D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 1 (1995)

Workers Vanguard No. 626, 28 July 1995

Revelation on the Road to Tuzla

David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination

PART ONE OF TWO

The collapse of the former workers states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union unleashed an orgy of nationalist bloodletting. Today the imperialist media denounces Serbian war crimes in the fratricidal slaughterhouse that is now Bosnia. But “ethnic cleansing” is hardly a practice unique to the Serbs. Not only are grisly atrocities carried out by all sides in the Balkans, but no less bloody national wars have been waged between Armenians and Azeris for possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, by Georgia against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, and throughout the Caucasus. To assert its domination in the region, the Russian army launched a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya which has virtually obliterated the capital city of Grozny and devastated the countryside.

To read the bourgeois press one would get the idea that these gruesome nationalist slaughters are inspired by the revival of some ancient “tribal” feuds. In fact, it is the logic of capitalist counterrevolution that is the motor force behind the resurgence of nationalism from Central Europe to the Caucasus, as economically more advanced peoples seek to consolidate their own advantage at the expense of their less-developed neighbors. As we wrote in “`Ethnic Cleansing’ and Nationalist Wars” (WVNo. 580, 16 July 1993): “What is happening in Bosnia is a recurrent phenomenon in this epoch of capitalist decay.... Thus national consolidation under capitalism has been reduced to its stark component of communal savagery to drive out or eliminate minority nationalities.”

Yet it is to the capitalist imperialist rulers that a whole number of Vietnam-era “doves,” liberals and radical intelligentsia appeal for military intervention to bring “democracy” to the Balkans. Among this lot is one Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the American Workers League, the U.S. satellite of the now-departed Gerry Healy and his International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In his current role as saved sinner and “born again” anti-Leninist social democrat, Wohlforth called for U.S. imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the headline “Give War a Chance” (In These Times, 26 July 1993).

Wohlforth’s former master, Gerry Healy, was the consummate example of what Lenin called a “political bandit” able to wield Trotskyist orthodoxy when that suited his purpose and equally capable of being the bought-and-paid-for press agent for a variety of bourgeois-nationalist Mideast regimes (which he and his organization were for many years). Almost a decade ago, Healy’s organization blew apart, but the mark of this self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the ICFI can be found today in the heated exchange between Healy’s one-time lieutenants over their mutual responses to the Balkan quagmire. One side openly embraces Bosnian Muslim nationalism, while the other feigns orthodoxy in a supposed anti-nationalism which turns out to be de facto support for imperialism and national oppression.

For the past couple of years, Healy’s former “theoretician,” Cliff Slaughter, and his Workers Revolutionary Party have occupied the leading position in the campaign for “Workers Aid to Bosnia.” Running supplies to the bourgeois-nationalist Bosnian Muslim regime, with French and British imperialist troops in “UN” blue helmets riding shotgun, the WRP calls this an example of “working class internationalism”! To believe this line, one would have to include former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher — who is beating the drums for more aggressive aid to the Bosnian Muslim government — in the ranks of “proletarian internationalists.” In short, “Workers Aid to Bosnia” is nothing other than a direct echo of, and stalking horse for, those ruling-class forces who want to take a more belligerent military stance against Serbia.

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North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
_______________________________

Occupying the “orthodoxy” corner is David North, who replaced Wohlforth as leader of the Workers League and is now the head of the various national fragments who lay claim to the heritage of Healy’s ICFI. In response to Slaughter’s “Workers Aid” campaign, North’s group published a lengthy statement titled, “The Road to Tuzla — How Slaughter’s WRP Aids Imperialism in the Balkans” (May 1994).

Correctly arguing that communists must “fight intransigently against the nationalist poison spread by capitalism,” North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.

It is hardly a large leap for Slaughter and the WRP to go from singing the praises of Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Iranian Revolution” to becoming the blatant press agent for the Islamic regime of Sarajevo’s Alija Izetbegovic. But North’s Workers League was also up to its neck in backing the sheiks and colonels in the name of the so-called “Arab Revolution.” If today North’s ICFI chooses to wax “orthodox,” it is simply because that is what fits their perceived opportunist advantage.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, amidst the imperialist chorus hailing the “death of communism,” North’s organization began issuing strident statements writing off the unions as “direct agents of imperialism.” Any and every other tendency within the workers movement have been deemed to be thoroughly bourgeois organizations. To what end? The obvious conclusion is that one is to believe that David North is now the sole uncontested proletarian leader on the face of the planet. Now, posing as Marxist theoretician maxim, North writes off the right of nations to self-determination as completely retrograde.

Proletarian Internationalism and the Right to Self-Determination

There can be no democratic solution to the bloody nationalist conflict in Bosnia and other regions of ex-Yugoslavia short of a thorough-going socialist revolution. Bosnia is not a nation, and there is no Bosnian “people.” Rather, Bosnia-Hercegovina is composed of three heretofore intermingled and closely related peoples — Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims. Formerly a province in the Ottoman and then Habsburg empires, Bosnia — Hercegovina was set up as a constituent republic in Titoist Yugoslavia, intended to be a model of interethnic harmony. Now, within the framework of capitalist counterrevolution, the heavy geographic interpenetration of these various peoples means that the national rights of one can only he realized through savage persecution aimed at driving out the others.

While various social-democratic and pseudo-Trotskyist organizations back the Bosnian Muslims and some leftover Stalinists back the Serbs, as communists we oppose all sides in this national/ communalist slaughter. We also, naturally and necessarily, oppose all imperialist intervention in the Balkans. Concretely this means that our organization internationally has stood for the defense of the Serbs against repeated NATO air strikes, as well as demanding that all UN troops, including those of Yeltsin’s Russia, get out of the Balkans and calling for an end to the UN/NATO blockade of Serbia. The only perspective that offers a way out of this all-sided slaughter is for the working class throughout the former Yugoslavia to overthrow their bourgeois-nationalist leaders in an internationalist struggle for a socialist federation of the Balkans.

To realize such a perspective, to forge proletarian unity and bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class of the Balkans, requires a leadership which in Lenin’s words acts as a “tribune of the people,” fighting against every manifestation of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnic hatred. Only in this way can the various competing nationalisms be undercut and the common class interests of all of the working people be brought to the fore. It was in this respect that the Bolshevik Party championed the right to self-determination for the myriad nations and peoples imprisoned in the tsarist empire.

But such a leadership is not what the Northites have on offer, nor could they. While they write that the “strong internationalist traditions of the Yugoslav proletariat must be revived on the basis of a scientific analysis and revolutionary program,” in “The Road to Tuzla” they simultaneously write off the whole question of the defense of the right to self-determination as an anachronism, inapplicable in today’s “global economy”:

“In politics, terms which had a definite social and class content in one period often come to represent something quite different in the next. This is the case with the slogan of ‘self-determination.’...
“Those who advance the demand for self-determination through national separatism and bourgeois rule are responsible for the global consequences of such slogans. This ‘right’ will be championed by imperialist powers and backed by their military forces in other parts of the Balkans and throughout the world.”

Beyond Bosnia, the Northites argue against the right of self-determination for Kashmir, the Punjab and other nations locked into the “prison house of peoples” that is the Indian bourgeois state. Similarly, they come out against the national rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Quebecois in Canada.

The ICFI statement invokes the authority of the Marxist movement and Lenin. But in fact the Northites’ position is a purely chauvinist one which accepts the rule of the dominant nation in multinational states. Or as Lenin himself put it in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914): “Repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration...”

Far from having become some kind of anachronism, defense of the right of self-determination is, if anything, increasingly important. The escalation of interimperialist rivalries coming in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the drive by major powers to redivide the world into regional trade blocks and the increasing offshore production in low-wage “Third World” countries reinforces the need for communists to champion the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

North’s ICFI and Nationalist Reaction

The Northites try to find refuge in the statement that in “Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, nationalism arises today as part of a retrograde tendency seeking to restore both direct imperialist domination and capitalist property relations.” But nationalist reaction is not simply a product of counterrevolution. It was also a driving force for capitalist restoration in the former Stalinist-ruled workers states. In the latter case, North’s organization was among the bigger fans of nationalism.

For decades the imperialist rulers howled about the “oppression” of the so-called “captive nations,” seeing them as a battering ram for shattering the former Soviet bloc. And the Northites howled right along with them. In 1979-80, when the Soviet army intervened in Afghanistan, we of the Spartacist League said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” noting that this brought with it the possibility, albeit unfulfilled, of breaking the chains of Islamic feudal reaction and extending the gains of the October Revolution to that hideously backward country. The Northites, in contrast, squealed along with U.S. president Jimmy Carter that the Soviet intervention was an attack on “the national rights and feelings of the Afghan people” (Bulletin, 8 July 1986). But there was no Afghan “nation,” and the peoples whose “rights” were being attacked were a cabal of tribal chiefs and Islamic mujahedin funded by the CIA.

Together with the Vatican and the CIA, North’s Workers League made the counterrevolutionary cause of the Pilsudskiite nationalist Solidarność in Poland their own, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). In 1990, they echoed crazed anti-Communists like U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in denouncing then-president George Bush for refusing to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union for its clampdown on the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania.

An article headlined “Gorbachev Steps Up Stalinist Aggression Against Lithuania” (Bulletin, 30 March 1990) decried that the “Bush administration has pointedly refused to make any condemnation of the Soviet military actions in Lithuania.” As we wrote in our article, “Imperialists Demand the Baltics” (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991):

“As Leninists and internationalists, we stand for the democratic reorganization of the Soviet Union and for the right of any nationality with a leadership that opposes counterrevolution to withdraw to any extent it sees fit. But in Lithuania and the other Baltic republics the fig leaf of ‘national independence’ is being used as a cover for capitalist restoration. And this must be fought.... To prevent the disintegration of the USSR amid fratricidal nationalism, it is necessary to recapture the proletarian internationalism which animated the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky.”

Looking to establish their own independent capitalist states, the nationalist movements in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had their own program for “ethnic cleansing,” calling for the suppression of any and all rights of other peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Poles and others) within these states, if not openly advocating their forcible removal. But this didn’t much bother the Northites then.

Now they try to palm themselves off as the epitome of proletarian internationalism. Not only is this a monumental fraud, but the ICFI’s new-found opposition to nationalism is neither “orthodox” nor even vaguely leftist. Rather, once again, their position mirrors that of the imperialist rulers. Whereas yesterday they aided and abetted reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, today international capitalism is far from happy that the spoils they expected to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of bloody nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. While raising a hue and cry about “poor little Bosnia,” the imperialist rulers now generally decry the very nationalist forces they fomented, and the Northites join the chorus.

Was It All Gerry Healy’s Fault?

In his article, “Permanent Revolution . and the National Question Today” (The Fourth International, Winter-Spring 1994), David North declares that Healy’s WRP “systematically betrayed the principles of Trotskyism as it subordinated the proletariat to...bourgeois regimes such as those of Libya, Iran and Iraq.” From here he goes on to opine that only the “split within the International Committee made possible an intensive reexamination of the entire historical significance of the movements of ‘national liberation’ and their relation to the proletariat and the perspective of socialist revolution.”

North certainly has an elastic view of his own history — similar to his organization’s relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. His support to bourgeois — nationalist forces was far from abstract. In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an official Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.” That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” The ICFI, including North and his current cohorts, also enthused over “the anti-imperialist content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini” — i.e., the Iranian ayatollah’s “struggle” for an Islamic Republic (to the best of our knowledge this praise was gratis).

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left long before the 1985 implosion of his Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. As for the so-called “split” in the ICFI, it would better be described as a falling out among thieves. Healy was ousted, North rushed to claim his mantle as the ICFI “leader,” and Slaughter took the name of the WRP and ran. For years, North & Co. have sought to clear their name by claiming they had no idea Healy was being paid for the role as publicity agent for Hussein, Qaddafi and others. In other words, their defense is that they betrayed the very same Trotskyist principles — except that unlike Healy, they did it for free! But even this “defense” would appear to be rather threadbare, considering that, for one, North’s colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, got censured by the Central Committee of his own organization in February 1986 for failing to report the receipt of monies from Arab regimes to the IC (Socialist Labor League Internal Bulletin, February 1986).

To alibi their former support for a whole variety of reactionary nationalist causes and regimes, today North’s ICFI acts as if nationalism has only recently become a “retrograde tendency.” In the “Road to Tuzla,” they write of the “progressive, unifying characteristic of the national movements of the epoch in which Lenin put forward the slogan of self-determination of nations.” But in calling for military support to national movements fighting against imperialist-colonialist subjugation, Lenin never praised their supposed “progressive, unifying character.” On the contrary, in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), Lenin called for:

“...a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

The Bolsheviks championed the right of self-determination not to advance the cause of nationalism but to advance proletarian class unity. The fundamental propositions of a Marxist position on the national question in the imperialist epoch were underlined by Lenin in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”: “on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle.”

The right to self-determination is purely a bourgeois-democratic demand and as such is correspondingly a subordinate part of a revolutionary-internationalist program. This question was posed point-blank for the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. In the latter region, newly independent bourgeois regimes sought and found the direct military backing of the imperialists — first the Germans and then the British — posing a direct threat to the revolution. At the close of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks took power in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan through a combination of local uprisings and Red Army intervention. As Trotsky wrote two decades later, “Forceful sovietization was justified: the safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before formal democratic principles” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” [April 1940] in In Defense of Marxism).

The “Global Economy”

Other than claiming that their newfound “wisdom” on the national question is the fruit of having got rid of Healy, the ICFI claims a “new world reality” for its line change:

“Vast changes in world economic and political relations have created corresponding changes in the character of the national movements.... Can it be seriously argued that the resurgence of ethnic chauvinism in the Balkans, or for that matter in the former USSR or the Indian subcontinent, expresses an effort to put an end to the legacy of imperialist and feudal domination? Can one speak today of the national bourgeoisie of Bosnia, or Kazakhstan or Kashmir seeking to ‘capture the home market,’ thereby creating conditions for the ‘victory of commodity production’ and hence a fuller development of the class struggle?”

The idea of an “era of global economic integration” which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique “theoretical breakthroughs” has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!

Up until the mid-1880s, Marx and Engels judged national movements according to their ability to consolidate modern independent nation-states favorable to economic development. But with the development of imperialism the terms of reference changed. Marx and Engels began to address this over the question of Irish independence. As Marx wrote in a paper on the Irish question in 1869: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.”

Marx’s position on Ireland was further developed by Lenin in his writings on the national question. For Lenin the question of self-determination had nothing to do with the ability to develop a modern, economically independent capitalist nation. Indeed he polemicized at some length against Rosa Luxemburg, who declared that self-determination had become an “illusory” demand with the development of imperialism. In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin answered:

“Not only small states, but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of ‘rich’ bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states, but even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as Marx pointed out in Capital....
“For the question of the political self-determination of nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society, Rosa Luxemburg has substituted the question of their economic independence.”

Unlike the Northites, however, Rosa Luxemburg was animated by genuine proletarian internationalism. Although wrong, her visceral opposition to the right of self-determination was motivated by revulsion with the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in Poland (forces which some decades later the Northites would cheer on in the name of Solidarność counterrevolution).

Lenin recognized that imperialism was the epoch of capitalist decay, in which the development of a national economy and emergence of a vigorous bourgeoisie were stifled by imperialist exploitation and domination over the more backward capitalist countries. The understanding that the national bourgeoisies of these countries are incapable of carrying out the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as genuine national independence, is ABC Trotskyism — in fact it is a fundamental underpinning of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

Of course, very real changes have taken place in the world in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The relentless drive to destroy the Soviet workers state provided a point of unity for the various imperialist powers. With that removed, inter-imperialist rivalries have escalated. The global system of “free trade” the economic cement which held together the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet alliance — has crumbled as the major powers seek to redivide the world into regional trade blocs. But what is going on is not “new.” Rather, the post-Cold War world increasingly resembles the pre-1914 world of heightened interimperialist rivalries intersecting regional nationalist conflicts.

The so-called “globalization of production” — i.e., the export of capital — simply means that the capitalists have moved large chunks of industry to low-wage “Third World” countries. This, for example, has meant the attempted wholesale takeover of Mexico by U.S. imperialism under the conditions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Far from being a negation of the Leninist position on the national and colonial question, the current situation underlines the importance for communists of defending the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations against imperialist depredations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Trotskyism, What It Isn't and What It Is! Part 2 (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 2]

The Political Bandits

This brings us to the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA). The statement issued by the BSA’s Political Committee entitled “East Germany—Forward to the Political Revolution” certainly sounds very Trotskyist in many respects. They call to defend the planned state economy. Yet for over a decade, in any and every case this question was concretely posed vis-a-vis the defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution, the BSA and its sinister “International Committee” stood for every force that was hostile to the USSR.

They hailed the victory of Khomeini’s viciously anti-Communist “Islamic Revolution” in Iran. In Afghanistan, they stood on the side of imperialist-financed Islamic feudal reaction against the Soviet intervention. In Poland, they heralded Solidarność’ counterrevolutionary bid for power as the beginning of a “political revolution.”

The BSA calls on East German workers to unite with the working class in the capitalist West in the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe. A good demand. Yet during the 1984-85 British coal miners strike, the most militant class battle in the capitalist West in decades, the BSA’s then-leaders in Gerry Healy’s British Workers Revolutionary Party acted as the finger men for the most right-wing agents of British capitalism in the labor movement in trying to isolate and betray the miners strike — and they did it in defense of Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland.

The Healyites pilloried the miners’ leftist union leader Arthur Scargill because he had, quite correctly, remarked some months earlier that Solidarność was an “anti-socialist organization” seeking the overthrow of the Polish state. The Healyites’ attack on Scargill was featured in their press on the eve of the miners strike, precisely timed to create a huge furor in Margaret Thatcher’s union-hating press and among the Cold War British trade-union and Labour Party tops who used it in an attempt to cut off any solidarity with the miners strike.

Our organization in Britain sought in every way we could to aid the miners, fighting for workers to honor the picket lines, campaigning for joint strike action by other major unions, while internationally we successfully waged a campaign of financial aid, largely from labor unions, to support the miners strike and, when it was defeated, continued to aid those miners jailed by Thatcher.

There was nothing new in the Healyites’ appeasement of Cold War unionism. At the height of the Vietnam War, the American Healyites proposed a “labor party” whose platform made no mention of either the war or the fight against white racism (which is key to unlocking proletarian struggle in the U.S.). Today they charge us with being “obsessed with race” and even “black nationalists” because we insist that leading the working class as a whole to champion the rights of its most oppressed sections is an essential component of a real proletarian revolutionary program, in keeping with Lenin’s insistence that the workers vanguard must be a “‘tribune of the people.”

With mind-boggling hypocrisy and chutzpah, the BSA’s International Committee is now attacking Ernest Mandel as “an agent of capitalist restoration” in Poland for his support to Solidarność. Excoriating Mandel as “absolutely hostile to questions of political principle” they point to the Mandelites’ embrace of Jacek Kuron as a “Trotskyist” despite Kuron’s “refusal to defend the conquests of the October Revolution, conquests which, in a deformed character, were extended into Poland following World War II.”

Mandel has certainly abandoned most every principle of Marxism in desperate pursuit of whatever force is “in motion.” But who are the Healyites to talk? Like Mandel, they championed Solidarność in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” Like him they embraced Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”—a bloody power struggle between antagonistic cliques in the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy in which Mao’s control of the army proved decisive.

But the Healyites have gone further. When the Healyites discovered the “Arab Revolution,” they simply traded any shred of political principle for cold, hard cash, and plenty of it. For years, the International Committee operated as the press agents for a variety of oil-rich Middle Eastern colonels, sheiks and dictators. They were handsomely rewarded with millions in money from Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi, among others. SED members should beware the BSA’s call for resolute struggle against Stalinism. In 1979, the Healyite press hailed the Iraqi Ba’athist regime’s murder of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party, which historically had commanded the allegiance of key sections of the working class in that country. Railing against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism” they applauded the execution of these Communists by a vicious bourgeois regime.

Of course the BSA would like to say that this is all past history, simply the work of Gerry Healy, the self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the International Committee who was ousted from the organization in 1985. Without the trappings of state power, Gerry Healy occupied a position in the organization somewhat equivalent to that of J.V. Stalin in the Russian Communist Party. But like Stalin, Healy did not operate alone in running a regime that was characterized by thuggery and gangsterism internally and externally. He had his loyal henchmen and toadies, including the current leader of the International Committee, David North.

Not one of the leaders of the International Committee objected to the vicious betrayals that were carried out to get the money that came pouring in from Middle Eastern regimes. On the contrary, Healy was deposed by his former lieutenants only after the money was no longer coming in. Now the BSA pays its allegiance to David North — a man who not only made his way into the leadership of the organization as Healy’s loyal running dog but who continues to carry out Healy’s most despicable practices. A Healyite renegade who has always opposed every practical and military measure to defend the Soviet Union from imperialism, North recently committed the giant fraud of speaking as a Trotskyist at the Historical Archival Institute in Moscow.

The BSA claims to base “itself on the struggle of Leon Trotsky” and his fight to defend the Leninist program of proletarian internationalism against the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. The statement of their Political Committee correctly notes that it was this struggle that made Trotsky not only the main target of the Moscow Trials but which led to his murder by a GPU agent. However, for more than a decade the Healyites, and now the Northites, have peddled a version of the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of “his own.”

The Northites charge that Joseph Hansen, who was Trotsky’s personal secretary in Mexico and a leader of the American Socialist Workers Party until his death in 1979, was an accomplice of both the GPU and the FBI in Trotsky’s murder. This slander was used by North’s Workers League in the Alan Gelfand case to take the SWP before the federal courts of U.S. imperialism, demanding that the courts determine the membership of the SWP. Most recently the North group waged an international campaign in support of the capitalist state’s prosecution of an SWP cadre, who is now in prison on a 25-year sentence.

While North’s Workers League has never once concretely stood for the defense of the gains of the October Revolution they have spent thousands of dollars to cripple the Socialist Workers Party, an organization known for its ardent support to Castro’s Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the U.S. rulers have long aimed their fire at Castro’s Cuba to stop the spread of revolution in “their own backyard” and as a stepping stone in their drive to reconquer the Soviet Union for capitalist exploitation. Domestically, the American imperialists have waged a campaign of political repression and disruption of organizations known for their defense of the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions.

The SWP was the target of heavy infiltration, burglaries, wiretaps and harassment of its members by FBI agents. North’s outfit claims that this infiltration “proves” that the SWP is controlled and run by the U.S. government! On the contrary, what is questionable is the fact that the Workers League has never claimed that it has been penetrated by agents of U.S. imperialism as has been the experience of every other socialist or radical organization in the U.S. How could this be?

This is all the more suggestive given that the present top leadership of the Workers League includes people who studied in post-graduate Slavic studies departments at elite American universities where the CIA does its heaviest recruiting. Financed by Arab gold and perhaps from elsewhere, these Workers League leaders have done their level best to paralyze the pro-Fidelista Socialist Workers Party through an incessant and expensive campaign in the American courts. Did they learn all this in their elite graduate schools of anti-Communism? Only a paranoid believes that history is a plot but everybody knows there are plots in history. And about this outfit we can only warn: Beware!

The BSA calls to “Overthrow the Stalinist Bureaucracy! Build Workers’ Councils in East Germany!” On the surface of it, this would appear to echo Trotsky’s call for a proletarian political revolution. In fact, the BSA’s characterization of the Stalinist bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through” owes more to the social-democratic anti-Sovietism of Max Shachtman and equates simple membership in the Communist Party with being a part of the bureaucracy.

In the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote that “all shades of political thought are to be found among the bureaucracy: from genuine Bolshevism (Ignace Reiss) to complete fascism (F. Butenko).” Trotsky saw that the bureaucracy was not a new ruling class but a brittle and contradictory caste. He foresaw that under the impact of proletarian political revolution a section of the bureaucracy would come over to the side of those rebelling against Stalinist rule. This was witnessed during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In 1938 Trotsky observed:

“If tomorrow the bourgeois-fascist grouping, the ‘faction of Butenko,’ so to speak, should attempt the conquest of power, the ‘faction of Reiss’ inevitably would align itself on the opposite side of the barricades. Although it would find itself temporarily the ally of Stalin, it would nevertheless defend not the Bonapartist clique but the social base of the USSR, i.e., the property wrenched away from the capitalists and transformed into state property.”

In July 1937, Ignace Reiss, who had worked for the GPU, declared in a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR:

“No. I cannot stand it any longer. I take my freedom of action. I return to Lenin, to his doctrine, to his acts.
“I intend to devote my feeble forces to the cause of Lenin. I want to continue the fight, for only our victory—that of the proletarian revolution—will free humanity of capitalism and the U.S.S.R. of Stalinism.
“Forward to new struggles! For the Fourth International!”

In September 1937, Reiss was murdered by the Stalinists in Switzerland.
By the BSA’s maxim Reiss would have been dealt with as simply another “counterrevolutionary” Stalinist — like the 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party whose execution they hailed.

When it wants to this outfit can spout orthodox Leninism but they are, to borrow Lenin’s term, “political bandits,” i.e., political pirates who will show any flag to attack any target. When it has suited their own episodic interests the BSA’s International Committee has turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of striking unionists on the eve of a desperate class battle, and have generally crawled before alien class forces, above all any and every force hostile to the social gains that exist for the working people in the collectivized property forms from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe to Havana.

The Healyite/Northite tendency has always made a big deal out of its supposed “international” organization, which in practice meant that Healy and his British group called the tune and everyone else danced. At the same time, they are second to nobody, not even the ultra-legalistic American SWP, in their use of reactionary American legislation to justify a federated organization. To a man, the American fake-Trotskyists have hidden behind the “Voorhis Act,” a patently unconstitutional, unenforced U.S. law (passed nearly 50 years ago and never used against anyone) “prohibiting” international affiliation — a very convenient screen behind which centrists and reformists hide to preserve their freedom to carry out mutually incompatible opportunist ventures on each national terrain.

By contrast, our American section, the Spartacist League/U.S., has denounced this reactionary law — and has ignored it. While the revisionists embrace an excuse to disaffiliate from their overseas comrades, we take pride in the vibrant debates and common discipline of international democratic centralism, a necessary corrective to the pressures of one’s “own” imperialist ruling class.

Like the social democrats who claim to be “socialists” and the Stalinists who claim to be “communists,” the revisionists who pose as “Trotskyists” have left a trail of slime wherever they have gone. In their opportunism, they recall Oscar Wilde’s famous description of a fox hunt: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”

III. The Balance Sheet

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!

One-party rule is a synonym for Stalinism. Now the lid has come off and the working people of the DDR are demanding personal freedom, free speech, democracy. If these legitimate aspirations for democratic liberties are not to be wielded by imperialism and its social-democratic agents for capitalist restoration, they must be expressed in the creation of a regime based on workers councils which include the whole of the working people: soldiers, foreign laborers, technicians, farm workers, the mass of office workers, with advisory status for students, intellectuals and pensioners. Workers democracy means passionate political debate among the parties in workers councils over all the urgent political and economic problems and the alternative programs put forward for solving them. It means free and open discussion and, when the issues are serious, it means vituperative and if necessary factional struggle.

Anything less than the democracy of freely elected workers councils is fake — bureaucratically controlled elections or else “free elections” coerced and financed by conduits of imperialism acting upon an atomized mass.

The Stalinists always taunt that Trotskyism is insignificant in size and chronically faction-ridden. Yet the faction fights that have taken place since the inception of Trotsky’s Fourth International over 50 years ago have been struggles to preserve for the cause of the proletariat internationally the principles and revolutionary traditions that were brought to bear by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in leading the toiling masses of the former tsarist empire to victory.

We of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) have small forces; our achievements, if modest, have been vital and sometimes powerful.

We have fought to preserve and to the best of our capacities actively bring to bear in struggle the program of genuine Trotskyism. We are the tendency that has led the fight in America for militant mobilizations of labor and minorities which have successfully stopped fascists like the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi-lovers from staging provocations in major U.S. cities. Carrying forward Trotsky’s agitation for a united front of the powerful German workers movement to crush Hitler’s fascists before they had consolidated their power (as against Ernst Thalmann’s empty “Third Period” braggadocio: “nach Hitler wir” [after Hitler us]), we have fought to wield the power of the multiracial American labor movement in successful exemplary actions against the fascists who are a terrorist spearhead of capitalist reaction, union-busting and official racism.

We started as an oppositional tendency within the American Socialist Workers Party against that organization’s embrace of Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrillas as the modern-day equivalent of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. While defending the Cuban Revolution and celebrating this defeat of U.S. imperialism, we understood that in the absence of mobilizing the proletariat in its own class interests under a revolutionary leadership, the outcome could only parallel the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Deformed by the pressures of McCarthyism and the Cold War, the SWP in the early 1960s adapted to the same revisionism that led the Pabloists to proclaim that Stalinism could play a “roughly revolutionary role.” The founding cadre of our tendency were expelled from the then-centrist SWP in 1963-64. Shortly thereafter the SWP completely degenerated into reformism. Echoing the defeatist wing of American imperialism during the Vietnam War, the SWP campaigned around the “single-issue” social-patriotism of “Bring Our Boys Home,” building huge rallies where the only program presented was that of the Democratic Party politicians who saw the war as a “mistake” (because it was losing) by America’s otherwise “peace-loving” policymakers.

We fought for the military victory of the NLF against U.S. imperialism and called for working-class political strikes in the United States against the war. At the same time we recognized that the Vietnamese Stalinists, limited by the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” and corresponding futile attempts at “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist enemies, could not bring about the socialist liberation of the workers and peasants of that desperately impoverished and backward country. The achievement of that goal required a revolutionary proletarian internationalist leadership, one which was represented by the Vietnamese Trotskyists who led the 1945 Saigon uprising and who were murdered by the Vietnamese Stalinists.

The rapid degeneration of the once-revolutionary U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had fought to preserve Trotskyism against the anti-Soviet Shachtman opposition and initially against the revisionist current in Europe, reflected the party’s stagnation and isolation for more than a decade during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witchhunt. Nonetheless, we have always treasured the heritage which we gained from the American party. It was founded from leading cadre of the early Communist Party of the United States who fought against the Stalinist degeneration of that organization.

The principal leader of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, made at least four trips to Moscow as a delegate to the Communist International. From the Sixth CI Congress in 1928, Cannon brought back to America Trotsky’s renunciation of the course being pursued by the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and internationally, which is now published under the title The Third International After Lenin. Although our tendency has only existed for 25 years it embodies a continuity that goes straight back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Communist International.

In the early 1960s the comrades who went on to found our tendency internationally were attracted to Gerry Healy’s International Committee which at least on paper wrote very impressively in defense of authentic Trotskyism. In 1962 we got a taste of Healy’s organizational methods when, through the agency of his American toady Tim Wohlforth, Healy broke up the left-wing tendency in the Socialist Workers Party. On behalf of Healy and in pursuit of supreme local authority for himself, Wohlforth — claiming that we had a “split perspective” and that it was necessary at all costs to remain in the SWP which remained a “revolutionary party” (!) — split the opposition to the SWP’s right turn, cut it off from winning valuable comrades from a section of the old-time SWP membership and set up our tendency for expulsion from the SWP in a situation of weakness and isolation.

We refused to accept the 1962 rupture as definitive given that, despite their unprincipled organizational practices, Healy/Wohlforth still proclaimed to stand on a program of anti-revisionism. Yet the declaration by the Spartacist delegation at the 1966 London conference of Healy’s IC that “Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites” was considered one of our greatest crimes by Gerry Healy and his followers who declared themselves to be the Fourth International. According to Healy’s megalomaniacal posturings, the revisionism of Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Joseph Hansen had long since been destroyed within the working-class movement.

That generation of communist trade unionists, in good part revolutionary syndicalists, who had been won over by the victory of the October Revolution to Lenin and Trotsky’s Third International, not least by Lenin’s book “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, found in James P. Cannon and his faction, one of the three that led the Communist Party in the United States in the early 1920s, senior Communist functionaries who voiced their interests and feelings. In 1966 we were simply following Jim Cannon’s precept to say what is, an idea quite alien to maximum leaders and megalomaniacs.

Healy’s break with us and our demand for the reform of his group was followed within one year by a host of major political differences as Healy broke loose from such political anchors as he had had. These were exemplified in an already extant dropping of any political criticism of Vietnamese Stalinism in the just war against U.S. imperialism. Within a year the Healyites were enthusing over Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and had embraced the “Arab Revolution” as permanent, continuous and always requiring of support no matter what the particulars. The latter was to become the source of millions in pounds sterling from the grateful local masters and exploiters of this chronic “Arab Revolution.”

As for Tim Wohlforth, he was unceremoniously dumped by Healy in 1974. After years of serving as Healy’s fawning American accomplice, who emulated his mentor’s organizational practices of Stalinist-style gangsterism, suppression and slander, when Wohlforth was deposed as National Secretary of the Workers League he suddenly “discovered” that:

“Open discussion and political struggle was discouraged by Comrade Healy’s tendency to push every discussion to the most extreme point and to seek to break the person who disagreed with Comrade Healy. Only the most muted discussion ever took place in the international movement under such conditions.”

Truly the son of the “god that failed,” in the 1980s Wohlforth resurfaced in the pages of rad-lib journals as an academic-sounding neo-Kautskyan, nostalgic for the “good old days” of Shachtmanism. What Wohlforth doesn’t mention is his own history as the bullying lider maximo of a particularly nasty Healyite section.

From a handful of people in the United States we continued the fight to root out the revisionism which had destroyed Trotsky’s Fourth International. Our tendency extended itself internationally through political struggle to win cadre and militants away from organizations which laid claim to being Trotskyist while they betrayed every fundamental principle on which the Fourth International had been founded. In the 1960s this was largely fought over the question of permanent revolution vs. guerrillaism and pro-Stalinist enthusiasm. In the 1970s, the major question was the defense of the class independence of the proletariat against suicidal popular-front alliances with the class enemy, particularly as exemplified in Allende’s Chile.

With the onset of “Cold War II,” the question that was concretely posed was the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. We forthrightly championed the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan declaring: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan —Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples!” The PDPA government which came to power in 1978 in Afghanistan was based overwhelmingly on students, schoolteachers and Soviet-trained officers who, having some direct comparative experience of how truly backward their country was, sought far-reaching modernization. As soon as the PDPA regime attempted to implement its reforms—particularly education for girls and the lowering of the bride price — in the countryside, it was confronted by a reactionary insurgency organized by landlords, tribal chieftains and mullahs.

It was only the intervention of the Red Army which objectively provided an external social base for a thoroughgoing social transformation of the pre-feudal class structure existing in the country. This was not the proletarian internationalist Red Army led by Trotsky. Nonetheless we heralded the intervention of Soviet troops in Afghanistan as not only a defense of the USSR against imperialist encirclement but as a military force whose battle against CIA-financed Islamic reaction necessarily generated the possibility of bringing the social progress embodied in the remaining gains of the Russian Revolution to Afghanistan.

After the Soviet troops had been withdrawn we offered to organize international brigades to light in defense of social progress against the bloodthirsty mujahedin in Afghanistan. We anticipated drawing into this internationalist effort not merely volunteers from our own forces but from the ranks of militant fighters in many parts of the globe who would recognize in the defense of heroic Jalalabad an opportunity to strike a powerful blow against the imperialist system by which they are themselves oppressed and dispossessed. We also calculated that the formation of an international brigade could have a powerful effect within the Soviet Union among veterans of the Afghanistan intervention, many of whom — both officers and enlisted men — see themselves as having performed an internationalist duty in Afghanistan which was shamefully left unfinished when the Soviet troops were withdrawn in the name of international “détente.” Thus in offering to “fight to the death” against the agents of imperialism and reaction in Afghanistan, we were at the same time seeking to push forward the program of Leninist internationalism and proletarian political revolution within the Soviet Union itself. When the government of Afghanistan turned aside our offer of a brigade as militarily unnecessary, at their request we undertook a publicity and fund-raising campaign for the embattled civilians of Jalalabad as a vehicle to bring the Afghanistan civil war to the attention of the working people of many countries. This work was an impetus toward our changing our name from “international Spartacist tendency” to International Communist League, in recognition that over the Afghanistan issue and in response to developments in the USSR and Eastern Europe, there would be found many subjective communists who want to be in a communist organization worthy of the name. The Jalalabad campaign was also central to extending the Partisan Defense Committee (a legal and social defense organization inspired by the early work of the International Red Aid and its American section, the International Labor Defense) into Western Europe and Australia.

In 1981 we recognized that the leadership of Solidarność were traitors to the working class on behalf of NATO imperialism. The rest of those who are now trying to present themselves as “Trotskyists” in East Germany cheered Solidarność. They saw a chance to earn their stars and stripes as a left cover for the social democrats and the pro-capitalist “labor statesmen” who long ago enlisted as junior partners in imperialism’s war drive against the Soviet Union.

Cold War II also produced defectors and renegades from our organization.

Today they call themselves the Bolshevik Tendency and the Gruppe Vierte Internationale. Based in North America, the BT are parasites who often will put forward a parody of our positions (an imitation which is similarly attempted by the British Workers Power organization) while staging repeated provocations against our organization. As for the BT’s own political positions, besides hatred of the Soviet Union, these highly dubious provocateurs appear to dislike American blacks, are solicitous of Zionism and praise the indiscriminant mass killings of Americans. Of the state agencies in the world only the Mossad, the Israeli secret police, has similar appetites. Although they claim to be a separate organization the West German GIVIs have operated as the knowing cohorts of the BT, keeping whatever political differences they have an internal secret.

Now, when the Polish working class faces unemployment, austerity and immiseration under the Solidarność-led government, the false pretenders to Trotskyism are all trying to cover, downplay or otherwise evade their years of slavish support to this agency for the CIA, Western bankers and the Vatican. Now suddenly they “discover” the millions of American dollars funneled into Solidarność’ coffers and even publish “exposés” of the role of Irving Brown of the “AFL-CIA,” a professional buster of left-led unions beginning in postwar Western Europe more than 40 years ago, whose invitation to Solidarność’ 1981 congress they somehow all neglected to mention at the time. By their genuflections in the direction of “Trotskyism” today, these opportunists pay involuntary tribute to the power and persistence of authentic Trotskyism which has told the working people the truth all along.

The call for “communist unity against imperialism through political revolution” was first raised by our tendency at the time of the Sino-Soviet split. Unlike the Stalinists who seek through appeasement to persuade imperialism to join in “détente,” we understand that the capitalist rulers have never reconciled themselves to the loss of the deformed workers states from the realm of direct imperialist exploitation. From the invasion of Russia by 14 foreign armies during the Civil War to the dropping of atom bombs on an already defeated enemy in a racist war crime largely aimed at intimidating the USSR for the forthcoming division of the spoils between the victors of World War II, the imperialists by their actions themselves expose the futility of “peaceful coexistence” illusions. A great gift to imperialism is Stalinist nationalism, as each regime seeks to mitigate capitalist hostility to itself by offering to sacrifice other people’s revolutions. Refusing to be taken in by the more militant rhetoric occasionally found expedient by the Stalinist betrayers, as early as 1969 we predicted China’s rapprochement with the U.S. which has led to Mao and his successors’ despicable service as imperialist cat’s paw from the Vietnamese border to southern Africa.

Today the call for communist unity against imperialism through political revolution has acquired even greater urgency as the question of “which class shall rule” is posed in Eastern Europe. The tyranny of the capitalist world market will never be abolished until it is supplanted by a world planned economy. But in the meantime, through the shattering of the Stalinist bureaucracies, who now strive for national economic self-sufficiency, a unified and more rational planned economy can be created from East Berlin to Hanoi.

This must result in a vast improvement in the quality and quantity of consumer goods through a multinational division of labor, producing a great strengthening in the overall efficiency and modernization of the whole economies of these workers states.

There is a historic link between the German, Polish and Russian working classes particularly as embodied in Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew and German Communist leader. The worshippers of Pilsudski’s fascistic dictatorship who head Solidarność despise what Luxemburg was and everything she stood for. The Stalinists malign her. The Social Democracy, which was responsible for her murder, now seeks to portray her as a “democratic” alternative to Bolshevism. But proletarian internationalists hail Luxemburg just as she hailed the Russian Revolution at the founding conference of the German Communist Party in 1918. Now is the time to reverse the defeats of the German Revolution, which led to the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, through proletarian political revolution from East Germany and Warsaw to Moscow and Beijing.

The world’s ruling classes, above all the American imperialists, are celebrating the “death of Communism.” They hope to extend their system of raw exploitation, poverty and racism to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a task for which the social democrats have eagerly enlisted.

Should they succeed it would mean bloody counterrevolution within the deformed workers states (counterrevolution is no more a “peaceful,” “evolutionary” process than revolution) and the intensification of interimperialist rivalries in the fight to divide the spoils, heightening the prospect of thermonuclear World War III.

What we are seeing is not the “death of Communism” but the unraveling of the Stalinist bureaucracies. The choices are starkly — either workers Soviets to replace the corrupt, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies or a string of imperialist victories and the terrible immiseration of the masses in the workers states and elsewhere. This cannot be separated from the need for revolutionary struggle against the rule of capital by the working people in the imperialist West.

Marxists believe that revolutionary leadership is decisive — the intervention of the conscious factor into history at crucial moments. Capitalism is a stinking corpse, but those whose misleadership of the workers has granted the imperialist system a multitude of new leases on life still “prove” that that system can’t be overthrown because...it has not been overthrown. Humanity has in effect paid thrice for the failure of a party like Lenin’s Bolsheviks to emerge in Germany during the revolutionary wave following World War I. First, the failure of the German Revolution and the consequent isolation and Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Second, Hitler’s rise leading to the holocaust of world war—the German ruling class handed the country over to the Nazis because it was terrified of the spectre of workers power, but the German workers movement lacked the resolute revolutionary leadership to smash capitalist rule instead of merely scaring the rulers. Finally, the Stalinists’ commitment to allying with “democratic” imperialism allowed Western European capitalism to restabilize its class rule throughout West Europe after World War II, opening the way to the Cold War.

Now once again the German proletariat stands at a crossroads of history. If the workers of the DDR take power into their own hands, they will not only electrify the working class of West Germany and the advanced capitalist countries, they will as well send a powerful internationalist message to the workers and soldiers in the USSR and in every other country where capitalism has been overthrown but where Stalinist conservatism and nationalism has created new blocks to the extension of the revolution.

Since the invention of the “theory” of “socialism in one country,” Stalinism has been the antithesis of Leninist internationalism. Today in East Germany nationalism openly serves the appetites of the Frankfurt bankers for capitalist reunification of Germany. Return to the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin! Concretely today, the revolutionary workers of the DDR must extend the hand of fraternity to the Soviet soldiers who perform a lonely duty to world peace as the military bulwark against rapacious NATO imperialism, and to the Vietnamese immigrant workers who have daily endured official and unofficial racist mistreatment in a DDR ruled by an arrogant Stalinist regime.

On the eve of World War II, Trotsky observed with increasing urgency that the objective preconditions for world proletarian revolution were overripe, but what was lacking to uproot decadent capitalism on the world scale and establish a socialist world order was an authentic revolutionary leadership. Trotsky’s insistence on the need for “a party, a party and once again a party,” has only become more desperately urgent.

The International Communist League offers itself in the struggle to return to the authentic Communist tradition of the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky’s time. We are compelled to believe that our fidelity to the work of Lenin and its continuation by Trotsky necessarily means that the ICL and its German section, the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, formerly the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands, represents the highest expression of scientific socialism, the hope of humanity.

But, we too remain subject to the great pressures of the class struggle, pressures which demand new answers. Among our ranks we strongly need those who share a revolutionary perspective in order that Marxist answers addressing the interests of the working people will continue to emerge from the SpAD and our tendency internationally—expressed by a majority, or if necessary, a minority.

So long as the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat from the tyranny of the imperialist bourgeoisie continues to develop and be fought for, there will necessarily be fights to preserve and extend the program of revolutionary internationalism that inspired Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks against alien class pressures. Workers councils committed to the historic interests of the proletariat, above all internationally, must be the decisive arbiters in such disputes. Meanwhile all the impostors and fakers, who drag the banner of Leninism through all the old crap, must be fought.

We hope that we will be joined through a common political program with many individuals, loose formations and at least sections of parties in pursuit of our common goal.

• For proletarian political revolution, the rule of workers soviets, to replace the corrupt parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies who endanger the socialist foundations of the workers states! Defend the Soviet Union against imperialism and internal counterrevolution!

• No to the capitalist reunification of Germany! For soviet power in the DDR! For socialist revolution in West Germany! For a red soviet Germany in a Socialist United States of Europe!

• For a Leninist-egalitarian party, regrouping all revolutionary internationalist forces in a German section of a reborn Fourth International!

• For world socialist revolution! Return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky!


This article is dedicated to:

Marcel Hic, French Trotskyist leader who was the driving force in organizing the Trotskyist European Secretariat in Nazi-occupied Europe. Arrested in 1943, deported to Buchenwald, murdered by the Nazis at the Dora concentration camp;

Piet van’t Hart, leader of the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists who fought with great heroism in illegality in Holland under Nazi occupation;

Pietro Tresso (Blasco), member of the Political Bureau of the Italian Communist Party, expelled by Togliatti, organizer of the International Left Opposition and member of its International Secretariat in the 1930s. Died mysteriously while being “helped” to escape from a Nazi prison by Stalinist partisans;

Abram Leon, secretary of the Belgian Trotskyist section, leading Marxist theoretician on the Jewish question, arrested and killed by Nazis in Auschwitz in 1944;

Walter Held (Heinz Epe), member of the KPD expelled as a “Trotskyist” in 1932, leader of the German section of the Left Opposition, “disappeared” after being arrested while trying to cross the Soviet Union by train in 1941;

Martin Monat (Widelin), member of the European Secretariat, editor of Arbeiter und Soldat, assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944;

Oskar Hippe, participant in the 1918 Spartacus uprising, founding member of the KPD and the German Left Opposition, jailed by the Nazis from 1934-36, arrested in the DDR in 1948 for organizing a Trotskyist group and imprisoned for eight years;

and to the thousands of other revolutionaries who died directly at Stalin’s hands in the Soviet Union; the hundreds of other militants from many lands, including the valiant comrades of South and East Asia, who fought and mostly died in the hands of that terrible excrescence of capitalism — Nazism. No one will ever know how their destruction facilitated “order” toward the end of World War II.

— The International Secretariat of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

What Happened to Peter Fryer (1986)

Spartacist No. 38-39 (Summer 1986)

Letters

What Happened to Peter Fryer

London, December 17, 1985

Editorial Board
Spartacist
New York, NY

Dear Comrades,
I have just read with great interest the account in your Winter 1985-86 issue of what you aptly term the implosion of Healyism. You include on page 27 some friendly, and, I fear, unduly flattering references to me. I hope you have space for a few corrections and amplifications.

“Healy and Fryer had some kind of falling-out.” In fact, after two and a half years' close daily work with Healy. I had reached the conclusion that he was a gangster and that I could no longer continue to associate with him. So I quite the Socialist Labour League giving my reasons in an open letter to the members which was issued in the autumn of 1959.

No doubt it would have been better to stay in nd fight. But I had been exhausted by the bitter struggle in the Communist Party - my expulsion and unsuccessful appeal - and the gruelling work of building The Newsletter and the SLL. I simply didn't have the stomach, or the energy, or the appetite for a further bitter fight against a further set of of cynical and unscrupulous opponents. And I frankly admit, I was more than a little afraid of Healy, whose favourite method with dissenters was, in those days, a knock on the door by him and his thugs at two o'clock in the morning.

But I didn't go to Portugal to run away from Healy. Nor was I accompanied by my wife and my mother. I went with my then companion, Patricia McGowan Pinheiro, and our purpose was to write a book together. That book, Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar's Portugal, was published in 1961.

I have never written a book with the title The Anthropology of Sex Through the Ages, or anything remotely resembling it. My books “on sex” were the following: Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (1963), a social history of contraception; and Private Case - Public Scandal (1966), an attack on the censorship at that time practised in the British Museum Library.

James Robertson asks: “What happened to Peter Fryer?” I'll tell him. My most recent book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, was published by Pluto Press in 1984. I am still working in the field of black history, and I have two projects in hand: a history of black people in the British Empire; and an anthology (which I am compling in collaboration with Rozina Visram) of black writing in Britain since the eighteenth century.

In general, I think your account of the events of 1956-59 grossly overestimates my personal role and contribution. But, leaving that aside, the portrait of Healy that emerges is instantly recognizable to all honest people who have ever had dealings with him.

Yours fraternally,

Peter Fryer

Spartacist replies: We thank comrade Fryer for his information and comments regarding Spartacist No. 36-37, “Healyism Implodes."“ ”

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, 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.”
…

Interview on the 1966 Split (1985)

English Language Spartacist, No. 36-37 (Winter 1985-86)
[Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007: http://www.marx.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/1966interview.html]

On the 1966 Split

Interview with London Conference Participants

On November 16-17 [1985], Spartacist interviewed four leading members of the Spartacist League/U.S. in the aftermath of the spectacular implosion of the Healy/Banda WRP in England. The subject matter covered in the interview is wide-ranging, but it centered on the expulsion of Spartacist from Healy’s and French leader Pierre Lambert’s April 1966 London Conference of the International Committee (IC). Three of the comrades interviewed — Jim Robertson, Joseph Seymour and Liz Gordon — were participants in the London Conference as members of the Spartacist delegation. (The fourth Spartacist delegate, Rose Jersawitz, was passing through London on her way to study politics with the Voix Ouvrière group in France. Upon returning to the U.S. she launched a faction fight in the SL urging emulation of VO, and then quit to do so, founding the Spark group based in Detroit.) The other comrade interviewed, Al Nelson, was the party leader in command back in New York when Healy broke with us at the London Conference.

As necessary historical background to the material presented in the interview, a narrative account of our tendency’s history and experiences with Healy is provided in “Spartacists and Healyism.”

Conducting the interview on behalf of Spartacist was a panel of five comrades. Mark Kellerman (joined 1965) is a former member of the Central Control Commission, a member of the SL Central Committee and a staff writer for Workers Vanguard. Reuben Samuels (joined 1968) is a member of the Workers Vanguard editorial board and the SL Central Committee. Joel Salant (joined 1968) once edited Spartacist East and is currently a member of the SL Central Control Commission. Bonnie Brodie (joined 1974) is the editor of Young Spartacus. Helene Brosius (joined 1964) is secretary of the International Secretariat and managing editor of the English-language edition of Spartacist.

SPARTACIST: Since the definitive rupture between ourselves and Healy took place nearly two decades ago, we might begin by indicating where the idea came from to interview the participants in that history.

Robertson: The Healy/Banda organization has blown apart, and a lot of dazed people are asking “where did we go wrong?” And the 1966 IC Conference and our expulsion keeps coming up over and over again. Now Wohlforth says, oh of course Ernie Tate was maliciously beaten. Banda says to his miner supporters, yes, maybe it was a mistake to get rid of the Spartacists in ’66. And it seems that François Demassot had told a lot of people that I was beaten up in London, which isn’t even true.

And now we are told, by people who were in a position to know, that Healy was wild, drunken and really violent in the summer of 1966, after his expectations were thwarted at the ’66 Conference in April.

The article that we wrote last summer also figures strongly. That article was on what the Healyites did to the mine union leadership, playing running dogs for the Labourite right wing and the Tories. Because we heard from miners: “You better watch out for the WRP, Banda is absolutely out of his mind over what you people have written and he has sworn to get you.” So we may have helped to crystallize a split in the WRP that was evidently one or two years in the making, and having nothing to do with Healy’s alleged sadistic sexual proclivities.

You know, Shachtman once got very, very mad at Cannon who observed that we Trotskyists are the only moral people. And he thought that was a little too angular a formulation, leaving Shachtman in a brothel somewhere. Well, what Cannon meant was that without a correct program you cannot be very moral in the course of wars, revolutions, repression, betrayals, lawsuits. Without a correct program that crystallizes, in writing and in your work, the historic aims of the proletariat, you simply cannot be moral. Even if you are the Reverend A.J. Muste, who wouldn’t kill a fly. To the extent that we have something to crow about here, we have to locate it in our programmatic outlook.

It turns out that we have a profound difference with the WRP, over politics. Their nominal defense of the Soviet Union is at such a level of abstraction that any concrete expression for several decades has been against the Soviet Union, on most anything you can name. Including, interestingly, going way back, support for the Cultural Revolution, which was virulently anti-Soviet. And they applauded the execution of Communists in Iraq. Then they had to dump the Ba’athist connection in Iraq in order to back the Ayatollah, because Iran and Iraq were at war. And may I point out that to back the Ayatollah is also to be anti-Russian. And they back Solidarność, which wants a bloody counter-revolution to make Poland safe for NATO. Iran, Poland, China. Afghanistan — back all the enemies of the Soviet Union on the perimeter of the Soviet Union. And this is called “defense of the Soviet Union”!

So we have some stuff to say now, because we were the principled people the whole way. And I would suggest that the main reason is not some morality associated with Americans versus English persons, but that over a long period of time, through many fights, through one tendency after another, we stood concretely for the defense of the Soviet Union, against imperialism, and against the damn Russian bureaucracy. That has in fact been our political compass, and it also generates a certain cultural superstructure and a certain morality.

Our political culture is associated with an actual Leninist program that seeks to live, instead of a series of sideshows and circuses.

In light of the things that the two WRPs are daily revealing about their stinking common heritage and recent practice, one is tempted to say “thank god we’re not Healyites.” But this is not an accident. Our practice and tradition come out of the international communist movement, and we have the examples before us of the Cannonites and Shachtmanites. Whose leaders weren’t “maximum leaders”: they sometimes had fights in their central committees. And they lived modestly and they did not claim to have total knowledge — of “security,” dialectics and everything else in the world. Unlike Gerry Healy. J.V. Stalin, Elijah Muhammad, the Reverend Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, Lynn Marcus and L. Ron Hubbard.

SPARTACIST: Do you consider the Shachtmanites part of our Trotskyist heritage?

Robertson: There was a lot wrong with the Shachtmanite organization: it was deeply programmatically weak, disoriented and subject to demoralization, which did in fact, in a difficult time, destroy it. But as far as internal administration and party democracy went, it was very good. You could get up in conferences and say rude things about Shachtman, have debates. A pretty lively National Committee, as many internal bulletins as people were capable of writing. And I learned a lot.

The SWP I thought was basically a sound organization but I saw certain practices that seemed kind of bureaucratic. In particular, every week members of the National Committee got a big packet of information from the center, which was confidential unless you happened to be personally close with an NC member. If it was a real issue, it would hit the internal bulletin within a year or so. But there was a kind of vicarious insiderism that I thought was offensive and manipulative.

But by and large the organization seemed to run OK. I mean, you knew what your rights were. And if you stepped over the line, you knew you could get thrown out. But at least you sort of knew what the line was.

My first fight with Wohlforth was on that subject. We had our first faction meeting, and I mentioned in the course of it, “Well, comrades, this is a pretty serious business.” This was right around the time of the 1961 plenum where we had it out on Cuba — I think it was immediately following it. Hansen sort of booby-trapped us into turning up as an opposition. The intention was to smash this youth leadership and bring them to heel on Castro. Well, we didn’t smash. We came out fairly hard and we called a faction meeting a few days later. We had quite a few people there. And I said, “Well, the way things are going, looking at the party and looking at the situation, I give us about 18 months here.” And Wohlforth yelled at me and screamed and yelled and screamed.

After the meeting, I hung around a little bit — it was in his apartment — and I went up to him and said, “Well, Tim, why did you argue with me about that? You know the nature of the organization we’re in, we’re on a pretty hard collision course. I think we’ll be pretty lucky if we last 18 months, given the logic of the situation.” He said, “I know.” I said, “So why did you fight me about it?” He said, “Well, there are people like Freddy Mazelis who are very nervous, and I didn’t want to scare him.”

We lasted about 18 months.

But insofar as I encountered the Healy organization, there was nothing top to bottom that I found appetizing, in accordance with my understanding of a communist organization. And the Healyites did indeed march to a different drummer. We were put off track by their literary side for several years because of Healy’s success in winning over significant sections of the trade-union and educational apparatus of the British CP to an ostensibly Trotskyist position. They wrote very powerfully. And it took a little while for Gerry to work through that and use it up, and to create some kind of nasty, shabby, deepening and evolving cult.

SPARTACIST: When did you develop the slogan, “However Healy does it, do the opposite”?

Robertson: It was from watching the Wohlforth operation here, grinding the members to pieces. I’ll give you a nice example. We just spent about 18 months preparing and running an election campaign in New York. We got a good party organizer in, a campaign manager and two candidates. And we ran hard for many months, the best campaign we could, pound, pound, pound.

OK, in a Healyite organization, the day after the election, you walk in and you say, “Well, comrades, the crisis intensifies and you’ve been semi-traitors for the way you’ve dogged it. Now you’ve really got to go to work.” That’s an absolutely normal Healyite technique. Instead of, “Well, comrades, take some vacations now. Go and skin dive, or go to Portugal, or do something. Pay as much of your own way as you can, and perhaps the party treasury can assist you. We have worked you relentlessly, now take a break.” That’s a very good example of an anti-Healyite technique. And so maybe we’ll have some of the same candidates around in a few years.

In a Healyite organization it would be: “Turn over your vacation money and work twice as hard.”

What does this reflect? If you’re going to try to build a revolutionary workers party, you’ve got to have cadres. If you’re running a perpetual sideshow, you don’t want cadres. You need a few supervisors or foremen, and you just run through the human material and milk it. These administrative techniques reflect qualitative differences in purpose.

SPARTACIST: How did the Revolutionary Tendency first get involved with Healy?

Robertson: It all began really in 1961 with the document called “World Prospect for Socialism.” At that time there was the old International Committee, which was the SWP and a little group in England and a little group in France and a little group in Switzerland and maybe a few corresponding sympathizers here and there — the Cannon wing fallout from the 1953 split, which was pretty moribund.

And then the Healyites broke away from their deep entrism in the Labour Party, in the course of winning over several hundred very able people out of the CP, from the education and industrial departments, mainly in the wake of the Khrushchev revelations and the Hungarian Revolution. And they wrote this document, which was very fine. And there was Healy’s magazine Labour Review, in which was appearing some of the finest Trotskyist analytical and political material written since the ’40s fight, particularly material by Cliff Slaughter but not restricted to him. Peter Fryer’s material on dialectics. The American magazine Fourth International of the SWP was fairly dull and pedestrian.

The youth leadership of the founding YSA was kind of restless with the SWP. For a while Tim [Wohlforth] got into secret correspondence with Patrick O’Daniel (Sherry Mangan), who was the editor of Pablo’s English-language magazine, the Fourth International. I was a little nervous about this correspondence.

And then one day Tim was on tour and a letter came, and a majorityite comrade, Al Taplin, opened the letter instead. It was forwarded immediately to Jim Cannon in L.A., who invited Tim over to his house. And Cannon pulled out the party constitution and read him the relevant passage, and then handed Tim the letter. I ran into Tim in San Francisco a few days later. He was still shaking.

We were smuggling in half a dozen copies of the Pabloite FI and handing them around surreptitiously. Because Pablo was putting an orthodox front on things, and we were kind of nervous, because we were wondering what the devil we were doing in a very small, largely Anglo-Saxon wing of the world movement. We hadn’t worked anything out—we were poking around, as youth will.

When I first came into the SWP I noticed that if I asked any of the younger comrades. “What party are you a member of?” they would answer, “The SWP.” So I said to them: “Read this book.” And they would come back after having read the book and I would ask, “What party are you a member of?” and they would answer, “The Fourth International.” The book was The Case of Comrade Tulayev, by Victor Serge. Thus, in a rather unintentional way, I was building a proto-faction.

So we were disgruntled in a non-focused way with the SWP, it was very much of a national party. We were casting around looking at various socialist currents and tendencies in the world. It would be useful to explain what caused us to shift from looking at the Pabloites sympathetically to looking at the Healy group sympathetically.

The Pabloites put out their English-language Fourth International which looked attractive and sufficiently orthodox. We studied the resolutions from their Fourth and Fifth Congresses which looked very straightforward.

Then there was a huge scandal. A Healyite fraction got expelled from a local constituency Labour Party organization and it was alleged that supporters of Pablo had blocked with the right wing to get rid of them. The SWP publicized this as a classic atrocity which was supposed to show how rotten the Pabloites were as opposed to their good friend Gerry Healy. But Wohlforth and I thought: what happened one night in some town several thousand miles away is not susceptible to our critical examination.

Then, when the Marcyites split from the SWP in 1958. Pablo gave them some coverage in his press. But he made a careful political separation between himself and them. We thought that was fair, even though we knew that the Marcyites were no good. One always wants to exploit the misfortunes of one’s opponents, and the SWP was an opponent of Pablo.

However, something took place which we could evaluate from a distance. Around 1959 or so, a group with some prominent people, including Alasdair Maclntyre, broke away from Healy. We got their documents—probably published by Pablo—and saw that they mainly complained about various organizational abuses and had drawn classically Menshevik conclusions on the party question. So we said, these guys are no good. But Pablo, in his introduction, supported them without reservation. So we thought, forget Pablo. We also drew another, objectively quite stupid conclusion. Healy’s defense of the correct Leninist position on democratic centralism caused us to tilt toward Healy and we started looking upon Healy much more favorably. But the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

And then “World Prospect for Socialism” came out in 1961. We were getting more than restless over the Cuban question. And here was this really good, hard line “for the revolutionary workers party!” Since it wasn’t against the law in the SWP, we got scores of copies and started handing them around. We thought, well, program is decisive, and this is the clearest and most pristine expression of the program of international Trotskyism that we’ve seen in a long time.

Then we got into this fight on the Cuban question, and got plunged into being the minority faction in the SWP.

And we were still trying to run the youth group, which I knew was going to be for a very short time. Wohlforth didn’t seem to want to understand that, either.

And I couldn’t stand the alternations that Wohlforth was doing. Every week he’d go down to 116 University Place and he’d be jerked around by Farrell Dobbs, and either we’d be in a hard oppositional stance or we were going to be conciliatory. And I said, we’re through in the youth org. I think we ought to pay attention to what we can do. We’ve got some pretty good young cadres, there’s a few branches that can be taken, because in those days branches were like independent castles with barons. They didn’t use membership transfers—there weren’t enough people to move around and they were all too old.

But I thought if we could get Philadelphia and New Haven and a branch on the coast, transform ourselves from the youth majority into a tendency in the party as a whole with a majority in a couple of branches, that we’d get more longevity, to run a fight. Also we’d get more political prestige, because the youth didn’t count for much. The old Cannonites vividly remembered what happened to the last youth organization: the YPSL-Fourth left with Max Shachtman.

Well, Wohlforth wanted to play around, and then just got mulish. At the same time, Mage had gone on a walking tour through Algeria in the middle of the war against the French and he came back pretty much a Lambertist. He was keeping it very quiet — I had to go visit his house, and I reached into his file of magazines, and there was a whole bunch of La Vérités. And Tim had done the same thing he pulled with Pablo — this time behind my back — and that is he had gotten into secret communication with Gerry Healy.

So we reproduced in our own little minority tendency the IC: we had a Cannonite, we had a Healyite and then we had a Lambertist! Earlier Wohlforth had made another departure; he had decided to support Swabeck on Mao’s Great Leap Forward of ’59-’60. Well, he got badly burned on that, because Larry Trainer and Jim Cannon got up and disavowed Swabeck—Shane and Murry Weiss being the principal polemicists that shredded Swabeck. And I remember in a break one of the younger leaders, Bert Deck, asking me, “How come you didn’t speak, Jim?” And I said, “Well, Comrade Swabeck was at the Fourth Congress of the CI. I think he’s terribly out of line now. I think he was beautifully handled by Murry and Shane and I don’t think you needed me to put my boot in too.”

And the youth leadership was a bloody disaster. The Weissites had had the youth leadership. And then Wohlforth and Weiss had a falling out, and the majority of the youth leadership went with Wohlforth. So there was a very small and not very competent and quite hysterical Weissite presence in the youth leadership. (That’s when we started asking for party reps. I remember Tom Kerry came once or twice, and he never came back. He had had it with these maniacs.)

Well, that’s all Dobbs was waiting for. So he started pouring in Barry Sheppard and Peter Camejo. And he managed then, over the Cuba issue, to bring it to a national youth conference in December of ’61, and clean us out.

OK, so suddenly we were in a situation in which Wohlforth is in private communication with Healy. He kept those letters pretty close to his vest. He had a set of two or three lieutenants, that he would reveal little bits and pieces to. Wohlforth and Healy would do whatever they did in their letters, and then Freddy [Mazelis] and I and one or two other guys would get the word to line up the masses of the faction, which probably consisted of 15 people in New York. I went out to California and I lined up some people that I’d known out there. So we got another wing, with the pre-eminent figure being Geoff White, with whom I had been seriously at odds for years, because I was in the left wing of the SWP and he came out of the CP pretty much a Deutscherite. So we got on not well at all. Also he was much more diplomatic than I was and the SWP believed in suavity, and suave I wasn’t. So I got dumped out of the Bay Area and into the center. From which there is a political moral: if you really want to wipe somebody out, don’t send them to the center.

SPARTACIST: How did the 1962 split in the RT come about?

Robertson: Then we started getting into trouble about the nature of the SWP. Because it looked to me like, with the SWP embracing the Castro road to revolution, we had a flagrant case of centrism here. You can go read the documents and, starting with a flirtation with Tito, every time there was an opportunity or an action, you could see that the SWPers were straining against the bounds of a formal revolutionary program, because their appetites were going somewhere else. The SWP was physically and socially in very bad shape by 1960. It had about 600 members, and they were ready for something.

They got it over Cuba. I remember Morris Stein, a nice fellow. He got up at the June ’61 SWP convention and said, “What’s happening in Cuba is the greatest thing since the October Revolution.” He sat down, and that was the last we ever saw of him. Hooray—he had lived to see it. One has to draw conclusions from the SWP’s Cuba position: that the party was a centrist formation rapidly moving to the right. It had crossed a certain kind of watershed. And we had to fight.

I wrote a letter to Ed Lee in the Bay Area about how we have to not get wiped out. We used the phrase: otherwise each new rightward departure is going to create a new wave of oppositionists, who then will let themselves get washed out; our job is to stay here and accumulate such revolutionary Marxian discontent as the current course of the party is throwing up.

And Wohlforth didn’t want that. Healy was saying, “Trotskyism Betrayed: The Story of the SWP,” and at the same time, “the SWP in its central core is firmly proletarian and revolutionary.”

And so Healy and Wohlforth pulled a coup in ’62. The only trouble is, Wohlforth has never won a faction fight, ever. I mean, it’s almost impossible for the main leader of a group to lose a faction fight (and he’s lost about six of them in a row) — you really have to do it badly. The crucial trick is to alienate the large majority of your key lieutenants. Really infuriate and offend them. And be very unstable. You zigzag all over the place. That’s Wohlforth — a talented, hard-working guy, but this short-term appetite for maximum-leader status. And terrible weakness — if you got a chance to pound him politically for a couple of days, you’d get the opposite line.

And so he really wanted to be the principal leader and he worked like a son of a bitch. He’d bring out all kinds of copy — which wasn’t very good, he wrote a major error into every single article.

So he made an ever-closer pact with Healy, and dumped us. And that was supposed to be the end of us. Because I’m pretty sure that they believed that they were going to wipe us out. That we were a petty-bourgeois little group of six people hanging around Columbia University, and that in 1962 it was going to be all over for us. And then Wohlforth, to make sure, made a bloc with Dobbs to get rid of us. At least, Dobbs thought getting rid of us was a charming idea, but didn’t think much of keeping Wohlforth around either. And then, once we were thrown out, Wohlforth got immediately demoralized and quit, declaring the party centrist.

SPARTACIST: But you didn’t draw final conclusions about Healy?

Robertson: We didn’t know what to do vis-a-vis Healy and the SLL. Because we continued to be impressed by them politically, by what they said programmatically. It looked like a big force, Gerry said he was the leader of the world proletariat and we were prepared to give him a contingent credit. So we persisted — we fought as nastily as we could with the local Wohlforthites, continued to be polite with Healy and took the best articles that Slaughter and others wrote for Labour Review and printed them as a pamphlet, “What Is Revolutionary Leadership?”

SPARTACIST: And that was it until the Montreal meetings in ’65 and the ’66 Conference?

Robertson: We had our ups and downs and Gerry diddled us a little bit over the years. Then I guess he was thinking that in 1966 something very big was going to happen. So he upped the voltage, and set up for the fall of ’65 this conference in Montreal. And we went in, a lot of us, and all the Wohlforthites. We did some hard negotiating, got what we thought was a very satisfactory, principled resolution of our negotiations, rubber-stamped of course every step of the way by the poor Wohlforthites, who came out of there looking pretty gloomy—very gloomy indeed. Well, I guess I was looking at them about the way the Chinese peasant looks at a little pig.

And off we went to London. We were under a lot of pressure, because the Wohlforthites had written their perspectives document as fluently and rapidly as they always did. And we were still working on ours when our delegation left for London in April 1966. I turned it in, kind of ruined and exhausted, and after that, stayed up all night again because they started the general discussion on the state of the world, and I thought, well, we’re coming in, we’re this very junior, puny, unimportant American group, but we owe it to these comrades that we’re uniting with to offer some of our views on the main questions of the international movement. So we went in, and I made a presentation.

And on the way out that noon, finished, thinking that nobody would ever pay any attention, I ran into Gerry on the stairs and I said, “I’ve really had it. We did our document for the fusion. I made a statement to show where we’re coming from, and now I want to go and take a nap.” He just nodded. And then someone — I always sort of thought it was Banda, but I don’t know — really didn’t like some of the stuff we said.

Gordon: Our long-standing position that the fight against Pabloism had never been carried through internationally put us on the “wrong” side of a concealed power fight between the British and the French.

Seymour: There’s another aspect where I think that we, again possibly inadvertently, gored their ox. They had this “final crisis” line, that the incomes policy was the beginning of fascism in Britain, that the ghetto upheavals in the U.S. were the beginning of the American revolution. And in the Spartacist presentation was the refusal to inflate—we said that the crisis of the Fourth International is not comparable to the situation of 1914, that revolutions are not on the order of the day, that we’re not at the head of mass parties.

Robertson: So they were paying more attention to us qualitatively than we imagined.

SPARTACIST: Jim, how did you personally get along with Healy?

Robertson: I think Gerry Healy knew me a lot better than I knew him. In the first place, he only showed a face—he had a lot of faces. But he had 20 years on me. He’d seen all kinds of people in politics. And I think he had a very good idea of the customer he was dealing with.

Let’s be clear: I liked Gerry Healy, I got on very well with him, we saw eye to eye on all kinds of questions, gossip, nuances, tactics, like a couple of fairly hard-bitten communists who’d been through some mills. He had a hard young Cannonite on his hands.

I noticed a few odd things here and there. I did not like at all at the [April 1966] Morecambe conference of the Young Socialists, when he said, “you know, some YCLers turned up to distribute their paper and we sent them packing.” I thought, wait a minute, that doesn’t sound so good. And I thought he was a little flamboyant, telling me all these stories that I thought he shouldn’t have told me, about concealing assets in the middle of a bankruptcy proceeding, for example. And he bragged that his organizers had cars, but he was planning to get them helicopters to move around Britain.

This is only now, in the light of this split that took place a couple of weeks ago —I think Healy was on to me a lot better than I was ever on to him. And he had an idea of what I’d come out of. I think he wanted a fusion in London very badly. He had to make what he took to be an unacceptable compromise in Montreal (which we took as good coin), figuring that he’d rectify it by a pressure cooker in London. And that blew up.

I think that he was under pressure from the French already, and wanted to produce in the English-speaking world, which was his half of the world. And I think that it bothered him a very great deal that it blew up, judging by the accounts coming out now that he was drunk and wild and unusually violent in the summer of ’66; we represented in his mind a very big setback.

I know he had a perfectly good idea of what Wohlforth was. Because after the night of the first blowup, when I wandered back in, probably after dinner, we went at it for a while. And then when that session adjourned, fairly late, Liz and I were called into Healy’s room, with Banda in a shadowy corner, and Healy quite drunk, and he said, “Listen, Jim”— very friendly then, the sudden switch — “we can work this out. The fusion can go through. Just go and make a good act of contrition. You know you’ve got this petty-bourgeois American background; together we will struggle to overcome it. And I care nothing for Wohlforth — you’ll go back home the leader.”

And I looked at Liz out of the corner of my eye — I had come out of the CP you remember, not entirely an innocent — and I said something to the effect of “Gee, Gerry, this is a really interesting proposition. Our delegation wants to leave right now and consider it.” And we got out of the room as fast as we could.

We’d run into Healy’s Stalinist technique in ’62. Geoff White and others wrote most eloquently then — if you sign confessions to stuff you don’t believe, you have had it. You are neutralized as a reputable political factor henceforth.

Nelson: You know that you’re making public allegiance to views that you don’t hold, and it sort of guts you. You’re somebody else’s person. You’re Zinoviev waiting for the Moscow Trials.

SPARTACIST: So they did this long denunciation of you. What was the response of the other delegations that were there?

Gordon: I remember being endlessly harangued by large quantities of people from the Lambert section and VO: “Why don’t you just apologize? We can get this out of the way, and then we can have clear political discussion.” And VO would say: “So it’s wrong. So it’s unfair. But you are being petty-bourgeois individualists. OK, we can see it’s unfair. But it’s not that important, is it?”

Robertson: VO just backed off; they figured it was Healy’s conference.

Seymour: The Japanese observer, I think, abstained, or maybe voted against.

Robertson: Hardy [VO] said to me, “You know, I made a mistake. I came with 18 female schoolteachers who speak English. I should have brought 18 of my auto workers. If I ever get into another conference with the Healyites....” But they just went along, that’s all.

You know, it didn’t happen by accident. Healy/Banda wanted to pick a fight, and we were either supposed to crawl or become wild and enraged and make weird indefensible political statements—it was a technique of Healy. Put the blocks to somebody, and you either break them or drive them to stand up and announce that Michel Pablo is the real world leader. And I thought, we’ll just hang in here like Ulysses S. Grant, and fight it out all summer — because they started the fight on indefensible grounds, and we’re not going to give them anything else to make the split over.

SPARTACIST: With the recent split everyone’s started talking, and we learned that a lot of people on the British left think Robertson was beaten up at the London Conference.

Robertson: That story needs a correction. Our expulsion had the smell of violence about it, all right. We got downstairs at the end, and Gerry was quite drunk, and he was running around and he was visibly working himself up into a punchout—not between him and me, but he had these guys in the shadows. And I had a very vivid image of the alley in back.

What is quite true is that it was Lambert who intervened to cool Healy off, and we got out of there. So I never had a hand laid on me, but the suggestion was in the air.

Gordon: I can remember Jim telling me in London, “You know, we really fought hard in the SWP. We said some unkind things about Farrell Dobbs, we told Tom Kerry to shut up and sit down when he was heckling in a national convention, and there were a lot of people there that just couldn’t wait to get rid of us, but I never felt that I was in physical danger when I was in the SWP headquarters.”

SPARTACIST: After the ’66 split, the Spartacist organization maintained a posture of loyalty to the IC for a period of time.

Robertson: As long as we had the same formal program in common. So we complained about Healy’s administration, ending up with “Oust Healy!” But within a few months, the “Arab Revolution” and the Red Guards obtruded, and we said, wait a minute — we don’t care now about Healy’s internal administration, it is the administration of a formally, programmatically alien tendency. When you have a regime that is nominally of a revolutionary Marxist character, and is multi-facetedly corrupt, that creates a tension. Because the corruption has to reflect an appetite alien to the program. That’s always the basis of bureaucratism—when you proclaim one thing and practice another.

SPARTACIST: How did Hansen actually get hold of our documents, the ones he used in his pamphlet, “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International”?

Robertson: When we got back, we took about every scrap that we had in connection with the London Conference and the earlier negotiations in Montreal—we immediately mimeographed it all up in kits. I remember one night we had a social and invited everybody we could think of over, and we were handing these kits around to whoever turned up. And we got in the subway, and there was a friend of ours, a left civil-libertarian who we’d worked with on some cases before, his name was Marvin Siegal. I reached into the leftover kits, and I handed him one.

So he went home with his kit. He was pretty interested in it. He was living with Berta Green, who I think was on the National Committee of the SWP at the time. And he mentioned, “Oh, I ran into Jim, look what I got.” And she took it right out of his hands! (He complained later, “She wouldn’t even let me read it. She said it was a security matter.”) And took the documents straight to the SWP. And the next thing we know, it’s a pamphlet by Hansen, whose introduction seems so penetratingly knowledgeable, you’d think it was the power of Marxism. I gather he’d also had reports from the two dissident USec delegations that were there. So he had a lot of fun writing that introduction.

And then Healy made a great to-do out of it, that we had betrayed the class line by going to the SWP and giving the documents to them. Well it was a public split and these were our documents.
And in a straightforward way, that led to the beating of Ernie Tate, because that’s the pamphlet he was selling when they creamed him.

SPARTACIST: Our tendency made a vigorous outcry against Healy after Banda’s beating of Tate and Healy’s legal action to suppress the story.

Robertson: It was either Healy or Banda, and I don’t expect now we’ll ever know which one, that actually organized the beating. It was a calculated act, orchestrated, not just somebody becoming unhinged. Tate was selling, they harassed him, they went inside and then half a dozen guys came out all at once and systematically beat the shit out of him. At the time (I don’t know what’s happened to him since) he had a bad medical condition. He had some kind of fine, black, grainy stuff in the fluid inside his eyes; and if he got a sharp blow it all swirled up and he was blind for some time afterward and had to lie in a darkened room for a long time while it settled out. So the Healyites knocked him down in the gutter and kicked the hell out of him! He was rather a mess. And we’d been pretty friendly — at one point we were right on the edge of winning most of the young and quite able Canadian Trotskyist cadre. But one of their key guys, John Riddell, had some contact with Healy that put them off very badly. They then went on to found the USec [United Secretariat] section in England.

SPARTACIST: In hindsight, did Healy have a “good” period, let’s say 1957-67?

Seymour: I think the split of the Healyites from the Labour Party Young Socialists in ’64-’65 actually—with all proportions guarded—created some of the conditions that Jim Jones got when he took his operation to Guyana.

Because it’s not simply that Healy had a formal literary posture, but that he had to fight for the line of orthodox Trotskyism, including the Soviet defensism which was expressed in those documents—he had to fight for that line as long as he was doing entry work in the Labour Party against the Labour Lefts and the Cliffites. For example, one of the split issues was that the Labour Party Young Socialists should defend the Warsaw Pact against NATO. And that was one of the key—if not the key—issues of a somewhat ragged split.

I was a very junior member of the Spartacist League coming not from the SWP, but rather from a background of sort of New Left Maoism with a short stint in Progressive Labor. And I went to England in September of 1965, to be an economics graduate student, and what struck me was precisely the degree to which the Healyite youth operation was like the politics that I had had to break from to become a member of the SL. In fact it reminded me of nothing so much as the Marcyite youth operation—on the terrain of a society much more dominated by Labourite reformism and with a more plebeian but not proletarian base—a youth group that basically consisted of high school students, not young workers. Some apprentices, but certainly not youth that were active in the trade unions as a central arena.

I had been in London for a couple of months when I wrote back, “Apparently the SLL has been recruiting into the YS on an activist, revolution-tomorrow line. Little attempt is made to raise the level of consciousness of most of them or to build cadre, but they’re used for purely organizational work, selling the paper, etc., and peopling demonstrations. Needless to say, the turnover of the kids is high. If true, and I believe it is, it is a serious fault. At best it can be considered negligence caused by a rapid influx of young members, and at the worst a cynical exploitation of the aimless discontent of lower-class youth.”

So I don’t know what subjective change the central cadre underwent, but it was clear that once they had broken from the Labour Party, they built a pretty self-isolating, rather apolitical lumpen-plebeian youth operation which did not intervene in the mass organizations of the British working class. And I think that this provided them with what could be called the sociological and organizational basis for the subsequent degeneration, culminating in becoming agents for Qaddafi and justifying the murder of the Iraqi CP members.

Robertson: Remember their academic student journal, The Marxist? Very high level, fine stuff. And then I saw some of the members of the executive committee of the YS at Morecambe. Real good guys. There was one from Ulster in particular that I would love to have talked to. But every time there was the faintest air of the possibility of the loss of unanimity, Healy and Slaughter were right up at the front of the platform. I wasn’t used to this in the youth organizations that I’d been in, where Shachtman had a reliable gang of half a dozen kids who were perfectly capable of running an operation.

I think we understand now where Healy’s SLL came from. It had Gerry’s cadres from the old RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party], the people that he got out of the Communist Party after ’56, and Seymour has added the third crucial component—the Young Socialists operation. Winning over this big chunk of the Labour Party Young Socialists gave them a certain kind of base in what you’d roughly call a lumpen section, and they were also at the same time working the adult employed industrial workers — and so they were walking on two stilts. If you look at “Wohlforth Terminated,” you’ll see that in Britain in those days, the lumpen consisted of unemployed, unskilled white kids who were actually the sons of employed industrial workers. The gap didn’t open up the way that it certainly did for the Workers League in the United States when they tried to work the parallel social strata, so that on the one hand the WL aimed at black and Hispanic youth, at the same time pushing this Committee for a Labor Party which denied the black question, the war in Vietnam, and wanted to found a Labor Party headed by George Meany.

The SLL actually got a base among footloose kids. And it required the “festival” quality of ersatz politics to keep them going. Marches all over bloody hell, and all that sort of thing. The WL tried to reproduce that in the United States, and they’re still looking for the killers of Tom Henehan. The Healyites were always on the lookout for the take, and always sucking up to somebody. I think it was to Healy only a quantitative shift to go from playing footsie with Nye Bevan to Qaddafi.

SPARTACIST: After your experiences in ’62, comrades, weren’t you concerned going into the London Conference about Healy’s manipulative organizational practices?

Nelson: If there’s a cult made of Lenin, there’s also from the social-democratic side a reverse cult made of Stalin. You know, Stalin was this beast that always lived in the belly of the Bolshevik Party, and then one day like in the movie “Alien” it comes ripping out and all of a sudden it starts chomping up everything in sight, and then you have Stalinism. That’s kind of simple-minded.

So Healy had been around for a long time and done some rotten things. I also expect he could turn the leftism on and off if it served a purpose. So it’s hard to tell from afar. We knew a lot more about the Workers League because we worked closely with them and knew the cast of characters. We weren’t worried about Wohlforth and his bunch because we were very much harder politically than they were. And the differences they had with us, which we understood was a left-right difference, could be contained within one democratic-centralist organization. Except we were concerned about having the right relationship on our domestic ground with the international. And their organization was something of a curiosity, because they had tried to kill us in ’62 and simultaneously put out some fine material.

Gordon: I want to go back to the Montreal Conference in ’65. That ran for three or four days. We brought in a much heavier delegation than we sent to London; Montreal was the first time that I ever saw Geoff White. And we really went at it with Healy. The main bone of contention was whether a disciplined section can select its own leadership and make its own tactics. And Al reminded me that at one point Healy said, “Not one word of this document will be changed,” and we were prepared to split right there. And it was then that Harry Turner and Bob Sherwood came forward as the capitulators just by making a little noise in that meeting.

Nelson: Turner broke discipline: “Let’s not be hasty, comrades” — as Jim was packing up his briefcase.

Gordon: Enabling Healy, after the London split, to address his letter to those two people, because they were soft. Healy was a lot of things but not stupid. And our tendency, including in ’62, was prepared to accept international discipline. We found out only after the London Conference that there was no democratic centralism in the IC — they admitted the IC was governed by the principle of unanimity between the English and the French.

In Montreal, we raised our differences and Healy was pretty conciliatory on the politics and he said, “Oh, we have lots of differences with Mike Banda. We have differences over Vietnam, we have differences over Indonesia.” And it’s when Nelson got up and made a presentation on the ’62 split — that Healy was responsible for it—at that point Healy blew his stack. Then he started saying, “Oh, come to London. We’re not going to discuss this now — come to London, you can discuss this in London.”

Here’s a small story about something Healy didn’t like at the London Conference. We said, “We and the Japanese comrade want to go off to Highgate Cemetery and see Marx’s grave.” Healy said, “Agh, only the Stalinists do that—all the visiting Stalinists from Eastern Europe go and lay flowers there.” Well, we didn’t care; we went and didn’t think twice about it. It’s that kind of attitude that I think made Healy decide we were unassimilable.

Robertson: You know, we weren’t afraid of these guys in some political sense. I remember the ’62 split. The night that Philips got back from England — Wohlforth and Philips, triumphant. First they both lit cigars to show there were members of the proletariat in the room. And then they brought out the document we were supposed to sign: “Here it is — take it or leave it.” And I said: “Did you write it all down, Lynne [Harper]? Okay, that’s a split, isn’t it?” We weren’t afraid of these birds. Why should we be? We thought we were probably quite as good as they were.

We knew how Leninism is supposed to work: the majority controls the line. You get a majority, you control the line; we get a majority, we control the line. If you don’t like it enough, one of us splits! You want debate? You get debate. You want an internal bulletin? You get an internal bulletin. You have a “non-negotiable demand,” and we don’t accept it — well, that’s that, it’s time to go!

Nelson: That’s how it was in ’65 too. We worked our position out in caucus. Healy read us his proposal, we asked some questions, wanted some assurances about the relationship between the fused section and the international. He said, “That’ll be handled by the American Commission.” And then he read his statement. We said, “Well, what about putting...” He said, “Nothing different can be put in here. Nothing will be changed.” And we had had a caucus where we said that if we don’t get these assurances, we get out. Healy said no and Jim started packing his stuff up. I think Geoff White was talking, and Jim was starting to pack his material up. And then Turner pops up with, “Let’s not be hasty.”

Robertson: Have a good time with Moreno, Harry! [Laughter.]

Nelson: And we held out and Healy backed down.

Robertson: So here’s the answer to the implied question, “when did we first know that Healy was a beast?” Well, we didn’t care whether he was a beast—because we figured we were pretty tough too. It was Healy that wasn’t willing to be in the same cage, let’s keep that in mind. Somebody said to Cannon something about how Stalin corrupted the American Communist Party. He said, “No, don’t be so sure. There were a lot of people who were yearning for corruption in the American Communist Party. Don’t blame it all on the Russians.” Wohlforth was not a victim of Healy. Wohlforth was a servant.

And we were not in a big hurry to go around and justify everything. We got bounced? Weaklings then run and suck differences out of their thumbs. We thought: well, this seems fraught with the possibility of political differences. We said: a leadership that behaves in such an irresponsible fashion is no good. And we let them come up with the political differences.

And now the evidence — it’s not conclusive — is that Healy went around the bend that summer.

This absurd thing about an apology... “Gerry, you are rude! You will apologize to me” — except I wouldn’t dare do that, I would have been beaten to a pulp on the spot. But given an equal relationship of forces, with VO’s 18 auto workers in the room, Healy would have apologized to me for insult — then we might have had a unity. Healy was very good in Ceylon when he went out there in ’64. Pudgy little colonial imperialist, he got up and started swinging his weight around. Bala Tampoe went and stood over Healy and said, “Sit down and shut up!” And Healy sat down and shut up.

So one noticed early on that Healy didn’t seem to have a lot of fixed politics. Looking back, reviewing the fight we had in Montreal in ’65 and the rest, I can see where Gerry would get nervous about us. We actually had firmly committed politics. We looked at what we thought were his fundamental political statements and we thought: this is very good, this is really what we’re about. And I can see where that would make brother Healy very nervous, encountering an organization in the United States that actually believed the stuff he was currently peddling, whereas he knew perfectly well that yesterday he was singing a different tune and would be again tomorrow.

Well, Gerry has his own administrative means. If we sign a sufficient number of confessions, get our back broken, then it doesn’t matter where he takes his sleigh, we’re going to take the ride. Only he ran into a lot of obstruction. Some of it came programmatically. And some was that we were in a fairly strong position: we were in another country, where we were more numerous and entrenched than they were. They announced in London at the end of the conference, of course we’re going to make a campaign and rip the Sparts wide open. Instead, we ripped ten or a dozen people out of the Healyite organization in this country, because they were much smaller and their people were looking forward to getting into a fused organization with us, even if Wohlforth’s head was going to roll.

Not that we did anything specially good, it was pure missionary position, going straight down the road according to program. When Tate got beaten up we yelled and screamed, while everybody in Britain was taking a dive on account of a couple of writs. “A high court writ? — oh my god, that’s it.” Well that didn’t travel too well into another country.

The Tate beating — that’s the first hard evidence we ever had of Healy’s kind of violence. And then we yelled our heads off. Subsequently I’ve run into too many people in England who personally either participated in beatings for Healy/ Banda or were the victims — or both — who simply shut up. So we have to ask a question: is this a matter of English moral fibre, or is there another political process at work here? Is it just the way things are done, the flip side of the mateyness in and around the Labour Party, to treat gangsterism like a guilty secret?

Well, part of the silence was certainly embarrassment. That if the truth comes out, “Trotskyism” looks bad. But you have to be hard-nosed — in politics you can’t do the gentlemanly thing and hope that if you don’t talk about it, it will just go away. This thing happened, it has to be exposed and dealt with — and now there’s a big public split and all the old bodies have risen to the surface.

Maybe there is also a certain cultural component: the background in Methodism. The Healy organization at their summer camps had sexual segregation and sex patrols. Their attitude toward homosexuals is vicious — the A. Jennings letter says: we uncovered the fact that there was a homosexual who slipped through and was actually training our pure youth, and you know what that means.

I think Peter Fryer was the SLL’s most important recruit from the CP. He’d been a British Daily Worker correspondent in Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution. He came back and wrote a beautiful little book, which was called The Tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution. We must have sold those by the tens of thousands. Well, Peter Fryer turned out to be a man of many facets — he was quite good. And he started, presumably at the instigation of Healy and others, Peter Fryer’s Newsletter, which became the Newsletter, organ of the SLL. So what happened to Peter Fryer? Well, I don’t know.

Healy and Fryer had some kind of falling-out. And this was the first time I ran into some of Healy’s megalomaniacal practices. Healy told me, he may have printed it, “Fryer has run for it. I’m having all the ports of England watched.” In fact Fryer wisely had taken off for Portugal. The Healyites made much of it: “And this Peter Fryer — when he ran for it he left the country with his wife, his mistress and his mother.” We were supposed to be appalled. I always felt that was rather elegant.

Peter Fryer really was the guy who introduced the SLL into the milieu of the British CP: the industrial apparatus, the intelligentsia and education department. Later when the Healyites were busy denouncing Fryer, Healy printed a little thing that said: “And now, look what has happened to Peter Fryer, as happens with all renegades” and they listed a bunch of renegades and the low pass they had come to. “This Fryer, he now writes books on ‘sex’.” So I read this, and I wondered what happened to Peter Fryer.

One night I was walking down Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and looked into a bookstore. Sure enough, there was a book by one Peter Fryer called something like The Anthropology of Sex Through the Ages. He was indeed writing books on sex.

This gives you some of the flavor of the Healyite organization rather early on. Fryer was a very important acquisition from the CP. He did set up the Healyites’ first press. And he was a top-flight Marxist journalist. He also had very fine theoretical capacity. His little article on Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (Volume 38) is a masterpiece, and is something that we’d always wanted to print as our own pamphlet, “What Is Dialectics?” And he was savaged by Healy.

And I thought that Healy made a mistake after 1966 with his whispering campaign against me personally — the way he put it in writing was “the relations within the delegation resembled that of a clique,” which, translated, was a verbal campaign around the world that Robertson likes liquor and women. (Now during that conference I was a lot more sober than he was. He kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer which he drank neat; I was pretty much dried out because I had a lot of writing and speaking to do.) But the nonconforming religious derivation of significant sections of the British working class is such that he thought this would be effective. And I thought: wait a minute, I think I know a little more about the proletariat of the world, a liking for liquor and girls is not automatically going to disqualify a Marxist politician from consideration over political issues.

One is reminded of the psychological pattern of a Jack the Ripper who on Sunday morning gets up and gives lay lectures about demon rum and bad women. The Banda wing says: if Healy was single-handedly building the party, what was he doing with his other hand? Well we don’t know anything about Healy’s relations with women, but we have seen the sanctimonious puritanism of the Healy organization — an attitude which goes back to the Methodist traditions of a founding section of British trade unionism in the last century.

One of the top leaders of the Independent Labour Party in the ’30s put in his book something along these lines: “Ah, it’s terrible, the drink. I’ve seen so many fine young men come to Parliament from the mines and the mills. And because the evil Tories have licensed Parliament as a royal palace exempt from the licensing laws, during the long hours in Commons these fine working-class lads turned to drink. And within a few years they became completely useless, completely corrupted.” My answer is, in the thousand years that the Tories have ruled England, I don’t believe that one of them has drawn a sober breath.

Gordon: At the London Conference in ’66 Healy complained: we’ve got to have these bottles of wine here for the French during the meal breaks. Whereas you were supposed to do your drinking privately, out of Gerry’s bottle presumably. So we had our meals with the Lambertists and VOers, who liked to drink wine and crack jokes—we just dove in indiscriminately among them, keeping them between us and the English delegates.

Robertson: The IC said things, and we acted on what they said. We weren’t entirely blind, although I must say that we were very innocent of the techniques of controversy associated with Pabloism in Europe, which seem to consist of—if you announce that your most unyielding and fundamental principle is X, that’s sure to be a lie. It took us a couple of trips to Europe to figure that one out, because we came from the “parochial American” Cannon/Lenin school, not the Michel Pablo style of wheeler-dealerism.

Lately we’ve heard countless stories of brutality. One such story is that Healy went up to a putative cripple, a comrade of the editorial apparatus, who was writing at a desk, and Healy began to kick him, and went on until eventually he got tired of kicking him and wandered away. I never got a chance to see anything like that. When we left the London Conference there was the smell of violence in the air, which we said some months later — after the Tate case, when we had something more than “we think maybe Healy was ready to have us beaten.”

But we can do some reevaluation too: I think we were a lot more important to Gerry Healy than we considered at the time. We were actually a significant entrenched group. He had already tried to destroy us once, in ’62. It hadn’t worked — we bounced back and went straight down the road according to program.

He tried to pull us in again with the unification agreement in Montreal in ’65. He had to give us what we thought was essential. He hedged it, with all his own protections, but we got what we thought we had to have. The IC determines the overall international program, Healy has the right to address our national conference, but the conference majority decides. That was the crucial clause that we fought about. His draft said: the future of the American section will be decided in the American Commission in London. Ours said: it will be decided in an American conference (where we happen to have the majority). So Healy bracketed it in all known ways, but he gave us what we said we had to have, expecting to take it away from us in London once he got us there.

And then that attempt blew up in his face, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. And it’s reported that he went quite mad in the summer of ’66. In hindsight I think that we were a giant disappointment — much more so than we understood at the time — to the old man and it helped unhinge him. And I am sorry about the guys that were beaten (and the abused girls, if one believes what the Banda/Slaughter wing says) — the people Healy could get his hands on, who paid the price that summer for our intransigence. And if we were surprised by what happened at the London Conference it didn’t matter because we just did what we had to do, according to our program and understanding.

SPARTACIST: Comrade Nelson was the anchorman in New York when the delegation went to London. Was that in the expectation of trouble?

Robertson: It sounded exactly like going to Moscow in the late ’20s. You know, the factions go off to Moscow. You don’t send everybody. Somebody’s got to mind the store. We had the predominant assumption, since we’d fought with Healy in Montreal, that those accords were going to be carried out, but we were not hopelessly naive.

SPARTACIST: When the split took place in London, what was happening here?

Nelson: Well it actually started after the Montreal Conference. We started some common work and we had a pretty good fix on their U.S. organization, which was extremely soft. For instance, when we split out of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee in October ’65 they stayed. Over the massive American bombing of Haiphong harbor they signed a call beseeching, “Where is the voice of our president for peace on Christmas?” They were politically soft. Wohlforth broke down in a joint meeting and ran out of the room, crying, a month before the fusion as I recall. While we were being very sharp-toothed and determined and beady-eyed and saying, “Sure, parity in all committees, absolutely. You want the paper, you got the paper. Half the central committee, of course.” We knew we were going to gobble them up. There was also a middle layer; we used to call them “November Bolsheviks.” They wouldn’t join either group, they were going to join the fused group, and they went away after the ’66 split.

So Jim called up and said there’s been a split, break off all contact and stop selling their paper. We laid out the tactics and we moved fast, setting up meetings right away with all of the pro-unity Wohlforthites we could find. On our side, when the delegation came back. Turner was the only one on the Political Bureau that was soft. I remember he raised a motion, he said we should have apologized. Jim said, “But I did, Harry.” He said, “Well you should have really apologized.” Jim said, “You mean I should have said what Healy wanted me to say.” (And Turner did try running to Healy, a couple of years later.)

SPARTACIST: What were our relations with the ACFI — subsequently the Workers League — in this country?

Robertson: Our relations were that the Wohlforthites wanted violence against us. Wohlforth was zealous in seeking the maximum of physical destruction for our people. At the NPAC [National Peace Action Coalition] Conference where SWP and CP goons violently excluded us and Progressive Labor to keep their keynote speaker, a U.S. Senator, from having his feelings hurt. Tim Wohlforth personally led one of the goon squad charges. He was out for our blood. Harry Ring in the SWP’s Militant praised the Wohlforthites for their loyal services.

Then later, they got some lumpen youth around them, mainly Hispanics and blacks. They programmed these kids for deadly violence against our people. They called us agents of the FBI and CIA and cops and tried to work these youth up to the point of murder. And at the same time Wohlforth was perfectly clear that when there were a few murders of our people, the kids who had done them would be immediately disavowed.

So we pulled back from selling at WL events in New York while continuing elsewhere to try to intersect them politically. They countered with a campaign of violent attacks on us in a number of places — Toronto and Los Angeles come particularly to mind. And we defended ourselves. And then we got this exquisite letter from David North, who was head of the WL by then: please stop your campaign of violence against us. To which we replied: we will always defend your democratic rights, we’re glad you want to stop this shit. This exchange was published in our paper.

SPARTACIST: What were the differences with Wohlforth over Cannon?

Robertson: Wohlforth got hold of Shachtman’s account in the New International of the fight between Cannon and Shachtman in the CLA [Communist League of America-forerunner of the SWP] in 1933. I remember arguing with Wohlforth, who said, “You know, Trotsky was really against Cannon.” And I said, “Well, that’s really interesting, Tim. Where is this?” And he said. “Oh, it’s well known.”

Well, 15 years later I got hold of the CLA internal bulletins and the material that never got into the bulletins, and I can speak chapter and verse on the triad of Cannon and Shachtman and Trotsky. But it took a major research project mounted over many years to get all that material. Cannon owes a lot to Trotsky. At some point Trotsky did indeed have something resembling an organizationally third-camp position on the CLA dispute, but not for long. And Cannon said (I came across it just lately in the SWP’s newest Cannon volume), referring to his own experience as a leftist CPer (Fosterite), “You know, before Trotsky got hold of me I was a very highly trained professional factional hooligan.”

But when it came right down to it, there was no question about what the relationship between Cannon and Trotsky was.

But Wohlforth — lacking any documentation, with no knowledge except having read Shachtman’s account 20 or 30 years later in the NI — Wohlforth instantly embraced Shachtman’s contention: Trotsky was against Cannon, Cannon was never really a Trotskyist. This was on the road to discovering that the first good American Trotskyist leader was... Wohlforth.

Nelson: During the unity negotiations in 1965 Wohlforth took great exception when Jim said that the SWP had been badly damaged because they lost all their intellectuals with the Shachtman split. And Wohlforth got all bent out of shape and said, “how dare you say that, it was a principled split,” which it was. Wohlforth didn’t want unity with us, so he was coming out with all kinds of things, and then he and Marcus cooked up this line that Cannon was just a Third Period window-smasher — that was supposed to stick in our craw, which it certainly did.

SPARTACIST: In 1981 we supported Sean Matgamna’s Socialist Organiser group in their defense against Healy’s libel suit.

Robertson: There was Healy using the courts again, to bankrupt a small organization and shut everybody up. And we published Matgamna’s letter and were planning to feed him a thousand pounds and any information we thought would help him fight the case that Gerry had brought against him.

Except that Matgamna returned our initial check, thereby insinuating that we were some kind of CIA agents, because first Matgamna appealed to the socialist public for support and then wouldn’t take our money. What was really going on then was that Matgamna was playing footsie with Thornett, who was a right-wing split from Healy and specially hated our guts. Of course Healy always does this to opponents — calls them CIA agents.

SPARTACIST: In the Socialist Organiser article that we reprinted in WV No. 391, Matgamna said that Healy played a revolutionary role after the Revolutionary Communist Party “collapsed” under the leadership of Jock Haston and Ted Grant.

Robertson: I remember when I first heard the name Gerry Healy. An old guy, a soft SWP sympathizer in San Francisco, came back from England and said he’d seen this marvelous man — he has great weight on the docks and is a personal friend of Nye Bevan, has three MPs in his pocket — his name was Gerry Healy, he was on the inside of everything. Well, his great weight on the docks was with the “blue union” that was fighting General Transport, and Gerry was right in there with a split away section of the bureaucracy in the out-of-London ports. And I was having a fight in the Shachtmanites over “What is the theoretical limit of nationalizations? Why can’t Parliament every year just nationalize more and more until they’ve nationalized the most profitable sectors and undercut the economic foundations of the British ruling class?”

About the RCP we presently have to be pretty agnostic, because any time any three old members of the RCP get together in a pub, all the old wars start again. But I think that, whatever a madhouse the RCP was, this was the seminal period for British Trotskyism. And I think it was done to death by the International, a bloc between Cannon and Pablo with Healy as the local accomplice. I think they made a decision to destroy this organization.

Now Matgamna thinks that Healy’s emergence at that time as the central figure proves that he was once a real revolutionary. When I look at what he did immediately afterward to become the underground wing of Aneurin Bevan’s section of the Labour Party (while hundreds of then-Trotskyist cadres were dumped out into the wilderness) I remain a deep skeptic, without sufficient information. And very possibly, comrades, reflecting the fact that there was a lot I liked about Max Shachtman, who liked Jock Haston.

Now Haston had kind of an odd line on Russia, and maybe a sterile line on Labour. But instead of saying “you guys should have a more flexible line on Labour” the international leadership used a sledgehammer on the RCP, and Healy was the hammer man. Healy’s line was not just entrist — Nye Bevan set up some kind of think tank which Healy participated in until the LP executive tumbled to the operation and got rid of it.

The RCP came from a fusion of two groups, each with multiple factions, that emerged in Britain in the late ’30s, after a number of false starts. One of them turned up in 1938 at the founding conference of the Fourth International and the other didn’t. Healy happened to be in the one that didn’t. Cannon went to England at the time and was very impressed with Healy. But Haston was the principal leader of this cascade of six or eight factions. And they were rammed together by the international to form the RCP.

The Labour Party during the war was a junior partner with the Tories under Churchill. And the RCP began to become quite sensational and they picked up cadres. As the war ended and the Labour Party competed and won an enormous electoral triumph in 1945, Cannon and also Pablo were very much on the RCP’s case, and Healy was their local inside man. I don’t know all the rights and wrongs but I do believe that they did not try to reshape the RCP, but successfully destroyed it. And so far as I know that was the last Trotskyist organization in Britain, the SLL in the period from 1957-67 proving to be hollow.

Now this history happened, but it is certainly not clear to me that it had to happen that way. “Did he fall or was he pushed?” I think the RCP was pushed right out the window and went splat. Was it necessary? I don’t know, sometimes you need to break up an organization, but I remain skeptical. And when it went splat, of course, its fragments turned up everywhere.

It’s true the RCP was horribly disoriented by the Labour Party electoral victory. Their conception I think was a linear one — analogous to Cannon’s “The Coming American Revolution” [1946], which tended to ignore the CP, the unions, the blacks, suggesting instead that what was going to happen was a massive linear extension of the SWP which when it got big enough would come to power. The RCP’s perspective of steady linear growth came to a screaming halt one day, when little Major Attlee took over after Churchill, and furthermore the Labour Party actually carried out some nationalizations.

By the way, the RCP analysis on the Russian question wasn’t that bad, it was just too simplistic. It certainly beat Wohlforth’s and most everybody else’s. It was simply that wherever the Russian Army arrived has become part of the Russian workers state, which as a first approximation had a certain merit.

On the Labour Party question, I think that from the end of the war and the general elections that immediately followed, up through the present time, developments in Britain in the working class have been linear—not a straight line, but a smooth curve. They went up a bit, largely as a result of the Labourites heavily increasing the taxes on beer and tobacco to subsidize the social security program that came in, and during the period of recovery when British industry functioned a bit. And now they’ve gone steadily downhill for a long time. But there have been no real major discontinuities. There was one opening of a modest sort at the juncture recently when the SDP [Social Democratic Party]—the CIA wing, pro-American wing of the Labour Party — split away.

Now, in that time Gerry has blown hot and cold on the Labour Party — always some new revelation. But there aren’t any new revelations. Wohlforth did a memo on shallow entry; the Pabloists in Europe went wild, saying “that’s not a scientific Marxist term.” Shallow entry — you can’t ignore the Labour Party, and you better not immerse yourself in it. And I don’t mean that you should have a split in your group, one side going into the LP with illusions and the others being hard sectarians who say the LP is a protofascist organization that you throw rocks at. No, you need a unitary organization which tries to play the Labour Party question the way you would an organ. And I’ve had that position since the fight in the Shachtman organization in 1952 over Bevan.

I would hope that all of our members are more or less members of the Labour Party, and I think often it’s very unimportant. What are the tactics? Well, we would love to have a miner stand for election openly against Neil Kinnock. Simultaneously, in other places, there is the tactic of conditional support to LP candidates: here’s where we Spartacists stand on issues; will you, selected Labour leftists, accept our support? And then get into the constituency campaigns and really support those that we think might exacerbate the situation inside the Labour Party.

A somewhat detached attitude, which does not ignore the Labour Party but recognizes that it must sooner or later be deeply split. This is very different from what Healy did then (and Grant [the Militant group] tries to do now): rah, rah, all the way with the Labour Party, which will, by a series of internal transformations, become the instrument for socialism in Britain.

SPARTACIST: And the earlier period of British Trotskyism, you called it “false starts”?

Robertson: There were no beginnings to British Trotskyism; it had to be imported. And it didn’t take root right away. And it had no history. It was not like in Poland or Bulgaria or the United States, or even Germany or Belgium or France, where you had Trotskyists coming into existence at the time the Stalin-Trotsky fight began to unfold in 1925.

The first British Trotskyists are supposed to be the “Balham group.” Know what they were like? “Well we went over to France and we spent our time above the pub. And we had mass unemployment in Britain and all those foreigners were screaming that some dictator had come to power in Germany. We couldn’t imagine anything more irrelevant so we went back to good British soil.”

So we had to implant in Britain, starting finally around ’36 I think, and then under pressure two successive waves of unification were imposed, first around the time of the Fl founding conference in ’38 and then culminating in ’44 with the RCP—a hothouse plant that needed very tender care. They ran into the very sharp objective change, from the Labour Party as a junior partner in imperialist war to a Labour government. The international did not help, it destroyed. And then you have fragmentation, and then that literarily brilliant decade of Healy, when he got the numbers from the youth group and the brains out of the CP.

We’re just lucky we come from a country that had Trotskyist nuclei, admittedly late, and a continuous documented history. The internal bulletins and the volumes of the Cannon writings are available to us all. There’s nothing specially American about that—we’re just lucky to come from a protected enclave, unlike the Bulgarians or the Chinese or Vietnamese, the Russian Left Opposition, or the fragile European Trotskyist nuclei whose slender threads of human continuity with the Fourth International were simply physically wiped out by fascism and the war.