Spartacist and the Healyites (1985)

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

Spartacist and the Healyites

The Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) first came together in 1961 in opposition to the party’s deepening revisionism over Cuba. The SWP’s line, which would be codified particularly in documents by Joseph Hansen, boiled down to the idea that the overturn of capitalist property relations in Cuba by a petty-bourgeois nationalist revolution under Castro’s leadership meant that Trotskyist parties were no longer necessary. Hansen, in classic centrist fashion, hid behind all kinds of saving clauses his central contention that Castro was unconsciously a Marxist revolutionary.

Leading the RT were three comrades who were the founding leadership of the SWP’s recently launched youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance: Tim Wohlforth, Jim Robertson and Shane Mage. These comrades had been won over to the SWP out of the competing Shachtman organization, whose final liquidation into “State Department socialism” they had fought. They were won to the program of the SWP, which through the stagnant 1950s had remained formally orthodox—as well as getting organizationally pretty ingrown.

The SWP cadres were themselves about ready to shake loose from their programmatic moorings as political life in this country had begun to heat up, first of all with the civil rights movement, which shattered the illusion of a seamless all-American anti-Communist consensus, and later with the polarizations brought about centrally by the escalation of the losing war against Vietnam. Emerging from the 1950s a weakened and rather depoliticized party still formally possessing a narrowly orthodox program, the SWP in its central core was now on the lookout for something “new.”

Thus the founding youth leadership of Wohlforth, Robertson and Mage found themselves increasingly at odds with the party majority, which was already in the grip of a centrist mood. Following a sharp fight over Cuba at the 1961 SWP Convention, it was clear that our comrades would soon be pulled out of leading positions in the youth and had to transform themselves into a minority tendency within the party as a whole if they were to continue the fight against the SWP’s degeneration.

The SWP and the IC

The SWP at that time was the main organized force behind the “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC), the international grouping which had emerged out of a fight against the revisionism associated with Michel Pablo. Pablo had risen to prominence in the Trotskyist movement in Europe after the world war had decimated the founding Trotskyist cadres. Beginning in 1951, he concocted a theory that a new “objective” reality would force the Stalinist parties to play a revolutionary role. Pablo proposed liquidating the Trotskyist nuclei into the Communist Parties in order to accelerate their transformation into revolutionary instruments under the pressure of this “new world reality.”

The SWP leadership’s association with the struggle against Pabloism was largely a reaction to the emergence in the SWP of the Cochran-Clarke faction, whose politics, adapted to the U.S. terrain, appeared to be similar to Pablo’s. The wing of the SWP leadership headed by James P. Cannon and Murry Weiss was deeply opposed to the political liquidation of the struggle for Trotskyist parties as indispensable instruments for the conquest of power by the proletariat. The conservative SWP apparatus (Farrell Dobbs, Tom Kerry, Joseph Hansen) came to oppose the organizationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke line as applied to the United States. The apparatus agreed to support Cannon in exchange for his relinquishing control of the party administration.

In Cannon’s concluding speech at the party plenum held in May 1953, he said

“During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the ability of the SWP to survive. At one time—I will frankly admit to you here for the first time—I thought that our twenty-five-year effort, compounded on all the previous experience and work of ourselves and others, had ended in catastrophic failure; and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick up the pieces, and start all over again to build the new cadre of another party on the old foundations.”

Cannon chose instead the compromise with Dobbs & Co. The bloc then fought Cochran-Clarke to the finish, while belatedly aligning itself with the anti-Pabloists internationally. The SWP’s 1953 “Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement” was a fine document but the fight was never carried aggressively into the various national sections to split authentic revolutionary forces away from the Pabloists.

By the early 1960s the SWP’s commitment to the anti-Pabloist IC had become empty, while the SWP and European Pabloists had drawn together on the question of Cuba—abandoning the necessity for Trotskyist parties. The break-up of the IC came in 1963 when the SWP and the European Pabloists led by Ernest Mandel reunified to form the “United Secretariat” (USec). The withdrawal of the SWP left the IC pretty much a rump formation, with Gerry Healy, formerly Cannon’s man in England, as the leading English-language spokesman for anti-revisionist Trotskyism.

Healy’s organization in England, then called the Socialist Labour League (SLL), had grown rapidly. It had regrouped out of the Communist Party, after the Khrushchev revelations and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, some people who wrote impressively in defense of authentic Trotskyism. And it had succeeded in capturing a large chunk of the Labour Party Young Socialists.

1962 Split

It was therefore rather a shock when Healy intervened into the RT in 1962 to bring about an utterly unprincipled rupture within the tendency. Healy claimed to believe that the position of Robertson and others that the SWP had become centrist meant that our comrades had a “split perspective” from the party. So Healy (who was still not sure it was all over between the IC and the SWP leadership) and Wohlforth, Healy’s American tool, presented the RT with an ultimatum that we must sign a statement renouncing our views on the nature of the SWP. Wohlforth’s bloc partner at the time, the state capitalist Art Philips, returned from England with the ultimatum, whose flavor is conveyed in this excerpt:

“We do not want to impose [our proposals] on you. If you do not like to accept them, then there is no need to accept them. All those comrades who do accept them will be considered as part of an international tendency.”
— Healy letter, 12 November 1962

The RTers in their majority replied they would accept international discipline in dealing with the SWP, but refused to lyingly recant their views. This was our first experience of Healy’s technique of blackmail — false confessions to destroy the reputation and self-respect of comrades and nail them into Healy’s corner for future fights.

In New York only a minority of the RT agreed to commit political suicide; on the West Coast, where Robertson had his “base,” the vote against accepting Healy’s ultimatum was 17-0. The split between the RT majority and the Healy-loyal group under Wohlforth, called the “Reorganized Minority Tendency” (RMT), was a crime, reinforcing the older party cadres in their view that the oppositionists were not young Trotskyists of the Cannon tradition fighting for program but unserious and unassimilable professional factionalists.
It’s not clear that Healy ever had much use for Wohlforth, or necessarily thought a viable American group would be built under his leadership. It is clear that Healy wanted no truck with anybody who thought discipline meant having a fight, taking a vote, then doing what Healy wants — if you lose the vote.

The RT and Wohlforth’s RMT intervened each in its own fashion at the 1963 party convention. Whereas the Wohlforthites counterposed their own long, turgid, pompous and cranky document to the SWP majority’s long, turgid, unexceptionable but abstract main document, the RT introduced a one-page amendment calling for active intervention into the civil rights movement, including getting into the South, and for recreating SWP trade-union fractions on a modest selective basis.

The RT in 1963 had already recognized as an important difference between ourselves and Healy/Wohlforth the latter’s affectation that it was possible for small Trotskyist nuclei to go over to a perspective of “mass work” irrespective of limitations of forces. A draft letter to Wohlforth’s RMT dated 18 May 1963 regarding the RMT material for the upcoming convention explains this divergence:

“We see one central defect in your convention material.... We do not believe that the way to combat the revisionists’ surrender of a strategic perspective of proletarian revolution is by counterposing a demand for the Trotskyists to undertake (everywhere and with forces no matter how small!) immediate agitational struggles of the working masses. This is a call which perhaps corresponds to felt inner-factional needs but which lacks reality. Your posing of our immediate task in every country as ‘the conquest of the masses’ creates an enormous discrepancy between this declared task and our means. This call is a slide into a sectarianism which tends to cut the movement off from opportunities as they are.... The general, but not sole or universal, perspective which the present world juncture demands, in our opinion, is one which places major emphasis on propagandistic work toward the crystallization of Trotskyist cadres.
Today in most parts of the world our task is to lay down the foundations for revolutionary parties, not to pretend they already exist and declare ‘they’ should struggle for hegemony over the mass movement.”
—Marxist Bulletin No. 3, Part II, published August 1970

The “conquest of the masses” pretense we analyzed in 1963 leads straight to the quintessential Healyite press policy: the daily paper for a microscopic group. An over-frequent “agitational” paper of an organization devoid of the organized communist cadres and real base necessary to actually lead masses of workers in struggle is not the “collective organizer” of anything, but merely the “mass work” window-dressing for a sterile sect.

RT Expelled

The RT had no illusions that the SWP leadership could be won back to the revolutionary road. But we hoped to remain in the party long enough to win over some experienced forces as the SWP deepened its right-centrist course on the domestic terrain. Healy/Wohlforth foreclosed that possibility when they fingered us for expulsion in 1963. The ultimate proof that we did not have a “split perspective” was that the Dobbs regime of the SWP expelled us for “disloyalty” because they could find no breaches of party discipline on our part. Dobbs authored the infamous 1965 “Organization” resolution to justify after the fact the first-ever expulsion of a minority solely for its political views.

The few years that our tendency got to spend in the SWP were crucial for us. Veterans of the party that Trotsky and Cannon had built—comrades like Cannon and Dobbs, Murry Weiss, Dick Fraser and Art Sharon—taught us some things that make us what we are. Later, Wohlforth (along with Marcus) was to sneer at Cannon as a mere vulgar “window-smasher,” en route to Wohlforth proclaiming himself in effect the first real American Marxist. That has never been an affectation of ours. James Cannon was that communist politician of his generation who uniquely emerged intact as a functioning Leninist from out of the decaying Comintern. In that sense, we certainly aspire to be Cannonites. And later on, when we encountered some of the numerous left splits from the USec in Europe, we appreciated more than ever that it was the American SWP’s unbroken continuity with Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Communist International through the SWP’s founding cadre which permits us to be different from so many European New Leftists who thought they were Trotskyists, having learned “Trotskyism” from books after Stalinism, fascism and war had physically wiped out the cadres.

The recent sequel to the reformist degeneration of the SWP—Barnes has only lately finally driven out and expelled the last of the long-time party veterans, so that he could finally surface with his denunciation of Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution—is a relevant postscript to the expulsion of the RT. Healy/Wohlforth’s discrediting split of the tendency was surely not the main reason why the party cadres stayed with Dobbs and Barnes (just recently Barnes & Co. gloated over how little trouble they had sliding these veteran layers out of leading positions and influence beginning in the late 1960s). Mainly, the party had come through a grinding period of perceived irrelevance and the cadres were pretty well used up politically; if something turned up that looked like a way out of stagnation they weren’t about to look it over too closely. They couldn’t fully act out their appetites until the emergence of mass discontent against the Vietnam War allowed them to become organizers of a popular-front “movement” under Democratic Party hegemony. In the meantime they didn’t resist becoming cheerleaders for Castro. Nevertheless, in a very subordinate measure, Healy/Wohlforth have some responsibility for the outcome which ultimately was Jack Barnes’s contemptuous wastage of these comrades.

When Healy got us untimely ripped out of the SWP he surely expected that we would just die, a few dozen comrades without too much literary capacity and devoid of international ties. Wohlforth, meanwhile—having failed to cement lasting ties with Dobbs by setting us up—engineered his own group’s expulsion. Now the two groups confronted one another in America, both claiming adherence to the same basic political program. We neither withered away nor changed our politics to make the organizational rupture look justified; we persisted in the ways dictated by our program, intervening where we could among radical students, the labor movement, the civil rights movement North and South. Wohlforth’s “conquest of the masses,” meanwhile, consisted entirely of his over-frequent paper.

We continued to press Wohlforth for unity and in 1965 we and Wohlforth’s American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) undertook unity negotiations. The minutes of these sessions, published as our Marxist Bulletin No. 3, Part IV, “Conversations with Wohlforth,” reflect our criticisms of the ACFI’s grotesquely opportunist practice and of the SLL’s political instabilities—e.g., their crisis-mongering, their stupid “orthodox” line that Cuba was still capitalist (at the same time as they had a perfectly Pabloist, tailist line toward Vietnamese Stalinism). The negotiations showed no tendency to go in the direction of fusion, but in 1965 Healy overrode his American group and proposed to himself meet with delegations from Spartacist and ACFI.

These meetings were held in Montreal in October 1965. The delegation from England consisted of Healy and Aileen Jennings. Healy’s initial draft of a unification proposal provoked a sharp fight by Spartacist over how disputes in the fused American group would be settled — by a body of the IC, meeting in London (Healy’s proposal), or by a conference of the members of the fused American group (our proposal). Healy’s initial draft stated that disagreements would be set aside “for consideration by the American Commission at the International Conference.” We fought for an amendment that the American Commission “would report back its recommendations for consideration by the Unification Conference of the two American groups.” The final draft was: “Tactical disagreements on work in the U.S. would not be an obstacle to unity provided they did not contravene the above decisions. They would be left up to the majority of delegates at the Unification Conference to decide.”

The importance of the right of national sections, within the framework of a unitary international program, to make their own tactical decisions and select their own leaderships is demonstrated by the degeneration of the Communist International under Stalin, reducing national leaderships to incompetent, Kremlin — servile hacks devoid of revolutionary capacity.

London Conference

On the basis of the Montreal agreement, a delegation from Spartacist went off to London for the April 1966 IC Conference. (Wohlforth stayed home and sulked, sending his lieutenant Freddy Mazelis to head the ACFI delegation.) We submitted to the Conference our draft perspectives document, and took part in the general international discussion. Comrade Robertson’s presentation on behalf of the Spartacist group is reprinted here. While the Spartacist group felt we could live in an international which had Healy’s position on Cuba because of its acceptable programmatic expression—the reassertion of the need for a Trotskyist party independent of Castro, combined with the defense of Cuba against U.S. imperialism—we considered ourselves obliged to bring to the attention of the Conference our disagreement with the Healyite analysis. Robertson noted: “If the Cuban bourgeoisie is indeed ‘weak,’ as the I.C. affirms, one can only observe that it must be tired from its long swim to Miami, Florida.” We criticized the IC’s enormous overestimation of the imminence of the final “crisis of capitalism.” And we commented that “Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites,” insisting that “in many countries a period of united fronts and organizational penetration into revisionist groupings remains necessary” to the refounding of the Fourth International.

It soon emerged that the question of reforging the FI was a main axis of division within the IC. Healy’s line — in contradiction to his draft document under discussion — was that the FI had been rebuilt and the IC was it. The Hungarian delegate, Michel Varga, acting evidently for the French Lambert group, which then failed to back him up, put forward the view that Pabloism had organizationally destroyed the FI, which remained to be reconstructed on the basis of the IC’s program. Our views on this question thus intersected a power fight between the British and French.

The response of Healy/Banda was swift. Following his presentation in the morning, comrade Robertson at the lunch break had informed Healy that he intended to miss the next session in order to get some rest. When the Conference reconvened, charges were leveled that Robertson’s “unexcused” absence was an act of petty-bourgeois, American-chauvinist contempt for the Conference for which he must be made to “apologize.” For two days wild and escalating political attacks on us were made by Healy, Banda, Mazelis and others. While repetitively making it perfectly explicit that we had had no intention of violating an (unannounced) Conference rule, our delegation refused to denounce ourselves. After reading out our final statement (see Spartacist Delegation Final Statement) we were summarily excluded. An internal circular by Al Nelson was instantly sent out to all Spartacist members from our national office. It read in part:

“After the ridiculous incident ... had been so grotesquely inflated, a verbal apology to the IC Conference for our ‘petty-bourgeois indiscipline’ was demanded of Comrade Robertson and our delegation. We of course refused and in a prepared statement stated that this was a violation of Leninist practice and represented singling out of the Spartacist for special ‘treatment,’ using fear and intimidation as substitutes for international discipline based on political consciousness, and that to apologize would be to vote for false charges....
“We must stand firm in the face of this unprincipled attack. Nothing must get in the way of building a revolutionary movement here as part of the re-building of the Fourth International.... Granite Hardness!!”

As a sidelight to this expulsion where false confession was made a matter of “discipline,” it must be noted that for the privileged French and English IC sections there was no discipline. The IC, it turns out, was for democratic centralism “in principle” but was in reality governed by the position that “The only method of arriving at decisions that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity.” The IC was thus revealed — to our surprise — to be not an international tendency but a bloc whose two main sections each said and did their own thing while imposing “discipline” on smaller sections within their respective spheres of influence: Europe for the French, the English-speaking countries for Healy.

In Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966), we reported the facts of the trumped-up expulsion and reprinted comrade Robertson’s political presentation made to the Conference. We wrote that

“the experience of the Conference, taken together with other evidence from the history of the SLL, demonstrates that the Healy-Banda machine subordinates real political issues of agreement and disagreement to the exigencies of organizational issues and personal prestige politics. That organizational tendency is itself a political issue of the first order.”

We concluded:

“We draw appropriate political conclusions from the organizational wrecking practices of Healy and Wohlforth. However, we do not close the door to them, much less to all those forces within the I.C. who are their victims.... So long as they remain on their present bankrupt course, we are locked in an implacable struggle to cleanse the revolutionary movement of their poisonous influence. We shall go forward, let our enemies beware!”

Gangsterism and the Courts: The Tate Scandal

In June 1966 another piece of propaganda appeared on the scene. The SWP, delighted at the explosion of the London Conference, and having gotten their hands on our documents on the split, brought out a pamphlet entitled “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International (Documents and Comments by Participants in a Fiasco).” Joseph Hansen wrote the preface, a clever piece (“He [Robertson] is in a foreign land...among unusual people given to unusual ways. In fact, of all the organizations he has been in, it can safely be said that he has never seen anything like this.”). Apart from a few incidental lies, like that the RT was expelled from the SWP for violations of discipline, the preface is truthful on the events of the Conference, while also making every effort to make us appear naive and pathetic. Thus, according to Hansen, the expulsion of Spartacist caught Robertson “by complete surprise (he came to believe his own propaganda about Healy being a model leader),” Robertson was “dazed,” etc. But the documents contained in the pamphlet—including an exchange of letters between Healy and Spartacist following the Conference—speak eloquently for themselves.

The Healyites, having for nearly three months publicly concealed the flimsy “apology” pretext for our exclusion under a smokescreen of political accusations, finally had to respond to our Spartacist article and Hansen’s pamphlet.

Cliff Slaughter got the dirty job and in the Newsletter of 2 July 1966 he contradicted himself exquisitely:

“Robertson was, of course, not asked to denounce himself as a petty-bourgeois, or anything of the sort. Such is not the politics of Bolshevik organizations....
“His very rejection of this, his insistence on personal prestige against this discipline, confirms our characterization of this group as petty-bourgeois, dominated by the ideology of middle-class radical groups in American politics, their ideology subordinated to the US monopolists and American exceptionalism.”

An IC Statement on the “Robertson Group” dated 9 April 1966, which was rather detailed on the “apology” fiasco, was finally brought out publicly in Labour Review in August.

In Spartacist No. 7 (September-October 1966) we denounced as “monstrous” the Healyites’ initial response to the Hansen pamphlet: the August 20 Newsletter had slandered opponents as “finger men for the State Department” and threatened to itself use the capitalist courts — Hansen’s pamphlet, said the SLL Political Committee, “is legally libellous, we shall not hesitate to deal appropriately with the handful of United Secretariat agents who hawk it around the cynical fake-left in England.” We concluded our article

“... we must state that for the historic short run at least we have been vindicated in the course that we steered at the [London] Conference and subsequently, and have emerged with our capacity to pursue revolutionary work unimpaired....
“It is absurd to describe Healy’s break with Spartacist as being our breaking from the Fourth International.... And if Healy’s wrecking sectarianism and bureaucratism have made the work of Trotskyists (including ourselves) internationally more difficult, we will go ahead: the world party of socialist revolution will be reborn, but toward that task Healy has been shown to be not a midwife, but an abortionist.”

In November 1966 Healy/Banda drew the blood line over the Hansen pamphlet with a savage goon squad assault on a USec supporter. Ernie Tate, who was selling it outside London’s Caxton Hall. Then they justified the beating, suing Tate for protesting publicly and also pressuring some English left papers who had printed Tate’s protest to back down and apologize. (Fifteen, years later, Vanessa Redgrave on behalf of the Healyites sued a sharp-tongued centrist, Sean Matgamna, for having said a bunch of hostile things about Healy that everyone knew were true.)

The recourse to violence signals contradiction between professed program and real appetite. It was the Stalinists who brought these “tactics” into the workers movement systematically — they, more than the previously existing kinds of “socialists” who made promises and broke them, had an acute conflict between their professed fidelity to the Bolsheviks and the example of the October Revolution, on the one hand, and their anti-revolutionary practice on the other. Healy/Banda’s characteristic methods of violence include the verbal kinds of violence: slandering opponents as “CIA,” “FBI,” “GPU,” etc. to isolate them and set them up for physical attack, and direct use of the state, especially using the particularly loathsome British libel laws to muzzle people and/or go after their assets.

Our response to the beating of Tate was to make the biggest outcry we could. We published Tate’s statement — an account of the assault and appeal for workers democracy — and headlined our editorial, “Oust Healy!” [Spartacist, No. 9, January-February 1967] In that article we answered the question always posed by IC sycophants: if the SLL has a good program how can it have such a bad “regime” as you say? We wrote:

“How is this contradiction to be explained? We say that Healy is an aggressive and greedy adventurer whose particular politics have changed frequently.” [original emphasis]

It was in 1970 that we recalled comrade Lenin’s term for a phenomenon like the Healyites: political bandits.

Programmatic Gulf Opens Up

Our call to “oust Healy” presupposed a continuing contradiction in the IC between formally correct program and corrupt “regime.” Within a year of the Tate scandal, however, the Healyites had resolved the problem by sharp programmatic departures from Trotskyism: principally, their embrace of the Maoist “Cultural Revolution,” which was at bottom nothing but an unusually degrading and violent falling out between sections of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy; and their line on the 1967 Arab-Israeli “Six Day War” when, in the name of fighting Zionist racism and expansionism, they embraced a totally classless concept of an “Arab Revolution” consisting of the despotic nationalist regimes which have cravenly colluded with imperialism and Zionism to dismember the Palestinian nation.

This programmatic shift into classically Pabloist tailism of “Third World” Stalinism and nationalism signified a clear political break by the Healyites from the political terrain of Leninist class politics. Earlier, while making clear our various differences, and refusing resolutely to capitulate to Healyite blackmail efforts in 1962 and 1966, we had remained unreconciled to the disunity of apparently programmatically closely related forces. Healy no doubt hoped to push us into drawing unjustified political lines—ideally, in his terms, we would call for a Fifth International and spin off into space. But we did not make Healy’s wrecking conduct toward us into the center of our political world; we consciously sought to follow the example of Trotsky when he deferred until after 1933 in drawing the theoretical balance sheet of the Stalinization of the Comintern. Only in Spartacist No. 10 (May-June 1967), after Healy had come programmatically unstuck from his orthodox posture, did we conclude that “These departures by the Healy group from revolutionary politics signal the transformation of the unclarified civil war between Healy-Banda-Wohlforth and ourselves into a clear-cut political struggle between counterposed tendencies.”

In 1967 the Healyites made themselves programmatically external to our own history. The full unfolding of Healyite appetite took a while longer. But the 1967 adaptation to the mythically progressive Arab rulers was the theoretical preparation for the Healyites’ grossly crossing the class line when they became open press agents for murderous Arab regimes, associated with the launching of the daily News Line by the British WRP in 1975. In 1979 we headlined, “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi.” The precise development of these corrupt relations with capitalist dictators — from the signing of an accord with Libya’s Qaddafi in 1977, through the applauding of Iraq’s execution of 21 Communist Party members, to the fulsome support of Iran’s theocrat Khomeini (the Iran-Iraq war making the latter two policies incompatible) — was admitted in nauseating detail by the U.S. Workers League’s David North in 1984, when the Healy/Banda IC machine had begun organizationally to decompose, soon culminating in its present spectacular implosion.

Healyism Implodes (1985)

English-language Spartacist No. 36-37 (November 1985)

[Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007: http://www.marx.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/index.htm]

Healyism Implodes

NOVEMBER 23 [1985] – The British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy and Michael Banda, which professes to be the largest and most leftist group in Britain calling itself Trotskyism, is in profound upheaval. The apparent bulk of the group, headed by general secretary Banda and leading theoretician Cliff Slaughter, has severed itself from Healy, the WRP’s historic leader. Healy claims 250 supporters, out of a total of perhaps 1,000 WRP members or a bit more, including film star Vanessa Redgrave. The two wings have expelled one another, both claiming the WRP name and both producing papers with the same name, News Line. To appreciate just what a traumatic event this is for WRPers (not least for the Banda/Slaughter side, which at first glance might seem in a strong position, with an apparent majority as well as physical possession of the headquarters and printshop), it must be added that Gerry Healy has long occupied in the WRP a position roughly equivalent to that enjoyed by J.V. Stalin in the Russian Communist Party.

In the pages of the British gutter press, the apparent ouster of Healy by his long-time chief lieutenant is portrayed as a rip-roaring sex scandal. Given the deep-seated puritanism of the WRP, the sex angle undoubtedly deepens the members’ shock at the charges, revelations and admissions that have been made in the pages of the WRP’s own newspapers. But at bottom, there are two reasons why most members of the WRP must feel that reality has come totally unhinged: (1) charges of hideous physical violence against members and of concrete, bloody crimes against the international working class have been leveled, and are in the main admitted; (2) the whole of the WRP leadership and membership participated in the cult of Gerry Healy, while Banda admits to having been Healy’s closest collaborator for 35 years. The slimy capitalist reptile press may headline “Red in the Bed” but for the thousand or so members of the WRP, the old story of the emperor who had no clothes is more to the point. And Banda’s got a problem: when Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 launched his attack on the crimes of Stalin, the question legitimately would be posed, “Hey Khrushchev, where were you?” But Khrushchev had a mechanism for controlling the whole process; it’s called a Stalinist bureaucracy, backed by state power. Banda does not have state power.

The Banda/Slaughter News Line (30 October) says the WRP Central Committee expelled Healy on October 19, charges having been brought against Healy on October 12 by a CC vote of 25 to 11. The charges against Healy were (Banda News Line, 13 November): “sexual abuse of female party members, physical violence against party members and of making unfounded accusations of involvement with the CIA against an international leader of the Trotskyist movement” (i.e., David North of the American Workers League). Banda’s paper presents the following chronology: a letter (see page 4) by Aileen Jennings, Healy’s longtime secretary and mistress, was sent to the Political Committee last July. Jennings charged Healy with violating “security” over a 19-year period by having had sexual relations with some 26 women listed by name. “The letter was suppressed by the political committee…. But other victims of Healy’s behaviour came forward to tell their own appalling stories of his brutality.”

In September, still according to the Banda/Slaughter wing, Healy signed an agreement with Banda and Sheila Torrance, then the WRP assistant general secretary, to “retire on the grounds of ‘ill-health and age’.” But Torrance switched sides and the decision was overturned, Torrance making the motion to expel one of the women who had testified against Healy. “This produced an explosion inside the party. General secretary Banda and other members of the full-time staff walked out of party headquarters in protest. They were followed by workers at four of the Paperback Centres, the College of Marxist Education in Derbyshire and the Runcorn works where News Line is printed.” Banda mobilized forces outside of London, took back the print works and “prevented the pro-Healy group from producing News Line.” A Central Committee minority, including Torrance, actress Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Mitchell and some nine others went into opposition on Healy’s behalf, boycotting the CC meeting which voted his expulsion.

Banda describes the WRP in these terms:

“…byzantine debauchery and bureaucratic violence, intrigue and usurpation of members’ rights which Healy symbolised.
“It is admittedly not easy to make this conclusion alter 35 years of close political collaboration….
“For reasons which cannot be fully explained here, the truth was concealed from me as general secretary over a long period.”

Ex-Healyites’ Revenge

Healy, who now calls himself “founder-leader” of the WRP, claims his present difficulties “cannot be separated from the brutal incarceration of Nelson Mandela, the Israeli Zionist bid to eliminate Yassir Arafat and the Tory state’s relentless attacks on Arthur Scargill” (Healy/Redgrave News Line, 6 November). It may console Healy to believe that he is the chosen victim of these powerful evil forces, but we doubt that the lights are burning late in Pretoria or even 10 Downing Street over his fate. Exuberant in seeking to drive an oaken stake through his black heart are, however, thousands of ex-Healyites, some of whom now occupy positions of authority, influence and responsibility, or at least can get the ear of a Fleet Street reporter or two. These people burn with a hatred appropriate for founder-leaders like Healy, Sun Myung Moon or Lynn Marcus.

The new International Secretary of the Banda group is David North, whose American group (concentrated around Detroit) is rated by the Healy wing in print as having 74 members. Indeed the capacity to lie about membership figures is sharply reduced, and Banda blithely sneers at the WRP’s former claims as if he’d never been a party to them: “It would seem to any member that there is a profound and inexplicable difference between the 250 members of [Healy’s] so-called majority and the oft-stated claim of a membership of 10,000 made by Healy and Torrance. What indeed happened to the other 9,750?” (Banda News Line, 30 October).

Banda has the WRP physical apparatus — the headquarters, the printing plant, the little country estate where they educate people in their travesty of dialectics. The founder-leader has himself and the Redgraves, Vanessa and brother Corin, as well as Alex Mitchell, who “was one of the few individuals who had read even less of Marx’s ‘Capital’ than the former Labour Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson” (Banda News Line, 7 November). Healy also has some film equipment retrieved by Redgrave via a court order. We were not surprised to see Banda deploring the use of the capitalist courts against the left which has been a Healy/Banda practice for two decades; Banda’s paper (9 November) remarked: “Another triumph for the Healyite school of judicial Marxism.”

A speech made by Slaughter on October 18 (Banda News Line, 16 November) said that WRP members “were physically and sexually beaten and abused, brutally and systematically, for years and years.” In the same speech. Slaughter boasted:

“At last week’s Central Committee, C Redgrave was ‘caught with his hand in the till.’ He was found to have removed the deeds to the College of Marxist Education out of the lawyer’s office where it was kept, two days earlier.
“The deeds name him as Trustee of the property on behalf of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Under pressure, he told us he had put them in the bank under his personal account. We decided he should stay on the premises, on guard, until the morning, when he could be escorted to pick up the document.
“Some hours later he remembered the deeds were in fact not in the bank but in his home, and a nocturnal exchange, of C Redgrave for the deeds, was arranged immediately.”

The bourgeois press is enjoying the WRP sex scandal. Writing in The Spectator (9 November), Jim Higgins noted:

“For some 50 years Healy has graced, or rather disgraced, the British Trotskyist movement. In that time, by a combination of low cunning, skulduggery, and verbal and physical abuse, he has created almost as many ex-Trotskyists as Joe Stalin. It would not have surprised me… if he had been expelled for grievous bodily harm, but that it should be for grievous bodily charm is extraordinary….
“Now he has been exposed, angry parents of young females lobby the centralcommittee for redress and even his chosen successor, Michael Banda, has turned on him, leaving him bereft of support from all but the wilder reaches of the actors’ trade union.”

For all the talk about sex, it is nevertheless not possible to determine if what was involved was brutal rape or consensual activity with young women or something in between. British centrist Sean Matgamna, in an article in the 7 November issue of his Socialist Organiser (reprinted in full in our own U.S. publication, Workers Vanguard No. 391, 15 November), observed: “But nevertheless it is also true that a considerable part of the ballyhoo against Healy’s sexual antics is both frame-up and an appeal to backwardness. Insofar as anything was voluntary in the WRP, many of the ‘harem 26’ must have acted voluntarily.”

The Tory rags, in their fascination with the glossy Redgrave connection, insinuate that it was Vanessa’s job to service the old man with guilt-ridden starlets. This is not a likely scenario. If Healy did prey on young girls, they are more likely to be the young daughters of party members, a captive milieu where Healy’s transcendental programmatic charm would have more effect, and where outraged relatives would tend toward keeping it quiet. However in any case, one can be reasonably sure that alleged sex crimes beginning 19 years ago have little to do with the implosion of the WRP.

Coup

The Aileen Jennings letter, in the blackmailing tradition long practiced in the WRP, was the evident smoke-screen for a coup by Healy’s long-lime lieutenants, Banda the bully and Slaughter the kept intellectual. Slaughter has reportedly stood for countless years of Healyite abuse for being an effete petty-bourgeois. And we know that for many years Healy has been stringing Banda along with promises that the old man was going to retire, any day now, and Banda would take over.

Sean Matgamna coined a Machiavelli-like maxim to describe what happened to Healy: “He who rules by fear and terror should not live to get old and feeble.” And to that we would add that infallible leaders sometimes have trouble when things go badly for their organizations. Over the miners’ strike for example – the WRP gloried in being an open instrument for the Tory press in redbaiting and isolating miners union head Arthur Scargill on the very eve of the strike – we’ve heard that the WRP eventually had to privately apologize to Scargill.

Healy’s aberrations, his penchant for shamelessly dim deals with truly sinister “Third World” capitalist regimes, his “dialectics” doubletalk, his cynical “security” mania, his organizational abuses, and maybe sexual abuses as well, were becoming an embarrassment and there was an accumulation of restlessness in the WRP at the top. David North put out some feelers to Banda and Slaughter, beginning with criticisms over Healy’s sacrosanct “dialectics” in 1982, and a very cautious private correspondence ensued which has now been published in North’s American paper, the Bulletin. Efforts were made at points to raise some criticisms in conferences, but the bloc partners tended to cop out on one another, leaving the whining North in a rather exposed position:

“Healy and the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party refused to discuss these criticisms…. The Workers League was compelled to withdraw the criticisms, without an answer being given, under threat that there would be an immediate breaking off of fraternal relations.”
– Bulletin, 15 November

But the WRP’s main principle of unity – that all power flows from Gerry Healy — had become brittle. Then came the Aileen Jennings letter – very probably simply a contrived thing from the outset – and it was held over Healy’s head. The Political Committee was still covering up for Healy, while simultaneously trying to unload him with a promise to keep his picture on the wall. In the infamous July statement, Healy agreed to “unreservedly undertake to cease immediately my personel [sic] conduct with the youth.” Banda’s News Line (6 November) claims that Healy objected to the term “youth”: “It should say: ‘Under 25’. As it is it’ll ruin my lifestyle.” Torrance then snapped, “Just get on and sign it.”

Healy was barred from party headquarters. But he apparently decided to fight back, and convinced a chunk of the CC that they’d better rally behind him. But not a majority. And then it all blew sky high.

Bigotry and Brutality

Healy mouthpiece Mitchell said that Healy “built the WRP almost singlehanded.” The Bandaites retorted that the members “want to know what Healy was doing with his other hand while he was engaged in this single-handed endeavour” (News Line, 1 November). We have no idea what went on in Healy’s flat. We do know that Healy is a thief and swindler, a totally shameless liar, a systematic and brutal bully, a drunkard, a braggart of founder-leader proportions. And he is a canting, puritanical, hypocritical bigot. Our own experiences with Healy were quite unsavory. We witnessed Healy extorting false confessions, glorying in slanders and lies, deliberately driving weak unfortunates into unprincipled positions – all of which drove us into hard and prolonged open opposition to Healyism. Our own contact with the Healyites ended nearly 20 years ago, when the opening of a political chasm between us made us very uninterested in the internal machinations of the Healy group, then called the SLL (Socialist Labour League).

The Banda wing’s News Line (1 November) quotes Alex Mitchell as having said, “I would defend Gerry Healy even if he was found to be Jack the Ripper.” It so happens that last October 26, the Spartacist candidate for mayor of New York appeared on a radio program just after we had first gotten word of Healy’s expulsion. She remarked that “to expel Gerry Healy on the grounds of bureaucratism is something like expelling Jack the Ripper on grounds of being a male chauvinist.” It’s not just that we have priority on the comparison – there are some aspects of Gerry Healy’s psychological profile that naturally bring the image to mind. Your classic Jack the Ripper goes in for sanctimonious preaching on Sunday mornings against loose ladies and demon rum – afte being out all night dismembering prostitutes.

Over the years we have heard a good deal about the puritanical practices of the Healyites: Young Socialist summer camps patrolled by purity squads, for example. The whole bunch of them are manifestly virulent anti-homosexual bigots – witness the A. Jennings letter’s hysteria over the idea that a homosexual had somehow slipped through and was carrying out party assignments among the youth. The Healyite organization has been a machine for degrading people. So now Healy is charged with sadistic sexual practices against young girls. Perhaps the burden is on him to show that in one important field of human activity he is not moved by the same spirit which has characterized his conduct in every other known department of human existence.

Now that the lid has come off the WRP, long-time ex-members are also talking up a storm. A clear picture emerges of an organization in which physical intimidation and capricious brutality were a system. Telling Healy you were quitting the organization, we are told, was the most suspenseful experience of your life: you could be beaten to a pulp and thrown down a long flight of stairs – or Gerry might pour you a drink, pat you on the back and wish you well.

Some years ago a former Healy goon told us of having participated in the quasi-kidnapping of an SLLer who wanted to resign. From a summer camp hundreds of miles away, a couple of Healyites drove to the defector’s home. He was not there, his wife explained, but out shopping. So they picked him up on the High Street, groceries and all, drove him to the camp, harangued him all night long until the man broke and said he would rejoin. And then they let him loose, without any money to get home.

A former prominent Healyite, who says he was himself beaten at least three times, tells us that in the summer of 1966 – after the London Conference in April, where Healy’s expectations were frustrated by the steadfast principled conduct of the Spartacist delegation – Healy went into a particularly psychopathic, alcoholic, violent mood, and several people were beaten at the ’66 summer camp.

We first encountered documentable Healyite violence with the brutal beating of a political opponent, Ernie Tate, in late 1966 on Healy/Banda’s orders. Tate protested publicly and the SLL replied by going to the capitalist courts to suppress the scandal. We responded by making the most vociferous protests we could and demanding, “Oust Healy!”

Our own experience also demonstrates that Healy has always been fixated on money. In 1961 Healy took over a thousand dollars from political supporters of the IC in the U.S. We collected this money for him based on the promise that the IC would make a world tour to pursue political opportunities, particularly in Japan. The tour never materialized; later we were told the money was used in England – and we were denounced as American parochialists for having asked. In the way of gratuitous financial chicanery, we recall that at the 1966 London Conference, where women comrades of the SLL slaved away under fairly primitive conditions to provide nice food, Healy turned a neat profit on their labor by extorting grossly inflated prices for the meals, thereby ripping off the foreign delegations. These unprincipled financial games were a harbinger of what the Healy/Banda organization was to become when it turned centrally to the pursuit of Arab capitalist gold.

Apparently the main route of financing for Healy’s outfit in recent years was a simple, perfectly legal arrangement. At the Healy printshop, a small number of copies of some Libyan Embassy puff piece were produced at a very high price. Meanwhile News Line was printed there at very low cost. So far as we know there is no law against a printshop having two contracts, one very profitable and the other losing large sums. The problem with taking Libyan money, though, is what you have to do to get it. Barrels of oil, buckets of blood.

WRP Alibis Near East Murderers

The WRP – both wings, of course -– is a Frankenstein’s monster appropriate to its creator. From early on, Healy’s programmatic legacy is “anything goes.” Certainly the Healyites have grossly and repetitively crossed the class line. Their nominal “Trotskyism” is in sharpest possible contradiction to the actual programmatic content of the WRP’s politics. Their service to Thatcher’s pals in the right wing of the Trades Union Congress to witchhunt Scargill is a matter of record. The WRP’s nominal position of “defense of the Soviet Union” has reached such a level of abstraction as to turn into its opposite: adding to their early infatuation with Maoist China, their hailing of Khomeini’s Iran, the Afghan mullahs and Polish Solidarność, the Healyites have come to stand concretely for the hostile encirclement of the Soviet Union.

It has been perfectly clear for some time that the Healy/Banda organization has been a captive creature of despotic “Third World” capitalist regimes which have the blood of the workers and peasants on their hands. In the WRP’s present tumultuous organizational situation, it has become impossible for those who along with Healy participated in hideous political crimes to avoid acknowledging that fact. Out of Cliff Slaughter’s own mouth comes this admission:

“GH [Healy] sought and found relations with bourgeois leaders like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Nkomo. It is not only that Marxism was distorted in order to mislead on their class nature. This Party, through Healy, sought financial support from these bourgeois, not just for this or that political purpose, but as a system.”
— Banda News Line, 20 November

This “system” led the WRP to commit a monstrous crime against the workers of the world. At the height of a flirtation with the Ba’ath regime in Iraq in 1979, the Healyite press hailed the execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party. With the Ba’ath regime moving to behead the workers movement through physical destruction of cadres of the CP, which has historically had the allegiance of key sections of the working class, the Healyites railed against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism” and applauded the execution. This was a logical application of the WRP adulation for the “progressive,” “anti-imperialist” Arab rulers combined with WRP anti-Sovietism. Now, six years later, Slaughter seems to have finally “discovered” that the WRP did some things that a group with that line might do:

“The thinking put forward in justification of these actions by the WRP was ‘they were only Stalinists’, ‘they were only Ba’athists’, and so on. The practice behind it was an unprincipled financial and political dependence on the Iraqi bourgeoisie.
“Now we know more. A News Line photographer was sent to the Iraqi Embassy with pictures of opponents of the regime… (At this point the photographic department comrade involved came to the microphone and said, firstly he did not recall the exact date, and secondly the faces of the oppositionists were concealed by placards.
“(Slaughter said he had asked the photographer before the meeting to confirm the report, and he had. Then another comrade who was a photographer on News Line came to the microphone and told how she was sent by A Mitchell, a Political Committee and Editorial Board member, to photograph supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party demonstrating outside the Iraqi Embassy.
“(When she realized what was going on she left the demonstration and refused this work. Another comrade came forward and told of discussions with Iraqi officials here, on documents as well as photographs, in which money was mentioned. This material is being investigated.)”
—Banda News Line, 20 November

Those responsible for this monstrous crime should be brought to proletarian justice. It is the entire WRP leadership which bears the central responsibility —and it is impossible to believe that the only criminals are those on Healy’s side of the current split. So “this material is being investigated”? Who, comrade Slaughter, is investigating the “investigators”?

Cult

There are two kinds of ostensibly socialist organizations in this world. There are those where, if you read the group’s paper and find yourself in agreement, and go and join the organization, it turns out to be pretty much what you expected. As examples: the Communist Party, the American SWP (until fairly recently, at least), the Democratic Socialists of America, the Spartacist League. The Healyite organization is of a different kind. It is a political cult. Formations of this sort can come into existence in the workers movement under conditions of a low level of class struggle, where there is therefore a considerable separation between socialist organizations and the movement of the masses, and little chance of corrective interaction. But these objective conditions are not sufficient in themselves. Also required is a leader with the appetite for cultism. James Cannon, speaking of the cliquist formation around J.R. Johnson (C.L.R. James), observed:

“In order for a cult to exist, it is not enough for a leader to have personal followers — every leader has personal influence more or less — but a cult leader has to be a cultist himself. He has to be a megalomaniac who gets revelations outside the realm of reality. A megalomaniacal cult leader is liable to jump in any direction at any time, and all the cultists automatically follow, as sheep follow the bellwether, even into the slaughter house.”
– Cannon, “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership,” 3 November 1953

An illustrative example of a cult is the Lynn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche) organization in the U.S., which is today a virulently reactionary outfit which seeks to function as a think tank for the far-right wing of the bourgeoisie. In the mid-1960s the Marcus group, the Labor Committee, was a leftist group active in the New Left milieu. We ran into them a lot at Columbia University, and when they suggested a debate between our groups on Marxist economics, we agreed readily. We sent our most highly qualified comrade, Joseph Seymour, as our debater; the Marcusites were mortally insulted, because we hadn’t sent our “leader.” But just because someone is elected head of a party does not mean he is therefore the ultimate fount of all knowledge and authority in every field of human endeavor. In ordinary organizations, there are dozens of comrades who have more knowledge and expertise in particular fields relevant to the Marxist movement. But not in Marcus’ organization. And not in Healy’s either.

Over the course of years the Healy operation has sought to create a totally controlled environment devoid of any risk of internal political struggle. The intimidation of potential critics through sporadic displays of gangsterism was only one means. The Healy group worked to keep its people on the run: the endless apolitical youth marches, the sales of the daily paper, the ceaseless exhortations to work harder because the final “crisis of capitalism” was (always) at hand. There was the systematic destruction of cadres: abusing them and then holding them up to scorn as weaklings, breaking down their self-respect by extorting false confessions, using their loyalty to the professed ideals of socialism to make them complicit in crimes against their comrades and the comrades of other groups. The use of these techniques was calculating, as was also the two-pronged effort to deprive the members of the ability to think, by the invocation of “dialectics” and “security.”

“Dialectics”: those hopelessly idealist lectures of incomprehensible anti-dialectical garbage that nobody could understand – except Healy. We even made a joke out of it: “only Healy knows which opposites to hold fast to.” But it was not a joke to the members, who were supposed to come to believe that Healy alone was the repository of Marxism/Leninism, chosen for this purpose from among the mere mortals, like Moses and the Ten Commandments.

“Security”

And on the other side: “security.” It has long been the Healyite norm that if you fell from favor, you would be denounced as a CIA agent or the intimate companion of such a creature. That is precisely what happened to Tim Wohlforth, Healy’s hapless toady and American servant, ten years ago. Wohlforth’s ouster by Healy afforded outsiders like us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Healyite operation (see “Wohlforth Terminated,” in Spartacist, No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). Of course, it was sometimes possible to evade the full treatment, if Healy had some use for you still. In that case, you would merely be denounced for not understanding “dialectics” – if you were American, you were sure to be lectured at great length about empiricism and pragmatism.

The monstrous “security” fetish of the Healyites flowered fully with the multi-year campaign called “Security and the Fourth International.” In an endless series of ludicrous “exposés”—centering on the despicable slander of Joseph Hansen of the revisionist American SWP as an “accomplice” in Stalin’s murder of Trotsky – Healy threw the net wider and wider, until just about everyone was supposed to be implicated as a spy for the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. The methodology is: “Watch out, they’re everywhere – and only your glorious leader can detect them.” “You say you have differences? – which are you, FBI, GPU, or both?” This is a way to keep people subliminally terrified – calculated paranoia. And just as Healy is the world’s greatest dialectician, so is he also the WRP’s James Jesus Angleton.

The Spartacist League campaigned actively against Healy’s “security” campaign of slander against Hansen and the SWP. We even held a couple of demonstrations demanding, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” Healy’s case against Hansen was nonexistent from the start. When Trotsky was in exile in Mexico, several attempts were made on Stalin’s orders to assassinate him, and he was indeed murdered on 20 August 1940. The FBI undertook a very minimal investigation into the murder of one of Trotsky’s bodyguards, Robert Sheldon Harte, an American citizen, kidnapped and killed in an earlier assassination attempt. The SWP cooperated with the investigation, and Hansen was the SWP’s liaison man. It takes only one piece of evidence to dispose of Healy’s claim that Hansen was an agent of the FBI and Stalinist GPU. Hansen at one point sent a letter to the FBI district director in New York: I’m going out of town for a while, if you have more questions you should write to me at 116 University Place. And 116 University Place was SWP party headquarters. What kind of spy asks for his secret instructions to be sent openly to the very people he is supposed to be spying on? The whole hideous structure of Healy’s slander collapses under the weight of that one critical fact.

But perhaps the Healyites are sincere in their “security” fetish, sincerely paranoid? No, they are simply cynical. This is shown by the publication of the A. Jennings letter on the front page of the Banda/Slaughter News Line. First they go after Healy for violating “security” with 26 women, because some of them might be informers, then they print the letter – the informer is the party press! On a different scale, the story of Stalin’s Katyn forest “massacre” proves something similar about the Nazis – that they were not deluding themselves about their death camps, their genocide, their Einsatz units. The Katyn forest massacre was a Stalinist excess, a mass execution of members of the Polish officer corps; each individual was questioned, and those found guilty were executed. When the Germans uncovered the mass grave, they went screaming to anyone that would have anything to do with the Third Reich – the Swedes, the Swiss Red Cross, forensic experts – and insisted an investigation be carried out by independent scientists and international humanitarians. This response to someone else’s massacre showed the Nazis knew right from wrong; they just didn’t care. And so it is too with Healyite “security.”

“Security” and “dialectics” are a system for control of the WRP membership. On the one side, the “dialectics” only Healy can fathom; on the other side, “security” with Healy having the only security clearance; the membership in the middle. The purpose is to create a strong structure, one in which anything can happen, as indeed “anything” did. The Healyite organization is about the most authoritarian structure you can have short of wielding state power as a Stalinist. Other such phenomena are the Moonies, or Jonestown.

What Next?

Neither of the two WRPs should have much grounds for optimism. On the Healy side one would reasonably expect a lot of the prominent people to drift away. The Banda group claims this is already happening and that’s why Healy’s newspaper has stopped publishing the names of its editorial board members.

The Banda/Slaughter outfit is likely to undergo heavy hemorrhaging of angry and confused members, who are finding it oddly difficult to believe that Banda and the rest of the leadership were innocents. The Banda wing’s youth press (Young Socialist, 2 November) says “there is now within the WRP a justified mistrust of the leadership.” Put more crudely, a lot of the ranks think the whole bunch should be expelled for complicity; it is reported that at the recent Bandaite conference a motion was raised to expel Banda for gangsterism. In the atmosphere of ferment following the split, the Banda/Slaughter gang has been unable to keep the members focused solely on the alleged sexual crimes of Healy, and a wave of revulsion has swept through the ranks over “excesses,” particularly the apparent collusion with the Iraqi government in the murder of leftists.

Inevitably, the Bandaites are having big trouble over cutting back to a twice-weekly publication, the members having had inculcated in them since time immemorial the idea that either you have a daily paper or you are less than nothing. Reflecting this fight, the News Line of 13 November says that the responsibility for abandoning the daily paper “lies not with our members who have steadfastly and self-sacrificingly fought for the Trotskyist daily” – it’s all Healy’s fault, of course. More than 20 years ago we pointed to the profoundly abstentionist thrust of Healy/Wohlforth’s proclamation that the task of tiny organizations is the immediate “conquest of the masses.” The search for shortcuts and gimmicks is counterposed to the necessary tasks of seeking to win authority for the party through propaganda and sustained communist participation in the workers’ struggles. For Healy/Banda & Co. the way to become a mass party is to pretend you are one: provide yourself with the external trappings of such a party, like a daily paper, and run about trying to dupe more and more people into believing it. That’s on the political side. Empirically, the Healyite experience casts a certain additional light on the effort to sustain a daily paper with hardly any members or influence - such an undertaking eats up a good deal of money. The WRP members who are now appalled to find out some of the services their party performed for oil-rich despots ought to give this some thought: the only “mass base” of the WRP paper turned out to be the exploitation of the workers and peasants of the Near East by their capitalist rulers.

The present split is a clique split, as befits an organization where political discussion has been driven deeply underground by the combination of terror and circuses. But there are politics in a clique fight in any political organization, even in the political cult that Healy built. In the Stalinized American Communist Party (which was not a cult but certainly had its fundamental fibre gutted by the cultist adulation of Stalin), political discussion often took place in a deformed way: “Do you like Browder?” “Well actually, I like Foster.” So some nuances at least of political differentiation will come out of the demise of the unitary WRP.

Healy has always been somebody’s running dog, but between working for Cannon and working for the Libyan government there is a class gulf. But in Healy’s mind there probably wasn’t much difference between seeking to ride the coattails of left-Labour politician Aneurin Bevan and becoming a political whore for Colonel Qaddafi. Once you discard the struggle tor the building of Leninist parties to lead the working class in the liberation of mankind, and take oil in search of get-rich-quick schemes, you will end up in a despicable place – if not a Healy, perhaps the more ordinary kind of scoundrel voting war credits for his own ruling class.

Healy is a political bandit, and the organization he built is an outfit of cynical charlatans at the top. If that were all, we would simply be enjoying the excruciating problems of the WRP leaders, who have it coming. But there is a tragic side to all this: the damage that has been done over the years to thousands of sincere young people who joined the WRP because they hated capitalism and wanted to take part in the fight for socialist revolution. The WRP’s posture of “Trotskyism,” utterly fraudulent though it is, is not without meaning for many members. And Healy/Banda’s organization has frequently done a competent job in exposing the reformist scum and centrist confusionists who people the British left; hence, the WRP is widely seen as the “hard Trotskyists,” the alternative to class-collaborationist betrayal. Now the members in the main feel profoundly betrayed, as indeed they have been. We urge them not to turn away in shock and despair from the ideals of socialism, but instead to seek to understand what has happened: we believe that they will find some of the answers in the history and analysis presented in this issue of Spartacist.

“Morality” for Marxists is inextricably tied to program. The Spartacists’ unwavering adherence to revolutionary Trotskyism — our genuine, concrete defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and against the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy, our commitment to building an international party of proletarian revolution — this has been our political compass. From that also comes a certain superstructure, a certain morality. We are fortunate to have been the heirs to an unbroken tradition which started with the American party of the Russian Revolution — the Communist Party — and continued through James Cannon’s SWP to the Spartacist League, the party which is today acknowledged as the Trotskyist party in the United States.

Phony “Dialectics” and Impotent Opportunism (1973)

Workers Vanguard No. 19 (25 May 1973)

Phony “Dialectics” and Impotent Opportunism

In a desperate attempt to harden up his organization against the impact of Spartacist League criticism, Wohlforth of the Workers League has been holding over the past two months a class series in New York centered almost exclusively on the SL. In an unprecedented reversal of WL policy, Wohlforth has permitted supporters of the SL to attend the public series and to speak even in several instances granting SL spokesmen extended floor time to make brief presentations. SL supporters have actively intervened in the classes and have succeeded in turning them into sharp political confrontations – of course, on unequal terms, with Wohlforth making presentations of one to one and a half hours and having the only summary. The SL has continued to press for a real, equal-time debate between the two organizations, but without success.

If the WL had ever maintained even lip service to the principle of workers democracy, its observance of standard democratic discussion procedure in this class series would be unremarkable. But the WL has a long history of excluding opponent tendencies (especially the SL) from its "public" meetings; in fact, only the night before the fifth WL class was held in New York, the SL was excluded from a public meeting called by the WL in the Bay Area.

Even the temporary suspension of the WL's usual exclusionism in the New York classes proved too much for Wohlforth to sustain. At several of the sessions SL supporters were prevented from entering the building by a WL goon squad until all WLers had been ad mitted. Inside the hall the atmosphere resembled a miniature deformed workers state, with Wohlforth revelling in his total power: Any protest by SLers to even the most vicious slanders (such as the accusation at the fourth class that a former member of the SL was probably now working for the CIA) was met with threats of immediate forcible expulsion. At the end of every session SL supporters were instantly herded into the elevator and every conversation with WL supporters cut off by the goons. At one point Wohlforth called on his thugs to "sit down" a member of the audience who simply wished to go to the bathroom. Then, at the end of the sixth class, after refusing in typical fashion to answer the numerous criticisms raised by SLers during the discussion period, instead devoting most of his summary to reading aloud for a half hour from Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, Wohlforth flew Into a rage when two SL supporters were detected reading the Bulletin instead of respectfully paying attention to this force-feeding. He proclaimed that, as punishment, these ingrates would be excluded from subsequent meetings, and, when the SL supporters at that point indignantly rose in protest to leave the hall, they were physically prevented from doing so.

Is Workers Democracy "Stupid"?

Wohlforth's fundamental stand on the crucial question of workers democracy was made crystal clear at the fifth session of the New York class. He shrilly denounced the Bay Area SL comrades for picketing in protest of their exclusion from the WL San Francisco meeting, terming the action “anti-communist,” and repeatedly made implicit but unmistakable threats of physical violence any time our comrades again publicly protest the WL's exclusionism. Going so far as to allege that the SL's protest demonstration had been intended to get the WL barred from the future use of public meeting hall facilities, Wohlforth stated that the WL had also often been kept out of similar meetings called by other organizations and that exclusionism is to be expected. He then went on to make the astounding remark that if the SWP is stupid enough to let us into a meeting, we will use the opportunity; if they are smart enough to keep us out we will never picket them. This revealing remark-delivered with appropriate pounding on the table-shows the real "method" of the Wohlforth tendency: sneering at Trotsky's fight for proletarian democracy, the WL considers exclusionism (like opportunism in general) “smart.”

To the Workers League, principles are “stupid” because they get in the way of temporary organizational appetites. The entire history of the WL demonstrates that it has never been restrained in pursuing its shameless opportunist zigzags by any consideration of elementary Marxist principle. To revolutionaries, however, it 'is opportunism which is stupid because it subordinates the historic interests of the international proletariat to short-term parochialism. Proletarian morality is not based on bourgeois moralism but rather on the understanding that only a conscious working class can make the proletarian revolution. Opportunism may "build" an organization like the WL, but it can never build an authentic working-class vanguard party. Thus the practice of exclusionism, preventing the open confrontation of different political programs, enables the misleaders to strengthen their hold over their followers and is inherently a weapon of the reformists and centrists against the revolutionists.

What has apparently prompted Wohlforth to permit even these limited and stacked debates with spokesmen of the Spartacist League has been the WL's inability to continue to seal off its membership from SL politics. Finally forced to confront the SL after years of relying solely on slander (such is his infamous "What is Spartacist?" pamphlet), Wohlforth wants to take his followers from, naive acceptance of his characterizations to hardened cynicism – to weed out any who might be disturbed by the exposure of their organization's abandonment of Marxism and to make of the rest fully corrupted opportunists who do know what authentic Trotskyism is-and simply don't care.

Organizational Stalinism

The purpose of these carefully controlled political confrontations with the SL (a full discussion of the issues raised in the WL class series will follow in the next issue of WV) is to harden up the membership of the Workers League/Young Socialists at a time when the organizational stagnation of the WL, combined with the recent striking growth of the SL, has rendered the Wohlforth organization vulnerable despite its characteristic use of typically Stalinist organizational methods intended to quarantine its members from authentic Trotskyist criticism. Recently, several New York WL/YS members were castigated as "SL agents" and summarily expelled (naturally without a trial) almost before they had time to investigate whether the SL does indeed offer the answer to their developing programmatic criticisms of the WL.

Through the liberal use of gross falsification of the positions of opponent organizations and the total suppression of internal democracy in the WL, Wohlforth has in the past been quite successful in preventing the emergence of any serious political opposition within the organization. Members of the WL are in practice denied the right of factional communication with other members, and are virtually prohibited from familiarizing themselves with the literature of other political organizations. As is also common in the Stalinist movement, the WL is divided up into "locals" which typically consist of half a dozen or ten members, so that any comrade with questions or differences can be effectively isolated and prevented from learning if there are other WL members who might share his views.

In the WL there is no real provision for the circulation of critical, let alone factional material to the general membership. Even members of the leading bodies of the organization have no real access to information, and their “rights” are mainly confined to the receipt of circulars which begin with pompous declarations of the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and end with exhortations about fund-raising or circulation drives. WL members who raise differences are immediately assigned to make “reports” on such items as Wohlforth’s big-lie “What is Spartacist?” pamphlet or the WL’s supposed continuity with the Fourth International, knowing that they must reaffirm the line of the WL on precisely the questions on which they disagree, or be summarily expelled. The holding of oppositional views on any significant question is likely to lead to immediate expulsion without recourse to trial.

Political education in the WL is systematically precluded by a frenzied level of deliberately mindless activity, which leaves the members almost no time for study, even of the written materials of the WL, let alone a chance to read Lenin or Workers Vanguard. Wohlforth's elaborate falsifications are the only version available to WL members of their own history – the actual documents of the formation of the Wohlforth tendency in the 1962 split or of the policies pursued by this tendency inside the SWP, for example, are not accessible to WL members except through the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin series. Even back issues of the WL’s own Bulletin are virtually inaccessible, not an unimportant precaution, since they are the skeletons in the closet which demonstrate incontestably that the WL has at various points in its history pursued diametrically counterposed lines on virtually every significant political question.

The fruits of this years-long practice of undermining the creation of cadres were apparent in the classes. SLers were able to dominate the discussion period due to the simple fact that, despite glares and prodding from meetings’ chairman, only a handful of WL supporters raised their hands and attempted to defend the line of the organization. Those who did dare to take the floor responded only with vague denunciations of the SL speakers exposures of the concrete opportunism of the WL over specific programmatic points. “SL hates the working class”, “SL is Pabloist”; “SL does not understand dialectical materialism”; ”SL rejects internationalism;” “SL has no economic analysis” – this was the litany. What was missing from the interventions and from Wohlforth’s summaries was any attempt to respond to any concrete programmatic points or to defend the WL’s wretched opportunist history.

Phony “Dialectics”

The “method" which Wohlforth constantly invokes like a talisman to ward of evil is precisely this: the systematic denial of the importance of program. Simply to proclaim oneself and anti-revisionist or a dialectician does not make it so. Trotskyism and internationalism are fine words, but the test is the concrete positions and practice of the organization and its consistency over time. Oh, Wohlforth will admit that the SL has “lots of positions” but refuses to discuss those positions – or the WL’s own positions.

The “method” of Wohlforth is completely counterposed to the method of Lenin and Trotsky, who struggled ceaselessly to draw the political lines over concrete programmatic issues. The basis for the foundation of the Communist International was not the vague protestations to solidarity with the Bolshevik revolution on the part of erstwhile revolutionists impressed by the accomplished fact, but the “Twenty One Points" by which Lenin attempted separate the real communists from centrists and reformists on the specific and overwhelming programmatic issues facing the working-class movement, in order to struggle concretely to overthrow the bourgeois order and to achieve socialism. And the founding document of the Fourth International was -- the Transitional Program!

The WL's pervasive "method" of' belittling program as a mere collation unimportant "bits and pieces" having no relationship to the organization's purported revolutionary capacity is all that stands between Wohlforth and disaster. When confronted with the wretchedly opportunist history of his tendency, Wohlforth takes cover beneath a barrage of idealism masquerading as dialectical materialism. Wohlforth's ultimate dodge for every concrete programmatic question raised by SL speakers at the classes was that the SL refused to recognize the primacy of “Marxist philosophy” over program. An SL spokesman who was granted extended floor time to present a position on “the Marxist method” began by citing SLL's own Cliff Slaughter, whose pamphlet “Lenin on Dialectics” explicitly attacks the view that Marxism be considered a philosophy as such:

"The science of society founded by Marx has no room for philosophy as such, for the idea of independently moving thought, with a subject-matter and development of its own, independent of reality but sometimes descending to impinge upon it."

The Slaughter pamphlet quotes Marx in The German Ideology: “When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.” And the pamphlet concludes that "we shall follow the path of Lenin in using theory as a guide to action, not as a system.”

Wohlforth is compelled to caricature Marxism as a closed “philosophy” unconnected to reality precisely in order to prevent consideration of the WL's history and program. It is certainly true that a grasp of the living method of dialectical materialism is vital to an organization's ability to preserve and creatively extend Marxism; it is equally true that there must be a relationship between theory and practice. The writings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on dialectical materialism certainly demonstrate that Wohlforth is no more a philosopher than he is a Marxist. But an exploration simply of the WL’s history on almost any political question would be sufficient to expose the Wohlforth leadership as cynically unprincipled political bandits.

Thus it does not require a knowledge of dialectics to understand that the WL's position on the 1971 New York police strike was a shameless betrayal of Marxism. The WL line that cops are in effect part of the working class (see WL Bulletin, 25 January and 15 February 1971) was an abandonment of the elementary Leninist position on the state, dictated by the WL's constant policy of sucking up to the labor bureaucrats (who, as usual, crossed the class line to hail the racist cops as their brothers). Every militant class-conscious worker should have been revolted by the WL's disgraceful capitulation. The purpose of Wohlforth’s constant abstract appeals to “the Marxist method” is precisely to dodge the political questions and drown any inchoate class instinct among his membership in a sea of mystical obscurantism.

“Philosophical” obscurantism and organizational Stalinism may be sufficient to prevent the development of any hard, cohesive or extensive oppositions in the WL, but they are not sufficient to insulate the WL from its inherent contradictions. Far from being able to build a mass Trotskyist party with these deliberately anti-consciousness methods, the WL is not even able to stave off disaster for its own little sect. Over the past year the WL/YS membership has been substantially contracting. The Potemkin Village-WL continues to shrilly proclaim the expansion of its apparatus – the acquisition of a new national office and an $88,000 press, the expansion to twice-weekly of its "mass" paper which (fortunately) is read by nobody and has no influence in the working class because the organization which it represents has none – but the reality behind the facade is becoming increasingly an empty shell.

The Old Shell Game

The WL has always pursued a policy deliberately counterposed to the creation of politically conscious cadre. Far from seeking to create a body of lifetime professional revolutionists who can acquire the theoretical knowledge and experience in struggle which enables them to develop authority among the workers as the carriers of the party's program, the WL has always pursued a burn-out policy which takes willing young revolutionaries and works them for a couple of years at fever pitch with promises that the revolution is around the corner, fully expecting that in a year or two they will drop out – politically uneducated, exhausted from the feverish make-work pace and demoralized by the empty promises of instant success – to become at best nonpolitical and at 'worst cynical anti-communists, having however in the meantime recruited two or three others to take their places. Those who do last must learn to accept and even glorify the WL's shameless opportunist zigzags and finally become as cynical as the WL leadership.

The operational motto of the WL has always been, “nothing succeeds like success.” The working class is presumed to be as cynical and non-political as the WL, to be won to “revolutionary” politics through admiration of a going concern and impressed by constant opportunist zigzags as “smart.” Thus the apparatus for a mass party – dozens of branches, a daily paper – will be established and the masses will roll. Like any group of cynical advertizng men, the WL leadership aspires to maintain a high profile at the expense of any real mass work. In 1968 the WL explicitly affirmed that there was no time to seek trade-union implantation and the consolidation of significant industrial fractions because the crisis of capitalism was imminent. Today the WL maintains virtually no trade-union presence with the exception of a couple of white-collar caucuses and a few scattered militants in industry whose sole purpose is to be featured in the newspaper. The organization is little more than a sales and promotional apparatus for the Bulletin, and the Bulletin' is nothing more than a radical rewrite of the bourgeois press. The WL's youth organization, currently named the “Young Socialists,” makes no attempt to train young militants as Trotskyists and future communist workers, but simply seeks to draw in, through various youth-culture activities, undifferentiated radical youth suitable for photographing for the paper.

Political Bandits

Behind this organizational charade, however, lies a-political method – the method of cynicism. Behind the WL's hysterical opportunist zigzags (which have included a nearly simultaneous chase after the Black Panthers and the New York City cops in 1971), certain features of the WL-have remained constant: crisis-mongering to keep the members going for another month or two (Wohlforth seems unaware of the absurdity of proudly proclaiming in one recent article that, unlike the SL – which recognizes ebbs and flows within the context of a world system which has been fundamentally unstable at least since 1914 – the WL has insisted that the final crisis of capitalism has been at hand since its inception as a tendency in 1962); crisis-mongering as the implicit excuse for the abandonment of the Trotskyist transitional program (the "logic" is that since the capitalist system has exhausted every option for maneuver and reform, therefore even the most purely reformist demands are revolutionary because they cannot be granted); an organizational practice which is a mockery of Leninist democratic centralism; the substitution of organizational apparatus for politics; the invocation of thoroughly phony “dialectics” to obscure political issues and explain away bizarre zigzags in line; the use of deliberately mystical appeals to “continuity” or “method” to substitute for the elementary Leninist understanding that the basis of the party is its program (thus Wohlforth's meaningless attack on the SL as “having lots of positions but no perspective” while dismissing crucial programmatic differences raised by SLers as “tertiary questions”); a subservience to the British Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, which has about as much in common with real internationalism as Browder's subordination to Stalin; gross capitulation to the Peking and especially the Hanoi wing of Stalinism, which reached its height (or depth) in an adulatory obituary for Ho Chi Minh, the murderer of the Vietnamese Trotskyists; the vilest trade-union opportunism, flowing out of appetites toward even the Meany wing of the racist and American-chauvinist trade-union bureaucracy, focused around endless empty campaigns for a "labor" party -deliberately stripped of Trotskyist programmatic criteria; the systematic use and defense of physical gangsterism within the working-class movement, exemplified by constant exclusionist “public” WL forums and the employment of incredible slander in the WL press.

Were it not for the destruction of subjectively serious revolutionary militants drawn to the WL by its professed “Trotskyism” only to be plunged into a cynical anti-Trotskyist whirlpool of fake “mass” activity and then discarded, we would be tempted to hail the WL's mushrooming organizational expansion – "Forward to the daily Bulletin!" – based on a declining pool of human material as inevitably hastening the collapse of this fraudulent pretender to the continuity of the Fourth International. A house of cards can only be built so high before it must inevitably topple. But as serious Marxists we can only deplore the political fact that the necessary destruction of the Workers League and other obstacles to the construction of the U.S. section of a reborn Fourth International means that the dedication and self-sacrificing work of many who began as subjectively revolutionary militants has served only to build a hideously deformed diversion which can play no role in the principled combat of the world working class for socialism.

Revolution and Truth (1966)

Spartacist No. 8 (November - December 1966)

Revolution and Truth

G. Healy, general secretary of the British Socialist Labour League, and his publicists in the American Committee for the Fourth International are evidently striving to compensate with volume for what they lack in cogency. Determined to do a "job" on the Spartacist League, Healy's efforts to discredit our "clique of petty-bourgeois friends" is frankly impressive: very heavy coverage in five issues of Wohlforth's Bulletin, four of the SLL's Newsletter, sections of the August issue of Fourth International, and a 38-page pamphlet reprinting the first six attacks. As if the split itself did not have enough of a Kafkaesque quality, Healy and his ACFI mouthpiece accuse Spartacist of "sectarianism," "declaring war," and "pouring out slanders and lies" – in replying to the attack which the Bulletin initiated.

But the split's grotesqueness must not obscure its seriousness. The Hansen pamphlet, Healy 'Reconstructs' the Fourth International, published by the SWP, only suggests the value of the breach to the revisionists. Healy and Wohlforth, with whose organizations the Spartacist League remains in essential political agreement, actually seem to gloat that unity with us was not consummated, yet we have already expressed our bitterness over "the temporary set-back to the world movement and to our prospects in the U.S.," "the resultant aid and comfort given to the SWP and to Pabloist revisionists internationally," and the "delight to Stalinists of all varieties who have for years attacked Trotskyists as unprincipled splitters." (Letter of Spartacist leader H. Turner to Healy, 30 April 1966.)

The Calculated Lie

A set-back of another sort has also resulted: ACFI's efforts to rationalize Healy's anti-Leninist organizational practices have driven these comrades into a truly appalling anti-Marxist direction: the conscious embrace of calculated deception as political methodology. Our comrades formerly in the Socialist Workers Party first fully tasted Wohlforth's talents in 1963 when, as de facto party prosecutor, his lying accusations were the basis for their expulsions. The April conference debacle has again revealed Wohlforth's and Healy's expertise. Striving defensively to project the image that everybody is a bit of a liar, they challenge our assertion that James Robertson, Spartacist editor and a delegate, was expelled from the conference for refusing to acknowledge our "petty-bourgeois" nature and other characterizations. These charges constituted the bizarre motivation of a demand for an "apology" for Robertson's absence from a session.

ACFI brands our version as "mythology"; but they and Healy have inadvertently let slip a glimmer of the truth. The 12 September Bulletin, While ignoring Robertson's several apologies to the delegates for an unintentional infraction of "protocol," describes the ultimatum thus "Only when he continued to refuse to acknowledge that he had caused the conference to be inconvenienced was his attitude characterized as that of a petty-bourgeois… . But he continued, for the next 24 hour period of the conference .... to refuse to apologize." Healy's letter of 15 April to Turner picks up the story: "At the end of this session … Robertson was then asked if he would carry out the unanimous request of the Congress and apologize for his attitude towards the Congress. He refused to do this and was accordingly asked to leave." (Our emphasis.) Healy's docile words fail to convey the full flavor of this verbal hate session, culminating in our delegate's expulsion.

Wohlforth and Struggle

Our ACFI comrades have been particularly hard put co defend, the allegations that we "write off the white working class as quiescent and oppose any agitational work," especially since this charge emanates from a group which in its entire existence has issued three leaflets directed to situations of struggle – and two of these were issued jointly with Spartacist, which has more than 90 of its own to its credit! Wohlforth's isolation from civil rights struggles, as from the labor movement, is reflected in his obsequious "Open Letter to SNCC" (Bulletin, 10 October) and more significantly in ACFI's incapacity to recruit a single Black member. Apparently as a wishful consolation, the Bulletin prints a photograph of a tin-hatted Black worker as its "Labor Scope" mascot; and while claiming to be "printed entirely by union labor," the paper lacks the authority of a printers' trade label – a suggestion of cynical ignorance of even the anti-scab traditions of militant trade unionism.

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But the profoundly cynical assertion of deception as a principle – which represents Wohlforth's abdication of any intention to function as a revolutionist – was learned from Healy, not Trotsky.

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Having many times acknowledged the Spartacist League's modest but real involvement in mass struggle, our ACFI comrades had to explain their post-conference public fabrication. After first expressing unconcern, ACFI members tragically began to suggest that dishonesty as such is correct in principle. On 17 September, at ACFI's first public function since their April rupture with us, a Coordinating Committee member privately boasted, in the presence of unafiliated members, that ACFI would stoop to any debasement to safeguard its connection with Healy. Similar cynical admissions began to accumulate. Finally on 2 October, in the first of several classes on "Leninism" (actually an Aesopian re-run of the split aimed at hardening ACFI's Membership) Wohlforth codified his "method." Discussing Trotsky's 1925 denial of Lenin's Testament, Wohlforth acknowledged that Trotsky misled his comrades. But, said Wohlforth, exalting this desperate evasion into a principle, "Trotsky taught us when to lie and when not to lie."

The fact that Trotsky's disavowal was committed at the decision of the leading body of the Opposition, and under terms dictated by Stalin, did not prevent it from accruing heavily to Stalin's advantage and producing no little disorientation among Trotsky's followers. But the profoundly cynical assertion of deception as a principle – which represents Wohlforth's abdication of any intention to function as a revolutionist – was learned from Healy, not Trotsky. In fact, Wohlforth takes that action which our opponents have sought to exploit as the "core" of Trotskyist practice and himself turns it into the essence of Trotskyist practice!

The minuteness of Wohlforth's literary sect does not deflect from the power of this poison. What is at stake is no less than whether the future Leninist vanguard – of which we today are the progenitors – will have the capacity to carry through the task of leading working people to revolutionary victory. But the proletariat's conscious understanding of its tasks, central to Marxism, is only nourished to the extent that the workers realize the clear and sober truth – including about ourselves and our opponents.

Treating this problem in Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky reasoned:

"The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves. There is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off defeats as victories, friends as enemies, bribing workers' leaders, fabricating legends, staging false trials, in a word, doing what the Stalinists do. These means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already condemned by history. But they cannot serve to liberate the masses."

The Bulletin itself of 29 March 1966, describing the "political methodology” of Progressive Labor, anticipated its own tragedy:

"It has been said by someone who probably learned the hard way, 'never trust anyone who lies to you.' ... It would be thought that anyone belonging to an organization that aspires to revolutionary victory of the working class would examine the history … and see the political method of the lie as an important component of the reformist degeneration of the Communist parties throughout the world.”

Wohlforth's Method

Armed with this "method," Wohlforth has had no difficulty in subordinating theory and truth to his tactical needs. Thus, to resurrect the slander of Spartacist's denial of the working class, Wohlforth in the Bulletin of 10 October isolates a quotation from our last issue referring to the New Leftists "image of an apathetic white working class" – in order to attribute this view to us in the very article by us calling for "arousing the working class" to a political struggle against capitalism! Similarly Wohlforth, like Healy, relishes in endlessly slandering individuals who break with the movement. Thus Wohlforth vituperates against Shane Mage while printing in the 24 October Bulletin, without a single acknowledgement, an article on Hungary almost wholly adopted and plagiarized from Mage's work!

Our experience with Healy's and Wohlforth's opportunism, which predicates such dishonesty, dates back to our original split in 1962. Rewriting the history of his relations with us in a series, "Problems of the Fourth International" (Newsletter, 22 and 29. October), Healy serves up as, "educational assistance" the ultimatum given our comrades then in the SWP – not simply to accept the discipline of his group with which they had only close but ill-defined relations, but to renounce their views before the party. Healy explains that he was "opposed to any attempt to sharpen up the internal faction struggle inside the SWP…" (Newsletter, 22 October), and, through Wohlforth at the time circulated charges of our comrades' "indiscipline" and "split perspective" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, June 1963); yet Healy's 29 October version endeavors to prove our alleged anti-internationalism by citing that we were "ready to accept SWP discipline"! Healy's contradiction reflects his flip-flop at the time: Healy was willing to police our tendency in exchange for a deal with Dobbs; when this proved fruitless, Healy had Wohlforth drop the "party loyalty" line and virtually invite expulsion. Our comrades, on the other hand, steered one straight course until their expulsion: a principled, vigorous struggle inside the SWP for a revolutionary program.

While Healy largely just rehashes the Bulletin's well-worn lies, these articles further reveal the man's Stalinist-conditioned idea of an International: not a disciplined collective of peer sections, guided by a democratically-selected center, but a network of puppets obedient to Healy for his "revolutionary integrity and rich experience." A dubious integrity, indeed, after the "rich experience" of "advice" to our "goodselves" like the following: "We do not want to impose [our proposals] on you. If you do not like to accept them, then there is no need to accept them. All those comrades who do accept them will be considered as part of an international tendency...." (Healy's letter to Revolutionary Tendency of SWP, 12 November 1962.)

As the servant reflects the master, Wohlforth exposes the political character of Healy; and their performance as micro-careerists repudiates their literary Leninism. The latest manifestation of ACFI's left-centrist behavior has been their electoral positions: in New York City they supported the middle-class Hal Levin campaign; meanwhile ACFI's man on the West Coast caved in to the "boycott" 'line Of the Scheer liberals – placing ACFI to the right of even the National Guardian, which supported the SWP's write-in campaign. Such opportunism links to Healy's own shortcomings which we would have sought to correct within the International Committee had we not been expelled: especially his tendency towards a Great-Power insensitivity on the national question; the SLL's tactical vacillations between unprincipled concessions and violent sectarianism; and the Healy regime's anti-Leninist bureaucratism. ACFI, parodying Trotsky, begs these questions by "defying " us to explain the "social roots" of Healy's practices. The Voix Ouvriere comrades have observed that while a bureaucracy such as the Stalinists' has a basis in social and economic causes, including the conservative protection of material privilege, Healy's bureaucratism is a product primarily of his incapacity as a revolutionist!

Trotskyism and Truth

While Healy's practices, aped by Wohlforth, increase our opponents' vulnerability, the Spartacist League takes no pleasure in the business; the 29 March Bulletin's sober commentary on PL ironically well-foretold our present assessment of ACFI:

"We do not simply gloat over the self-destruction of a political organization... Progressive Labor's behavior can have no other effect than to isolate and demoralize its own membership as well as creating, skepticism and mistrust in the minds of working class and student militants toward communist organization and struggle. All in all, a criminal waste!"

Yet Wohlforth assails us for not "closing ranks with the IC" by denying that a crime was committed! There is compounded irony here – the Spartacist League is politically much closer to the IC than, for example, to Voix Ouvriere, with whom we have strong differences over their state-capitalist position on the Sino-Soviet states, their tendency towards syndicalism, and their erroneous assessment of the Fourth International. But we, like VO, recognize that true solidarity with the International Committee forces requires that we help it purge its ranks of criminals, not deny their deeds. The honest engagement of this task itself facilitates the rebuilding of a Leninist Fourth International.