion of Finland produced an opposition which renounced defense of the Soviet Union in adaptation to a frenzied outcry of petty-bourgeois public opinion over the supposed violation of “poor little Finland” and the identification of Stalinism with fascism.

Up until the outbreak of the war, the SWP opposition led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham had declared that they too stood for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy. They did not shrink from this position when the Stalinists betrayed the workers by strangling the forces for proletarian revolution during the Spanish Civil War. But at that time the Kremlin’s participation in the Republican camp was supported by bourgeois democrats around the world. In 1939-40 when the question of the defense of the Soviet Union was posed in the concrete, the opposition “welched on their promise,” to use the words of SWP leader James P. Cannon.

Trotsky played a major role in the ensuing faction fight in the American party. The close collaboration of Trotsky, combined with the fact that the SWP, unlike other sections of the Fourth International, was not directly subjected to the ravages of the war, made the fight with the anti-Soviet opposition a surrogate for such a struggle throughout the international Trotskyist movement.

The Shachtman-led minority split from the organization. Over the years, and heightened under the pressures of the Cold War, they evolved into anti-Soviet “socialist” advisers to the State Department and the CIA. At the time of America’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Shachtman gave a speech alibiing the counterrevolutionary invaders as including some “good stout working class fighters” who were fighting Stalinist “totalitarianism.”

When on 17 June 1953 the East German workers were the first to rise up against Stalinism, they immeasurably assisted authentic socialists in the West to reject the blandishments of “State Department socialism.” The monstrous crimes of Stalinism — the purge trials and labor camps – facilitated the fake-“democratic” pretensions of imperialism, and the onset of the Cold War unleashed a barrage of bourgeois “political theorists” (exemplified by Hannah Arendt) arguing that Stalinist totalitarianism had reduced the workers of the Soviet bloc to mindless, soulless slaves rendered now and forever incapable of struggle. Therefore, they argued, partisans of the workers’ struggle should be in the front ranks of the new imperialist crusade against Stalinism. The East German workers, by their revolutionary action, punctured this myth and made it possible for those Western radicals who wanted to do so to make an aggressive counterthrust against imperialist propaganda. But of course many “radicals” wanted only to continue their bloc with their own bourgeoisie.

The Sozialistische Arbeitergruppe (SAG) are the direct heirs of Max Shachtman. Their British leader Tony Cliff split from the Trotskyist movement in 1950, refusing to defend the North Korean deformed workers state against U.S. imperialism. Today, the SAG sees the mass protests in East Germany as an uprising against “capitalist” exploitation. For them, there are no social gains to be defended in the collectivized property forms that exist in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Like Shachtman, this position has led the SAG not only into supporting some of the darkest forces of imperialist reaction but into offering them as a model for struggle against Stalinist “totalitarianism.” Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Cliffites cheered on the CIA-funded mujahedin who were preparing to drown any and every element of social progress in blood, with declarations that a “Mojahedin victory will encourage the opponents of Russian rule everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe” (Socialist Worker, 4 February 1989)! It is small wonder that the SAG has attracted to its ranks many skinheads, among the most loathsome SA-type [Sturm-abteilung] expressions of resurgent German nationalism and imperialist revanchism.

The British Workers Power organization and its League for a Revolutionary Communist International (in West Germany the Gruppe Arbeitermacht and the Gruppe ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt in Austria) drifted left from its origins in the Cliff organization. Workers Power has done such things as supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini in his struggle for power and initially in his war with Iraq. They also “critically” championed Solidarność while admitting that if Lech Walesa & Co. should conquer it would mean capitalist restoration. Now that there is a Solidarność-led government, Workers Power pathetically opines, “Poland: No Return to Capitalism”!

Most recently this outfit tried out the nasty practice of calling upon capitalist governments to throw out the ambassadors from “bad” deformed workers states. As far as we know only one of the groups that adhere to the LRCI’s “democratic-centralist” international did this, the Irish Workers Group who called on the southern Irish Republic to throw out the Chinese ambassador as a statement of “solidarity” with those murdered by the Chinese Stalinists in Tiananmen Square. Of course if pushed by tens of thousands of students defending a woman’s right to abortion, the government of the Irish Republic would probably want to pull its own Tiananmen Square to stop the demon of dissolute youth desecrating the values, most sacred to the government forces, upon which this bourgeois-clericalist state was formed.

II. The Cold War and “Trotskyist” Revisionism

In Europe, the decimation of Trotskyist cadre during the war combined with events in the aftermath of the war led to the emergence of a revisionist current within the Fourth International. Trotsky had predicted that the war would provoke social convulsions throughout the capitalist world, as the First World War had done, which would necessarily have a profoundly destabilizing effect on the Stalinist bureaucracies.

Trotsky’s warning that Stalinism posed a deadly danger to the USSR’s very survival was borne out in the initial collapse of the Red Army, which had been decapitated by Stalin, in the face of Hitler’s invasion, before the Soviet masses rallied to the defense of their country (ultimately, 20 million Soviet citizens gave their lives in the smashing of Hitler’s armies on the Eastern Front). Trotsky’s predictions of renewed capitalist crisis were fully confirmed by the objective situation at the end of the war, as the old imperial powers of Europe were militarily devastated and politically tainted with fascism, the ties to their colonial empires disrupted or shattered. All that remained was to throw them out and the means were in the hands of the proletariat.

Instead Stalin propped up his “democratic” Western allies. In Italy and Greece, naked treachery was required to militarily and politically disarm the Resistance forces and hand power back to the capitalist class. In France, the Stalinists had to work overtime as proponents of capitalist “national reconstruction” in order to establish a stable bourgeois regime.

A postwar development unanticipated by Trotsky was the expansion of Stalinist-ruled states in Eastern Europe. With the military victory of the Red Army over the Nazis and their puppet regimes, the former rulers fled to the nearest American headquarters leaving behind a power vacuum which was filled by the Soviet army. Confronted with the onset of the Cold War, the Stalinists were forced to establish deformed workers states in these countries as a “buffer zone.”

These deformed workers states, which carried out the expropriation of these ruling classes whose power was broken when Hitler’s Nazis were smashed, were established without revolutions (with the exception of Yugoslavia, where Tito’s partisans prevailed in a peasant guerrilla war). These were cold social revolutions from the top down. The Soviet military forces were the state power; they established governments of the Walter Ulbrichts, the surviving Stalinist hacks who arrived back in Germany from Moscow and set up the SED in 1946 as the ruling party whose “leading role” was until just recently prescribed in the DDR constitution. The structures set up paralleled those which issued from the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR. Thus the expansion of “Soviet-bloc” states was at the same time a padlock and chain on the working class — a chain which despite episodic workers’ struggles was in place for four decades but has now been broken.

Just as the stabilization of capitalist imperialism with the containment of the “Russian menace” was at the root of Stalinism afer World War II the revisionist current which arose in the Trotskyist movement (under the leadership of the impressionist Michel Pablo) adapted to the apparent stability and geographical extension of Stalinism. The ascendancy of this revisionist current destroyed the Fourth International as the nucleus of a disciplined world party of socialist revolution (which has not prevented assorted pretenders to “Trotskyism” from claiming to be “the Fourth International” when it suits them).

Worshipping the accomplished fact of Stalinism’s survival, the Pabloists projected a “new world reality” of “centuries of deformed workers states” and opined that under mass pressure the Stalinist parties could be forced to play an “objectively revolutionary role.” The need for revolutionary Trotskyist parties to lead the struggle for socialist revolution in the West and for political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies was thus obviated. Today the main continuators of this revisionist current are the “United Secretariat” (USec) led by Ernest Mandel.

At the time of the 17 June 1953 uprising in East Germany the Mandelites advocated the self-reform of the bureaucracy under the slogan for the “real democratization of the Communist Parties.” Three years later they backed away from the Hungarian workers who had risen up against the bureaucratic rulers and their hated secret police. At the time, they wrote that the absence of political leadership in Hungary provoked “exactly those shortcomings and dangers” which had been avoided in Poland “thanks to the leadership role” played by “the Gomulka tendency” (Quatrième Internationale, December 1956)!

In the 1960s the United Secretariat adapted to every petty-bourgeois radical craze. They wrote off the working class in the West as hopelessly bought off and counter-posed the idea that “red universities” would be oases of revolution in a supposed sea of stagnant proletarian reaction. They passed through a period of vicarious pick-up-the-gun guerrillaism. Junking Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, they postured as armchair Che Guevaras.

Enthusing over the Vietnamese NLF, in his book Le Parti Communiste Vietnamien (Paris 1973) French USec leader Pierre Rousset did not condemn the murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Vietnamese Stalinists but rather whitewashed these assassinations with the explanation that they showed “the width of the political gulf which then separated the Trotskyist groups from the Indochinese CP, the former probably underestimating the importance of the national question in the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, the latter profoundly underestimating the social question in the colonial revolution.”

Since Rousset also heralded the NLF leadership as having “assimilated the decisive implications of the permanent revolution,” their murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists was alibied as simply an unfortunate mistake.

In the mid-1970s the USec refused to even recognize the existence of the surviving Vietnamese Trotskyists in exile, who had asked for recognition as the USec’s Vietnamese section.

In the name of “anti-imperialism,” the Mandelites and their cothinkers served as uncritical apologists for the bourgeois-nationalist FLN in Algeria, about whom they enthused for many years; Michel Pablo was a senior adviser to the head of state, while the American SWP’s Joseph Hansen touted the brutal Algerian regime as a “workers and peasants government.”

Like Max Shachtman, the USec was ever sensitive to petty-bourgeois public opinion. With the first hint of “Cold War II,” as imperialism went back on the offensive after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the Mandelites beat a retreat from former pro-Stalinist enthusiasm over to tailing “Eurocommunism,” voting for the installation of the most viciously anti-Communist popular-front governments like that of French “Socialist” François Mitterrand, and defending any and all manner of pro-Western Soviet “dissidents.”

In the early 1980s, they joined with the pro-NATO social democrats in going all out in support of Solidarność in Poland. From hailing Gomulka, whose policies began the process of mortgaging the Polish economy to West German bankers, decollectivization of agriculture and conciliation of the Catholic church, the USec went over to hailing a movement for capitalist restoration as a “political revolution” against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Having championed any and every opposition to the Soviet government, the Mandelites have recently found occasion to embrace the fascistic fringe of Baltic nationalist movements which in the guise of “independence” are seeking a vicious capitalist restoration. This September, the USec’s journal International Viewpoint ran an article praising the Estonian Nazi “Forest Brothers” as “freedom fighters” in the “struggle against Stalinism.”

Now the USec counters the imperialists’ proclamations of the “death of Communism” by correctly pointing out that “what is dying is Stalinism.” But this rings pretty hollow coming from the mouths of people who three decades ago predicted that Stalinism would survive for “centuries” and adapted their politics accordingly. Now Mandel, who in the 1953 uprising of workers in East Germany saw a wing of the bureaucracy as a solution, trumpets the “upsurge of the mass movement rocking the GDR.” He talks of the need for a “politically capable vanguard” to “open the way for the victory and consolidation of the political revolution.” Don’t buy it. Mandel and his followers have heralded everything from university students in the West to the mullahs in Iran to Lech Walesa as the “vanguard.”

At a rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Trotsky’s Fourth International in New York City, Claudio Magnani representing the United Secretariat openly admitted: “We committed many mistakes, big mistakes, terrible mistakes” (printed in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, December 1988). Mandel’s USec is shamelessly opportunist, wildly impressionistic and given to extreme vacillations in line — a chronic instability that reflects the lack of a programmatic anchor. What differentiates Bolshevism from these centrist impostors is the ability to “swim against the stream” when the masses are being misled against the historic interests of the proletariat. There would have been no October Revolution if Lenin’s party had submerged itself in the sea of social-chauvinism that inundated the Russian workers at the start of World War I. But Lenin persevered, and three years later the Bolsheviks achieved state power.

The various revisionists who claim the name of “Trotskyism” — like Mandel’s United Secretariat, Tony Cliff’s organization and Workers Power’s League for a Revolutionary Communist International — have followed the general political pattern established by Max Shachtman in both reflecting and capitulating to alien class pressures. In the postwar period they have come to occupy roughly the same political niche as that of the “London Bureau” in the 1930s.

The London Bureau (also known as the London-Amsterdam Bureau or the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity) was a lash-up of centrist organizations including, at one time or another, the German Socialist Workers Party (SAP), the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP, later the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP), the British Independent Labour Party and the Spanish POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), who were driven by despair and distrust of the Second and Third Internationals following Hitler’s victory in Germany.

As Trotsky noted in his 1934 article “Centrism and the Fourth International,” the coming to power of the Nazis, followed by the bloody defeat of the 1934 general strike in Austria in which hundreds of workers were killed and thousands more imprisoned, “placed a final cross over ‘classic’ reformism,” i.e., the perspective of peaceful, parliamentary “evolution” to socialism. Open reformism was supplanted by various shadings of centrism. The Trotskyist Left Opposition energetically sought to intersect and win over elements from these centrist currents but for the most part was unable to overcome programmatically the congenital reformism of these organizations.

Writing of the irresolution and chronic vacillations of the organizations in the London Bureau, the refusal to draw revolutionary conclusions posed by the impending war and increasing political ferment among the working class, Trotsky predicted, “The failure of this group is absolutely inevitable.” The London Bureau collapsed on the eve of World War II. Many of its former leaders, such as Willy Brandt, Marcel Pivert and Fenner Brockway, returned to social democracy.

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.”

Fake-Trotskyist Family Reunion (1977)

Workers Vanguard 141 (21 January 1977)

Opposing Healy Slanders, Suppressing Workers Democracy

London Meeting: Fake-Trotskyist Family Reunion

At a London meeting attended by some 1,500 people last Friday, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Lambert, Michel Pablo and representatives of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were to have shared the same platform for the first time in over 25 years. Behind the speakers was a banner proclaiming, “For Workers Democracy – Against Frame-Ups and Slanders,” and the ostensible purpose of this reunion of renegades from Trotskyism was to condemn the outrageous accusation by Gerry Healy that SWP leaders Joe Hansen and George Novack were “accomplices of the GPU” in Stalin’s 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky.

To be sure, Healy’s disgusting slanders deserve nothing but utter contempt from revolutionists as they are manifestly absurd and groundless, and, moreover, serve to fuel the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was murdered by “one of his own.” But the main purpose of the meeting's organizers lay elsewhere. Planned at an October 1976 session of the “United” Secretariat (USec), at the same time as an abortive pact was worked out between the USec and the French OCI (see “No Tango in Paris,” WV No. 137, 10 December 1976), Friday’s meeting provided a forum for the chieftains of the squabbling factions of competing revisionists masquerading as Trotskyists to publicly bury the hatchet.

Much of the meeting was an orgy of indignation against Healy and his Stalinist practices, from gangster attacks against other leftists to pernicious cop-baiting and character assassination. Healy richly deserves the harshest condemnation for his venomous slanders and thuggery, but the ex-Trotskyist dignitaries who use his travesty of anti-revisionism to justify their own maneuvers have little to boast about as partisans of workers democracy.

Starring in the role of “saved” sinner and prodigal son was former Healy lackey Tim Wohlforth. After a dozen years as servile Gauleiter of American Healyism, Wohlforth was blackjacked by his master (and perforce accused of harboring a suspected “CIA agent”).

Wohlforth, now a book reviewer for the SWP’s Militant, appealed for sympathy because of the trials and tribulations he and his companion Nancy Fields faced after being dumped by Healy (“no one knocked on our door”). In the, process he inadvertently revealed his own moral cowardice and total unfitness to be a revolutionary leader. According to Wohlforth, “the hardest thing that I ever said in my life” was to get up in a meeting with Healy and say that he “disagreed with the proceedings.” But this “disagreement” was not sufficient to prevent him from voting (“against my convictions”) for his own removal as head of the Workers League. By his own testimony, then, Wohlforth demonstrates that he would have stood in the front ranks of the capitulators to Stalin in the 1920's. If he cannot stand up to Healy's blustering, how could he have resisted the onslaught of Stalin, who had the full resources of state power at his command, or the pressures exerted by the bourgeoisie?

You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours

In the chummy atmosphere of a family reunion, the meeting also celebrated the “growth and vitality of the Fourth International.” Mandel put it most clearly: the meeting was not called to refute Healy's vile frame-up, but “to defend the Fourth International through our solidarity with comrade Hansen and comrade Novack... because it needs defending.”

The intervention by Lambert of the OCI – by far the most political of the evening – gently chided the USec majority for refusing to discuss with the OCI so long as the latter refused to characterize the Mandelites as “revolutionaries” (after all, he pointed out, terms such as “centrist” are a legitimate part of political debate among ostensible Marxists). But at the same time he abandoned the OCI's anti-Pabloist tradition and accepted the USec's ultimatum by several times pointedly referring to this gang of revisionists as “the Fourth International.”

Lambert went out of his way to imply that the OCI had never considered the Socialist Workers Party as anything but revolutionary. He claimed that in 1963 when Healy characterized the SWP as centrist the OCI had rejected this label. This bald assertion cannot alter the fact that during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the OCI referred to the SWP as “revisionist.” Moreover, in 1962 Healy had split the Revolutionary Tendency (RT – predecessor of the Spartacist League/U.S.) of the SWP when the RT majority refused to sign his dictated statement avowing that the SWP was revolutionary and not centrist.

Mandel in his closing speech returned Lambert’s compliment, stating that he must “give credit where credit is due” and praising the OCI for having played “an excellent, excellent leading role" in the campaign to free Leonid Plyushch and to defend other left dissidents in the Soviet Union. Referring to the liberation of Plyushch last February, Mandel assimilated the OCI to the USec by triumphantly proclaiming, “we got him out.”

Michel Pablo, the dean of anti-Trotskyist revisionism, did not show up, no doubt to the secret relief of Mandel and Lambert, since Pablo no longer maintains any pretense of Trotskyism or adherence to the Fourth International and might therefore give the game away. His message read at the meeting was in many ways the frankest of all He disparagingly, referred to “this nasty quarrel” which was “symptomatic of a certain ideological decomposition in the movement of epigones, who have not succeeded in linking themselves up seriously with the natural movement of the class.” But after denouncing the “exacerbated sectarianism of the sects,” in the spirit of the evening he went on to propose “our common task” which was to “search with the utmost determination for what can unite us and not divide ourselves.” All that was necessary, said Pablo, was a “common program which corresponds to the current necessities.”

The speakers wholeheartedly took up Pablo’s admonition. Lambert declared that he didn’t wish to discuss “who was correct” in 1953, when Pablo caused the split and destruction of the Fourth International with his liquidationist program of “deep entrism” in the Stalinist and social democratic mass reformist parties. Mandel, recalling Pablo’s 1950s talk of a “new world reality” in which the Stalinists could no longer betray, discerned that “Eurocommunism” has introduced “new and tremendously vulnerable elements of division into world stalinism,” which can have “fairly big effects in favor of Trotskyism.” He therefore proposed that “all comrades present here, of all different tendencies, factions and organizations," undertake a “common political campaign” to “ask” the European Stalinists to “immediately, openly and publicly rehabilitate all the victims of Stalin, all the victims of the Moscow trials,” and to call on the Spanish Communist Party to expel Trotsky’s assassin! After all, “it can’t hurt to ask”!

Following hard on the USec's prostration before a new wave of popular-frontism in Europe and Latin America, Mandel is proposing a “broad front” of the “family of Trotskyism” to fight “what remains [his emphasis] of the poison of Stalinism today in the working class movement, in the Communist parties and the trade-union organizations” in Europe. As the Stalinists seek to prove their reliability to the imperialist bourgeoisies, in classic Pabloist fashion Mandel capitulates to their talk of classless “democracy” rather than exposing its pro-capitalist essence. Is he preparing for entrism in the “Eurocommunist” parties?

Workers Democracy or Bureaucratic Suppression?

Any remaining doubts concerning the real purpose of the meeting were dispelled after the scheduled speakers had finished. As chairman Tariq Ali was announcing the end of the proceedings, Gerry Healy rose from the audience and demanded speaking time to answer the chorus of attackers. All serious defenders of workers democracy – purportedly the central theme of the meeting – would have wanted Healy to speak, but Ali, with the practised sleight-of-hand of union bureaucrats and shell game operators, called for an immediate vote amidst the uproar, then declared that “workers democracy” had upheld him.

As Healy continued to protest, with considerable support among the audience, the chair demagogically silenced him by bursting into the Internationale to close the meeting.

This outrageous violation of elementary workers democracy – at a meeting allegedly called precisely in order to defend it – again exposes the USec's rotten bureaucratic maneuvers. Moreover, it is only because the decomposition of the “United” Secretariat has reached such a point that it barely exists that this meeting was held at all. Today Mandel and Lambert exchange compliments on the podium and defend the integrity of Hansen and Novack; but when the SWP first sought statements denouncing Healy's slanders a year and a half ago, it took Mandel & Co. quite a while before coming up with a statement.

None of the organizers of this meeting are true defenders of workers democracy or of the Fourth International. The OCI systematically uses thug violence against its ostensibly Trotskyist opponents on the left. Pablo and his acolytes (today the Mandelite USec majority) refused to defend the Chinese Trotskyists jailed by Mao in 1949-51, slandering them as “refugees from a revolution” for their courageous defense of proletarian democracy against the bureaucratic Stalinist regime. As for the SWP, it responded to Castro's jailing of the Cuban Trotskyists by remarking, in the words of Barry Sheppard, now SWP national secretary, “There are Trotskyists and there are Trotskyists. But if I were in Cuba, I wouldn't be arrested.”

While the USec and OCI use Healy's despicable slanders as a convenient excuse for a reunion of the “family” of ex-Trotskyists, the international Spartacist tendency insisted that a genuine and principled programmatic regroupment of authentic Trotskyists can come about only through hard, open debate. A leaflet distributed at the meeting by the London Spartacist Group – cosigned by the iSt, the Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria of Chile and the Trotskyist Faction (expelled) of the German Spartacusbund – pointed out that “The real political issues which place all these squabbling, slander-mongering, violence-prone elements at one pole and the iSt at the other are currently posed by two decisive considerations: the popular front and the Fourth International.”

Exposing the speakers’ false pretensions to defending workers democracy, the leaflet explained that behind this lay their capitulation to reformist programs of class collaboration. It concluded, “without the struggle to create a programatically united and disciplined Fourth International the workers are left to wander into the new traps of capital... with the assistance of their revisionist would-be ‘leaders’.” Forward to the rebirth of the Fourth International!

Healy, Wohlforth and "The Crisis" (1973)

Workers Vanguard No. 26 (3 August 1973)

Healy/Wohlforth and “The Crisis”

The socialist movement repeatedly throughout its history has had to struggle against the abandonment of Marxist principles by tendencies and individual leaders who were adapting to pressure from the bourgeoisie. Thus although the Communist Manifesto unambiguously declares that "the workers have no country," the reformist Social Democrats voted for national defense of their respective bourgeoisies in World War I. Without a determined struggle against this betrayal the workers movement could not go forward.

The abandonment of proletarian politics is usually accompanied by a "theoretical" justification, in the form of a new "discovery" which "corrects" or "brings up-to-date" central propositions of Marxism. This is what is meant by revisionism – an attempt to attack the substance of Marxism-Leninism without openly coming into conflict with its great authority. Therefore revisionism often takes the form of maintaining lip-service to traditional Marxist terminology but redefining (usually broadening) certain key concepts to insinuate a different political line. For example, the Socialist Workers Party has transformed Lenin's concept of "self determination" for oppressed nations into the thoroughly utopian-reformist concept of freedom from all forms of oppression through real or illusory separatism.

A central facet of the revisionism of Gerry Healy's "International Committee" and his U.S. satellite, Tim Wohlforth's Workers League, has been the redefinition of the term "crisis." The Marxist use of this term is fairly conventional -- meaning an abrupt change in a situation or a sharp transitional period. However, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were always careful to distinguish different types of crises. There are for instance the epochal crisis of the capitalist order since World War I, a parliamentary crisis (e.g., Watergate), a crisis of class rule (e.g., Chile) or a revolutionary crisis (Russia in October 1917). For a Marxist, an economic crisis has a precise and limited meaning. It is that phase in the business cycle between the boom and the bust, between expanding and declining production, and is accompanied by mass layoffs, widespread bankruptcies and the contraction of money and credit

Contrary to the fantasies of the proponents of Kondratieff long waves (Mandel) or a post-war boom which according to different versions lasted from 15 to 27 years (Healy), the phases of the business cycle are limited in duration. This is doubly true of the transitional, crisis phase. In the entire four volumes of Capital, Marx never mentions a crisis involving more than two years. Of course, depressed conditions can last many years. However, in contrast to the IC, Marx clearly distinguishes a "crisis" from "stagnation." ("In the period of stagnation following a crisis, circulation is smallest...." Capital, Vol. III, Ch. 33). The concept of a fifteen-year-old never-ending economic crisis is a fundamental revision of Marxism

Where Marxists are careful to distinguish the different types of crises, the IC amalgamates everything into one omnipresent super-crisis. The Watergate scandal, resurgent Peronism in Argentina, the rising price of gold, Heath's economic policies in Britain, are all an expression of The Crisis. Moreover, this cataclysmic event is also The Worst Crisis Ever:

"The latest moves by the Nixon administration in devaluing the dollar mark a rapid acceleration of the capitalist system towards a breakdown and crisis deeper than at any time in its history...

"In no way could the implications of the crisis after August 1971 be likened to those of 1931. Despite the depth of the earlier crisis, it was one in which the world's major trading currency, sterling was replaced by another currency, the dollar. The blunt fact today is that nothing can replace the dollar." [emphasis in original]
-- "Development of the Post-War Economic Crisis - Draft Resolution of the Socialist Labour League,"
– Workers Press, 24 February 1973

In fact, The Crisis is the Healyite term for the Pabloist conception of a "New World Reality," in which the question of proletarian leadership is no longer the key issue facing the workers movement, due to the changed objective conditions. The purpose of this terminological revisionism is to justify a revision of the Trotskyist program, particularly the methods of constructing a proletarian vanguard party. According to Pablo in 1951 the "New World Reality" would force erstwhile reformists to take revolutionary measures, thereby justifying liquidation of the Trotskyist parties into the local Stalinist, social-democratic or even petty-bourgeois nationalist parties. Today Healy/Wohlforth assert that traditional trade-union economic demands are now objectively revolutionary and that there are new shortcuts to creating a mass revolutionary party.

Crisis Magic: Trade-Union Reformism Becomes Revolutionary

The consequences of the IC's crisis-mongering are starkly revealed in a recent polemic by the Workers League against the Spartacist League on the question of whether ;wage demands by themselves are revolutionary. According to the WL:

"But the fact is that the fundamental contradiction within capitalism, suppressed for an entire historical period through wild inflation, is radically transforming the relations between classes....
"This is why simple trade union demands are so profoundly revolutionary today."

-- Bulletin, 16 April 1973

This is reformist hogwash. An economic downturn does of course weaken the power of the trade unions and make wage increases more difficult to win. Moreover, in the epoch of imperialism, the decaying stage of capitalism, there is no possibility of substantial and lasting reforms in the conditions of the workers. But the impossibility of successful reformism on a systematic scale does not at all imply the impossibility of reformist misleaders taking the working class down to defeat.

Moreover, since the capitalists do not confront the working class in a unified way, they can always temporarily improve the conditions of certain groups of workers at the expense of others and then try to reverse the process. For example,- even during the Great Depression those workers who remained employed and were relatively insulated from the market (e.g., government employees) had their real wages rise, as prices fell faster than their money wages. Communists must fight against reformist illusions in the workers movement under all political and economic conditions. In a period of actual economic crisis in the Marxist sense, to limit the struggle to reform demands, thereby failing to raise the consciousness of the masses to the understanding of the need to fight the entire capitalist system, means preparing even worse defeats.

The most important way in which capitalists play off different sections of the working class is along national lines. In recent years this was manifested in the systematic effort by bourgeois politicians and the labor bureaucracy to build support for the Vietnam war. With the end of the U.S.' post-World War II imperialist hegemony, codified in Nixon's August 1971 wage freeze/devaluation measures, the heightened inter-imperialist rivalry has led to a wave of social-chauvinist economic protectionism in the labor movement. During this period, the Spartacist League has been unique on the American left in consistently raisng the need for a class opposition to the Vietnam war and economic protectionism in its trade union work. In marked contrast, the Workers League, precisely by asserting the objective impossibility of reformism, has adapted to the social-patriotic union bureaucracy. In 1968 the WL set up Trade Unionists for a Labor Party whose program did not even mention the Vietnam war; in 1972 these pseudo-Trotskyists hailed Buy-American, No-Strike I.W. Abel's right-wing opposition to McGovern as a step toward a labor party.

The Jeremiah Theory of the Proletarian Vanguard

It seems that Healy/Wohlforth (together with Lyn Marcus) believe that the essential qualification for proletarian leadership is the same as that for an astrologer or religious mystic - the ability to miraculously foretell the future. And like successful astrologers, Healy/Wohlforth/Marcus are careful to couch their prophesies in obscure formulations which allow them to claim vindication no matter what happens. This fortune-teller blueprint for building a communist vanguard consists of: (1) asserting that the final crisis will appear imminently; (2) redefining the term "crisis" to render it meaningless; (3) then proclaiming at what appears to be an auspicious moment that the crisis is now occurring; and finally (4) asserting the right to lead the working class on the basis of credentials as a successful crystal-ball gazer.

These intreped "revolutionary" prognosticators will doubtless reply that their wisdom is based on Marxist science (or in the case of Marcus, on superhuman powers of "creative mentation"). But what kind of Marxism is it that announces week-in and week-out for the last twelve years that The Crisis is imminent or already here; that talks of a period of boom (during which the law of value was denied) lasting either until 1961, 1968 or, in the most recent version, until 1971; and that consistently refuses to print any concrete economic statistics of the real evolution of production to back up their ravings? There is only one way a communist organization can genuinely prepare for a revolutionary crisis, regardless of the factors which precipitate it. This is by establishing its cadre as recognized leaders in the labor movement and mass organizations of the oppressed on the basis of a revolutionary program. But this is precisely what the IC and Labor Committee do not do. According to their method one does not need a party whose cadre have won authority in the labor movement. All one needs is a genius-leader and effective publicity gimmicks.

A hallmark of Pabloism is the view that the changed objective conditions (The Crisis) will solve the tasks of the proletarian vanguard. Thus the perspectives document of the European majority of the so-called "United Secretariat" comments that recent changes in economic conditions place revolution on the order of the day (as opposed to earlier, when, presumably, it was not).

"The socialist revolution is once again on the agenda in Europe, not just in a broad historical perspective (in this sense, it has been on the agenda since 1914), but even from a conjunctural point of view."
- "The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe," 1972

Similarly, in the recent statement of Healy's Socialist Labour League on The Crisis reprinted in the WL pamphlet, "The Dollar Crisis" (1973) we read:

"The building of a mass revolutionary party i.e. no longer a propaganda demand, as it has always been for the revisionists. It is the urgent burning question of the hour."

The building of a revolutionary party is never a demand, propagandistic or otherwise. Who is it to be demanded of -the bourgeoisie, the labor bureaucracy, the entire working class? The creation of a mass revolutionary party is the result of the lengthy struggle to root an organized communist cadre in the workers movement. If a revolutionary situation occurs when the communist vanguard does not yet have significant authority in the proletariat, that revolution will fail and no amount of wishful thinking, hysterical posturing or gimmicks can change that. The Healyites believe in every kind of crisis except the decisive one -- the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Economic Analysis as Subjective Idealism

In the article "Myth of Neo-Capitalism" (RCY Newsletter, No. 10, January-February 1972) we wrote:

"All theories of fundamental post-war capitalist change assume that postwar capitalism has performed extraordinarily well. This exceptional performance can only be explained if major structural reforms have taken place. Bourgeois and revisionist theorists then search for the structural changes behind this otherwise inexplicable boom – Keynesian-type stabilization policy, capitalist planning, increased government expenditure, the permanent arms economy, etc. The first, and in some ways most important, myth of neo-capitalism is the post-war boom.

The IC accepts the essential theoretical premise of neo-capitalism. This is that after World War II, the advanced capitalist countries enjoyed a lengthy, extraordinary economic boom as a result of some form of state activity.

"The fact that after the Bretton Woods 1944 conference it [the ruling class] was forced to establish a series of agencies through which the economy was artificially stimulated by means of inflation was its recognition that the working class was too strong to be dealt with at that stage."
-- "The Dollar Crisis"

This credit-inflation boom is nothing other than a monetarist variant of the theory of neo-capitalism. This is now clearly demonstrated by the fact that just when the Healyites declare the boom has generated the definitive crisis, the Mandelites have also declared the end of neo-capitalist expansion; ("For the first time since the Second World War, attempts to reduce these crises of over-production through stepped-up inflation ran into obstacles...." ["The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe"]). Healy and Mandel have reinvented the famous Bukharin-Stalin "period" analysis - the "Second Period" of absolute capitalist stabilization is followed by the "Third Period" of terminal economic collapse and immediate revolutionary situations everywhere.

Common to all these final-crisis enthusiasts is the desire to give a pseudo-Marxist explanation to their impressionistically-derived organizational ambitions. Thus in the articles "Myth of Neo-Capitalism" and "Boom Heads Toward Bust" (Workers Vanguard No. 25, 20 July 1973) we scientifically demonstrated that the 1950's was definitely not a period of exceptional capitalist prosperity. For the U.S., 1953-61 was the second worst economic period in this century, with three recessions, a per capita growth rate of only one percent a year and an average unemployment rate of over five percent. In addition to the U.S., France and Japan had distinctly higher growth rates in the 1960's than in the 1950's, while Britain stagnated at the same rate in both decades. The IC theorists have never produced a single statistic to demonstrate that the 1950's was a boom period because it simply was not.

Instead, Wohlforth counters our concrete refutation of their thesis with the following incredibly un-Marxist argument: "To deny the boom of the 1950's is simply a way to assert that today is the same as the 1950's, that ft requires no more of the revolutionary than was possible to do in the 1950's" (Bulletin, 9 July 1973). The state of production is here deduced from a subjective evaluation of organizational prospects: We think we can do much better now than in the 1950's, says Wohlforth. Therefore, there must have been a boom in the 1950's and a great crisis now. Marxists have a term for this method of reasoning. It is called subjective idealism. If Wohlforth thinks he can fly now but could not in the 1950's, do we then conclude that he was a human then and a pigeon now?

Behind Wohlforth's impressionistic idealism there is an element of truth. The organizational perspectives for Trotskyists are more favorable now than in the 1950's. The reason, however, is not the end of the mythical boom. Rather the relative quiescence of the workers movement in the major advanced countries in the 1950's was the result of demoralization produced by recent defeats engineered by the solidly entrenched Stalinist bureaucracies and conditioned by the direct military might of U.S. imperialism. Now a new generation is coming to the fore, uncowed by past defeats, but also unaware of the crucial lessons of the past betrayals. A crucial task of the Trotskyist vanguard is to bring to the new generation of militants the knowledge of these lessons. It will not accomplish this by constantly screaming "Crisis:" but rather through struggling for the program of permanent revolution which represents the distillation of this past history.

Marxism vs. Monetarism

As a supposedly definitive statement, the WL pamphlet "The Dollar Crisis" is most peculiar. Supposedly analyzing the "post-war economic crisis," it contains virtually no statistics on production, labor input, wages or profits. Despite Peter Jeffries' two theoretical appendices, the central document is journalistic and makes no attempt to present the analysis within the Marxist theoretical framework or even terminology. Particularly peculiar in a supposedly Marxist work, there is no treatment of the changing conditions for the buying and selling of labor power (the labor market) -- the point of intersection between the organized working class and capitalism as a system of production. Thus while the Profumo scandal is mentioned, the absolutely strategic importance of cheap foreign labor for the West European economy is not!

However, the strangest fact of all is that there is no detailed, theoretical analysis of the pamphlet's central theme – how the expansion of money and credit could stimulate a prolonged period of expanded production. The term "Bretton Woods agreement" is used like abracadabra as if it were obvious that the gold-convertability of the dollar could generate an international economic boom. A brief, clear explanation of the IC analysis appears to the following: There exists a fixed relation between the supply of money and total circulation and, therefore, production. By setting up a dollar-backed reserve currency system in 1944, the world bourgeoisie temporarily created a kind of pseudo-money. The expansion of dollar capital caused an economic boom which lasted until the late 1950's in some IC versions, and until 1971 in others. In any case, with the dollar devaluation in 1971, world production must contract to the point where it can be circulated by gold alone. This contraction creates the conditions for immediate proletarian revolution or the universal victory of fascism.

There is an important bourgeois economic school which, like the IC, regards the stock of money as the active, causal element in determining the general level of production. Running from J.B. Say and the British Currency School in the nineteenth century to Milton Friedman today, it is called the quantity theory of money. This theory holds that there is a fixed relationship between the stock of primary money (gold) and the flow of money expenditures. Until Lyn Marcus and Peter Jeffries, all erstwhile Marxists regarded the quantity theory of money as one of the most reactionary-utopian schools of bourgeois. economics, since it asserts that the bourgeois state can control the level of economic activity through its traditional control over bank reserves, or that total production is limited by the physical supply of gold, a kind of bullionist Malthusianism.

Jeffries is no doubt aware of Marx's attitude toward the quantity theory of money so he doesn't explicitly identify it as the basis of the IC analysis. However, the assertion of a fixed relation between the stock of monetary gold and production is the basis of the IC analysis.

"With gold now supporting perhaps only 10 per cent of the value of world trade, the implications of the crisis must be a collapse of much of the other 90 per cent.... Here again, however, the limits to the expansion of credit (which the revisionists such as Mandel saw as the means of indefinite capitalist expansion) are strictly limited by the available money supply."
– "The Dollar Crisis"

A good deal of Marx's writings on money, particularly in Volume III of Capital, is a direct attack on the quantity theory of money. Marx asserted that the money supply adjusted to the demands of industrial and commercial capital through changes in the amount of credit and the velocity, of circulation. In the following passage Marx explicitly attacks the notion that the stock of monetary gold or level of bank reserves can determine production. We could cite fifty similar passages.

"So long as the condition of business is such, that the returns on the loans given come in regularly and credit remains unshaken, the expansion and contraction of the currency depends simply on the requirements of the industrialists and merchants. Since gold does not enter into consideration in the wholesale trade, at least in England, and the circulation of gold aside from the fluctuations with the seasons, may be regarded as a rather constant magnitude for a long time, the circulation of the notes of the Bank of England forms a sufficiently accurate measure of these changes. In a period of stagnation following a crisis circulation is smallest, with the recovery of demand comes also a greater demand for currency, which increases with the rising prosperity; the quantity of currency reaches its culminating point in the period of overtension and overspeculation...." [our emphasis]
– Capital, Vol. III, Ch. 33

The availability of loanable money capital cannot stimulate production if expanded output is considered insufficiently profitable. As Marx observed:

"Not every augmentation of loanable capital indicates a real accumulation of capital or expansion of re-production. This becomes most evident in the phase of the industrial cycle following immediately after a crisis, when loanable capital lies idle in great masses.”
– Capital, Vol. III, Ch. 30

The highest level of excess bank reserves (an index of the difference between actual bank loans and legally authorized lending capacity) in U.S. history occurred in the late 1930's, when interest rates were also abnormally low: if what is needed to bring the economy out of stagnation is simply an infusion of more money, a la Keynes and Healy, why was this available money not used to immediately end the depression instead of letting it drag on until World War II? Precisely because it is the rate of profit and not the supply of money which is the immediate determinant of the level of production. The credit expansion of the New Deal policies was a total failure. Conversely, the "shortage” of money and credit during a crisis is not because the stock of gold is too small in relation to total circulation. It is because financiers are hoarding money since they do not think loans can be repaid under conditions of rapidly contracting production and falling commodity prices.

The Role of Credit

One of the most characteristic features of petty-bourgeois socialism has been to emphasize the supposedly key role of "unproductive" financial capital and credit, rather than the productive system which Marx emphasized was the key to capitalism. From Proudhon to Lyn Marcus their battle-cry has been, "Tax the Banks!" To complement this reformist program, they produce a theoretical analysis emphasizing "fictitious" capital. Thus Marcus writes:

"Under capitalism, however, expanded production tends increasingly to obstruct itself and to turn into stagnation, increasing misery and decay....Its cause lies in the contradiction between expanded social production and the largely fictitious values associated with individual property-titles in the means of production and other income-producing property forms."
-- "Economism or Socialism, Part II," The Campaigner, October 1970

Wohlforth is not so blatant in his revisions of Marx as is the guru of the NCLC. So in his current series on "What is Spartacist Today?" he spends part four in attacking the SL for allegedly ignoring the question of circulation, listing several quotes from Marx which point out how th ecrisis o f overproduction is expressed in the process of circulation. But Wohlforth is saddled with an insurmaountable difficulty: namely that the IC monetary crisis theory is rooted in circulation, not production, and is precisely the kind of monetarist theory Marx polemicized against in Vol. III, Part 5 of Capital. So in the next installment we discover that crises in Marx's time were, it is true, production crises but now things are different:

"Marx wrote of [capitalism] under conditions in which it was still capable of expansion of the productive forces of mankind. Crises in his period were more limited in impact and largely of a commodity or commercial nature. Today the overall expansion of capital with its corresponding change in the organic composition of capital producing a falling rate of profit means that capitalism has reached its general historical limit...
"This is also why questions of the monetary system and credit become so vital as well. As Lenin explained, the epoch of imperialism is a period in which finance capital triumphs over manufacturing capital...
"If forms of credit, of extended credit, are entered into this process both through bank loans and through the production of paper currency quite out of proportion to the money (gold) backing of the currency, then we can immediately see how the problem of overproduction can be momentarily overcome and along with the problems related to the falling rate of profit..."
-- Bulletin, 23 July 1973

Thus, you see, today the crisis takes place in circulation, today it is possible to solve the economic crises of overproduction by artificially creating credit! Keynesianism works according to Wohlforth, although only "momentarily." On the other hand, according to the 28 May Bulletin, Wohlforth's Hegelian "moment" when the law of value was "denied" lasted for "27 years"! Even more explicitly, the "Dollar Crisis" pamphlet exclaims: "The capitalist system, in any case is not fundamentally a crisis of commodity over-production, but one involving the over-production of capital." Wohlforth just can't keep that Marcus ghost hidden in the closet! As if in anticipation, Marx entitled one of the sections of chapter 17 of the Theories of Surplus Value "Absurd Denial of the Overproduction of Commodities, Accompanied by a Recognition of the Over-Abundance of Capital." But then, of course, that was in his day. As far as the substance of the matter is concerned, commodities are capital and capital in turn takes the form of commodities and even money at different points in the process of circulation. And the triumph of finance capital over manufacturing spoken of by Lenin was achieved by the absorption of the latter by the former. The opposition of financieal and manufacturing capital is a myth of Stalinism conconcted to justify the theory of a people's front with the "progressive" capitalists against the reactionary, unproductive sector, variously known as the Robber Barons, the 200 Families or Wall Street.

Not the Credit System, But the National State

Although the IC keeps insisting that the present crisis is insoluble, if their analysis was correct there could ba an easy solution. If world trade must collapse because the value of monetary gold is too small to circulate it, all that is necessary is to raise the price of gold. And this is precisely what is now happening. Within a year, most governments will probably be buying and selling gold on the open market. When this happens, the IC will have to come up with another explanation for the final crisis.

In general, the Dollar Crisis raises an obvious question which it does not answer. Why didn't the ruling class restore the pre-1914 gold standard after World War I, or World War II, or why don't they do so now? Under the pre-1914 gold standard the only way a national bourgeoisie could improve its international competitiveness was by lowering th edomestic price level. This, in turn, could only be brought about through unemployment, cutting money wages and temporarily sacrificing profits. Under nineteenth century comditions of generally expanding world production and a weak labor movement, the advanced capitalist countries were prepared to play by the gold-standard rules of the game. But backward capitalist countries (e.g., Argentina) did not adhere to the gold standard even in the nineteenth century.

After World War I the qualitatively greater instability in the world economy, the strengthening of the labor movement and development of powerful revolutionary proletarian tendencies made domestic deflation to correct a balance of payments too politically dangerous. Significantly, the only contemporary bourgeois political tendency which even contemplated a return to the pre-1914 gold standard was semi-bonapartist French Gaullism in the early 1960s'. After World War I, the conflicts between the national bourgeoisies produced international financial anarchy because this condition enabled a national bourgeoieise to mantain or incras its share of world trade and capital at the expense of other nations through permanent borrowing, competitive devaluation and direct control over foreign exchange transactions. That this did not occur after World War II was the result of the absolute economic and political hegemony of the U.S. in the capitalist world, a condition which lasted until the late 1960's. Even today the U.S. produces roughly 45 percent of total goods and services of capitalist countries, and its still considerable power has enabled it to force upward valuations of its major competitors' currencies (Japan, Germany). The endless crises of international finance are arenas of struggle between the imperialist powers over markets and spheres of exploitation. The decisive arena is war.

Despite its lip service to Lenin's "Imperialism," the SLL negates the Leninist-Trotskyist view of contemporary capitalism. Written during World War I, "Imperialism" has two major themes. The first is that a decaying world economy intensifies inter-imperialist conflicts leading to a war over the division of world markets and spheres of exploitation. The second is that labor reformism necessarily leads to social-patriotic support for one's own imperialist bourgeoisie. In contrast to Lenin, the IC ignores the question of imperialist war and denies the possibility of labor reformism, even in its virulent social-chauvinist form. Instead what is projected is a uniform world economic collapse whose result could be the international victory of fascism:

"Either the working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary party, takes the power and puts an end to capitalist anarchy, or the ruling class will be forced to impose brutal dictatorship on the European, Japanese and American working class."
– "The Dollar Crisis"

Such a view dangerously miscomprehends the nature of fascism. A fascist bourgeoisie is not content merely to intensify the exploitation of its own working class. Fascism is, above all, the mobilization of the masses for imperialist war. Fascists come to power by proclaiming that the "people" need a "strong leadership" to defend them against their national enemies. It is precisely by social chauvinist demagogy that fascism attains its mass base and disorients and splits the workers movement. After Hitler came to power, the German Social Democrats announced their support for Nazi foreign policy. Labor reformism prepares the way for fascism through its social chauvinist policies. Because the IC rejects the centrality of the struggle against social-chauvinism and labor reformism in this epoch, the politics of international Healyism are essentially economist – which because they fail to go beyond the limits of capitalism ultimately lead to outright support for the bourgeoisie. Healy/Wohlforth have not yet had their 4 August 1914 (the day the German Social Democrats voted for war credits), but they have one in their future. It is only a question of time.

Healyism and Pabloism Drift Together

For the past several years we have called attention to the rightward degeneration of international Healyism, and its increasing adoption of Pabloist methodology. The parallelism of the IC and USec Majority's present economic analysis and particularly the organizational perspectives they draw from it further strengthens this view. It is now clear that Mandel's neo-capitalism and the Healyites' credit-inflation boom were objectivist explanations for the organizational stagnation of the erstwhile Trotskyist movement in the 1950’s-early 1960's. Likewise, their present catastrophic economic analysis is an objectivist projection of their get-rich-quick organizational ambitions. These ambitions are simultaneously associated with both sectarian posturing and adventurism and with opportunist tailism. On the one hand, we have the Healyites boy-scout-type hikes against unemployment and ever more-frequent press or the USec's experimentation with guerilla terrorism in Latin America and confrontation with the police in France. On the other hand we have the WL's campaign to pressure the Meanyite union bureaucracy into building a reformist labor party and the Ligue Communiste's and the WL's support to the French popular front, the Union of the Left. What sectarian posturing, adventurism and tailism have in common is that they are apparent short cuts to building a mass party

The Spartacist League does not pretend to be able to foretell the pattern of future economic cycles and their precise effect on the international class struggle. On the value of such predictions, we can do no better than to quote comrade Lenin

"We cannot tell-no one can tell in advance how soon a real proletarian revolution will flare up there, and what immediate cause will most serve to rouse, kindle and impel into struggle the very wide masses, who are still dormant.” [emphasis-in original]
– "Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder," 1920

We assert that in this epoch of the death agony of capitalism many revolutionary situations will occur. They can only be resolved in favor of socialism if led by a revolutionary proletarian party. And the only way to successfully prepare for a revolutionary situation is a constant struggle to establish a cadre as recognized leaders in the labor movement and mass organizations of the oppressed on the basis of the Transitional Program.