Healyites Got Blood Money (1991)

Workers Vanguard No. 517 (4 January 1991)

Healyites Got Blood Money

Incredibly, the anti-Communist repression in Iraq in the late 1970s was actually supported by one tendency which masquerades as Trotskyists, Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC), represented in the U.S. by David North’s Workers League. They alibied the Ba’athist executioners, declaring: “This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in Iraqi armed forces for the purpose of undermining the regime. It must accept the consequences” (Bulletin, 16 March 1979). The Healyites’ “justification” for the massacres of CPers was that “the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party of Iraq has played a hundredfold more progressive role in the Middle East than Stalinism.”

The Spartacist League had long described the Healy tendency with Lenin’s phrase, “political bandits.” In 1967 the Healyites became champions of a mythical “Arab Revolution,” a catch phrase to justify tailing after Arab nationalist despots. By the mid-’70s, they had become press agents for Libyan strongman Qaddafi, and then shameless apologists for anti-Communist terror in Iraq (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April 1979). The details of this sordid affair came out in 1985 following the spectacular implosion of international Healyism. Not only did Healy & Co. hail the extermination of Iraqi CPers, but they photographed protest demonstrations in Britain and turned over to the Iraqi embassy the pictures of Iraqi militants, fingering them for arrest, torture and possible death.

How was it possible for a group claiming to stand for “socialism” to support anti-working-class terror carried out by a capitalist government? The answer can be summed up in two words: blood money. A 16 December 1985 report by an IC Control Commission documented how their “founder leader” Healy and his cohorts like the actress Vanessa Red-grave had shuttled around Libya and various Near East countries — including both Iraq and Kuwait! — looking for and, receiving subsidies to pay for their expensive daily press in Britain. (It should be noted that the implosion of Healyism didn’t come about over taking the money, but only when the money ran out.) The Control Commission was only able to trace part of the money because no serious financial records were kept, but it published the amounts it was able to uncover, which were received from various countries over a seven-year period beginning in the mid-’70s:

Libya ........................£542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar ...........................50,000
Abu Dhabi ....................25,000
PLO ..............................19,997
Iraq .............................19,697
Unidentified
or other sources ........261,702
Total ....................£1,075,163

(reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)

In exchange for this largesse to keep their showpiece press alive, Healy & Co. filled their pages with grotesque paeans to these very same Arab dictators. At the same time as they were alibiing the murder of Iraqi CPers, here is a sampling of what the Healyites had to say about Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds:

“The Iraqis are slandered with the tale that the Ba’athists ‘shot thousands’ and
denied Kurdish independence....
“In a statement in [the Healyite] News Line the party leadership critically appraised the efforts of the Ba’ath Party to solve the Kurdish question.
“At the same time the [Healyite] WRP defended the Iraqi government from the CIA-organized forces of General Barzani.”
- Bulletin, 20 April 1979

Today David North cynically pretends that he and others of Healy’s loyal henchmen and toadies didn’t know that the “IC” was on the take. Yet we and others had denounced Qaddafi’s patronage of Healy for years! Moreover, in the factional blowout which followed Healy’s overthrow, British WRP leader Cliff Slaughter wrote a letter (14 January 1986) revealing that Australian Healyite Nick Beams had obtained tens of thousands of dollars from Near East regimes and had passed on the information to David North, who agreed not to raise the matter within the IC (see “On Baghdad, and Bagmen,” Australasian Spartacist No. 138, September-October 1990). Beware of these provocateurs for hire.

Some Political Bandits at the End (1989)

Spartacist No. 43-44 (Summer 1989)

Some Political Bandits at the End

22nd March 1988

Dear Comrade,

Obviously, it is important that we gain the maximum support for the campaign to get the Russian government to release all documents relating to Leon Trotsky and the Moscow trials: Truth must out. The trail of blood left by Stalinism needs to be acknowledged by all, even if it is unpalatable to some communists.

By the same token, we must see that errors of a similar type are not committed in this country by people purporting to be Trotskyists. That is why the current issue of the Syndicalist journal, Solidarity, is so alarming. It contains a secret internal report of the WRP.

This shows that the WRP received large infusions of funds from Libya and other Middle East governments. Apparently, a total of at least £1,075,163 came from these sources.

Even more disturbing, the secret report reveals that the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein wanted information about the activities of opponents of the regime living in Britain. So members of the WRP acted as spies for their Iraqi paymasters. As a result, Iraqi left-wingers, returning to Baghdad, were tortured and executed.

In my opinion, it is vital [for] working-class organisations, as a matter of urgency, to make the following demands:

First, that the full facts be revealed about the WRP's associations with Colonel Gaddafi and other Middle East dictators.

Second, that the names of all those involved be made public.

Third, that both the WRP and these individuals be asked to account for their actions.

The principles of glasnost should not be confined to the precincts of the Kremlin. Unless we are a bunch of hypocrites, the British left must see to it that the same principles of frankness and openness operate in this country. Otherwise how can we expect Mikhail Gorbachev to reveal all?

Yours fraternally, Raymond Challinor

Spartacist replies: We thank Raymond Challinor for his letter, originally sent to the editors of both Workers Press and Revolutionary History and printed here with his agreement. The “secret internal report” of the WRP to which Comrade Challinor refers is the by now infamous report of the David North-dominated “International Committee” Control Commission, dated 16 December 1985. Substantial excerpts of this report were published in the Spring 1988 issue of the British anarcho-syndicalist journal Solidarity. Subsequently, the British Workers International League (WIL) published the report in full in the April 1988 issue of their newspaper Workers News. The WIL is the only one of the remnants of the implosion of Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (there are currently at least seven publishing journals in Britain) to have made the report available to the international workers movement. Interested readers who wish to obtain a copy of the report can order one directly from the WIL (1/17 Meredith Street, London EC1R OAE, England).

From the time Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) imploded spectacularly in the fall of 1985 (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86), it has been clear that none of the myriad cliques and tendencies which spun out of it were interested in a real reckoning with the WRP's despicable record of political banditry. For 20 years the Healy cult, with a brutal internal regime held together by mind-numbing “dialectical” mumbo-jumbo, violence and security fetishism, was a mill for the cynical destruction of those leftists who made the mistake of joining it. Healy was infamous for his capacity for wild swings in political line in pursuit of egregious and often mutually contradictory opportunist appetites. (In “Wohlforth Terminated,” Workers Vanguard No. 61, 31 January 1975, we cited the Healyites’ high-turnover operation in lumpen youth milieus as the political context for their programmatic oscillations in the early 1970s.) By the late 1970s the WRP had become shameless apologists for Near Eastern dictators and oil sheikdoms. But to the extent that the Healyites had a coherent political core they were cringing legalist/Labourite economists and virulently anti-Soviet in concrete program. Those who had stuck it out for years with Healy, through every twist, turn and betrayal, could not be expected to function very differently without him.

Soon after the implosion the dubious David North, who came to replace Tim Wohlforth as leader of the tiny American Workers League in 1976, stepped into Healy 's misshapen shoes as lider maximo of the WRP’s “International Committee” (IC). North claimed the allegiance of the German and Sri Lankan IC sections, the majority of the Australian section led by Nick Beams, and a minority of the old WRP under David Hyland. North expelled the rump of the post-Healy WRP led by Cliff Slaughter, which retained in its international orbit only a minority of the old Australian IC led by Phil Sandford.

The Northite IC has clung to every despicable hallmark of Healyism, from the use of the capitalist cops and courts against opponents in the workers movement, to the “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who the IC claims are and were (even in Trotsky's time!) agents of the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. Not only does the shadowy North, who won his spurs in the Healyite organization as mouthpiece for “Security and the Fourth International,” continue to retail the Stalinist slander that Trotsky was killed “by his own people,” but his organization has made its sinister efforts to aid the American capitalist state in railroading SWP member Mark Curtis on phony rape charges into its chief international activity (see “The Workers League and Mark Curtis,” Workers Vanguard No. 480, 23 June 1989).

___________________

Healy's long-time lieutenants, none of whom ever objected at the time to any of the betrayals perpetrated by the WRP in order to get money from Near Eastern bourgeois governments, moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.
______________________

From the time the old WRP started up its subsidized daily News Line in May 1976, its pages full of uncritical adulation of the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, it was clear that Healy's organization was on the take from the Libyan regime. Slaughter's rump WRP was forced to admit as much in the aftermath of the implosion and with the membership clamoring for the truth, an International Committee Control Commission was convened to investigate. The Commission’s “Interim Report,” dated 16 December 1985, was more of an exercise in damage control than a real attempt to get at the truth; its revelations were used by David North in his cynical IC powerplay and the Commission didn’t even attempt to investigate allegations that other IC sections had also received Near Eastern oil money. Moreover, the Commission never aimed to hold accountable the WRP leaders who were implicated. All names were deleted from the report except those of WRP members who had split along with Healy, presumably so North would have plenty to hold over Slaughter et al. in the future.

The report documents the WRP’s receipt of a total of £1,075,163 from the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as the governments of Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Iraq from 1977 to 1983. No surprises here. More damningly, the report reveals some of the concrete services to be provided by the WRP to obtain the alliance with Qaddafi: in an April 1976 secret agreement with the Libyan government the WRP agreed to provide intelligence information on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the Control Commission report acknowledges that this agreement had “strongly anti-Semitic undertones, as no distinction is made between Jews and Zionists and the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” So the WRP agreed to in return for Arab gold. Healy’s organization became spy on leading British Jews in return for Arab gold. Healy’s organization became agents for Qaddafi, and a lot more than publicity was involved.

The Control Commission reports that in connection with this agreement, the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press. The Control Commission says it was unable to find any documentation that this money was received. But the WRP did launch the daily News Line a month after the agreement was signed and did (according to the report) spend £188,500 to buy two Hunter offset presses some time in the period between September 1974 and April 1981.

The London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) obtained a copy of the report and exposed the WRP as having been “paid to spy for Gadaffi.” An ex-WRP member told them that the WRP had called information on leading “Zionists” from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya, What was the response of the Slaughter WRP to the Sunday Times revelations? A statement (Workers Press, 13 February 1988) that “no worker with any sense will believe such rubbish.... There is no evidence that the party when led by Healy ever spied on ‘Jews’, prominent or otherwise,” On the contrary, the £542,267 that the Control Commission documented the WRP got from Libya is a hell of a lot of evidence. The April 1976 spying agreement is what cemented Healy's alliance with Qaddafi.

Perhaps the most vicious crime of the Healy-led WRP was the fulsome support they gave to the Iraqi Ba’athist government's execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979. Both the Australian and American IC sections reprinted articles from News Line hailing the execution of these working-class militants: the Healyites positively gloried in it, portraying the Communist oil workers, the most class-conscious section of the Iraqi proletariat, as agents of counter-revolutionary Stalinism. Whet the WRP imploded, some members reported that they had been assigned to take photographs of a London protest against the Iraqi government, photographs which they believed had been turned over to the Iraqi embassy. About this deed, the Control Commission reports “a receipt for£ 1,600 for 16 minutes of documentary footage of a demonstration is in the possession of the Commission.” Who was the receipt made out to? Needless to say, we aren’t told. The perpetrators should be brought to proletarian justice. But that is the least concern of any of the Healyite remnants.

What Are North and Beams Covering Up?

After the IC Control Commission delivered its report, Cliff, Slaughter and his followers immediately began to cry foul. In a 14 January 1986 letter to all WRP members, Slaughter wrote:

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments? Which other sections did so?

“Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousand [sic] of dollars) in 1983? (We do not say of course, that to seek such assistance is always wrong, it is wrong when political principles are sold for the maintenance of such relations).

“Is it not a fact that the receipt of this. money by the Australian section [w]as reported to the Central Committee of the SLL (Australia) only in the month before the IC meeting of Dec 16? And is it not a fact that the IC delegate, Cde Beams, was told by his CC in Australia to report this matter to the IC?

“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North? That is what happened.

“Finally: is it not true that Comrade North and Beams agreed the matter should not be raised at the IC because they considered it did not constitute a “class betrayal”? How did they differentiate between the class betrayal of the WRP in this matter - on which was based the argument for suspending the WRP from the IC without charges and without a hearing — and the actions taken on behalf of the SLL(Australia)?”

Slaughter’s accusations have the ring of (self-serving) truth. The Central Committee of the Australian SLL did censure Beams, at a meeting held in February 1986, for failure to report receipt of money from Arab regimes to the IC, and according to Phil Sandford, Beams even voted for the motion (Socialist Labour League Internal Bulletin, February 1986). Sandford, who soon after led a split from the Northite SLL to found the Communist League in solidarity with Slaughter, claims in the same bulletin that “the SLL carried out a class betrayal in identical terms to that carried out by the WRP, but it is not possible to discuss that here for obvious reasons.” In an article in the December 1986 Socialist Press (journal of the Communist League), Sandford recounts the story of SLL leader Greg Adler’s 1979 trip to Baghdad, where Adler had been instructed to ask for $100,000 to buy a printing press. Sandford claims that Adler didn't ask for the money, but nonetheless Gerry Healy gave him quite a dressing down for daring to poach on his preserve. Sandford goes on to report:

“The SLL’s relations with the Libyan regime require a separate article. Suffice to say they were more productive financially thanks to an even more slavish public relations job in the pages of Workers News and such things as the memorable, Libyan-financed brochure entitled Libya - the true story.”

As part of their turn to “commercial enterprise, commercial print work,” the SLL also took money to print The Bell of Saigon, organ of the fascistic Vietnamese thugs who have attacked Australian leftists and labor meetings.

One thing is for sure, the Australian Healyite remnants are complicit with North and Slaughter in hiding the real truth. A letter of Simon Pirani (for the Slaughter WRP Central Committee) to the Northite IC dated 21 July 1986 cynically asks “whether the Control Commission has completed its work.” The equally cynical Peter Schwarz replies for the Northites, “You know as well as I do that the ICFI Control Commission was refused any access to any further information as soon as it had given its interim report” (correspondence published in March 1987 issue of Northite Fourth International). Both sides blame each other for the “incomplete” work of the Control Commission because neither side wants the whole truth revealed.

Why Did the Healyites Implode When They Did?

Another document in our possession sheds a lot of light on events in the WRP in the fall and summer of 1985, immediately predating the implosion. It is a “Financial Report” by Corin Redgrave, dated 8 October 1985. While Redgrave’s testimony must be taken with a grain of salt, he certainly gives the flavor of things:

“In the financial year 1984-85 scarcely a single rent or rates demand was paid on time. Bailiffs took walking possession of print shop, the party bookshops, and on one occasion at east, the party headquarters at Clapham. The total cost to the party in one financial year from court charges, solicitors’ fees, bailiffs’ fees and interest, was more than £7,000.”

On 3 April 1985 British Rail, to whom the WRP owed £25,515.58 for carriage charges, suspended credit to Astmoor Litho, publishers of News Line, and demanded cash payments before it would ship the newspaper. By 1 July 1985, not a single major wholesale supplier would deal on credit terms with New Park Publications. By October, the WRP owed £30,000 in back fees to their accounting firm, which was refusing to keep up the books. Redgrave claims that the mess was all the fault of the WRP financial apparatus who, unbeknownst to Healy (!), had been financing WRP operations though a £35,000 bank overdraft negotiated in October 1982. Redgrave also claims that from 1984 on, the financial apparatus had been selling and mortgaging party property, all apparently in a desperate effort to keep things afloat.

By the summer of 1985 the whole stinking house built by Gerry Healy was about to come tumbling down. And everyone in the leadership knew it. It was doubtless no accident that Aileen Jennings, whose infamous letter charging Healy with sexual misconduct touched off the implosion was a linchpin in the WRP’s financial apparatus. The WRP Political Committee originally labeled her letter a “provocation.” It was only when the WRP’s financial debacle could no longer be hidden that Slaughter et al. decided to use its revelations against Healy.

An emergency meeting of the international Committee was called in August 1985 to discuss the WRP’s financial crisis. Healy tried his usual trick of soaking more money out of the tiny IC satellites. The slimy David North, who was in on all the backstabbing intrigues in the WRP leadership from the beginning, saw that things were about to explode. North pledged to contribute £30,000 and, according to Savas Michael (leader of the Greek IC section. who stuck with Healy), he then didn't turn over the money (Marxist Review, May 1986). North knew exactly what he was doing with this maneuver, and in the aftermath of the implosion his “Control Commission” smugly documented the WRP's financial impasse, confirming the picture painted by Corin Redgrave.

Redgrave dates the WRP’s escalating financial crisis from October 1982. The “Interim Report” of the IC Control Commission details the drastic dropping off of Near Eastern oil funds between 1982 and 1983 (£271,217 in 1982, only £3,400 in 1983; nothing in 1984 and 1985). Thus the immediate motive seems clear. Healy's long-time lieutenants, none of whom ever objected at the time to any of the betrayals perpetrated by the WRP in order to get money from Near Eastern bourgeois governments, moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.

Ex WLer Joins Spartacist League (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 184 (2 December 1977)

Ex WLer Joins Spartacist League

Life in the Healyite Snake Pit

Dear comrades:

I am in agreement with the program of the Spartacist League/U.S. and therefore would like to submit this application for membership in the party. More than seven years ago I came to the understanding that communism represented the force capable of freeing mankind from the various forms of oppression under which it lives. The succeeding years found me seeking to translate my aspirations for revolutionary change into practical activity.

The path to the Spartacist League [SL], the embodiment of the Leninist program, was unfortunately not direct and I took a detour called the Workers League [WL] from 1971 to 1974. Prior to joining the WL, I had had some contact with the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], and read some of Trotsky's books, and considered myself a Trotskyist.

It was the Workers League's espousal of Trotskyist orthodoxy, in particular, that attracted me to the organization. My involvement in the anti-war protests and Black Students Union during my high school days had taught me to despise liberal pacifism and black nationalism, both defended by the SWP, as roadblocks to the development of a communist world outlook. The WL intersected my revulsion towards SWP's reformism by calling for the victory of the NLF and maintaining a knee-jerk reaction against nationalism. With its anti-Pabloist pretensions, the WL seemed to carry the authority held by the leaders of the October Revolution. At a time when many New Leftists still claimed the working class was hopelessly reactionary, the WL's workerist orientation seemed like a defense of principle.

Life in the Workers League was a continual zigzag between socialist posturing and adaptation to the most blatant backwardness in the working class. At Stanford we peddled our “maximum” program to the students. We screamed to them that capitalism's collapse and fascism were imminent, placing the socialist revolution immediately on the agenda. In East Palo Alto the Young Socialists recruited black lumpen youth who had no political understanding. TUALP, the WL's trade-union front, restricted its program to demanding higher wages.

This opportunist practice found a political rationalization in the crisis theory. This asserted that the acute crisis of capitalism made even minimal demands revolutionary. The inexorable march of the class struggle would force the trade union bureaucrats to build a labor party and take up revolutionary demands. In effect, the WL negated the task of revolutionists in the trade unions: breaking the grip of the bureaucrats and constructing an alternative class-struggle leadership.

My three years in the Workers League saw a revolving door of members, the trampling of democratic centralism by Healy's lackeys, and the cultivation of many anti-communist youth who became disillusioned by the WL's deception and manipulation. They were recruited on the basis of dances and basketball games and were tired of having “politics” jammed down their throats. I received a bloody nose from a Young Socialist twice my size while trying to defend another comrade from attack.

After the summer camp I decided to leave the WL. Wohlforth had been deposed and I saw the organization making no serious attempt to assess how it got itself on such a disastrous course. I sensed something was vitally wrong with the organization. But because I lacked political development, I felt ill-equipped to carry out a factional struggle. So outside the WL I read and thought.

The WRP's [Workers Revolutionary Party - the British Healyite organization] expulsion of the Thornett group broadened my understanding of Healy to a certain degree. Attracted to the WSL [Workers Socialist League - founded by Alan Thornett and others expelled by Healy from the WRP in 1974] politics, I joined the American fraternal group - the Socialist League (Democratic Centralist). After a month I resigned, realising that the SL(DC) had not fundamentally broken from Healyism. This circle continues the WL's mass posturing and unashamedly demands a reformist labor party.

Separating the League from every other leftist tendency is its granite adherence to the program. With this program as its core, the SL has assembled an impressive group of cadres. In the WL debate over “mass work” versus the regroupment tactic, the SL has proven its line correct by its ability to assimilate several political generations in one party.

John K.

Healyite Slander Mill Grinds On (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 176 (7 October 1977)

Healyite Slander Mill Grinds On

The Healyite gang has struck again. As part of the latest installment in its disgusting two-year smear campaign against SWP chief and ex-Trotskyist Joseph Hansen, the British Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, has published (News Line, 30 July 1977) what it melodramatically terms “the most incriminating document in the history of the Trotskyist movement.” The Healyites' latest exhibit is a two-sentence letter, evidently written by Hansen to one George P. Shaw, the U.S. consul in Mexico City in 1940.

This letter is cited as unimpeachable “evidence” that Hansen secretly collaborated with the FBI. to “shield known GPU agents” responsible for the assassination of Trotsky in 1940. It is backed by other “damning” corroborative testimony, such as the following quotation, dramatically blown up and set against a black background in News Line:

“Mr. Joseph Hansen, secretary to the late Leon Trotsky, called yesterday to ask for a picture of Trotsky's assassin. I told him I would be glad to see if we could give him one.”
- U.S. Embassy in Mexico City

Of Hansen's meeting with an embassy official, News Line howls.

“There is nothing to rival it in the annals of the world Trotskyist movement: a secretary of imperialism's most feared enemy is walking in and out of the American embassy and holding private discussions with the FBI's head men in Mexico City!”

News Line implicitly acknowledges that the entirety of its “case” for Hansen's involvement as an “accomplice” in the Trotsky assassination rests on the alleged “secrecy” of Hansen's contact with the police agencies of U.S. imperialism. The article concedes that “It is true that other members of Trotsky's household also visited the U.S. Embassy – Albert Goldman and guard Charles Cornell among them.” The article further admits that Trotsky himself met with Robert G. McGregor, the same embassy official with whom Hansen supposedly met. The difference, claims News Line, is that “Trotsky made no secret of his meeting with McGregor.”

The Healyite's “expose” of Hansen, they boast, will “certainly be news to every member of the SWP from the oldest veteran to the youngest rank-and-filer.” We doubt it. The “most incriminating document in the history of the Trotskyist movement” has a return address on it. That address is 116. University Place, New York City. This is not a secret – or even a private – address for the correspondence which Hansen was supposedly trying to hide from the Trotskyist movement, but the public headquarters of the SWP! We would be surprised indeed if any correspondence routed through this mailing address could be “news” to the SWP.

Hansen has much to answer for before the working class: his role as a leader of a reformist organization which has become a roadblock to the construction of a Trotskyist party. But there is no evidence whatsoever of any unauthorized contact or “collusion” by Hansen with the FBI or GPU. Rather, it is perfectly clear that Trotsky and the SWP assigned Hansen to undertake such confidential contact on behalf of the movement and the Healyites are simply exploiting this fact, which for self-evident security reasons would hardly have been officially noted or bandied about at the time. It is the Healyites who, with their cop-baiting smear campaign, have made themselves “accomplices” of the Stalinists' half century of slander against the Trotskyist movement.

Joe Hansen is an Honest Revisionist (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 141 (21 January 1977)

“Hypocrisy is the Homage that Vice Pays to Virtue”

Joe Hansen is an Honest Revisionist

We reprint below a leaflet distributed by London supporters of the international Spartacist tendency at a January 14 meeting to protest Healyite slanders of SWP leaders Joseph Hansen and George Novack.

Considering the notorious scoundrels who mainly comprise the speakers tonight, this is not a company that we of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) would freely choose to be among. But Trotsky has taught us that if the issue is just, one can unite with “the devil and his granddam” (taking due account of the old folk saying that “when you sup with the devil, use a long spoon”). But the ostensible purpose of this meeting – to protest and expose the infamous slanders against Joseph Hansen and George Novack of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) by Gerry Healy and his Workers Revolutionary Party – is at most only one of its purposes. For the speakers have another, overriding common denominator: they are all, to a man, revisionists and destroyers of the Trotskyist movement, not merely guaranteed to be oh-so-diplomatic about one another's betrayals of Marxism, but actively in pursuit of new combinations and configurations of revisionism (the stresses of an internationally rising line of class struggle having deeply undermined their old alignments).

It is only abstractly nauseating to think of speaking from the same platform as e.g., a Pierre Lambert, whose organization continues to practice endless physical violence against the “Vargaites” in the streets of Paris; or a servile Tim Wohlforth; now speaking for the shamelessly reformist SWP, who has spent fifteen years as a leading practitioner of Healyite slander and violence; or, above all, a Michel Pablo (sometime arch-enemy,of the former two), who personally has done quite as much as any other living human being to destroy the Trotskyist movement from within and turn “Trotskyism” into a cesspool.

Nonetheless a meeting “for workers democracy” and “against frame-ups and slanders” – even including such elements as these – could be a good thing, only providing that it was an honest meeting with full freedom of criticism.

Unfortunately, as the speakers’ list guarantees, this is not the case here. It is the omissions which tell the story. For example, when Hansen’s Intercontinental Press (6 September 1976) published the statement “A Shameless Frame-Up” signed by a long list of individuals and organizations, IP in its informational breakdown identified from among the hundreds of signers sixteen as “internationally known Trotskyists.” Of these, eleven were supporters of the United Secretariat (USec), two were from the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) of Pierre Lambert, two were from Lutte Ouvriere and one was from the iSt. But only some of the USec leaders, and Lambert from the presently ingratiating OCI, and that master of intrigue, Pablo himself, are to speak tonight. Particularly objectionable to the meeting’s sponsors would be a spokesman of the iSt – the group which at the level of workers democracy campaigned earliest against the Healyite slanders (picketing with our slogan “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”) and which helped initiate the impartial Commission of Inquiry into the affair of the highly dubious Varga vs. the slanderous OCI.

It is not enough to describe Healy, as Hansen does, as a paranoid. The conduct of Healy’s organization demands political explanation. The Healyite combination of crude opportunism and fake-Trotskyist “orthodoxy” has repeatedly lost out to the slicker USec, whose internally warring wings are led by Joseph Hansen and Ernest Mandel. In his slander campaign, Healy no doubt thinks he has gone V. I. Lenin one better. Lenin exposed Karl Kautsky as a revisionist through careful and savage analysis. It would therefore have been inconceivable for Lenin, as a Marxist, to have substituted the false and gratuitous – and so simplifying – accusation that Kautsky was an agent of the Kaiser. Healy cannot follow this principled course toward the USec revisionists, for comparable analysis would indict his own conduct. He resorts to contemptible slander which merely brings ostensible “anti-revisionism” into disrepute. As always, Healy is the horrible example which Hansen feeds off, for his own purposes – in this case, an unprincipled attempted international “regroupment” parading as a rally for workers democracy.

The real political issues which place all these squabbling slander-mongering, violence-prone elements at one pole and the iSt at the other are currently posed by two decisive considerations: the popular front and the Fourth International. Of course, as in the 1930's when the centrist London Bureau zig-zagged through the no-man’s-land between Trotskyism and the mass reformist parties, so today one finds more leftist ephemeral groupings which seek to straddle between a revolutionary course and the accommodationism common to all tonight’s speakers. The overriding characteristic of these groups is negative: not to stand for a common and coherent international program, but to posture against those (such as tonight’s speakers) whose betrayals have become too overt. Thus for example there is the “Necessary International Initiative” bloc (including one Roberto from Italy, Sean Matgamna’s recently split International Communist League, the disintegrating German Spartacusbund and maybe somebody else).

Their tendency to themselves capitulate under pressure to popular frontism aside, they have hardly a point in common among their component factions and individuals except their objection to the manifest revisionism of the USec (and to the “sectarian” intransigence of the iSt).

With the renewal internationally of massive proletarian unrest, the popular front is again in the air. And all revisionists must try, in their own ways, to accommodate on the central question of class collaboration and, with their “new mass vanguards” or self-serving descriptions of mass reformist parties as simply “workers parties,” to pave the way for new betrayals.

The 1930s centrists of the London Bureau, which Trotsky condemned, had to verbally separate themselves from the popular front rather more than such types do today:

“The Popular Front practised by the Second and Third Internationals is a form of class collaboration between the proletariat and the Liberal bourgeoisie (and the petty bourgeoisie which depends on this latter) on a capitalist basis which subordinates and sacrifices the class interests of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie to those of monopoly Capitalism.... In consequence, the Revolutionary Socialist Movement rejects the Popular Front as being absolutely contrary to the historic interests of the working class. To Capitalism we must oppose Socialism! To the Popular Front we must oppose the United Workers Front.”
– Resolution adopted at the"Revolutionary Socialist Congress" of the
London Bureau, February 1938

Thus despite their anti-Trotskyist obliteration of the necessity of the proletarian vanguard party, the London Bureau was perforce compelled to make a categoric class counterposition to the popular front and did not expect the Stalinist and reformist parties to somehow turn into their opposites. But instead of, and in opposition to, the Trotskyists’ hard, bleak struggle for the Fourth International, those centrists counterposed to reformism their innocuous and impotent phantom, “the Revolutionary Socialist Movement.” This is why the organizations of the London Bureau, 'though nominally disposing of forces one hundred times that of the Trotskyists, are a barely known historical footnote whose descendents must masquerade today as Trotskyists.

The hard lessons of the victorious October Revolution retain their full force on our planet. Lenin and Trotsky did not enter or tail the provisional government of socialists and liberals – they overthrew it on the basis of soviet power.. The international Spartacist tendency stands today with Lenin's Third and Trotsky's Fourth International in insisting not only that the issue of state power is class against class, but that without the struggle to create a programmatically united and disciplined Fourth International the workers are left to wander into the new traps of capital – and, as in the 1930's, with the assistance of their revisionist would-be “leaders.”

[Authorized text] 14 January 1977

international Spartacist tendency
Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria de Chile
Trotskyist Faction (expelled) of the Spartacusbund (Germany)
London Spartacist Group BCM Box 4272 London WCIV 6XX England

WL Goon Assault Backfires (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 137 (10 December 1976)

Workers Democracy Defended in Los Angeles

WL Goon Assault Backfires

LOS ANGELES, December 4 - Spartacist League reporters and salesmen were wantonly attacked today by club-wielding Workers Leaguers outside the WL's poorly attended “Fifth Anniversary Conference and Disco” held at the Twilight Zone Bar in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles. The WL's Healyite goons were courageously repulsed by defenders of workers democracy. Finally the frustrated WLers took refuge behind the “protecting” mantle of the racist L.A. cops.

The incident began as SL supporters outside the bar were selling WV and Australasian Spartacist detailing Healyite thug attacks on Spartacists and other leftists in Australia (see WV No. 134, 19 November). Anticipating possible trouble from the notorious political bandits of the WL, who have repeatedly provoked similar confrontations in L.A. and elsewhere, the WV salesmen were accompanied by SLers and others who support the right of working-class tendencies to distribute their literature and who oppose thug violence within the workers movement.

Shouting “we don't want your cameras here,” a frenzied WL goon lunged at a WV photographer. Then a gang of WL thugs brandishing wooden clubs and jagged broken pool cues attempted unsuccessfully to assault the photographer. After a brief scuffle during which a plate glass door was broken, the Healyite goons were repulsed and retreated into the bar. The SL supporters resumed selling their literature. Then “somebody” called the cops. Four squad cars arrived, accompanied by a police helicopter overhead. Recent WL congressional candidate Sheila Leburg brazenly accused the SL of attempting to “disrupt” the meeting.

Not even hiding behind the cops can the WL shield itself from the revolutionary criticism of the Spartacist League. Working-class militants must continue to instruct the WL hooligans in the principle of workers democracy. Stalin-style gangsterism and attempts to suppress the expression of political views must be expunged from the workers movement!

Protest Healyite Thuggery (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 130 (27 October 1976)

Vicious Attack on SL/ANZ, SWP in Australia

Protest Healyite Thuggery

SYDNEY, October 18 – A rampage of thuggery by the Healyite Socialist Labour League (SLL) here yesterday left supporters of the Australian Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand (SL/ANZ) seriously injured. Under direct supervision of SLL national secretary Jim Mulgrew, the Healyite goons launched two brutal premeditated assaults outside a “public” SLL forum at the Sydney Trades Hall. The Spartacist supporters were selling literature and protesting the Healyites’ exclusionist practices, while SWPers were distributing a statement in reply to the Healyites’ slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack. Several SL and SWP members were bruised and bloodied, and one SWPer required hospital treatment after numerous punches and kicks to the head and body.

Healyite gangsterism is no news to the workers movement. But yesterday’s attacks indicated a deliberate attempt to maim members – in particular leading members – of opponent tendencies.

No sooner had the Spartacists approached the Trades Hall than SLL honcho Mulgrew began threatening an Australasian Spartacist photographer. The reason for Mulgrew’s concern with photographs became clear an instant later as, with SWPers looking on, he directed several of this thugs to jump SL national chairman Bill Logan, shrieking “get Logan, get Logan!” SLers who sprang to their comrade’s defense were slugged and pummelled, one receiving a bloody nose.

Unable to dislodge the SLers without exposing the seamy side of Healyism before untutored SLL ranks and others coming into the hall, Mulgrew pulled his hoodlums back, restricting them to personal and sexist insults, threats, physical harassments and provocations against the SLers an SWPers who were still arriving.

But when the bulk of their youth had been shepherded inside, the Healyite goons shoved and jostled an SWP supporter handing out material to people going in. Mulgrew and his hooligans then surrounded a leading SWPer, John Percy, who was attempting to photograph the incident. After smacking him on the face, they proceeded to indiscriminately assault SL and SWP supporters coming to his defense. As Mulgrew retreated to safety, the goons launched a barrage of kicking and punching in the middle of the street. One SLer received a severe blow to the head and SWP youth leader David Deutchmann, who had vigorously protested the earlier assault on the SL, was singled out by the enraged Healyites who punched him to the ground and continued to stomp and kick him as he lay.

Healyite gangsterism against the Trotskyist criticism of the SL has a long history. SL/ANZ supporters were subjected to a similar, though less brutal, attack at the same site a year ago when Healy himself came to Sydney on a speaking tour. But with the initiation of their international slander campaign against American SWP leaders Hansen and Novack – which has driven the Healyites further into self-imposed disrepute and paranoid insularity – their thuggery has become more frequent. At a May Day march in Sydney this year, the Healyites not only kept Spartacist literature a “safe” distance from their closely guarded contingent (going so far as to call the cops to prevent an SL supporter from distributing leaflets), but they even accosted a salesman of the Socialist, paper of the ossified, ultra-reformist pro-Moscow Stalinists. This was followed by a series of incidents with salesmen of other left papers.

In July, a gang of Healyites disrupted a forum in Sydney by American SWP vice-presidential hopeful Willie Mae Reid. The SLLers, shouting and waving their “indictments” of Hansen and Novack during the discussion period, prevented Reid from speaking. The reformist SWP used the incident to ban the SLL from attending all SWP public forums. The SWP has had a longstanding ban against allowing Spartacist supporters at forums as well, thus displaying that its main concern is the suppression of left criticism of its rotten politics.

The Spartacist tendency has from the start taken an active principled stand in combating the Healyite slander campaign against Hansen and Novack and in defending the SWP against SLL disruptions and physical attacks. This is more than can be said for the SWP’s Australian partner in the “United” Secretariat (USec), the crumbling Mandelite Communist League (CL). While Bill Logan on behalf of the SL/ANZ signed the American SWP-initiated statement against the slanders, the CL was conspicuously absent from the list of Australian signatories. In fact it has bolstered the Healyite campaign by supporting their demand for an “inquiry” into the bizarre charges – an act not entirely unconnected with a certain parallelism between the SLL’s slogans and appetites toward militant Labourism and those of the CL.

The Healyites’ paranoid concern with police infiltration in the workers movement – the ostensible justification for the frenzied campaign to slander Hansen and Novack as “accomplices” in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky – is exposed as hollow by their own practice. Their wilful provocation of thug violence opens up the workers movement to repression by the cops at any time. The short step between this Stalinist gangsterism and calling upon the cops to suppress leftist opponents is one which the Healyite political bandits made a decade ago. From the beating of USec supporter Ernest Tate in 1966, and the subsequent appeal to the bourgeoisie’s courts against Tate, to the present day the Healyites have repeatedly invoked the capitalist cops and courts against left-wing opponents. Yesterday Mulgrew boasted, “If the police come, we’ll get them to arrest you all.”

“Cop”-baiting slander and gangster violence are deliberately employed by the Healy tendency as obstacles to debate and political clarification within the workers movement. Open political debate would expose, for example, the SLL’s adaptation to the protectionist hysteria sweeping the Australian ship-building industry, threatened by overseas competition (the SLL has failed to criticize the chauvinist character of Australian shipyard workers’ occupation of Japanese ships, even though an SLL supporter is shop steward in one of the yards most active in the occupations). It would expose the SLL’s consistent catering to social-democratic illusions through its campaign to “Force the Liberals to Resign.”

We can assure Mulgrew, Healy and their gang of one thing: their gangster tactics will not prevent their exposure in the course of the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International.

Healy “Assimilates” Angola (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 102 (26 March 1976)

Editorial Note

Healy “Assimilates” Angola

For almost a decade Gerry Healy's so-called “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC) has combined ritual denunciations of Pabloist revisionism with opportunist tailing after various non-proletarian forces, from Nasser’s “Arab Revolution” to Mao's Red Guards. The latest recipient of the Healyites’ cynical hosannas has been the People’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA, we are told, is “a mass movement of the Angolan working class and peasantry which is inseparably linked to the new stage of revolutionary struggles that has opened up in every country.” Its victory, gushed the newspaper of the IC's American supporters, would “take forward the world socialist revolution” (Bulletin, 28 November 1975).

For those of his followers who might have been confused by the IC’s alternately “critical” and “unconditional” (but always rhapsodic) support of the MPLA, Gerry Healy recently put his distorted parody of dialectics to work cooking up a bizarre explanation (“SWP: Apologist and Defender of Imperialism,” Bulletin, 5 March). The IC uses as a foil the Socialist Workers Party's neutrality in the civil war between the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA and the CIA/ South Africa/ Portuguese colonialist/ FNLA/UNITA bloc, in order to put forward an anti-Leninist position of political (as opposed to military) support for the petty-bourgeois nationalist People's Movement.

This incredibly muddled IC “Statement” strings together lengthy quotations from a hodgepodge of sources to advance two self-contradictory arguments for politically backing the MPLA: that bourgeois nation-building is historically progressive and (at least implicitly) that an MPLA regime in Angola will result in the creation of a deformed workers state.

While making some ritual genuflections in the direction of “independence of the working class,” the polemic's main thrust is to build political confidence in the MPLA which, we are told, is the “only authentic bourgeois nationalist movement in Angola,” has “called for a fight to the finish” against the U.S. and South Africa, struggles against tribalism and “reactionary separatism” and is backed by “the majority of the independent African nations.” Moreover, its struggle “is an historically progressive struggle involving the Angolan nation and not just the bourgeoisie against U.S. imperialism.” To build this case, the IC must deny that the other groups had ever fought the Portuguese and must ignore the MPLA's record of collaboration with the Portuguese military, its narrow and partially tribally circumscribed base of support among the Angolan peoples and its demonstrated willingness to smash the nascent organizations of the working class.

The MPLA is described as if it were an emergent bourgeois class building a nation in the epoch of capitalist expansion. In fact, the national boundaries the MPLA-led People's Republic of Angola (and the IC) defends are but the arbitrary divisions imposed on the African continent by plundering imperialist powers. The Healyites – who demonstrated their abject insensitivity to national oppression when they “critically supported” the Nigerian government's genocidal slaughter of the Ibo (Biafran) people in 1967 – now pass over in silence the division of the Bakongo people between northern Angola and Zaire in order to present the MPLA as about to resolve the national question.

The IC's enthusiasm for bourgeois nation-building is a back-handed acceptance of the Menshevist/ Stalinist “theory of stages”: “first” the bourgeoisie kicks out imperialism and establishes capitalist democracy, “later” the proletariat conquers state power and institutes socialism. In one article, the American Healyites explicitly lay out the stagist conception behind their effusive outpourings for the People's Movement: “We support unconditionally the MPLA's fight for national liberation and independence and recognize that it is only through this necessary struggle that the conditions can be created for a new stage of class struggle in all the African countries” (Bulletin, 30 January).

One of Trotsky's crucial extensions of Leninism was the theory of permanent revolution, which explained that in the epoch of imperialist decay the unresolved bourgeois-democratic tasks of the underdeveloped countries could not be undertaken by a weak capitalist class, which is inevitably subservient to imperialism. Trotsky insisted that only the proletariat, in the process of consolidating the victorious socialist revolution, could seriously address the unsolved bourgeois-democratic tasks (including the elimination of national oppression) in the context of proletarian property relations. Thus the Healyites, in jumping on the MPLA bandwagon, once again leave their pretended Trotskyism behind.

The IC “Statement” simultaneously dishes out another unsavory mess from Healy's greasy spoon: the proposition that an MPLA victory equals the destruction of capitalism and the constitution of a deformed workers state. This argument is advanced through some inapplicable historical analogies and a string of quotations whose purpose in this article would otherwise be perfectly inexplicable.

The 1C “completely opposes the SWP's opportunism and follows Trotsky's position of defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories, while condemning, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the suppression of dissident opinion in the CP and the working class.” These admirable sentiments are followed by no less than twenty paragraphs from Trotsky's lucid polemic, In Defense of Marxism, explaining that the Russian bureaucracy would be compelled to destroy capitalist property relations in eastern Poland before incorporating the territory into the USSR.

What is the application of Trotsky's analysis of Poland at the time of the Second World War to the situation in Angola today? Like Henry Kissinger, Healy seems to believe that Soviet weaponry equals the uprooting of capitalist property relations. This same “method” was the main theoretical vehicle whereby a revisionist current in the Fourth International, led by one Michel Pablo, in the 1950's turned the majority of the Trotskyist world movement toward centrist accommodation to Stalinism and other petty-bourgeois forces. Pablo propounded a “new world reality” in which the power bloc led by the USSR would against its will become the ally of all progressive movements, which would thereby find themselves swept along by the onrushing “world revolution” and compelled to establish deformed workers states.

The only possible conclusion from the IC's rhetoric about “defending any extension of the nationalized property relations of the Soviet Union to other territories” is that Healy & Co. believe that what is taking place is the transformation of Angola into a deformed workers state (presumably by a process of “structural assimilation”). One hilarious little wrinkle is that the Healyites presumably still hold to their idiot position that Cuba – whose troops in Angola are presumably doing the “extending of nationalized property relations” – is a capitalist state.

The implication that Angola is becoming a deformed workers state is a characteristic Healyite gyration. Even before its headlong degeneration into outright political banditry, the Healy tendency showed itself unable to oppose the Pabloists’ political accommodation to Stalinism by anything other than an alternation between know-nothing anti-Pabloism (Cuba) and archtypically Pabloist softness toward militant Stalinist guerrillaism (Vietnam).

The current Angola polemic, whose main purpose seems to be to provide copy to fill the dreary pages of the Bulletin, also somehow manages to incorporate the IC's latest hobby horse – a slanderous campaign against the SWP’s Joseph Hansen and George Novack as “accomplices of the GPU” in the 1940 Trotsky assassination:

“The SWP's veiled support for the CIA-financed organizations and their overt hostility to the MPLA is inseparably tied up with the gross betrayal of Trotskyism which is expressed in the refusal of SWP leaders Novack and Hansen to answer any of the charges made against them by the International Committee of the Fourth International on the question of security and the Fourth International. Their consistent refusal to do anything to rid the movement of the stigma of GPU intrigue and provocation today renders them just as vulnerable to the pressure of the CIA.”

The IC makes unsupportable charges, echoing the Stalinists, that SWP leaders were implicated in the GPU's murder of Trotsky, and then brazenly bemoans “the stigma” which Healy himself is working wildly to create! In the delirium tremens of the disintegrating IC, the reformist leadership of the SWP has become a kind of collective Herbert Philbrick, “leading three lives”: as ostensible socialists, GPU agents and now witting CIA pawns. The SWP's degeneration is “explained” by the absurd comparison to a double agent who, having allegedly been an “accomplice” for the KGB, thereby becomes “easy pickings” for the CIA.

Substituting cop-baiting for political struggle, the IC is an invaluable tool for the SWP leadership in seeking to reassure its ranks that consistent reformism provides a far more secure political niche than the wild-eyed incoherence of Healy's “anti-Pabloists.” The international Spartacist tendency has uniquely put forward the policy of warning the working class against placing any political confidence in the strikebreaking MPLA, while giving military support to the latter against imperialist-led attack. As the last South African troops withdraw and the bourgeois People's Republic of Angola consolidates its position, the defense of the Angolan workers against their new capitalist rulers becomes more urgent than ever. Yet the IC continues to praise the “revolutionary” MPLA.

As the IC digs itself deeper into the grave of irrelevance, the growth and programmatic cohesiveness of the international Spartacist tendency uniquely demonstrate that principled struggle against Pabloist revisionism is the means for the reforging of the Fourth International.

IC Fraud Explodes (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

RECONSTRUCT THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

The "International Committee," which for nearly two decades proclaimed itself the embodiment of authentic revolutionary Trotskyism opposed to the Pabloist revisionism of the "United Secretariat," has now crumbled under the weight of years of gross political deception perpetrated against the international Trotskyist movement. The IC combination sought to present itself as a political tendency but was in fact a rotten bloc between the political bandits of the Socialist Labour League of Britain and the left centrists of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste of France. Years of jockeying for hegemony within the IC while seeking to preserve the criminal fiction of basic programmatic agreement came to ahead as the OCI increasingly gained the whip hand, especially by the affiliation to the IC of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, which was lined up from the first with the OCI against the SLL. The IC has finally broken apart completely in open rupture, with the OCI-POR on one side and the SLL (and its U.S. sycophants, the Workers League) on the other. The split in the IC -- together with the increasingly strained relations within its major international competitor, the United Secretariat -- represents the fragmentation into chaotic chunks of the organizational configurations of ostensible Trotskyism which haveexisted essentially since 1953.

The SLL-OCI split is at once inevitable, unprincipled and opportune. Its inevitability was obvious to anyone familiar with the wide political distance separating Gerry Healy's SLL from the OCI of Pierre Lambert, joined in agreement not to disagree. The internationalist masquerade thinly concealed the reality of an unprincipled bloc between two power centers with keen competing appetites for satellites. The split, accomplished by a calculated SLL-WL provocation over the issue of the policies of Guillermo Lora's POR of Bolivia, is as unprincipled as was the erstwhile posture of unity. The split can be of great objective assistance in rebuilding the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky, by breaking unprincipled combinations as a prerequisite for political clarification and internal political struggle within national groupings previously insulated by the comforting assurance of "internationalism" (i. e. membership in one of the unprincipled international blocs).

But the rebuilding of the Fourth International does not proceed automatically from the collapse of the ersatz, revisionist and centrist conglomerations. The possibilities for revolutionary regroupment in authentic democratic centralist international tendencies defined by programmatic cohesion are sharply enhanced in the present period of heightened class struggle and growing instability in the imperialist world order; but the dangers of new unprincipled combinations built upon congruent appetite rather than principle likewise increase; only a vigorous fight by the revolutionary Trotskyists can prevent the creation ofsome new centrist swamp to trap and disillusion militants and breed revisionist confusion.

Healyite Provocation

The IC split Was precipitated by the British and U. S. Healyites' public attack on the policies pursued in Bolivia by the POR in the events which culminated in the August rightist military coup, The denunciation, appearing in the U.S. for the first time in the 30 August issue of the WL Bulletin, was a device for accomplishing quickly the desired break with the increasingly powerful OCI wing. By 8 November the Bulletin was able to print documents confirming the split, with the SLL-WL and smaller associates claiming to be the majority.

According to the Healyites, however, the "real" issue is not Bolivia. Bolivia's a "smokescreen''; the real issue is Essen, the youth conference called by the OCI in July 1971, during which the two centers of the same "international" voted against each other's motions. In a sense Healy is right -- for reasons which hardly, redound to his credit! Healy, accustomed to the organizational whip hand in the IC, was understandably chagrined to find himself opposed and outvoted by the OCI supporters; perhaps the unkindest cut of all was the presence (afterwards apologized for by the French) of a Spartacist League observer. Having lost organizational control, the Healyites determined upon a split, and chose to strike anorthodox Leninist pose over Bolivia as an excuse for a precipitous break. No, Bolivia was not the"real" issue, Comrade Healy; that it was not is shown by your own egregious opportunism over popular frontism in Ceylon and Chile, as documented below. It was only when the POR's policies came to their inevitably disastrous fruition in a rightist coup, and when the SLL-WL needed a factional stick to beat the OCI-POR, that the Healyite bandits rediscovered Trotskyism for Bolivia. In this they are strikingly reminiscentof their supposed polar opposites, the Hansen-SWP wing of the United Secretariat, which suddenly remembered Leninist orthodoxy in order to polemicize against the petty-bourgeois guerrillaist adventurism of Mandel-Maitan.

Will the Real IC Please Stand Up?

That the main impetus for the split was a power fight can be seen in the hilarious gyrations of Tim Wohlforth and his Workers League over the POR -- not over its politics, but over the question of its putative IC membership. In the 19 July Bulletin the POR, then riding high, was described simply as the "Bolivian section of the International Committee." By 30 August the connection between the POR and the IC had been disappeared:

"...Lora was carrying forward a political course begun over a decade ago, from which he has consistently refused to veer. At every point this course has received support within the Fourth International or forces claiming to represent the Fourth International.... "

If the reader knew who the suddenly organizationally anonymous Lora was -- well, okay. If not, Wohlforth wasn't telling.

The United Secretariat's Intercontinental Press was, of course, delighted to be able to point out that the man Wohlforth was denouncing was a member of Wohlforth's own IC. On 4 October the Bulletin attempted to reply to the charges of unprincipled combinationism and sectarianism, but did not deny the POR 's affiliation although such a denial would have been the most effective answer to the attack. But the 24 October SLL-WL statement declares that the POR "is not a section of the International Committee." The OCI has consistently claimed that it is. The treatment of this question -- at first boasting of the link with the influential POR, then ignoring the connection, then not denying it when asserted by the United Secretariat, then denying it later when a Healyite "majority" in the split is needed -- not only casts doubt on the present SLL-WL claim but, much more importantly, illustrates the utter hollowness of the IC pretense of Leninist internationalism. A prerequisite for any genuine organization, obviously, is knowing who is in it! Nothing illustrates more clearly the rottenness of the IC -- bordering on organizational non-existence, which claimed to be an international (and the Fourth International, at that) -- than its inability to agree on its own membership.

In fact, the IC never even managed to agree on its own name. According to the SLL, it was "the IC of the Fourth International"; the OCI has always called it "the IC for the reconstruction of the Fourth International." Two fundamentally different evaluations of the very nature of the IC were expressed in these difference over nomencllture: the British held the IC to be the simple, linear political and organizational continuity of the international founded by Trotsky; the French insisted that the international had been destroyed by Pabloist revisionism and the central international task of Trotskyists was to wage a struggle for its rebuilding. This difference was debated the 1966 London IC Conference and an internal exchange occurred between the SLL and OCI on this question in 1967; yet both wings continued insist that their adherence to "the IC" was a priori proof of their internationalism (one might paraphrase "the IC position" as: the Fourth international no longer exists and we are it!). The SL position is merely another example of its much vaunted "method" -- the creation of cynical, shabby Potemkin villages by which it seeks to dupe its followers -- in this case simply sidestepping the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International by a dogmatic and sectarian assertion that the task was completed in the form of the IC. And the French were content to coexist with the Healyites despite their numerous differences, the least of which was what their common organization was and who was in it!

The IC: Rotten Bloc

Healy and Wohlforth are now seeking to create an orthodox Leninist image for themselves against their picture of the OCI as unprincipled centrist maneuverers. But the mask keeps tearing, revealing the ugly features of an organization qualitatively worse than the grossly defective OCI/POR. For on every issue on which they indict the Lambertistes, the SLL-WL have in their readily verifiable history swung far to the right of their former bloc partners, in response to the most trivial appetites, ignoring even the limitations on opportunism observed by intelligent reformists in pursuit of the "main chance." The OCI is a serious political current with a persistently centrist thrust-i. e. an opportunist practice; the SLL-WL are both hilariously sectarian and egregiously opportunist.

The chief opportunist sin of the OCI is precisely the one with which the Healyites will never charge them: their service for years in shoring up Healy's claims to internationalism. The grave charges which both sides are now flinging at on another include not only sharp differences over current and recent issues, but positions of years' duration -- public positions of the competing wings when both sides claimed adherence to the same IC as proof of their internationalism! The main SLL-WL statement, dated 24 October, denounces the OCI for supporting a wing of the Algerian nationalist bourgeoisie, the MNA, in the 1950's; the 19 September OCI statement included a veiled attack on the Healyites ("those who attack the POR... are the same people who... ") for having "characterized Ho Chi Minh as a revolutionary" and having "subordinated the Palestinian resistance to Nasser, then to the petty-bourgeois leaders of the Palestine resistance."

We ask the OCI: If these things disturb you now, how is it that you remained in an international bloc -- which you foisted off on the word movement as a political tendency -- with Healy and Wohlforth who shouted from the housetops their capitulation to Vietnamese Stalinism and Arab nationalism? The Bulletin's laudatory obituary of Ho Chi Minh, which painted hint as a sincere revolutionary betrayed by Stalin, glossing over his own role in the repeated Stalinist sellouts and the murder of Trotskyists, was no more than a vulgar but consistent extension of the SLL-WL's years-long policy of critical (and sometimes not-so-critical) political support, rather than principled military support against imperialism, to the NLF. This position was of a piece with the Healyites' shameless enthusing over Mao's "Red Guards" in the 1968 "Cultural Revolution" intra-bureaucratic fight, treating Mao's mobilization of the student youth (and the army) as a surrogate political revolution in China. The SLL-WL's campaign of political support to the so-called "Arab Revolution" -- i.e., the Arab governments' move to deflect the aspirations of the Arab working masses for social revolution into wars against Zionist Israel -- was in flat contradiction to the OCI line of revolutionary defeatism for both sides; where was the OCI outcry then? It is not enough to have published your own positions while for years lending your weight to the cynical fiction at the IC was a disciplined international. Such unprincipled combinationism contradicts the OCI's pious assertions of its commitment to struggle "for the reconstruction of the Fourth International."

OCI and NSA

The conduct of the. OCI at their Essen youth conference on 3-4 July demonstrates that on the question of the relationship between the youth and the working class the Lambertistes' rightist course places them on common ground with the past and present practice of the Healyites. Under guidance of the OCI and its youth affiliate, the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme, the call was put forward for "the Revolutionary Youth International":

"Youth wants to live, in hope and freedom, and in order to live it must struggle. Youth aspires to life, youth needs exhilarating perspectives. Bureaucrats and bourgeois offer only a sordid life, unemployment, misery, failure, war and suffering. "

A main slogan of the conference was "Long live the struggle of the youth against the Stalinist bureauracy and imperialism!" The posing of the struggle against Stalinism and capitalism as equivalent reflects not only a persistent tendency the OCI's part to fail to distinguish political revolution in the Sino-Soviet states from social revolution in the capitalist states, but also a capitulation to current moods among petty-bourgeois radical youth, The conference and the propaganda surrounding it constituted an adaptation to youth vanguardism; the very concept of a "youth international," unless it is indissolubly linked with and politically subordinated to an international proletarian party, can only be at best an illusion, and at worst a capitulation to anti-Leninism. "The youth" are not a class: proletarian youth are generally one of the most militant sectors of their class; student youth are the most volatile sector of the petty-bourgeoisie, many of whom can be won over to a proletarian revolutionary perspective but only by becoming in effect traitors to their own future class interests. Thus the youth movement must be linked -- in conception, program and organization -- to the revolutionary party, which is firmly rooted in the working class and encompasses the historical and living experi ence of previous generations of proletarian militants. In short, a "revolutionary youth international" cannot be independent of the vanguard party and it cannot be anything less than Trotskyist. The OCl line over the Essen conference is an accommodation to youth vanguardist and spontaneist moods in the petty-bourgeois student milieu.

Moreover, at Essen the Lambertistes were openly courting the Spanish POUM and even the U.S. NSA. (The NSA was in the past disgraced by the receipt of CIA funds. In projecting the NSA as a likely seedbed for the U.S. revolution, the OCI has compounded its opportunist appetites by gross ignorance.) While chasing after rightist elements, the OCI committed a gross violation of workers' democracy by forcibly preventing an oppositional Trotskyist tendency, the International Communists of Germany (IKD), from distributing outside the hall a leaflet criticizing the OCI's refusal to base the "revolutionary youth international" on an explicitly Trotskyist program. Although it lacks the Healyites' world-wide reputation for thuggery, the OCI shares with the SLL-WL the reprehensible position that the use of force and recourse to the capitalist state are legitimate means for settling disputes within the workers' movement.

The Healyites in effect boycotted the Essen conference -- they sent a delegation of perhaps two dozen headed by Cliff Slaughter (by way of Contrast, the SLL-WL demands that virtually the entire WL membership turn out for yearly rallies in England) -- while bringing in an "orthodox" motion that the youth international must base itself on revolutionary theory, the Fourth International and the IC, which the Lambertistes voted down.

Healy and YSA

That the Healyite opposition to the OCI's pollcies at Essen was a provocation empty of principle is shown by the SLL-WL conduct of many years' standing. The abysmal political level of Healy's own model youth operation, the Young Socialists, is well known and exposes his new-found concern for the importance of Marxist theory among the youth as a fraud from start to finish. The WL's several ill-fated attempts to build a youth group in the U.S. have been notable for their singular absence of anything resembling Trotskyist politics; having once launched a short-lived youth group called "Revolt" whose program was determined by what the WL thought would be most attractive to Maoist street confrontationists, the Wohlforthites' most recent exploit is a call for "a Conference of Revolutionary Youth" based on an economist "Program for Youth to Fight Back" whose section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against U. S. imperialism.

The Healyites now denounce the OCI for its appetites toward the NSA, but their own orientation for the U.S. is no better. An internal WL Political committee directive dated 15 March 1970 earnestly explained the need to tone. down criticisms of the SWP's Young Socialist Alliance because:

'The perspectives document agreed to in England' proposed that the road to the American working class is through the YSA and it meant just that."

One wonders what the SWP oppositionists, rebuffed in their campaign to make the SWP adopt even the most rudimentary working-class orientation, would think of this apparent affirmation of the YSA's proletarian credentials!

the Healyites' chase after the Pabloists -- perhaps motivated by the awareness that their own international rotten bloc was coming unstuck --reached its high point in the summer of 1970 when, on Healy's ' initiative, they approached the United Secretariat leadership with a proposal for private discussions toward the aim of joint work and the holding of a joint international conference: The overture, which had the effect of shoring up the Pabloists' Trotskyist pretensions at precisely the time when they were experiencing significant left splits in several countries, was spurned by the United Secretariat as Joe Hansen, lavishly covering himself in orthodoxy, explained that such discussions without a firm basis in a deepening programmatic agreement would not be principled, The incident illustrated the symbiotic relationship between the IC and the Pabloists, each episodically making the other look good by comparison.

From Red Guards to Stalinophobia

At the national convention of the SW P's antiwar front group last July the Wohlforthites pledged their physical support to the group's sponsorship of bourgeois speakers in the anti-war movement and joined the SWP goon squad in beating and evicting the militants, including supporters of the Spartacist League, who were vociferously protesting the presence of a U. S. senator. The slogan under which they justified this capitulation to popular frontism to their membership was "Stalinism vs. Trotskyism" --which in this case meant excluding the (ex-Maoist, now theoretically state capitalist) Progressive Labor and the (Trotskyist) Spartacist League, in the service of the (ex-Trotskyist) SWP and the (pro-Moscow) Communist Party. (This convenient. Stalinophobic pose rests very uneasily on the WL, which enthused over the "Red Guards" maneuver and the Stalinist NLF and in its frenzy of appetite toward PL once went so far as to justify an incident of gross PL violence against SWPers.) Now Wohlforth -- who, at the time of the 24 April anti-war demonstration categorically ruled out seeking a united front, based on a class line against the war, with left-wing Stalinists ("In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists") -- is castigating the OCI for... Stalinophobia!

Where will the components of the former IC go from here? The Healyites, endlessly veering from egregious sectarianism to blatant opportunism, have never shown themselves loath to abandon any and every one of the ostensible principles in pursuit of new allies, dupes or masters. The OCI, in the past more stable in maintaining connection with a fundamental class line, but now loosed from its IC moorings by a rotten split -- in which it cast itself as a left cover for the POR debacle -- and launched on a youth vanguardist capitulation, may find itself moving further to the right than most of its cadres ever dreamed. The only' perspective which can open the road to authentic Trotskyism for these militants is intransigent internal struggle. Only by a ruthless examination of the IC split and its roots in unprincipled combinationism can the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International go forward!

Centrist Debacle in Bolivia (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

Centrist Debacle in Bolivia

The issue of the role of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the recent Bolivian events has become inevitably a factional football in the power fight between the Healyite (SLL-WL) and Lambertiste (OCI) wings of the now split International Committee. But in addition to providing a test of, the revolutionary capacity of both wings of the IC, the lessons of Bolivia are important in their own right, as a verification, in the breech, of the lessons of the October Revolution of 1917. The POR is an avowedly Trotskyist organization under the leadership of Guillermo Lora, which since 1970 has claimed agreement with the anti-revisionist avowals of the IC. Despite its opportunist policy following the 1952 Bolivian uprising in Conciliating the left wing of the bourgeois nationalist MNR government of Paz Estenssoro, the POR is an organization which must be, treated seriously because of its considerable implantation in the most militant sector of the Bolivian proletariat, the tin miners.

People's Assembly

The POR played an active role in the People's Assembly which came into existence under the bonapartist regime of left militarist General Juan Jose Torres, which was overthrown by the rightist coup of General Hugo Banzer in August. The People's Assembly was composed of a majority of representatives from working-class organizations and included representatives of the significant left political organizations. The basis for adherence to the People's Assembly was defined as support to the Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Central Obrera Boliviana, the main trade union federation, which is heavily influenced by left nationalists and Stalinists. The People's Assembly pledged to lead the struggle against imperialism and for socialism:

"The People's Assembly is a revolutionary anti-imperialist front led by the proletariat, constituted by the Central Obrera Boliviana, the trade union confederations and federations of a national character, the people's organizations and the political parties of revolutionary orientation. It recognizes as its political
leadership the proletariat and declares that its program is the Political Theses
passed by the Fourth Congress of the COB, held in May 1970....
"The People's Assembly constitutes itself as the leadership and unifying center of
the anti-imperialist movement and its fundamental goal consists in attaining
national liberation and the establishment of socialism in Bolivia.
(from the statutes of the People's Assembly, reprinted in the POR organ Masas of 13 July 1971)

According to the POR, the People's Assembly was a body of the soviet type which had the potential to become an institution of dual power - i.e., that it was an embryonic workers government within and in contradiction to the bourgeois government under Torres. Masas engaged in occasional sharp criticism of the CP for pursuing a "rightist and pro-government line" in the Assembly but did not systematically expose the CP and the other reformist parties for their betrayal of the working class in attempting to subordinate the Assembly to Torres, devoting at least as much emphasis to praising the Assembly and defending it against "leftist" detractors.

Centrist Vacillation

Even on the basis of insufficient documentation, what emerges clearly is a pattern of centrist vacillation on the part of the POR. For example, in an article written by Guillermo Lora after Banzer's coup is the admission:

"At this time [October 1970] everybody thought - including we Marxists -
that the arms would be given by the governing military team, which would
consider that only through resting on the masses and giving them adequate
firepower could they at least neutralize the gorila right.
This position was completely wrong...."
(Bulletin, 27 September 1971)

To have placed any confidence in Torres to arm the masses shows the most severe
disorientation on the part of the POR over the crucial question of the class
nature of the state. Torres was a bonapartist seeking to balance between the
working class, roused by a foretaste of power and eager to struggle for its own,
class rule, and the reactionary generals - at the head of a
bourgeois state. Although forced to grant concessions to the
masses, Torres, as Lora points out:

"...preferred to capitulate to his fellow generals before arming masses who showed signs of taking the road to socialism and whose mobilization put in serious danger the army as an institution."

The issue is clear, but the attitude and role of the POR is not. For in the 31 May 1971 issue of Masas we find a call for the formation of independent workers and peasants militias and the categorical assertion that: "General Torres Will never arm the workers and peasants militias. "

An article in the SLL's Workers Press of 24 August quotes POR leader Filemon Escobar:

"...we will work for political objectives that help radicalize the present process - for example, worker-participation in COMIBOL [Bolivian Mining Corporation]."

And Lora's Bulletin article speaks of "the danger to the state that majority working class participation in COMIBOL would mean." Yet a major article in the 31 May Masas exposes the plan for "worker-participation at COMIBOL as the point of departure for the bureaucratization and political control over the 'worker-managers' on the part of the state," counterposing to this the demand for "workers control - with veto rights" and pointing out that workers control does not obviate the class struggle.

A severe blunting of a hard Leninist edge is apparent in an article in the 9 May Masas which states:

"...the fundamental contradiction in Bolivia is nothing else than that which exists between the proletariat and imperialism."

Our question is simple: what role does the national bourgeoisie play in this schema? For the fatal illusion fostered by the nationalist-Stalinist cabal was precisely the conception of the "anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie as an ally. What was required of the POR was precisely to break the working class from subordination to the "revolutionary," "anti-imperialist" regime of Torres. To Marxists, the counterposed class forces are the working class supported by the peasantry on the one side and the bourgeoisie – both the puppets of imperialism and the "progressive" nationalist wing – on the other.

The OCI's response to the grave accusations levelled against the POR is an attempt to bluff it out. The 19 September statement declares:

“…the coup d'etat organized by the CIA and the military dictators of Brazil and Argentina and facilitated by the action of the Torres government is the proof that the policy carried by the POR was fundamentally based on the interests of the Bolivian proletariat...
“... All those who attack the POR through this, represent the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They take the sides of imperialism and Stalinism. They are agents of counterrevolution and are enemies, conscious or unconscious, of the Fourth International.”

This kind of argumentation can simply be dismissed out of hand. As Trotskyists, we have listened too many times to the hysterical accusations of Stalinists of all stripes along the same lines: the ferocity of U.S. imperialism's aggression against the NLF and the North Vietnamese regimes proves that their leaderships have not sold out; all those who attack Chairman Mao are taking the side of imperialism; Trotsky was a conscious or unconscious agent of fascism; those who stand in opposition to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, ad nauseam. We only that this "defense" of the POR says nothing about the POR but a great deal to the discredit of the OCI.

The OCI asserts that the People's Assembly was "under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR." This statement is open to question. In an interview in the 9 August Bulletin, POR leader Victor Sossa States that "the POR represented only around 20 per cent of the delegates, perhaps a little more." Yet he expected that the Assembly, still predominantly influenced by Stalinists, bourgeois nationalism and "ultra-left adventurist petty-bourgeois groups, " to do the following:

"In the case of a coup the People's Assembly will call a general strike, will assume the military and political command of the masses. The decision to go over to the systematic organization of militias is geared to this perspective and prepares the working class for the inevitable confrontation, the fight to fully install its own government, the workers and peasants government."

The question here is not whether the POR had already established its hegemony over the workers organizations, but whether it was struggling to do so - whether the POR's perspective was to expose the reformists' and nationalists' treachery before their supporters by demanding that the Assembly counterpose itself to the regime, breaking all ties with the regime and struggling to establish a workers and peasants government - i. e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would appear that the POR placed political confidence in the Assembly under its existing leadership.

Soviets: Form vs Content

What was the role of the POR within the People's Assembly? The OCI notes that:

"...the setting up of the People's Assembly expresses the fundamental trend of the period, the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power."

But Allende's Popular Front government in Chile, for example, also without doubt represents "the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power" – yet we know that the Chilean masses have been terribly deceived and they are likely to pay for their misleaders' promises in blood. The willingness of the working masses to struggle is not in dispute. In Bolivia, as in Chile, Spain, Vietnam and dozens of other instances, the question is whether their combative heroism has been betrayed.

The OCI declares:

"It is the unity in and around the People's Assembly, organ of dual power, which under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR, dominated the whole revolutionary process before and after the confrontations of August 20-23."

What does it mean to acclaim the "unity in and around the People's Assembly"? If the People's Assembly was indeed an embryonic soviet form, how was the struggle for its leadership carried out? A soviet is a united front of the working class raised to the level of struggling for power. There is nothing sacred about the soviet or any other united front form. Soviets arise, even spontaneously, in revolutionary crises as the proletarian axis in the dual power situation, with the potential under revolutionary leadership to oust the bourgeois state power and become the agency of working-class rule – i.e. to consummate the revolution on the national plane. They are the best arena in which the Bolsheviks can demonstrate their superiority in carrying forward the tasks implicit in the soviet as an embryonic form of the state of a different class: the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A Menshevik-led soviet, for example, may indeed be an authentic soviet – but it will inevitably betray. Thus a Leninist call for the formation of soviets, for power to the soviets, must contain within it the perspective of struggle within the soviet: in order to demonstrate to the workers that it is they, unlike the revisionists and reformists, who have nothing to fear from soviet power and that only their policy can achieve and defend it. The existence of a soviet is in itself no guarantee of revolutionary principle. (Even the Stalinists have called – bureaucratically, to be sure – for the formation of soviets in their "left" zigzags, after having doomed the workers in advance by their policies – policies which guaranteed the ruin of the soviet.) Without the presence of revolutionaries intransigently struggling at every point to expose before the working class the traitorous misleaders within its ranks, the People's Assembly offered no more promise for the Bolivian proletarian revolution than George Meany's AFL-CIO raised to the political level. Does the OCI really want to boast that the POR expounded "unity in and around the People's Assembly"?

When questions of power politics between the wings of the IC were not so clearly and ultimatistically posed, the OCI was willing to take a more critical attitude toward the POR on precisely this question. A letter to the POR leadership dated 30 July 1970 and later published in the Lambertistes' public theoretical magazine discussed the COB Theses which the POR had helped prepare and voted for. The sections of the COB document singled out for sharp criticism by the OCI include the following:

"In order to attain socialism, it seems necessary first of all to make a unity of all the revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces. The people's anti-imperialist revolution is linked to the struggle for socialism. The people's front is an alliance of related classes, and the unitary instrument for making the revolution. The expulsion of imperialism and the realization of national and democratic tasks will render possible the socialist revolution." (La Verite, October 1970)

What this paragraph sets forward is the Menshevik theory of stages, pure and simple – first national liberation, then socialist revolution. It is the classic reformist rationale for class collaboration, which has led to the most bitter and bloody defeats for the working class. And yet the POR supported this resolution and continued to acclaim it in Masas. Instead of struggling around this question, the POR compromised around a contradictory hodge-podge document which contained affirmations of internationalism, condemnations of class collaboration alongside praise of the so-called "socialist" nations and clear popular frontism.

It speaks well of the Lambertistes that they were willing to raise to the POR and subsequently make public their criticisms of the POR's departure from principle. Now, however, the OCI's opportunism has gained the upper hand, and so all critics of the POR become "agents of counterrevolution"!

And what of the POR's conduct since the coup? The 6 December issue of the SWP's Intercontinental Press reprints a declaration signed by the POR – along with the Communist Party, the "POR" of the Moscoso Pabloists, left nationalist groups and General Torres himself! The document again pays lip service to "the leadership of the proletariat, the ruling class of the revolutionary process" but the tone of the document is nationalist-populist ("revolutionary priests," "revolutionary officers," "patriots," "the power is now in the hands of foreigners," etc.) and its core is the following:

“Therefore the need is undeniable to build a fighting unity of all the revolutionary democratic and progressive forces that the great battle can be begun in conditions offering a real perspective for a popular and national government....
"This is not a battle that concerns only one sector of the exploited people, or one class, institution or party. ... Any form of sectarianism is counterrevolutionary. Let us be worthy of the sacrifice of those who fell August 21 defending Bolivia." (our emphasis)

In fact, the declaration is a classic popular front which subordinates the working class to alien class forces and ideologies to which it is in fundamental and irreconcilable opposition.

Healyite Pop Frontism

For the political bandits of the Healyite SLL-WL, the OCI's decision to march in lockstep behind the POR is a godsend, a cheap way to assert their Leninist orthodoxy and cast themselves as the principled left wing in the IC split. But the real difference between the Healyites and the POR on proletarian policy toward a "leftist" bourgeois government is that the POR has had the opportunity to wreck a pre-revolutionary situation and the Healyites have not. Healy-Wohlforth have seized on Bolivia as a pretext for ridding themselves of the OCI, which was increasingly playing a dominant role in the IC -- and that's all. For although they would now prefer to bury it, the Healyites have a shining example of how they would deal with a Popular Front bourgeois government: Chile.

The 21 September 1970 Bulletin advised the workers of Chile:

"There is only one road, and that is the revolutionary road of the October Revolution.... as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises...."<

Wohlforth's road is not that of the October Revolution, but of those Bolsheviks, Stalin prominent among them, who very nearly ruined the chances for October by their policy – denounced by Lenin and Trotsky – of support for the bourgeois Provisional Government "insofar as it struggles against reaction or counterrevolution." Wohlforth's statement parallels the notorious Pravda articles capitulating to Menshevism in February and March of 1917, filled with statements like the following:

"The way out is bringing pressure to bear on the Provisional Government with the demand that the government proclaim its readiness to. begin immediate negotiations for peace."

Against this policy Lenin declared: "To turn to this government with a proposal of concluding peace is equivalent to preaching morality to the keeper of a brothel," And Trotsky, in Lessons of October, said:

"The programme of exerting pressure on an imperialist government so as to 'induce' it to pursue a pious course was the programme of Kautsky and Ledebour in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald in England, but never the programme of Bolshevism."

One must be sharply critical, as was Trotsky, of those Bolsheviks who would have let slip a revolutionary opportunity if it had not been for the sharp correction of Lenin. But more than criticism is merited by the Healyites, who claim to stand on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks, to have assimilated the "lessons of October."

Lenin expressed his policy in an uncompromising formula:

"Our tactic: absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of the proletariat the sole guarantee;. . . no rapprochement with other parties."

Against Lenin's policy stand both the centrism of the POR-OCI and the Healyite pseudo-Leninist posturing.

And now the Healyites sanctimoniously denounce the POR-OCI for the same kind of Pop Frontist capitulation which they themselves espoused for Chile!

Healy lawyers for the LSSP

But perhaps an even purer example of Healyite hypocrisy is the question of Ceylon. The 30 August Bulletin declares:

"...Though less known than the evolution of the LSSP in Ceylon, the role of Lora and the POR has been no less treacherous and important."

For years, in endless articles, the Healyites have used the betrayal of the Ceylonese masses by the LSSP – which tail-ended the bourgeois nationalist party of Mrs. Bandaranaike and when it came to power in 1964 entered the government – as an expose of the United Secretariat Pabloists, who covered for the LSSP until the last moment. (The Bulletin has just concluded yet another four-part series on the subject.) And rightly so, for their role over Ceylon was an important verification of the SWP-United Secretariat's departure from Trotskyism. But what the Healyites are unlikely to mention is that they themselves are tarred with the same brush!

In May 1960 the SWP, then affiliated with the IC as was Healy's SLL, began to get increasingly nervous about the line and conduct of the LSSP. On 17 May Tom Kerry addressed a letter on behalf of the SWP's Political Committee to the LSSP. It states:

"We are greatly disturbed by the parliamentary and electoral course now pursued by the leadership of the LSSP....
"Your policy of working for the creation of an SLFP government appears to us to be completely at variance with the course of independent working class political action which you have always promoted in the past as a matter of principle....
"Your new political course also appears to us to be a form of 'popular frontism' of the kind promoted in many countries by the Stalinists since 1935 – that is, class collaboration between the working-class parties and a section of the bourgeoisie...."

Despite their concern the SWP leadership hesitated to raise this betrayal in the public press.

On 8 August James Robertson, then a member of the SWP, wrote to the Political Committee:

"I am addressing you on the matter of our party's public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the, Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party's entry into a 'Popular Front' electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.
"In raising this matter privately with several members of your body I was told that letters have been sent the Ceylonese and that your view is that for the present a greater advantage is to be gained by revolutionary Marxists in the LSSP through our remaining publicly silent, I must disagree and urge you to reconsider..."

The letter concludes:

"Comrades, that you condemn the Ceylonese ex-Trotskyist I have no doubt, but your failure to raise this publicly and with great seriousness does the movement internationally a disservice."

And what was the position of Gerry Healy, who now proclaims himself the world's only consistent anti-Pabloist After having written to the SWP that delicate maneuvers among the Pabloists were required in Ceylon, Healy on 14 August wrote to the SWP's Joe Hansen:

"We discussed at some length... the proposition concerning the situation in Ceylon. We think that it is necessary to write again asking for the fullest possible information concerning the present situation in the party in Ceylon.
"There is no doubt that they are in a severe crisis but if we take their situation and recent events in Europe it is not improbable that there will now be important developments inside the Pablo camp, This is all the more reason for us to proceed with caution – as you have in the past so rightly insisted.
"We are going to cable them tomorrow for information and we suggest you do likewise and hold up for the time being publication of anything in the Militant "

Rebuild the Fourth International!

It is their own sordid history which gives the lie to the Healyites' claims of internationalism and anti-revisionism. If the Lambertistes – who in 1952 launched the struggle against Pabloism never transcended centrism and have now hardened themselves in opportunism - their line on Bolivia and their conduct at Essen, the Healyites' pretensions of principle have always rested on sand.

Only the Fourth International – rebuilt in the process of struggle against all varieties of Pabloist revisionism, including the inverted Pabloism of the IC – can provide the way forward toward the decisive victory of the international working class.