Workers Vanguard No. 687, 27 March 1996
Bulletin Liquidated
Northite Pirates Run for Cyberspace
After years of hysterically trumpeting the need to build a weekly, then twice-weekly, then daily Bulletin, David North’s fake-Trotskyist “Socialist Equality Party” (SEP — formerly the Workers League, and before that the “American Committee for the Fourth International”) has now officially thrown in the towel on what was always a grotesquely fake newspaper. A February 13 “Dear Reader” letter announcing the SEP’s latest grandiloquent scam, “the launching of the World Socialist Web Site,” mentioned in passing: “We… will no longer be publishing The International Workers Bulletin. “ North’s British SEP satellite has similarly announced the end of its International Worker.
So much for the Northites ”mass paper” pretensions. Since anointing himself supreme leader of the “International Committee of the Fourth International” following the ouster of the discredited (now deceased) Gerry Healy a dozen years ago, North has followed in Healy’s corrupt, thuggish and megalomaniacal footsteps. When in 1976 Healy launched a fancy, four-color, daily paper modeled on the British tabloids, we asked: “Where’s the Class Line in the News Line?” (WV No. 114, 18 June 1976). That soon became clear, as Healy — and his American flunkey North — began running paeans to Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi and other oil-rich Arab bourgeois regimes (see “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” WV No. 158, 20 May 1977). Two years later, Healy and North openly hailed Saddam Hussein’s execution of 21 Iraqi Communists, while Healy’s outfit secretly spied on Iraqi oppositionists in Britain.
When the flow of petrodollars for services rendered dried up, Healy’s regime imploded. North stepped into the breach, soon proclaiming himself, ever so modestly, the leader of the international proletariat.
Humbug
The Northites are now rhapsodizing about the Internet as a “revolutionary medium” which is supposedly “relatively cheap and accessible” to “potentially millions.” This pompous dismissal of the vast majority of the world’s workers and poor — especially minorities and immigrants — who don’t have up-to-date computers, modems and netsurfing capacity sums up the Northites’ appetites as “middle-class radicals” (an epithet they are fond of throwing at the Spartacist League in an attempt to deflect our polemic attacks). For North, the Internet is a evolutionary medium” because it enhances his ability to bury his wildly opportunist 2ig-zags of yesterday in flickering digital documents that may appear today and be wiped out tomorrow. And the Northites no longer have to face attacks from angry trade unionists who noticed that the Bulletin was a scab paper, published without a union “bug.” The new SEP Web site, rapidly expanding via the gaseous “great thoughts” of David North, is the latest in a growing junk belt of virtual fantasy worlds, where posturing little grey men with gigantic egos and dubious politics can play at revolution. Nowadays it’s become quite the rage for burnt-out drop-outs to set up Potemkin Village Web sites as outposts of retreat. It’s fitting, indeed, that the “Internationalist Group” of Jan Norden, a shamefaced defector from Trotskyism who was formerly editor of Workers Vanguard, has also created its own little world within the Net.
The liquidation of the Bulletin is part of a broader phenomenon as a host of reformists and centrists, buying into the imperialist lie that “communism is dead;” submerge themselves in larger social-democratic formations or split up on the road to oblivion. Among the flotsam and jetsam of anti-Spartacist grouplets in the U.S., both the “Bolshevik Tendency” (BT) and Workers’ Voice recently announced (hopefully fatal) splits. The BT has long pushed grossly Anglo-chauvinist opposition to independence ‘for Quebec; now a wing has decamped ostensibly over its abstentionist line on the anti-working-class European Union Maastricht Treaty — of 1992! And in a January 23 Internet posting, the Bay Area Workers’ Voice announced that its Detroit branch — which ”constituted the majority of the leadership… but were a minority in the organization” — had split.
Contrary to the hostile buzzing of a small clot of petty-bourgeois losers and nerds who obviously have nothing better to do than clog up the Internet with sneers that the SL is “anti-technology,” we actually do believe that computers, and yes, even Web sites, are useful tools — for certain purposes. But that’s all they are. To pretend dumping some documents into cyberspace is any substitute for the hard fight — in the real world, among real people — to build a revolutionary workers party, only confirms the total depths of cynicism and humbug for which the Northites are infamous.
Sordid
The Healy/Northites are, to borrow Lenin’s term, “political bandits” — political pirates who will show any flag to attack any target — for whom the class line is a revolving door. In the bureaucratic infighting of the 1960s “Cultural Revolution” in China, they enthused over Mao Zedong’s wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy; throughout the Cold War of the 1980s, they supported every imperialist-backed force arrayed against the Soviet Union, from fascist-infested Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin. After years of routinely pleading with the racist Cold Warriors of George Meany’s AFL-CIO bureaucracy to “build a Labor Party,” North & Co. veered recently into writing off the trade unions entirely as workers organizations — openly apologizing for scabs who crossed United Auto Workers picket lines in the long and bitter Caterpillar strike (see “David North, 'Socialist’ Apologist for Scabbing” WV No. 637, 19 January 1996).
There is much, much more to this tendency’s sordid history — all thoroughly documented and readily available in bound volumes of back issues of Workers Vanguard. Indeed, since North’s Bulletin had barely 150 subscribers, many of you are probably only here learning of its demise. At its core, the program of the SEP, proclaimed with great fanfare in the leadup to the 1996 presidential elections, is profoundly reformist — or worse. Reflecting their long history of hostility to the struggles of blacks, women and gays, this strange “equality” party made a central focus of its election campaign an attack on affirmative action — in an election year marked by a virulently racist bipartisan assault on welfare and affirmative action. The SEP also advised the capitalist rulers on how to reallocate economic resources, mewling: “Tax codes would have to be radically revised to place the greatest burden on those who can afford it, the corporations and the rich” (International Workers Bulletin, 11 November 1996). “Our aim is not to reduce the rich to conditions of penury,” they wrote. Well, our aim is to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class, and they can then find meaningful employment, if they want to eat. You need a world party of socialist revolution — a reforged Fourth International — to do that, and you need a Trotskyist press to build that party.
Showing posts with label Qaddafi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qaddafi. Show all posts
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 1 (1995)
Workers Vanguard No. 626, 28 July 1995
Revelation on the Road to Tuzla
David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination
PART ONE OF TWO
The collapse of the former workers states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union unleashed an orgy of nationalist bloodletting. Today the imperialist media denounces Serbian war crimes in the fratricidal slaughterhouse that is now Bosnia. But “ethnic cleansing” is hardly a practice unique to the Serbs. Not only are grisly atrocities carried out by all sides in the Balkans, but no less bloody national wars have been waged between Armenians and Azeris for possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, by Georgia against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, and throughout the Caucasus. To assert its domination in the region, the Russian army launched a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya which has virtually obliterated the capital city of Grozny and devastated the countryside.
To read the bourgeois press one would get the idea that these gruesome nationalist slaughters are inspired by the revival of some ancient “tribal” feuds. In fact, it is the logic of capitalist counterrevolution that is the motor force behind the resurgence of nationalism from Central Europe to the Caucasus, as economically more advanced peoples seek to consolidate their own advantage at the expense of their less-developed neighbors. As we wrote in “`Ethnic Cleansing’ and Nationalist Wars” (WVNo. 580, 16 July 1993): “What is happening in Bosnia is a recurrent phenomenon in this epoch of capitalist decay.... Thus national consolidation under capitalism has been reduced to its stark component of communal savagery to drive out or eliminate minority nationalities.”
Yet it is to the capitalist imperialist rulers that a whole number of Vietnam-era “doves,” liberals and radical intelligentsia appeal for military intervention to bring “democracy” to the Balkans. Among this lot is one Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the American Workers League, the U.S. satellite of the now-departed Gerry Healy and his International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In his current role as saved sinner and “born again” anti-Leninist social democrat, Wohlforth called for U.S. imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the headline “Give War a Chance” (In These Times, 26 July 1993).
Wohlforth’s former master, Gerry Healy, was the consummate example of what Lenin called a “political bandit” able to wield Trotskyist orthodoxy when that suited his purpose and equally capable of being the bought-and-paid-for press agent for a variety of bourgeois-nationalist Mideast regimes (which he and his organization were for many years). Almost a decade ago, Healy’s organization blew apart, but the mark of this self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the ICFI can be found today in the heated exchange between Healy’s one-time lieutenants over their mutual responses to the Balkan quagmire. One side openly embraces Bosnian Muslim nationalism, while the other feigns orthodoxy in a supposed anti-nationalism which turns out to be de facto support for imperialism and national oppression.
For the past couple of years, Healy’s former “theoretician,” Cliff Slaughter, and his Workers Revolutionary Party have occupied the leading position in the campaign for “Workers Aid to Bosnia.” Running supplies to the bourgeois-nationalist Bosnian Muslim regime, with French and British imperialist troops in “UN” blue helmets riding shotgun, the WRP calls this an example of “working class internationalism”! To believe this line, one would have to include former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher — who is beating the drums for more aggressive aid to the Bosnian Muslim government — in the ranks of “proletarian internationalists.” In short, “Workers Aid to Bosnia” is nothing other than a direct echo of, and stalking horse for, those ruling-class forces who want to take a more belligerent military stance against Serbia.
Correctly arguing that communists must “fight intransigently against the nationalist poison spread by capitalism,” North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
It is hardly a large leap for Slaughter and the WRP to go from singing the praises of Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Iranian Revolution” to becoming the blatant press agent for the Islamic regime of Sarajevo’s Alija Izetbegovic. But North’s Workers League was also up to its neck in backing the sheiks and colonels in the name of the so-called “Arab Revolution.” If today North’s ICFI chooses to wax “orthodox,” it is simply because that is what fits their perceived opportunist advantage.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, amidst the imperialist chorus hailing the “death of communism,” North’s organization began issuing strident statements writing off the unions as “direct agents of imperialism.” Any and every other tendency within the workers movement have been deemed to be thoroughly bourgeois organizations. To what end? The obvious conclusion is that one is to believe that David North is now the sole uncontested proletarian leader on the face of the planet. Now, posing as Marxist theoretician maxim, North writes off the right of nations to self-determination as completely retrograde.
Proletarian Internationalism and the Right to Self-Determination
There can be no democratic solution to the bloody nationalist conflict in Bosnia and other regions of ex-Yugoslavia short of a thorough-going socialist revolution. Bosnia is not a nation, and there is no Bosnian “people.” Rather, Bosnia-Hercegovina is composed of three heretofore intermingled and closely related peoples — Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims. Formerly a province in the Ottoman and then Habsburg empires, Bosnia — Hercegovina was set up as a constituent republic in Titoist Yugoslavia, intended to be a model of interethnic harmony. Now, within the framework of capitalist counterrevolution, the heavy geographic interpenetration of these various peoples means that the national rights of one can only he realized through savage persecution aimed at driving out the others.
While various social-democratic and pseudo-Trotskyist organizations back the Bosnian Muslims and some leftover Stalinists back the Serbs, as communists we oppose all sides in this national/ communalist slaughter. We also, naturally and necessarily, oppose all imperialist intervention in the Balkans. Concretely this means that our organization internationally has stood for the defense of the Serbs against repeated NATO air strikes, as well as demanding that all UN troops, including those of Yeltsin’s Russia, get out of the Balkans and calling for an end to the UN/NATO blockade of Serbia. The only perspective that offers a way out of this all-sided slaughter is for the working class throughout the former Yugoslavia to overthrow their bourgeois-nationalist leaders in an internationalist struggle for a socialist federation of the Balkans.
To realize such a perspective, to forge proletarian unity and bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class of the Balkans, requires a leadership which in Lenin’s words acts as a “tribune of the people,” fighting against every manifestation of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnic hatred. Only in this way can the various competing nationalisms be undercut and the common class interests of all of the working people be brought to the fore. It was in this respect that the Bolshevik Party championed the right to self-determination for the myriad nations and peoples imprisoned in the tsarist empire.
But such a leadership is not what the Northites have on offer, nor could they. While they write that the “strong internationalist traditions of the Yugoslav proletariat must be revived on the basis of a scientific analysis and revolutionary program,” in “The Road to Tuzla” they simultaneously write off the whole question of the defense of the right to self-determination as an anachronism, inapplicable in today’s “global economy”:
The ICFI statement invokes the authority of the Marxist movement and Lenin. But in fact the Northites’ position is a purely chauvinist one which accepts the rule of the dominant nation in multinational states. Or as Lenin himself put it in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914): “Repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration...”
Far from having become some kind of anachronism, defense of the right of self-determination is, if anything, increasingly important. The escalation of interimperialist rivalries coming in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the drive by major powers to redivide the world into regional trade blocks and the increasing offshore production in low-wage “Third World” countries reinforces the need for communists to champion the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.
North’s ICFI and Nationalist Reaction
The Northites try to find refuge in the statement that in “Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, nationalism arises today as part of a retrograde tendency seeking to restore both direct imperialist domination and capitalist property relations.” But nationalist reaction is not simply a product of counterrevolution. It was also a driving force for capitalist restoration in the former Stalinist-ruled workers states. In the latter case, North’s organization was among the bigger fans of nationalism.
For decades the imperialist rulers howled about the “oppression” of the so-called “captive nations,” seeing them as a battering ram for shattering the former Soviet bloc. And the Northites howled right along with them. In 1979-80, when the Soviet army intervened in Afghanistan, we of the Spartacist League said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” noting that this brought with it the possibility, albeit unfulfilled, of breaking the chains of Islamic feudal reaction and extending the gains of the October Revolution to that hideously backward country. The Northites, in contrast, squealed along with U.S. president Jimmy Carter that the Soviet intervention was an attack on “the national rights and feelings of the Afghan people” (Bulletin, 8 July 1986). But there was no Afghan “nation,” and the peoples whose “rights” were being attacked were a cabal of tribal chiefs and Islamic mujahedin funded by the CIA.
Together with the Vatican and the CIA, North’s Workers League made the counterrevolutionary cause of the Pilsudskiite nationalist Solidarność in Poland their own, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). In 1990, they echoed crazed anti-Communists like U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in denouncing then-president George Bush for refusing to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union for its clampdown on the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania.
An article headlined “Gorbachev Steps Up Stalinist Aggression Against Lithuania” (Bulletin, 30 March 1990) decried that the “Bush administration has pointedly refused to make any condemnation of the Soviet military actions in Lithuania.” As we wrote in our article, “Imperialists Demand the Baltics” (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991):
Now they try to palm themselves off as the epitome of proletarian internationalism. Not only is this a monumental fraud, but the ICFI’s new-found opposition to nationalism is neither “orthodox” nor even vaguely leftist. Rather, once again, their position mirrors that of the imperialist rulers. Whereas yesterday they aided and abetted reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, today international capitalism is far from happy that the spoils they expected to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of bloody nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. While raising a hue and cry about “poor little Bosnia,” the imperialist rulers now generally decry the very nationalist forces they fomented, and the Northites join the chorus.
Was It All Gerry Healy’s Fault?
In his article, “Permanent Revolution . and the National Question Today” (The Fourth International, Winter-Spring 1994), David North declares that Healy’s WRP “systematically betrayed the principles of Trotskyism as it subordinated the proletariat to...bourgeois regimes such as those of Libya, Iran and Iraq.” From here he goes on to opine that only the “split within the International Committee made possible an intensive reexamination of the entire historical significance of the movements of ‘national liberation’ and their relation to the proletariat and the perspective of socialist revolution.”
North certainly has an elastic view of his own history — similar to his organization’s relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. His support to bourgeois — nationalist forces was far from abstract. In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an official Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.” That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” The ICFI, including North and his current cohorts, also enthused over “the anti-imperialist content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini” — i.e., the Iranian ayatollah’s “struggle” for an Islamic Republic (to the best of our knowledge this praise was gratis).
Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left long before the 1985 implosion of his Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. As for the so-called “split” in the ICFI, it would better be described as a falling out among thieves. Healy was ousted, North rushed to claim his mantle as the ICFI “leader,” and Slaughter took the name of the WRP and ran. For years, North & Co. have sought to clear their name by claiming they had no idea Healy was being paid for the role as publicity agent for Hussein, Qaddafi and others. In other words, their defense is that they betrayed the very same Trotskyist principles — except that unlike Healy, they did it for free! But even this “defense” would appear to be rather threadbare, considering that, for one, North’s colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, got censured by the Central Committee of his own organization in February 1986 for failing to report the receipt of monies from Arab regimes to the IC (Socialist Labor League Internal Bulletin, February 1986).
To alibi their former support for a whole variety of reactionary nationalist causes and regimes, today North’s ICFI acts as if nationalism has only recently become a “retrograde tendency.” In the “Road to Tuzla,” they write of the “progressive, unifying characteristic of the national movements of the epoch in which Lenin put forward the slogan of self-determination of nations.” But in calling for military support to national movements fighting against imperialist-colonialist subjugation, Lenin never praised their supposed “progressive, unifying character.” On the contrary, in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), Lenin called for:
The right to self-determination is purely a bourgeois-democratic demand and as such is correspondingly a subordinate part of a revolutionary-internationalist program. This question was posed point-blank for the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. In the latter region, newly independent bourgeois regimes sought and found the direct military backing of the imperialists — first the Germans and then the British — posing a direct threat to the revolution. At the close of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks took power in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan through a combination of local uprisings and Red Army intervention. As Trotsky wrote two decades later, “Forceful sovietization was justified: the safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before formal democratic principles” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” [April 1940] in In Defense of Marxism).
The “Global Economy”
Other than claiming that their newfound “wisdom” on the national question is the fruit of having got rid of Healy, the ICFI claims a “new world reality” for its line change:
Up until the mid-1880s, Marx and Engels judged national movements according to their ability to consolidate modern independent nation-states favorable to economic development. But with the development of imperialism the terms of reference changed. Marx and Engels began to address this over the question of Irish independence. As Marx wrote in a paper on the Irish question in 1869: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.”
Marx’s position on Ireland was further developed by Lenin in his writings on the national question. For Lenin the question of self-determination had nothing to do with the ability to develop a modern, economically independent capitalist nation. Indeed he polemicized at some length against Rosa Luxemburg, who declared that self-determination had become an “illusory” demand with the development of imperialism. In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin answered:
Lenin recognized that imperialism was the epoch of capitalist decay, in which the development of a national economy and emergence of a vigorous bourgeoisie were stifled by imperialist exploitation and domination over the more backward capitalist countries. The understanding that the national bourgeoisies of these countries are incapable of carrying out the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as genuine national independence, is ABC Trotskyism — in fact it is a fundamental underpinning of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Of course, very real changes have taken place in the world in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The relentless drive to destroy the Soviet workers state provided a point of unity for the various imperialist powers. With that removed, inter-imperialist rivalries have escalated. The global system of “free trade” the economic cement which held together the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet alliance — has crumbled as the major powers seek to redivide the world into regional trade blocs. But what is going on is not “new.” Rather, the post-Cold War world increasingly resembles the pre-1914 world of heightened interimperialist rivalries intersecting regional nationalist conflicts.
The so-called “globalization of production” — i.e., the export of capital — simply means that the capitalists have moved large chunks of industry to low-wage “Third World” countries. This, for example, has meant the attempted wholesale takeover of Mexico by U.S. imperialism under the conditions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Far from being a negation of the Leninist position on the national and colonial question, the current situation underlines the importance for communists of defending the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations against imperialist depredations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Revelation on the Road to Tuzla
David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination
PART ONE OF TWO
The collapse of the former workers states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union unleashed an orgy of nationalist bloodletting. Today the imperialist media denounces Serbian war crimes in the fratricidal slaughterhouse that is now Bosnia. But “ethnic cleansing” is hardly a practice unique to the Serbs. Not only are grisly atrocities carried out by all sides in the Balkans, but no less bloody national wars have been waged between Armenians and Azeris for possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, by Georgia against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, and throughout the Caucasus. To assert its domination in the region, the Russian army launched a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya which has virtually obliterated the capital city of Grozny and devastated the countryside.
To read the bourgeois press one would get the idea that these gruesome nationalist slaughters are inspired by the revival of some ancient “tribal” feuds. In fact, it is the logic of capitalist counterrevolution that is the motor force behind the resurgence of nationalism from Central Europe to the Caucasus, as economically more advanced peoples seek to consolidate their own advantage at the expense of their less-developed neighbors. As we wrote in “`Ethnic Cleansing’ and Nationalist Wars” (WVNo. 580, 16 July 1993): “What is happening in Bosnia is a recurrent phenomenon in this epoch of capitalist decay.... Thus national consolidation under capitalism has been reduced to its stark component of communal savagery to drive out or eliminate minority nationalities.”
Yet it is to the capitalist imperialist rulers that a whole number of Vietnam-era “doves,” liberals and radical intelligentsia appeal for military intervention to bring “democracy” to the Balkans. Among this lot is one Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the American Workers League, the U.S. satellite of the now-departed Gerry Healy and his International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In his current role as saved sinner and “born again” anti-Leninist social democrat, Wohlforth called for U.S. imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the headline “Give War a Chance” (In These Times, 26 July 1993).
Wohlforth’s former master, Gerry Healy, was the consummate example of what Lenin called a “political bandit” able to wield Trotskyist orthodoxy when that suited his purpose and equally capable of being the bought-and-paid-for press agent for a variety of bourgeois-nationalist Mideast regimes (which he and his organization were for many years). Almost a decade ago, Healy’s organization blew apart, but the mark of this self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the ICFI can be found today in the heated exchange between Healy’s one-time lieutenants over their mutual responses to the Balkan quagmire. One side openly embraces Bosnian Muslim nationalism, while the other feigns orthodoxy in a supposed anti-nationalism which turns out to be de facto support for imperialism and national oppression.
For the past couple of years, Healy’s former “theoretician,” Cliff Slaughter, and his Workers Revolutionary Party have occupied the leading position in the campaign for “Workers Aid to Bosnia.” Running supplies to the bourgeois-nationalist Bosnian Muslim regime, with French and British imperialist troops in “UN” blue helmets riding shotgun, the WRP calls this an example of “working class internationalism”! To believe this line, one would have to include former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher — who is beating the drums for more aggressive aid to the Bosnian Muslim government — in the ranks of “proletarian internationalists.” In short, “Workers Aid to Bosnia” is nothing other than a direct echo of, and stalking horse for, those ruling-class forces who want to take a more belligerent military stance against Serbia.
Occupying the “orthodoxy” corner is David North, who replaced Wohlforth as leader of the Workers League and is now the head of the various national fragments who lay claim to the heritage of Healy’s ICFI. In response to Slaughter’s “Workers Aid” campaign, North’s group published a lengthy statement titled, “The Road to Tuzla — How Slaughter’s WRP Aids Imperialism in the Balkans” (May 1994).______________________________
North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
_______________________________
Correctly arguing that communists must “fight intransigently against the nationalist poison spread by capitalism,” North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
It is hardly a large leap for Slaughter and the WRP to go from singing the praises of Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Iranian Revolution” to becoming the blatant press agent for the Islamic regime of Sarajevo’s Alija Izetbegovic. But North’s Workers League was also up to its neck in backing the sheiks and colonels in the name of the so-called “Arab Revolution.” If today North’s ICFI chooses to wax “orthodox,” it is simply because that is what fits their perceived opportunist advantage.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, amidst the imperialist chorus hailing the “death of communism,” North’s organization began issuing strident statements writing off the unions as “direct agents of imperialism.” Any and every other tendency within the workers movement have been deemed to be thoroughly bourgeois organizations. To what end? The obvious conclusion is that one is to believe that David North is now the sole uncontested proletarian leader on the face of the planet. Now, posing as Marxist theoretician maxim, North writes off the right of nations to self-determination as completely retrograde.
Proletarian Internationalism and the Right to Self-Determination
There can be no democratic solution to the bloody nationalist conflict in Bosnia and other regions of ex-Yugoslavia short of a thorough-going socialist revolution. Bosnia is not a nation, and there is no Bosnian “people.” Rather, Bosnia-Hercegovina is composed of three heretofore intermingled and closely related peoples — Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims. Formerly a province in the Ottoman and then Habsburg empires, Bosnia — Hercegovina was set up as a constituent republic in Titoist Yugoslavia, intended to be a model of interethnic harmony. Now, within the framework of capitalist counterrevolution, the heavy geographic interpenetration of these various peoples means that the national rights of one can only he realized through savage persecution aimed at driving out the others.
While various social-democratic and pseudo-Trotskyist organizations back the Bosnian Muslims and some leftover Stalinists back the Serbs, as communists we oppose all sides in this national/ communalist slaughter. We also, naturally and necessarily, oppose all imperialist intervention in the Balkans. Concretely this means that our organization internationally has stood for the defense of the Serbs against repeated NATO air strikes, as well as demanding that all UN troops, including those of Yeltsin’s Russia, get out of the Balkans and calling for an end to the UN/NATO blockade of Serbia. The only perspective that offers a way out of this all-sided slaughter is for the working class throughout the former Yugoslavia to overthrow their bourgeois-nationalist leaders in an internationalist struggle for a socialist federation of the Balkans.
To realize such a perspective, to forge proletarian unity and bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class of the Balkans, requires a leadership which in Lenin’s words acts as a “tribune of the people,” fighting against every manifestation of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnic hatred. Only in this way can the various competing nationalisms be undercut and the common class interests of all of the working people be brought to the fore. It was in this respect that the Bolshevik Party championed the right to self-determination for the myriad nations and peoples imprisoned in the tsarist empire.
But such a leadership is not what the Northites have on offer, nor could they. While they write that the “strong internationalist traditions of the Yugoslav proletariat must be revived on the basis of a scientific analysis and revolutionary program,” in “The Road to Tuzla” they simultaneously write off the whole question of the defense of the right to self-determination as an anachronism, inapplicable in today’s “global economy”:
Beyond Bosnia, the Northites argue against the right of self-determination for Kashmir, the Punjab and other nations locked into the “prison house of peoples” that is the Indian bourgeois state. Similarly, they come out against the national rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Quebecois in Canada.“In politics, terms which had a definite social and class content in one period often come to represent something quite different in the next. This is the case with the slogan of ‘self-determination.’...
“Those who advance the demand for self-determination through national separatism and bourgeois rule are responsible for the global consequences of such slogans. This ‘right’ will be championed by imperialist powers and backed by their military forces in other parts of the Balkans and throughout the world.”
The ICFI statement invokes the authority of the Marxist movement and Lenin. But in fact the Northites’ position is a purely chauvinist one which accepts the rule of the dominant nation in multinational states. Or as Lenin himself put it in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914): “Repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration...”
Far from having become some kind of anachronism, defense of the right of self-determination is, if anything, increasingly important. The escalation of interimperialist rivalries coming in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the drive by major powers to redivide the world into regional trade blocks and the increasing offshore production in low-wage “Third World” countries reinforces the need for communists to champion the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.
North’s ICFI and Nationalist Reaction
The Northites try to find refuge in the statement that in “Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, nationalism arises today as part of a retrograde tendency seeking to restore both direct imperialist domination and capitalist property relations.” But nationalist reaction is not simply a product of counterrevolution. It was also a driving force for capitalist restoration in the former Stalinist-ruled workers states. In the latter case, North’s organization was among the bigger fans of nationalism.
For decades the imperialist rulers howled about the “oppression” of the so-called “captive nations,” seeing them as a battering ram for shattering the former Soviet bloc. And the Northites howled right along with them. In 1979-80, when the Soviet army intervened in Afghanistan, we of the Spartacist League said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” noting that this brought with it the possibility, albeit unfulfilled, of breaking the chains of Islamic feudal reaction and extending the gains of the October Revolution to that hideously backward country. The Northites, in contrast, squealed along with U.S. president Jimmy Carter that the Soviet intervention was an attack on “the national rights and feelings of the Afghan people” (Bulletin, 8 July 1986). But there was no Afghan “nation,” and the peoples whose “rights” were being attacked were a cabal of tribal chiefs and Islamic mujahedin funded by the CIA.
Together with the Vatican and the CIA, North’s Workers League made the counterrevolutionary cause of the Pilsudskiite nationalist Solidarność in Poland their own, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). In 1990, they echoed crazed anti-Communists like U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in denouncing then-president George Bush for refusing to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union for its clampdown on the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania.
An article headlined “Gorbachev Steps Up Stalinist Aggression Against Lithuania” (Bulletin, 30 March 1990) decried that the “Bush administration has pointedly refused to make any condemnation of the Soviet military actions in Lithuania.” As we wrote in our article, “Imperialists Demand the Baltics” (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991):
Looking to establish their own independent capitalist states, the nationalist movements in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had their own program for “ethnic cleansing,” calling for the suppression of any and all rights of other peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Poles and others) within these states, if not openly advocating their forcible removal. But this didn’t much bother the Northites then.“As Leninists and internationalists, we stand for the democratic reorganization of the Soviet Union and for the right of any nationality with a leadership that opposes counterrevolution to withdraw to any extent it sees fit. But in Lithuania and the other Baltic republics the fig leaf of ‘national independence’ is being used as a cover for capitalist restoration. And this must be fought.... To prevent the disintegration of the USSR amid fratricidal nationalism, it is necessary to recapture the proletarian internationalism which animated the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky.”
Now they try to palm themselves off as the epitome of proletarian internationalism. Not only is this a monumental fraud, but the ICFI’s new-found opposition to nationalism is neither “orthodox” nor even vaguely leftist. Rather, once again, their position mirrors that of the imperialist rulers. Whereas yesterday they aided and abetted reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, today international capitalism is far from happy that the spoils they expected to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of bloody nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. While raising a hue and cry about “poor little Bosnia,” the imperialist rulers now generally decry the very nationalist forces they fomented, and the Northites join the chorus.
Was It All Gerry Healy’s Fault?
In his article, “Permanent Revolution . and the National Question Today” (The Fourth International, Winter-Spring 1994), David North declares that Healy’s WRP “systematically betrayed the principles of Trotskyism as it subordinated the proletariat to...bourgeois regimes such as those of Libya, Iran and Iraq.” From here he goes on to opine that only the “split within the International Committee made possible an intensive reexamination of the entire historical significance of the movements of ‘national liberation’ and their relation to the proletariat and the perspective of socialist revolution.”
North certainly has an elastic view of his own history — similar to his organization’s relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. His support to bourgeois — nationalist forces was far from abstract. In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an official Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.” That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” The ICFI, including North and his current cohorts, also enthused over “the anti-imperialist content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini” — i.e., the Iranian ayatollah’s “struggle” for an Islamic Republic (to the best of our knowledge this praise was gratis).
Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left long before the 1985 implosion of his Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. As for the so-called “split” in the ICFI, it would better be described as a falling out among thieves. Healy was ousted, North rushed to claim his mantle as the ICFI “leader,” and Slaughter took the name of the WRP and ran. For years, North & Co. have sought to clear their name by claiming they had no idea Healy was being paid for the role as publicity agent for Hussein, Qaddafi and others. In other words, their defense is that they betrayed the very same Trotskyist principles — except that unlike Healy, they did it for free! But even this “defense” would appear to be rather threadbare, considering that, for one, North’s colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, got censured by the Central Committee of his own organization in February 1986 for failing to report the receipt of monies from Arab regimes to the IC (Socialist Labor League Internal Bulletin, February 1986).
To alibi their former support for a whole variety of reactionary nationalist causes and regimes, today North’s ICFI acts as if nationalism has only recently become a “retrograde tendency.” In the “Road to Tuzla,” they write of the “progressive, unifying characteristic of the national movements of the epoch in which Lenin put forward the slogan of self-determination of nations.” But in calling for military support to national movements fighting against imperialist-colonialist subjugation, Lenin never praised their supposed “progressive, unifying character.” On the contrary, in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), Lenin called for:
“...a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”The Bolsheviks championed the right of self-determination not to advance the cause of nationalism but to advance proletarian class unity. The fundamental propositions of a Marxist position on the national question in the imperialist epoch were underlined by Lenin in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”: “on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle.”
The right to self-determination is purely a bourgeois-democratic demand and as such is correspondingly a subordinate part of a revolutionary-internationalist program. This question was posed point-blank for the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. In the latter region, newly independent bourgeois regimes sought and found the direct military backing of the imperialists — first the Germans and then the British — posing a direct threat to the revolution. At the close of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks took power in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan through a combination of local uprisings and Red Army intervention. As Trotsky wrote two decades later, “Forceful sovietization was justified: the safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before formal democratic principles” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” [April 1940] in In Defense of Marxism).
The “Global Economy”
Other than claiming that their newfound “wisdom” on the national question is the fruit of having got rid of Healy, the ICFI claims a “new world reality” for its line change:
“Vast changes in world economic and political relations have created corresponding changes in the character of the national movements.... Can it be seriously argued that the resurgence of ethnic chauvinism in the Balkans, or for that matter in the former USSR or the Indian subcontinent, expresses an effort to put an end to the legacy of imperialist and feudal domination? Can one speak today of the national bourgeoisie of Bosnia, or Kazakhstan or Kashmir seeking to ‘capture the home market,’ thereby creating conditions for the ‘victory of commodity production’ and hence a fuller development of the class struggle?”The idea of an “era of global economic integration” which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique “theoretical breakthroughs” has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!
Up until the mid-1880s, Marx and Engels judged national movements according to their ability to consolidate modern independent nation-states favorable to economic development. But with the development of imperialism the terms of reference changed. Marx and Engels began to address this over the question of Irish independence. As Marx wrote in a paper on the Irish question in 1869: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.”
Marx’s position on Ireland was further developed by Lenin in his writings on the national question. For Lenin the question of self-determination had nothing to do with the ability to develop a modern, economically independent capitalist nation. Indeed he polemicized at some length against Rosa Luxemburg, who declared that self-determination had become an “illusory” demand with the development of imperialism. In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin answered:
“Not only small states, but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of ‘rich’ bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states, but even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as Marx pointed out in Capital....Unlike the Northites, however, Rosa Luxemburg was animated by genuine proletarian internationalism. Although wrong, her visceral opposition to the right of self-determination was motivated by revulsion with the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in Poland (forces which some decades later the Northites would cheer on in the name of Solidarność counterrevolution).
“For the question of the political self-determination of nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society, Rosa Luxemburg has substituted the question of their economic independence.”
Lenin recognized that imperialism was the epoch of capitalist decay, in which the development of a national economy and emergence of a vigorous bourgeoisie were stifled by imperialist exploitation and domination over the more backward capitalist countries. The understanding that the national bourgeoisies of these countries are incapable of carrying out the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as genuine national independence, is ABC Trotskyism — in fact it is a fundamental underpinning of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Of course, very real changes have taken place in the world in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The relentless drive to destroy the Soviet workers state provided a point of unity for the various imperialist powers. With that removed, inter-imperialist rivalries have escalated. The global system of “free trade” the economic cement which held together the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet alliance — has crumbled as the major powers seek to redivide the world into regional trade blocs. But what is going on is not “new.” Rather, the post-Cold War world increasingly resembles the pre-1914 world of heightened interimperialist rivalries intersecting regional nationalist conflicts.
The so-called “globalization of production” — i.e., the export of capital — simply means that the capitalists have moved large chunks of industry to low-wage “Third World” countries. This, for example, has meant the attempted wholesale takeover of Mexico by U.S. imperialism under the conditions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Far from being a negation of the Leninist position on the national and colonial question, the current situation underlines the importance for communists of defending the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations against imperialist depredations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
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
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.
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?…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.
“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)?”
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:_____________________________
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.
_______________________________
”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?”Tony Banda’s “we were all crooks” indictment of “Mr. Holier-Than-Thou” North captures the cynical quality of this falling-out among thieves.
— printed in Fourth International, Autumn 1986
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.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Healyites Got Blood Money (1991)
Workers Vanguard No. 517 (4 January 1991)
Healyites Got Blood Money
Incredibly, the anti-Communist repression in Iraq in the late 1970s was actually supported by one tendency which masquerades as Trotskyists, Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC), represented in the U.S. by David North’s Workers League. They alibied the Ba’athist executioners, declaring: “This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in Iraqi armed forces for the purpose of undermining the regime. It must accept the consequences” (Bulletin, 16 March 1979). The Healyites’ “justification” for the massacres of CPers was that “the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party of Iraq has played a hundredfold more progressive role in the Middle East than Stalinism.”
The Spartacist League had long described the Healy tendency with Lenin’s phrase, “political bandits.” In 1967 the Healyites became champions of a mythical “Arab Revolution,” a catch phrase to justify tailing after Arab nationalist despots. By the mid-’70s, they had become press agents for Libyan strongman Qaddafi, and then shameless apologists for anti-Communist terror in Iraq (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April 1979). The details of this sordid affair came out in 1985 following the spectacular implosion of international Healyism. Not only did Healy & Co. hail the extermination of Iraqi CPers, but they photographed protest demonstrations in Britain and turned over to the Iraqi embassy the pictures of Iraqi militants, fingering them for arrest, torture and possible death.
How was it possible for a group claiming to stand for “socialism” to support anti-working-class terror carried out by a capitalist government? The answer can be summed up in two words: blood money. A 16 December 1985 report by an IC Control Commission documented how their “founder leader” Healy and his cohorts like the actress Vanessa Red-grave had shuttled around Libya and various Near East countries — including both Iraq and Kuwait! — looking for and, receiving subsidies to pay for their expensive daily press in Britain. (It should be noted that the implosion of Healyism didn’t come about over taking the money, but only when the money ran out.) The Control Commission was only able to trace part of the money because no serious financial records were kept, but it published the amounts it was able to uncover, which were received from various countries over a seven-year period beginning in the mid-’70s:
Libya ........................£542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar ...........................50,000
Abu Dhabi ....................25,000
PLO ..............................19,997
Iraq .............................19,697
Unidentified
or other sources ........261,702
Total ....................£1,075,163
(reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)
In exchange for this largesse to keep their showpiece press alive, Healy & Co. filled their pages with grotesque paeans to these very same Arab dictators. At the same time as they were alibiing the murder of Iraqi CPers, here is a sampling of what the Healyites had to say about Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds:
Healyites Got Blood Money
Incredibly, the anti-Communist repression in Iraq in the late 1970s was actually supported by one tendency which masquerades as Trotskyists, Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC), represented in the U.S. by David North’s Workers League. They alibied the Ba’athist executioners, declaring: “This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in Iraqi armed forces for the purpose of undermining the regime. It must accept the consequences” (Bulletin, 16 March 1979). The Healyites’ “justification” for the massacres of CPers was that “the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party of Iraq has played a hundredfold more progressive role in the Middle East than Stalinism.”
The Spartacist League had long described the Healy tendency with Lenin’s phrase, “political bandits.” In 1967 the Healyites became champions of a mythical “Arab Revolution,” a catch phrase to justify tailing after Arab nationalist despots. By the mid-’70s, they had become press agents for Libyan strongman Qaddafi, and then shameless apologists for anti-Communist terror in Iraq (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April 1979). The details of this sordid affair came out in 1985 following the spectacular implosion of international Healyism. Not only did Healy & Co. hail the extermination of Iraqi CPers, but they photographed protest demonstrations in Britain and turned over to the Iraqi embassy the pictures of Iraqi militants, fingering them for arrest, torture and possible death.
How was it possible for a group claiming to stand for “socialism” to support anti-working-class terror carried out by a capitalist government? The answer can be summed up in two words: blood money. A 16 December 1985 report by an IC Control Commission documented how their “founder leader” Healy and his cohorts like the actress Vanessa Red-grave had shuttled around Libya and various Near East countries — including both Iraq and Kuwait! — looking for and, receiving subsidies to pay for their expensive daily press in Britain. (It should be noted that the implosion of Healyism didn’t come about over taking the money, but only when the money ran out.) The Control Commission was only able to trace part of the money because no serious financial records were kept, but it published the amounts it was able to uncover, which were received from various countries over a seven-year period beginning in the mid-’70s:
Libya ........................£542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar ...........................50,000
Abu Dhabi ....................25,000
PLO ..............................19,997
Iraq .............................19,697
Unidentified
or other sources ........261,702
Total ....................£1,075,163
(reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)
In exchange for this largesse to keep their showpiece press alive, Healy & Co. filled their pages with grotesque paeans to these very same Arab dictators. At the same time as they were alibiing the murder of Iraqi CPers, here is a sampling of what the Healyites had to say about Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds:
“The Iraqis are slandered with the tale that the Ba’athists ‘shot thousands’ andToday David North cynically pretends that he and others of Healy’s loyal henchmen and toadies didn’t know that the “IC” was on the take. Yet we and others had denounced Qaddafi’s patronage of Healy for years! Moreover, in the factional blowout which followed Healy’s overthrow, British WRP leader Cliff Slaughter wrote a letter (14 January 1986) revealing that Australian Healyite Nick Beams had obtained tens of thousands of dollars from Near East regimes and had passed on the information to David North, who agreed not to raise the matter within the IC (see “On Baghdad, and Bagmen,” Australasian Spartacist No. 138, September-October 1990). Beware of these provocateurs for hire.
denied Kurdish independence....
“In a statement in [the Healyite] News Line the party leadership critically appraised the efforts of the Ba’ath Party to solve the Kurdish question.
“At the same time the [Healyite] WRP defended the Iraqi government from the CIA-organized forces of General Barzani.”
- Bulletin, 20 April 1979
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Healyites Blow Up (1985)
Workers Vanguard No. 391 (15 November 1985)
Banda/Slaughter vs Healy/Redgrave
Healyites Blow Up
The spectacular explosion of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is a sweet moment of revenge for a wide swathe of Trotskyists, ostensible and others who have been abused and slandered by the Healy/Banda machine of political bandits over the course of decades. The story broke late last month when two warring wings – one led by Gerry Healy and actress Vanessa Redgrave, the other led by Healy’s long time hatchet man Michael Banda and above-the-battle intellectual Cliff Slaughter – expelled each other. The ostensible basis was the rather remarkable charge that the 73-year-old Healy had been sexually abusing woman comrades for the last 19 years or so. What gives the event its prurient and vicious British bourgeois press but the fact that Healy’s role in the WRP roughly mimicked that of Stalin in the CPSU. The WRP’s supreme organizational principle was keeping the ranks in line by a combination of simple physical gangsterism and the cult of Healy as unique interpreter of the twin mystifications, “security” and “dialectics.”
As we continue collecting and evaluating the information, we think WV readers will find informative the article reprinted below from Socialist Organiser No. 251, 7 November 1985. The article, titled “The WRP Proves Us Right,” appeared under the byline of Sean Matgamna, a sharp-tongued British centrist. Matgamna and his Socialist Organiser know whereof they speak. And they surely have earned the right to enjoy the WRP’s downfall, having been hauled into the capitalist courts by Healy/Banda for having published “libelous” statements about the WRP which were manifestly true.
Matgamna’s article presents, from his own political standpoint, as good an interpretation of the split as we are likely early to encounter. And he nails the whole WRP cabal for its most corrupt political act – the explicit justification of the execution of Iraqi Communist militants by the Ba’ath military regime. “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi” was WV’s headline in 1979 when the WRP thus took to the loathsome logical conclusion its corrupt press agentry for murderous bourgeois-nationalists like Libya’s Qaddafi, Iran’s Khomeini and the PLO’s Arafat.
In bringing Matgamna’s article to the attention of WV readers we of course are not endorsing Matgamna’s centrist political views, particularly his stance toward the Labour Party – from which, we think, he also derives the characterization of Healy as a revolutionary in the immediate postwar period and the evaluation presented of the alignments in the British Trotskyist movement at that time, i.e., around the demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
REPRINTED FROM SOCIALIST ORGANISER NO. 251, 7 NOVEMBER 1985
By Sean Matgamna
Kennington Park Road, South London, last Saturday, 2nd. Four people are selling “Newsline” as they wait for the anti-apartheid march to come by. Two men and two women; all of them are in their late 20s or early 30s.
Suddenly a half-brick comes whizzing through the air from the other side of the road and lands at their feet. It has been thrown by a burly man, also about 30.
The brick is only the start. A steady rain of stones follows the brick across the road, and soon the intrepid four take refuge in the rhododendron bushes.
Triumphantly, the bombardier then jumps on a wall, raises both hands above his head after the fashion of football fans, and chants “Healy! Healy! Healy!” Then he drops back into the housing estate.
After the events of the WRP’s week, it’s a wonder they haven’t been going for each other with guns and knives! The picture of what has happened in the WRP is now reasonably clear.
The organisation has split down the middle. The Healy faction’s claim that they have the majority of the members of the old organisation on their side may even be true. The bourgeois press credits the old WRP with five to seven thousand members, but it was probably not more than one-tenth of that. So when the Bandaites jeer that Healy only has 250 supporters, they are admitting that he has something like half the organisation.
The Healyites have declared their expelled Central Committee minority to be the WRP, and claim to have held a special conference which “rejected” Gerry Healy’s expulsion and instead expelled Michael Banda and the other “conspirators” who raised their hands against the great leader.
Their resolution explicitly gave Healy a special place in the WRP, making it an article of faith to believe Gerry Healy to be “the outstanding leader of the world Trotskyist movement in the post-war period.” They have brought out one issue of their own “Newsline” (eight pages and without any sports section hich undoubtedly points to a propagandist deviation by them away from mass work) and an issue of “Young Socialist.” They have launched an appeal for £250,000 to bring out their “Newsline” daily from next January.
Gerry Healy is accused of sexual abuse of 26 and more women. This salacious “red-in-the-bed” stuff has been spread all over the tabloid press for the last week. But by far the most important and interesting developments have been the other charges that the Bandaites have laid against Healy and implicitly against their own organisation and its entire history.
In “Newsline” and in interviews with the bourgeois press, WRP general secretary Michael Banda has repeated SO’s [Socialist Organiser] comments on the WRP phrase for phrase and sometimes word for word.
Banda has:
1. Denounced Healy’s followers such as the Redgraves as people who have the attitude of religious cultists towards their “guru” Healy. We were sued for saying that.
2. Denounced Healy for systematic and routine violence and brutality against members of the organisation. We were sued for saying that.
3. Denounced Healy for using pressure, intimidation and violence to coerce young women comrades, into sexual activity with him. We were sued for saying that the organisation “exploited” raw young people.
4. Newsline now denounces the Healy faction for hiving a morality of “anything goes for the organisation.”
5. They challenge the Healy-Redgrave faction to sue them if what they say is not true. “In the days when they, dominated the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, newspapers, political opponents, trade unionists and individuals who happened to cross them were showered with writs” (“Newsline” 5.11.85). You can say that again!
Paranoid
6. Banda describes Healy as “a classic case of schizoid paranoia.” Classic case or not, he has been publicly paranoid for at least a quarter of a century.
7. Banda denounces Healy’s works on dialectical materialism, long the bible on which WRP members were trained, as “an outrageous piece of charlatanism.”
8. Banda denounces Healy for justifying the execution of Communist Party members by the vile Ba’athist regime in Iraq. Reports have appeared in one bourgeois paper that militants from Iraq who came to the WRP school were later turned over to the Iraqi regime, which killed them. Banda is quoted as saying that the motive was to get “bags of money.” It is not clear whether this is true or not, though people within the WRP claim to have evidence that at least one person was so denounced to the Iraqi government.
Explosion
There are also some political shifts by the Bandaites, adding up to a small move away from the lunacy of Healy and towards a slightly more realistic appreciation of the world they actually live in. It is still too early to assess this, because many things are obviously being said for effect, and the anti-Healy WRP has not settled down politically yet.
The probable reasons for the explosion and its dynamics are now pretty clear also: Healy had agreed to take a back seat or retire, no doubt under pressure, but apparently with the agreement of some who are now his supporters. But Healy is a half-crazy – and sometimes completely crazy – old man, who would not find that congenial.
There may have been political differences or nuances in play, but that would have had no autonomous weight. Healy seems. to have been forced to sign a written agreement to retire. But the Political Committee bloc that had pushed for his retirement then began to break up.
Two prominent WRP leaders, Mitchell and Torrance, seem to have changed sides, and perhaps others did too. The Political Committee reversed the decision that Healy would retire. A minority led by Banda revolted and appealed to the Central Committee, whose majority backed them. They decided on drastic action against Healy, and grabbed the weapons to hand. Hence the charges.
For the Bandaites it was probably a matter of survival. Theirs is a world where nobody has the right to disagree with the caliph, where disagreement is heresy against the leader in his capacity as pontiff and treason against him in his capacity as monarch. To “conspire” and lose, or to usurp and be overthrown, is to lose your head.
Healy has politically “executed” other long-time associates for a lot less than forcing him to retire. For example, Tim Wohlforth, leader of the U.S. clone group for a dozen years, was purged because he was slow to join Healy when Healy denounced Wohlforth’s wife as a CIA agent.
If Healy regained control, his defeated opponents would not have lasted long. So Banda and his allies acted as Healy had long taught them to act: brutally and without concern for decency, credibility or consistency.
The WRP’s atmosphere was saturated with incipient or actual violence, intimidation and terror. The organisation was a cult, built on the leader principle around Healy. Within it Healy did more or less what he liked.
It is as certain as anything is that in that organisation sexual exploitation, and where necessary harassment, intimidation, or ‘worse, would be part of the great leader’s way of life.
In one notorious case – I know the people involved – Healy beat up a woman comrade, a full-time organiser, because she wanted an abortion rather than to have his baby. (This is probably the case that got to the Control Commission in 1964 – she had two brothers and a husband in the organisation, one on the Central Committee.) But nevertheless it is also true that a considerable part of the ballyhoo against Healy’s sexual antics is both frame-up and an appeal to backwardness. Insofar as anything was voluntary in the WRP, many, of the “harem 26” must have acted voluntarily.
Revolutionary
Despite the political and personal weaknesses and inadequacies that over 20 years ago turned Gerry Healy into a bitter enemy of the Trotskyism he set in his youth to fight for, Healy was once a revolutionary. He was one of a small group at the end of the ‘40s and the beginning of the ‘50s who had the courage to set out to rebuild the Trotskyist movement when it collapsed and fell apart under the leadership of Ted Grant and Jock Haston.
If today there is poetic justice in his treatment at the hands of his pupils, as well as essential truth in what they say against him, that is the measure of how degenerate Healy had become.
Machiavelli might draw the lesson for him thus: “He who rules by fear and terror should not live to get old and feeble.” Politically the Bandaites are in a hopeless situation. Everything they say against Healy condemns them too. They were not rank and file activists or raw youth, but Healy’s close associates for many, many years.
And what WRP tradition exists apart from the one Gerry Healy made and shaped for three decades? What do they know about politics except what he taught them? What have they ever been but Gerry Healy’s stooges, deferring when they felt inclined to take a view different from his?
Teeth
Some of them may have gritted their teeth at various times – but if so, that’s all they did. Whether or not the WRP turned would-be communists over to the Ba’athist execution squads in Iraq, the WRP’s public justification of the execution of CPers by the Iraqi government was there in black and white-in “Newsline.”
And “party discipline” is no excuse for going along with Healy and the WRP across the class line – in glorifying the Iraqi regime, or Gaddafi for example.
Banda’s attempt to “blame Healy” is already going to preposterous lengths. Did Michael Banda and others beat up a Central Committee member in the north-west last June? Yes. “But Healy told me to,” says Banda! Nobody who went through Healy’s “machine for maiming militants” will fail to find some satisfaction in the present explosion. Public vindication for Socialist Organiser’s stand against the WRP is, of course, satisfying.
But if the Healyites and Bandaites eat each other up like the Kilkenny cats, that won’t undo the damage they have done to the Marxist movement and to the name of Marxism in the British labour movement.
We can only undo the damage by building the Marxist movement.
Honest members of the WRP can take the word of the Banda faction leaders for nothing. They should study the record, debate the issues that have divided the WRP from other leftists – like those who support Socialist Organiser – and break out of the WRP ghetto and into discussion with other socialists.
Banda/Slaughter vs Healy/Redgrave
Healyites Blow Up
The spectacular explosion of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is a sweet moment of revenge for a wide swathe of Trotskyists, ostensible and others who have been abused and slandered by the Healy/Banda machine of political bandits over the course of decades. The story broke late last month when two warring wings – one led by Gerry Healy and actress Vanessa Redgrave, the other led by Healy’s long time hatchet man Michael Banda and above-the-battle intellectual Cliff Slaughter – expelled each other. The ostensible basis was the rather remarkable charge that the 73-year-old Healy had been sexually abusing woman comrades for the last 19 years or so. What gives the event its prurient and vicious British bourgeois press but the fact that Healy’s role in the WRP roughly mimicked that of Stalin in the CPSU. The WRP’s supreme organizational principle was keeping the ranks in line by a combination of simple physical gangsterism and the cult of Healy as unique interpreter of the twin mystifications, “security” and “dialectics.”
As we continue collecting and evaluating the information, we think WV readers will find informative the article reprinted below from Socialist Organiser No. 251, 7 November 1985. The article, titled “The WRP Proves Us Right,” appeared under the byline of Sean Matgamna, a sharp-tongued British centrist. Matgamna and his Socialist Organiser know whereof they speak. And they surely have earned the right to enjoy the WRP’s downfall, having been hauled into the capitalist courts by Healy/Banda for having published “libelous” statements about the WRP which were manifestly true.
Matgamna’s article presents, from his own political standpoint, as good an interpretation of the split as we are likely early to encounter. And he nails the whole WRP cabal for its most corrupt political act – the explicit justification of the execution of Iraqi Communist militants by the Ba’ath military regime. “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi” was WV’s headline in 1979 when the WRP thus took to the loathsome logical conclusion its corrupt press agentry for murderous bourgeois-nationalists like Libya’s Qaddafi, Iran’s Khomeini and the PLO’s Arafat.
In bringing Matgamna’s article to the attention of WV readers we of course are not endorsing Matgamna’s centrist political views, particularly his stance toward the Labour Party – from which, we think, he also derives the characterization of Healy as a revolutionary in the immediate postwar period and the evaluation presented of the alignments in the British Trotskyist movement at that time, i.e., around the demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
REPRINTED FROM SOCIALIST ORGANISER NO. 251, 7 NOVEMBER 1985
By Sean Matgamna
Kennington Park Road, South London, last Saturday, 2nd. Four people are selling “Newsline” as they wait for the anti-apartheid march to come by. Two men and two women; all of them are in their late 20s or early 30s.
Suddenly a half-brick comes whizzing through the air from the other side of the road and lands at their feet. It has been thrown by a burly man, also about 30.
The brick is only the start. A steady rain of stones follows the brick across the road, and soon the intrepid four take refuge in the rhododendron bushes.
Triumphantly, the bombardier then jumps on a wall, raises both hands above his head after the fashion of football fans, and chants “Healy! Healy! Healy!” Then he drops back into the housing estate.
After the events of the WRP’s week, it’s a wonder they haven’t been going for each other with guns and knives! The picture of what has happened in the WRP is now reasonably clear.
The organisation has split down the middle. The Healy faction’s claim that they have the majority of the members of the old organisation on their side may even be true. The bourgeois press credits the old WRP with five to seven thousand members, but it was probably not more than one-tenth of that. So when the Bandaites jeer that Healy only has 250 supporters, they are admitting that he has something like half the organisation.
The Healyites have declared their expelled Central Committee minority to be the WRP, and claim to have held a special conference which “rejected” Gerry Healy’s expulsion and instead expelled Michael Banda and the other “conspirators” who raised their hands against the great leader.
Their resolution explicitly gave Healy a special place in the WRP, making it an article of faith to believe Gerry Healy to be “the outstanding leader of the world Trotskyist movement in the post-war period.” They have brought out one issue of their own “Newsline” (eight pages and without any sports section hich undoubtedly points to a propagandist deviation by them away from mass work) and an issue of “Young Socialist.” They have launched an appeal for £250,000 to bring out their “Newsline” daily from next January.
Gerry Healy is accused of sexual abuse of 26 and more women. This salacious “red-in-the-bed” stuff has been spread all over the tabloid press for the last week. But by far the most important and interesting developments have been the other charges that the Bandaites have laid against Healy and implicitly against their own organisation and its entire history.
In “Newsline” and in interviews with the bourgeois press, WRP general secretary Michael Banda has repeated SO’s [Socialist Organiser] comments on the WRP phrase for phrase and sometimes word for word.
Banda has:
1. Denounced Healy’s followers such as the Redgraves as people who have the attitude of religious cultists towards their “guru” Healy. We were sued for saying that.
2. Denounced Healy for systematic and routine violence and brutality against members of the organisation. We were sued for saying that.
3. Denounced Healy for using pressure, intimidation and violence to coerce young women comrades, into sexual activity with him. We were sued for saying that the organisation “exploited” raw young people.
4. Newsline now denounces the Healy faction for hiving a morality of “anything goes for the organisation.”
5. They challenge the Healy-Redgrave faction to sue them if what they say is not true. “In the days when they, dominated the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, newspapers, political opponents, trade unionists and individuals who happened to cross them were showered with writs” (“Newsline” 5.11.85). You can say that again!
Paranoid
6. Banda describes Healy as “a classic case of schizoid paranoia.” Classic case or not, he has been publicly paranoid for at least a quarter of a century.
7. Banda denounces Healy’s works on dialectical materialism, long the bible on which WRP members were trained, as “an outrageous piece of charlatanism.”
8. Banda denounces Healy for justifying the execution of Communist Party members by the vile Ba’athist regime in Iraq. Reports have appeared in one bourgeois paper that militants from Iraq who came to the WRP school were later turned over to the Iraqi regime, which killed them. Banda is quoted as saying that the motive was to get “bags of money.” It is not clear whether this is true or not, though people within the WRP claim to have evidence that at least one person was so denounced to the Iraqi government.
Explosion
There are also some political shifts by the Bandaites, adding up to a small move away from the lunacy of Healy and towards a slightly more realistic appreciation of the world they actually live in. It is still too early to assess this, because many things are obviously being said for effect, and the anti-Healy WRP has not settled down politically yet.
The probable reasons for the explosion and its dynamics are now pretty clear also: Healy had agreed to take a back seat or retire, no doubt under pressure, but apparently with the agreement of some who are now his supporters. But Healy is a half-crazy – and sometimes completely crazy – old man, who would not find that congenial.
There may have been political differences or nuances in play, but that would have had no autonomous weight. Healy seems. to have been forced to sign a written agreement to retire. But the Political Committee bloc that had pushed for his retirement then began to break up.
Two prominent WRP leaders, Mitchell and Torrance, seem to have changed sides, and perhaps others did too. The Political Committee reversed the decision that Healy would retire. A minority led by Banda revolted and appealed to the Central Committee, whose majority backed them. They decided on drastic action against Healy, and grabbed the weapons to hand. Hence the charges.
For the Bandaites it was probably a matter of survival. Theirs is a world where nobody has the right to disagree with the caliph, where disagreement is heresy against the leader in his capacity as pontiff and treason against him in his capacity as monarch. To “conspire” and lose, or to usurp and be overthrown, is to lose your head.
Healy has politically “executed” other long-time associates for a lot less than forcing him to retire. For example, Tim Wohlforth, leader of the U.S. clone group for a dozen years, was purged because he was slow to join Healy when Healy denounced Wohlforth’s wife as a CIA agent.
If Healy regained control, his defeated opponents would not have lasted long. So Banda and his allies acted as Healy had long taught them to act: brutally and without concern for decency, credibility or consistency.
The WRP’s atmosphere was saturated with incipient or actual violence, intimidation and terror. The organisation was a cult, built on the leader principle around Healy. Within it Healy did more or less what he liked.
It is as certain as anything is that in that organisation sexual exploitation, and where necessary harassment, intimidation, or ‘worse, would be part of the great leader’s way of life.
In one notorious case – I know the people involved – Healy beat up a woman comrade, a full-time organiser, because she wanted an abortion rather than to have his baby. (This is probably the case that got to the Control Commission in 1964 – she had two brothers and a husband in the organisation, one on the Central Committee.) But nevertheless it is also true that a considerable part of the ballyhoo against Healy’s sexual antics is both frame-up and an appeal to backwardness. Insofar as anything was voluntary in the WRP, many, of the “harem 26” must have acted voluntarily.
Revolutionary
Despite the political and personal weaknesses and inadequacies that over 20 years ago turned Gerry Healy into a bitter enemy of the Trotskyism he set in his youth to fight for, Healy was once a revolutionary. He was one of a small group at the end of the ‘40s and the beginning of the ‘50s who had the courage to set out to rebuild the Trotskyist movement when it collapsed and fell apart under the leadership of Ted Grant and Jock Haston.
If today there is poetic justice in his treatment at the hands of his pupils, as well as essential truth in what they say against him, that is the measure of how degenerate Healy had become.
Machiavelli might draw the lesson for him thus: “He who rules by fear and terror should not live to get old and feeble.” Politically the Bandaites are in a hopeless situation. Everything they say against Healy condemns them too. They were not rank and file activists or raw youth, but Healy’s close associates for many, many years.
And what WRP tradition exists apart from the one Gerry Healy made and shaped for three decades? What do they know about politics except what he taught them? What have they ever been but Gerry Healy’s stooges, deferring when they felt inclined to take a view different from his?
Teeth
Some of them may have gritted their teeth at various times – but if so, that’s all they did. Whether or not the WRP turned would-be communists over to the Ba’athist execution squads in Iraq, the WRP’s public justification of the execution of CPers by the Iraqi government was there in black and white-in “Newsline.”
And “party discipline” is no excuse for going along with Healy and the WRP across the class line – in glorifying the Iraqi regime, or Gaddafi for example.
Banda’s attempt to “blame Healy” is already going to preposterous lengths. Did Michael Banda and others beat up a Central Committee member in the north-west last June? Yes. “But Healy told me to,” says Banda! Nobody who went through Healy’s “machine for maiming militants” will fail to find some satisfaction in the present explosion. Public vindication for Socialist Organiser’s stand against the WRP is, of course, satisfying.
But if the Healyites and Bandaites eat each other up like the Kilkenny cats, that won’t undo the damage they have done to the Marxist movement and to the name of Marxism in the British labour movement.
We can only undo the damage by building the Marxist movement.
Honest members of the WRP can take the word of the Banda faction leaders for nothing. They should study the record, debate the issues that have divided the WRP from other leftists – like those who support Socialist Organiser – and break out of the WRP ghetto and into discussion with other socialists.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi! (1981)
English Language Spartacist No. 31-32 (Summer 1981)
Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi!
Healyite Libel Suit: An Attack on Workers Movement
We reprint below material documenting the attempt by the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy and Michael Banda to silence, through the bourgeois courts, Socialist Organiser (SO), a fortnightly newspaper of a tendency within the British Labour Party initiated by and politically identified with Sean Matgamna’s Workers Action grouping. The WRP (formerly the Socialist Labour League) had long been notorious for seeking to bludgeon left-wing critics into silence through physical gangsterism and use of the agencies of the bourgeois state. After more than a decade of political banditry of the most extreme sort, the Healyites decisively departed the ranks of the workers movement by 1978 by politically and materially subordinating themselves to a host of murderous Muslim dictatorships, most notably that of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, protector of Idi Amin and self-proclaimed apologist for Adolf Hitler. The current threat of libel action against SO (with the WRP’s Vanessa Redgrave fronting for them) represents a sinister attack against the right of political expression by the workers movement as a whole, and must he vigorously opposed by all tendencies of the left and labor movement.
To the best of our not uninformed knowledge, we affirm that, the charges and characterizations alleged against the WRP by SO are true. We emphasize comrade Matgamna’s observation that Redgrave’s attorneys conspicuously choose not to contest the allegation of the WRP’s ties with the oil-rich bloodthirsty bourgeois tyrant of Libya. In April 1979, we noted the WRP’s role as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” through its open support for the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party militants by the bourgeois nationalist Ba’ath regime:
As noted, the libel action against SO is taken in the name of performer Vanessa Redgrave, the most well known, of the WRP’s dwindling constellation of supporters and “angels” within the entertainment industry. Though it is common practice under British libel law to set up a personality to pursue a libel suit (organizations generally have a very difficult time pursuing a libel case), the use of Redgrave’s name and money against a working-class tendency is particularly scandalous. Nor is it the first time they have done this. In 1975 Redgrave dragged former Healyite Alan Thornett, a car worker, into court over an outstanding personal loan. This action against Thornett was taken by one who, as we noted at the time, has a lifestyle which would do no shame to Princess Grace of Monaco or Princess Ashraf, lately of Iran.
Since the material we are reprinting below came in hand, five writs, used to secure prior censorship through vicious and punitive methods, have been served against SO, its printing firm and the secretary of the defense committee. Indeed, one of those writs was used to prevent publication at the last minute of an article in Socialist Press, weekly paper of Thornett’s Workers Socialist League (WSL), which is printed at the same firm (which also prints a number of other left-wing papers in Britain). Some clients have already been intimidated into withdrawing their business from this printer.
Every working-class militant should look forward to the day when the Healy/ Banda gang is politically removed as a menace to the left and labor movement. A victory by SO against this attack would constitute a step toward that goal and we are therefore compelled by basic class principle to offer such resources as we can to assist in the defense of this case, including fund-raising and publicity, not least internationally. (The very English Healyites have a few shriveling international connections known as the “International Committee of the Fourth International.”) We offer as well to make available our extensive files documenting the Healyites’ history of slander, internal intimidation and violent hooliganism. We urge our readers to likewise support this important defense of the workers movement.
* * *
* * *
Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi!
Healyite Libel Suit: An Attack on Workers Movement
We reprint below material documenting the attempt by the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy and Michael Banda to silence, through the bourgeois courts, Socialist Organiser (SO), a fortnightly newspaper of a tendency within the British Labour Party initiated by and politically identified with Sean Matgamna’s Workers Action grouping. The WRP (formerly the Socialist Labour League) had long been notorious for seeking to bludgeon left-wing critics into silence through physical gangsterism and use of the agencies of the bourgeois state. After more than a decade of political banditry of the most extreme sort, the Healyites decisively departed the ranks of the workers movement by 1978 by politically and materially subordinating themselves to a host of murderous Muslim dictatorships, most notably that of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, protector of Idi Amin and self-proclaimed apologist for Adolf Hitler. The current threat of libel action against SO (with the WRP’s Vanessa Redgrave fronting for them) represents a sinister attack against the right of political expression by the workers movement as a whole, and must he vigorously opposed by all tendencies of the left and labor movement.
To the best of our not uninformed knowledge, we affirm that, the charges and characterizations alleged against the WRP by SO are true. We emphasize comrade Matgamna’s observation that Redgrave’s attorneys conspicuously choose not to contest the allegation of the WRP’s ties with the oil-rich bloodthirsty bourgeois tyrant of Libya. In April 1979, we noted the WRP’s role as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” through its open support for the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party militants by the bourgeois nationalist Ba’ath regime:
“For a small propaganda group without a significant mass base, moreover, program is decisive in determining a group’s class character. In the case of the Healy/Banda organization, the contradiction between its ‘Trotskyist’ pretensions and the dictates of its Libyan patrons has repetitively come down in favor of the latter.”We explained in the same article that this action, though decisive, was by no means isolated, but capped a long period of bizarre and venomous behavior, targeted in more than one brutal instance against supporters of the international Spartacist tendency:
– Workers Vanguard No. 230, 27 April 1979
“The Healy/Banda tendency has long had an extremely unsavory flavor. It combines idiot organizational sectarianism with the wildest gyrations of gross political opportunism to create an aura of extreme instability. Its penchant for elaborate conspiracy theories and its well-known readiness to employ physical gangsterism against left-wing opponents denote more than a trace of paranoia. But in the past couple of years the Healyites have added another clement to their political banditry: they have become the British press agents for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the fanatical dictator of Libya.”In Spartacist (No. 9, January-February 1967) we publicized the savage beating of Canadian United Secretariat supporter Ernie Tate outside a Healyite meeting at London’s Caxton Hall which inflicted injuries so severe as to require Tate’s hospitalization. The Healyites then sought to cover their tracks, not by denying that they beat up Tate, but (as today) by instituting legal proceedings against him to stop the circulation of an open letter by Tate describing the thug attack. In fact, Healy succeeded in frightening two weak-kneed British left-wing publications into publishing retractions of Tate’s letter under threats of libel actions against them. Healy’s then-loyal American toad, Tim Wohlforth, shamelessly defended the vicious beating with typically convoluted Healyite “logic” (workers rightly beat up scabs, Tate was scabbing on the Healyite International Committee, (Q.E.D...).
As noted, the libel action against SO is taken in the name of performer Vanessa Redgrave, the most well known, of the WRP’s dwindling constellation of supporters and “angels” within the entertainment industry. Though it is common practice under British libel law to set up a personality to pursue a libel suit (organizations generally have a very difficult time pursuing a libel case), the use of Redgrave’s name and money against a working-class tendency is particularly scandalous. Nor is it the first time they have done this. In 1975 Redgrave dragged former Healyite Alan Thornett, a car worker, into court over an outstanding personal loan. This action against Thornett was taken by one who, as we noted at the time, has a lifestyle which would do no shame to Princess Grace of Monaco or Princess Ashraf, lately of Iran.
Since the material we are reprinting below came in hand, five writs, used to secure prior censorship through vicious and punitive methods, have been served against SO, its printing firm and the secretary of the defense committee. Indeed, one of those writs was used to prevent publication at the last minute of an article in Socialist Press, weekly paper of Thornett’s Workers Socialist League (WSL), which is printed at the same firm (which also prints a number of other left-wing papers in Britain). Some clients have already been intimidated into withdrawing their business from this printer.
Every working-class militant should look forward to the day when the Healy/ Banda gang is politically removed as a menace to the left and labor movement. A victory by SO against this attack would constitute a step toward that goal and we are therefore compelled by basic class principle to offer such resources as we can to assist in the defense of this case, including fund-raising and publicity, not least internationally. (The very English Healyites have a few shriveling international connections known as the “International Committee of the Fourth International.”) We offer as well to make available our extensive files documenting the Healyites’ history of slander, internal intimidation and violent hooliganism. We urge our readers to likewise support this important defense of the workers movement.
* * *
SOCIALIST ORGANISER,
c/o 214 Sickert Court,
London N1 2SY.
2nd March 1981.
The Editor,
Spartacist Publications,
26
Harrison St.,
London W.C.1
Dear Friend,
Socialist Organiser appeals for support to the left wing and labour movement press
against the attempt by the WRP to stifle accurate reporting and fair comment
about them. The enclosed documents give the details of the WRP’s threatened
legal action and the case which looks likely to go to court.
I draw your attention to the curious fact that the WRP have not chosen to regard as
libellous the statements about their relationship with Colonel Gaddafi, and to the proposals that were made at the end of Sean Matgamna’s letter of 26th February 1981, including for a jointly agreed working class movement inquiry on the issue.
Yours fraternally,
John Bloxam. Secretary.
____________________________
5th February, 1981
Sean Matgamna, Esq.,
Socialist Organiser,
5 Stamford Hill,
London, N.I6.
Dear Sir,
We are instructed by our Client Miss Vanessa Redgrave
a well known member of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party
(WRP). The WRP is referred to on page 10 of the issue of Socialist
Organiser No. 33 dated January 24, 1980, and in particular in an article at
the bottom of page 10 under your name, with the headline “GADDAFI’S FOREIGN
LEGION TO KNIGHT’S RESCUE”. The Knight in question is Ted Knight and your
article referred to the support by the WRP for Lambeth Council’s rent and rate
rises discussed, on January 17, 1981, at the second “Local Government in Crisis”
conference. It is therefore obvious that this issue of Socialist Organiser should have been dated 1981 and not 1980.
In view of her widely known association with the WRP our Client regards the attack on the WRP in your article in this issue of Socialist Organiser as a libel on her as well
as on the Party itself. While we understand that the article contains very many
untrue and defamatory statements and implications (for instance by the headline
quoted above) about the WRP we are instructed to call upon you to undertake to
publish an unequivocal withdrawal of certain of those statements which constitute particularly gross libels. These are contained notably in the second and third full paragraphs of the second column where you state that the WRP:“is a pseudo-Marxist gobbledegook-spouting cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult which committed mass suicide in the Guyana jungle three years ago.At the end of the above second paragraph there is an asterisk which refers
It recruits and exploits mainly raw, inexperienced, politically socially and psychologically defenceless young people. It employs psychological terror and physicalviolence against its own members (and occasionally against others).”
to a footnote naming “The Battle for Trotskyism” published by the Workers
Socialist League “For an account of its (i.e. the WRP’s) internal life”. We are
instructed that the publication in question most certainly does not substantiate
the allegations made in the said paragraph which have been completely refuted in
WRP publications published subsequently, e.g. in “The Thornett Clique Exposed”.
As you must know, the WRP bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
Moonies, the Scientologists or the Jones Cult. Nor does it exploit young people
or anyone else amongst its recruits. Further, it not only does not employ
psychological terror and physical violence against its own members or against
anyone else but has gone on record repeatedly to dissociate itself from any
policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims.
If any future issue of the Socialist Organiser is to be published we would ask you to let us hear from you in immediate reply to this letter, that is within seven days of its date, as to the intended or proposed date of such publication and the date when it should go to press, together with the names of the paper’s Editor or members of its editorial committee and its proprietors. We learn that Socialist Organiser is not registered as a business name and note that, contrary to the law, its printer’s name and address do not appear anywhere in its pages, as to which your explanation is awaited. Our Client’s primary concern at this point is to have your undertaking that, with appropriate prominence to be agreed, a disclaimer and apology in the following terms will be published in the next issue of Socialist Organiser or in such other publication as may replace it as the newspaper put out by the publishers of Socialist
Organiser, whoever they may be, or in any such other publication to which you are contributing:Vanessa Redgrave and the Workers’ Revolutionary PartyWhile we await your undertaking as to the arrangements to be made to publish the above disclaimer and apology and your response to our above request for information, we must also ask you to acknowledge receipt of this letter within seven days of its date and to undertake not to repeat the same or any other libels on the WRP or on our Client in the future.
”Sean Matgamna and the Editor and Publishers of Socialist Organiser acknowledge that the terms in which they referred to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP)in their issue of the 24th January last contained wholly unwarranted suggestions that the WRP is a ‘cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult’ or bears a material resemblance to those non-political, non-Marxist organisations. Further, it is acknowledged that the WRP does not, as falsely stated in Sean Matgamna’s article, recruit and exploit ‘mainly raw, inexperienced, politically, socially and psychologically defenceless young people’ or, indeed, exploit anyone; nor does it employ ‘psychological terror and physical violence against its own members’ or others, being on record repeatedly as condemning violence in support of its aims. We apologise to the WRP and to Vanessa Redgrave, who is in particular associated with it, for having published wholly unwarranted and grossly libellous matter which we now expressly withdraw.”
Pending a fully satisfactory reply to this letter our Client’s full rights in the matter are reserved.
Yours faithfully,
Rubinstein Callingham
cc: Morning Litho Printers
* * *
Socialist Organiser
c/o 214 Sickert Court, London NI 2SY.
Your
reference: MR/AS.
26th February 1981.
Rubinstein Callingham, Solicitors,
6 Raymond Buildings, Grays Inn,
London WCIR 5BZ.
Dear Sirs,
I am in receipt of your curious letter of 5th February 1981, which is in fact more an attempt at a political polemic than a normal legal communication.
I hereby formally acknowledge sole responsibility for Socialist Organiser, and declare myself to be the publisher and political editor of the paper. The printer’s name was inadvertently left off Socialist Organiser no. 33, but there was a name and address on the paper. The printer’s name and address has appeared on previous issues. There was therefore no intention of evading legal responsibility. I owe you no explanation, and that section of your letter reads like a rather feeble attempt to intimidate the printer. I do offer you the assurance that our relations with the printer are proper commercial relations, without benefit of subsidies from the Arab or any other bourgeoisies.
I note that your letter refers to the headline of my article ‘Gaddafi’s Foreign Legion to Knight’s Rescue’, alleging that it is “one of the very many untrue and defamatory statements and implications about the WRP”, and goes on to contrast it with what you say are “particularly gross libels” and for which you demand a public apology. You make no reference to the clear statements in the text which clearly imply that you are subsidised by the Libyan Government, and perhaps other Arab Governments. Can it be that Ms Redgrave and the organisation for which she is in this affair acting as a front do not consider important what the labour movement believes about their relations with Libya? The implication is inescapable that your client knows that she must treat this as not libellous because it is true and, moreover being true, not something disreputable nor something which places the WRP outside the ranks of the labour movement because they have every appearance of acting as agents within that movement of the bourgeois Libyan Government. The implied admission in your client’s letter is therefore a valuable, if inadvertent, step to admitting the truth and to enlightening the labour movement on matters that concern it.
As regards your client’s reputation, although my article names three prominent leaders of the WRP organisation (Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter, Michael Banda) it makes no reference to Vanessa Redgrave. In my view, our readers would not be likely to consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP. In fact, the invocation of Ms Redgrave’s reputation, such as it is, is a transparent hypocrisy. Those who have decided to threaten a legal action obviously regard Ms Redgrave’s reputation, like Ms Redgrave’s money and her publicity value, as an expendable asset. The attempt to invoke the courts against a labour movement publication, like Socialist Organiser, can only tarnish Ms Redgrave in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of labour movement activists who consider it a fundamental breach of principle to involve the bourgeois state in the affairs of the labour movement. In fact, Ms Redgrave’s threatened action will provide topical illustration to show even more clearly that the WRP has, as my article asserted, ceased to be part of the labour movement.
In fact, my article in Socialist Organiser no. 33 (which was written in response to the Newsline editorial of Monday 19th January 1981 which attempted to brand the entire left at the second ‘Local Government in Crisis’ Conference as agents of Thatcher) contains not one single untrue statement or implication about the WRP. Every single statement in the passage you complain of is either true or fair comment and reasonable construction on the stated facts, or both. I would not choose to go to court with you over this. That decision is yours. In the event, however, that you force it on me, I will have no inhibitions or qualms about bringing into court some of the mass of evidence which has accumulated in the labour movement in order to establish that my article was in no way untrue or unfair to the WRP.
In your letter you make the absurd claim that your client’s organisation has “completely refuted” the account of the WRP contained in the publication ‘The Battle for Trotskyism’. This is laughable. One of the prime examples of the mental world of the WRP is the latest pamphlet ‘The Thornett Clique Exposed’ dealing with it. Here I draw your attention to the fact that the cover of that publication consists of a photostat of a document stolen, together with a filing cabinet full of other documents, in a burglary of a house in Oxford in 1977. This burglary was on Alan Thornett’s house. I would be interested in your client’s explanation of where they got this document.
You say that the WRP has gone on record “repeatedly to dissociate itself from any policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims”. This is disingenuous. I know very well that the WRP has publicly disavowed in the courts, during the ‘Observer’ libel case, the Marxis teaching on violence-which is essentially that the bourgeoisie, if faced with defeat by the majority of the people, will impose on the working class the choice to either defend itself and secure its interests by defensive violence or to peacefully accept the alternative which is bloody counter-revolution. My article clearly refers to the internal regime of the WRP. What it said about that regime is, as stated above, factually true and can be substantiated with oral evidence and documents. I want to add here, however, that anything the WRP says, whether by way of denial or affirmation, has little credibility in any existing section of the labour movement which is even slightly familiar with the WRP. That organisation has lied systematically and to a degree never paralleled (except by the Stalinists in the 30s, 40s and 50s) in the entire history of the labour movement, of which the WRP was part until 4 or 5 years ago.
My approach to this matter is governed by the responsibility to tell the truth to the labour movement and to call things by their right names where the WRP is concerned. While I am determined to discharge that responsibility, I nevertheless would not choose to go to court. There can however be no question of gainsaying what I know to be true or of publicly lying for the WRP according to the terms of your proposed letter of apology. I make the following proposals to you however.
1. As I said above, I would be willing publicly to explain that I do not consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP and its policies, with the precise wording of such an explanation to be agreed between us.
2. I would be willing to publish a reply of the same length as my article in Socialist Organiser by Ms Redgrave or even by “the leadership”, namely Mr Gerry Healy. They could probably have had that for the asking, as Socialist Organiser is an open and democratic newspaper. It is offered now, however, only in exchange for one of the following:
(a) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by Alan Thornett of the Workers Socialist League, to explain to the readers of Newsline how 20 members of the WRP came to Oxford 2 weeks ago and made a mass distribution at British Leyland’s Cowley plant of a printed broadsheet which, among other things, implied that he was a police agent and was clearly aimed, for the WRP’s own sectarian and. vindictive reasons, to help Michael Edwardes to discredit and then smash the militant rank and file leadership in the Cowley plant;
(b) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by George Novack, on behalf of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, to reply to the WRP’s campaign of libel;
(c) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by the Stalinist Iraqui Communist Party, the slaughter of whose
members Newsline has publicly justified;
(d) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by myself, discussing the recent statement by Colonel Gaddafi calling for the rehabilitation of Hitler and Nazism.
3. I do not consider the WRP to be part of the labour movement any longer. The WRP however pretends that it is. I propose that a working class movement inquiry be set up to investigate the statements in my article and contribute to the public debate on the issue, with the composition and other details of the inquiry to be agreed between us.
4. I would be willing to publish a clarification about the point on violence, explaining clearly that for anyone who knows the WRP the idea that the “leadership” would contemplate violence against the bourgeois state is an absurdity. That, however, would he done in such a way as to make our own Marxist views clear.
Yours faithfully, Sean Matgamna.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Qaddafi, Billy Carter, Healy (1979)
Workers Vanguard No. 231 (11 May 1979)
Qaddafi, Billy Carter, Healy, Idi Amin
Who’s Behind WL Provocations Against Spartacist?
Demanding “Defend Workers Democracy Against WL Provocation!” the militant demonstrators outside the WL’s May 6 meetings (called ostensibly in celebration of May Day) were replying to a pathological smear article in the WL's yellow journalism Bulletin (1 May) entitled “The Spartacist League: Provocateurs Against Trotskyism and the Iranian Revolution.” This I2-column tirade was the Healyites’ frenzied reaction to the SL's exposure of the WL/IC’s press agentry on behalf of its oil-rich Libyan patron. Last issue, WV had excoriated Healy/Banda for their efforts to justify the bloody suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party at the hands of the Qaddafi-allied bourgeois-nationalist Ba'ath regime (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April). Also goading the Healyites to new paroxysms of slander was the SL’s political offensive against Qaddafi’s pal Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, highlighted by the widely publicized tour by Fatima Khalil, the Near Eastern communist who spoke in eight cities on “No to the Veil! For Workers Revolution Against Islamic Reaction!”
Hoping to egg on the Muslim fundamentalists who have mounted physical assaults on Spartacist forums several times over the past few months, the Bulletin takes the SL’s Trotskyist line on Iran as the excuse for a new orgy of cop-baiting slander:
Lynn Marcus, Gerry Healy – Brothers Under the Skin
Of course, cop-baiting is nothing new for the Healyites, who slandered the SL as “the fingerman for the world capitalist class” as early as 1966. But the Bulletin article represents the full flowering of Healyite paranoia to an extent reminiscent of ex-leftist cultist Lynn Marcus:
To support this grotesque paranoid schema, the Bulletin must now create the SWP’s Iran line out of whole cloth. As everyone knows, the SWP has enthused over Khomeini’s reactionary clericalist regime in Iran with only the most perfunctory finger-wagging when the mullahs sought to reimpose the veil and suppress the national minorities. Only the WL/IC can justly claim to be more vulgarly nationalist, more slavishly pro-Khomeini, more programmatically reactionary than the reformist SWP.
And no wonder. The SWP’s pro-mullah capitulation represents mere opportunism; that of the WL/IC is dictated by its sinister ties to Qaddafi. Like the Stalinists whose political line is an apology for the foreign policies of the Sino-Soviet bureaucracies, the WL/IC takes its cues from the Libyan government – with one significant difference: the regimes the Stalinists seek to defend through suicidal “peaceful coexistence” are deformed workers states; the Healyite homeland is a theocratic, militarist, capitalist dictatorship.
The Shoe Fits You, Gerry!
The May 6 SL protest demonstrations reaffirmed the SL’s commitment to defend workers democracy for all tendencies in the workers movement, not only the SWP and the Stalinists but also ourselves. The chants and slogans included:
• What Keeps Billy Carter Out of the Workers League?
• WL Cheers as Iraqi Ba'athists Murder Communists
• Khomeini Attacks ‘Satanic Marxism’ – WL Hails Khomeini
• Lynn Marcus and Gerry Healy: Brothers Under the Skin?
• Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi
• Gangsterism and Slander – Hallmark of Provocateurs
• For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
At both demonstrations the picketers far outnumbered the WL supporters and easily rebuffed the WL’s attempts to provoke violence.
The WL/IC cop-baiting succeeds only in demonstrating how well the shoe fits them. Organizationally, their “method” of gangsterism and slander has long since been an open invitation to provocateurs. Politically, they sold their soul to the bourgeois “Arab Revolution” so many years ago that when it came time to auction off the stinking body, only the wretched Qaddafi was bidding. It seems likely that the present Bulletin attack was “made in U.S.A.” (or in London) rather than in the Libyan embassy, but it’s getting harder and harder to tell.
Qaddafi, Billy Carter, Healy, Idi Amin
Who’s Behind WL Provocations Against Spartacist?
“Q: What Do Idi Amin, Billy Carter and Gerry Healy have in Common?On May 6 trade unionists and supporters of the Spartacist League demonstrated at the Hotel Taft in New York City and the Alameda County Labor Temple in Oakland, California against new provocations against workers democracy by the notorious Workers League (WL), American cohorts of the British-based “International Committee” (IC) of Gerry Healy/Mike Banda. Once a claimant to the mantle of “anti-revisionist Trotskyism,” the Healyite WL/IC has in recent years placed itself in the service of Muammar Qaddafi, megalomaniacal strongman of Libya, utilizing on behalf of its patron the characteristic “method” of the Healyite political bandits – gangsterism and slander.
“A: The Qaddafi Connection!”
Demanding “Defend Workers Democracy Against WL Provocation!” the militant demonstrators outside the WL’s May 6 meetings (called ostensibly in celebration of May Day) were replying to a pathological smear article in the WL's yellow journalism Bulletin (1 May) entitled “The Spartacist League: Provocateurs Against Trotskyism and the Iranian Revolution.” This I2-column tirade was the Healyites’ frenzied reaction to the SL's exposure of the WL/IC’s press agentry on behalf of its oil-rich Libyan patron. Last issue, WV had excoriated Healy/Banda for their efforts to justify the bloody suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party at the hands of the Qaddafi-allied bourgeois-nationalist Ba'ath regime (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April). Also goading the Healyites to new paroxysms of slander was the SL’s political offensive against Qaddafi’s pal Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, highlighted by the widely publicized tour by Fatima Khalil, the Near Eastern communist who spoke in eight cities on “No to the Veil! For Workers Revolution Against Islamic Reaction!”
Hoping to egg on the Muslim fundamentalists who have mounted physical assaults on Spartacist forums several times over the past few months, the Bulletin takes the SL’s Trotskyist line on Iran as the excuse for a new orgy of cop-baiting slander:
“[The Iranian revolution] has earned the hatred of the CIA, the U.S. corporations, the military and the entire Carter administration. Nowhere is this hatred expressed more viciously however, than in the pages of the revisionist press The Militant, published by the Socialist Workers Party [SWP], and Workers Vanguard of the Spartacist group.These vile slanders are intended to provide a “political” cover for physical gangsterism against the SL, befitting the Qaddafi henchmen who applauded the Iraqi colonels’ execution of Communist militants and who now endorse Khomeini’s butchery of Kurdish nationalists in the name of preserving the territorial integrity of “Iran, Iraq and Syria, all centers of anti-imperialist revolutionary activity.” These tools of the capitalist Arab dictators – the worst enemies of the Arab working masses – will stop at nothing to still the voice of authentic Trotskyism.
“Utterly degenerate both politically and morally, it may be said without exaggeration that these groups represent not so much a political tendency within the workers movement, as an out-and-out provocation against the entire working class.
“Upon reading the articles on the Iranian Revolution in both of their newspapers, one cannot help but wonder aloud, In what police academies did these writers complete their educations?...
"If the antics of the Spartacist were directly orchestrated by the FBI and CIA, they could not be more provocative. And, in fact, there is every reason to believe that they are....
“[SL national chairman] James Robertson, an unmitigated degenerate....”
Lynn Marcus, Gerry Healy – Brothers Under the Skin
Of course, cop-baiting is nothing new for the Healyites, who slandered the SL as “the fingerman for the world capitalist class” as early as 1966. But the Bulletin article represents the full flowering of Healyite paranoia to an extent reminiscent of ex-leftist cultist Lynn Marcus:
“[The SL] is a small sect that was set up by the late Joseph Hansen, the proven FBI agent who for many years ran the Socialist Workers Party, for the specific purpose of organizing provocations against the International Committee of the Fourth International and, in the United States, against the Workers League.The present slanders thus carry forward the scurrilous campaign to smear Hansen as an “accomplice” of the Stalinist secret police in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky. This slander campaign, ludicrously dubbed “Security and the Fourth International,” has constituted the WL/IC's main activity for four years. The SL replied to these provocations with demonstrations demanding “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”
“The activities of Spartacist are intimately bound up with the massive infiltration of the SWP by FBI agents. For many years, Hansen and other FBI agents within the top leadership of the SWP used Spartacist to carry out those sordid political operations with which they preferred not to be associated publicly.
“It must also be said, that if the Spartacists did not exist, the Stalinists of the Communist Party would have had to invent them. Indeed, because of the history of the infiltration of the revisionist movements by the Soviet secret police as well as the FBI, it is not unlikely that the Stalinists did have a hand in the birth of this diseased organization....”
To support this grotesque paranoid schema, the Bulletin must now create the SWP’s Iran line out of whole cloth. As everyone knows, the SWP has enthused over Khomeini’s reactionary clericalist regime in Iran with only the most perfunctory finger-wagging when the mullahs sought to reimpose the veil and suppress the national minorities. Only the WL/IC can justly claim to be more vulgarly nationalist, more slavishly pro-Khomeini, more programmatically reactionary than the reformist SWP.
And no wonder. The SWP’s pro-mullah capitulation represents mere opportunism; that of the WL/IC is dictated by its sinister ties to Qaddafi. Like the Stalinists whose political line is an apology for the foreign policies of the Sino-Soviet bureaucracies, the WL/IC takes its cues from the Libyan government – with one significant difference: the regimes the Stalinists seek to defend through suicidal “peaceful coexistence” are deformed workers states; the Healyite homeland is a theocratic, militarist, capitalist dictatorship.
The Shoe Fits You, Gerry!
The May 6 SL protest demonstrations reaffirmed the SL’s commitment to defend workers democracy for all tendencies in the workers movement, not only the SWP and the Stalinists but also ourselves. The chants and slogans included:
• What Keeps Billy Carter Out of the Workers League?
• WL Cheers as Iraqi Ba'athists Murder Communists
• Khomeini Attacks ‘Satanic Marxism’ – WL Hails Khomeini
• Lynn Marcus and Gerry Healy: Brothers Under the Skin?
• Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi
• Gangsterism and Slander – Hallmark of Provocateurs
• For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
At both demonstrations the picketers far outnumbered the WL supporters and easily rebuffed the WL’s attempts to provoke violence.
The WL/IC cop-baiting succeeds only in demonstrating how well the shoe fits them. Organizationally, their “method” of gangsterism and slander has long since been an open invitation to provocateurs. Politically, they sold their soul to the bourgeois “Arab Revolution” so many years ago that when it came time to auction off the stinking body, only the wretched Qaddafi was bidding. It seems likely that the present Bulletin attack was “made in U.S.A.” (or in London) rather than in the Libyan embassy, but it’s getting harder and harder to tell.
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