IC Fraud Explodes (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

RECONSTRUCT THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

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

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

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

Healyite Provocation

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

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

Will the Real IC Please Stand Up?

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

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

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

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

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

The IC: Rotten Bloc

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

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

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

OCI and NSA

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

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

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

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

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

Healy and YSA

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

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

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

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

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

From Red Guards to Stalinophobia

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

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

OUST HEALY! (1967)

Spartacist No. 9 (Jan.-Feb. 1967)

OUST HEALY!

An Open Letter to Other Supporters of the IC

There is today a gross scandal in the Trotskyist movement, involving charges of an extremely serious nature leveled against the leadership of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). Because of the political similarity between the Spartacist League and the SLL, and the close organizational relations existing at various times in the past, we feel it our responsibility to make our views on the matters involved clear and unambiguous. The content of the charges is revealed in the following letter circulated by Ernest Tate.

"Dear Editor,
"I believe it is a tradition in England that all socialists should be allowed to sell or distribute their literature, without hindrance or fear of violence, outside public meetings. I would like to report an outrageous violation of this tradition to your readers and ask for their assistance in preventing it from happening again.

"As quite a number of people on the Left know, I manage Pioneer Book Service, a large outlet for Trotsky's books in England, and I or some of my friends try to cover most meetings with our literature. On Thursday, 17th November, I went along to Caxton Hall to sell literature outside the Socialist Labour League's meeting on the 10th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution. "

"I arrived at 7 :15 p.m. and began to sell the International Socialist Review and a pamphlet, critical of the S.L.L., entitled "Healy 'Reconstructs' the Fourth International." Several people were selling literature. A group of Irish Communists were selling their publication and someone was selling the English Militant.

"Initially there was some baiting of me by the Socialist Labour League supporters who were selling the Newsletter. At 7:50, Gerry Healy and Michael Banda entered the hall. A few seconds later Healy came to the entrance and indicated to his followers that I should be removed from the front of the hall.

"I was immediately set upon and physically assaulted by six or seven Socialist Labour League supporters. My literature was knocked from my hands. I was punched and thrown to the ground, my glasses were smashed, and as I lay on the ground I was kicked repeatedly in the groin and stomach.

"After the attack I had to attend the casualty department of Middlesex Hospital and I was forced to stay in bed for the greater part of the next day. At the moment of writing I am still badly bruised.

"The issue is a simple one. The Socialist Labour League Leadership hope by their actions to prevent me selling my literature outside their meetings. They hope to take away my freedom of speech. This attack comes after a number of threats against me and my friends by members or supporters of the Socialist Labour League. At Brighton during the Labour Party Conference, my comrades were physically threatened and prevented from selling our literature. The same was true at the recent anti-war demonstration in Liege, Belgium, where I was threatened.

"I refuse to be intimidated. Neither a Fascist Mosley nor an ultra-left sectarian Gerry Healy who imagines himself to be a Trotskyist, should be allowed to curtail our democratic rights. I intend to be present at the next public meeting of the Socialist Labour League to sell my literature. I ask for the full support from all people on the Left to ensure I do it without interference from the misguided followers of Gerry Healy.

"Fraternally, ERNEST TATE”

Following the circulation of this letter among Left and labor circles in England and its reprinting by several radical publications, the SLL instituted legal proceedings against Comrade Tate and threatened publications printing Tate's letter with the same treatment.

"Alighting from Coaches"

That Healy had Tate beaten is not disputed - in fact it is defended, as being within the framework of bourgeois "law and order." According to Healy's lawyers, the Tate letter

"described a disturbance on the pavement outside Caxton Hall, where the meeting was being held at which our client was a speaker. The letter states that Mr. Healy indicated to his followers that the writer of the letter should be removed from the front of the Hall and that he was assaulted by supporters of the Socialist Labour League. We are instructed that this is inaccurate. Mr. Healy, in fact, asked a steward to clear the pavement in front of the entrance to the Hall in order to allow passengers alighting from coaches to enter the Hall without being obstructed."

This grotesque legal language only serves to point up the hypocrisy of a man claiming to be a proletarian revolutionary leader using such a law – from the period when lords and ladies descending from their coaches had the right to smash beggars, petitioners, children and anyone else in their way – against another member of the labor movement.

Healy's legal action was clearly intended to intimidate other publications from printing the letter and to end public discussion of the whole matter. Two of the papers which had printed the letter, the Socialist Leader and Peace News, issued retractions and paid the costs demanded by Healy.

Perhaps Healy's having Tate beaten might have been rationalized as an uncontrolled individual outburst of anger; but the appeal to "the Queen's Justice" implicates the entire SLL leadership, both in the initial hooliganism and in the attempt to suppress discussion within the workers movement.

Gangsterism

Such tactics applied internally are not new to Healy. We have not previously spoken of the atmosphere of physical intimidation that surrounded the April London Conference, but it was present. We have since heard well-authenticated accounts of the use by the SLL leadership of calculated violence ("punch-ups") to silence internal critics. We already knew that Healy had developed a technique, which destroyed the revolutionary morality of those around him by systematically forcing them to make false confession against themselves. It was for refusing to do this that Spartacist was expelled from the April Conference of the International Committee.

What has now led Healy to employ these tactics outside his movement? This summer the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) issued, for their own purposes a pamphlet on the April Conference entitled "Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International," the one Tate was attempting to sell outside the SLL meeting. The pamphlet consists mainly of correspondence between Spartacist and the SLL prior to and following the Conference. It lays bare – most clearly in Healy's own words – the criminal wrecking tactics he employs within the international Trotskyist movement. In denouncing the pamphlet in the 20 August Newsletter, the Political Committee of the SLL stated: "We shall not hesitate to deal appropriately with the handful of United Secretariat agents who hawk it around the cynical fake-left in England."

"Outside the Working Class"

Healy has attempted to put a theoretical face on his actions against. supporters of the SWP – one similar to that used by the Stalinists in the thirties to justify their gangster attacks on Trotskyists. Then Trotskyists were labelled "counter-revolutionary" and beaten when they attempted to circulate literature explaining what was happening in the Soviet Union. The SLL at a "Special Conference" held 26 and 27 November passed a Declaration on the Socialist Workers Party, printed in the 3 December Newsletter and reprinted in the Bulletin. The document describes tie SWP as "turning completely away from the working class." The dispute between the SLL and the SWP is "a fight between the working class and the servants of the class enemy." It states:

"We tell the SWP: The days when you could address us as 'comrades' are long since gone. Your political actions have placed you outside the camp of Trotskyism and of the working class... There can be not the slightest question of your telling us what we must do to reestablish our reputation with you."

At the conclusion of the document appears the statement: "The issues raised in the Nov. 21st letter by Farrell Dobbs, Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, about what happened at Caxton Hall on the night of November 17th, we cannot discuss at this stage for legal reasons." Yet even if supporters of the SWP must be cleared from the streets as "servants of the class enemy," the appeal against them to the bourgeois courts is not explained. The Trotskyist movement has always opposed any appeal to the bourgeois state, even against Fascists.

Healy Exposed

The turn by Healy and the SLL leadership to the political methods of the petty bourgeoisie and to the bourgeois courts is not the action of either genuine revolutionists or of "ultraleft sectarians." Such methods have no relation to the formal politics of the SLL, the politics of revolutionary Trotskyism. How is this contradiction to be explained? We say that Healy is an aggressive and greedy adventurer whose particular politics have changed frequently. At the present he is claiming to adhere to the revolutionary Marxist program of Trotskyism. Tomorrow his politics will be something else, just as they were only a few years ago when Healy was indistinguishable from the Bevanites in the Labour Party.

Furthermore, Healy is an adventurer peculiarly preoccupied with sharp financial deals and with technical and material matters: His Plough Press does heavy commercial work – using his comrades' labor. He believes that "weak" national sections should financially support the "strong" one, i.e., his. Thus in 1961 he took over $1,000 from those of us who were then his supporters in this country in order to make a world tour. The tour never materialized, nor was the money returned or otherwise accounted for. (Copies of the relevant correspondence and cancelled checks would be available to any bona-fide workers' investigating commission.) Since then Healy has always sought, successfully, to conduct his relations with comrades in the U.S. at a profit. Churchill once described England as a nation of small businessmen. Healy stands as the left wing of his nation.

Sack Healy!

The persistent adherence by the Spartacist League to the revolutionary principles and program of Trotskyism, to which Healy gives lip service, have twice led Healy to break with and attempt to destroy us. Because of this adherence, the Spartacist League is not now besmirched by the public exposure of the gangster tactics Healy uses. Just as Farrell Dobb's telegram of condolences to Mrs. Kennedy came as a revelation, even to those who were most aware of the deepening revisionism of the.SWP, so Healy's outrageous beating of Tate, compounded by dragging the victim before the courts of Elizabeth II's England, is a striking exposure of his and his leading committee's bankruptcy as revolutionists.

To the members of the SLL and the other sections of the IC, we say: OUST HEALY! In the United States the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) has consistently aped Healy. Its members have now individually defended Healy's attack on Tate by saying, "Well, we want to smash Pabloites, don't we?" while the Bulletin reprints Healy's cynical statement that questions pertaining to "the events around Caxton Hall" cannot be discussed "for legal reasons." The ACFI members, whose initial weaknesses were exploited by Healy in typical Comintern fashions, are now being made to accept and justify ever greater departures from revolutionary practice. As with Stalin's Comintern, sections that have developed along this path have no inner stamina to resist any threat or any "opportunity" domestically. At the first opportunity we will see ACFI's vaunted "internationalism" (i.e., loyalty to a British clique) change into the most vicious American nationalism.

As for the SWP, it is certainly their right to factionally use against their political opponents this act of hooliganism. However, as Oscar Wilde once pointed out, hypocrisy is the acknowledgement vice pays to virtue. The SWP today is chasing after the same pacifists, Stalinists and middle-class elements who have been and will be guilty of the most serious violence against the working class and its left wing, both directly and through the bourgeois state. However, despite the motives of the SWP, its objective call at the present time for democracy within the labor movement is correct. We concur, only insisting that this democracy be applied impartially to all sections of the workers' movement. Furthermore, we are for the defense by any measures necessary of the right of Tate or anyone else within the workers' movement to press their opinions. The legal defense imposed on Tate certainly merits the support of all militants, and contributions for this purpose may be sent to him c/o Pioneer Book Service, 8 Toynbee Street, London E1, England.

Trotsky's Method

In addition to the defense of Tate, what can be done to apply the maximum pressure against repetitions of this conduct? Trotsky has offered us an example of how to proceed in his article, "A Case for a Labor Jury – Against All Types of Gangsterism in the Working Class Movement; On the Murder of the Italian Stalinist Montanari." In this emigre quarrel the killer had apparently been victimized by the Stalinists and after resorting to violence he was for a time falsely linked by them to the Trotskyists. The conduct of the Italian Communist Party then roughly corresponds to the SLL's now. The conclusion of the article from the New Militant, 5 October 1935, is reprinted here :

". . . The Montanari-Beiso case is important precisely because a conflict on the political plane has led to a supremely senseless act of murder of one emigre by another. In this there lies an ominously serious warning, and it is necessary to grasp its significance in time!

"The matter is now in the hands of the bourgeois law courts. The official investigation is obviously not intended to cast light on the bloody tragedy from the standpoint of revolutionary morals of the proletariat. The prosecution will probably try only to compromise the proletarian emigres and the revolutionary organizations in particular. But the agents of the Comintern will also try to exploit the trial for every vile purpose, as they are obliged to do. The duty of workers' organizations, without any regard for political banners, lies in one thing: in shedding the greatest light possible on this case, and thereby, insofar as it is possible, to prevent the repetition of gunplay in revolutionary circles.

"In our opinion, the labor organizations,must establish, without any further delay, an authoritative and non-partisan committee which would go over the entire material, including Beiso's letters mentioned in l'Humanite, to examine all the witnesses and representatives of the parties and groups who are concerned or interested in the case, so that the political, moral and personal circumstances in the case be clearly established. This is necessary not only in memory of Montanari, not only to reveal Beiso's real motives, but also to purge the atmosphere of all working class organizations of treachery, calumny, hounding and gun play. Naturally the interests of the case would be best served if the representatives of l'Humanite and of the Central Committee of the Italian C.P. were to take part in this Committee. But we may safely predict that they will most certainly refuse: these politicians stand only to lose from an impartial investigation, and much more than would appear on the surface. But the investigation ought not to be wrecked by their refusal to participate. Every honest participant in the labor movement is deeply interested in seeing to it that this abscess is opened which can otherwise develop into gangrene. The tragic case of Montanari-Beiso must be brought before a labor jury."

Workers' Inquiry

In the event that the grip of Healy's clique on the Socialist Labour League is too strong, or Healy's leading collaborators on the International Committee too cowardly, to intervene directly to oust Healy, we think it appropriate to force a workers' inquiry to expose this fraud who disorients and corrupts the Trotskyist movement by posing as a revolutionary leader.

Revolution and Truth (1966)

Spartacist No. 8 (November - December 1966)

Revolution and Truth

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

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

The Calculated Lie

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

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

Wohlforth and Struggle

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

__________________________

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

___________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wohlforth's Method

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

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

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

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

Trotskyism and Truth

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

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

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

1966 London Conference 1: Reunification Smashed

Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)

REUNIFICATION SMASHED

The unity between the American Committee for the Fourth International and Spartacist has been smashed. The Trotskyist movement internationally and in the U.S. is being seriously disorganized by G. Healy and M. Banda, leaders of the British Socialist Labour League. The Healy group dominates the International Committee of the Fourth International, whose forces, including ourselves, we deem the essential political repository in this period of authentic revolutionary Marxism, i.e., Trotskyism.

The current wrecking campaign being pushed in the columns of the ACFI Bulletin and elsewhere represents a 180-degree turn away from the principled fusion line advanced by Healy at the October 1965 Montreal conference. Then Healy insisted, with our full concurrence, that the three-year-long unjustified (and unprincipled) division between Spartacist and ACFI must be brought promptly to an end; ACFI-Spartacist fusion, he then insisted, was an absolute pre-condition for building the Trotskyist movement in the U.S.

Now, in the wake of the April London I.C. Conference (reported on in this issue) Healy, without offering any serious political pretext for his actions, has diverted the energies of the I.C. away from building an international to conducting a campaign of petty internecine warfare against those with whom, up to April, he proposed to unify. By his own criteria of last October, Healy has set out to wreck the revolutionary movement in the United States.

This compels Spartacist to evaluate this Healy with whom we have been in political solidarity since 1961. We must redefine our tasks in, the light of this recent development.

Healy's Line

The issue which Healy cites to justify his strange actions is that SPARTACIST editor, Robertson refused to denounce himself before the Conference as "a petty-bourgeois American chauvinist."

This incident proves, according to Healy, the political and organizational character of the entire Spartacist organization!

Now, the Bulletin and particularly Healy's voluminous personal correspondence to Spartacist and ACFI members, are filled with all sorts of charges against Spartacist. Most of these charges, it is interesting to note, are identical with objections to unification raised by Wohlforth at Montreal, where Healy denounced Wohlforth as a "non-Marxist" for his approach to Spartacist on just these grounds. Now, Healy reverts to this same "non-Marxist" nonsense -- on the pretext that Robertson suddenly revealed his "true nature" in London.

The Actual Issues

There is a consistent political issue underneath Healy's surface irrationalities. It was only with considerable negotiation that the Spartacist delegation at Montreal won the following concession from Healy: "Tactical disagreements on work in the U.S. will not be an obstacle to unity provided decisions do not contravene the basic documents of the world movement." Healy reluctantly agreed to the right of national sections to make their own tactical decisions, a right whose importance is demonstrated by the degeneration of the Comintern under Stalin: national leaderships reduced to incompetent, Kremlin-servile hacks devoid of revolutionary capacity.

Since Wohlforth had completely discredited himself at the joint ACFI-Spartacist New York membership meeting on the eve of the April Conference, Healy could no longer proceed on the (always false) assumption that a cohesive ACFI fraction under Wohlforth would simply march into and take over the "loose, activist" Spartacist organization. This weakening of Wohlforth's position was aggravated by the latter's political break with ACFI's proclaimed theoretical leader, L. Marcus, at the same time. If fusion were carried out, Wohlforth would enter Spartacist as representative of a doubly-isolated faction. Healy was faced with the prospect of an American section led, by a bloc which would resist Healy's Cominternist practices. Under the circumstances, Healy could not accept fusion unless Robertson servilely degraded himself at the conference. Healy doesn't want any section in the I.C. that Healy himself does not control down to the last nut and bolt.

What This Means

A section of Spartacist then forming the SWP Revolutionary Tendency had a similar experience with Healy in 1962. Healy insisted that the R.T. bloc with the Dobbs leadership of the SWP as a still genuinely revolutionary tendency, against Hansen, Weiss and Warde. R.T. leaders were given an ultimatum to sign such an agreement without discussion, vote or appeal. At that time the R.T. wrote: "One of the most serious implications of the mode of intervention of the SLL-IC is the question mark it places over the capacity of these comrades to rebuild the Fourth International on a solid basis. We must reserve final judgment until more of the circumstances are clear."

The circumstances are now quite clear. Healy and Banda, free-swinging figures in control of the SLL party machinery, have, for the moment, an organizational hammerlock on the I.C. They have used their hammerlock at the recent conference to drive out a number of candidate and observer sections and thus dissipate an historic opportunity for refounding Trotsky's Fourth International. The Healy-Banda machine itself is now aptly characterized as "fake Leninist," a tendency whose real political character is displayed by its "clever" machine politics. That is to say, the experience of the Conference, taken together with other evidence from the history of the SLL, demonstrates that the Healy-Banda machine subordinates real political issues of agreement and disagreement to the exigencies of organizational issues and personal, prestige politics. That organizational tendency is itself a political issue of the first order.

Turn to SWP?

In late 1962, Healy broke with the R.T. for characterizing the SWP leadership as centrist. Barely half a year later, after his opportunistic maneuver had failed, Healy began describing that same SWP leadership as total betrayers of Trotskyism without redeeming quality. Now, in the wake of the new split with Spartacist, Healy again makes certain moves toward a new maneuver with that same SWP leadership. In a letter to two, Spartacist members, he justifies the split on the grounds that unification "would have strengthened the anti-internationalist trend of the SWP." Then, in the 21 May Newsletter, after over six months' intensive denunciation of the SWP's Anti-War line in the Newsletter and Bulletin, Healy comments on the killing of a Detroit YSAer by a deranged person by praising the anti-war struggle of the SWP! In any case, the smashing of ACFI-Spartacist fusion is a gift to the revisionist SWP.

ACFI

We refrained from advancing conclusive judgments of ACFI until recently. The recent experience, added to our intimate acquaintance with Wohlforth and his circle over many years, brought us to the conclusion that he represents a literary left-centrist tendency. This was graphically revealed at the time of the NYC October 16 Peace Parade. Then while the Bulletin was correctly attacking the popular-front nature of he Parade Committee, at the same time the ACFI, membership was marching under the discipline of that committee, and refused to carry any slogans other than the officially approved "Stop the War in Vietnam Now."

However, the ACFI with which we proposed to fuse consisted of more than the original eight members of Wohlforth's SWP sectlet. Both experienced and new Marxists had been drawn to ACFI on the basis of the I.C.'s political program. ACFI's greatest rate of growth occurred on the basis of its perspective of fusion with Spartacist. Now, since Wohlforth first called fusion off in an outburst at the March 20th joint membership meeting, over a quarter of ACFI's nearly forty members has dropped from the organization or joined with L. Marcus and Carol Lawrence in carrying out fusion with Spartacist. Of those who remain in ACFI, a majority are simply unwilling to break with Healy's "junior Comintern," despite their contempt for the Wohlforth leadership clique; how many hang on remains to be seen.

We Go Ahead

Politics shapes the direction of organizations far more decisively than organizational and personal issues. At the same time the latter interact with and are therefore a part of real politics. It is from that that we draw the lessons of the April Conference and define our tasks flowing from it.

We draw appropriate political conclusions from the organizational wrecking practices of Healy and Wohlforth. However, we do not close the door to them, much less to all those forces within the I.C. who are their victims. Yet, from Healy and Wohlforth, in particular, we will need evidence of an inner-revolution before collaboration would be possible. So long as they remain on their present bankrupt course, we are locked in an implacable struggle to cleanse the revolutionary movement of their poisonous influence.

In our final statement to the I.C. Conference, with expulsion but minutes away in a grotesque, petty frame-up that gives the real measure of the Healy clique, we said: "If the comrades go ahead to exclude us from this Conference, we ask only what we have asked before -- study our documents, including our present draft on U.S. work before you now, and our work over the next months and years. We will do the same, and we firmly believe that real a unification of the proper Trotskyist forces will be achieved, despite this tragic setback."

In addition to extending our international ties and functioning as a conscious detachment of the world movement within the U.S., we have the duty to go on to build a strong American section rooted in the class struggle and to push forward our understanding through the inner-struggle confrontation between our acquired lessons from yesterday and the endless new challenges that are inherent in social life. We shall go forward, let our enemies beware!

Conversations with Wohlforth - Preface

Marxist Bulletin No. 3 (Part IV - 1965)

PREFACE

The 8 sessions of unity negotiations between Spartacist and the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) took place from 18 June to 8 October 1965. The minutes, taken by the secretary in shorthand, are correct and complete almost to the word; the first six sets of minutes were adopted by the two negotiating committees during the course of the talks.

As transcripts of the spoken word, the minutes may be somewhat confusing to the reader, to whom the specific incidents debated may not be common knowledge. Other numbers of our Marxist Bulletin series provide explanation and documentation of the earlier history of relations between Spartacist and ACFI. To summarize briefly here: The two groups were originally a united Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and both looked for political leadership to the International Committee for the Fourth International (IC) whose leading section was the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). In 1962, while still inside the SWP, two leaders of the RT, Tim Wohlforth and Art Philips, under the guidance of the SLL's Gerry Healy, deliberately forced a split in the RT ostensibly over the dispute within the RT over the nature of the SWP. Because of the fraudulent nature of the split and the organizational atrocities of Wohlforth-Philips, the majority of the RT comrades refused to be part of Wohlforth's "Reorganized Minority Tendency" (RMT). In 1963-4 the Wohlforthites were instrumental in deliberately bringing about the expulsion of the RT from the SWP. Shortly thereafter the RMT (having split internally, the unstable bloc with Philips having blown up) engineered its own expulsion from the SWP. The former RT majority around Robertson-White-Mage organized around the publication of the Spartacist and later became the Spartacist League. The RMT changed its name to ACFI, publishing the Bulletin of International Socialism; this tendency now calls itself the Workers League.

Negotiation and Its Aftermath

The negotiating sessions themselves have something of an abstract quality. To the Wohlforthites they were just a game, as Wohlforth did not seriously intend to unify. The negotiations were begun at the insistence of Spartacist on the basis that the formal political positions of the two groups were too similar to justify separation on organizational grounds. ACFI replied by attempts at fraternization which were no more and no less than an attempted raid, while refusing to state that unity was possible or principled. It was not until the 5th session that Wohlforth made this admission, and throughout, the ACFI negotiators continued to insist that splitting the RT in 1962 had been "principled". Relations between the two groups deteriorated visibly throughout the last few negotiating sessions, culminating in a frank show-down in the 8th meeting over the 1962 split and the wretched record of ACFI. Logically, this might well have meant the cessation of all attempts to unify. At this point, Gerry Healy instructed ACFI to proceed with unity forthwith. In this sense, the negotiations are unreal: they actually had little to do with bringing about the Northern (Montreal) joint unity conference which followed them. The Spartacist side had from the start been willing to unite; ACFI had no control over its policies, having as an article of faith entrusted absolutely and in advance all decision-making to the British.

Following the Northern conference, both groups sent delegations to the April 1966 IC Conference in London at which the united U.S. section was to have been set up. At that Conference, however, occurred what is undoubtedly one of the most hilarious organizational atrocities ever: James Robertson, Spartacist's senior delegate, was expelled from the Conference ostensibly for failing to apologize for missing a session (see Spartacist #6). What lay behind the facade was that the Spartacist delegation had presented to the Conference, in the context of general political agreement and willingness to accept international democratic centralism, our differences with the SLL's position on Cuba, the roots of Pabloism, etc. As had been shown earlier by the 1962 split, the IC leadership would not permit U.S. Trotskyists to fight for their political positions inside the IC. Following the IC Conference, the political deterioration of the IC line (its embracing of Mao's "Cultural Revolution" purge and of the Arab militarists of Egypt and Syria as leading an undefined "Arab Revolution") rapidly reached the point that seeking to heal the organizational rupture was no longer posed.

History is Bunk?

Throughout the negotiations, Spartacist's careful and scrupulous attitude toward our record is belittled by ACFI as "bookkeeping", "archaeology", etc. Their own attitude seems to be a kind of learn-by-doing, as an excuse for their history of opportunist zigzags and political gutlessness. "The net effect from all this is to learn once again it is not very worthwhile to go over old documents," Wohlforth (who, by the way, likes to style himself a theoretician!) says in the 4th session. Confronted with ACFI's vacillations, Mazelis replies: "we're very proud of the fact that what we're saying now is not what we said then. We have developed, there's nothing wrong with that." (8th session) The opposite approach characterized the Spartacist negotiators. In the words of Al Nelson:

"'If you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.' This is the basis for our raising "old" questions (they aren't old).... You said there are formulations in our '63 documents we should both forget. No indeed! The truth is that on almost every major point and tactic in dispute between us over the last years, you have been in error -- mostly by your own admission: on the youth question, nature of the SWP (which resulted in our split), on PL, on your assessment of the level of struggle and tasks of the revolutionary party. In '63 you supported the party majority on Black Nationalism and submitted only an action amendment. On the American question your position was that now was the time for the conquest of the masses. We have to agree on what the mistakes were in order to come to a position now." (4th session)

It is because our actions and positions have stood the test of time that we have brought out the actual documents of both sides in the 1962 split (Marxist Bulletin #2 "Nature of the SWP--Revolutionary or Centrist?--Discussion Material of the RT"; and #3 Part I "The Split in the Revolutionary Tendency") while Wohlforth cringes and hopes nobody will notice.

1962 Split

The Wohlforthites sought to justify splitting the RT by alleging its majority intended to quit the SWP. Their claim is given the lie by the fact that we remained in the SWP -- until the RMT framed up and then informed on our comrades and continued to act as the attorney for the party Majority in expelling the RT from the youth (for a scathing and accurate account, see Nelson's remarks to the 5th session, pages 4-5). In the same session Wohlforth admitted he forced the split to avoid abiding by RT decisions: "We and the British came to a common judgment at the time of our split. We had no intention of carrying out your line."

Several salient facts about the 1962 split are dealt with elsewhere. The issue, whether the SWP was still a revolutionary party or had become centrist (see M.B. #2), is now clearly resolved in our favor. The organizational atrocity resorted to by Healy-Wohlforth is discussed in detail in M.B. #3. Neither of these points (i.e., the nature of the SWP Majority, the mechanics of the split ultimatum) is debated much in the negotiating sessions. What is discussed herein is who "struggled" inside the SWP. It must be understood that the practical result of Wohlforth's insistence that the SWP was still a solidly revolutionary party and possessed a "proletarian core" was to justify his bloc with the Pabloist central party leadership of Dobbs and Co., defining the largely impotent right-wing oppositions (Weiss, Swabeck) as the main enemy. That this analysis of the party was a cynical fabrication became clear almost immediately, when the ACFI group left the SWP and proceeded to deny that it had ever been a truly revolutionary party at all! As Robertson pointed out: (8th session)

All through 1962 Wohlforth oscillated back and forth, doing something very peculiar to the word "centrist". "Centrist" means nothing if not flux, change, motion, heterogeneous elements lumped together. You insisted that centrism was a finished category, and to say the party is centrist is to say it's finished, that everyone in it is a centrist. Yet centrism means that in the minds of the members are all sorts of contradictory ideas. You made a mockery of the meaning of centrism for the sake of polemical convenience, at the same time carefully avoiding comrade Dobbs. You labelled Weiss and Swabeck the main enemy in the SWP, aided and abetted by the hirelings Hansen and Warde, but not the central party leadership, not Cannon and Dobbs. You worked this angle for only a little while, until the fall of 1963. Since nothing happened in the SWP between the spring and fall of '63 you became dispirited and ready therefore to walk out of the party (maybe you decided the party didn't have a proletarian core after all)....

The Wohlforth tendency continued to exhibit its characteristic lack of backbone and principle at the 1963 SWP Convention. The main issue facing the SWP was Black Nationalism; their capitulation to it was the first application of their Pabloism to the terrain of the domestic class struggle. The SWP defined itself as a "white party" which could have little role in the recruitment of Blacks to revolutionary consciousness. At the 1963 Convention the SWP started on the course of enthusiastically tail-ending the Black Nationalists from Elijah Muhammed to Rhody McCoy. In these negotiating sessions ACFI constantly insisted that the "American Question"--divorced from the Black question, a separation which is artificial in any case-was the important fight. The RMT's long counter-resolution on the American Question declared that the trouble with the SWP was that it had lost contact with the American proletariat, predicted imminent economic crisis and insisted now was the time for the conquest of the masses. In their analysis they were, of course, hopelessly disoriented. But more importantly, what the Wohlforthites would love to overlook now (with their present oversimplified, grossly insensitive position toward Black oppression) is that in 1963 they supported Black Nationalism. Were it not for the fake super-proletarianism of their British mentors, they would probably be supporting it still.

Admits Left/Right Difference

For even when our political similarities were most striking, differences between ACFI and Spartacist tended to follow a pattern: Spartacist showed political seriousness, principle and spine, while ACFI caved in at any opportunity. In the 8th session ACFI spokesman Mazelis expounded a policy of conciliation:

We would have no objection as part of a struggle in a living movement to distribute this welfare workers committee leaflet, calling for negotiations or indicating some confidence in the U.N., as part of a struggle, making it clear where we stand but not refusing to go along with these people. The same thing goes in part for the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade next week. The same thing goes for PL.... You take an Oehlerite line on tactics.

In the same session he was forced to admit that the Spartacist tendency was discernibly to the left of ACFI.

As part of our continuing insistence that a Leninist organization must take responsibility for its past, we are publishing these minutes. In the long run, opportunist, unprincipled conduct will hang its perpetrators by their own rope.

24 April 1970