Workers Vanguard No. 562, 30 October 1992
Freddy and the Mob
In the early 1980s, as the Reagan White House kicked off a full-scale judicial counterrevolution — aimed at gearing up the state’s machinery of repression by shredding any semblance of democratic rights — it stepped up its legal vendetta against “the Mob.” As we noted, “The Reaganites want to institutionalize the frame-up principle, and what easier target for a frame job than vicious parasites like gangsters?” (“Feds Frame Up Mob,” WV No. 400, 28 March 1986). For the past ten years, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) “conspiracy” law has been wielded for murderous frame-ups of the government’s leftist opponents, wholesale attacks on labor, and general intimidation of the population.
So when the feds’ RICO dragnet finally got John Gotti, the reputed New York “crime boss” who last summer was sentenced to life without parole, we responded with a straightforward statement based on the understanding that democratic rights are indivisible. As we observed in “Gotti, RICO and You” (WV No. 557, 7 August): “Civil liberties, if they mean anything at all, apply first of all to those perceived as really far out — whether they be Marxists, religious sects (recall Rev. Sun Myung Moon or Oregon guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) or even in fact mobsters.”
One would think that any self-proclaimed leftist, of whatever political persuasion, would by definition be opposed to RICO even if only out of self-preservation. But not David North’s Workers League. A raving response to our article on Gotti by the Northites’ vice-presidential candidate Fred Mazelis, titled “The Spartacists and John Gotti” (Bulletin, 2 October), doesn’t even mention, much less oppose, the police-state RICO laws that were used to nail Gotti.
On the contrary, Mazelis takes umbrage that the “Spartacists go on to compare Gotti favorably to the leading spokesmen of US imperialism in the Democratic and Republican parties,” citing our observation that: “If John Gotti were running with Noriega in this year’s elections, they’d be the lesser evil.” Mazelis is so insulted by the comparison of the Italian “mobster” and the Panamanian strongman with “his” imperialist rulers that he choked on quoting our next sentence: “Gotti’s probably not nature’s nobleman, but neither is the Arkansas executioner Bill Clinton nor George Bush, who regularly bombs small countries to rubble.”
This, writes Mazelis, “is the language of politically deranged elements of the petty bourgeoisie.” But somehow the oh-so-proletarian “Workers” League has been strangely mum on a law that has been the government’s primary legal weapon against the unions. Sponsored by segregationist Arkansas Senator John McClellan, who presided over the witch-hunting Senate subcommittee in the 1950s that went after Jimmy Hoffa and produced the Landrum-Griffin Act outlawing “hot cargoing” in the trucking industry, the RICO laws were in fact intended to equate “organized labor” with “organized crime.”
In the name of fighting “mob influence” in the labor movement, the gang of criminals that run this country invoked RICO to place the Teamsters under government trusteeship. Mine Workers, Longshoremen, Laborers and Hotel Workers number among the other unions to feel the RICO sting. And it is rare today that a picket line isn’t met by the threat of RICO suits.
RICO’s definition of “racketeering “ is so elastic it allows the government to go after whoever they want, whenever they want, without any evidence of any crime. You’re guilty until proven innocent and sentenced before convicted. The government has free rein to take everything you own, and without any assets it’s pretty hard to find a lawyer to take your case. Attorneys’ fees may be seized if the government claims these were paid with “ill-gotten gains,” RICO’s witch-hunting provisions were applied with a vengeance against the “Ohio 7,” a group of leftist opponents of U.S. imperialism, who were met with wiretaps, dragnets, preventive detention, kidnapping and interrogation of children.
Mazelis’ lips are sealed on all of this. But then again the Workers League would be hard pressed pretending to oppose government intervention in the labor movement or capitalist state persecution of leftists. After all, the Northites have a wealth of experience in using the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and otherwise try to bankrupt their political opponents. In their psychotic vendetta against the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which they charge with being a government conspiracy, the Northites have pursued their own version of RICO.
In the late 1970s, a Workers League provocateur, Alan Gelfand, filed suit against the SWP demanding the court seize its membership lists, financial records and minutes. In 1988, the WL’s Bulletin supplied the closing arguments for the bourgeois state’s prosecution of a young SWPer, Mark Curtis, who was sentenced to 25 years in jail on frame-up charges of sexual abuse.
One of the most common means the government uses to nail people under RICO is the charge of using the mails or wire services for “fraudulent” purposes. The Workers League, which has made an international campaign out of condemning “The Mark Curtis Hoax,” threw its support behind a court case filed by the father of the alleged victim claiming that Curtis’ defense committee was engaged in an “international smear campaign,” and demanding that the courts requisition monies raised in Curtis’ defense for damages.
Now Mazelis charges that our article “Gotti, RICO and You” is evidence of the “class affinity between the Spartacists and the mob.” This is pretty rich coming from an outfit which is internationally renowned for its gangsterism and truly criminal financial deals with a whole variety of colonels, sheiks and despots in the Near East. Moreover, given that the Workers League claims to be the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository of Marxism on the face of the planet, what kind of protection racket do they have going that makes them feel so smugly secure against the repressive legal arsenal of this capitalist government?
Showing posts with label Fred Mazelis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred Mazelis. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Bulletin Doth Protest Too Much (1986)
Workers Vanguard No. 394 (3 January 1986)
Bulletin Doth Protest too Much
We reprint here an excerpt concerning the Spartacist League from the article “Political Lessons of Anti-Concessions Conference” contained in the 13 December 1985 Bulletin, organ of the recently Healyite U.S. Workers League. Those familiar with the activity of the SL in the real world may not be able to match this with the assertions in this account of the “National Rank-and-File Against Concessions” conference held in Chicago on December 7.
Attending the rotten “fight back” conference were all the usual out-bureaucrat suspects, and some not-so-outs, which the Bulletin doesn’t tell you about – Victor Reuther was the honored guest. Also present were six Workers Leaguers, among them former National Secretary Freddy Mazelis who took over from former, former National Secretary Tim Wohlforth and was in turn replaced by current National Secretary David North.
The Bulletin is compelled to mention the SL, castigating us as “revisionist” (along with the “revisionist Socialist Workers Party,” “revisionist Trotskyist Organization,” and “revisionist Revolutionary Workers League”). We note that for the WL this represents a downgrading from our previous classification as “fingerman for the world capitalists,” the FBI and other dark forces. They also label us “sectarian” and take us to task for only sending a reporter to the event.
A discerning reader might conclude that we were the only principled Trotskyists there, refusing to play “honest trade-union center folk” or to suck up to some of the more entrenched union bureaucrats. Naturally any number of phony socialists undoubtedly consider that “sectarian.” In the WL’s case, Mazelis/North may be just a little defensive about their own deep immersion in this “rank-and-file” event which, by their own account, excluded rank-and-file groups from the leadership.
In any case, you'd think North & Co. would show a little modesty. Their international founder-leader – Gerry Healy of the British Workers Revolutionary Party – has, after all, only recently been expelled for alleged revolting sex crimes against young women as well as having called David North a CIA agent. Fairly squalid stuff. For our analysis, see “Healyism Implodes” in the latest issue of Spartacist (English edition), No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the world’s a revisionist except thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.
Bulletin Doth Protest too Much
We reprint here an excerpt concerning the Spartacist League from the article “Political Lessons of Anti-Concessions Conference” contained in the 13 December 1985 Bulletin, organ of the recently Healyite U.S. Workers League. Those familiar with the activity of the SL in the real world may not be able to match this with the assertions in this account of the “National Rank-and-File Against Concessions” conference held in Chicago on December 7.
Attending the rotten “fight back” conference were all the usual out-bureaucrat suspects, and some not-so-outs, which the Bulletin doesn’t tell you about – Victor Reuther was the honored guest. Also present were six Workers Leaguers, among them former National Secretary Freddy Mazelis who took over from former, former National Secretary Tim Wohlforth and was in turn replaced by current National Secretary David North.
The Bulletin is compelled to mention the SL, castigating us as “revisionist” (along with the “revisionist Socialist Workers Party,” “revisionist Trotskyist Organization,” and “revisionist Revolutionary Workers League”). We note that for the WL this represents a downgrading from our previous classification as “fingerman for the world capitalists,” the FBI and other dark forces. They also label us “sectarian” and take us to task for only sending a reporter to the event.
A discerning reader might conclude that we were the only principled Trotskyists there, refusing to play “honest trade-union center folk” or to suck up to some of the more entrenched union bureaucrats. Naturally any number of phony socialists undoubtedly consider that “sectarian.” In the WL’s case, Mazelis/North may be just a little defensive about their own deep immersion in this “rank-and-file” event which, by their own account, excluded rank-and-file groups from the leadership.
In any case, you'd think North & Co. would show a little modesty. Their international founder-leader – Gerry Healy of the British Workers Revolutionary Party – has, after all, only recently been expelled for alleged revolting sex crimes against young women as well as having called David North a CIA agent. Fairly squalid stuff. For our analysis, see “Healyism Implodes” in the latest issue of Spartacist (English edition), No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the world’s a revisionist except thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.
* * *
Bulletin, 13 December 1985
…
“The revisionist Spartacist League sent a correspondent to the conference, but did not participate, in keeping with itsstance that it is impossible to fight for revolutionary leadership in the actual struggles of the working class, and that trade union work is only "exemplary," i.e., for the edification of aging middle class radicals outside the labor movement.
Sectarians
The Spartacist League demonstrated its attitude to the struggle
against concessions shortly after the first major battle at Chrysler in 1979.
Their response was to reduce the weekly Workers Vanguard to a fortnightly because the objective conditions for a weekly paper did not exist. Nothing that has happened in the working class movement in the last six years has convinced these middle class sectarians otherwise.”
…
Saturday, July 11, 2009
WL Exclusionism Wrecks Own Meeting (1977)
Workers Vanguard No. 147 (4 March 1977)
WL Exclusionism Wrecks Own Meeting
TORONTO – The tiny local branch of the Workers League (WL), reinforced by a goon squad of its cronies from Detroit, forcibly prevented members of the Trotskyist League of Canada (TL) from attending a so-called “public” WL, meeting February 19 at the University of Toronto. Although a showing of the film “Trotsky: His Life and Work” was the drawing card for the meeting, its real purpose was revealed once the WL had corralled about 40 people inside. It was simply a forum to continue the vicious slander campaign of the Healyite International Committee (IC) against United Secretariat (USec) leaders George Novack and Joseph Hansen.
As usual, the Workers League was concerned above all with spreading its lies without having to face exposure by supporters of the international Spartacist tendency. At the entrance to the meeting a WL goon announced, “Everyone is welcome who is not a member of the Trotskyist League.”
To protest this Stalinist exclusion, the TL and its supporters initiated a militant picket line, 40-strong, in front of the meeting site. They chanted: “Let the communists in,” “Down with Stalinist exclusionism – For workers democracy,” “On Sadlowski, Miller and Ho Chi Minh – IC and USec are brothers under the skin,” and “Down with the Healyite slander campaign – Reforge the Fourth International.”
Inside the meeting a supporter of the TL demanded to know why the Trotskyist League was excluded and protested this cowardly act as a blatant violation of workers democracy. WL goons immediately rushed him, pushing him out the door. Two others who protested the exclusion were also thrown out. WL honcho Fred Mazelis took the floor, ranting that anyone who disagreed with the exclusion should “go out and join the protest outside,” at which point six more people left.
Mazelis cynically offered to let the TL have one speaker. But later when a TL delegation came to accept this offer, four goons at the door mumbled, “You're too late.” The remaining audience was treated to over an hour of the WL’s crisis-mongering and GPU agent-baiting of Hansen and Novack before the movie. When one person asked when the film would start, Mazelis replied: “If you don't like it you can leave.” At that point ten more people walked out.
The Workers League’s penchant for slandering and hysterical crisis-mongering is as notorious as its longtime Stalinist exclusion of opponent tendencies from “public” WL forums. Its recent hypocritical appeal against violence in the socialist movement (see “Look Who's Calling Us Comrade,” WV No. 143, 4 February) is belied by its continuing practice of exclusionism.
The Workers League fortunately has no impact on the working class. Its capitulation to the right-wing social-democratic New Democratic Party and its chauvinist refusal to recognize Quebec's right to-self-determination are but Canadian adaptations of its appeals to arch-reactionary labor traitors such as Meany and Abel to form a labor party in the U.S. However marginal this group is, its recourse to lies and slander instead of political debate is a poison that must be vigorously combatted, while its exclusion of and thug attacks against opponents on the left are Stalinist provocations that cannot be tolerated in the workers movement.
WL Exclusionism Wrecks Own Meeting
TORONTO – The tiny local branch of the Workers League (WL), reinforced by a goon squad of its cronies from Detroit, forcibly prevented members of the Trotskyist League of Canada (TL) from attending a so-called “public” WL, meeting February 19 at the University of Toronto. Although a showing of the film “Trotsky: His Life and Work” was the drawing card for the meeting, its real purpose was revealed once the WL had corralled about 40 people inside. It was simply a forum to continue the vicious slander campaign of the Healyite International Committee (IC) against United Secretariat (USec) leaders George Novack and Joseph Hansen.
As usual, the Workers League was concerned above all with spreading its lies without having to face exposure by supporters of the international Spartacist tendency. At the entrance to the meeting a WL goon announced, “Everyone is welcome who is not a member of the Trotskyist League.”
To protest this Stalinist exclusion, the TL and its supporters initiated a militant picket line, 40-strong, in front of the meeting site. They chanted: “Let the communists in,” “Down with Stalinist exclusionism – For workers democracy,” “On Sadlowski, Miller and Ho Chi Minh – IC and USec are brothers under the skin,” and “Down with the Healyite slander campaign – Reforge the Fourth International.”
Inside the meeting a supporter of the TL demanded to know why the Trotskyist League was excluded and protested this cowardly act as a blatant violation of workers democracy. WL goons immediately rushed him, pushing him out the door. Two others who protested the exclusion were also thrown out. WL honcho Fred Mazelis took the floor, ranting that anyone who disagreed with the exclusion should “go out and join the protest outside,” at which point six more people left.
Mazelis cynically offered to let the TL have one speaker. But later when a TL delegation came to accept this offer, four goons at the door mumbled, “You're too late.” The remaining audience was treated to over an hour of the WL’s crisis-mongering and GPU agent-baiting of Hansen and Novack before the movie. When one person asked when the film would start, Mazelis replied: “If you don't like it you can leave.” At that point ten more people walked out.
The Workers League’s penchant for slandering and hysterical crisis-mongering is as notorious as its longtime Stalinist exclusion of opponent tendencies from “public” WL forums. Its recent hypocritical appeal against violence in the socialist movement (see “Look Who's Calling Us Comrade,” WV No. 143, 4 February) is belied by its continuing practice of exclusionism.
The Workers League fortunately has no impact on the working class. Its capitulation to the right-wing social-democratic New Democratic Party and its chauvinist refusal to recognize Quebec's right to-self-determination are but Canadian adaptations of its appeals to arch-reactionary labor traitors such as Meany and Abel to form a labor party in the U.S. However marginal this group is, its recourse to lies and slander instead of political debate is a poison that must be vigorously combatted, while its exclusion of and thug attacks against opponents on the left are Stalinist provocations that cannot be tolerated in the workers movement.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant (1976)
Workers Vanguard No. 109 (14 May 1976)
Shocked WL Supporters Pull Off Ex-National Secretary
Fred Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant in Cleveland
At a Cleveland shopping center last week, Fred Mazelis, former national secretary of the disintegrating Workers League (WL), physically assaulted a WV salesman. While WL thuggery is far from unprecedented, the frenzied attack so startled several of Mazelis' shocked supporters standing nearby that they rushed forward to restrain him and drag him away.
Mazelis initially appeared reasonable enough and bought a copy of WV. But when asked why he was no longer WL head and why the WL had changed its leadership so often in the past couple of years, Mazelis denounced the Spartacist supporter for starting a "non-political" argument.
Responding to another question, Mazelis defended the WL's political support to the petty-bourgeois nationalist MPLA. But when pressed about the MPLA's strike-breaking activities, Mazelis without warning put down his bundle of Bulletins, grabbed the SLer by the throat and began hitting him in the face. The SLer struck back effectively in self-defense and three WLers intervened to stop Mazelis' unprovoked attack. Mazelis began shouting to his comrades, “No, no! This is important!” Clearly beside himself, he told the SLer: “We kicked your ass in Los Angeles too.... This is just the beginning!”
Workers League gangster violence within the workers movement erupted several times recently in Los Angeles. On March I the WL held a meeting at Cal. State L.A. to publicize its shameful campaign to smear leaders of the reformist Socialist Workers Party as "accomplices of the GPU" in the Stalinists’ assassination of Trotsky. When members of the Spartacus Youth League appeared at this “public” meeting, they were physically threatened and one was assaulted and choked. A supporter of the WL's Young Socialists told a campus employee to have the university police eject the SYLers on the grounds that not all of them were students.
The next week, when the same presentation was made at UCLA, an enraged David North, current WL national secretary, attacked a photographer and ripped her camera out of her hands.
Then two weeks later at a March 21 meeting of TUALP, the WL's fake trade-union front, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Spartacist supporters were excluded, as were members of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME Local 2070, a class-struggle opposition within the public employees union. When one Militant Caucus member insisted on his right to attend, he was set upon by WL goons and struck in the face. As before, the WL enlisted the aid of the Convention Center management to expel the SL and Militant Caucus members, and the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to lend a hand.
These Stalinist hooligan tactics are completely alien to the Trotskyism which the WL pretends to uphold. They are the tactics of an impotent, paranoid sect which cannot defend its politics and is terrified of losing control of its membership. Labor militants and supporters of all left-wing political tendencies, must defend the principle of workers democracy by repudiating the Workers League's despicable gangsterism and expunging such practices from the workers movement.
Shocked WL Supporters Pull Off Ex-National Secretary
Fred Mazelis Assaults Spartacist Militant in Cleveland
At a Cleveland shopping center last week, Fred Mazelis, former national secretary of the disintegrating Workers League (WL), physically assaulted a WV salesman. While WL thuggery is far from unprecedented, the frenzied attack so startled several of Mazelis' shocked supporters standing nearby that they rushed forward to restrain him and drag him away.
Mazelis initially appeared reasonable enough and bought a copy of WV. But when asked why he was no longer WL head and why the WL had changed its leadership so often in the past couple of years, Mazelis denounced the Spartacist supporter for starting a "non-political" argument.
Responding to another question, Mazelis defended the WL's political support to the petty-bourgeois nationalist MPLA. But when pressed about the MPLA's strike-breaking activities, Mazelis without warning put down his bundle of Bulletins, grabbed the SLer by the throat and began hitting him in the face. The SLer struck back effectively in self-defense and three WLers intervened to stop Mazelis' unprovoked attack. Mazelis began shouting to his comrades, “No, no! This is important!” Clearly beside himself, he told the SLer: “We kicked your ass in Los Angeles too.... This is just the beginning!”
Workers League gangster violence within the workers movement erupted several times recently in Los Angeles. On March I the WL held a meeting at Cal. State L.A. to publicize its shameful campaign to smear leaders of the reformist Socialist Workers Party as "accomplices of the GPU" in the Stalinists’ assassination of Trotsky. When members of the Spartacus Youth League appeared at this “public” meeting, they were physically threatened and one was assaulted and choked. A supporter of the WL's Young Socialists told a campus employee to have the university police eject the SYLers on the grounds that not all of them were students.
The next week, when the same presentation was made at UCLA, an enraged David North, current WL national secretary, attacked a photographer and ripped her camera out of her hands.
Then two weeks later at a March 21 meeting of TUALP, the WL's fake trade-union front, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Spartacist supporters were excluded, as were members of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME Local 2070, a class-struggle opposition within the public employees union. When one Militant Caucus member insisted on his right to attend, he was set upon by WL goons and struck in the face. As before, the WL enlisted the aid of the Convention Center management to expel the SL and Militant Caucus members, and the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to lend a hand.
These Stalinist hooligan tactics are completely alien to the Trotskyism which the WL pretends to uphold. They are the tactics of an impotent, paranoid sect which cannot defend its politics and is terrified of losing control of its membership. Labor militants and supporters of all left-wing political tendencies, must defend the principle of workers democracy by repudiating the Workers League's despicable gangsterism and expunging such practices from the workers movement.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Workers League Bitten by 7-Headed Cobra (1975)
Workers Vanguard No. 80 (10 October 1975)
SLA: From “Heroic Guerillas” to “Police Plot”
Workers League Bitten By Seven-Headed Cobra
The uproar over recent assassination attempts against Gerald Ford together with the capture of Patricia Hearst and the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) has spotlighted the chronic inability of ostensibly socialist organizations to analyze social phenomena and events from a Marxist viewpoint. The Spartacist League has been unique in consistently maintaining that the SLA is not part of the left but "an irrational and cultist expression of lumpen-proletarian rage having nothing in common with the struggle of the working class for socialism" (WV No. 43, 26 April 1974).
Quite a different line is presented by the fake-Trotskyist Workers League (WL), which asserts that, "This fantastic tale [Patricia Hearst's 'amnesia'] is being whipped up as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the SLA was a police operation from beginning to end" (Bulletin, 26 September). This is at least consistent with its cop-plot "theories" at the time the SLA kidnapping of Hearst first hit the headlines: according to a 19 February 1974 Bulletin editorial, "The SLA has all the characteristics of a CIA or FBI creation."
However, between then and now the WL said something entirely opposite. Shortly after Patricia Hearst announced her "conversion" to the SLA, Melody Farrow wrote in the Bulletin (19 April 1974):
The explanation is, however, self-evident to those who know the Workers League: discovering that Patricia Hearst and the SLA evoked sympathy from various petty-bourgeois radicals, the WL decided to appeal to these strata by transmogrifying their heros from cops into "revolutionaries." Nor is this something new for these practised political bandits.
Under the leadership of Tim Wohlforth the WL gained widespread notoriety for its political dishonesty, its subordination of political principle to pursuit of organizational opportunities. A truly gross instance was Wohlforth's hailing of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton for turning to "dialectics" just weeks before Newton turned to the church and the Democratic Party. In the same issue of the Bulletin, Wohlforth also called for all-out labor support to the strike of New York City cops!
Wohlforth is gone, reduced to spending his time sniffing around the social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the unsavory, ethereal sectlet of Michel Varga, the International League Rebuilding the Fourth International (LIRQI). But his fabled "method" remains. Under its new lackluster manager, Fred Mazelis, the WL is every bit as unprincipled and dishonest. (See page 8 on the Bulletin's recent flipflops over Portugal.) In addition to the time-honored technique of the Big Lie, one of its favorite modes of argumentation is the amalgam. Thus the 30 September Bulletin attempts to lump the Spartacist League together with the snivelling reformists of the SWP, claiming the SL has been driven into a frenzy by the bourgeoisie's antiterrorism campaign.
Mere facts are of little importance to the WL, but for anyone else there is an obvious difference between the SWP's condemnation of assassination attempts on Ford as "part of the violence, hatred and irrationality which seem to poison American society today," and the SL's forthright statement: "We wept no tears over the death of John Kennedy; and class-conscious workers are not concerned to protect the physical safety of the chief imperialist warmonger, Gerald Ford" (WV No. 78, 26 September).
The Bulletin writer is particularly upset that we could say: "That a disturbed crackpot like Lyn Marcus, for instance, can gain a following of hundreds of youth (some of whom want to see a socialist society) is an expression of the extreme weakness of the U.S. left and the present quietism of its misled and racially torn working class."
"Aha!" cries the Bulletin. "Here in its purest form, is the enormous cynicism and despair of the American middle class." It continues: "The exact opposite is the case. The use of provocations by the ruling class expresses its enormous weakness when confronted by the labor movement... . The key issue is not that the working class lacks sufficient strength to defend its rights, but that it is not conscious of its strength. The task of making it conscious is the central responsibility of the revolutionary party."
The Workers League specializes in the preposterous truism, first presenting false premises, then obscuring the issues and conveniently missing the point. Yes, we said the U.S. left is weak, the working class is quietist, i.e., not conscious of its strength and unaware of its true interests. Why? Because it is misled by confusionists and opportunists. Given the WL's penchant for changing its line as casually as most people change their underwear, it is evident that Mazelis and Co. offer no alternative but only more of the same. The construction of a truly revolutionary Trotskyist party in the U.S. will have as one of its by-products the political destruction of such pettifogging snake oil peddlers.
SLA: From “Heroic Guerillas” to “Police Plot”
Workers League Bitten By Seven-Headed Cobra
The uproar over recent assassination attempts against Gerald Ford together with the capture of Patricia Hearst and the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) has spotlighted the chronic inability of ostensibly socialist organizations to analyze social phenomena and events from a Marxist viewpoint. The Spartacist League has been unique in consistently maintaining that the SLA is not part of the left but "an irrational and cultist expression of lumpen-proletarian rage having nothing in common with the struggle of the working class for socialism" (WV No. 43, 26 April 1974).
Quite a different line is presented by the fake-Trotskyist Workers League (WL), which asserts that, "This fantastic tale [Patricia Hearst's 'amnesia'] is being whipped up as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the SLA was a police operation from beginning to end" (Bulletin, 26 September). This is at least consistent with its cop-plot "theories" at the time the SLA kidnapping of Hearst first hit the headlines: according to a 19 February 1974 Bulletin editorial, "The SLA has all the characteristics of a CIA or FBI creation."
However, between then and now the WL said something entirely opposite. Shortly after Patricia Hearst announced her "conversion" to the SLA, Melody Farrow wrote in the Bulletin (19 April 1974):
"There can be no question of the courage and dedication of the SLA members who are willing to risk their lives to fight capitalism. They must be unconditionally defended against the plans of the government to massacre them."Thus with consummate fake-"dialectics" the SLA was transformed from a group with "all the characteristics of a CIA or FBI creation" into a band of courageous and dedicated anti-capitalist fighters. And with a wave of the Healyite magic wand - presto! - the SLA again becomes a police creation from start to finish, without a word of explanation.
The explanation is, however, self-evident to those who know the Workers League: discovering that Patricia Hearst and the SLA evoked sympathy from various petty-bourgeois radicals, the WL decided to appeal to these strata by transmogrifying their heros from cops into "revolutionaries." Nor is this something new for these practised political bandits.
Under the leadership of Tim Wohlforth the WL gained widespread notoriety for its political dishonesty, its subordination of political principle to pursuit of organizational opportunities. A truly gross instance was Wohlforth's hailing of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton for turning to "dialectics" just weeks before Newton turned to the church and the Democratic Party. In the same issue of the Bulletin, Wohlforth also called for all-out labor support to the strike of New York City cops!
Wohlforth is gone, reduced to spending his time sniffing around the social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the unsavory, ethereal sectlet of Michel Varga, the International League Rebuilding the Fourth International (LIRQI). But his fabled "method" remains. Under its new lackluster manager, Fred Mazelis, the WL is every bit as unprincipled and dishonest. (See page 8 on the Bulletin's recent flipflops over Portugal.) In addition to the time-honored technique of the Big Lie, one of its favorite modes of argumentation is the amalgam. Thus the 30 September Bulletin attempts to lump the Spartacist League together with the snivelling reformists of the SWP, claiming the SL has been driven into a frenzy by the bourgeoisie's antiterrorism campaign.
Mere facts are of little importance to the WL, but for anyone else there is an obvious difference between the SWP's condemnation of assassination attempts on Ford as "part of the violence, hatred and irrationality which seem to poison American society today," and the SL's forthright statement: "We wept no tears over the death of John Kennedy; and class-conscious workers are not concerned to protect the physical safety of the chief imperialist warmonger, Gerald Ford" (WV No. 78, 26 September).
The Bulletin writer is particularly upset that we could say: "That a disturbed crackpot like Lyn Marcus, for instance, can gain a following of hundreds of youth (some of whom want to see a socialist society) is an expression of the extreme weakness of the U.S. left and the present quietism of its misled and racially torn working class."
"Aha!" cries the Bulletin. "Here in its purest form, is the enormous cynicism and despair of the American middle class." It continues: "The exact opposite is the case. The use of provocations by the ruling class expresses its enormous weakness when confronted by the labor movement... . The key issue is not that the working class lacks sufficient strength to defend its rights, but that it is not conscious of its strength. The task of making it conscious is the central responsibility of the revolutionary party."
The Workers League specializes in the preposterous truism, first presenting false premises, then obscuring the issues and conveniently missing the point. Yes, we said the U.S. left is weak, the working class is quietist, i.e., not conscious of its strength and unaware of its true interests. Why? Because it is misled by confusionists and opportunists. Given the WL's penchant for changing its line as casually as most people change their underwear, it is evident that Mazelis and Co. offer no alternative but only more of the same. The construction of a truly revolutionary Trotskyist party in the U.S. will have as one of its by-products the political destruction of such pettifogging snake oil peddlers.
Workers League Crumbles (1974)
Workers Vanguard No. 56 (8 November 1974)
SL Goes Forward
Workers League Crumbles
Crisis Comes, Wohlforth Goes
Amidst the desultory fanfare of celebrating "Ten Years of the Bulletin," the Workers League slid its former leader of more than a decade, Tim Wohlforth, into oblivion without a word of lamentation, jubilation, or even excuse.
An apathetic audience of about 180 listened as the WL's October25 "Tenth Anniversary" public meeting in New York introduced Fred Mazelis as WL National Secretary, confirming the rumors that Wohlforth had been deposed as WL head. (We print below the text of our leaflet distributed at that meeting.)
The ouster of Wohlforth represents a tremendous setback for Healyism internationally. The Workers League is the oldest and largest Healyite colony, and Wohlforth had been its leader, pretentious propagandist and public spokesman from the outset. As befits the WL's razzle-dazzle operation, Wohlforth had at least a certain, albeit tawdry, presence. His replacement by the colorless and slimy Fred Mazelis is apparently a last-ditch attempt to stem the WL's hemorrhaging of its small core of cadre.
For years the WL sought to drive its young supporters to ever greater frenzies of work and self-sacrifice in executing an opportunist line with promises that The Crisis would catapult the WL's Potemkin Village into the big time. With unintentional irony, one young WL supporter told a WV reporter that the bureaucratic and sectarian Wohlforth finally had to go, now that The Crisis has come.
Whether Wohlforth will reappear in the course of some future WL gyration, opposition or palace coup, only time and possibly Healy can tell. But this much is clear: Wohlforth has no future in ostensibly socialist politics outside the Workers League. Even among the most demoralized of the degeneration products of Trotskyism, he is notorious as a demagogue and a fraud.
Only the consummate cynics of the WL would try to disappear their founding leader without one word of denunciation, self-criticism or comment. It might have been wiser, though, to have announced that poor Wohlforth had come down with a bad case of phlebitis.
The pages of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist and individual leaflets have over the years devoted sufficient attention to Tim Wohlforth and the Workers League. We have exposed the WL's shamefully opportunist and self-contradictory positions (most grotesquely, managing in one issue of the Bulletin to simultaneously hail the alleged turn of the corrupt black nationalist Newton wing of the Panthers to "dialectics" and [to support] the striking New York cops). We have exposed the WL's accompanying lies, dishonesty, duplicity and bombastic pretense, centered on the WL’s fake-popular "agitational" newspaper. We have exposed the WL's shameless disregard for the principle of workers democracy. The cynics who have made up the core of the WL either ignored or even agreed with these characterizations and shrugged them off with a "so what? that's how we're going to get ahead."
But the WL's attempt to adapt the usual practices of big-time bureaucratic and revisionist parties to the few hundreds in the WL has been a disaster, as indeed such a one-sided sellout must be. The WL is hopelessly cut off from recruiting militants from any part of the existing left, where everyone who cares knows the WL as a dirty word. The only source left for WL recruitment is raw, semi-political youth, whom the WL tries to turn from would-be socialists into corrupted WL cynics. But the real all-sided irrelevance and isolation of the WL from social or political struggles lead to enormous turnover, for the WL can deliver neither social struggle nor even any real payoff for corruption. So these often serious, if naive, youth just go away, embittered and anti-socialist. The internal life of the WL mirrors its publicly expressed fakery and scumminess. So except for the very narrow central clique, even the most cynical and degenerate WL cadres can only be the recipients of the same endless stupid abuse and lying which the WL tries to dump on the world at large. The political life of a WL member is indeed nasty, brutal and above all short. The WL's basic method of "short-cuts" in principle and endless demagogy is a losers' strategy.
Healy
The WL's creeping crisis of cadre loss appears to have reached Tim Wohlforth himself. The main story going around is that he has been deposed as central leader. For all we know he's still covertly the American boss, or perhaps the disappearance of his name in recent Bulletins reflects his expulsion. If the latter is the case this makes Wohlforth a three-time loser as central leader: in 1962 the Spartacist tendency took a majority in the then-common faction away from him; in 1964 his then-buddies, the Phillips state capitalist group, broke with him and took a majority with them; now three quarters of his cadre has walked out on him over the last 18 months, and Gerry Healy appears to have dumped him.
While Wohlforth has preened himself as a master theoretician, parading in his "The Struggle for Marxism in the U.S." as the first real American Marxist and proud author of the eccentric work "Theory of Structural Assimilation" (an embarassed WL disappeared that one several years ago), his main contribution has been to turn crucial aspects of Marxism – "theory," "method" and "dialectics" – into empty mystification in order to peddle political garbage.
The WL has always been a satellite of Gerry Healy's British group and is the product of steady pressure to conform to Healy's imaginings of what an American version of the British WRP ought to look like. Remember that the idiot opportunist WL line of a couple of years ago that "the road to the American working class is through the YSA" was admittedly dictated to the WL in Britain. The WL as it has become is, together with the interchangeable Australian and West German Healyite groups (the only other two visible Healyite groups outside Britain), the foreign face of the British Healy/Banda operation.
To blame Wohlforth and not Healy for the present sad state of the WL would be like blaming William Z. Foster and not Stalin for the crimes of the American CP, and in no case could an Earl Browder/Freddie Mazelis set things right.
Trotskyism
Unlike the Healyite shambles, the international Spartacist tendency and its American section, the Spartacist League, have leaped forward, making great gains because of its fidelity to the Trotskyist program and its energetic assault upon crisis-ridden revisionists in a dozen countries. The Spartacist is published in four languages, while the SL/U.S. produces a bi-weekly Workers Vanguard on the road to becoming a weekly, a monthly Young Spartacus and the journal Women and Revolution. In the United States a communist cadre is being forged in the labor movement, through hard-hitting trade-union fractions, and elsewhere.
It is the Spartacist League, not the Workers League, which has been able to win revolutionary elements from Maoism, labor reformism, the SWP and its international bloc partners, and the left social democracy. While the WL press makes wild claims to having brought down Nixon and then warns of resulting iminent fascism which only the WL can stop, the SL and Spartacus Youth League have undertaken real campaigns and struggles: in solidarity with the British miners' strike; around the agricultural workers; stopping the loading of ships to Chile; for the jailing of Nixon; for strikes against anti-labor legislation; for mass united front demonstrations to defeat the racist anti-busing forces. This is why the Spartacist League is undergoing all-sided growth – geographical, among workers and into new industries, among black and student youth
Don't wait for cynicism and burnout, the sure fate of those who stay overlong with the Workers League: like many other fake "revolutionary" organizations, the ranks are better than the counterfeit cause they try loyally to serve. Look to the Spartacist League for Marxist leadership!
To those who cling to the demonstrated bankruptcy of the Workers League's opportunism and deceit, we can only say along with Trotsky: "To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one's program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth International" (Transitional Program, 1938).
SL Goes Forward
Workers League Crumbles
Crisis Comes, Wohlforth Goes
Amidst the desultory fanfare of celebrating "Ten Years of the Bulletin," the Workers League slid its former leader of more than a decade, Tim Wohlforth, into oblivion without a word of lamentation, jubilation, or even excuse.
An apathetic audience of about 180 listened as the WL's October25 "Tenth Anniversary" public meeting in New York introduced Fred Mazelis as WL National Secretary, confirming the rumors that Wohlforth had been deposed as WL head. (We print below the text of our leaflet distributed at that meeting.)
The ouster of Wohlforth represents a tremendous setback for Healyism internationally. The Workers League is the oldest and largest Healyite colony, and Wohlforth had been its leader, pretentious propagandist and public spokesman from the outset. As befits the WL's razzle-dazzle operation, Wohlforth had at least a certain, albeit tawdry, presence. His replacement by the colorless and slimy Fred Mazelis is apparently a last-ditch attempt to stem the WL's hemorrhaging of its small core of cadre.
For years the WL sought to drive its young supporters to ever greater frenzies of work and self-sacrifice in executing an opportunist line with promises that The Crisis would catapult the WL's Potemkin Village into the big time. With unintentional irony, one young WL supporter told a WV reporter that the bureaucratic and sectarian Wohlforth finally had to go, now that The Crisis has come.
Whether Wohlforth will reappear in the course of some future WL gyration, opposition or palace coup, only time and possibly Healy can tell. But this much is clear: Wohlforth has no future in ostensibly socialist politics outside the Workers League. Even among the most demoralized of the degeneration products of Trotskyism, he is notorious as a demagogue and a fraud.
Only the consummate cynics of the WL would try to disappear their founding leader without one word of denunciation, self-criticism or comment. It might have been wiser, though, to have announced that poor Wohlforth had come down with a bad case of phlebitis.
The pages of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist and individual leaflets have over the years devoted sufficient attention to Tim Wohlforth and the Workers League. We have exposed the WL's shamefully opportunist and self-contradictory positions (most grotesquely, managing in one issue of the Bulletin to simultaneously hail the alleged turn of the corrupt black nationalist Newton wing of the Panthers to "dialectics" and [to support] the striking New York cops). We have exposed the WL's accompanying lies, dishonesty, duplicity and bombastic pretense, centered on the WL’s fake-popular "agitational" newspaper. We have exposed the WL's shameless disregard for the principle of workers democracy. The cynics who have made up the core of the WL either ignored or even agreed with these characterizations and shrugged them off with a "so what? that's how we're going to get ahead."
But the WL's attempt to adapt the usual practices of big-time bureaucratic and revisionist parties to the few hundreds in the WL has been a disaster, as indeed such a one-sided sellout must be. The WL is hopelessly cut off from recruiting militants from any part of the existing left, where everyone who cares knows the WL as a dirty word. The only source left for WL recruitment is raw, semi-political youth, whom the WL tries to turn from would-be socialists into corrupted WL cynics. But the real all-sided irrelevance and isolation of the WL from social or political struggles lead to enormous turnover, for the WL can deliver neither social struggle nor even any real payoff for corruption. So these often serious, if naive, youth just go away, embittered and anti-socialist. The internal life of the WL mirrors its publicly expressed fakery and scumminess. So except for the very narrow central clique, even the most cynical and degenerate WL cadres can only be the recipients of the same endless stupid abuse and lying which the WL tries to dump on the world at large. The political life of a WL member is indeed nasty, brutal and above all short. The WL's basic method of "short-cuts" in principle and endless demagogy is a losers' strategy.
Healy
The WL's creeping crisis of cadre loss appears to have reached Tim Wohlforth himself. The main story going around is that he has been deposed as central leader. For all we know he's still covertly the American boss, or perhaps the disappearance of his name in recent Bulletins reflects his expulsion. If the latter is the case this makes Wohlforth a three-time loser as central leader: in 1962 the Spartacist tendency took a majority in the then-common faction away from him; in 1964 his then-buddies, the Phillips state capitalist group, broke with him and took a majority with them; now three quarters of his cadre has walked out on him over the last 18 months, and Gerry Healy appears to have dumped him.
While Wohlforth has preened himself as a master theoretician, parading in his "The Struggle for Marxism in the U.S." as the first real American Marxist and proud author of the eccentric work "Theory of Structural Assimilation" (an embarassed WL disappeared that one several years ago), his main contribution has been to turn crucial aspects of Marxism – "theory," "method" and "dialectics" – into empty mystification in order to peddle political garbage.
The WL has always been a satellite of Gerry Healy's British group and is the product of steady pressure to conform to Healy's imaginings of what an American version of the British WRP ought to look like. Remember that the idiot opportunist WL line of a couple of years ago that "the road to the American working class is through the YSA" was admittedly dictated to the WL in Britain. The WL as it has become is, together with the interchangeable Australian and West German Healyite groups (the only other two visible Healyite groups outside Britain), the foreign face of the British Healy/Banda operation.
To blame Wohlforth and not Healy for the present sad state of the WL would be like blaming William Z. Foster and not Stalin for the crimes of the American CP, and in no case could an Earl Browder/Freddie Mazelis set things right.
Trotskyism
Unlike the Healyite shambles, the international Spartacist tendency and its American section, the Spartacist League, have leaped forward, making great gains because of its fidelity to the Trotskyist program and its energetic assault upon crisis-ridden revisionists in a dozen countries. The Spartacist is published in four languages, while the SL/U.S. produces a bi-weekly Workers Vanguard on the road to becoming a weekly, a monthly Young Spartacus and the journal Women and Revolution. In the United States a communist cadre is being forged in the labor movement, through hard-hitting trade-union fractions, and elsewhere.
It is the Spartacist League, not the Workers League, which has been able to win revolutionary elements from Maoism, labor reformism, the SWP and its international bloc partners, and the left social democracy. While the WL press makes wild claims to having brought down Nixon and then warns of resulting iminent fascism which only the WL can stop, the SL and Spartacus Youth League have undertaken real campaigns and struggles: in solidarity with the British miners' strike; around the agricultural workers; stopping the loading of ships to Chile; for the jailing of Nixon; for strikes against anti-labor legislation; for mass united front demonstrations to defeat the racist anti-busing forces. This is why the Spartacist League is undergoing all-sided growth – geographical, among workers and into new industries, among black and student youth
Don't wait for cynicism and burnout, the sure fate of those who stay overlong with the Workers League: like many other fake "revolutionary" organizations, the ranks are better than the counterfeit cause they try loyally to serve. Look to the Spartacist League for Marxist leadership!
To those who cling to the demonstrated bankruptcy of the Workers League's opportunism and deceit, we can only say along with Trotsky: "To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one's program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth International" (Transitional Program, 1938).
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