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.

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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.
_______________________________

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).

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”:

“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.”

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.

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):

“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.”

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.

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....
“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.”

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).

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]

Workers League vs. the Unions (1993)

Workers Vanguard No. 571, 12 February 1993

Workers League vs. the Unions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Workers League Vile Provocation (1992)

Workers Vanguard No. 549 (17 April 1992)

Workers League Vile Provocation

The murder of our comrade Martha Phillips in Moscow has drawn the sinister attention of David North’s Workers League and other denizens of his self-styled “International Committee of the Fourth International.”

For more than 20 years this outfit has variously described the Spartacists as “racist” and “fascist,” the “main spokesman for the national interests of the American bourgeoisie,” “provocateurs in the service of Stalinism,” “the finger-man for the world capitalists,” “Finger Man for the FBI” and generally as the most decadent and unregenerate, “politically diseased” elements, motivated by “hatred of the working class.” Why would they care what happens to our comrades? Yet twice in the space of four weeks the Workers League’s Bulletin has carried articles dealing with the death of our comrade.

Their 28 February issue cites the “disturbing report” in Workers Vanguard (No. 545, 21 February) of Martha’s murder. They shed a few crocodile tears, although everyone who knows the Workers League knows full well that they would gleefully break open a bottle of champagne over news of an SL leader’s death. There soon follows a long list of dark and insinuating “questions” and innuendos about “sketchy” accounts of the murder, “hastily” organized memorial meetings, a “highly unusual” lack of any reports on the murder in the Moscow or U.S. press. The article asks darkly, “Could the killers have been known to Phillips?” Even more explicitly, a second installment on “The Murder of Martha Phillips” (Bulletin, 27 March) talks of “the unavoidable inference that Spartacist has something to hide.”

For Martha’s comrades, the agony of her brutal and untimely death has been compounded by the fact that we still do not know who murdered her. Describing — in the obituary the circumstances of the discovery of Martha’s body on the mom ing of February 9, we said:

“At the present time, the possibility cannot be ruled out that this hideous crime may have been politically motivated. The Moscow militia is carrying out an investigation in which our friends and supporters in Moscow are cooperating.”

Two weeks later, after we had managed with great difficulty to get some further details from the militia investigation, this was reported to a memorial meeting by SL/U.S. National Chairman James Robertson. Laying out the range of potential suspects, comrade Robertson concluded:

“I do not have any basis now to speculate. It could have been somebody within our milieu for personal or provocateur reasons. We’ve had altercations with Pamyat. The Kuzbass region independent mine workers union is run straight out of Washington by a Russian fascist and the CIA; we intervened and got in their way. There are many other possibilities. Moscow is hardly New York — that is, you don’t get knifed in the street in Moscow, although increasingly with impoverishment you can get robbed. But this was not that kind of murder at all. And the plain truth is, we do not know.”

North & Co. talk as though they do know more, or pretend to, claiming to find in our straightforward statement the “smell of political coverup.” They demand a “public accounting of the ‘milieu”‘ in which we intervene in the Soviet Union, reports of which appear regularly in Workers Vanguard. These virulent Stalinophobes point an accusing finger at the “political swamp of disintegrating Soviet Stalinism,” with which they attempt to put us in league. They find it expedient, to say the least, to ignore other suspects, such as the numerous “assets” of the CIA in the Soviet Union, or even the possibility of a simple criminal act.


The Bulletin remarks that the WV obituary has “no suggestion in the headline that Phillips was the victim of murder.” Perhaps they will next denounce Trotsky for titling his obituary of his slain son, “Leon Sedov — Son, Friend, Fighter.” And maybe they will go after Trotsky’s article as well for the fact that “the first mention of murder as the cause of death comes more than three-quarters of the way into the article.”


They cynically pick up on a call for a “commission of inquiry” raised in a very powerful letter of solidarity by a sympathizer of our organization (see WV No. 546, 6 March). They even cite Trotsky as a precedent. Yet the Dewey Commission was convened not to determine that it was Stalin who murdered Left Oppositionists in the 1930s, but to clear Trotsky’s name from the lies heaped on him by Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials.

As we wrote in reply to our supporter, “unlike in Stalin’s time, today it is not an easy task to identify the culprit(s).” The Workers League claims this statement is “so specious and flimsy that it invites suspicion.” What “invites suspicion” is that the Bulletin editors willfully ignore the many sinister and deadly forces we pointed to as potential suspects. We observed that “within the decomposing bureaucracy, several of its wings” could be implicated, but “equally there are those with considerable investment in Yeltsin or ties to Yeltsin,” as well as smaller forces who “may have seen our activities as a direct roadblock to their aspirations.” The Workers League certainly fits in this last category. Far from demanding a commission of inquiry, they should be worried about what an inquiry might reveal!

What do they really want, these people who have for years treated the Spartacists as deserving nothing more than to be shot down like mad dogs? They want to seize on a tragedy which has struck our organization, and use that tragedy to hurt the Spartacist League.

The SL has earned a reputation for telling the truth, no matter how bitter, just as the rules of Trotsky’s Fourth International instruct us, from warning against Solidarnosc counterrevolution back in 1981, when the bulk of the left (and .the Workers League) was cheering it on, to correcting errors in our press. We stand on our record, making available the indexed bound volumes of Workers Vanguard and Spartacist dating back to our first issue.

We tell our readers the truth, as it is known to us, when it is known to us. And when we don’t know, we say that too.


The Northites, on the other hand, specialize in the arts of fabrication, innuendo and anti-communist smear designed to bring forces far more powerful than their own down on those whom they target. In short, they are an organization devoted to committing provocations against the left. And go after the SL not least because they see in us all-purpose surrogates for their anti-Soviet venom.

This is not the first time they have expressed a macabre interest in our dead. Following the suicide of one of our cadres two years ago, the Northites raised this in an article on the New York Daily News strike, as they tried to weasel out of our exposure that the Bulletin is published by non-union labor. Several months later, they seized on the untimely death of another comrade from cancer to twist their gruesome knife again.

Take this ghoulish mindset, add the mercenary appetites of a poison pen for hire, and that gives you a rough approximation of the North gang. In exchange for petrodollars, the IC under North’s British mentor Gerry Healy served as press agents for anti-Communist repression by Near East dictators. They are notorious for assisting the bourgeois state in persecuting working-class militants, from the Healyites’ smear of British miners leader Arthur Scargill to North’s campaign to imprison American SWP trade-union activist Mark Curtis.

In November 1990, they seized on the attempted assassination of German SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine to go after our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany (SpAD), the only organization to unambiguously oppose the imperialist annexation of the DDR (East Germany). Ina vicious smear, whose only purpose could be to set us up as would-be “terrorists” in the eyes of the Fourth Reich’s agencies of repression, the German Northite BSA vituperated that “The hysterical language of the SpAD is directed at people who are in a mental state similar to that of the schizophrenic would-be assassin of Lafontaine.”

For years, the Workers League has been out to get us. Now they seek to use the tragic murder of our comrade who died at her post, fighting to defeat counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, for another of their insidious “campaigns.” Whose interests does the Workers League serve?

Poisoned Pens for Hire

The “International Committee” has a well-known history as a mercenary outfit. This is a matter of public record. By their own later admission, Healy’s IC received at least well over £1 million (over $2 million at the time) from a variety of Near East sheiks and bonapartist butchers over a period of years beginning in the mid-1970s (see “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March 1991). And this really was for services rendered.

Beginning with a 1976 deal with the Libyan government for £50,000 with which to buy a four-color web offset printing press, according to an IC Control Commission report, the IC received more than a half million pounds from the Qaddafi regime over the years, Among the services this money bought was turning Healyite publications into hagiographic press agents for the Libyan strongman, as well as supplying names of and intelligence on prominent “Zionists” in “finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere.”

Another £20,000 — and this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the “investigation” was carried out by the guilty parties themselves — came from Saddam Hussein. In exchange, the IC hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1978. They not only whitewashed the Ba’athist regime’s anti-Communist terror, they actively assisted it. Healyite provocateurs spied on anti-Saddam demonstrations in Britain, taking pictures of Iraqi leftists and turning them over to the Ba’athist regime.

North points to the IC “control commission” to claim innocence, protesting the WL never got any of the loot, But the entire IC carried out the political services required for this money over a whole period, and the fact that the Healyites were on the take was obvious to anyone who looked. In 1977 we ran an article, “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” concluding that “even a cursory look” at the IC’s “year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Three years later, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, was dragged by Healy into Her Majesty’s courts on libel charges. But the one charge that Matgamna raised which Healy didn’t contest was the central one, that the Healyites must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In 1985, when Healy was deposed by his lieutenants, the accusations of taking blood money from Arab bourgeois regimes became a big scandal in the IC. Why? Because by then the flow of money had dried up. When it was coming in, nobody complained (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86).

More than 20 years ago, we characterized the Healyites as unsavory “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic advantage. As they continued to degenerate, their ostensible politics, like their cheering for a mythical bourgeois “Arab Revolution,” became a front — basically dependent on who they were working for at any given time. The petrodollar connection was only one of their contracts. In Australia they took money to print a Vietnamese rightist emigre newspaper, the Bell of Saigon, which called on its fascist supporters to “exterminate” communists. Even when it isn’t exactly clear in whose employ they are at a given moment, like out-of-work gunslingers in the Old West they have continued to do their dirty work with the aim of serving somebody.

In the early 1970s, the Healyites began a decades-long vendetta against the reformist SWP entitled “Security and the Fourth International.” Resuscitating the vile Stalinist slander that Trotsky had been killed by “one of his own,” the Healyites tried to smear the entire SWP leadership — especially Trotsky’s secretary Joseph Hansen — as “FBI and KGB agents” and “accomplices” in the murder of Leon Trotsky. This slander, of course, also implicated SWP leader James P. Cannon and Trotsky himself. David North cut his teeth on that campaign.

The Workers League’s modus operandi in order to get left-wing opponents is to place themselves at the service of larger forces hostile to revolutionaries. In 1971, at a time when the bourgeoisie worried over growing radicalization, the SWP decided it was time to draw a blood line in the “antiwar movement.” At a meeting of the SWP’s “National Peace Action Coalition,” a popular front including prominent Democratic Party politicians, the WL rushed to join in a vicious thug attack led by SWP goons against Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League when we protested the presence of Senator Vance Hartke on the podium. And here they were acting as guard dogs for the same SWP which they now claim has been an FBI-controlled organization for decades. Within their own demented framework, what would that make the Workers League?

True to form, the main vehicle North & Co. have used in pursuing their vendetta against the SWP is the capitalist courts-appealing to the U.S. government to determine that the SWP is an organization of “government agents”! In 1979, when the SWP was engaged in a lawsuit against the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration, the Northites — using WL tool Alan Gelfand — took the SWP to court in order to force it to hand over Political Committee minutes.

Four years ago, the “Workers” League launched a big international campaign with the aim of sending SWPer Mark Curtis to prison (see “The Workers League and Mark Curtis,” WV No. 480, 23 June 1989). Curtis was an Iowa trade unionist who was getting in the way of the Swift Packing Co. He is currently serving a 25-year prison term after being railroaded on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. Whole paragraphs of the prosecutor’s summation at the trial that put Curtis behind bars were taken almost word for word from what the Bulletin had written a month earlier! As the headline of a subsequent WV article said, “Why Should Anyone Believe David North?”

What “Milieu” Does North Work In?

And that brings us back to the Northites’ grotesque insinuations concerning the murder of Martha Phillips in Moscow. We have sought to marshal whatever resources we can to press Moscow authorities to pursue all possible avenues of investigation with vigor and rigorousness. And we are taking other measures. Particularly given the chaos of the disintegrating Soviet Union since Yeltsin’s pro-imperialist countercoup last August, pursuing this investigation is fraught with difficulty. This is compounded by the fact that Martha was a Trotskyist, a Jew and an outspoken public opponent of Yeltsin counterrevolution. As we’ve said, at this point we have no way of knowing who killed our comrade and are in no position to exclude any possibility.

But as noted above, the Workers League has been quick to exclude certain possibilities, notably those connected to the CIA and the Yeltsinites. Why might that be? From opposing Soviet intervention against CIA-financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to hailing CIA-sponsored Solidarność in Poland. the Healy/Northites have been found on any side fighting against the Soviet Union.

Thus in Britain, when anti-Communist “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher was gearing up for a bloody showdown with the powerful National Union of Mine-workers, the Healyites put their support for Solidarność into service for the union-busting cabal. On the eve of the heroic 1984-85 miners strike, Healy’s press made a big play of scandalizing NUM leader Arthur Scargill for opposing Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” The scurrilous anti-Communist campaign was instantly picked up by the Labour Party/Trades Union Congress right wing and the Fleet Street tabloids with the aim of isolating the miners union and trying to crush it.

A few years later, the American AFL-CIO’s International Department (widely known as the “AFL-CIA”) sought to put together a new Solidarność by creating a layer of pro-imperialist “free trade unionists” in the Soviet Union. To this end, they tried to get the so-called Independent Union of Miners (NPG) to endorse slanders that Scargill had pocketed contributions by Soviet miners to the British miners strike. Our comrades’ intervention into the founding conference of the NPG in the Donbass in 1990 put a spike in this disinformation campaign. We gored the ox of these CIA-connected elements, and they have good cause to hate us.

Currently, the Northites are engaged in a fund drive for “aid to the Vorkuta miners,” who however are not presently engaged in any particular struggle. This was launched at a November Berlin meeting of North’s “IC,” supposedly on the basis of an appeal from the miners. Yet the appeal has not been published. Could this be related to the fact that a few months earlier the AFL-CIO set up a “relief fund” for Soviet miners? This was reported in an article on Boris Yeltsin’s visit to AFL-CIO headquarters, where he was hailed for his “commitment to free unions.” Interestingly, the article talks of the “plight of the Soviet miners, who first struck in November 1989 in Vorkuta” (AFL-CIO News, 24 June 1991).

Now this is curious indeed, for the Soviet miners struck massively across the country in the summer of 1989. The later Vorkuta strike, however, was the first to openly raise anti-Communist demands. The WL’s Bulletin (8 December 1989) publicized an appeal by the “Vorkuta Workers' (Strike) Committee,” which included a demand for the “complete cutoff of the financial and economic help to the fraternal totalitarian regimes” — i.e., Cuba, Vietnam, etc. In introducing this appeal, the Bulletin explained that it had been “transmitted by telephone from Vorkuta to Leningrad and published there by the Democratic Union Party.” The Democratic Union is a pro-Western, anti-Communist outfit which has been financed by the American government through the notorious conduit of the “National Endowment for Democracy”!

One of the leaders of the Vorkuta miners is Nikolai Terokhin, who railed that “The Cubans receive this money out of our pockets and practically flip out under their beautiful sun” (taz, 18 November 1989). This same Terokhin, along with another Vorkuta miner, Sergei Masolovich, were brought to Britain in June 1990 by the fascistic NTS, which has been financed for decades by Western intelligence agencies. There they addressed the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” which was set up to destroy Arthur Scargill’s NUM. These two are also sponsored proteges of AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland, who have been highlighted in the pages of that other Bulletin, published by the AFL-CIO “Department of International Affairs.” Is this the “milieu” that North & Co. have been working? What’s in it for them, we wonder, and does it have anything to do with their interest in the murder of our comrade?

Hate the Soviet Union, Hate the Spartacist League

If there has been one political constant to North’s organization for the past couple of decades, it has been unadulterated anti-Sovietism. This is “theoretically” justified with the description of the Stalinist bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through” — which flatly denies Trotsky’s understanding of the dual nature of this parasitic caste sitting atop proletarian property forms. Hostile to defense of the gains of the October Revolution, now the Northites have joined Yeltsin in proclaiming the death of the Soviet Union. Under a headline trumpeting “The End of the USSR,” David North writes: “It is impossible to define the Confederation of Independent States as a whole, or any of the republics of which it is comprised, as workers states” (Bulletin, 10 January).

In his famous trade-union analogy, Trotsky compared the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule to a giant labor organization which must be defended against the capitalist enemy despite its bureaucratic misleaders. North inverts Trotsky’s analogy to write off the organized labor movement along with the Soviet Union. After years of groveling to the racist, pro-imperialist labor fakers to build a “labor party,” the Workers League now says, “to define the AFL-CIO as a working-class organization is to blind the working class to the realities which they confront.”

Only a few years ago, the WL denounced us for saying that the hard-fought Hormel meatpackers strike had been knifed by the “labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement.” North’s Bulletin (1 April 1986) claimed that this revealed our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism.” Now the Workers League writes off the unions along with the Soviet Union. This comes from an outfit which is notorious for hailing police “strikes,” a supposedly “working-class” group whose newspaper is produced with no union label, an ostensibly socialist organization which in this deeply racist society fulminates against SL-initiated anti-Klan actions as an “obsession with race.”

Other than providing a convenient excuse for scabbing on strikes, North’s pronouncement that the unions in the U.S. can no longer be considered working-class organizations reflects his líder maximo complex. In Berlin last November, North pompously declared: “The delegates today speak to the international working class as the authoritative representatives of the Fourth International” (Bulletin, 22 November 1991). From the “modest” start of crowning himself as Healy’s heir apparent at the top of the IC garbage heap, North is now assiduously trying to eliminate any perceived rivals to his new claim to be leader of the world proletariat.

In his Berlin speech, North declared that Ernest Mandel, leader of the United Secretariat, has “become, in the full sense of the word, a bourgeois politician.” He took Mandel to task for preparing “the ground for the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe,” in particular by supporting Polish Solidarność and its ideologue Jacek Kuron. He charged that “through the medium of Jacek Kuron, Lech Walesa himself is a political Frankenstein created by Man-del.” What chutzpah! When it comes to cheering Solidarnosc, the Northites took second place to no one, including the Mandelites. David North is a “political Frankenstein” created by Gerry Healy (and who knows who or what else).

Having now defined themselves as the sole representatives of the working class, where the megalomaniacal Northites go from here is anybody’s guess. We do know that they are capable of anything; they will work for just about anyone, and maybe they do.

The Workers League claims to be calling for an “inquiry” not “as a question for factional dispute,” but because “If Phillips was the victim of a political killing, her death is of concern not merely to the Spartacist League, but to the entire working class movement.” If Martha’s murder was politically motivated — which at this point we do not know — it is indeed a matter of vital importance and concern for the workers movement internationally. But such interests are of no concern to North’s organization, which has crossed over the class line with such frequency and ease that where it fits in relation to the workers movement is elastic, to say the least. The WL and its activities and associations do indeed warrant close scrutiny.

Martha Phillips was a proletarian internationalist, and as our most prominent spokesman in the Soviet Union she riled the counterrevolutionary nationalists who spearhead the drive to restore capitalist exploitation there. The very forces she fought against are the ones that are championed by the Workers League, from the reactionary Lithuanian Sajudis government to the “AFL-CIA” — backed “independent” miners, whose masters pull the strings from Washington. We know that there are powerful and sinister elements intent on stopping us from building the Leninist-Trotskyist party needed to lead the Soviet workers in a proletarian political revolution to defeat the counterrevolutionary onslaught.

As the capitalist-restorationists seek to consolidate a hold on power and uproot the foundations of the Soviet workers state, we honor our martyred comrade Martha by continuing the struggle to reimplant Bolshevism in the land of its birth, to return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.

Northite Fool's Gold (1991)

Workers Vanguard No. 533 (22 November 1991)

Northite Fool’s Gold

This article was written for Spartakist No. 91, published by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany

For close to two decades David North’s Workers League and his cohorts in the “International Committee of the Fourth International” have been foam-flecked cheerleaders for virtually every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet force in the world. But these days the WL is talking a lot out of the other side of its mouth. Now we read in the “ICFI” statement on “The Lessons of the August Putsch and the Tasks Before the Soviet Working Class” (Bulletin, 6 September) that only their organization “defends the historic conquests of the Soviet proletariat and upholds its great socialist traditions”! Our advice to anyone who falls for this one is, as the Romans said, caveat emptor - hold on to your wallet.

More than 20 years ago we recalled Lenin’s term “political bandits” to describe the Workers League and its “International,” then headed by IC “founder-leader” Gerry Healy. Over the years, the Healyites’ “political” banditry was eclipsed by their degeneration into outright gangsters-for-hire. In 1979, after years of pimping for Libya’s Qaddafi, Healy & Co. heralded Iraqi Ba’athist dictator Saddam Hussein as a leader of the struggle against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism” and hailed his execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party. At the same time they photographed anti-Saddam protesters in London and handed the photos over to the Iraqi embassy, fingering demonstrators for arrest, torture and possibly death. Meanwhile the Healyites were receiving tens of thousands of dollars from the Ba’athist regime.

Although the most heinous, this was only one of many crimes committed by the Healy/Northites, for which they were put on the payroll of virtually every Arab sheik and dictator in the Near East (see “Healyites Got Blood Money,” WV No. 517, 4 January, and “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523, 29 March).

In 1985 when this dirty source of revenue dried up, Healy’s organization fell apart and Workers League leader David North declared himself the heir to his former master’s seat at the head of the shattered remnants of the International Committee. Now that it seems like nobody’s paying them for what they say and write, the Northites have reverted to an earlier scam: selling themselves as supposed orthodox Trotskyists in the abstract, while still tailing after anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries in the concrete. But this latest con game blew apart with the August showdown in Moscow, as Yeltsin’s countercoup brought to power the capitalist-restorationist forces that the Bulletin has been covering for.

The Northites’ current posture as the defenders of the gains of the October Revolution is so manifestly fraudulent that they can’t get it straight themselves.

Healyite Schizophrenia

The “ICFI” statement on tie coup and Yeltsin’s countercoup reads like it was written by a schizophrenic. First we have the declaration that “The International Committee of the Fourth International welcomes the humiliating collapse of the August 19 Stalinist putsch in Moscow.” Yet the very next paragraph states, “But the justified satisfaction felt by workers both in the Soviet Union and internationally at the failure of the putschists must not blind them to the fact that those now assuming center stage in Moscow are bitter antisocialists and ruthless exponents of capitalist restoration.” Again later it declares, “The collapse of the August 19 coup is a large. nail in the coffin of the Stalinist bureaucracy.” Yet this is followed by:

“But any premature jubilation on the part of the working class would be totally unjustified.
“Those forces now in the forefront are the most ruthless and frothing enemies of the working class. Their aim is nothing less than selling off all the assets of the Soviet Union and its reduction to a semi-colonial status.”
– Bulletin, 6 September

It’s those telltale “buts” that give the game away. For the collapse of the coup, which North & Co. “welcome,” is not divorced from, but identical with the victory of “those forces now in the forefront” who they admit are “frothing enemies of the working class.” What’s to welcome? This is not “dialectics,” which Healy and North have done so much to discredit, but the squirmings of opportunists hoist on their own petard. They want to be with the Yeltsinite “masses” on the barricades while warning against Yeltsin the harbinger of capitalism. The dilemma, which many Stalinophobic pseudo-Trotskyists resolve by prettifying the “democrat” Yeltsin, North deals with by talking out of both sides of his mouth.

The anti-Stalinist David North evidently agrees with Joseph Stalin on one thing: “Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.”

Even at the level of description, the “two-line” statement exposes itself. It heralds “the implacable opposition of the socialist working class to the military-KGB coup.” Yet a few paragraphs later it notes Yeltsin’s “appeal for a general strike went largely unanswered, even in Moscow. The working class identified with neither faction.” The Northites warn that “without the independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program, the collapse of Stalinism will lead to even more brutal forms of repression and social devastation” and “the terror of capitalism.” Yet for years these Stalinophobes have denounced the Kremlin bureaucracy as the sole moving force for capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR.

Thus in one of his interminable speeches, spread over six pages of the same 6 September issue of the Bulletin, David North refers to Gorbachev as “leader of the restorationist faction of the official Communist Party apparatus” while Yeltsin is called “a representative of the emerging Soviet bourgeoisie” and of “bourgeois comprador elements,” dating this as far back as 1987. But as recently as the 21 June Bulletin, an article titled “Behind the Election of Boris Yeltsin” writes of “the drive to capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, whether it is led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin or some other counterrevolutionary representative of the bureaucracy.”

And referring to Yeltsin the bureaucrat rather than Yeltsin the bourgeois is no mere slip of the pen, for in the Northite zodiac the Soviet bureaucracy is nothing but a “counterrevolutionary” agency working hand in hand with imperialism. Thus in his 1989 tract on Perestroika Versus Socialism, North declares that “the political and economic goals of the bureaucracy in its relations with world imperialism” are “the destruction of the planned economy and the social conquests of the October Revolution” and the restoration of capitalism. And, more generally, in his 1988 tome The Heritage We Defend, he declares that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘counterrevolutionary through and through’.” This stupidly one-sided formulation is the banner of every anti-Soviet fake-Trotskyist. And it is a lie.

Leon Trotsky never said any such thing. Rather, he wrote in “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933) that “Whoever fails to understand this dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has understood nothing.” He is referring here to the position. of the bureaucracy, which rests upon the collectivized property forms inherited from the October Revolution, at the same time as it seeks to balance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, transmitting the pressures of imperialism but also, on occasion, constrained to defend in its bureaucratic fashion the workers state in order to protect its privileges. Trotsky repeatedly insisted on this fundamental point, as in The Revolution Betrayed, which has a section on “The Dual Character of the Workers State” And in a 1937 article against the future renegade Burnham, Trotsky noted:

“The function of Stalin, like the function of Green [then head of the American trade-union federation, AFL], has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through this defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of This that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.”
– ”Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937)

We discussed the genealogy of the anti-Trotskyist formula that Stalinist is “counterrevolutionary through and through” in our article “David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son” (WV No. 456, I July 1988). It is important to underline it here once again, for behind North’s analytical deceit lies a fundamental assault on the Trotskyist program of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against counterrevolution. And indeed, at the decisive moment in the face of a direct counterrevolutionary assault by forces which North himself acknowledges to be a “comprador bourgeoisie,” North’s bottom line was “we were for the defeat of this coup” – which was also Yeltsin’s bottom line.

From Walesa to Yeltsin: Crush the Counterrevolution!

In an article titled “Middle Class Radicals and the Soviet Coup” (Bulletin, 13 September), the Northites assume a posture of denouncing the cabal of fake-Trotskyists who cheered Yeltsin’s countercoup. At the same time they rant that the Spartacist League “criticized the coup plotters only for ‘ineptitude’ and ‘stupidities,’ because they did not arrest Yeltsin or even cut off his phones, and did not mount a ‘serious assault’ on the Russian parliament building. In other words, this politically-diseased organization was hoping against hope for an old-fashioned Stalinist bloodbath.” North’s German followers of the BSA (Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter) continue in the same vein, saying the Spartacists only criticize the coup plotters “because they didn’t carry out a bloodbath in front of the White House in Moscow like the Chinese Stalinists did two years earlier in Tiananmen Square in Peking” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 4 October).

To compare the couple of thousand scruffy yuppies, speculators and Russian nationalists, including fascists and priests, who were the pathetic advance guard of Yeltsinite counterrevolution, with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students, many of them explicitly pro-socialist, who rallied day after day in Tiananmen Square, is obscene. Like the less duplicitous cheerleaders for Yeltsin, the Northites can’t stand our statement that “a call on Moscow workers to clean out this counterrevolutionary rabble was in order.” And to North & Co., the crime of crimes would be a military bloc with a section of the bureaucracy seeking to fight the outright capitalist restorationists. And as we wrote in our polemic “Traitors, Not Trotskyists – Cheerleaders for Yeltsin’s Counterrevolution” (WV No. 535, 27 September):

“The ‘gang of eight’ was incapable of sweeping away Yeltsin in its pathetic excuse for a putsch because, as we wrote, it was a ‘perestroika coup.’ But both imperialism and the forces of internal counterrevolution were aligned on Yeltsin’s side. The coup plotters were not only irresolute but didn’t want to unleash the forces that could have defeated the more extreme counterrevolutionaries, for that could have led to a civil war if the Yeltsinites really fought back. And in an armed struggle pitting outright restorationists against recalcitrant elements of the bureaucracy, defense of the collectivized economy would have been placed on the agenda whatever the Stalinists’ intentions. Trotskyism would have entered a military bloc with ‘the Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy against open attack by capitalist counterrevolution,’ as Trotsky postulated in the 1938 Transitional Program. This was precisely our policy toward Jaruzelski in 1981.”

And indeed, it is precisely the example of Poland which lies behind the Northites’ policy in the Moscow coup. At that time, when the entire left was proclaiming “Solidarity with Solidarity,” the international Spartacist tendency sought to expose before the world’s working class that Lech Walesa & Co. were an agency for the CIA and Western bankers, Ronald Reagan, the Pope and clerical nationalists. They quoted as if it were an outrage our forthright statement: “If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily …we will support this. And we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity’s counterrevolution” (WV No. 289, 25 September 1981). Healy, North et al. lined up with the counterrevolutionary cabal.

Now that Solidarność leader Walesa is presiding over the capitalist immiseration of Poland, all the fake-lefts are jumping ship, including North. Thus in its statement on the August coup, the Bulletin denounces Walesa for running a “pro-imperialist regime” which uses police and troops to smash workers strikes. But ten years ago, the Northites joined with anti-Communist Polish emigres and AFL-CIO bureaucrats at a pro-Solidarność rally in Chicago which was addressed by the Reaganite governor of Illinois. “Mass Support for Solidarity,” ran the front-page headline of the Bulletin (18 December 1981) describing this anti-Soviet political orgy.

Anti-Soviet Nationalists and Anti-Union Witchhunts

With openly. capitalist-restorationist forces on the ascendancy in Russia and other republics, the Northites offer themselves as the leadership for the struggle of the Soviet working class to “stop the degradation of the Soviet Union into a Balkanized semicolony of imperialism.” What gall! The Workers League has been the most fervent defender of every force in the USSR that was fighting for just such an outcome.

Last year they championed the cause of the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania. Echoing the most right-wing, anti-Communist elements of the American ruling class, the Workers League even denounced Bush for not imposing imperialist sanctions against the Soviet workers state on behalf of Lithuanian independence:

“The April 24 announcement by the White House that it is taking no retaliatory actions against Moscow for its blockade of Lithuania underscores the unprecedented level of collaboration between imperialism and Stalinism against the international working class.”
– Bulletin, 27 April 1990

Here the militantly counterrevolutionary Lithuanian Sajudis regime – whose first act when granted independence by the Yeltsin-Gorbachev regime was to grant a blanket amnesty to the native fascist collaborators of Hitler’s Germany – Is identified with the international working class!

Today the Northites declare that the Soviet working class “must retain its complete independence from the political aims of the imperialists and their political and economic agents in the Soviet Union.” Yet last spring the Bulletin uncritically enthused over the Soviet coal miners strike, which was organized and manipulated by the pro-Yeltsin leaders of the newly formed Independent Union of Miners to demand that control over the mines and other industrial enterprises be transferred from the central Soviet government to the Yeltsin regime of the Russian Republic.

Although the strike reflected the desperate economic conditions facing the miners and their growing hatred for the Gorbachev regime, we warned of the hardline Yeltsinites at the head of the miners union:

“These people are bitter enemies of the Soviet working class. They seek to turn the powerful Soviet miners into a battering ram for openly pro-capitalist forces whose victory would mean the destruction of every remaining social gain - the right to work, cheap housing and low food prices, free medical care-which the Soviet workers have as a result of the collectivized economy.”
– ”Soviet Miners Strike Amid Perestroika Turmoil,” WV No. 522, 15 March

We pointed out how many of the leaders of the new union were “well known to the AFL-CIO,” according to the American union federation’s newspaper, and indeed they had been toured through the U.S., paid for by the Bush government. And we noted how the AFL-CIO is notorious as an agency for CIA intervention into the labor movement internationally. Not a peep on any of this from the Northites.

Among the cabal of CIA types present at the founding congress of the Russian miners union in October 1990 was a delegation from the scab “Union of Democratic Miners” in Britain. A creature of the Thatcher government and the British mine bosses set up to destroy the real miners union during the 1984-85 coal strike, the UDM was there to purvey the imperialist-orchestrated Big Lie campaign that miners union leader Arthur Scargill “mishandled” funds that were donated by Soviet miners during the strike. The bourgeoisie was enraged at this internationalist solidarity from Soviet workers, who dug deep in their pockets to aid this bitter class battle. After years of persecuting the union, and even stealing union funds from the banks, the British state finally had to drop court charges against Scargill.

Spartacists who were present at the Soviet miners congress exposed this anti-union vendetta. Now the Northites say nothing about the whole affair. Small wonder. In 1983 it was their own international leaders, in Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, who instigated the initial anti-Communist witchhunt against Scargill. On the eve of the coal strike, Healy’s press lambasted the miners union leader for accurately calling Solidarność an “anti-socialist” organization. This was a completely calculated “bombshell” by the Healyites and one which was played for all it was worth by Thatcher, her Fleet Street media and the anti-Communist labor bureaucrats in Britain in their campaign to cut off any solidarity with the miners. The Healyites were so proud of themselves that they published an entire pamphlet about it.

David North and the “AFL-CIA”

Here we had the intersection of the two political hallmarks of Healyism – vicious anti-Sovietism and belly-crawling before the Cold War trade-union tops. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Workers League put out a program for a labor party that didn’t mention either the war or the fight for black liberation in the U.S. And in the December 1990 German Bundestag elections, the Northite BSA ran on a program that did not even mention immigrant workers, racist/fascist attacks or women’s rights. And while they included ritual criticisms of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Northites called for votes to the SPD witchhunters, who served as the advance guard of capitalist reunification in a Fourth Reich of German imperialism.

Today, as part of its “orthodox” con game, the Northite “ICFI” is making critical noises about the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy. North cynically proclaims: “We do not make a fetish of the so-called mass organizations, with their paper membership and their overstaffed and overpaid bureaucracies…. The AFL-CIO, like all the other bureaucracies which exist in this world, is an instrument of imperialism which exists to control and discipline the working class” (Bulletin, 6 September). He calls for a “Fight for a Labor Party Based on a Socialist Program,” and even declares at such a party need not be “some sort social democratic party under the aegis of the AFL-CIO.” Quite a mouthful coming from the same Workers League which for years routinely called on the same sellout AFL-CIO bureaucrats lead everything including general strikes.

In fact, during the Iran-Contragate scandal, the Northites demanded that he AFL-CIO conduct[s] its own independent inquiry into the, illegal White House activities and the direct dangers they pose to the working class” (Labor Must Act on Iran-Contra Crisis, January 1987). This is tantamount to calling on e CIA to investigate itself! The AFL-CIO tops were no less involved in the U.S. war crimes in Central America than the crew in the White House basement. Lane Kirkland was a member of the Rockefeller Commission, which carried out a whitewash of CIA assassination activities for the Ford administration in 1975. Kirkland was a member of the Kissinger Commission, which rubber-stamped Reagan’s support to the contra terrorists in Nicaragua. He is a member of the National Endowment for Democracy, set up to give a veneer of legitimacy to CIA-funded subversion. And the AFL-CIO has for years provided cover for CIA “labor” activities through the “American Institute for Free Labor Development” in Latin America and similar outfits elsewhere.

“Democratic” Cover for Imperialist War

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, but hardly new for the sinister David North, who was one of the prime authors of the Healyite cop-baiting smear job against the American reformist Socialist Workers Party, “Security and the Fourth International,” and who more recently appealed to the capitalist state to jail SWP member Mark Curtis, while lining up AFL-CIO bureaucrats to back this vicious frame-up. As part of his current pseudo-orthodoxy jag, North is putting his membership’s heads through yet another Healyite wringer as they build for a “Berlin Conference Against Colonialism and War” this month.

This is quite a name for a conference held by this crew. When the U.S. imperialists’ mad bombers were laying waste to Iraq, the central demand of the Northites was for a “national referendum on the gulf war in which all workers and youth of voting age would be able to take part” (Bulletin, 30 November 1990). We pointed out (and perhaps members of North’s Workers League could figure out for themselves) how this amounted to “democratic” support for the imperialist 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 Iraq – 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!”
- WV No. 523, 29 March

North’s attempt to invoke Trotsky in defending this social-patriotic ploy is a slander against the Bolshevik leader, who consistently fought for class struggle against imperialist war. While the “ICFI” was peddling this line, the Spartacist League marched under the banner “Defeat U.S. Imperialism! Defend Iraq!” and the sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought for labor political strikes against the war.

So our advice to anyone who might be taken in by North’s latest shell game is to look carefully at the record of this dubious tendency which took well over £1 million from Arab bourgeois regimes; which set up the leader of the British miners union for persecution by the class enemy; which has systematically used the capitalist cops and courts against its opponents on the left; which extolled the execution of Iraqi Communist workers, and fingered opponents of the Ba’athist regime for bloody repression; which hailed feudalist Ayatollah Khomeini and Walesa’s Solidarność, the only union Ronald Reagan ever loved; which has supported fascistic Lithuanian nationalists and Yeltsinite “union” misleaders bought by the “AFL-CIA”; which has catered to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in America and the Fourth Reich Social Democrats in Germany …look carefully at all this and understand that the slimy reality of the Northites is not just what you read on paper. These people are capable of saying and doing anything.