Workers League vs. the Unions (1993)

Workers Vanguard No. 571, 12 February 1993

Workers League vs. the Unions

For more than five months, United Mine Workers members have been battling the coal bosses with one hand tied behind their backs, straitjacketed by UMW president Richard Trumka’s “selective strike” scam. From the outset, Workers Vanguard has told miners the truth: to wage a militant strike “means a clean break from Trumka’s Democratic Party ‘friends’ like Clinton, and a fight for a workers party …. You need a class-struggle leadership prepared to take on the Taft-Hartley ‘slave labor’ law, court injunctions and the cops, as well as the capitalist politicians from plutocrat Democrat Jay Rockefeller to ‘right to work’ Clinton” (WV No. 570, 26 February).

When WV teams traveled through the coal fields of southern Illinois and West Virginia, miners were receptive to our call for a solid strike to reverse the gutting of their union at the hands of the coal bosses and the UMW bureaucracy. But the Bulletin (5 March) of David North’s Workers League (WL) vituperated against our article for “promoting syndicalist nostrums” and “bankrupt illusions in trade union reformism.” In a piece entitled “Trumka’s Accomplices,” after a few swipes at the craven apologists for the UMW bureaucracy in the Communist Party (CP), Workers World and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Northites turn to their real target, the Spartacist League: “The February 26 edition of their weekly paper Workers Vanguard carried an article which presented the bureaucracy as waging a serious fight against the coal bosses.”

And how, pray tell, do we do that — by our call, “Coal Miners: Fight for a National Strike!” (WV No. 569, 12 February)? According to the Bulletin, “The Spartacists issue their appeals not to the working class but to its corrupt bureaucratic leadership. They cover up the transformation of the UMWA under the grip of the bureaucracy into an appendage of the coal bosses and the government.” Similarly, North’s German followers recently denounced our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party as a “left fig leaf for the trade-union bureaucracy” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 14 May) for the Spartakist headline during the recent East German metal workers strike, “Metal, Steel, Coal: Full Strike Now, East and West!” (along with the kicker “Workers Must Fight for Power!”).

Interestingly, the 21 June Bulletin headlines, “It Is Time for a Nationwide Strike,” but they coyly put this in the mouth of a “West Virginia miner.” Above all, for the WL there is no possibility of a fight for the union to wage a national strike. Equating the pro-capitalist bureaucracy with the union as a whole, the political bandits of the WL are currently claiming that the unions are in no sense working-class organizations.

This is pretty rich coming from North & Co., who for years have issued endless appeals to the pro-capitalist AFL-CIO traitors to do everything from call a general strike to form a labor party! As recently as the 1990-91 New York Daily News strike, when striking pressmen gave the WL some heat over the lack of a union bug on their rag, we were taken to task by the Northites: “Spartacist never makes any demands on the New York AFL-CIO” (Bulletin, 16 November 1990).

The one constant for the Northites is their identification of the unions with the pro-capitalist bureaucratic apparatus which chains them to the bosses’ state. Thus the WL has never fought to unchain the unions. Quite the contrary, from Arnold Miller to the 1985-86 Hormel meatpackers strike, they have supported government intervention into the unions. It is crucial that class-struggle militants recognize that the regime atop the UMW today is the continuation of the pro-Labor Department bureaucracy that was installed with the approval and assistance of the capitalist government — and to the applause of most of the left, from the reformist Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party to the Workers League. In our coverage of the miners’ class battles, we have repeatedly pointed to the key question — fighting for the independence of the union from the capitalist state:

“From the Labor Department campaign of Arnold Miller, to Carter/Mondale’s use of Taft-Hartley against the long, bitter 1977-78 strike, to Trumka’s bowing before the injunctions of the coal company judges during the Pittston strike, the miners’ historic militancy has been throttled in the service of the bosses’ parties and the capitalist state.”
— WV No. 569, 12 February

The Spartacist League stood virtually alone on the left 20 years ago in refusing to capitulate to the Labor Department-run Miners for Democracy “rank and file” opposition in the UMW. Though many miners only came to. recognize Miller as the class traitor he was during the coal strike of 1977-78, we told the truth from the beginning:

“For communists, whose fundamental aim in the labor movement is to transform the unions into a tool of the revolutionary will of the proletariat, no reform can increase the power of the working class if ‘it is won by placing the unions under the trusteeship of the capitalist state, thus destroying the first precondition for their mobilization in the struggle to smash that state.”
— ”Labor Department Wins Mine Workers’ Election,” WV No. 17, 17 March 1973

In recent years, the WL pretends they always opposed Miller et al., whom they now term “‘reform’ candidates backed by the capitalist state. In the 1970s, the Labor Department put Arnold Miller in as head of the Miners for Democracy movement to suppress the powerful rebellion against the gangster leadership of UMWA President Tony Boyle” (Bulletin, 2 November 1990). But in the 1970s, when North was “Labor Editor,” the Bulletin (11 December 1972) hailed the MFD as “a real alternative to the Boyle leadership” and called on “all miners to vote for the Miners for Democracy slate, and to fight for this leadership to carry through a real struggle to defend the miners against the mining companies and the government”!

A few months before that, North himself held an “exclusive interview” with hidebound anti-Communist Steelworkers president I.W. Abel — in his Miami Beach hotel room, no less — where North enthused about the “developing break between the labor movement and the Democratic Party” (Bulletin, 24 July 1972). This was at a time when the Meanyite bureaucracy stood to the right of significant sections of the ruling class on the burning question of the Vietnam War. North reprinted excerpts from a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in which Abel “broke” with Democratic “peace” candidate McGovern, meticulously editing out his endorsement of the right-wing Democratic “Senator for Boeing” Henry Jackson.

Has North come clean after two decades of tailing the racist, anti-Communist AFL-CIO lieutenants of capital? Hardly. Since parting ways with his lord and mentor Gerry Healy (when their “International Committee” spectacularly imploded after the blood money from Arab sheiks dried up), North has continued as a political bandit who, as we put it, “will show any flag to attack any target. For this, the CIA-inspired graduate departments of elite universities attended by those among North and his crew were a good classroom. It, at the least, taught them how to write on every side of the question, like the position papers of the State Department” (“Why Should Anyone Believe David North?” WVNo. 487, 13 October 1989).

Take the “Russian question.” Trotsky argued, against those who wrote off the Soviet Union, that’ just as militant workers defend a trade union under bureaucratic leadership against the employers’ attacks, ‘so must they defend against imperialism the bureaucratically degenerated workers state. For decades — whether under Healy or without him — North tailed every anti-Soviet force from the “AFL-CIA” to Polish Solidarność, the CIA-sponsored Afghan mujahedin and the Lithuanian Sajudis. When Yeltsin formally dissolved the USSR in December 1991, North rushed to announce the death of the Soviet workers state. And in a grotesque inversion of Trotsky’s argument, North wrote off the unions as well, saying that “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (“The End of the USSR,” Bulletin, 10 January 1992).

Over 50 years ago, Trotsky wrote of “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (August 1940):

“They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no
room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can
either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the
subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution,
or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the
revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”

Subsequent historical development has fully borne out Trotsky’s warning. The anti-Communist trade-union bureaucracy installed in the Cold War is so beholden to the bourgeoisie that it has presided over the destruction of union gains and whole unions, like PATCO. Writing about the closing of the auto plants in Detroit, already a decade ago we denounced United Auto Workers leader “Doug Fraser: Company Cop” (/em)(WV No. 330, 20 May 1983). But the unions themselves remain the principal mass organizations of the working class, and the point Trotsky was underlining was the necessity for a communist struggle for leadership.

As always with the shameless opportunists of the WL, even as they deny that the unions are any longer workers organizations, this doesn’t stop them from appealing to the wretched bureaucracy in North’s vile campaign of helping to railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the SWP, into a 25-year prison term on frame-up charges of burglary and sexual abuse. Thus the 13 September 1991 Bulletin ran an article headlined “Iowa AFL-CIO Denounces Mark Curtis Campaign,” complete with photo of Iowa AFL-CIO South Central Federation of Labor president Perry Chapin! The WL reprinted the bureaucrats’ entire resolution, including a call on the national convention of the AFL-CIO to “refuse any support to the Mark Curtis defense campaign.”

And today, the Northites will in one and the same issue of the Bulletin (12 February) compare the UMW to a “company union” — which the workers must seek to smash — while trumpeting headlines from the coal fields calling for (that “syndicalist nostrum “?) a national UMW strike! Writing off the unions’ potential to act in pursuit of the class struggle and kowtowing to the pro-capitalist bureaucracy are flip sides of the same coin. Both variants exclude a communist political struggle within the unions. But though the WL’s two postures may be symmetrical, they imply rather different appetites, and one thing we know about the WL is that it determines its “political” positions by their utility in pursuit of egregiously corrupt (often financial) self-interest.

What new appetite does the WL’s anti-union incarnation serve? We don’t know, but we notice the Bulletin’s recent makeover into a yuppified, expensive-looking weekly done up in modish earth tones. The great prevaricator Stalin once boasted that “paper will take anything written on it,” and the WL evidently intends to prove that fancy paper will, too.

WL's "Vorkuta" Fund: Follow the Money (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 563, 13 November 1992

Follow the Money

Workers League’s “Vorkuta” Fund

With great fanfare, David North’s Workers League and its bogus “International Committee” launched a “Vorkuta Miners Relief Fund” last year, ostensibly in response to an appeal by Soviet workers in the northern Russian coal fields “for desperately needed medical and pharmaceutical supplies.” This was announced as “one of the principal decisions” of the Northites’ November 1991 Berlin “World Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism,” and the opening shot of the WL’s new “International Labor Defense.” The fund drive was scheduled to “run until February 29,” supposedly aimed at helping the Vorkuta miners overcome the brutal winter in the face of the ravages of capitalist restoration. Yet right through May, week after week, the WL’s Bulletin and North’s Australian and English acolytes carried impassioned appeals exhorting workers to “come to the aid of their brothers and sisters in the Vorkuta mining region.”

In “Workers League Vile Provocation” (WV No. 549, 17 April), we raised some questions about this dubious “aid campaign.” We noted that the Vorkuta miners “are not presently engaged in any particular struggle,” and that the Northites had not published the appeal on which the fund drive was supposedly based. We asked, “Could this be related to the fact that a few months earlier the AFL-CIO set up a ‘relief fund’ for Soviet miners?” The pro-Yeltsin leadership of the Vorkuta miners in the “Independent Miners Union” had well-documented links to the CIA, through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy and the AFL-CIO’s “International Department.” Two of these “Vorkuta miners” toured Britain in June 1990 — where they addressed a conference of the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” — under the auspices of the Russian fascist NTS, which has been financed for decades by Western intelligence agencies.

The Northites, who are wont to write voluminous multipart “exposes” on the Spartacist League at the drop of a hat, never replied to these questions. However, a month after our article appeared, the Bulletin mysteriously stopped running its Vorkuta appeal box, without further explanation. Nothing more was heard for months, until a front-page article in the 4 September issue of the Bulletin trumpeted “International Campaign Aids Soviet Workers,” claiming that “seven tons of medicines, worth over a quarter million dollars” had been sent to one “Doctor Alexander Apenko” in …the Ukrainian town of Shostka. This was supposedly in response to a personal appeal to a visiting IC delegation by the “Chernobyl Union of Shostka” in the summer of 1991. As far as we could tell, this Chernobyl “appeal” had hitherto gone unmentioned in the Northite press.

Whatever happened to Vorkuta? At the conclusion of the article the reader discovers those were the supplies that the WL had earlier “assured” would go “directly to the miners”: “Originally it was planned that the bulk of the medical supplies collected would go to the miners of Vorkuta,” but because of problems with “transportation,” “corruption” and “security,” the IC “could not obtain any reasonable assurance that its shipments would arrive safely in Vorkuta.” Yet in April, the Australian Northite Socialist Labour League declared in Workers News (24 April) that it had “this month shipped more than $40,000 worth of desperately-needed medical supplies” to Vorkuta.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said. In reporting on its fund drive efforts, the Bulletin cited the fears of Detroit union auto workers at a plant gate collection: “Expressing their distrust of the trade union officialdom, workers wanted to make sure that their contributions really reached the miners and would not be pocketed by either the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in the United States or the Stalinist mafia in the Soviet Union.” Concerns about what happens to money donated to the WL are certainly in order. Indeed, we wonder if the shift of focus in the Northites’ philanthropical efforts from Russia to the Ukraine has anything to do with the fact that an AFLCIO delegation traveled to the Ukraine this past summer.

Even a cursory reading of the Northite press, raises myriad questions. On February 28, the day before the (first) announced end of the campaign, the Australian SLL’s Workers News lists a total collection of $631.45 in the U.S. and £700 in Britain. Two weeks later they added $1,400 Australian. In a few weeks this becomes $40,000 Australian, and after it is “shipped,” the next issue of Workers News announces a $60,000 “Party Development Fund.” After a few months, during which the campaign never again appears in their press, the Northites’ international collection mysteriously grew to $250,000 “worth” of supplies. Perhaps cynical political bandits like North have been lying so long they think no one notices.

The financial chicanery and deceptions displayed in the Workers League campaign is not surprising to anyone who knows the WL’s history of political prostitution in the service of anticommunist reaction. In the “Vorkuta” campaign, the Northites, with consummate cynicism, denounce British National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president Arthur Scargill as a Stalinist, while condemning “the state orchestrated campaign against Scargill” (International Worker, 18 January) over the aid that Soviet trade unions sent to striking British miners.

Just who kicked off that campaign? On the eve of the 1984-85 British miners strike, when Thatcher and the ruling class were preparing all-out war on the NUM, the “International Committee” (then run by North’s mentor Gerry Healy) publicly crucified Scargill for opposing Solidarność — Reagan and Thatcher’s favorite union — as “anti-socialist.” Their redbaiting crusade was picked up, as Healy intended, by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress traitors and the Conservative bourgeois press, and used as a battering ram against the miners. It was Healy/North who supplied the ammunition the bourgeoisie used to go after Scargill and the NUM.

We have noted before that the WL’s relationship to the class line is that of a man in a revolving door. Presently, the Workers League is engaged on several fronts in acts of profound hostility to the interests of the working class — from being junior G-men for the prosecution in the case of imprisoned Socialist Workers Party activist and unionist Mark Curtis, to blocking with racist scum against black schoolchildren in Detroit. Revolutionaries gag at the mercenary “IC” trying to appropriate the honorable name of the early American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, led by James P. Cannon. In founding the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League has emulated the ILD’s strict accounting of funds through publishing in the PDC’s Class-Struggle Defense Notes a full list of numbered receipts for all in the workers movement to see. If the Healyite “IC” listed its receipts over the years, it would have to include the names of various Near East sheiks and bonapartist butchers who paid at least two million dollars for services rendered by the Healy gang as press agents, spies and provocateurs during the 1970s and ‘80s (see “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March 1991). Now that the money from anti-communist bourgeois regimes has dried up… .

Freddy and the Mob (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 562, 30 October 1992

Freddy and the Mob

In the early 1980s, as the Reagan White House kicked off a full-scale judicial counterrevolution — aimed at gearing up the state’s machinery of repression by shredding any semblance of democratic rights — it stepped up its legal vendetta against “the Mob.” As we noted, “The Reaganites want to institutionalize the frame-up principle, and what easier target for a frame job than vicious parasites like gangsters?” (“Feds Frame Up Mob,” WV No. 400, 28 March 1986). For the past ten years, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) “conspiracy” law has been wielded for murderous frame-ups of the government’s leftist opponents, wholesale attacks on labor, and general intimidation of the population.

So when the feds’ RICO dragnet finally got John Gotti, the reputed New York “crime boss” who last summer was sentenced to life without parole, we responded with a straightforward statement based on the understanding that democratic rights are indivisible. As we observed in “Gotti, RICO and You” (WV No. 557, 7 August): “Civil liberties, if they mean anything at all, apply first of all to those perceived as really far out — whether they be Marxists, religious sects (recall Rev. Sun Myung Moon or Oregon guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) or even in fact mobsters.”

One would think that any self-proclaimed leftist, of whatever political persuasion, would by definition be opposed to RICO even if only out of self-preservation. But not David North’s Workers League. A raving response to our article on Gotti by the Northites’ vice-presidential candidate Fred Mazelis, titled “The Spartacists and John Gotti” (Bulletin, 2 October), doesn’t even mention, much less oppose, the police-state RICO laws that were used to nail Gotti.

On the contrary, Mazelis takes umbrage that the “Spartacists go on to compare Gotti favorably to the leading spokesmen of US imperialism in the Democratic and Republican parties,” citing our observation that: “If John Gotti were running with Noriega in this year’s elections, they’d be the lesser evil.” Mazelis is so insulted by the comparison of the Italian “mobster” and the Panamanian strongman with “his” imperialist rulers that he choked on quoting our next sentence: “Gotti’s probably not nature’s nobleman, but neither is the Arkansas executioner Bill Clinton nor George Bush, who regularly bombs small countries to rubble.”

This, writes Mazelis, “is the language of politically deranged elements of the petty bourgeoisie.” But somehow the oh-so-proletarian “Workers” League has been strangely mum on a law that has been the government’s primary legal weapon against the unions. Sponsored by segregationist Arkansas Senator John McClellan, who presided over the witch-hunting Senate subcommittee in the 1950s that went after Jimmy Hoffa and produced the Landrum-Griffin Act outlawing “hot cargoing” in the trucking industry, the RICO laws were in fact intended to equate “organized labor” with “organized crime.”

In the name of fighting “mob influence” in the labor movement, the gang of criminals that run this country invoked RICO to place the Teamsters under government trusteeship. Mine Workers, Longshoremen, Laborers and Hotel Workers number among the other unions to feel the RICO sting. And it is rare today that a picket line isn’t met by the threat of RICO suits.

RICO’s definition of “racketeering “ is so elastic it allows the government to go after whoever they want, whenever they want, without any evidence of any crime. You’re guilty until proven innocent and sentenced before convicted. The government has free rein to take everything you own, and without any assets it’s pretty hard to find a lawyer to take your case. Attorneys’ fees may be seized if the government claims these were paid with “ill-gotten gains,” RICO’s witch-hunting provisions were applied with a vengeance against the “Ohio 7,” a group of leftist opponents of U.S. imperialism, who were met with wiretaps, dragnets, preventive detention, kidnapping and interrogation of children.

Mazelis’ lips are sealed on all of this. But then again the Workers League would be hard pressed pretending to oppose government intervention in the labor movement or capitalist state persecution of leftists. After all, the Northites have a wealth of experience in using the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and otherwise try to bankrupt their political opponents. In their psychotic vendetta against the once-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which they charge with being a government conspiracy, the Northites have pursued their own version of RICO.

In the late 1970s, a Workers League provocateur, Alan Gelfand, filed suit against the SWP demanding the court seize its membership lists, financial records and minutes. In 1988, the WL’s Bulletin supplied the closing arguments for the bourgeois state’s prosecution of a young SWPer, Mark Curtis, who was sentenced to 25 years in jail on frame-up charges of sexual abuse.

One of the most common means the government uses to nail people under RICO is the charge of using the mails or wire services for “fraudulent” purposes. The Workers League, which has made an international campaign out of condemning “The Mark Curtis Hoax,” threw its support behind a court case filed by the father of the alleged victim claiming that Curtis’ defense committee was engaged in an “international smear campaign,” and demanding that the courts requisition monies raised in Curtis’ defense for damages.

Now Mazelis charges that our article “Gotti, RICO and You” is evidence of the “class affinity between the Spartacists and the mob.” This is pretty rich coming from an outfit which is internationally renowned for its gangsterism and truly criminal financial deals with a whole variety of colonels, sheiks and despots in the Near East. Moreover, given that the Workers League claims to be the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository of Marxism on the face of the planet, what kind of protection racket do they have going that makes them feel so smugly secure against the repressive legal arsenal of this capitalist government?

Would-Be Prosecutors... (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Would-Be Prosecutors Can't Get Their Story Straight

A couple of documents are being circulated by the campaign to get supporters of Mark Curtis’ defense to “dis-endorse.”

“Labor Defense and the Mark Curtis Case” was written in 1989 by Charles Adams. Adams is a former member of Socialist Action who was expelled by the group for conducting a private “investigation” into the Curtis case; they noted his “secret contact with the Workers League.”

“The Case Against Mark Curtis” was written by Greg McNaghten, a Seattle official of Brakemen’s Local 1024, in the form of a 29-page open letter to his “fellow UTU [United Transportation Union] members.”

These documents are cited as showing how a “leftist” and a “unionist” undertook “independent investigations” and supposedly found that the evidence proved Mark Curtis guilty. But some of this “evidence” is more than suspect: for instance, Adams’ account that after Demetria Morris was attacked, “blood was running down her face.” This is repeated as fact by other accounts, yet at the trial it was never stated that Morris was bleeding. Where does this come from?

Parts of these documents are bizarrely revolting: Thus Adams reports his “long conversation” with Assistant D.A. Catherine Thune, whom he asked to explain how a person like Mark Curtis, a union activist committed to the rights of the oppressed, could commit such a crime: “Mrs. Thune explained that she had handled many rape cases and that unfortunately is the profile very often. Mark is a very gentle passive person…. They do lots of little kind things for people but there’s an inner rage that may come out only once in a lifetime.” So Curtis is deemed prone to rape because he’s a quiet person!

Then there’s Adams’ dismissal of the time discrepancies in Demetria Morris’ testimony - he “explains” that black people can’t tell time, are guided by “Colored People’s Time,” and the only reason the defense attorney pushed the time question was that he “was viewing the conception of time from white cultural perspective.” This is blatant racism.

UTU official Greg McNaghten also says he “spent several hours on the phone with Mrs. Kathy Thune, the prosecuting attorney in this case,” as well as the Iowa State Parole Board, Polk County prosecutors and others, and “as a result of all this digging” concluded that “Mark Curtis was given a fair trial” and is guilty. McNaghten has a novel theory as to why the cops beat Curtis bloody - it was all part of Curtis’ plot to show he was framed up: “Ergo: create a mysteriously disappearing woman, throw in police racism and bigotry; get yourself beat up …and you’ve got yourself a defense.”

But, interestingly, on some of the key facts about the case, these two accounts contradict each other. Take the question of dog hairs. The forensic expert testified Demetria Morris had dog hairs all over her sweatshirt, yet no dog hairs were found on Mark Curtis. How can this be, if, according to the story, Curtis wrestled Demetria to the ground and attempted to rape her? The anti-Curtis people attempt to explain this, for instance Adams asserts that “The dog is never kept on the front porch.” But McNaghten states flatly, “Demetria testified that they often let the dog on the front porch.”

Curtis says that after work on March 4, he attended and spoke, in Spanish, at a large meeting (which was videotaped) called to protest the INS raid and arrest of 17 fellow workers at the Swift plant. Adams says he’ uncovered the fact that “Nobody remembers him [Curtis] even at the meeting,” the meeting was small and the media wasn’t present. But McNaghten says that he spoke with a member of Curtis’ union local who “said it was true that Curtis spoke and in Spanish but he did so from the assembled crowd and was one of a great many who spoke up.”

In repeating the lines fed to them by the prosecutors, the witchhunters can’t even get their stories straight.

Free Mark Curtis! WL Brokers Frame-Up Operation (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Free Mark Curtis!

Workers League Brokers Frame-Up Operation

There’s a first-rate anti-communist witchhunt in progress over the case of Mark Curtis, a member of the quirky reformist Socialist Workers Party, now doing 25 years in the Iowa state penitentiary on frame-up charges. The Des Moines district attorney’s 1988 railroading of Curtis was aided and abetted by the Workers League, a dubious outfit that specializes in provocation, in pursuing its vendetta against the SWP, long a target of government harassment and “dirty tricks.” But although Curtis has spent the past four years behind bars, his defense campaign has been the object of a frenzied assault by right-wing feminists who want to prevent him from getting out on parole. Their aim is to smear the entire left as racists, rapists and sexists. To do so, they pass off the Workers League as good coin, ignoring its history of many years of sinister provocation, insist on the existence of a “rape” which even the prosecution doesn’t claim took place, and cite a plethora of “pro-victim” sources which turn out to be linked to government agencies.

There’s some pretty strange stuff going on, particularly coming out of the Boston area. Consider the following:

• The Boston NAACP has been on campaign footing circulating a letter (dated March 14) declaring “MARK CURTIS IS A VIOLENT RAPIST!” and urging those who had defended him to withdraw their names from the Curtis campaign.

• When multiracial protests swept the country in solidarity with the Los Angeles upheaval against the acquittal of the racist cops who beat Rodney King, Boston NAACP official Mary ‘ Benin and some associates attended a May 8 demonstration at Boston City Hall. They were there not to protest the racist L.A. verdict, but …to circulate an anti-Curtis tract calling to “Dis-endorse now” and saying “it’s not anti-left to be anti-rape.”

• Days later, at a May 16 Boston SWP forum on the Rodney King case, a group of so-called progressives showed up including Bertin, Fred Pelka of “Men to End Sexual Assault” (MESA) and other activists of the “stop rape movement.” They had come, not to discuss police brutality, and certainly not to criticize the SWP’s reformist call on George Bush’s “Justice Department” to indict the cops, but …to set up a picket line outside the Pathfinder Bookstore, chanting “Racist, sexist SWP!” and “Keep Mark Curtis in jail!”

• On July 18, a forum was held at the Boston Public Library where Bertin, Pelka and Ann Russo, a women’s studies professor at MIT, participated in a panel discussion whose purpose was …to destroy the Mark Curtis Defense Committee activities in the Boston area. Mark Curtis was described here as a “white man” who “raped” “an Afro-American woman,” and the SWP as “racists” who “glorify” a “rapist.”

• At a demonstration in Boston on September 30, where thousands of black Haitian workers were protesting the anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the government of the radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the anti-Curtis crowd was back again, with leaflets not against the bloody junta and its links to the U.S. government but …denouncing a socialist group and its imprisoned member for “Racism and Rapism.”

What kind of people go to a Rodney King demonstration against cop brutality and a Haiti demonstration against a military junta in order to pillory a young socialist militant who was active in the defense of immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant in the Midwest? Even if they think he is guilty of rape, why are self-proclaimed advocates of the interests of women, blacks and labor so driven to go after someone who is already in jail? What is going on here?

What’s going on here is a sinister, organized provocation with a not-so-hidden agenda of vilifying the left. In the name of victims’ rights and stopping rape, a network has sprung up that works closely with the police, embraces vigilantism and is in the tow of reactionary forces. With liberal rhetoric they engage in witchhunting taken straight from the hook (literally) of J. Edgar Hoover. And the whole operation is being brokered by David North’s Workers League, which is obsessed with destroying the Socialist Workers Party and sees this case as its vehicle.

The Spartacist League has no love lost for the rotten-reformist SWP, but we can tell a dirty frame-up when we see it. And this one is a threat to everyone. Rape and sexual abuse are serious crimes, and we have given careful consideration to the Curtis case. We have read the 400-page trial transcript and the voluminous articles and pamphlets on this case, and we have documented our conclusion that Mark Curtis was framed – see the statement of the SL/U.S. Political Bureau, “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (WV No. 480, 23 June 1989), and our article “Why Should Anyone Believe David North?” (WV No. 487, 13 October 1989).

The Railroading of Mark Curtis

Mark Curtis is a former national chairman of the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. At the time of his arrest he was a union activist at the Swift packing plant in Iowa. There had been a lot of turmoil in the Midwest meatpacking industry, particularly around the protracted 1985-86 Hormel strike by Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, which was broken by the combined efforts of the company, the Democratic state government and the social-democratic national union bureaucracy. In the Swift plant in Des Moines, four days before Curtis’ arrest in March 1988, an INS immigration raid had picked up 17 workers. On March 4, Curtis spoke in Spanish at a meeting in defense of these workers. Only hours after this, he was arrested at the Morris residence in Des Moines by cops who took him to police headquarters where they beat him to a pulp, calling him a “Mexican lover.”

In September 1988, Curtis was convicted of third degree sexual assault and first degree burglary. The state charged that he had forced his way onto the porch of the Morris house, and attempted to rape 15-year-old Demetria Morris. Curtis said he was lured there by a request for aid. By no account, not even that of the police or the young woman at the trial, did a rape ever take place, nor was anything stolen, nor was there a weapon. Whatever may have happened to Demetria Morris, there was never any physical evidence of contact between Curtis and the alleged victim. The court refused to allow testimony about the government’s multi-year campaign of “dirty tricks” aimed against the SWP. And now Curtis is serving a 25-year sentence. Despite vows by members of the Iowa State Parole Board that he will serve his entire sentence unless he confesses his “guilt,” Curtis has not been broken. “I am not a rapist, but a fighter for women’s rights. And I am not guilty of the crimes I have been charged and convicted of,” Curtis declares.

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But in the midst of all this imaginary psycho-projection and demagogic collective guilt-tripping, a simple fact has been left out: in this case there was no rape! In fact the state dropped the charge of rape against Mark Curtis. So why then this tabloid-style hysteria based on the assertion that there was a rape?
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The Workers League has aided the capitalist state prosecution of this young socialist militant as part of their decades-long vendetta against the eccentric, and pretty irrelevant, reformists of the SWP. In the trial, the closing arguments of the Polk County prosecutor were taken virtually verbatim from the pages of the WL’s paper, the Bulletin. After the conviction, they have sought to destroy Curtis’ defense committee and drive away its endorsers. Through the father of the alleged victim, Keith Morris, they went to the capitalist courts demanding the names of endorsers, and access to the defense committee finances. WL agents have crisscrossed the globe searching out individuals who endorsed or contributed to the defense fund, contacting and harassing them.

In January, Mark Curtis won a police brutality suit against the Des Moines cops who beat him bloody the night of his arrest. (The verdict came a month after the Des Moines cops were exposed for the brutal beating of a black worker, Larry Milton, who they subsequently tried to frame up on “theft” charges.) The court decided the cops lied when they said they didn’t beat up Mark Curtis, and awarded him $11,000 plus attorney’s fees. Since the cops were critical witnesses at Curtis’ trial, that testimony is deeply suspect as well.

The Smear Campaign

All this has only been a spur for the Workers League to accelerate their campaign smearing Curtis as a “depraved rapist.” The WL went after Curtis’ labor support, lining up with the Iowa AFL-CIO officialdom as well as bourgeois black organizations like the Des Moines NAACP and Black United Front. More recently they have hooked up with a clot in Boston including the Rape Crisis Center, black politicos and union officials. As a result of their poison campaign, some 20 people have reportedly withdrawn their support, including former Boston mayoral candidates Mel King and Rev. Graylan Ellis-Hagler, IUE Local 201 president Jeff Crosby (Lynn GE), former Boston University professor Howard Zinn and feminist author Margaret Randall.

Circulating in the feminist milieu are several articles notable for their praise of the Workers League and virulent attacks on “the left” for supposed racism. “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis: Victim or Victimizer?” by Fred Pelka of Boston MESA appeared in an obscure Queens, New York “progressive woman’s quarterly” On the Issues (Spring 1991). And the Boston-based feminist newspaper Sojourner (October 1992) has , an article by Ann Russo, “Mark Curtis: When Racism Equals Rapism.” Russo calls the WL’s Martin McLaughlin “one of the few progressives who supported the rape survivor and her family.” She also lays out the witchhunt campaign in detail:

“Efforts to challenge the propaganda of the defense committee escalated this past spring when Mary Bertin, on behalf of the Boston NAACP, got involved …. A group of us, including Barry Shuchter, Fred Pelka, Anita Saville and others, including myself on behalf of White Women Against Racism and Violence Against Women, have been directing our efforts towards supporters of Curtis, encouraging them to disendorse his defense campaign.”

“Some activists wonder why we are making such an effort to stop the Curtis defense campaign,” Russo writes. “In this case, the rape survivor faces an international progressive community that supports this white male rapist.” She quotes Mary Bertin saying: “For the past four years, [the SWP has] literally had the reign of the world, and that has to end. I felt the NAACP could be her voice, and so we designed a campaign to inform people of Demetria’s story.”

Russo’s piece is loaded with emotional white liberal guilt-tripping. At issue in the Curtis case, she claims, is “a young working-class African-American girl … brutally raped and beaten by a white man.” Russo keeps repeating: Demetria Morris was “brutally raped and assaulted,” she is “a rape survivor.” Russo puts herself inside the victim’s mind, saying “imagine being reminded” about “the good things that the man who raped you has done.” Russo imagines this, imagines that. Of the SWP, she says that “they consistently downplay the rape” of one of the “women of color who have been raped by white men,” and they ignored “the impact of their campaign on the rape survivor.” How has the SWP “gotten away with” a “support campaign in defense of a, rapist,” she asks. The “progressive community …supports this white male rapist,” and this supposedly “illustrates the racist ignorance and denial of sexual assault that continue to permeate the progressive community.”

Russo locates the source of this in “the ideology that so-called ‘good men’ (which in this country translates into white men) don’t rape.” In the May 8 (leaflet this is rendered as “‘good men,’ that is, progressive activists) don’t rape.” What is the conclusion? That all men rape? But in the midst of all this imaginary psycho-projection and demagogic collective guilt-tripping, a simple fact has been left out: in this case there was no rape! In fact the state dropped the charge of rape against Mark Curtis. So why then this tabloid-style hysteria based on the assertion that there was a rape? And what purposes does the exploitation of the non-rape of Demetria Morris serve?

In Defense of the Scottsboro Boys

In this respect, the article by Fred Pelka of Men to End Sexual Assault is instructive. This smear job paints the left as “sexists” who reflexively defend and harbor rapists if they are among “their own.” Pelka claims that a “feminist analysis of the Curtis case” shows “how effectively the left has acted to silence the survivor.” “What does it mean … when so many ‘politically correct’ people are willing to take, at face value, the word of a white man convicted of rape , over that of his Black victim?” And in showing that the left supposedly has a long tradition of vilifying rape victims, he obscenely cites the case of the Scottsboro Boys!

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While fraudulently claiming to have recently resuscitated the traditions of the CP’s International Labor Defense, the economist WL never mentions any of the ILD’s defense of blacks. Moreover, the WL’s Bulletin (31 July) fulsomely quotes from Pelka and Russo without a mention of their vicious anti-communism and racism. Their silence on these issues is utterly damning.
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This astounding claim comes in response to Russ Davis, a Boston supporter of the Curtis defense campaign, who wrote that there are historical precedents for the use of rape in frame-ups. Pelka asserts:

“It’s significant that Davis’ list of cases where rape ‘has been used in frame-ups’ begins and ends with the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ – a group of African-American men convicted of rape by an all-white (and all-male) jury in Alabama in 1931 ….
“There is one similarity, though, between the Curtis case and that of the Scottsboro defendants. In both cases, the prosecution witnesses, women without access to power and unable to tell their stories, were vilified by the left. In 60 years that much, at least, hasn’t changed.”

What racist, anti-communist trash! Naturally Pelka doesn’t bother to mention that the Scottsboro Boys – nine young black men – were sentenced to die on the basis of the testimony of two young white women, based on charges of rape that had been manufactured by the Alabama cops! But to keep Curtis in jail, Pelka is glad to retry these victims of Southern lynch law.

Defense of the Scottsboro Boys was the focus of an international campaign, centrally led by the Communist Party, in which hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to save these young black men from Jim Crow “justice.” As for the two women, one did “tell her story.” Ruby Bates later recanted her testimony, and in 1933 marched at the head of a protest in front of the White House demanding freedom for the Scottsboro Boys. As James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, wrote in a 1932 article entitled “Mobilize White Workers for Scottsboro Prisoners”:

“The deliberately planned assassination of the unfortunate Negro children is notice to the entire world that imperialist America, this pretended pacifist and friend of justice, is in fact a monster. The endeavor to thwart its bloody designs in the present case calls out the deepest and best human instincts.”

Not so for Pelka & Co., for whom, even 60 years later, the case of the Scottsboro Boys calls out the basest, if reflexive, instincts.

What gets them seeing red is not the lynch rope, but that the lives of these young men were saved by mobilizations led by Communists. In his attack on the left over the Scottsboro Boys, Pelka is playing on an old theme. The NAACP sabotaged the Scottsboro defense, defended the court that convicted the framed-up youth, denounced the mass mobilizations and raised the cry of the “red menace,” accusing the CP of using the case for its own purposes. (Only four years later, under intense pressure from the black masses, did the NAACP finally take up the case.) During the McCarthyite witchhunt, the liberal historian Wilson Record vituperated against the CP over the Scottsboro case in his book The Negro and the Communist Party (1951). And today we have the Boston and Des Moines NAACP and Fred Pelka playing the same theme in the Mark Curtis case.

At the same time, the Workers League has scandalously erased the Scottsboro Boys from American working-class history. While fraudulently claiming to have recently resuscitated the traditions of the CP’s International Labor Defense, the economist WL never mentions any of the ILD’s defense of blacks. Moreover, the WL’s Bulletin (31 July) fulsomely quotes from Pelka and Russo without a mention of their vicious anti-communism and racism. Their silence on these issues is utterly damning.

The Scottsboro and the Curtis frame-ups are wielded in a cynical attempt to portray the left as enemies of women and blacks. Pelka, Bertin & Co. are supporters of the racist capitalist system. Just look at the charge of “lying.” Pelka approvingly cites the argument of prosecutor Catherine Thune that Curtis can’t be trusted because he lied …on an employment application! Is there another way to get a job? And what about the “illegal” immigrant workers at Swift whose jobs Curtis was defending – if their documents weren’t in order does that mean they should be deported? On the other hand, Pelka waves aside the fact that one of the cops, Gonzalez, had been suspended from the Des Moines police for lying, saying he was only “fudging an arrest report to protect the identity of an informant.” Actually, Gonzalez was caught lying about beating a suspect.

A lot of Pelka’s stuff sounds like it comes out of the House Un-American Activities Committee. “How is it,” he wants to know, that the SWP has gotten so much support for Mark Curtis? For the answer he goes to Barry Shuchter, formerly an editorial committee member of the Boston Labor Page. “The first thing (SWP members) do is the personal favors trick,” says Shuchter. “They say, ‘We’ve been on the line with you, we’ve come to your events. Now we’re asking for this one favor in return.’ Then comes the ‘Look who else has endorsed’ trick.” This sounded so much like a page out of J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit that we decided to check. Sure enough, the FBI boss gave as an example of Communist agitation:

“The communists publish a story: John Doe has been arrested, the charge is murder …. The Party machinery springs into action, typical of thousands of mass-agitation campaigns …. The next step is probably the formation of the XYZ Committee to Save John Doe …. Finally come the unsuspecting noncommunists, with contact being made either in person or on the telephone.
“‘Mr. X, I’m So-and-So from the XYZ. Committee to Save John Doe. I was just over at Mr. Y’s office. You know him, don’t you?’ …
“On and on. ‘Dr. F, Rev. O, etc., have given statements’ ….
“‘Why,’ a friend will say after reading the testimonial, ‘if So-and-So endorses that organization [or issue], it must be OK.’ The dupe becomes a communist thought-control relay station.”

Pelka and Shuchter have learned well at the knee of this master of frame-ups. Incidentally, the first use of the term “PC,” to our knowledge, comes from J. Edgar’s how-to chapter on “The Communist Front”: “Don’t just ‘slap’ slogans on cardboard. Make sure they are ‘politically correct’.”

Police Aides, Vigilantes and Willie Horton

What’s behind the new assault on Mark Curtis is a right-wing trend that might be called yuppie feminism. One of the most tangible effects of the women’s movement has been the appearance of a layer of women professionals and executives: lawyers, professors, bank managers. They’re hostile to the left, and the heroines of this upwardly mobile strata include Democratic women politicians and lady prosecutors, from Liz Holtzman to Des Moines’ Catherine Thune. They have a ruling-class outlook, including seeing the state and its police as their defenders and allies, from going after rapists, child abusers and “pornography” to “protecting” abortion clinics (by clamping down on radicals who seek to stop the bible bigots besieging the clinics).

The politics of these self-styled “progressives” are thoroughly bourgeois, and can get pretty reactionary. The Pelka article appeared in the same edition of On the Issues (Spring 1991) as a column by editor Merle Hoffman in support of Bush’ s Persian Gulf War! On the Issues has a distinct Zionist flavor, with articles on the “pros and cons” of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It features photos of the Vigilante Queen, the Guardian Angels’ Lisa Sliwa (at the trial of the black youths who brutally assaulted the Central Park jogger). The current (Fall 1992) issue has an article, “Let’s Make Rape an Election Issue,” which blames Dukakis’ 1988 defeat on his wimpy response as to what he would do if Kitty was raped – supposedly showing his “insensitivity” – while Bush at least was addressing the “issue” with the Willie Horton ad!

In the Mark Curtis case, it’s striking how the people lined up in the witchhunt against him all base themselves on the story being disseminated by the Des Moines police and their adjuncts. Pelka quotes prosecutor Thune, Marti Anderson of Polk County Victim Services, Demetria Morris’ rape crisis counselor Terry Schock. Barry Shuchter, who kicked off the Boston disendorsement campaign, says, “We called the Des Moines Rape Crisis Center who gave us quite a different story” from Curtis’ defenders (Labor Page, April/May 1990). Well, we called the Des Moines Rape Crisis Center, too, and they answered the phone, “Victim Services.” We confirmed that all of these are Polk County, Iowa, official agencies: Catherine Thune, Marti Anderson and Terry Schock are all government spokesmen and worked together in preparing the case against Mark Curtis. So the witchhunters call up the prosecution, and surprise, they get the prosecution line.

How could you not believe the victim, these righteous feminists ask? A piece of literature titled, “Rape Myths and the Mark Curtis Case,” claims: “In fact, more than ninety-eight percent of all rapes reported to the police actually occurred as described by the victim.” Yet, as the SWP points out, the source of this assertion can only be the police themselves. In reaction to the whole history of rape trials, in which the woman victim was placed on trial, her character assassinated and her word dismissed, it has become an article of faith in the “stop-rape movement” that the victim never lies. Russo says the Curtis defense campaign must be fought because it “betrays the already shaky alliances between the feminist, civil rights, labor, and progressive movements,” since “trust …cannot be assumed when a white man’s word” is taken as truth “against the words and experience of an African-American girl.”

This brings to mind the Tawana Brawley case, in which a black teenager having family trouble invented a story about being a victim of a racist rape. This became a cause célèbre as it was pushed by black nationalists with their own agenda and taken up by liberals and radicals who implicitly took the word of “the victim” as good coin. And it was all a pack of lies.

In his article, Pelka quotes Claire Kaplan of the “National Coalition Against Sexual Assault” who sees in the Curtis case “this eternal denial on the part of the left to think that men among their ranks couldn’t possibly commit such a crime.” Kaplan is one of the main proponents of the victims-don’t-lie argument. So much so, that in a Virginia case where the day after a Manassas man was convicted of rape the alleged victim (who was married with two children) recanted, admitting the sex was “probably consensual,” Kaplan told the press that such an incident was rare: “if a case is falsely reported …it doesn’t even get to a conviction” (Washington Post, 9 May 1990). For her, Curtis must he guilty, because otherwise it will damage the “stop-rape movement” and “groups will be divided wherever the SWP takes this campaign.”

Kaplan & Co. not only work closely with the police, but they also sanction reckless vigilante action, with not the slightest concern for the rights of the accused. In 1987, a teenage boy in a small California town sued for defamation when his name appeared on flyers posted around the county by the Santa Cruz Women Against Rape listing supposed rapists. The flyers included not only his name but a physical description, his address, place of employment and what kind of car he drove. The young man commented bitterly, “It’s a vigilante thing – they’re the Lone Ranger and all of a sudden they started getting out of hand with it.” The young woman who initially named him to the Women Against Rape settled out of court, putting in writing that “I was not raped by you …on the night described in the flyer, or at any time.” Kaplan, however, justified this vigilantism, saying “the whole anti-violence movement got started by guerrilla tactics and this is just one of them” (Los Angeles Times, 10 December 1987).

Working as adjuncts of the police, vigilantism, slander, anything goes in this milieu. And don’t forget one of the favorite themes of the new McCarthyism, child abuse. The current uproar against and police investigation of Woody Allen, in retribution for leaving Mia Farrow, is the worst kind of frame-up, designed and guaranteed to destroy his reputation and his life. Here also, some enraged feminists are making common cause with the Republican right in their vicious crusade over “family values.”

Boston Feminist Witchhunters

In Boston the anti-Curtis campaign has taken on a particular frenzy. Here the Workers League found fertile ground for its frame-up campaign against Curtis and the SWP. A center of the “disendorsement” campaign is the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, which is the parent outfit of Pelka’s MESA. In passing, let us note that this center gets almost half of its funding ($81,000 out of a total of .$178,000 in 1991) from agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Another chunk of their income comes from the Haymarket People’s Fund, based heavily on the inheritance of Abby Rockefeller and the Kellogg heirs, which underwrites various “progressive” causes in the Boston area. Until several months ago, NAACP official Bertin was on the Board of Directors of the Haymarket fund. What the WL has tapped into here is a feminist/popular-front milieu in which key actors have hated the SWP (and anyone they consider “Trots”) for the last 20 years.

It goes back to 1970 when the SWP split the Boston radical women’s group Cell 16, led by Roxanne Dunbar and among whose founders and funders was Abby Rockefeller. The history of “Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975” by Alice Echols (Daring to Be Bad [1989]), notes: “Cell 16’s shift from Marxism might have been related to the Socialist Worker’s Party’s (SWP) attempted take-over of the group some time after Dunbar’s departure …, non-SWP women circulated a letter throughout the movement alerting women to the SWP’s efforts to ‘infiltrate’ feminist groups.” Old history? Not at all. It’s still useful in whipping up anti-communist frenzy.

This summer, the New York Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) was a hotbed of controversy after abortion clinic defense demonstrations against the combined efforts of Operation Rescue and Cardinal O’Connor on the eve of the Democratic Party convention. Political polarization at WAC meetings led to an exclusion attempt against the Spartacist League and the ISO. At one meeting we found rent-a-cops and lady goons at the door, and leaflets of pages from a book by Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960(1990) retailing horror stories about how the Boston women’s liberation movement was “infiltrated” by “outsiders, primarily by the Socialist Workers’ Party,” which had “targeted” Cell 16. Railing against “takeover attempts by the Trots,” Davis wrote: “The Cell 16 women soon realized that they’d lost control. The Trots had their mailing list; they had the signature on the bank account …they had most of the back issues of the journal and the posters.”

Certainly, the SWP’s apolitical organizational maneuvering in the style of the Stalinist CP leaves them open to this kind of anti-communist attack (as occurred also in NOW at around the same time). Moreover, the by then anti-Trotskyist SWP recruited women not to Marxism but to socialist-flavored feminism. In contrast, the SL was able to beat back the WAC redbaiting attack with an up-front defense of our communist program for women’s liberation through socialist revolution (see “SL Zaps WAC Attack,” WV No. 557, 7 August). But in the Mark Curtis case, what’s notable is that liberal witchhunters are still burning over the SWP, and this feeds into their desire to burn Curtis at the stake. This is the culture medium of ex-New Leftists-become-social-democrats, the rad-lib Jamaica Plain crowd (more lib than rad) in which Pelka, Russo, Beltin, Shuchter and their friends are getting a hearing. And the SWP can’t fight it because they capitulate to it politically, not wanting to “alienate” potential bloc partners in their endless lowest common denominator pop-front coalitions.

WL and the Anti-Curtis Cabal

We have had our own experience with this crowd. In March 1991, when fascist David Duke tried to hold a rally at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee initiated a united-front demonstration and mobilized 1,500 people in the streets to stop this Klansman-in-a-suit. The NAACP and the various bureaucrats around Labor Page gave us the run-around and refused to endorse. And a slanderous whispering campaign was started, violence-baiting the Partisan Defense Committee and SL and claiming that the communists just want to “take all the credit,” to try to poison the atmosphere and prevent a united-front mobilization. Above all, this milieu of liberals, reformists and labor bureaucrats don’t like reds mobilizing in what they consider “their” constituencies, because it undermines their political “credit”-ability. It’s noteworthy that when there is a major class battle, to defend minorities against the fascist Duke or to protest cop brutality in L.A., these friends of the police are nowhere to be seen …or show up only to trash Mark Curtis!

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These days, along with targeting the Curtis campaign, the Workers League’s other major activity in Detroit is blocking with white racists against the Malcolm X school... But in order to get Mark Curtis, the Northites suddenly and cynically “discover” black oppression and play to the bourgeois feminists and “stop rape” vigilantes
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This slander campaign has become even more ominous now that it has been taken up by a “respectable” layer of antirape feminists and wannabe bureaucrats. Their anti-communism is their own, but their ammunition comes from the professional provocateurs of David North’s Workers League. This is hardly the first time that North’s sinister outfit has acted as fingermen for forces hostile to the interests and defense of the workers movement. In 1983, on the eve of the British coal miners strike, the WL’s British mentors, the Workers Revolutionary Party, set off an anti-red witchhunt against miners union leader Arthur Scargill by “exposing” his forthright statement that Polish Solidarność, the favorite “union” of Ronald Reagan, was “anti-socialist.” The WRP “exposé” was taken up by Cold War labor bureaucrats and the labor-hating Fleet Street press with the aim of crushing the militant miners union.

In the late 1970s, the WL tried to use the bourgeois courts against the SWP, in the Alan Gelfand case, demanding that it turn over its membership lists, financial records and minutes to the imperialist government which had been spying on it for 50 years, most recently in the COINTELPRO case. Meanwhile, for years North’s “International Committee,” then under founder-leader Gerry Healy, was on the payroll of virtually every Arab regime in the Near East. By its own later admission, the IC received over one million pounds sterling (at least) from these kings, sheiks and tin-pot colonels. In exchange, the “IC” offered to supply the names of, and intelligence on, prominent “Zionists” in “finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” to Qaddafi’s Libya. Financial backing from Saddam Hussein to the “IC” bought his regime not only the publicity services of the Healy/Northites – whose press hailed the 1978 execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members – but photographs of anti-Hussein protesters in Britain.

Insofar as one can speak of this Healyite outfit on a political level, its defining characteristics have been vicious anti-Sovietism and a crude workerist adaptation to the Cold War AFL-CIO tops. Their catering to the labor bureaucracy means mimicking every form of racial insensitivity and political backwardness. Or in the immortal words of former Workers League leader Tim Wohlforth: “the working class hates faggots, women’s libbers and hippies and so do we”! These days, along with targeting the Curtis campaign, the Workers League’s other major activity in Detroit is blocking with white racists against the Malcolm X school (see article on page 12). But in order to get Mark Curtis, the Northites suddenly and cynically “discover” black oppression and play to the bourgeois feminists and “stop rape” vigilantes.

The Curtis case is the latest installment of the Northites’ psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign slandering the SWP as an organization supposedly controlled by the U.S. government. The WL’s Bulletin (17 July) writes: “The issue has gone far beyond the guilt or innocence of Mark Curtis. The real question is: What is the Socialist Workers Party, and whose interests does it serve?” The same article provides a veritable data sheet of the names of leading SWPers and their industrial employers. This scurrilous McCarthyism is then offered as “proof’ that they are police agents – because they got hired! (Of course, for Pelka & Co., it’s the opposite, Curtis is a dishonest commie because he lied to the boss!)

Today the Northites act as brain-trusters for government prosecutors, right-wing feminists, AFL-CIO labor traitors, to get the SWP. Only a paranoid believes history is a conspiracy, but everybody knows there are conspiracies in history. And about North’s organization we can only warn: Beware! To paraphrase the Bulletin, “what the Workers League is” is pretty hard to fathom, but “whose interests it serves” are definitely not those of women, minorities or the working class.

Northite Blood Money (1991)

Workers Vanguard No. 523 (29 March 1991)

Northite Blood Money

“Lenin received German gold.” “Leon Trotsky was an agent of the Mikado.” “Spartacist — Finger Man for the FBI.” The first slander was supplied by self-proclaimed “socialists” and other elements in 1917 Russia who wanted to continue the imperialist carnage of World War I, the second by J.V. Stalin and the last by David North’s Workers League. In the 8 February issue of the Workers League’s press the Bulletin we read: “As American bombs are dropping on Baghdad, Workers Vanguard uses rhetoric indistinguishable from that of the Bush administration…. It willingly places itself on the ‘left’ flank of the bourgeois media propaganda blitz which seeks to demonize Saddam Hussein and whip up hatred for the Iraqi people.”

At least when the pro-war forces in imperial Russia lyingly accused Lenin of being a German agent they attempted to give a political façade to this slander by pointing to Lenin’s opposition to Russian imperialism and to the war. But for the Workers League to accuse the Spartacist League of trying to undermine the defense of Iraq while U.S. imperialism was raining down death on Baghdad is such a shameless lie that it would make the tsarist writers of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” blush.

In our banners at antiwar demonstrations, in the headlines of Workers Vanguard, in our speeches to protesters — the Spartacist League forthrightly fought for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and military defense of Iraq (without failing to note the crimes of Hussein’s regime against the Iraqi toiling masses). We sought to mobilize the social power of the working class in labor political strikes against the war. And what of the Workers League? As American bombs rained down on Baghdad, North’s outfit campaigned for a “democratic” referendum on the war! At the red-white-and-blue “antiwar” demonstration in Washington, D.C. on January 26, the Northites marched under a banner reading: “Stop War Against Laos — Let the People Vote on War.” This is worse than the most abject social-pacifism, appealing to the imperialist butchers to give a more “democratic” cover to their genocidal war against the Iraqi people. At the time, the American “people,” in their overwhelming majority, supported Bush’s war!

Crime and Dividends

What really has the Workers League frothing at the mouth is the one subject truly close to their hearts — lucre, as filthy as it comes. Earlier this year we Ian a short article entitled “Healyites Got Blood Money” (WV No. 517, 4 January), which detailed how the late Gerry Healy’s “International Committee” was on the take from a number of Near East despotic regimes, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And we pointed to the Healyites’ criminal cheering for the 1978 execution of Iraqi Communist Party members.

The Workers League headed by David North — the current representative of unadulterated Healyism here on earth — is squealing like stuck pigs. The Bulletin decries our exposure of their direct and immediate ancestors for being on the payroll of virtually every sheik and military bonapartist in the region as an attempt “to provide the FBI with a pretext to frame up the Workers League.”

The Northites certainly have an elastic view of their own history — similar to their relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. We nailed the Workers League as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” more than a decade ago. At the time Hussein was a client of U.S. imperialism, which was providing him with military aid and intelligence. (As we have reported, the first anti-Communist bloodbath carried out by the Ba’ath used hit lists supplied by the CIA.) In our most recent article we also noted that at the same time Healy et al. were raking in thousands from those other clients of American imperialism, the Kuwaiti emirs!

The Workers League probably has plenty to fear for the crimes they have committed, but getting in trouble with the FBI is at the bottom of the list (if they are on any FBI list at all). After all, the Healyites were working the same side of the street as U.S. intelligence! In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Hussein’s government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.”

According to the 1985 International Committee Control Commission report — which the Bulletin tries to hide behind as proof of their “innocence” — the Healyites got close to £20,000 from Iraq in the late 1970s. And this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the IC “investigation” into their organization’s financial dealings in the Near East was carried out by the guilty themselves.

The Bulletin doesn’t deny that it cheered the murder of Communist worker militants in Iraq. It simply whines that the Workers League didn’t know Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party got paid for this and other crimes. This, it is claimed, was done “without the agreement or knowledge of the International Committee.” For the Northites to claim that they didn’t know is about as believable as Bush and Reagan’s protests that they were “out of the loop” while another criminal by the name of North, first name Oliver, was running the Contragate arms-and-drugs scam out of the White House basement.

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left. From the time the WRP started up its daily News Line in May 1976, it was clear that Healy’s organization was on the take from Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan regime. Less than three months earlier, the WRP had folded its previous paper Workers Press following months of publicity pleading for funds for a press “Crisis Fund.” Then amidst great fanfare out comes a flashy new four-color daily full of articles extolling the Libyan dictator and “special reports” from Tripoli. Where did the money come from in this rags-to-riches story?

As early as May 1977, we ran an article entitled “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” which concluded that “even a cursory look at News Line’s yearlong pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.” Two years later we picketed Workers League meetings with signs reading “Workers League — Press Agents for Libyan Dictatorship!” and “Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi.”

Then in 1980, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, observed that the WRP must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In a vengeful attempt to destroy Matgamna’s organization, the WRP (under the aegis of jet-setting actress Vanessa Redgrave) filed a libel suit against Matgamna for his scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the one statement in Matgamna’s article which the suit did not take up was the central charge that the Healyites were being funded by bourgeois Arab regimes.

Now, the Bulletin writes that following the Control Commission investigation “the International Committee, with the support of the Workers League… denounced the WRP’s ‘pursuit of unprincipled relations with sections of the colonial bourgeoisie in return for money’.” But what did the Workers League find ”unprincipled”? Obviously not acting as press agents for Qaddafi (celebrating the ”Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the WL sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies”) or cheering the execution of Iraqi Communists. North’s “defense” is that Healy did it for money, while the Workers League did it for free! But did they?

Who Got the Money?

After the IC Control Commission had delivered its report, in 1986 Cliff Slaughter, another of Healy’s former lieutenants, wrote a letter to all WRP members asking

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments? Which other sections did so? “Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousand [sic] of dollars) in 1983?…
“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North? That is what happened. “Finally: is it not true that Comrade North and Beams agreed the matter should not be raised at the IC because they considered it did not constitute a ‘class betrayal’? How did they differentiate between the class betrayal of the WRP in this matter — on which was based the argument for suspending the WRP from the IC without charges and without a hearing — and the actions taken on behalf of the SLL (Australia)?”

Slaughter’s accusations against North’s cover-up for his colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, have the ring of (self-serving) truth. A month after Slaughter’s letter was circulated, the Central Committee of the SLL seems to have felt constrained to censure Beams for failure to report receipt of money from Arab regimes to the IC. Further information came from former SLL leader Phil Sandford, who revealed how another leading Australian Healyite was slapped down by Healy for attempting to poach on his Iraqi preserve to get $100,000 for a printing press (see “Some Political Bandits at the End,” Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989). Sandford reports that their relations with Libya were much more lucrative.

_____________________________
Only the Tip of the Iceberg…

Libya - £542,267
Kuwait - 156,500
Qatar - 50,000
Abu Dhabi - 25,000
PLO - 19,997
Iraq - 19,697
Unidentified or other sources - 261,702
Total : £1,075,163
(Reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)

Account of monies from Near East paymasters received by Healy’s WRP as reported by 1985 IC Control Commission — an “Investigation” carried out by the guilty.
_______________________________

But was North’s only role in this sordid affair to alibi for Beams? Not according to a letter from Healy lieutenant Tony Banda to the American Workers League Central Committee of 23 January 1986. Responding to accusations that leading members of the WRP, following the ouster of Healy, were refusing to make IC documents available to WRP members, Banda writes:

”This I find extremely interesting coming from you, who through your minions, have suppressed virtually the entire discussion on Healyism…. This is like the thief in the crowded bazaar crying,’ Stop, thief’ to distract attention from his own misdeeds. Up north Mr. Holier-Than-Thou makes his getaway with 90 grand, while his apprentice/accomplice makes off with another 25 grand down south. Is this your revolutionary morality? Is this your kind of internationalism?”
— printed in Fourth International, Autumn 1986

Tony Banda’s “we were all crooks” indictment of “Mr. Holier-Than-Thou” North captures the cynical quality of this falling-out among thieves.

It seems evident that when it looked like Healy was collecting all of the big payoffs from the Near East, the rest of his mob were driven into a shark-like feeding frenzy to get their share of the blood money. As we have noted many times, none of Healy’s epigones protested the vicious betrayals that were perpetrated by their organization in order to get money from Near East bourgeois governments. It was only when this revenue dried up that they moved in to depose Healy.

According to a financial report by Corin Redgrave, dated 8 October 1985, in 1984-85 “scarcely a single rent or rates demand was paid on time. Bailiffs took walking possession of the contents of the party’s printshop in Runcorn, the party bookshops, and on one occasion at least, the party headquarters at Clapham.” At first the WRP tried to blame the whole mess on their financial apparatus. But by the summer of 1985 it became clear that the whole stinking house that Healy had built was about to come crumbling down. Well-trained by their “founder-leader,” Healy’s longtime henchmen went, like sharks, for the kill.

North desperately wanted to declare himself as the new leader and wielded the IC Control Commission for his own cynical power play. Today, the Bulletin claims that the Workers League’s participation in this commission clears them of all crimes. Yet, curiously, they have chosen never to print the results of even this heavily censored and self-serving ”investigation” into the IC’s sordid financial wheeling and dealing.

The Commission’s report was completed in a big hurry, and this was not simply because Healy & Co. had allegedly spirited away the WRP’s financial records. No attempt was made to investigate allegations that other IC sections had been on the take. The names of implicated senior WRP members who had not left with Healy were deleted from the report. North used the “findings” to get the leftovers from Healy’s WRP out of his way. Slaughter’s rump WRP was suspended from membership and North anointed himself king of the remaining Healyite dung heap.

The Workers League tries to palm, themselves off as Trotskyists and from time to time, when it suits their purposes, they can sound quite orthodox. We recognized them for what they were twenty years ago when we publicly exposed the Healyites as “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic and unsavory advantage. In their further degeneration they became outright bandits, and far worse.

Talk about fingermen: for a fistful of petrodollars, the Healyites took pictures of protesters at an anti-Hussein demo in London and turned them over to the Iraqi embassy! For cash they cheered the murder of Iraqi CP members. One of Healy’s main bagmen in Baghdad was none other than Alex Mitchell, who together with North co-authored “Security and the Fourth International” — the sinister campaign to smear the leadership of the American Socialist Workers Party as agents of the FBI and the GPU!

While Mitchell today plies his pen for the capitalist press in Australia, North continues to use his for new installment of “Security.” After spending a fortune trying to get the capitalist courts rule that the SWP was being run FBI agents in the notorious case of provocateur Alan Gelfand, the Northites waged an international campaign as fingermen for the American imperialist state’s prosecution of a young SWP Mark Curtis — who is now behind bars sentenced to 25 years in jail on trumped! up rape charges. But why would the cope jail one of their own agents? And why does the Workers League profess to be worried about the FBI going after them? On the face of it, the U.S. government ought to be satisfied with their work. As for the Arab dictators, sheiks and colonels that the Healyites shook down for cash — doubtless on the claim that the IC was an organization with “mass” influence which could help them out — they might rightly feel duped, not to mention vindictive.

Some Political Bandits at the End (1989)

Spartacist No. 43-44 (Summer 1989)

Some Political Bandits at the End

22nd March 1988

Dear Comrade,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours fraternally, Raymond Challinor

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

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

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

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

___________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Are North and Beams Covering Up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did the Healyites Implode When They Did?

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

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

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

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

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

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