Wohlforth Brings "The Method" to Buffalo (1972)

From Revolutionary Communist Bulletin No. 1, "Documents of the Buffalo Marxist Collective" (January 1973)

Wohlforth Brings "The Method" To Buffalo:

WHY WE DIDN'T JOIN THE WL/YS

The Buffalo Marxist Collective (BMC) is a group of 30 youth, primarily students, formed by the determination to break with class-collaborationist popular-front strategies and to aid in the formation of a Leninist party in the United States. We have recently entered into a period of fusion negotiations with the Revolutionary Communist Youth, youth section of the Spartacist League. During the past summer the BMC resolved to break with the circle spirit of its subjective Leninism, and its confused and ineffectual centrist practice through a study of Trotskyism and the historical development of the world Trotskyist movement.

Some of us had broken with the confrontation politics of the New Left, while others (in and around-he Progressive Labor Party) had found themselves politically adrift after PL's ultra-left oscillation in the summer of '71, Road to Revolution III. Breaking with political infantilism from two directions, but without roots in the Trotskyist movement, we were easy pickings for the social-democratic charlatans of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, as 7 of our members split after sampling a little of Dr. Marcus's reformist cure-alls, the "common-interest program" for the "political working class ,' to 'lick depression in a day." Our conscious rejection of the NCLC led up to intensive political contact with both the Workers League and the Spartacist League. Many of us, convinced that the International Committee (led by Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League in Britain) represented the "historic continuation of the Trotskyist movement, almost joined the WL. Yet, after protracted struggle with comrades of the RCY, we rejected the Workers League. Why? Their opportunist toadying to the labor bureaucracy, their abstention on the woman question and their cynical mystification of the dialectic to justify every error, every appetite and every capitulation, persuaded us that their proud "internationalism " must be hollow, without foundation, a form without content, a fake. We felt that it was not possible that a group with such profoundly anti-Marxist positions could, somehow be right on the question of the Fourth International, and later examination of this did indeed coincide with the WL's cynical opportunism on other political issues.

WE TALK WITH THE WORKERS LEAGUE

Unable then to transcend the historic left, we renewed our study of Marxism, not however as a collection of classic texts, but as the history of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International in its struggle to construct the vanguard party on the basis of the Transitional Program. After our first exposure to the Workers League, several of us went down to New York and spoke with Lucy St. John, raising in a private discussion collective doubts and criticisms about the nature of their work in the SSEU, their notorious support of the New York police strike and their abstention on the woman question. St. John's answers, however, were not particularly clarifying, but we felt at the time that this was not decisive, and were assured that it would all be "straightened out" in further discussion. All that counted, we were told, was our agreement that the IC represented the historic continuation of the Fourth International.

The magnet of the Transitional Program exerts a powerful attraction. The comrades of the BMC were drawn to the Workers League for precisely the reasons that propelled us a few weeks later into fusion discussions with the RCY. Therefore, although comrade Wohlforth's presentation at the WL's Arrow Park Educational was dull and uninstructive, reflecting a tendency to abstract methodology from the fight of the party for its program in the class, we did not dwell on this. Although many of the comrades in the workshops seemed to be mechanically reciting the. formulas which the presentation provided, we made on the whole a favorable report to the BMC expecting all our questions to be answered in forthcoming discussions. The dishonesty of Wohlforth's method and the "practical Trotskyism" of his trade union work were not yet apparent. And the Stalinism of his organizational practice had not yet emerged from dim existence and rumor. We arranged for a visit of comrades Wohlforth and St. John to Buffalo.

ENTER THE SL/RCY

Since we had made a collective decision to thoroughly investigate the Trotskyist left we invited two members of SL/RCY to make a presentation. While at first we were hostile to the SL based on WL statements about SL "abstentionism" in the class struggle, we found that we could not defend political points that we advanced from the WL perspective. This was brought to a focus around the WL's "mass press." The Bulletin, the RCY argued, did not reflect the limited reality of the WL's work in the trade unions which was confined primarily to one white collar union. Most of the articles are written from the outside, many of them re-writes from the bourgeois press, while the centerfold features destined for the Bulletin pamphlet series are reserved for methodological profundities. To this conception of a "Bolshevik" press SL counterposed its own: They demonstrated the way in which Workers Vanguard was an organizing tool, directly related to the tactic of posing themselves as a pole of communist attraction in the trade unions on the basis of a full program. Workers Vanguard did not pretend to be the mass organ of a mass party.

Things must be called by their right names. Rather, Workers Vanguard was mainly directed towards advanced workers with whom SL had contact through implantation in the trade unions, and towards ostensibly revolutionary organizations, students and intellectuals. Polemics were directed against other left tendencies SL intersected in its actual trade union work, work on campus and in political events on the left, and was thus connected with SL's Leninist perspective of regroupment through splits and fusions. The SL compared the Bulletin to PL's Challenge, pointing out that real mass work was the penetration of the working class through its most advanced layers, not tailing the class at its present level of consciousness. Trotsky's comments on communist press policy are very much to the point:

“What is a ‘mass paper’? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the ‘mass paper.’ It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a "mass paper" to have the masses accept it in reality. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which transforms itself easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, lighten our slogans--in short, to throw out the ballast. Basically this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but must correspond to subjective appreciations (extremely superficial and inadequate) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans which prove themselves correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal appreciation.”
-- "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36, pp. 58-59

After the SL/RCY comrades left, we called the WL offices in New York and told them that we had spoken with SL and were unable to answer SL's criticisms. When the WL delegation arrived, Wohlforth's first remark was that he was speaking to us under protest, and that after our discussions any further contact with SL would mean a break in our relations with them. Wohlforth refused to answer any of our questions about Bangladesh, women, Cuba and what we had come to believe was the reformist and disorienting nature of their work in the SSEU -- forming an electoral bloc with a section of the union bureaucracy, after having previously characterized them as sellouts in the pages of the Bulletin.

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As for women's liberation, screamed Wohlforth, "the working class hates faggots, women's libbers and hippies, and so do we!" The WL hates McGovern because he likes "faggots, women's libbers and hippies." We found this strange, since we hated McGovern because he is a representative of the ruling class.

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Refusing to deal with our questions, Wohlforth resorted to verbal intimidation and smokescreen arguments about "method." We were, he shrieked, nothing but a small circle of friends who "hated the working class" and were only interested in "picking" at the authority of the "Fourth International (i.e., the IC). We replied that our reason for contacting the WL in the first place was precisely our desire to overcome the limitations of our localism, and we insisted that our questions were serious and legitimate. "Pick, pick, pick," Wohlforth answered. Did we agree with the IC on the '53 letter and the '63 reunification? -- that was all that mattered. Being Marxists we rejected this merely documentary claim to represent the continuity of the Fourth International. We asked Wohlforth how his "correct" evaluation of '53 and '63 led dialectically to his position, for instance, on the police strike.

From this point on, Wohlforth's only tactic was intimidation and slander, abandoning completely "Trotskyist " principle for Stalinist practice. As for women's liberation, screamed Wohlforth, "the working class hates faggots, women's libbers and hippies, and so do we!" The WL hates McGovern because he likes "faggots, women's libbers and hippies." We found this strange, since we hated McGovern because he is a representative of the ruling class. This tirade we felt was a reflection of, and a capitulation to, the most backward prejudices of the working class. Wohlforth argued that our attraction to the SL/RCY represented a petty-bourgeois desire to sit around and talk about politics, and that if we really wanted to be "hard communists" we would join the WL. We rejected the WL's anti-Marxist attitude toward political debate ands clarification and their slanders about "discussion-group" behavior against the SL, whose trade union work is both politically principled and real, unlike the WL's. We subsequently broke off all relations with the WL.

DIALECTICS

Wohlforth's claim to "historic continuity" and the asserted correctness of his "dialectical method" is loose talk--dangerous and disorienting. How is it that the WL/YS has supported the police strike, the Indian invasion of Pakistan, the Newton wing of the Black Panther Party, etc.? "Impressionists" and "empiricists" might ask: What is the "process" by which cops become workers, the Indian army becomes liberators and Huey Newton takes up Marxism (prior to taking up black capitalism)? Here is the answer: Dialectics. Congratulations, comrade Wohlforth! Fortunately, Lenin rejected this sort of rubbish:

"But the great Hegelian dialectics which Marxism made its own, having first turned it right side up, must never be confused with the vulgar trick of justifying the zig-zags of politicians who swing from the revolutionary to the opportunist wing of the party, with the vulgar habit of lumping together particular statements, and particular developmental factors, belonging to different stages of a single process. Genuine dialectics does not justify the errors of individuals, but studies the inevitable turns, proving that they were inevitable by a detailed study of the process of development in all its concreteness. One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as an abstract truth, truth is always concrete And one more thing, the great Hegelian dialectics should never be confused with that vulgar worldly wisdom so well expressed by the Italian saying: Mettere la coda dove non va il capo(sticking in the tail where the head will not go through)."
-- "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, " Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 437.

For Lenin dialectics is more than a few impressions of disconnected aspects of development, but is a totalistic understanding of an object or a process "in all its sides, connections and mediations." Wohlforth's pronouncements about "developing the Marxist dialectic " represent a qualitative regression into the Joseph Stalin-Mao Tse-Tung school of dialectical hocus-pocus, whereby bureaucrats and Stalinist misleaders become "objectively revolutionary " since "objective conditions" that hover above the class struggle turn "bad things into good things" (as Mao so aptly put it).

Wohlforth is also proud of the fact that the "Workers League takes sides," as in the police strike and the India-Pakistan War. SL's Leninist position of revolutionary defeatism in regard to the Indian invasion of Bangladesh was labelled "abstentionist" by the Bulletin. When, however, SL/RCY raised the question of excluding the bourgeoisie at NPAC/SMC conferences, the WL has abstained on the vote!

We believe in taking sides too, that is, picking the right side of the class line.

LABOR PARTY

Two recent examples of "bad things turning into good things" are George Meany and I. W. Abel, formerly bad, now good. Joyfully touting Meany's and Abel's right-wing maneuvering vis-a-vis the Democratic Party, the Bulletin proclaims this to be genuine evidence of Labor's imminent move towards political independence. Uncritically reporting Abel's remarks at the Democratic Convention, the WL enthuses over Abel's disgruntled chatter about a labor party, failing to add that these remarks were made in a nominating speech for Henry Jackson!

The methodological premise underlying this bureaucratic vanguardism is the conception that the forward movement of the class can push the Meanys and Abels in a revolutionary direction. This is a fundamental revision of the Leninist thesis that the bureaucracy must be overthrown in political struggle through the intervention of communists in the trade unions. It is, rather, typical of Pabloist methodology. As Marxists, we recognize the contradictory nature of the union bureaucracy. On the one hand, the bureaucrats are the conscious agents of the capitalist class in the labor movement; on the other hand, their base of power is the mass organizations of the working class, organizations built through years of militant struggles. The question of calling upon union bureaucrats to form a labor party, as the question of whether or not to extend critical support to a Labor Party or Communist Party electoral candidate, revolves around the question of making or breaking illusions in the working class about its "leadership. " It was in this manner that Lenin explained "critical support, " likening it to the way in which a rope supports a hanged man. If a left-talking bureaucrat with real influence in the rank and file has been paying lip service to the need for a labor party, we would try to expose him by calling upon him to act concretely on his words -- i.e., initiate campaigns in other unions toward calling a congress of labor to construct its own party -- all the while pointing out that we do not expect him to do it, and publicizing his real record of betrayal of the ranks. To uncritically tail the actions of the most reactionary section of the union bureaucracy and to put leftist meanings into the words of Meany et al. is nothing but cynical maneuvering, treacherously bolstering the sagging credibility of these fossils in the eyes of the rank and file. If successful, the result is precisely the creation of new illusions, new false consciousness in the working class, rather than the breaking of illusions and the building of class, and socialist, consciousness among workers.

Thus the WL has given up any semblance of communist opposition in the unions to become yet another of many centrist and reformist groups competing for the role of left pressure group on the bureaucracy.

INTERNATIONALISM

And what of that much-vaunted internationalism of Wohlforth/Healy? The recent OCI-SLL split in Healy's "International" demonstrates the hollowness of this claim, proving the IC since Cannon's '53 Open Letter to be nothing more than a mutual non-aggression pact between national parties desperately clutching their "spheres of influence" and unable to wage a thoroughgoing international struggle against Pabloism. The IC (since the OCI split) has acknowledged the incompleteness of the 1953 split, done a 180-degree turn on their evaluation of Cannon, now arguing that Cannon's Open Letter was not a reflex of "American pragmatism" (their old position) but a great act of internationalism!

The SLL finds itself able to maintain its international credentials only through a combination of Stalinist-like hooliganism and active myth-making--such as Wohlforth's statements at a meeting with the BMC: "I loved that man Cannon, I loved him!" Wohlforth has never given the reason for the change from his 1965 position, when he 'stated: "We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism. " (Conversations with Wohlforth, Marxist Bulletin No. 3, part iv-1965, published by Spartacist, 3rd session, 9 July 1965)

WL/YS: A DEAD END - JOIN THE RCY!

To the comrades of the YS we say: You were recruited into a cynical and opportunist organization. Healy's and Wohlforth's "internationalist" pretensions notwithstanding, the WL/YS is the most deceitful of dead ends, irrevocably incapable of providing Leninist leadership for the working-class movement, a "Trotskyist" outsider having nothing in common with the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and the first four Congresses of the Communist International.

We, members of the Buffalo Marxist Collective, have consciously and definitively rejected the WL/YS and are presently engaged in discussions leading to fusion with the RCY. Unlike the WL which pretends to be leading the working class through get-rich-quick schemes like the "Labor Party Now" conference and has proved totally incapable of consistently upholding Leninist principles, the SL/RCY is constructing the nucleus of a mass vanguard party in the United States, and struggling for the rebirth of the Fourth International through splits and fusions based on principled programmatic agreement. We have made a decision to be part of that struggle and we call on all serious revolutionaries in the YS to do the same.

--Buffalo Marxist Collective, 20 October 1972

(Distributed to WL "Labor Party" Conference, Chicago, 21-22 October 1972)

Healy at Liege and Peking (1967)

Spartacist No. 10 (May-June 1967)

Healy at Liège and Peking

Capitulating to the Maoist version of Stalinism, the Healy-Banda leadership has taken the Socialist Labour League through a qualitative step in its degeneration. A recent headline in the SLL Newsletter (14 Jan. 1967) calls for: “Conditional support of ‘Red Guards’ – the duty of every revolutionist.” The article, written by Banda, reveals exactly what the SLL support some section of the Chinese bureaucracy striving, against a less verbally “militant” section, to strengthen its own bureaucratic rule. Although Banda, like Mao, spouts the verbiage of “working class” and “proletarian revolution,” he cannot help but reveal his betrayal of working-class aims.

Banda manages a gentle criticism of the SLL’s newfound “revolutionary” hero:

“There is little doubt that in this struggle the opposition has been aided,
involuntarily, by some of the extravagant, improbable and Utopian ideas of Mao
Tse Tung; by his refusal to repudiate Stalin, his support of the Soviet
intervention in Hungary, his acceptance of ‘socialism in a single country’ and
his hare-brained schemes of ‘backyard furnaces’ and 100 percent communism. No
doubt excesses will be committed in the present campaign.”

But he insists that “the choice is clear and unavoidable,” a choice for Mao and the Red Guards.

For a Trotskyist to label these as “excesses”, etc. is a gross betrayal of the very foundations of Trotskyism. In creating the Fourth International, Trotsky fought to prevent Stalinism from destroying the Marxist program – but Banda, a “reconstructor” of the FI, is ready to dump this program, if only Chairman Mao will let the SLL jump onto his Stalinist, merry-go-round.

Instant Stalinism

Needless to say, Healy’s devotees, the American Workers League, formerly ACFI, junked their original correct interpretation of the events in China as don as the SLL Newsletter printed Banda’s pledge as a left Maoist. The Wohlforthites had originally analyzed the purpose of the “Red Guard Frenzy” as, a bureaucratic attack on all opponents:

“The mobilization of the Red Guard is thus aimed at both the right and the
incipient left. . . . By appealing to nationalism, just as Stalin did, the CCP
leadership hopes to divert the attention of the masses from their growing
problems.”

They saw the end result of this “frenzy” as anti-proletarian:

“The smashing of ‘Western’ art, the destruction of all evidence of improvements
in the living standards of the masses, all in the name of the ‘great proletarian
cultural revolution,’ are completely reactionary moves, and cannot fail to
alienate, advanced workers all over the world.” (Bulletin, 26 Sept. 1966.)

Since the sneaky Wohlforth discreetly avoids any mention of this earlier position, we must attempt to discover, in his later, SLL-influenced analysis, reasons for this sudden shift: “But Mao’s line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism either. It is essentially for this reason that we give him our support” (30 Jan. 1967). However, this centrist sophistry cannot explain away ACFI’s correct analysis of 26 September:

“But the fact is that the Chinese have been long on words and very short on
deeds. It is not that we advise responding to every imperialist provocation. But
the Chinese have not ‘drawn the line anywhere. . . . We can almost see the glee
of the imperialists over the genuine appeasement with which their provocations
have been met.”

Wohlforth, is it possible that your vaunted “Marxist method” led you to reverse your position on 30 January because the SLL had, only two weeks earlier, printed its very first analysis of the events in China – an analysis diametrically opposed to the first Bulletin handling of these same events? Could it be that your vaunted “method” consists of the air mail post between London and New York and that it leads you into political falsification? Such “method” has nothing in common with Marxism – it is a disgusting embodiment of sheer opportunism and theoretical bankruptcy.

SLL Capitulation Expected

The SLL’s capitulation, unwelcome as it is to those attempting to rebuild the FI, comes as no surprise to those, like the Spartacist League, who have had to fight against Healy’s bureaucratic Cominternist organizational maneuvers. If the politics of a group such as the SLL remain formally “correct” while the organizational practices of its leading clique increasingly degenerate into Stalinist gangsterism, this contradiction must inevitably set up a tension urgently in need of resolution: either the rotting leadership must be thrown out or the political life of the organization will be increasingly contaminated. The sectarian provocation committed at Liège in October 1966 by the Healy-Banda-protégés, the British Young Socialists (YS), indicated that this second alternative was being realized.

Liège Sectarians

The Liège demonstration was called by the Jeunes Gardes Socialistes of Belgium (JGS), a youth group influenced by the Pabloist United Secretariat (USec). The demonstration of European socialist and communist youth groups had two objectives: for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops from Viet Nam and against the imperialist NATO alliance. The YS appeared at the anti-imperialist demonstration carrying a banner in support of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. When the Stalinist Belgian Communist Youth (BCY) were confronted by this banner the group withdrew, although the BCY ranks had originally overridden their leadership to force participation in the demonstration.


The reason for this provocation is clear. The YS discovered that the USec had taken the initiative in working with some young Stalinists who might be pulled away from their leadership. The Healyites’ solution to such a challenge was to disrupt this working arrangement with a slogan designed not to educate the Stalinists but to drive them away. Thus the Healyites revealed their inability to politically confront an opponent, to prove through struggle and debate the correctness of their positions and to win over advanced elements from other groups. Instead they offered only a show of sectarian “revolutionary” activity.

However, the Healyites were not the only unprincipled participants at Liège. The USec advanced a defense of their Liège role which by its denial of the vital right to criticize others in a common action is reformist and anti-Trotskyist. Pierre Le Greve defended the USec forces, maintaining:

“The principle should have been recalled that it is impermissible in a united
front demonstration for certain participants to arrogate to themselves the right
to impose slogans which a participating tendency considers inadmissible.”
(Quoted in World Outlook, 27 Jan. 1967)

Trotsky might just as easily have been describing the rotten politics of Healy’s sectarianism and the USec opportunism when, in 1932, he wrote:

“The mistakes made in the policy of the united front fall into two categories.
In most cases the leading organs of the Communist party approached the
reformists with an offer of joining in a common struggle for radical slogans
which were alien to the situation and which found no response in the masses.
These proposals partook of the nature of blank shots. . . . The second type of
perversion bore a much more fatal character. In the hands of the Stalinist
bureaucracy, the policy of the united front became a hue and cry after allies at
the cost of sacrificing the independence of the party.” (What Next?)

Healy Wiggles

Several months after the demonstration Healy attempted a theoretical explanation of what had happened at Liège. This pseudo-Trotskyist claims that there could have been no united front because the groups confronting the YS at Liège do not have the “principled positions” Trotsky had. As proof, he offers up the reformist sins of their leaders! (Newsletter, 7 Jan, 1967.)

Insistence on this type of “principle” helps only to maintain the divisions within the workers’ movement. A united front is designed precisely because significant sections of the working class are still controlled by reformist leaderships – its aim is to help free them from that control. Trotsky called in the 1930s for the German CP (KPD) to form a united front with the Social Democrats against a fascist threat to the working class. The Stalinist KPD leadership refused, for reasons similar to Healy’s, to work with the “unprincipled” SPD leadership.

More Falsification

His insistence on such “principle” is not Healy’s only falsification of Trotskyist positions. In the manner of a Catholic priest, he also quotes Trotsky’s descriptions of historically specific conditions in Germany as though those were absolute, general definitions – in order to prove that there could have been no united front at Liège because a united front must in all cases be com posed of “a mass communist party and a mass reformist organization representing millions of members.”

Certainly, there were no “mass” organizations at Liège. But there were some 4000 militant socialist youth, who, through principled tactics, could be the path to a mass revolutionary party on the morrow. Only if the Trotskyist parties struggle – along with sections of the working class – whether on issues such as industry attempts to freeze wages, government attempts to destroy independent union or the imperialist attack on the Viet Nam revolution – can the class vanguard be pulled away from its reformist leaders and prepared for the development of soviets, the united front in its highest form. In such struggles the real communists (Trotskyists) must prove their willingness to fight and the correctness of their programmatic positions.

Fear of Struggle

The Healyites’ provocation at Liège destroyed the possibility of an educational struggle designed to set those wavering Stalinist youth against their reformist leadership. (Their criminality is similar to that of the German CP in the early ‘30s, when it raised abstractly correct slogans on the order of “Down with the Social Democratic Murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht,” thus driving the SPD workers back into the arms of their leaders.) A sharp, educational and anti-Stalinist basis for struggle would have been the slogan which the Spartacist League raises when with Stalinist youth in anti-war actions: “No New 1954 Geneva Sellout of Viet Nam by USSR-China!” The BCY youth were prepared, by their participation in a united front in defense of the Vietnamese ‘ Revolution, to be brought, by the implications of such a slogan, into opposition to their own sell-out leaders. But the Hungarian Revolution slogan was a deliberate provocation, entirely outside the framework of the Liège issues.

The SLL at one time was able to wage a struggle against the revisionists through an entry into the British Labour Party youth organization, the SLL won a significant section of that youth to the Trotskyist program. But the leadership has now “reduced the SLL and its International Committee to the position of maintaining itself in a bureaucratic fashion, attempting, through the use of ultra-left, pseudo- revolutionary intransigence, or of opportunist khvostism toward Mao – a Stalinist with élan – to create the illusion of serious struggle. Their ultraleftism (“an infantile disorder,” Lenin called it) is the complementary face of their adaptation to Mao. Both the opportunism and the ultra-leftism give the SLL the impression of struggle and shield its members from feeling the necessity to actually struggle for hegemony of the working class.

SLL as Maoist

The severity of the SLL’s political degeneration can best be seen in its opportunist handling of two theoretical questions concerning China: the source of bureaucracy in a workers state and the means for eliminating that bureaucracy. Their positions on these questions are ‘ best summed up in Banda’s own words. The source of the bureaucracy, according to this ignoramus, is purely subjective:

“Softened by an easy life, accustomed to their creature comforts, dazzled by the
privileges of their cousins in the USSR and yearning for ‘tranquility’ and an
end to struggle s and sacrifice, these people want an end to the Sino-Soviet
conflict and the conclusion of a compromise with U.S. imperialism.” (Newsletter,
14 Jan. 1967.)

Equally subjective is the “cure” for bureaucracy: “The best elements led by Mao and Lin Piao have been forced to go outside the framework of the Party and call on the youth and the working class to intervene,” (21 Jan. 1967) and

“… it is the youth who constitute the main attack in the movement against
bureaucracy. The youth instinctively hate bureaucracy, they detest this type of
party which stifles criticism and creative thought, and it is against this that
the youth react.” (28 Jan. 1967.)

Because, the SLL has emphasized subjective conditions as essential in the development of such a bureaucratic crisis, they have confused one section of that bureaucracy (i.e., “the best elements led by Mao and Lin Piao”) with the workers state itself and thence drawn the conclusion, that a criticism of Mao and his Red Guards is a counterrevolutionary attack on the Chinese Revolution.

SLL as Stalinist

In other words, these “Trotskyists” have put themselves in the curious position of those Stalinists of the 1930s who responded to Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin by labelling Trotsky a “completely ruined fascist and counterrevolutionary.” A striking comparison emerges between today and the Third Period, when those “friends of Soviet Russia” mistook Stalin’s words for revolutionary deeds and therefore construed Trotsky’s criticisms as proof of his counterrevolutionary intentions. So today the SLL and ACFI, friends of Mao’s Peoples Republic, take as proof of Mao’s “revolutionary sincerity,” his phrase mongering and sectarian abhorrence of any “deals with the Russian bureaucracy – even the demand for a common front in aid of the Vietnamese revolution.

These “Trotskyists” of the SLL might just as well listen to the words of Mao’s forebear, an equally “sincere” man:

“The second question concerns the task of combating bureaucracy, of organizing
mass criticism of our shortcomings, of organizing mass control from below. One
of the most bitter enemies of our progress is bureaucracy. ... The Communist
bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because his
bureaucracy is masked by the title of Party member. And unfortunately we have
quite a number of such Communist bureaucrats. .. How is this evil to be
combated? I think that there is not, nor can there be, any other way of
combating this evil than by organizing control by the Party masses from below,
and implanting inner-Party democracy. What objections can there be to rousing
the fury of the Party masses against the corrupt elements and allowing them to
throw these elements out?”

These words were delivered by Stalin to the Eighth All-Union Congress of the “Leninist” Young Communist League, 16 May 1928.

Trotsky on Bureaucracy

In contrast to these empiricists who seek to locate the trouble essentially in the desire for “privileges” of corrupt bureaucrats, Trotsky analyzed the historical conditions for both the cause of and relief from bureaucracy:

“In other words, the source of bureaucratism resides in the growing
concentration of the attention and the forces of the party upon the governmental
institutions and apparatuses, and in the slowness of the development of
industry.... It is unworthy of a Marxist to consider that bureaucratism is only
the aggregate of, the bad habits of office holders. Bureaucratism is a social
phenomenon in that it is a definite system of administration of men and things.
Its profound causes lie in the heterogeneity of society, the differences between
the daily, and the fundamental interests of various groups of the population.
Bureaucratism is complicated by the fact of the lack of culture of the broad
masses… . The struggle against the bureaucratism of the state apparatus is an
exceptionally important but prolonged task, one that runs more or less parallel
to our other fundamental tasks: economic reconstruction and the elevation of the
cultural level of the masses… In the last analysis, the question will be
resolved by two great factors of international importance: the course of the
revolution in Europe and the rapidity of our economic development.” (The New
Course, 1923.)

Trotsky emphasized in addition the need for greater dependence on the Soviets and on the working-class cadres within the party in order to hold down the growth of bureaucracy.

Chinese Bureaucracy

Today this basic historical analysis defines the situation in China, a situation intensified because there is not now, nor has there ever been, workers control in China. The roots of bureaucracy – low economic development and lack of aid from the international proletariat – now threaten the workers state and thereby the position of the bureaucracy itself. Forced by objective conditions, the leading section of the bureaucracy has reacted cynically to its own bureaucratic existence and dully, belatedly and empirically to its economic and social causes. The Mao-Lin Piao faction has labeled everyone else in sight a bureaucrat, assuming with the gall appropriate only to top bureaucrats that their own crimes won’t be noticed, hoping that such labels and the Thought of Mao Tsetung will scare away the results of bureaucracy.” To the economic and ‘international factors which threaten the Chinese workers state (and cause bureaucracy), the Maoists have reacted in fits and starts, zigs, then zags. From the alliance with the national bourgeoisie in 1949, to the nationalization of private industry in 1953, to the Great Leap Forward, of 1958-59, to the re-institution of private peasant holdings in 1961, to the present introduction of army units into the fields and factories, Mao has been attempting bureaucratically to “aid” the objective economic needs of the Chinese workers state. From their betrayal of the Vietnamese revolution in the 1954 Geneva Accords, to their decision to develop a nuclear striking force, to their alliance with “progressive” bourgeois governments like Pakistan and Indonesia, to their present verbal denunciation of imperialists and revisionists, the Maoists have reacted empirically to the problems confronting any revolution sealed off in one country.

For an imperialistically retarded and deformed country like China, industrialization necessarily requires sacrifice from the population. If the state is to avoid struggles such as the one falsely posed by the Maoists as “economism,” the sacrifice must be decided upon by the workers through their own organs of power. Furthermore, such sacrifice, even when decided upon by the workers themselves, can only be a holding operation, awaiting aid from victorious revolutions in more advanced countries – revolutions which themselves will be vastly accelerated by the experience, example and aid of a Chinese proletariat ruling in its own right.

Workers Control

The Maoists, of course, have tried every maneuver they could envision: student youth, red prayer books and military enforcement of production allotments. But they have fearfully avoided workers control, the only alternative which could promise to extend the revolution. The reason for their fear is understandable: workers control would have as one of its immediate outcomes – the ousting of the whole bureaucracy, including Mao himself.

Thus, Mao represents another extension of the criminal usurpation of Stalinism. The actions of the Maoists ultimately constitute the main internal danger to the Chinese Revolution. Because they disrupt the economy through bureaucratic mismanagement and waste, disrupt other revolutions and attack the Chinese proletariat, the Maoists objectively aid the attacks of U.S. imperialism on the Chinese revolution.

Thus aid to the Chinese revolution signifies in addition to military defense against imperialist attack, ruthless criticism of this Bonapartist clique at the head of the Chinese workers state and the call for its removal through a political revolution of the workers, given direction by a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. The Russian leadership now threatens to betray the other workers states in exchange for a “friendly” deal with the imperialists. Aid to China thus signifies a similar call for removal of the Russian bureaucracy. Only in these ways can the Chinese workers state be strengthened and its industrialization safeguarded against the constant aggression posed by world, imperialism.

This is the program the Fl called for in Russia and it is the program all Trotskyists should call for today for China. But clearly it is not the program of the SLL. To this day the Healy group has never been able to explain how the class forces involved in the Chinese revolution led to a deformed workers state – a characterization which they simply borrowed from others. Never having understood the historical developments, they now see the bureaucrats as able to wage a fight against themselves. This pseudo-Trotskyist SLL excuses Mao’s overall bureaucratic character and applauds his “progressive” line or his “best element” quality, both necessary aspects of Stalinist rule.

Liquidationism Next

In other words these applauding ex-Trotskyists have abandoned any proletarian perspective in the Chinese workers state for the “privilege” of supporting a section of the leading bureaucracy which has helped deform the state. At the same time they have not yet degenerated to Pablo’s position which dismisses the need for a Leninist party. The SLL still calls for the formation of a section of the FI in China. But on what base? – on the Red Guards, “the force upon which the Fourth International will surely be built”! (Newsletter, 4 Feb. 19667). In other words, they wish to be “revolutionary advisers” to Mao, to do what this “hero” is doing, only to do it a “little bit better.” They resemble the SWP in its fatherly advice to “Fidel” and Juan Posadas in his hysterical empathizing with the complete menagerie of such heroes.

This kind of centrist verbal cover was not sufficient to prevent Pablo from following the logic of capitulation through to the eventual destruction of his party. Unless Healy is ousted by those elements in the SLL and IC which want a perspective of international struggle, the SLL and IC will follow a course similar to that of the USec and Posadist groups and will end up liquidating the party as did Pablo.

Open Political Struggle

Healy generalized his sectarian wrecking tactics at Liège to a denial of the Leninist struggle for the united front in action; i.e., the Healyites have lost the possibility of building a revolutionary party in the face of mass Stalinist or reformist parties. Healy’s prior theoretically rudderless response to the Chinese revolution has led to his pathetic inability to distinguish a political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy from the massive purge the Maoists are now unfolding. From theoretical weakness it proved a short step for opportunist elements like Banda to push the SLL into giving essential political support to this purge under the slogan, “Defend the Red Guards.” These departures by the Healy group from revolutionary politics signal the transformation of the unclarified civil war between Healy-Banda-Wohlforth and ourselves into a clear-cut political struggle between counterposed tendencies.

Revolution and Truth (1966)

Spartacist No. 8 (November - December 1966)

Revolution and Truth

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

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

The Calculated Lie

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

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

Wohlforth and Struggle

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

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

___________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wohlforth's Method

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

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

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

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

Trotskyism and Truth

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

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

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

1966 London Conference 2: Defeat for World Trotskyism

Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)

Defeat for World Trotskyism

It is a bitter irony that the Newsletter (organ of the British Socialist Labour League) headlined its article on the April Conference of the International Committee "Rebuilding the Fourth International." The signal accomplishments of the conference: the Voix Ouvriere (a French Trotskyist group previously unconnected to either the I.C. or the United Secretariat) was driven away and Spartacist expelled. Thus the Fourth International was "rebuilt."

The break with Spartacist was accomplished over a transparent organizational pretext. Spartacist editor James Robertson, a delegate to the conference, excused himself from one afternoon session, and refused later to “confess” that his absence was either a violation of principle or the expression of “petty-bourgeois American chauvinism.” His failure to make the “proper apology” was deemed a departure from democratic centralism. It was grotesque that an international split should be precipitated by an undeclared rule on attendance which was applied only to the Spartacist delegation; so grotesque, in fact, that no section of the I.C. has yet found the courage to make this fact public. On the contrary, the American Committee for the Fourth International, which had formerly proclaimed itself an ardent advocate of unity, has suddenly "discovered" that the positions of Spartacist are incompatible with participation in the I.C., fabricating a smokescreen of political accusations in the ACFI Bulletin of 9 May 1966, to explain the unexpected break.

A Critical Review

Since all supporters of a principled unification among revolutionary Trotskyists must be surprised and confused at this about-face, it is necessary to review critically the political contributions and events at the London Conference, in order to determine what precipitated the split.

The major report of the conference was given by Cliff Slaughter, secretary of the IC, on "Rebuilding the Fourth International," the international resolution before the Conference. Incorporated in the summary by Slaughter was a vehement attack on the political activity and character of Spartacist and a special attack upon Robertson, as noted above. While our delegation voted in support of the resolution, they perforce abstained on the vote on the Slaughter report.

Where We Stand

Spartacist came to the conference because we were in basic political agreement with the main positions published by the International Committee. We remain in basic political agreement with the I.C. Resolution, despite particular exceptions.

Comrade Slaughter characterized the present objective context as one of “deepening crisis of imperialism,” especially since 1956. He saw the working class as both increasingly restive the world over, and rapidly exposing and rejecting the traditional labor bureaucracies. He described the rise of Pabloite revisionism as the reflection of conscious effort by the bourgeoisie to disorient and bridle the vanguard of the working class. Nevertheless, he declared, Pabloism has now been defeated decisively, and the struggle for leadership of the working class is the immediate task. The superiority of the I.C., he asserted, lies in its understanding of "Leninist methods of party-building and in Marxist theory."

The V.O. group stated a counter position that Pabloism his been the reflex of the petty-bourgeois composition of the Fourth International since World War II.

On the third morning of the Conference, Comrade Robertson's turn on the speakers' list was reached. He expressed Spartacist's fundamental agreement with' the line of the International Resolution and of the report, but he took the opportunity to make clear certain differences. (His remarks are printed in this issue, below.) Comrade Robertson then missed the session which followed the delivery of his remarks. Although three members of the Spartacist delegation were in attendance at the session, fully empowered to take part in the discussion, this absence by Comrade Robertson was made the excuse for a violent attack upon our organization.

Spartacist Expelled

During the session missed by Robertson, Michael Banda of the SLL chose as his comment on the Slaughter report a sharp political attack upon Spartacist’s positions. In the evening session which followed organizational issues of "indiscipline" were raised.

Attacks upon Spartacist continued for a twenty-four hour period during which the Healy group tried to create some political pretext for the expulsion. Finding none, they were left with the original shabby organizational pretext.

It should be noted that Robertson had informed Comrade Healy (National Secretary of the SLL) of his intended absence, and that furthermore upon returning to the conference he explained to the assembled delegates that he had known of no rule demanding his attendance, that he had had no intention of not following protocol and would certainly adhere to all rules in the future.

ACFI's Feeble Effort

What was the reason for this vehement assault? The Bulletin makes a feeble effort to provide some motivation. Thus: "Robertson stated that he was in general agreement with the report (of Cliff Slaughter) but showed that he had no understanding and in reality no agreement with its fundamental method and line." In evidence for this fantastic interpretation, the Bulletin, points to Spartacist's evaluation of the short-run stabilization of capitalism in the colonial world after the recent defeats sustained by the working class in the backward nations. Because Robertson has noted this temporary set-back for working-class forces, he is blind to the "unity of the crisis." If by unity of the crisis it is meant that despite interim advances the capitalist class cannot resolve or suppress the contradictions in society, then Spartacist vigorously concurs. But if the Bulletin and the I.C., whose line it represents, desires to- translate every defeat into a victory, to treat the crushing reversal, say, in Indonesia, as a new, higher stage in the struggle for socialism, that is another matter: so the Comintern in 1933 viewed Hitler's rise to power as the springboard for the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary conviction of Spartacist is based, not on euphoric optimism, but on confidence in the working class with the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party to become conscious of its mission to liberate society from the stranglehold of capital.

Negro Question

In a similar vein, the Bulletin article suggests that Spartacist's special approach to the Negro question disparages the white working class. This is especially dishonest of our ACFI comrades since it is they who went along with the SWP abdication to Black Nationalism in 1963. Spartacist comrades, then known within the SWP as the Revolutionary Tendency, voted for a revolutionary integrationist counter-resolution and have maintained a consistent position since then on the need for a class rather than national analysis of the Negro question.

To be fair, ACFI has since modified its line on this question, publishing in its Bulletin a revised position which characterizes the Negro people as a people-class, in analogy to A. Leon's characterization of the Jewish people as a people-class. Strangely, the ACFI delegation in London remained silent while Spartacist was denounced by Greek and French delegates for having an ACFI-like people-class line on the Negro question.

Why this sudden switch in line by ACFI, this insensitivity to the special position of Negroes in the U.S.? Because ACFI, like puppets on a string, must now view American questions in British terms.

Propaganda OR Agitation?

With "inexorable logic," the Bulletin article plods to the inevitable conclusion: Spartacist is only a propaganda group, incapable of fusing theory with action. Yet Tim Wohlforth, the uneasy ACFI leader, missed his signals and submitted to the London Conference a revealing document, "Some Comments on Perspectives for the Fused Movement," which concluded : "The Spartacist comrades, while insisting on a propagandistic course, have done more to break out of an exclusive propagandistic existence than we have." While Spartacist comrades have been arrested some twenty times over the past three years as a result of our active participation in the civil-rights movement, we have yet to hear of one single ACFI member facing similar persecution! This striking difference reveals the truth.

The final argument, all others failing, is that Robertson "did not agree that the I.C. and only the I.C. represents the continuity of the movement." If the Spartacist comrades did not believe that the I.C. was a political heir of Trotskyism, why have they sought unity within a disciplined International? The Bulletin intends something more: servile subordination is demanded.

No Bolshevik Discipline!

Most ironical: the I.C. is not an International: it has no discipline, at least not for the privileged British and French sections. The I.C. has instead accepted the position that "The only, method of arriving at decisions that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity." Yet it demands complete, unquestioning "discipline" from its sympathizers, even on the level of organizational trivia. Our friends in ACFI recently refused debate with us without first "clearing it."

For Robertson to have "apologized" in London would have meant that Spartacist would have accepted ACFI's puppet role in the international movement. This kind of subordination is political suicide.

It remains to answer why the Healy group in the I.C. chose to wreck the immediate prospects for rebuilding the Fourth International by driving out the V.O. group and expelling Spartacist. In the light of this how shall we evaluate the revolutionary potential of the Socialist Labour League despite its obvious achievements?

Behind the Split

In one sense, the remarks of Comrade Robertson did bring on the split. Clearly the I.C. felt unable to tolerate a disciplined but vigorous and independent tendency within its ranks. This is the organizational reality behind the. expulsion, behind the lies and distortions in the Bulletin. But what, in turn, is the political explanation for the monolithic bureaucratism of the I.C. and especially of its chief section, the SLL of Britain?

Rigid bureaucracy in a workers' movement always reveals fundamental lack of confidence in party members and ultimately in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. The Healy group has demonstrated a fundamental, incapacity to build a world revolutionary movement. It is up to Spartacist along with other sections of the International Committee to construct a leadership to that end.

1966 London Conference 1: Reunification Smashed

Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966)

REUNIFICATION SMASHED

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

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

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

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

Healy's Line

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

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

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

The Actual Issues

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

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

What This Means

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

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

Turn to SWP?

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

ACFI

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

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

We Go Ahead

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

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

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

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