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

Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 October 1992

Free Mark Curtis!

Workers League Brokers Frame-Up Operation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Railroading of Mark Curtis

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

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

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

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

The Smear Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of the Scottsboro Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police Aides, Vigilantes and Willie Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston Feminist Witchhunters

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

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

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

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

WL and the Anti-Curtis Cabal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Trotskyism, What It Isn't and What It Is! Part 2 (1990)

Spartacist Pamphlet (1990)

Trotskyism, What It Isn’t and What It Is!

Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encylopedia of Trotskyism On Line
full text: http://www.marx.org/history//etol/document/icl-spartacists/1990/trotskyism.html

[part 2]

The Political Bandits

This brings us to the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA). The statement issued by the BSA’s Political Committee entitled “East Germany—Forward to the Political Revolution” certainly sounds very Trotskyist in many respects. They call to defend the planned state economy. Yet for over a decade, in any and every case this question was concretely posed vis-a-vis the defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution, the BSA and its sinister “International Committee” stood for every force that was hostile to the USSR.

They hailed the victory of Khomeini’s viciously anti-Communist “Islamic Revolution” in Iran. In Afghanistan, they stood on the side of imperialist-financed Islamic feudal reaction against the Soviet intervention. In Poland, they heralded Solidarność’ counterrevolutionary bid for power as the beginning of a “political revolution.”

The BSA calls on East German workers to unite with the working class in the capitalist West in the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe. A good demand. Yet during the 1984-85 British coal miners strike, the most militant class battle in the capitalist West in decades, the BSA’s then-leaders in Gerry Healy’s British Workers Revolutionary Party acted as the finger men for the most right-wing agents of British capitalism in the labor movement in trying to isolate and betray the miners strike — and they did it in defense of Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland.

The Healyites pilloried the miners’ leftist union leader Arthur Scargill because he had, quite correctly, remarked some months earlier that Solidarność was an “anti-socialist organization” seeking the overthrow of the Polish state. The Healyites’ attack on Scargill was featured in their press on the eve of the miners strike, precisely timed to create a huge furor in Margaret Thatcher’s union-hating press and among the Cold War British trade-union and Labour Party tops who used it in an attempt to cut off any solidarity with the miners strike.

Our organization in Britain sought in every way we could to aid the miners, fighting for workers to honor the picket lines, campaigning for joint strike action by other major unions, while internationally we successfully waged a campaign of financial aid, largely from labor unions, to support the miners strike and, when it was defeated, continued to aid those miners jailed by Thatcher.

There was nothing new in the Healyites’ appeasement of Cold War unionism. At the height of the Vietnam War, the American Healyites proposed a “labor party” whose platform made no mention of either the war or the fight against white racism (which is key to unlocking proletarian struggle in the U.S.). Today they charge us with being “obsessed with race” and even “black nationalists” because we insist that leading the working class as a whole to champion the rights of its most oppressed sections is an essential component of a real proletarian revolutionary program, in keeping with Lenin’s insistence that the workers vanguard must be a “‘tribune of the people.”

With mind-boggling hypocrisy and chutzpah, the BSA’s International Committee is now attacking Ernest Mandel as “an agent of capitalist restoration” in Poland for his support to Solidarność. Excoriating Mandel as “absolutely hostile to questions of political principle” they point to the Mandelites’ embrace of Jacek Kuron as a “Trotskyist” despite Kuron’s “refusal to defend the conquests of the October Revolution, conquests which, in a deformed character, were extended into Poland following World War II.”

Mandel has certainly abandoned most every principle of Marxism in desperate pursuit of whatever force is “in motion.” But who are the Healyites to talk? Like Mandel, they championed Solidarność in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” Like him they embraced Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”—a bloody power struggle between antagonistic cliques in the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy in which Mao’s control of the army proved decisive.

But the Healyites have gone further. When the Healyites discovered the “Arab Revolution,” they simply traded any shred of political principle for cold, hard cash, and plenty of it. For years, the International Committee operated as the press agents for a variety of oil-rich Middle Eastern colonels, sheiks and dictators. They were handsomely rewarded with millions in money from Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi, among others. SED members should beware the BSA’s call for resolute struggle against Stalinism. In 1979, the Healyite press hailed the Iraqi Ba’athist regime’s murder of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party, which historically had commanded the allegiance of key sections of the working class in that country. Railing against “counterrevolutionary Stalinism” they applauded the execution of these Communists by a vicious bourgeois regime.

Of course the BSA would like to say that this is all past history, simply the work of Gerry Healy, the self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the International Committee who was ousted from the organization in 1985. Without the trappings of state power, Gerry Healy occupied a position in the organization somewhat equivalent to that of J.V. Stalin in the Russian Communist Party. But like Stalin, Healy did not operate alone in running a regime that was characterized by thuggery and gangsterism internally and externally. He had his loyal henchmen and toadies, including the current leader of the International Committee, David North.

Not one of the leaders of the International Committee objected to the vicious betrayals that were carried out to get the money that came pouring in from Middle Eastern regimes. On the contrary, Healy was deposed by his former lieutenants only after the money was no longer coming in. Now the BSA pays its allegiance to David North — a man who not only made his way into the leadership of the organization as Healy’s loyal running dog but who continues to carry out Healy’s most despicable practices. A Healyite renegade who has always opposed every practical and military measure to defend the Soviet Union from imperialism, North recently committed the giant fraud of speaking as a Trotskyist at the Historical Archival Institute in Moscow.

The BSA claims to base “itself on the struggle of Leon Trotsky” and his fight to defend the Leninist program of proletarian internationalism against the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. The statement of their Political Committee correctly notes that it was this struggle that made Trotsky not only the main target of the Moscow Trials but which led to his murder by a GPU agent. However, for more than a decade the Healyites, and now the Northites, have peddled a version of the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of “his own.”

The Northites charge that Joseph Hansen, who was Trotsky’s personal secretary in Mexico and a leader of the American Socialist Workers Party until his death in 1979, was an accomplice of both the GPU and the FBI in Trotsky’s murder. This slander was used by North’s Workers League in the Alan Gelfand case to take the SWP before the federal courts of U.S. imperialism, demanding that the courts determine the membership of the SWP. Most recently the North group waged an international campaign in support of the capitalist state’s prosecution of an SWP cadre, who is now in prison on a 25-year sentence.

While North’s Workers League has never once concretely stood for the defense of the gains of the October Revolution they have spent thousands of dollars to cripple the Socialist Workers Party, an organization known for its ardent support to Castro’s Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the U.S. rulers have long aimed their fire at Castro’s Cuba to stop the spread of revolution in “their own backyard” and as a stepping stone in their drive to reconquer the Soviet Union for capitalist exploitation. Domestically, the American imperialists have waged a campaign of political repression and disruption of organizations known for their defense of the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions.

The SWP was the target of heavy infiltration, burglaries, wiretaps and harassment of its members by FBI agents. North’s outfit claims that this infiltration “proves” that the SWP is controlled and run by the U.S. government! On the contrary, what is questionable is the fact that the Workers League has never claimed that it has been penetrated by agents of U.S. imperialism as has been the experience of every other socialist or radical organization in the U.S. How could this be?

This is all the more suggestive given that the present top leadership of the Workers League includes people who studied in post-graduate Slavic studies departments at elite American universities where the CIA does its heaviest recruiting. Financed by Arab gold and perhaps from elsewhere, these Workers League leaders have done their level best to paralyze the pro-Fidelista Socialist Workers Party through an incessant and expensive campaign in the American courts. Did they learn all this in their elite graduate schools of anti-Communism? Only a paranoid believes that history is a plot but everybody knows there are plots in history. And about this outfit we can only warn: Beware!

The BSA calls to “Overthrow the Stalinist Bureaucracy! Build Workers’ Councils in East Germany!” On the surface of it, this would appear to echo Trotsky’s call for a proletarian political revolution. In fact, the BSA’s characterization of the Stalinist bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through” owes more to the social-democratic anti-Sovietism of Max Shachtman and equates simple membership in the Communist Party with being a part of the bureaucracy.

In the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote that “all shades of political thought are to be found among the bureaucracy: from genuine Bolshevism (Ignace Reiss) to complete fascism (F. Butenko).” Trotsky saw that the bureaucracy was not a new ruling class but a brittle and contradictory caste. He foresaw that under the impact of proletarian political revolution a section of the bureaucracy would come over to the side of those rebelling against Stalinist rule. This was witnessed during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In 1938 Trotsky observed:

“If tomorrow the bourgeois-fascist grouping, the ‘faction of Butenko,’ so to speak, should attempt the conquest of power, the ‘faction of Reiss’ inevitably would align itself on the opposite side of the barricades. Although it would find itself temporarily the ally of Stalin, it would nevertheless defend not the Bonapartist clique but the social base of the USSR, i.e., the property wrenched away from the capitalists and transformed into state property.”

In July 1937, Ignace Reiss, who had worked for the GPU, declared in a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR:

“No. I cannot stand it any longer. I take my freedom of action. I return to Lenin, to his doctrine, to his acts.
“I intend to devote my feeble forces to the cause of Lenin. I want to continue the fight, for only our victory—that of the proletarian revolution—will free humanity of capitalism and the U.S.S.R. of Stalinism.
“Forward to new struggles! For the Fourth International!”

In September 1937, Reiss was murdered by the Stalinists in Switzerland.
By the BSA’s maxim Reiss would have been dealt with as simply another “counterrevolutionary” Stalinist — like the 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party whose execution they hailed.

When it wants to this outfit can spout orthodox Leninism but they are, to borrow Lenin’s term, “political bandits,” i.e., political pirates who will show any flag to attack any target. When it has suited their own episodic interests the BSA’s International Committee has turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of striking unionists on the eve of a desperate class battle, and have generally crawled before alien class forces, above all any and every force hostile to the social gains that exist for the working people in the collectivized property forms from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe to Havana.

The Healyite/Northite tendency has always made a big deal out of its supposed “international” organization, which in practice meant that Healy and his British group called the tune and everyone else danced. At the same time, they are second to nobody, not even the ultra-legalistic American SWP, in their use of reactionary American legislation to justify a federated organization. To a man, the American fake-Trotskyists have hidden behind the “Voorhis Act,” a patently unconstitutional, unenforced U.S. law (passed nearly 50 years ago and never used against anyone) “prohibiting” international affiliation — a very convenient screen behind which centrists and reformists hide to preserve their freedom to carry out mutually incompatible opportunist ventures on each national terrain.

By contrast, our American section, the Spartacist League/U.S., has denounced this reactionary law — and has ignored it. While the revisionists embrace an excuse to disaffiliate from their overseas comrades, we take pride in the vibrant debates and common discipline of international democratic centralism, a necessary corrective to the pressures of one’s “own” imperialist ruling class.

Like the social democrats who claim to be “socialists” and the Stalinists who claim to be “communists,” the revisionists who pose as “Trotskyists” have left a trail of slime wherever they have gone. In their opportunism, they recall Oscar Wilde’s famous description of a fox hunt: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”

III. The Balance Sheet

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!

One-party rule is a synonym for Stalinism. Now the lid has come off and the working people of the DDR are demanding personal freedom, free speech, democracy. If these legitimate aspirations for democratic liberties are not to be wielded by imperialism and its social-democratic agents for capitalist restoration, they must be expressed in the creation of a regime based on workers councils which include the whole of the working people: soldiers, foreign laborers, technicians, farm workers, the mass of office workers, with advisory status for students, intellectuals and pensioners. Workers democracy means passionate political debate among the parties in workers councils over all the urgent political and economic problems and the alternative programs put forward for solving them. It means free and open discussion and, when the issues are serious, it means vituperative and if necessary factional struggle.

Anything less than the democracy of freely elected workers councils is fake — bureaucratically controlled elections or else “free elections” coerced and financed by conduits of imperialism acting upon an atomized mass.

The Stalinists always taunt that Trotskyism is insignificant in size and chronically faction-ridden. Yet the faction fights that have taken place since the inception of Trotsky’s Fourth International over 50 years ago have been struggles to preserve for the cause of the proletariat internationally the principles and revolutionary traditions that were brought to bear by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in leading the toiling masses of the former tsarist empire to victory.

We of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) have small forces; our achievements, if modest, have been vital and sometimes powerful.

We have fought to preserve and to the best of our capacities actively bring to bear in struggle the program of genuine Trotskyism. We are the tendency that has led the fight in America for militant mobilizations of labor and minorities which have successfully stopped fascists like the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi-lovers from staging provocations in major U.S. cities. Carrying forward Trotsky’s agitation for a united front of the powerful German workers movement to crush Hitler’s fascists before they had consolidated their power (as against Ernst Thalmann’s empty “Third Period” braggadocio: “nach Hitler wir” [after Hitler us]), we have fought to wield the power of the multiracial American labor movement in successful exemplary actions against the fascists who are a terrorist spearhead of capitalist reaction, union-busting and official racism.

We started as an oppositional tendency within the American Socialist Workers Party against that organization’s embrace of Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrillas as the modern-day equivalent of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. While defending the Cuban Revolution and celebrating this defeat of U.S. imperialism, we understood that in the absence of mobilizing the proletariat in its own class interests under a revolutionary leadership, the outcome could only parallel the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Deformed by the pressures of McCarthyism and the Cold War, the SWP in the early 1960s adapted to the same revisionism that led the Pabloists to proclaim that Stalinism could play a “roughly revolutionary role.” The founding cadre of our tendency were expelled from the then-centrist SWP in 1963-64. Shortly thereafter the SWP completely degenerated into reformism. Echoing the defeatist wing of American imperialism during the Vietnam War, the SWP campaigned around the “single-issue” social-patriotism of “Bring Our Boys Home,” building huge rallies where the only program presented was that of the Democratic Party politicians who saw the war as a “mistake” (because it was losing) by America’s otherwise “peace-loving” policymakers.

We fought for the military victory of the NLF against U.S. imperialism and called for working-class political strikes in the United States against the war. At the same time we recognized that the Vietnamese Stalinists, limited by the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” and corresponding futile attempts at “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist enemies, could not bring about the socialist liberation of the workers and peasants of that desperately impoverished and backward country. The achievement of that goal required a revolutionary proletarian internationalist leadership, one which was represented by the Vietnamese Trotskyists who led the 1945 Saigon uprising and who were murdered by the Vietnamese Stalinists.

The rapid degeneration of the once-revolutionary U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had fought to preserve Trotskyism against the anti-Soviet Shachtman opposition and initially against the revisionist current in Europe, reflected the party’s stagnation and isolation for more than a decade during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witchhunt. Nonetheless, we have always treasured the heritage which we gained from the American party. It was founded from leading cadre of the early Communist Party of the United States who fought against the Stalinist degeneration of that organization.

The principal leader of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, made at least four trips to Moscow as a delegate to the Communist International. From the Sixth CI Congress in 1928, Cannon brought back to America Trotsky’s renunciation of the course being pursued by the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and internationally, which is now published under the title The Third International After Lenin. Although our tendency has only existed for 25 years it embodies a continuity that goes straight back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Communist International.

In the early 1960s the comrades who went on to found our tendency internationally were attracted to Gerry Healy’s International Committee which at least on paper wrote very impressively in defense of authentic Trotskyism. In 1962 we got a taste of Healy’s organizational methods when, through the agency of his American toady Tim Wohlforth, Healy broke up the left-wing tendency in the Socialist Workers Party. On behalf of Healy and in pursuit of supreme local authority for himself, Wohlforth — claiming that we had a “split perspective” and that it was necessary at all costs to remain in the SWP which remained a “revolutionary party” (!) — split the opposition to the SWP’s right turn, cut it off from winning valuable comrades from a section of the old-time SWP membership and set up our tendency for expulsion from the SWP in a situation of weakness and isolation.

We refused to accept the 1962 rupture as definitive given that, despite their unprincipled organizational practices, Healy/Wohlforth still proclaimed to stand on a program of anti-revisionism. Yet the declaration by the Spartacist delegation at the 1966 London conference of Healy’s IC that “Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites” was considered one of our greatest crimes by Gerry Healy and his followers who declared themselves to be the Fourth International. According to Healy’s megalomaniacal posturings, the revisionism of Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Joseph Hansen had long since been destroyed within the working-class movement.

That generation of communist trade unionists, in good part revolutionary syndicalists, who had been won over by the victory of the October Revolution to Lenin and Trotsky’s Third International, not least by Lenin’s book “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, found in James P. Cannon and his faction, one of the three that led the Communist Party in the United States in the early 1920s, senior Communist functionaries who voiced their interests and feelings. In 1966 we were simply following Jim Cannon’s precept to say what is, an idea quite alien to maximum leaders and megalomaniacs.

Healy’s break with us and our demand for the reform of his group was followed within one year by a host of major political differences as Healy broke loose from such political anchors as he had had. These were exemplified in an already extant dropping of any political criticism of Vietnamese Stalinism in the just war against U.S. imperialism. Within a year the Healyites were enthusing over Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and had embraced the “Arab Revolution” as permanent, continuous and always requiring of support no matter what the particulars. The latter was to become the source of millions in pounds sterling from the grateful local masters and exploiters of this chronic “Arab Revolution.”

As for Tim Wohlforth, he was unceremoniously dumped by Healy in 1974. After years of serving as Healy’s fawning American accomplice, who emulated his mentor’s organizational practices of Stalinist-style gangsterism, suppression and slander, when Wohlforth was deposed as National Secretary of the Workers League he suddenly “discovered” that:

“Open discussion and political struggle was discouraged by Comrade Healy’s tendency to push every discussion to the most extreme point and to seek to break the person who disagreed with Comrade Healy. Only the most muted discussion ever took place in the international movement under such conditions.”

Truly the son of the “god that failed,” in the 1980s Wohlforth resurfaced in the pages of rad-lib journals as an academic-sounding neo-Kautskyan, nostalgic for the “good old days” of Shachtmanism. What Wohlforth doesn’t mention is his own history as the bullying lider maximo of a particularly nasty Healyite section.

From a handful of people in the United States we continued the fight to root out the revisionism which had destroyed Trotsky’s Fourth International. Our tendency extended itself internationally through political struggle to win cadre and militants away from organizations which laid claim to being Trotskyist while they betrayed every fundamental principle on which the Fourth International had been founded. In the 1960s this was largely fought over the question of permanent revolution vs. guerrillaism and pro-Stalinist enthusiasm. In the 1970s, the major question was the defense of the class independence of the proletariat against suicidal popular-front alliances with the class enemy, particularly as exemplified in Allende’s Chile.

With the onset of “Cold War II,” the question that was concretely posed was the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. We forthrightly championed the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan declaring: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan —Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples!” The PDPA government which came to power in 1978 in Afghanistan was based overwhelmingly on students, schoolteachers and Soviet-trained officers who, having some direct comparative experience of how truly backward their country was, sought far-reaching modernization. As soon as the PDPA regime attempted to implement its reforms—particularly education for girls and the lowering of the bride price — in the countryside, it was confronted by a reactionary insurgency organized by landlords, tribal chieftains and mullahs.

It was only the intervention of the Red Army which objectively provided an external social base for a thoroughgoing social transformation of the pre-feudal class structure existing in the country. This was not the proletarian internationalist Red Army led by Trotsky. Nonetheless we heralded the intervention of Soviet troops in Afghanistan as not only a defense of the USSR against imperialist encirclement but as a military force whose battle against CIA-financed Islamic reaction necessarily generated the possibility of bringing the social progress embodied in the remaining gains of the Russian Revolution to Afghanistan.

After the Soviet troops had been withdrawn we offered to organize international brigades to light in defense of social progress against the bloodthirsty mujahedin in Afghanistan. We anticipated drawing into this internationalist effort not merely volunteers from our own forces but from the ranks of militant fighters in many parts of the globe who would recognize in the defense of heroic Jalalabad an opportunity to strike a powerful blow against the imperialist system by which they are themselves oppressed and dispossessed. We also calculated that the formation of an international brigade could have a powerful effect within the Soviet Union among veterans of the Afghanistan intervention, many of whom — both officers and enlisted men — see themselves as having performed an internationalist duty in Afghanistan which was shamefully left unfinished when the Soviet troops were withdrawn in the name of international “détente.” Thus in offering to “fight to the death” against the agents of imperialism and reaction in Afghanistan, we were at the same time seeking to push forward the program of Leninist internationalism and proletarian political revolution within the Soviet Union itself. When the government of Afghanistan turned aside our offer of a brigade as militarily unnecessary, at their request we undertook a publicity and fund-raising campaign for the embattled civilians of Jalalabad as a vehicle to bring the Afghanistan civil war to the attention of the working people of many countries. This work was an impetus toward our changing our name from “international Spartacist tendency” to International Communist League, in recognition that over the Afghanistan issue and in response to developments in the USSR and Eastern Europe, there would be found many subjective communists who want to be in a communist organization worthy of the name. The Jalalabad campaign was also central to extending the Partisan Defense Committee (a legal and social defense organization inspired by the early work of the International Red Aid and its American section, the International Labor Defense) into Western Europe and Australia.

In 1981 we recognized that the leadership of Solidarność were traitors to the working class on behalf of NATO imperialism. The rest of those who are now trying to present themselves as “Trotskyists” in East Germany cheered Solidarność. They saw a chance to earn their stars and stripes as a left cover for the social democrats and the pro-capitalist “labor statesmen” who long ago enlisted as junior partners in imperialism’s war drive against the Soviet Union.

Cold War II also produced defectors and renegades from our organization.

Today they call themselves the Bolshevik Tendency and the Gruppe Vierte Internationale. Based in North America, the BT are parasites who often will put forward a parody of our positions (an imitation which is similarly attempted by the British Workers Power organization) while staging repeated provocations against our organization. As for the BT’s own political positions, besides hatred of the Soviet Union, these highly dubious provocateurs appear to dislike American blacks, are solicitous of Zionism and praise the indiscriminant mass killings of Americans. Of the state agencies in the world only the Mossad, the Israeli secret police, has similar appetites. Although they claim to be a separate organization the West German GIVIs have operated as the knowing cohorts of the BT, keeping whatever political differences they have an internal secret.

Now, when the Polish working class faces unemployment, austerity and immiseration under the Solidarność-led government, the false pretenders to Trotskyism are all trying to cover, downplay or otherwise evade their years of slavish support to this agency for the CIA, Western bankers and the Vatican. Now suddenly they “discover” the millions of American dollars funneled into Solidarność’ coffers and even publish “exposés” of the role of Irving Brown of the “AFL-CIA,” a professional buster of left-led unions beginning in postwar Western Europe more than 40 years ago, whose invitation to Solidarność’ 1981 congress they somehow all neglected to mention at the time. By their genuflections in the direction of “Trotskyism” today, these opportunists pay involuntary tribute to the power and persistence of authentic Trotskyism which has told the working people the truth all along.

The call for “communist unity against imperialism through political revolution” was first raised by our tendency at the time of the Sino-Soviet split. Unlike the Stalinists who seek through appeasement to persuade imperialism to join in “détente,” we understand that the capitalist rulers have never reconciled themselves to the loss of the deformed workers states from the realm of direct imperialist exploitation. From the invasion of Russia by 14 foreign armies during the Civil War to the dropping of atom bombs on an already defeated enemy in a racist war crime largely aimed at intimidating the USSR for the forthcoming division of the spoils between the victors of World War II, the imperialists by their actions themselves expose the futility of “peaceful coexistence” illusions. A great gift to imperialism is Stalinist nationalism, as each regime seeks to mitigate capitalist hostility to itself by offering to sacrifice other people’s revolutions. Refusing to be taken in by the more militant rhetoric occasionally found expedient by the Stalinist betrayers, as early as 1969 we predicted China’s rapprochement with the U.S. which has led to Mao and his successors’ despicable service as imperialist cat’s paw from the Vietnamese border to southern Africa.

Today the call for communist unity against imperialism through political revolution has acquired even greater urgency as the question of “which class shall rule” is posed in Eastern Europe. The tyranny of the capitalist world market will never be abolished until it is supplanted by a world planned economy. But in the meantime, through the shattering of the Stalinist bureaucracies, who now strive for national economic self-sufficiency, a unified and more rational planned economy can be created from East Berlin to Hanoi.

This must result in a vast improvement in the quality and quantity of consumer goods through a multinational division of labor, producing a great strengthening in the overall efficiency and modernization of the whole economies of these workers states.

There is a historic link between the German, Polish and Russian working classes particularly as embodied in Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew and German Communist leader. The worshippers of Pilsudski’s fascistic dictatorship who head Solidarność despise what Luxemburg was and everything she stood for. The Stalinists malign her. The Social Democracy, which was responsible for her murder, now seeks to portray her as a “democratic” alternative to Bolshevism. But proletarian internationalists hail Luxemburg just as she hailed the Russian Revolution at the founding conference of the German Communist Party in 1918. Now is the time to reverse the defeats of the German Revolution, which led to the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, through proletarian political revolution from East Germany and Warsaw to Moscow and Beijing.

The world’s ruling classes, above all the American imperialists, are celebrating the “death of Communism.” They hope to extend their system of raw exploitation, poverty and racism to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a task for which the social democrats have eagerly enlisted.

Should they succeed it would mean bloody counterrevolution within the deformed workers states (counterrevolution is no more a “peaceful,” “evolutionary” process than revolution) and the intensification of interimperialist rivalries in the fight to divide the spoils, heightening the prospect of thermonuclear World War III.

What we are seeing is not the “death of Communism” but the unraveling of the Stalinist bureaucracies. The choices are starkly — either workers Soviets to replace the corrupt, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies or a string of imperialist victories and the terrible immiseration of the masses in the workers states and elsewhere. This cannot be separated from the need for revolutionary struggle against the rule of capital by the working people in the imperialist West.

Marxists believe that revolutionary leadership is decisive — the intervention of the conscious factor into history at crucial moments. Capitalism is a stinking corpse, but those whose misleadership of the workers has granted the imperialist system a multitude of new leases on life still “prove” that that system can’t be overthrown because...it has not been overthrown. Humanity has in effect paid thrice for the failure of a party like Lenin’s Bolsheviks to emerge in Germany during the revolutionary wave following World War I. First, the failure of the German Revolution and the consequent isolation and Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Second, Hitler’s rise leading to the holocaust of world war—the German ruling class handed the country over to the Nazis because it was terrified of the spectre of workers power, but the German workers movement lacked the resolute revolutionary leadership to smash capitalist rule instead of merely scaring the rulers. Finally, the Stalinists’ commitment to allying with “democratic” imperialism allowed Western European capitalism to restabilize its class rule throughout West Europe after World War II, opening the way to the Cold War.

Now once again the German proletariat stands at a crossroads of history. If the workers of the DDR take power into their own hands, they will not only electrify the working class of West Germany and the advanced capitalist countries, they will as well send a powerful internationalist message to the workers and soldiers in the USSR and in every other country where capitalism has been overthrown but where Stalinist conservatism and nationalism has created new blocks to the extension of the revolution.

Since the invention of the “theory” of “socialism in one country,” Stalinism has been the antithesis of Leninist internationalism. Today in East Germany nationalism openly serves the appetites of the Frankfurt bankers for capitalist reunification of Germany. Return to the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin! Concretely today, the revolutionary workers of the DDR must extend the hand of fraternity to the Soviet soldiers who perform a lonely duty to world peace as the military bulwark against rapacious NATO imperialism, and to the Vietnamese immigrant workers who have daily endured official and unofficial racist mistreatment in a DDR ruled by an arrogant Stalinist regime.

On the eve of World War II, Trotsky observed with increasing urgency that the objective preconditions for world proletarian revolution were overripe, but what was lacking to uproot decadent capitalism on the world scale and establish a socialist world order was an authentic revolutionary leadership. Trotsky’s insistence on the need for “a party, a party and once again a party,” has only become more desperately urgent.

The International Communist League offers itself in the struggle to return to the authentic Communist tradition of the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky’s time. We are compelled to believe that our fidelity to the work of Lenin and its continuation by Trotsky necessarily means that the ICL and its German section, the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, formerly the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands, represents the highest expression of scientific socialism, the hope of humanity.

But, we too remain subject to the great pressures of the class struggle, pressures which demand new answers. Among our ranks we strongly need those who share a revolutionary perspective in order that Marxist answers addressing the interests of the working people will continue to emerge from the SpAD and our tendency internationally—expressed by a majority, or if necessary, a minority.

So long as the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat from the tyranny of the imperialist bourgeoisie continues to develop and be fought for, there will necessarily be fights to preserve and extend the program of revolutionary internationalism that inspired Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks against alien class pressures. Workers councils committed to the historic interests of the proletariat, above all internationally, must be the decisive arbiters in such disputes. Meanwhile all the impostors and fakers, who drag the banner of Leninism through all the old crap, must be fought.

We hope that we will be joined through a common political program with many individuals, loose formations and at least sections of parties in pursuit of our common goal.

• For proletarian political revolution, the rule of workers soviets, to replace the corrupt parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies who endanger the socialist foundations of the workers states! Defend the Soviet Union against imperialism and internal counterrevolution!

• No to the capitalist reunification of Germany! For soviet power in the DDR! For socialist revolution in West Germany! For a red soviet Germany in a Socialist United States of Europe!

• For a Leninist-egalitarian party, regrouping all revolutionary internationalist forces in a German section of a reborn Fourth International!

• For world socialist revolution! Return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky!


This article is dedicated to:

Marcel Hic, French Trotskyist leader who was the driving force in organizing the Trotskyist European Secretariat in Nazi-occupied Europe. Arrested in 1943, deported to Buchenwald, murdered by the Nazis at the Dora concentration camp;

Piet van’t Hart, leader of the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists who fought with great heroism in illegality in Holland under Nazi occupation;

Pietro Tresso (Blasco), member of the Political Bureau of the Italian Communist Party, expelled by Togliatti, organizer of the International Left Opposition and member of its International Secretariat in the 1930s. Died mysteriously while being “helped” to escape from a Nazi prison by Stalinist partisans;

Abram Leon, secretary of the Belgian Trotskyist section, leading Marxist theoretician on the Jewish question, arrested and killed by Nazis in Auschwitz in 1944;

Walter Held (Heinz Epe), member of the KPD expelled as a “Trotskyist” in 1932, leader of the German section of the Left Opposition, “disappeared” after being arrested while trying to cross the Soviet Union by train in 1941;

Martin Monat (Widelin), member of the European Secretariat, editor of Arbeiter und Soldat, assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944;

Oskar Hippe, participant in the 1918 Spartacus uprising, founding member of the KPD and the German Left Opposition, jailed by the Nazis from 1934-36, arrested in the DDR in 1948 for organizing a Trotskyist group and imprisoned for eight years;

and to the thousands of other revolutionaries who died directly at Stalin’s hands in the Soviet Union; the hundreds of other militants from many lands, including the valiant comrades of South and East Asia, who fought and mostly died in the hands of that terrible excrescence of capitalism — Nazism. No one will ever know how their destruction facilitated “order” toward the end of World War II.

— The International Secretariat of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)