D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 2 (1995)

Workers Vanguard No. 627, 25 August 1995

A Case Study of Chauvinism

David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination

PART TWO OF TWO

Part One of this article, polemicizing against a pamphlet by David North ‘s International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), titled “ The Road to Tuzla.” appeared in WV No. 626 (28 July).

From Sri Lanka…

In his speech, “Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today,” North says he drew inspiration for the ICFI’s opposition to self-determination from Keerthi Balasuriya, a former leader of their largest section, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) of Sri Lanka.

Following Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 from the racist colonial rule of the British and the subsequent passage of a Sinhala-only language law in 1956, the national chauvinism of the Sinhalese ruling class has led to au increasing, and increasingly bloody, communal polarization of the Sinhala and Tamil peoples of the island. This reached a watershed with the 1983 government-inspired pogroms against the Tamils. Hundreds upon hundreds of Tamils were murdered in bloodcurdling wholesale massacres, Tamil homes and businesses in Colombo were burnt to the ground (often with the occupants inside), economic and geographic interpenetration of the two peoples was severed in blood as the Tamils were increasingly compacted in the North and East of the island.

Sinhala communalism, designed and instigated by the Lankan ruling class, has always been wielded to assert its own class domination over both the Tamil and Sinhalese working people and oppressed, to head off any popular revolt by preventing class unity. From our inception as a tendency in the 1960s, we have championed the rights of the oppressed Tamil people. At the same time, we oppose Tamil nationalism, which, for example, dismissed the struggles of the strategically placed Tamil plantation workers in the central highlands of the island. In fact, the Tamil nationalist politicians wrote off these stateless “Indian Tamils” who had lived and worked on the island for more than a century. In fighting against the popular-frontist betrayals of the once-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), we pointed out that their class collaboration was rooted in an accommodation to anti-Tamil Sinhalese chauvinism.

We had always called “For the Right of Self-Determination of the Tamil People!” From the time of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms, we raised the demand for the right of Tamil Eelam. As we wrote in “Massacre in Sri Lanka” (WV No. 336, 12 August 1983):

“The impact of the bloodletting and mass population transfers can only be described as a catastrophe….
“What is posed now as a minimal democratic demand is a plebiscite of the Tamil working people to decide on the formation of an independent state in the North….
“What is desperately necessary is the building of an internationalist Trotskyist party in Sri Lanka, necessarily substantially based among the exploited Tamil masses. The struggle against the hideous national oppression of the Tamils and communalism is central to forging such a party.”

In the early 1970s, Healy’s ICFI stridently opposed the national rights of the oppressed Tamil people, arguing that a separate Tamil slate would only serve imperialism. By the late ‘70s, however, they were uncritically cheering the petty-bourgeois nationalist “Tamil Tigers” (LTTE). In the late 1980s, the RCL did manage to approximate a decent and correct line — defending the right of self-determination for the Tamil minority, opposing the intervention of India, demanding the withdrawal of the Sinhalese government troops from the Northern and Eastern Provinces and calling “For a United Socialist States of Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka.”

Now, RCL leader Wije Dias repudiates the Tamil struggle for self-determination. For all North’s denunciations of Healy, he and his supporters have come full circle to the original chauvinist position (as articulated by Michael Banda) of Healy’s ICFI. In Dias’ words:

“If the LTTE established a separate Eelam state, it would, like any other comprador regime, offer the masses of Tamils as cheap labour to the transnational corporations. This is inevitable, as there exists no possibility of implementing any programme of national development under the present capitalist global system of production…. These nationalist aspirations lead not to national liberation, but to national subjugation to imperialism.”
— International Worker [Britain], 22 January 1994

This is truly Orwellian — to “prevent” national subjugation to imperialism one must preserve national subjugation to the dominant state power and to ...imperialism. Even the demand for withdrawal of the Lankan army from the Tamil areas is missing from articles in the ICFI’s International Workers Bulletin — rather contradicting all the bombast about the RCL’s opposition to what is euphemistically termed the government’s “racist” war. The Northites even mimic the chauvinism of the Sinhalese rulers by referring to the Tamil areas with quotation marks around the term traditional homelands.

This chauvinist denial of the right of self-determination for the Tamil people is alibied in the name of “proletarian internationalism.” But the Northites’ opposition to Tamil national rights is not simply confined to the “here and now.” The RCL’s previous call for “A United Socialist States of Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka” has been changed to the call for a single “Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.”

J.V. Stalin had a similar idea when in 1922, as Commissar of Nationalities, he highhandedly sought to subordinate the national independence of the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani soviet republics by turning their nascent Transcaucasian federation into a single federated republic. When Lenin then objected to Stalin’s subsequent plans to bring the Transcaucasian republics into the Russian republic, Stalin stubbornly persisted by incorporating the Transcaucasian federation again as a single republic into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The last fight of Lenin’s life was against the Great Russian chauvinism which was the initial signature of the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy.

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Every few years, the membership of North’s ICFI have their heads put through another “dialectical” wringer. From prostration before bourgeois-nationalist regimes, it is now pronounced that any and all struggles for self-determination must be vigorously opposed.
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Of a piece with their new appreciation of the Tamil national question in Sri Lanka, in “The Road to Tuzla” the Northites write, with apparent alarm, that “India is faced with the threat of dismemberment.” Citing the fact that “the Marxist movement opposed the partition of India and Pakistan along ethnic and religious lines in 1947” — a partition that was engineered by British imperialism as the culminating act of over 300 years of colonial “divide and rule” — they oppose legitimate national struggles such as those in Kashmir and of the Sikhs in the Punjab. This is nothing other than an apology for the maintenance of bourgeois “secular” India, a living hell for oppressed castes, women and myriad different peoples and nationalities.

…to Quebec

In Canada, leading up to the electoral victory of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Quebecois (PQ) in the Quebec elections last fall, the Northites were screaming like a bunch of Alberta prairie yahoos: “A PQ victory would throw the continued existence of the 127-year-old Canadian nation-state into question and raise the specter of a Yugoslav-style civil war in North America” (International Workers Bulletin, 29 August 1994)! The idea that Quebec is about to become the next Bosnia is truly dérangé. Unlike the Balkans, where the bloody nationalist conflicts are inspired by the competition of interpenetrated peoples for the same territory, Quebec is a separate French-speaking nation with a common people, common language, common culture and common history. Although Native Indians would certainly continue to get it in the neck should Quebec secede (not that they aren’t presently abused and denigrated by the English-Canadian imperialist rulers), independence would hardly require “ethnic cleansing” to drive out another people or nationality.

Quebec was forcibly incorporated into British North America following the 1759 defeat of the French garrison on the Plains of Abraham. In 1867, the national subjugation of the Québécois was the cornerstone of Canadian confederation. Almost 100 years later, the belated emergence of Quebec from clerical-dominated backwardness produced an upwardly mobile French-speaking petty bourgeoisie, and at the same time there emerged one of the most militant and class-conscious proletariats in all of North America. Opposition to Anglo chauvinism and the suppression of the national and language rights of the Quebecois fueled an upsurge in labor militancy in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

The Quebec labor bureaucrats channeled the militancy and combativity of the Québécois working class into support for the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois. In this they were assisted by the Anglo chauvinism of the labor misleaders in the rest of Canada, who militantly opposed the legitimate national and language rights of the Québécois. The fact that Quebec is a separate nation, with corresponding national rights — -i.e. the right to independence — -is similarly not even given a nod in the Bulletin’s articles on the question. Nor do they mention, much less oppose, the raving Anglo chauvinism against Quebec in English Canada.

Today, such chauvinism is particularly represented by the prairie-based Reform Party, which is now one of the two major opposition parties in the Canadian parliament. The other major opposition party is the Bloc Quebecois — the federal’ analogue to the PQ which now rules Quebec. This alone should give some idea of the dominance of the Quebec national question in Canada and the extent to .which it poisons relations between the workers of Quebec and English Canada.

Our Canadian comrades of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste have consistently championed Quebec’s unconditional right to independence, not out of support to the emergent Quebecois bourgeoisie‘s aspirations to become maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house), but out of a proletarian internationalist commitment to remove the national barriers to the class unity of the English — and French — speaking workers of North America. The Northites, however, although claiming to fight “to unite workers in Canada with their class brothers in the US and Mexico,” refuse to defend Quebec’s right to independence. This is antithetical to an internationalist struggle for revolutionary working-class unity.

On the contrary, it is simply a backhanded endorsement of the “unity” of the Canadian bourgeois state. In the words of Lenin:

“The proletariat cannot remain silent on the question of the frontiers of a state founded on national oppression, a question so ‘unpleasant’ for the imperialist bourgeoisie. The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state, which means that they must fight for the right to self-determination. The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words; neither confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations; the hypocrisy of the reformists and Kautskyites, who defend self-determination but remain silent about the nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation and kept in ‘their own’ state by force, would remain unexposed.”
— “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (January-February 1916)

Counterfeit “Orthodoxy”

While the Northites’ open rejection of right of nations to self-determination may be a new innovation, getting there is not a very big step. They have long sneered at racial and other forms of oppression born of capitalist exploitation somehow irrelevant to the “class struggle” — by which they meant the pursuit a crude workerist adaptation to the racist Cold War labor bureaucrats. At the height of the Vietnam antiwar protests and struggles for black freedom, the Bulletin put forward a program for a labor party which took up neither opposition to the war nor the fight for black liberation!

In a long series of articles in the U.S. Workers League’s Bulletin titled “The Politics of the Spartacist League,” written in the mid-1980s, the denounced us for “An Obsession With Race.” Why? By the Northites’ lights, Workers Vanguard featured too many articles on the question of black oppression, racist terror and opposition to fascism, and not enough on “workers.” Never mind that blacks are heavily represented in the ranks of organized labor and that the fight against racist and fascist terror is integral to the defense of the labor movement as a whole. But obviously not for the Bulletin. In 1983, it ran an article smearing the SL-initiated November 1982 labor/black mobilization in Washington, D.C. — in which over 5,000 black workers and youth came out and stopped the Klan — as “an adventure which played right into the hands of the police”!

Even Gerry Healy wrote of “D. North’s whiter than white socialism.” In American society, where the forcible segregation of blacks at the bottom is a keystone of U.S. capitalism, labor must champion the cause of black liberation if it is to break the chains of capitalist exploitation and degradation. This, the Northites claimed, is to “counterpose …struggle against racism” to “the struggle of the working class.”

The same Bulletin series reviled us for the simple (and eminently truthful) statement that the hard-fought 1986 strike by Hormel meatpackers had been knifed by the “labor traitors that currently make up the top leadership of the American labor movement.” The Workers League sneered that this was only further evidence of our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism.” The Northites’ equation of the trade-union misleaders with the unions themselves has been one of their few political constants. Now they have simply reversed the equation. From squealing that to attack the labor bureaucrats was some kind of “proof” of “hatred of the working class,” they have gone on to pronouncing that the unions as a whole can no longer be considered workers organizations!

A few years back, in one of his ponderous speeches, titled “The End of the USSR,” David North declared that “to define the AFL-CLO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992).

The unions have been grievously undermined by the pro-capitalist labor tops to the point where organized labor in this country is increasingly a hollow shell. Nonetheless, even though now only representing a small percentage of the working class, the unions are still the economic organizations of the working class. To transform them into fighting organizations for the working class and all of the oppressed requires a political struggle to break the trade-union bureaucracy’s stranglehold and replace these sellouts with a class-struggle leadership.

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There are, of course, so-called “unions” which have fit North’s description as “direct instruments of imperialism.” Solidarność in Poland is one, and one which the Northites eagerly and vigorously supported.
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But it is precisely such a political struggle that is excluded in either incarnation of the Northite line on the unions. From appealing to the AFL-CIO tops to do everything from launch general strikes to form a labor party, the Northites now equate all of organized labor with the bosses and their government. Such a view of the unions is one that is obviously not shared by the capitalists or their state, which have poured some billions of dollars into mercenary strikebreaking outfits. Far from promoting working-class struggle, the Northites’ appeals for the workers to junk their unions neatly dovetail with the interests of the union-busting bosses.

There are, of course, so-called “unions” which have fit North’s description as “direct instruments of imperialism. Solidarność in Poland is one, and one which the Northites eagerly and vigorously supported. Another is the “Union of Democratic Miners” in Britain. Consisting of a bunch of scabs on the heroic British coal strike of 1984-85, this “union” was set up at the behest of the Thatcher government to destroy the National Union of Miners (NUM).

Healy/North’s ICFI had its own hand to play against the British miners union. On the eve of the strike, Healy’s press made a big splash by scandalizing NUM leader Arthur Scargill for his correct opposition to Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” This scurrilous anti-Communist campaign was instantly picked up by the Fleet Street tabloids as well as the Labour Party/Trades Union Congress right wing with the aim of isolating the miners union and trying to crush it. The campaign to smear and discredit Scargill was taken up by the British secret police of MI5 as part of a full-scale mobilization of all the forces of the capitalist state aimed at destroying the miners union. Yet even now the Northites’ only criticism of Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) when it comes to the British miners is that it supposedly “ruled out any criticism of Scargill” (International Workers Bulletin, 25 April 1994)!

Classless Demagogues

In the concluding portions of “The Road to Tuzla,” North’s ICFI statement declares that Cliff Slaughter’s WRP “has been transformed as the result of a protracted national opportunist degeneration into a bourgeois tendency.” That just about finishes it. North’s organization has written off the unions, the social-democratic and ex-Stalinist parties, all of what they perceive as their major “Trotskyist” contenders — from Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat to Slaughter’s WRP — as thoroughly bourgeois organizations. As Hegel and Marx would say, the Northites have obliterated all contradictions — to the end of portraying themselves as the last, the only, proletarian leaders on the face of the planet.

The Northites’ description of Slaughter’s organization sounds all too much like their own, particularly the statement that the positions of the WRP serve to “ideologically” condition its membership “to reject any connection between the party’s politics, on the one hand, and the class interests of the proletariat and the principled positions of Marxism, on the other.” More than ten years ago, in responding to the Bulletin’s smear of our anti-Klan mobilization in Washington, D.C., we wrote that the leaders of Healy’s ICFI were “classless demagogues, all-purpose mock extremists whose radicalism has nothing in common with socialist struggle” (“Smash Fascist Smear of SL,” WV No. 379, 17 May 1985).

Every few years, the membership of North’s ICFI have their heads put through another “dialectical” wringer. From prostration before bourgeois-nationalist regimes, it is now pronounced that any and all struggles for self-determination must be vigorously opposed. After years of pandering to the AFL-CIO tops, the membership is now told that the unions are the “direct instruments of imperialism” and must be destroyed.

North’s grand speeches proclaiming “decisive turning points” for the proletariat not only serve to justify and reinforce his organization’s distance from the class struggle, they are a direct echo of the interests of the imperialists. The ICFI’s “theories” are nothing but cowardly rationalizations for sneering at struggle against chauvinist oppression, and for writing off the economic defense organizations of the working class, in order to boost their own petty advantage. The Northites’ policies are those of poseurs seeking a niche as spoilers. Otherwise, they are utterly devoid of, and antithetical to a program which can lead the international working class and oppressed to a socialist victory over their exploiters.

D. North “Abolishes” Right to Self-Determination 1 (1995)

Workers Vanguard No. 626, 28 July 1995

Revelation on the Road to Tuzla

David North “Abolishes” the Right to Self-Determination

PART ONE OF TWO

The collapse of the former workers states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union unleashed an orgy of nationalist bloodletting. Today the imperialist media denounces Serbian war crimes in the fratricidal slaughterhouse that is now Bosnia. But “ethnic cleansing” is hardly a practice unique to the Serbs. Not only are grisly atrocities carried out by all sides in the Balkans, but no less bloody national wars have been waged between Armenians and Azeris for possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, by Georgia against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, and throughout the Caucasus. To assert its domination in the region, the Russian army launched a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya which has virtually obliterated the capital city of Grozny and devastated the countryside.

To read the bourgeois press one would get the idea that these gruesome nationalist slaughters are inspired by the revival of some ancient “tribal” feuds. In fact, it is the logic of capitalist counterrevolution that is the motor force behind the resurgence of nationalism from Central Europe to the Caucasus, as economically more advanced peoples seek to consolidate their own advantage at the expense of their less-developed neighbors. As we wrote in “`Ethnic Cleansing’ and Nationalist Wars” (WVNo. 580, 16 July 1993): “What is happening in Bosnia is a recurrent phenomenon in this epoch of capitalist decay.... Thus national consolidation under capitalism has been reduced to its stark component of communal savagery to drive out or eliminate minority nationalities.”

Yet it is to the capitalist imperialist rulers that a whole number of Vietnam-era “doves,” liberals and radical intelligentsia appeal for military intervention to bring “democracy” to the Balkans. Among this lot is one Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the American Workers League, the U.S. satellite of the now-departed Gerry Healy and his International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). In his current role as saved sinner and “born again” anti-Leninist social democrat, Wohlforth called for U.S. imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the headline “Give War a Chance” (In These Times, 26 July 1993).

Wohlforth’s former master, Gerry Healy, was the consummate example of what Lenin called a “political bandit” able to wield Trotskyist orthodoxy when that suited his purpose and equally capable of being the bought-and-paid-for press agent for a variety of bourgeois-nationalist Mideast regimes (which he and his organization were for many years). Almost a decade ago, Healy’s organization blew apart, but the mark of this self-proclaimed “founder-leader” of the ICFI can be found today in the heated exchange between Healy’s one-time lieutenants over their mutual responses to the Balkan quagmire. One side openly embraces Bosnian Muslim nationalism, while the other feigns orthodoxy in a supposed anti-nationalism which turns out to be de facto support for imperialism and national oppression.

For the past couple of years, Healy’s former “theoretician,” Cliff Slaughter, and his Workers Revolutionary Party have occupied the leading position in the campaign for “Workers Aid to Bosnia.” Running supplies to the bourgeois-nationalist Bosnian Muslim regime, with French and British imperialist troops in “UN” blue helmets riding shotgun, the WRP calls this an example of “working class internationalism”! To believe this line, one would have to include former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher — who is beating the drums for more aggressive aid to the Bosnian Muslim government — in the ranks of “proletarian internationalists.” In short, “Workers Aid to Bosnia” is nothing other than a direct echo of, and stalking horse for, those ruling-class forces who want to take a more belligerent military stance against Serbia.

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North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.
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Occupying the “orthodoxy” corner is David North, who replaced Wohlforth as leader of the Workers League and is now the head of the various national fragments who lay claim to the heritage of Healy’s ICFI. In response to Slaughter’s “Workers Aid” campaign, North’s group published a lengthy statement titled, “The Road to Tuzla — How Slaughter’s WRP Aids Imperialism in the Balkans” (May 1994).

Correctly arguing that communists must “fight intransigently against the nationalist poison spread by capitalism,” North’s ICFI screams foul at its former comrades, sputtering with indignation, “Never before has a group claiming to be Trotskyist directly collaborated with bourgeois regimes....” Actually, Healy’s ICFI dragged the banner of Trotskyism through that pigsty some years ago — and not without the complicity of one David North.

It is hardly a large leap for Slaughter and the WRP to go from singing the praises of Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Iranian Revolution” to becoming the blatant press agent for the Islamic regime of Sarajevo’s Alija Izetbegovic. But North’s Workers League was also up to its neck in backing the sheiks and colonels in the name of the so-called “Arab Revolution.” If today North’s ICFI chooses to wax “orthodox,” it is simply because that is what fits their perceived opportunist advantage.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, amidst the imperialist chorus hailing the “death of communism,” North’s organization began issuing strident statements writing off the unions as “direct agents of imperialism.” Any and every other tendency within the workers movement have been deemed to be thoroughly bourgeois organizations. To what end? The obvious conclusion is that one is to believe that David North is now the sole uncontested proletarian leader on the face of the planet. Now, posing as Marxist theoretician maxim, North writes off the right of nations to self-determination as completely retrograde.

Proletarian Internationalism and the Right to Self-Determination

There can be no democratic solution to the bloody nationalist conflict in Bosnia and other regions of ex-Yugoslavia short of a thorough-going socialist revolution. Bosnia is not a nation, and there is no Bosnian “people.” Rather, Bosnia-Hercegovina is composed of three heretofore intermingled and closely related peoples — Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims. Formerly a province in the Ottoman and then Habsburg empires, Bosnia — Hercegovina was set up as a constituent republic in Titoist Yugoslavia, intended to be a model of interethnic harmony. Now, within the framework of capitalist counterrevolution, the heavy geographic interpenetration of these various peoples means that the national rights of one can only he realized through savage persecution aimed at driving out the others.

While various social-democratic and pseudo-Trotskyist organizations back the Bosnian Muslims and some leftover Stalinists back the Serbs, as communists we oppose all sides in this national/ communalist slaughter. We also, naturally and necessarily, oppose all imperialist intervention in the Balkans. Concretely this means that our organization internationally has stood for the defense of the Serbs against repeated NATO air strikes, as well as demanding that all UN troops, including those of Yeltsin’s Russia, get out of the Balkans and calling for an end to the UN/NATO blockade of Serbia. The only perspective that offers a way out of this all-sided slaughter is for the working class throughout the former Yugoslavia to overthrow their bourgeois-nationalist leaders in an internationalist struggle for a socialist federation of the Balkans.

To realize such a perspective, to forge proletarian unity and bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class of the Balkans, requires a leadership which in Lenin’s words acts as a “tribune of the people,” fighting against every manifestation of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnic hatred. Only in this way can the various competing nationalisms be undercut and the common class interests of all of the working people be brought to the fore. It was in this respect that the Bolshevik Party championed the right to self-determination for the myriad nations and peoples imprisoned in the tsarist empire.

But such a leadership is not what the Northites have on offer, nor could they. While they write that the “strong internationalist traditions of the Yugoslav proletariat must be revived on the basis of a scientific analysis and revolutionary program,” in “The Road to Tuzla” they simultaneously write off the whole question of the defense of the right to self-determination as an anachronism, inapplicable in today’s “global economy”:

“In politics, terms which had a definite social and class content in one period often come to represent something quite different in the next. This is the case with the slogan of ‘self-determination.’...
“Those who advance the demand for self-determination through national separatism and bourgeois rule are responsible for the global consequences of such slogans. This ‘right’ will be championed by imperialist powers and backed by their military forces in other parts of the Balkans and throughout the world.”

Beyond Bosnia, the Northites argue against the right of self-determination for Kashmir, the Punjab and other nations locked into the “prison house of peoples” that is the Indian bourgeois state. Similarly, they come out against the national rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Quebecois in Canada.

The ICFI statement invokes the authority of the Marxist movement and Lenin. But in fact the Northites’ position is a purely chauvinist one which accepts the rule of the dominant nation in multinational states. Or as Lenin himself put it in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914): “Repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration...”

Far from having become some kind of anachronism, defense of the right of self-determination is, if anything, increasingly important. The escalation of interimperialist rivalries coming in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the drive by major powers to redivide the world into regional trade blocks and the increasing offshore production in low-wage “Third World” countries reinforces the need for communists to champion the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

North’s ICFI and Nationalist Reaction

The Northites try to find refuge in the statement that in “Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular, nationalism arises today as part of a retrograde tendency seeking to restore both direct imperialist domination and capitalist property relations.” But nationalist reaction is not simply a product of counterrevolution. It was also a driving force for capitalist restoration in the former Stalinist-ruled workers states. In the latter case, North’s organization was among the bigger fans of nationalism.

For decades the imperialist rulers howled about the “oppression” of the so-called “captive nations,” seeing them as a battering ram for shattering the former Soviet bloc. And the Northites howled right along with them. In 1979-80, when the Soviet army intervened in Afghanistan, we of the Spartacist League said, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” noting that this brought with it the possibility, albeit unfulfilled, of breaking the chains of Islamic feudal reaction and extending the gains of the October Revolution to that hideously backward country. The Northites, in contrast, squealed along with U.S. president Jimmy Carter that the Soviet intervention was an attack on “the national rights and feelings of the Afghan people” (Bulletin, 8 July 1986). But there was no Afghan “nation,” and the peoples whose “rights” were being attacked were a cabal of tribal chiefs and Islamic mujahedin funded by the CIA.

Together with the Vatican and the CIA, North’s Workers League made the counterrevolutionary cause of the Pilsudskiite nationalist Solidarność in Poland their own, hailing it as “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement” (Bulletin, 15 September 1981). In 1990, they echoed crazed anti-Communists like U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in denouncing then-president George Bush for refusing to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union for its clampdown on the right-wing nationalist Sajudis government in Lithuania.

An article headlined “Gorbachev Steps Up Stalinist Aggression Against Lithuania” (Bulletin, 30 March 1990) decried that the “Bush administration has pointedly refused to make any condemnation of the Soviet military actions in Lithuania.” As we wrote in our article, “Imperialists Demand the Baltics” (WV No. 518, 18 January 1991):

“As Leninists and internationalists, we stand for the democratic reorganization of the Soviet Union and for the right of any nationality with a leadership that opposes counterrevolution to withdraw to any extent it sees fit. But in Lithuania and the other Baltic republics the fig leaf of ‘national independence’ is being used as a cover for capitalist restoration. And this must be fought.... To prevent the disintegration of the USSR amid fratricidal nationalism, it is necessary to recapture the proletarian internationalism which animated the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky.”

Looking to establish their own independent capitalist states, the nationalist movements in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had their own program for “ethnic cleansing,” calling for the suppression of any and all rights of other peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Poles and others) within these states, if not openly advocating their forcible removal. But this didn’t much bother the Northites then.

Now they try to palm themselves off as the epitome of proletarian internationalism. Not only is this a monumental fraud, but the ICFI’s new-found opposition to nationalism is neither “orthodox” nor even vaguely leftist. Rather, once again, their position mirrors that of the imperialist rulers. Whereas yesterday they aided and abetted reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, today international capitalism is far from happy that the spoils they expected to loot from the victory of capitalist counterrevolution are being drowned in a sea of bloody nationalist-inspired regional conflicts. While raising a hue and cry about “poor little Bosnia,” the imperialist rulers now generally decry the very nationalist forces they fomented, and the Northites join the chorus.

Was It All Gerry Healy’s Fault?

In his article, “Permanent Revolution . and the National Question Today” (The Fourth International, Winter-Spring 1994), David North declares that Healy’s WRP “systematically betrayed the principles of Trotskyism as it subordinated the proletariat to...bourgeois regimes such as those of Libya, Iran and Iraq.” From here he goes on to opine that only the “split within the International Committee made possible an intensive reexamination of the entire historical significance of the movements of ‘national liberation’ and their relation to the proletariat and the perspective of socialist revolution.”

North certainly has an elastic view of his own history — similar to his organization’s relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. His support to bourgeois — nationalist forces was far from abstract. In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an official Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.” That same year, celebrating the “Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the Workers League sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies.” The ICFI, including North and his current cohorts, also enthused over “the anti-imperialist content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini” — i.e., the Iranian ayatollah’s “struggle” for an Islamic Republic (to the best of our knowledge this praise was gratis).

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left long before the 1985 implosion of his Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. As for the so-called “split” in the ICFI, it would better be described as a falling out among thieves. Healy was ousted, North rushed to claim his mantle as the ICFI “leader,” and Slaughter took the name of the WRP and ran. For years, North & Co. have sought to clear their name by claiming they had no idea Healy was being paid for the role as publicity agent for Hussein, Qaddafi and others. In other words, their defense is that they betrayed the very same Trotskyist principles — except that unlike Healy, they did it for free! But even this “defense” would appear to be rather threadbare, considering that, for one, North’s colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, got censured by the Central Committee of his own organization in February 1986 for failing to report the receipt of monies from Arab regimes to the IC (Socialist Labor League Internal Bulletin, February 1986).

To alibi their former support for a whole variety of reactionary nationalist causes and regimes, today North’s ICFI acts as if nationalism has only recently become a “retrograde tendency.” In the “Road to Tuzla,” they write of the “progressive, unifying characteristic of the national movements of the epoch in which Lenin put forward the slogan of self-determination of nations.” But in calling for military support to national movements fighting against imperialist-colonialist subjugation, Lenin never praised their supposed “progressive, unifying character.” On the contrary, in his “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), Lenin called for:

“...a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

The Bolsheviks championed the right of self-determination not to advance the cause of nationalism but to advance proletarian class unity. The fundamental propositions of a Marxist position on the national question in the imperialist epoch were underlined by Lenin in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”: “on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle.”

The right to self-determination is purely a bourgeois-democratic demand and as such is correspondingly a subordinate part of a revolutionary-internationalist program. This question was posed point-blank for the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. In the latter region, newly independent bourgeois regimes sought and found the direct military backing of the imperialists — first the Germans and then the British — posing a direct threat to the revolution. At the close of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks took power in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan through a combination of local uprisings and Red Army intervention. As Trotsky wrote two decades later, “Forceful sovietization was justified: the safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before formal democratic principles” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events” [April 1940] in In Defense of Marxism).

The “Global Economy”

Other than claiming that their newfound “wisdom” on the national question is the fruit of having got rid of Healy, the ICFI claims a “new world reality” for its line change:

“Vast changes in world economic and political relations have created corresponding changes in the character of the national movements.... Can it be seriously argued that the resurgence of ethnic chauvinism in the Balkans, or for that matter in the former USSR or the Indian subcontinent, expresses an effort to put an end to the legacy of imperialist and feudal domination? Can one speak today of the national bourgeoisie of Bosnia, or Kazakhstan or Kashmir seeking to ‘capture the home market,’ thereby creating conditions for the ‘victory of commodity production’ and hence a fuller development of the class struggle?”

The idea of an “era of global economic integration” which North presents as if it were yet another of his unique “theoretical breakthroughs” has been known to the Marxist movement for over a century now. It’s otherwise known as imperialism!

Up until the mid-1880s, Marx and Engels judged national movements according to their ability to consolidate modern independent nation-states favorable to economic development. But with the development of imperialism the terms of reference changed. Marx and Engels began to address this over the question of Irish independence. As Marx wrote in a paper on the Irish question in 1869: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.”

Marx’s position on Ireland was further developed by Lenin in his writings on the national question. For Lenin the question of self-determination had nothing to do with the ability to develop a modern, economically independent capitalist nation. Indeed he polemicized at some length against Rosa Luxemburg, who declared that self-determination had become an “illusory” demand with the development of imperialism. In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin answered:

“Not only small states, but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of ‘rich’ bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states, but even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as Marx pointed out in Capital....
“For the question of the political self-determination of nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society, Rosa Luxemburg has substituted the question of their economic independence.”

Unlike the Northites, however, Rosa Luxemburg was animated by genuine proletarian internationalism. Although wrong, her visceral opposition to the right of self-determination was motivated by revulsion with the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in Poland (forces which some decades later the Northites would cheer on in the name of Solidarność counterrevolution).

Lenin recognized that imperialism was the epoch of capitalist decay, in which the development of a national economy and emergence of a vigorous bourgeoisie were stifled by imperialist exploitation and domination over the more backward capitalist countries. The understanding that the national bourgeoisies of these countries are incapable of carrying out the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks, such as genuine national independence, is ABC Trotskyism — in fact it is a fundamental underpinning of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

Of course, very real changes have taken place in the world in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The relentless drive to destroy the Soviet workers state provided a point of unity for the various imperialist powers. With that removed, inter-imperialist rivalries have escalated. The global system of “free trade” the economic cement which held together the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet alliance — has crumbled as the major powers seek to redivide the world into regional trade blocs. But what is going on is not “new.” Rather, the post-Cold War world increasingly resembles the pre-1914 world of heightened interimperialist rivalries intersecting regional nationalist conflicts.

The so-called “globalization of production” — i.e., the export of capital — simply means that the capitalists have moved large chunks of industry to low-wage “Third World” countries. This, for example, has meant the attempted wholesale takeover of Mexico by U.S. imperialism under the conditions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Far from being a negation of the Leninist position on the national and colonial question, the current situation underlines the importance for communists of defending the rights of neocolonial and oppressed nations against imperialist depredations in order to advance the interests of international proletarian class struggle.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Lord of the Fleas (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 412 (1986)

Workers League Cult Attacks Marxist Spartacists

Lord of the Fleas

Our party, the Spartacist League, is currently being subjected to the “polemical” attentions of one David North. In fact, a series on “The Politics of the Spartacist League” appearing in North’s Bulletin is already in its 13th part and still going. But who or what is David North? He is the little lord of neo-Healyite, anti-Healyite, total Healyism – i.e., of nothing-who heads the American Workers League (WL), a very small and very discredited staphylococcal pimple on the rump of ostensible Trotskyism.

Why North chooses this moment to work us over at such length must have something to do with his having become, at the moment, the top dog in a fragment of what used to be called the “International Committee” (IC), an unpleasant formation once built by Gerry Healy in his own image. When Healy was ousted last year by backstabbing intrigues among his lieutenants, including North, the “IC” broke into at least four pieces, with splits within its sections in several countries.

Only someone who wanted to be “the leader,” never mind of what, would rush to claim Healy’s mantle. Healy’s IC was an appendage of his British organization, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which was distinguished by its physically brutal internal regime and by its capacity, unmatched by garden-variety opportunists, for wild swings of political line in pursuit of egregious and often mutually contradictory appetites. To the extent that the Healyites had a coherent political core, they were cringing legalists/Labourite economists, and virulently anti-Soviet in concrete program. Through it all, the hapless denizens of the IC were assured that, small and miserable though their own groups might be, the British WRP led by Healy (who eventually dubbed himself the IC’s “founder-leader”) was conquering the masses through its daily paper.

In fact, Healy’s daily paper was also a fraud which, lacking a sufficient number of members to support it, came to depend on funding from the most unsavory forces. And the WRP’s sole significant “contribution” in many years to the British class struggle came when it made itself the “vanguard” of a redbaiting, union-busting attack on the National Union of Mineworkers, on behalf of the right-wing leaders of the Trades Union Congress. Healy’s “expose” of miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s minimal criticism of anti-socialist Polish Solidarność was timed for maximum exposure in Margaret Thatcher’s Tory press, and became the opening shot of the campaign to isolate the militant miners union on the very eve of their heroic strike.

When Healy was pushed out of power in the IC last year, the lid came off a real stinking garbage can. We responded by publishing a special issue of our Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) on “Healyism Implodes,” There we re viewed Healy’s history, which impinged on our own history until about 20 years ago; the next issue of Spartacist (No. 38-39, Summer 1986), devoted to the degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party, also had some relevant things to say about Healy and his IC. And now we find ourselves being vilified at such great length in the Bulletin. We know from experience that this means we’ve touched the WL where it hurts, and that the Northites have decided it’s time for them once again to administer some “education,” Healy-style, to their supporters – a refresher course in cynicism and how not to think.

Healyism Implodes

North got involved early on in the whisperings of proffered deals among longtime Healyite henchmen that started when Healy started losing his grip on the WRP/IC. Gerry the tinpot despot had got old, while at the same time evidently becoming more uncontrollable than ever in his habits. When Healy reneged on an earlier promise to retire, Mike Banda, Cliff Slaughter and others in England started playing around with revelations of alleged spectacularly abusive behavior by Healy. At the same moment, a first-rate financial scandal erupted: unpaid bills, some going back two years, came to light and it was estimated that one and a quarter million pounds would be required or the WRP would cease to exist. The “revelations” process, begun as blackmail, acquired its own momentum: the leadership was in pieces and the members began to clamor for an explanation for some of the more grotesque atrocities. For example: why were WRP photographers sent to the Iraqi Embassy to photograph Iraqi dissident protesters, the pictures then to be turned over to the Iraqi regime?

North himself became a “leader” in the IC when he was specially chosen by Healy to head the Workers League as his reward for eager services as a mouthpiece for Healy’s infamous “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against the historic American Trotskyist movement. In the early 1980s, though, North began testing the waters for a revolt against Healy, through timid criticisms – always withdrawn with craven apologies – mainly of Healy’s idealist-gobbledygook perversion of dialectics. Now he claims he “fought” Healy. He has to make such a claim, ludicrous though it is. Once Healy the supreme authority of the IC was exposed as the emperor who had no clothes, the members revolted. No longer could they be kept in line with doubletalk “dialectics,” endless mindless activism and felt threats. All of Healy’s loyal lieutenants scrambled to wash their hands of the IC’s more spectacular crimes and organizational “excesses.” The contest was on: who has less filth on whose hands? Banda, Slaughter, North, etc. all lacked credibility as virgin crusaders against Healyism (the “new Nixon” had similar problems). Soon the IC house of cards was a pile of rubble.

The departure of Healy and his well-heeled ally, actress Vanessa Redgrave, with a minority of the British WRP was only the beginning. North’s demand that the WRP recognize the hegemony of the IC (i.e., him) took another minority out of the WRP, along with most of the WRP youth. Cliff Slaughter leads what’s left now sans Banda, who split after writing his ignorant anti-Trotskyist diatribe, “Twenty-Seven Reasons Why the IC Should Be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.” North took the bigger piece of the split in Australia as well as the West German and Sri Lankan groupings. (The Peruvians who went with North have recently departed, allegedly in solidarity with some form of Stalinism/Maoism.)

So North’s IC doesn’t amount to much. Its record is of a bunch of political bandits who became corrupt press agents for despotic “Arab nationalist” capitalist regimes. Alleged to have received at least a million pounds from 1977 on from Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Iraq, among others, Healy’s British group and its subservient IC worked to give “anti-imperialist” cover to anti-working-class crimes by their patrons. In 1979 the Healyites hailed the execution of 21 members of the Communist Party of Iraq by the Ba’ath regime. This is North’s IC – loathsome, but at least it’s all his. Provided that the American WL (which Slaughter in 1984 said had 74 members) can avoid its fair share of the implosion. North played the “who’s dirtier?” game when required to oust Healy and secure the IC label. Once that was accomplished, he began to move to belittle the IC’s crimes in the service of oil-rich Near Eastern dictators. Now he’s embarked on a crusade to rally his ranks, not least through a hate campaign against the Spartacist League.

Why us? For one thing, we are the acknowledged Trotskyist organization in this country. Our forces are rather larger than North’s. We exist today as an international tendency, the only one to have fought in a principled political fashion against both the degeneration of the ex-Trotskyist (now explicitly anti-Trotskyist) Socialist Workers Party and, early on, against Healy’s fundamental corruption of the IC. This history, covering two decades, is long documented, most lately in the last two issues of our Spartacist.

Healyites: Counterfeit Trotskyists

The Workers League’s own history begins with its former leader – Tim Wohlforth – acting as Healy’s agent to split the left opposition (Revolutionary Tendency, RT) inside the SWP in 1962. The pretext was an ultimatum that all RT members must sign a document affirming they believed that the SWP, which was then centrist and moving rapidly to the right, remained a “revolutionary party.” In the hope that the SWP would remain aligned with Healy as part of the International Committee, Healy identified the party leadership’s deepening revisionism as solely the property of right-wing elements like Weiss and Swabeck, putting forward the perspective of the RT effecting “a united front where possible with the center elements” – i.e., the Dobbs leadership. Most of the RT, led by Jim Robertson and Geoff White, refused to sign the Wohlforth/Healy diktat. Wohlforth’s only successful “united front” with the Dobbs regime was in setting the RT majority up for expulsion.

In the present Bulletin series, great exception is taken to our remark that Wohlforth in 1964 “engineered his own group’s expulsion” from the SWP. Aha, says Bulletin editor McLaughlin, or whoever is actually writing the series, the Wohlforthites were expelled for an exemplary fight against the Ceylonese Trotskyists’ class-collaborationist betrayal in 1964. No doubt for distant consumption, the Bulletin fulminates that Spartacists, “as 100% American radicals... could not understand why someone would risk being thrown out of the party because of a dispute over events taking place halfway around the world.”

What happened in Ceylon didn’t drop magically from the skies at the moment Wohlforth decided he wanted out of the SWP. “Trotskyism” in Ceylon was founded very late and by some people of extremely privileged social origins. The Ceylon Trotskyists, the Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP), involved themselves in anti-imperialist activism and plebeian social struggles, achieving something of a mass electoral base. When after independence from Britain the main ruling-class political formation split to produce a populist, “national” party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the LSSP was pulled in its wake, led by the LSSP’s reformist wing, which had always ultimately called the shots for the party’s vacillating “center.”

By 1960 it was evident even to a distant American comrade like Jim Robertson that the situation had gone rotten. On 8 August 1960 comrade Robertson wrote a letter (reprinted below) to the SWP Political Committee (PC) urging the SWP to wage an open struggle against the LSSP’s course. Robertson’s letter was appended to the PC minutes, as were news articles from this period from the Ceylon News reporting the LSSP’s electoral pact with the SLFP and its withdrawal of opposition to the SLFP’s chauvinist “Sinhala Only” language program. The Ceylon News quoted longtime LSSP spokesman N.M. Perera: “the only logical tactic was for the LSSP to join hands with the SLFP in a Government and gain control of that Government. This was the only means the LSSP now seemed to have of gaining power.”

The SWP, which didn’t have much going for it in Ceylon, was proposing to publish a Militant article criticizing the LSSP’s policy as a classic “Popular Front.” But a letter dated 14 August 1960. by Gerry Healy (also reprinted below) urged the SWP to hold up any comment. Healy’s implication is clearly that he has people lined up who might he disturbed by criticism of their party. If only the SWP will avoid flying off the handle in such a delicate situation, Gerry will take care of it. What is striking in Healy’s letter, as much as his claim that the situation could be saved by maneuvers, is his gratuitous mendacity in suggesting that the reports in the Ceylon bourgeois press were just a pack of lies.

It was a foregone conclusion that the LSSP would decisively capitulate when opportunity presented. In 1964 the SLFP offered the LSSP ministerial portfolios; the LSSP eagerly accepted. Embarrassed, the Pabloite USec hastily expelled the LSSP, as elements of the left wing shook themselves out of the LSSP, finally. Now Wohlforth also discovered betrayal in Ceylon.

Wohlforth’s restlessness prior to the emergence of the Ceylon pretext is testified to by Albert Philips, bloc partner of Healy and Wohlforth in splitting the RT. “The Methodology of Frustration,” a document by the Philips group dated 23 April 1964, complains that “several months after the 1963 SWP convention,” the “frustration” at the SWP’s degeneration that had “characterized the Robertsonites” showed up in Wohlforth. “There had been no real changes in the SWP,” Philips observes, “yet comrade Wohlforth thought it was time for a reevaluation.” At the November 1963 tendency meeting, says Philips, “it was stated that the party was an unfinished centrist organization, and that we had better put ourselves in the best factional position for the time when we would be expelled.” After the Kennedy assassination, says Philips, “in terms that the Robertsonites never dared to use, comrade Wohlforth explicitly called for us to split.” But under pressure from those like Philips who still wanted to cling to the SWP and its purported “proletarian core,” Wohlforth “pulled back,” Philips says, from an open split perspective. Instead, he demanded a discussion on Ceylon, violating internal discussion procedures, knowing this would get his group expelled from the no longer very democratic SWP.

Now North recasts this deliberate organizational provocation as a supreme political act of internationalism. And no doubt inspired by that paragon of internationalism himself, Gerry Healy, who had intervened so strongly in 1960 to reassure worrywarts like Robertson that he had the Ceylon problem in hand.

Healyism: A Machine for Destroying Cadres

We had refused to accept Healy’s 1962 rupture as definitive, given that we and Wohlforth both still claimed to stand on the same anti-revisionist program. Unity negotiations were undertaken in 1965. But at the infamous 1966 IC Conference in London, Healy expelled the Spartacist delegation, ostensibly on the grounds that Robertson had missed a session without “permission.” In remarks to the conference, Robertson had sketched out the views of the Spartacist group. His subsequent absence was then used as the excuse for savage attacks by Healy & Co. on the Spartacists for petty-bourgeois arrogance and American chauvinism, and an “apology” (confession) was demanded. As the next two decades of Healy’s history amply demonstrated, this method was absolutely characteristic: to try to extract cringing false confessions from comrades, rendering them thereafter subservient instruments, destroyed in their own eyes and before their comrades.

For David North, the Spartacists’ refusal to be diverted from a Trotskyist course (they call this “Robertson Breaks from Trotskyism”) constitutes “American nationalism and the wounded vanity of an arrogant petty bourgeois.” The Bulletin series echoes Wohlforth’s own 1970 opus, “What Is Spartacist?”, which sneers at “Robertson’s noble battle for honor, his unbending head.” Never mind who that “international” was and what it did for the next 20 years. Robertson should have done like me – I David North always groveled (until I was ready to knife them).

North’s own account of how he “fought” Healy is revealing. In an October 1985 speech to the British WRP “Special Congress” North describes how he raised his differences over “dialectics” beginning in late 1982. “We decided,” he says (using the royal “we”), “to come and take the first opportunity to raise it with Gerry Healy in an objective manner. Well, the reaction was an explosion. We were told immediately, within a half a minute... he said the alliance is finished.”

After the Political Committee unanimously supported Healy, North says, he was privately approached by Banda, who “said that in fact he had grave differences.... And I must say that while I was shocked by the depth of the political differences that existed between Comrade Banda and Gerry Healy, I wasn’t in a sense surprised.” After “lengthy discussions,” it was “agreed that there would be a common fight in the International Committee to raise these issues.” North returned for the next IC meeting “fully expecting” to pick up his alliance with Banda. “But instead when I arrived I was immediately confronted [by Banda].... I was immediately told that the notes which I had written constituted a huge attack on Marxism. He said he had been wrong to come to an agreement with me.” They then went into a WRP PC meeting “in which we [North] were told that if we pressed ahead with these differences it would mean a split with the Workers League. And I must say under those conditions... “ (guess what!) “we thought that given the enormous authority and experience of the British section we should reconsider our position.” North “bit our tongue, we said we did withdraw the document, it wasn’t really a document it was notes....” And so it went, right up to the end.

But, says North today, Robertson still should have submitted himself to international authority. Never mind why North thinks it’s so natural, and so smart, to grovel and lie (it never occurs to North that in 1966 we thought: we’ll say what we believe and see what happens.) But what makes Healy (and the rest of his crew, like Banda and Wohlforth, now shown to have been a bunch of semi-competents and semi-gangsters) synonymous with “international authority”? Gerry was hardly the only person around laying claim to the mantle of the Fourth International.

Healy Flunks

We spent a long time looking at the fragments of the disintegrated Fourth International, i.e., as it emerged from World War II and the Second World Congress in 1948. In 1953-54, “orthodox” Trotskyists put together the International Committee out of national factions which had come out against the revisionism which gained hegemony under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s.

With the senior cadres of the American SWP used up, as we had direct reason to know, that left an IC mainly of Healy’s forces in England and Pierre Lambert’s in France. Healy claimed to be the IC in the face of the SWP’s political defection, and we were prepared to give him some conditional credit based on what looked like impressive work in England and some good documents. We were the majority of the small forces which had opposed the centrist degeneration of the SWP, once a revolutionary party and a close collaborator of Trotsky’s struggle for the Fourth International. We had no doubt of the necessity for disciplined subordination of our national group to a programmatically cohesive international movement committed to Trotsky’s program. So Healy thought he had us on trial in his “IC” kangaroo court? We had Healy on trial too, and so long as there seemed to be a programmatic basis of agreement, we were very patient about it. In 1962 we evaluated our first close encounter: “if Healy intervenes roughly and using authority to try to shove a puppet regime down our throats. it opens up a lousy vista of the future of the IC” (Jim Robertson, letter to Geoff White, 27 September 1962).

From the time of our inception as an independent tendency in 1964, we sought to work with and examine those who stood to the left among ostensible Trotskyists – e.g., Healy, Lambert in France. Guillermo Lora in Bolivia, the group in Ceylon around Edmund Sarnarakkody. These tendencies (except for Healy, who was a political bandit) proved to be nationally defined and delimited and/or used up.

Throughout, we were also aware of the United Secretariat (USec) led by the erudite Belgian Ernest Mandel. The USec was the Pabloists sans Pablo (who we also checked out) and somewhat allied with the SWP of Dobbs and Joseph Hansen. The USec had by far the most groups in the most countries, adhering to them in a semi-accidental way; then they got a big jolt from the international “generation of May ‘68.” It was our observing that the anti-revisionists had not done a very good job of exposing the USec’s (and others’) claims to be the Fourth International that evidently got us tossed out of Healy’s 1966 IC conference.

A decade or so later, Healy, North & Co. concocted a devil theory to explain the survival of Pabloite revisionism: the U.S. government, and also Stalinism, had adopted Hansen and then Jack Barnes to do the devil’s work. Healy, though, proved to be a very different sort of character – a political bandit capable of anything. What form the “anything” would take for him and those who through the self-selection process of groveling and lying became his creatures was not predetermined at the time Healy broke with us in 1966.

But it quickly ceased to be our problem at all, because by 1967 Healy had broken far away from “orthodox” Trotskyism. His forces emerged as the most vulgar, super-Pabloite cheerleaders for Stalinism (Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”) and Third World nationalism. The “Arab Revolution” line the Healyites adopted as the excuse to hail the 1967 Arab-Israel conflict proved most fruitful. A transclass, transnational, totally disembodied “Arab Revolution” is elastic enough to embrace any act by any Arab regime, depending perhaps on which monarchy, theocracy or military dictatorship is dispensing patronage. Thus in 1979 Healy hailed the execution of militant Communist workers in Iraq, who were allegedly undermining the glorious “anti-imperialist” Iraqi army. But later, Healy supported Khomeini’s Iran in its war with that same Iraqi regime.

The alternation of leftist posturing and egregious opportunism – that was Healyism. And the Workers League was a smeared carbon copy of that prototype. Wohlforth himself was dumped in 1975 amidst Healy’s slanderous CIA-baiting of Wohlforth’s companion, Nancy Fields. That set the stage for North’s ascent, but Healy evidently never got much joy out of his U.S. epigones. Indeed he seems to have concluded a decade ago that his loyal American satellite wasn’t worth too much. In an article titled “Healy writes off the American working class” (Workers News, 27 May) Martin McLaughlin whines:

“It suffices to say that from 1975 to 1984, a period of nine years, WRP leaders made exactly two trips to the United States for brief discussions with the Workers League, once each by Michael Banda and Cliff Slaughter.
“Healy never returned to North America alter the struggle against the renegacy of Tim Wohlforth in 1974-75.”

We know a bit about Healy and we know he never thought much of Wohlforth. Apparently he thought even less of North.

The Big Lie as “Method”

The present Bulletin series strings together lies so outlandish and shameless that they are clearly designed to drive away anyone in or around the WL who has the ability to read and think. This use of the Big Lie was perfected by Stalin as a method of control; Healy/ North elevated this method to a psychotic principle. It goes like this: here, comrade, are 50 articles in the Spartacist press calling for the smashing of apartheid, the forging of a genuine Bolshevik party to lead a proletarian revolution, for the establishment of a black-centered workers republic in South Africa. Memorize them and then go out and sell the Bulletin which says that Spartacist “Opposes Anti-Apartheid Struggle.” If you have a problem with this, you don’t understand “dialectics.” You are supposed to know you’ re lying; then having lied, you are bound to your leaders until you finally slink away – ashamed, destroyed. Such intentional destruction of cadre is a Healyite hallmark, the ugly cult side of Healyism.

In the past, the WL has smeared us as “racists” and “fascists” (see our article, “Smash Fascist Smear of SL,” WV No. 379, 17 May 1985), and even as “the fingerman for the world capitalists” (Bulletin, 2 December 1969). In November 1978 a leaflet of the German Healyites, now with North, called Jim Robertson the “main spokesman for the national interests of the American bourgeoisie”! We note our demotion to the old “middle-class radical” category in the current series, which simultaneously portrays us as black nationalists and white racists, Shachtmanites and Stalinophiles (i.e., anti- and pro-Russia).

The Bulletin’s first installment claims that our statement of simple fact – that the Hormel meatpackers strike was knifed – reveals our “virulent hatred of the working class and deep pessimism” (Bulletin, 1 April), then quotes from WV a citation which proves rather the opposite: “After a hard, bitter fight the heroic Hormel strike has been smashed.” Counterposing to us its own prostration before the local P-9 bureaucracy, the WL hails a federal court suit against the backstabbing UFCW International and another “major proposal” – “to take the strikers’ case to International President William Wynn, even out to his golf course if necessary.” The coy parenthetical note, “We will consider the Spartacist position on the use of the capitalist courts in a later article,” tops it off.

Did David North Go to Carleton College?

We think the Bulletin will be hard put indeed to consider the elementary labor principle that the bosses’ courts are not the vehicle for solving disputes in the labor movement. Healy made recourse to the state against opponents a hallmark of his “tactics” 20 years ago against the USec’s Ernie Tate. North & Co. have themselves dragged the capitalist courts in to police the left – most notoriously in the case of one Alan Gelfand. WL agent Gelfand was expelled from the SWP and sued that organization in federal court in 1979, citing Healy’s notorious slanders that the FBI (along with the Stalinist GPU) controlled the SWP. He demanded the court uphold these slanders and reinstate him as an SWP member. Gelfand was vigorously supported by North and financed by Healy. Since the WRP split, Slaughter and Banda have belatedly disavowed both the Gelfand provocation and the scandalous “Security and the Fourth International” campaign against the SWP. North – a major mouthpiece of “Security...” – is still proud of it.

North’s cohort was one Alex Mitchell, formerly the editor of Healy’s British paper and now described by his ex-comrades as “ace Healy snoop and his top hand-shaker. Master-minded disgraceful ‘Security & Fl’ with North, justified killing of Iraqi CPers.... Mideast link man, widely mistrusted” (Workers Press, 7 June). The “Security...” slander campaign was aimed specifically at veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen, accusing him of being an accomplice of the Stalinist assassination of Leon Trotsky. Mitchell is still with the Healy Healyites.

North was Healy’s accomplice in the loathsome assault on Hansen’s reputation, and, through that device, they attacked the reputation of the old SWP and Trotsky himself. After Trotsky’s murder by the degenerate Stalinist secret police in 1940, the Stalinists tried to put about the disgusting lie that Trotsky was murdered by “his own people.” This claim got no credence at the time, and the main effect of its resuscitation in new form by the IC was simply to discredit Healy/North.

Hansen had served as one of Trotsky’s secretaries in exile, one of the human links that welded the American party in its revolutionary days to Trotsky in his struggle to reforge an authentic Bolshevik international. Hansen was won in his youth to a revolutionary party; after that party degenerated, he spent long years as a centrist and then a reformist spokesman. In this he was no different from many others, in many countries, whose leftist impulses wore out before they themselves wore out.

For Healy, though, such an explanation is not sufficient. No, Hansen has to have been a police agent-indeed, a simultaneous agent for the FBI and the Stalinist GPU. The implicit corollary is: if Hansen, why not SWP founder James Cannon? And why not Trotsky himself? After Hansen died, the emphasis of Healy’s paranoid slander campaign shifted to the present SWP head, Jack Barnes. Hundreds of pages in the Healyite press sought to show that Barnes (who’s not one of our favorite people, by the way) was an FBI agent; in fact, they claim, so are all his cronies in the present leadership of the SWP. Why? Because a bunch of them all went to Carleton College, a small school in the American Midwest. For “proof” we are offered, among other things, a 1961 report on a visit to Carleton by... Jim Robertson! Robertson, then a leader of the SWP’s Young Socialist Alliance, went on tour for the YSA in 1961. At Carleton, he met with a loose group of youth, some of whom were SWP supporters. When he arrived he found that these leftist students “had all the party [internal] bulletins on the Cuba discussion and in the presence of a whole group of 18 students, their leader innocently asked me to fill them in on Wohlforth’s side in the dispute” (this letter by Robertson is quoted in the WL’s 1981 pamphlet, “Security and the Fourth International: The Carleton Twelve”).

Robertson, himself in opposition on Cuba, suggested the students should join the SWP if they wanted to be privy to its internal life. For Healy & Co., that these non-members had gotten some interesting documents (from SWP leader Carl Feingold) is “irrefutable” evidence of an FBI conspiracy, carried out by Hansen and Feingold, to groom Jack Barnes and his Carleton cronies to take over the government’s SWP operation from Hansen. Those familiar with Healyite doublethink will find nothing unusual about the idea that Robertson – elsewhere portrayed as the most pernicious agent of Hansen – here constitutes an unimpeachable witness to the Carleton College “conspiracy.” But perhaps there’s more to it. Is North himself an agent of Robertson? Why else would he use Robertson as an authority, when we all know how Robertson covered up for Hansen the FBI agent? Did David North also go to Carleton College?

As we have noted before, “Security and the Fourth International” was always a supremely cynical device, used along with a deliberately mystified “dialectics” to keep the Healyite membership scared witless and hopelessly confused. Healy was the man with the answers: who is a CIA/FBI/GPU agent and which “opposites” to hold fast to. Healy’s little heir, North, doesn’t believe his own lies, if there is any truth to the following story. According to Savas Michael (Greek IC section leader still with Healy), North visited Michael in Athens to line him up against Healy when it became clear the WRP was about to blow apart. Michael claims he asked North about “Security and the Fourth International” and North “spoke about a ‘personal vendetta’ between G. Healy and Joseph Hansen” (Marxist Review, May 1986).

Such a vendetta did indeed exist. A conscious revisionist and skilled polemicist, Hansen twisted Healy’s tail on more than one occasion – especially in his exposure of Healy’s antics at the 1966 London IC Conference. It was for selling Hansen’s pamphlet of documents on our exclusion from that conference that Healy had a Canadian USec leader, Ernie Tate, beaten up in London, then sued him when he protested. Then when Wohlforth was purged, his lengthy, lurid account of life in Healy’s IC was printed by Hansen in Intercontinental Press, the journal he edited. The Bulletin produced a reply to Wohlforth in the form of a polemic against our own article “Wohlforth Terminated” (WV No. 61, 31 January 1975). Hansen must have enjoyed himself thoroughly when he added the following footnote on the Healyite article:

“It is not clear why the Workers League Political Committee concludes that Robertson and Wohlforth have consummated ‘a political marriage that is pregnant
with historical ironies.’ Perhaps the WL PC misread the quip in the ‘Wohlforth Terminated’ article: ‘As for Wohlforth, we can say with sincerity: it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy’.”
– Intercontinental Press, Vol. 13, No. II, 24 March 1975

Healyism and Racism

When Healy wrote of “D. North’s whiter than white socialism” he doubtless didn’t know how right he was. For North continues the long tradition of U.S. Healyite “colorblind” economism. Perhaps the most self-indicting piece in the Bulletin’s series is the one entitled, “An Obsession With Race.” It both proves that nothing in the real world stands in the way of what the Bulletin will print and that the WL’s profile in this deeply racist country is, on the black question, akin to the old AFL, job-trusted white-racist unions. Of the latter, founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon said: “They also had nothing special to offer the Negroes; nothing at all, in fact” (“The Russian Revolution and The American Negro Movement”). According to the Bulletin’s research:

“The Workers Vanguard’s 1985 subject index contains references to at least 60 articles on the ‘black struggle,’ civil rights, police terror, racial attacks, fascist groups, etc. These included a number of articles on the MOVE bombing which was certainly one of the most important political developments [!] of the year, but dozens of other incidents as well.
“In the same one-year period, according to the index, the Spartacist newspaper managed a single article on auto workers, two on steelworkers and one on (US) coal miners.”
– Bulletin, 3 June

Talk about perfect Healyite hypocrisy. By rights, their tongues should grow hair and their toes shrivel up and fall off as they utter the word “index.” Can you imagine the WL putting out indexed bound volumes of the past years of the Bulletin so that advanced workers can study their record? Now what does the index controversy show? 1) That “only the Workers League” could refer to the hideous racist massacre of Philly MOVE by the state in such bloodless, colorblind terms. 2) That in Reagan’s America, racist terror has been unleashed viciously and consciously and often as part of the domestic reflection of the anti-Soviet war drive. 3) That the auto, steel and (U.S.) coal unions probably weren’t writing a proud new chapter in the history of the American class struggle last year.

For the Bulletin, though, it demonstrates that the Spartacists “counterpose” the “struggle against racism from the struggle of the working class,” “making the working class, rather than the capitalist system, responsible for racial discrimination and prejudice.” Inexorably, what follows is an example of our work proving precisely the opposite: the successful SL-initiated, union-backed Labor/Black Mobilization to Stop the Klan in Washington, D.C. on 27 November 1982. Over 5,000 black workers and youth turned out and placed themselves under our leadership and the threatened KKK march was stopped in its tracks. It was a singular victory for labor, and particularly for doubly oppressed black labor, in Reagan’s America.

At the time, the Bulletin smeared the anti-Klan mobilization as “an adventure which played right into the hands of the police,” but this grotesque and cowardly lie is not now repeated. Now, North & Co. sneer that our “reaction” was “seemingly out of all proportion to the significance of the threat posed [by] a handful of KKK scum in a city which is 60% black.” Fortunately, black Washington residents and unionists from the Tidewater area docks didn’t see it that way.

Belittling the Klan danger, North & Co. pretend not to know that the November 27 display of labor/black power faced down the Reagan government’s determination to shove the Klan provocation down the throat of that city. Our mobilization was a labor action not only in its program but in the simplest literal sense. Respectful treatment from the cops for the mobilization was wrested not mainly by the size and militancy of the assembly, though that was impressive, but by the black union presidents who made it known in the face of police threats that their memberships would take amiss any interference with this heavily union-endorsed anti- Klan action. Again, to our statement that the fascists in this country have been able to poll hundreds of thousands of votes, the Bulletin snaps: “the Spartacists cannot point to a KKK candidate who has received such a mass vote.” Try these for starters: KKKer Tom Metzger received over 32,000 votes in a 1980 Democratic Congressional primary in California; a brown-shirted Nazi, Harold Covington, took 56,000 votes in a North Carolina statewide election for attorney general. The Klan, of course, endorsed Ronald Reagan and took his victory as their own. But this is just social reality and therefore has no place in the Northites’ attempt to work us over. Perhaps the most idiotic part of the Bulletin’s anti- anti-racist tirade is the denunciation of our slogan “Finish the Civil War!” as “utterly reformist”!

Northite “Internationalism”: Little Lords of Nothing

By the mid-I970s, the IC had become unashamed apologists for Near Eastern bourgeois regimes. In 1985 Slaughter admitted:

“GH [Healy] sought and found relations with bourgeois leaders like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Nkomo. It is not only that Marxism was distorted in order to mislead on their class nature. This Party, through Healy, sought financial support from these bourgeois, not just for this or that political purpose, but as a system.”
– News Line, 20 November 1985

But now that these revelations have served their purpose in dumping Healy, North & Co. want to turn the IC’s crimes into Healy’s personal responsibility. Slaughter says that it was when he “raised the question of Comrade North tackling his own responsibility for the IC’s past” that North “moved very quickly to propose suspension of the WRP from the IC.” He also spills some beans about Nick Beams, North’s bloc partner in Australia:

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments?...
“Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousands of dollars) in 1983?...
“Is it not a fact that the receipt of this money by the Australian section [w]as reported to the Central Committee of the SLL (Australia) only in the month before the IC meeting of Dec 16 [1985]?...
“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North?”
– Slaughter, Letter to all members, 14 January 1986

According to the Slaughter Workers Press (28 June 1986) Beams “was formally censured... for failing to report to the December 17 [1985] meeting of IC leaders, held in London, on the SLL’s role in carrying out Healy’s betrayals especially in the Middle East.... At a further conference held on March 1 and 2 the [Northite Australian SLL] majority could not even agree on whether a betrayal had occurred when the SLL supported the execution of the 21 Iraqi communists.”
This article also notes that Beams and North had initially opposed Healy’s expulsion.

From virtually all quarters, save North’s own, comes the same story. Crisis in the WRP North maneuvering for junior “founder-leader” status - blocking with Slaughter/ Banda to dump Healy, banking on the demise of his bloc partners thereafter. Greek Healyite Michael says that when North visited him in September, “he spoke with the utmost contempt for the ‘unprincipled, nationalist British ‘ including his present day [now ex-] allies, Slaughter. Banda and Pilling. He called Slaughter ‘a physical coward’, Banda an opportunist and Pilling ‘an alcoholic’.” Slaughter supporter Bill Hunter, in his cogent reply to Banda’s “Twenty-Seven Reasons...”, adds:

“His [North’s] ‘authority’ is based on the Eighth Congress of the IC.... Every proceeding at that congress, every word which came out of it, is a monument of ‘Healyism’.”
- Workers Press, 15 February

What is North’s IC?

When you turn over the rock to see what makes them move, you find a dead-end pecking-order invidiousness appropriate to those who aspire to be little lords of nothing. Certainly there is no connection between these fracturing grouplets and the class struggle, the defense of the oppressed. The German Northites - the Bund Sozialistische Arbeiter (BSA) have adopted a “new” line for electoral support to the German Social Democratic Party, according to the 25 July Bulletin. Only three days before, the Bulletin had published a BSA statement entitled “Social-Democracy and the ‘Trail of Blood’.” While the Peruvian regime was massacring hundreds of political prisoners, the SPD and its fellows were meeting at a congress of the Second International “only a few kilometers away.” Former SPD chancellor Willy Brandt, we are told, made what amounted to “a complete apology for the blood bath.” He is, according to the Bulletin, “on the side of imperialism in Latin America.... His political aim differs from Ronald Reagan’s only in nuances.” Yet it is to this very SPD that the German Northites now extend their electoral support. Beams’ Australian SLL admitted publicly that it had printed an exile organ of the fascistic Vietnamese emigres, The Bell of Saigon. This link with the thugs who have been physically attacking leftist and labor meetings was “explained” by the SLL as part of a turn toward “commercial enterprise.” Has the financially beleaguered WL found similar sources of income yet?

David North: A Healyite’s Healyite

North and his gang are worthless people for the international working-class movement. Separated from their own “continuity” – Healy – their trajectory might lead anywhere. With supreme cynicism, the Bulletin has begun a series penned by North on “The Heritage We Defend,” which obscenely tries to claim connection with Trotsky and Cannon. The heritage North really defends is Healy’s at its worst: “Security and the Fourth International”; eager ventures across the class line in pursuit of trivial opportunist advantage or financial support; shameless use of the bosses’ courts within the workers movement.

Programmatically, the IC under Healy and now North is a virulently anti-Soviet sect. Beginning with embrace of the Maoist “Cultural Revolution” in 1966, they have moved on to support virtually every hostile force on the borders of the USSR, from Khomeini’s Iran to the Afghan mullahs to Polish Solidarność. Their enthusiasm for Solidarność, the Pope’s and Wall Street’s best hope for plunging Poland into a bloody civil war for the restoration of capitalism, led them into the arms of Margaret Thatcher when they red-baited miners’ leader Arthur Scargill on the eve of the heroic miners’ strike.

“Anti-Stalinism” was their cover for supporting the beheading of the Iraqi proletariat when they applauded the execution of the CP members on the grounds that, after all, “they were only Stalinists.” In the 3 January Bulletin, North denounced Pabloism for overthrowing “Trotsky’s characterization of Stalinism as ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’.” This formulation owes nothing to Trotsky; in fact, it comes from Dave Weiss (“D. Stevens”), who put it forward during the 1953 Cochran-Clarke fight in the SWP. A historical irony here – it was Healy/North’s arch enemy, Joseph Hansen, who defended this one-sided formulation in the debate. (Any curious Northites are referred to SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, Nos. 3 and 4, February 1953.) By Healyite logic, North must be: 1) a hopeless ignoramus or 2) a secret agent of Hansen.

Trotsky in all his writings insisted on the contradictory nature of Stalinism, a conservative bureaucratic caste which rests upon the socialized property forms in the deformed workers states; at the same time Stalinism, by seeking accommodation with imperialism, undermines the defense of the workers states, necessitating proletarian political revolution. (Denying the dual nature of Stalinism, how can the Healyites explain such occurrences as the overthrow of capitalism in Vietnam? They can’t, which explains that characteristic Healyite schizophrenia: slavishly tailing the Vietnamese leadership, while at the same time denying that an anticapitalist revolution took place in Cuba.)

The WL’s “anti-Stalinism” leans heavily on the notion that Washington and the Kremlin are united for counterrevolution in a global conspiracy against, e.g., Solidarność and the national liberation of Third World peoples. A glance at the real world, though, shows that more than 60 years of sincere Stalinist commitment to “peaceful coexistence” hasn’t reconciled (and can’t) the capitalist rulers to the continued existence of the Soviet Union. Indeed, a frenzied imperialist regime identifies as “Soviet surrogates” every movement for social freedom, from Nicaragua to South Africa. And needless to say the WL, busy denouncing Russian capitulations, never mentions how the Chinese are serving as direct military agents of U.S. imperialism from the Vietnamese border to Angola to Afghanistan.

Anti-Sovietism is a necessary credential for those who seek patronage from the maggoty labor bureaucrats, from those traitors to the working class who serve their “own” imperialism. And it’s among those traitors that the Healyites seek to nest. Thus the WL in the New York transit union seeks to entice the union tops to form a “labor party” by mimicking their bureaucrats’ hostile indifference to the defense of James Grimes, a black worker prosecuted for a courageous act of self-defense. The WL’s racist economism is fundamental. But there is also a chameleon-like quality to the WL’s politics. The Bulletin series paints us as “obsessed” with black people in America. But over South Africa, for example, they are simultaneously for imperialist “divestment” and for blood and vengeance, People’s War, and charge us with being obsessed with... white people. That’s because the Healyites/Northites are whores, and who they’re seeking to please varies from one moment to the next.

The thoroughgoing defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states against imperialism and capitalist restoration requires revolutionary leadership. It requires the forging of Trotskyist parties in each country welded together as disciplined sections of a reborn Fourth International. The international Spartacist tendency was forged to preserve and build upon the threads of continuity that link the authentic Fourth Internationalists of today to the movement of Trotsky’s and Cannon’s time. Those threads are slender. We are thinking not only of the murder of Trotsky and the decimation of the European Trotskyist groups by fascism and world war. We recall also the murdered Andres Nin, the Hanoi Trotskyists who were extinguished, and others about whom we know even less. From our independent inception in 1964, we sought to intersect and test out every kind of grouping that claimed to have something to offer in the way of international leadership. For our American-based grouping, tossed out of the SWP with small forces, the struggle for international collaborators was an uphill battle, and one that still continues.

Gerry Healy and his heirs are a world apart from this. They have a publishing machine, so we have to answer what they say. But what they say means nothing – their words are but applications for some sordid and episodic advantage, bearing no relationship to what they claim to believe. What is Healy, what is North? We have to concur with Trotsky’s remark about Stalinism, but in microcosm of course: to the extent the Healyites/Northites are part of the working class, they are its syphilis.

* * *

New York, N.Y.

August 8, 1960

To the Political Committee:

Dear Comrades,
I am addressing you on the matter of our party’s public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party’s entry into a “Popular Front” electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.

In raising this matter privately with several members of your body I was told that letters have been sent the Ceylonese and that your view is that for the present a greater advantage is to be gained by revolutionary Marxists in the LSSP through our remaining publicly silent. I must disagree and urge you to reconsider.

When I read in the New York Times of the electoral pact and then of the election and finally of the continued support by the LSSP to the new capitalist government, my concern over this classically social-democratic capitulation was mitigated by two thoughts: (1) first that the construction of a genuine Trotskyist party for the island could perhaps emerge out of the shambles, and (2) that now the blocks would really be put to Pablo, not over an obscured vote by his English followers in a provincial British Labour Party meeting, but over a clear act of historic proportions by a major party, an act about which the central world organs of the FI would have to take a stand and on the grounds for or against elementary revolutionary principle.

But the silence in the Militant weakens both these hopes. Within Ceylon our silence while it may temporarily continue our “respectability” in the mouths of the leaders also places a terrible weapon in their hands against any militants they may have to contend with – “Even the Americans are only privately disturbed and are treating this as a matter between comrades.” And as for Pablo’s stature before the world movement, every day of delay allows him to say in effect: “You’re another maneuverer subordinating principle to tactics.” Comrades, that you condemn the Ceylonese ex-Trotskyists, I have no doubt, but your failure to raise this publicly and with great seriousness does the movement internationally a disservice.

With comradely greetings,
James Robertson


* * *

SOCIALIST LABOR LEAGUE
186 Clapham High Street London S.W. 4, England

14th August, 1960

Joe Hansen

Dear Joe,
We discussed at some length on our Organizing Committee (the equivalent of your Political Committee) the proposition concerning the situation in Ceylon.

The opinion here is that the Ceylon News, being a Ceylon Embassy information hand-out, is not reliable and should not be used as the basis of the piece for the Militant. We think that it is necessary to write again asking for the fullest possible information concerning the current situation in the party in Ceylon.

There is no doubt that they are in a severe crisis but if we take their situation and recent events in Europe it is not improbable that there will now be important developments inside the Pablo camp. This is all the more reason for us to proceed with caution - as you have in the past so rightly insisted.

We are going to cable them tomorrow for information and we suggest you do likewise and hold up for the time being publication of anything in the Militant.

Best wishes,


Gerry
Copy to J.P.C.