How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky 2 (1999)

From Spartacist Pamphlet: Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky

The “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism
(Part 2)

Economic “Globalization”: Myths and Realities

An article in the recent special issue of the Nation (15 July 1996) devoted to the question of “globalization” begins with the portentous statement “Economic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution.” Similarly, Australian Northite leader Nick Beams asserts that “globalization refers to the internationalization of the circuit of productive capital” and that this constitutes a “qualitative transformation” of the world capitalist system (International Workers Bulletin, 15 July 1996).

In fact, the history of industrial capitalism was marked by a previous shift, far more profound than the present one, in the geographical distribution of production. The Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the early 19th century and then spread by mid-century to France and the Low Countries (Belgium and Holland). In the late 19th century, the “New Industrializing Countries” of the day were Germany, the United States and Japan.

Writing in the 1890s, Friedrich Engels noted that Germany, which at the time of the 1848 Revolution was economically dominated by peasant agriculture and small-scale artisan manufacturing, had become “an industrial country of the first rank.” During the same period the United States, too, became an industrial country of the first rank. American industrial development was heavily dependent on investment by British capital, especially in the key sector of railway construction. Following the overthrow of the feudal order with the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, Japan deliberately emulated the advanced capitalist countries of the West, beginning by exporting light manufactures produced by cheap unskilled labor. Tsarist Russia also experienced rapid industrial growth between the 1890s and World War I, largely financed by West European, especially French, capital.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the existing advanced capitalist (i.e., imperialist) countries had achieved such dominance over more backward regions that they were able to arrest the development of new rival industrial powers. Hence the present global division between the so-called First World and the Third World.

Since the Northite International Committee maintains that world capitalism has recently undergone a “qualitative transformation,” one would expect this ostensibly Marxist organization to substantiate their analysis with a comprehensive study of the relevant economic data. For example, Lenin’s 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, contains pages of statistical tables illuminating and substantiating its analysis on all aspects. By contrast, the writings and speeches on “globalization” by North and his henchmen are devoid of even cursory data on trends in global production, investment and trade. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, contains not a single statistical table or graph.

A few basic and easily accessible statistics debunk the notion of a qualitative transformation of world capitalism. Western/Japanese investment in the so-called Newly Industrializing Countries totaled some $100 billion in 1993, a peak year. Yet this record amount was only 3 percent of total capital investment in North America, West Europe and Japan. In other words, the imperialist bourgeoisies still invest more that 30 times as much in their own “First World” as in the Third World. American capitalists invest 9 cents in Canada and West Europe and just 5 cents in the entire rest of the world for every dollar they expend on productive assets in the United States.

Why, then, all the hullabaloo about economic “globalization”? For the past few decades, and especially since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the world capitalist economy has in certain respects been returning to the norms of the pre1914 imperialist order. To maintain a sense of perspective, one should understand that only in the early 1970s did the ratio of world trade to global production once again reach the level it had attained in 1914, on the eve of the first imperialist world war. Yet the current theoreticians of “globalization” rarely if ever mention Lenin’s seminal study of the rise of the imperialist system, to which they add little or nothing, save confusion. As we noted in an earlier article (“David North ‘Abolishes’ the Right to Self-Determination,” Part One, WV No. 626, 28 July 1995):

“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!”

The term “globalization” refers to certain significant quantitative changes in the contemporary structure of world production and trade. In 1970, 85 percent of all exports (in value terms) from Africa, Latin America and Asian countries other than Japan consisted of agricultural produce, oil, mineral ores and other primary products. Since then exports of manufactured goods from Third World countries have increased by an average rate of 15 percent a year in real terms and now make up well over half the value of their total exports. Much of this industrial , output is financed and organized by Western/Japanese corporations either directly or through local subcontractors, licensees, etc. However, the growth of internationally competitive manufactures in East Asia and Latin America is reversible and cannot continue at anything close to the rate of increase of the past few decades. That is a political, economic and, indeed, mathematical certainty.

There’s a saying in American business circles: there are liars, damn liars and statisticians. One can always select and present statistics to be deliberately misleading. One of the most common ways of doing this is to show dramatic percentage increases from a low initial base and then to project similar percentage increases into the future. For example, a worker making $5 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received a 20 percent increase while a worker making $13 an hour who gets a dollar raise has received an 8 percent increase. But the second worker is still vastly better off than the first. And the low-wage worker well knows he is not going to keep getting a 20 percent raise every year for the next ten years.

However, much writing and discussion on the world economy – by both bourgeois ideologues and leftist intellectuals – is based on this kind of fallacious methodology. For example, between 1950 and the mid-1970s Japan’s national output grew at an average annual rate two to three times greater than that of the U.S. In the 1970s, big-name American intellectuals wrote well-publicized books – e.g., Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate, Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One – predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s leading capitalist economic power by the end of the century. Not long after these books. came out, the Japanese growth rate sharply decelerated and during the past decade Japan’s economy has been stagnant. Today, Japan’s national output is still less than half that of the U.S.

The current apocalyptic vision of economic “globalization” is based on the same faulty premises as the “Japan will be number one” literature of the 1970s. For example, between 1985 and 1994 China’s share of world exports of footwear went from 1.5 percent to 15.5 percent, an increase of 1,000 percent. If one projects the same increase for the next ten years, China will account for 150 percent of world trade in footwear, a mathematical impossibility. In another example, investment in plant and equipment by Western/Japanese corporations in backward countries, now including East Europe and the ex-USSR, increased last year by 13 percent. But it is wrong to assume this trend will continue indefinitely into the future.

The Development of Modern Imperialism

To understand the actual significance and limits of the recent changes in the world economy, it is necessary to view these changes In a broad historical perspective. In his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin described modern imperialism as that epoch of capitalism marked by the export of capital and the division of the world into “spheres of influence” by a few major advanced capitalist states. The two key institutions of the pre-1914 imperialist order were colonialism and the gold standard.

Particularly Britain and France, but also other West European countries, the United States and Japan exercised direct state power over hundreds of millions of toilers throughout the world. British plantation owners in India did not have to worry that the Indian government would impose high taxes on their property or enact laws favorable to labor since the government in India was their government. Compared to British India, foreign investment in China in the pre-1914 era was relatively slight, because the country was beset by political disorder and was an arena of conflict among a number of rival imperialist powers.

At the same time, the gold standard assured a degree of financial integration among the advanced capitalist countries which has never been matched since. Exchange rates between currencies were fixed, there were few or no restrictions on the international movement of capital, and real interest rates were stable and closely linked in the major financial capitals –London, Paris, New York. British holders of American railway bonds did not have to worry, that their assets would be devalued by hyperinflation or by the depreciation of the dollar against the pound.

Under these conditions the globalization of capital flourished as never before or since, as can be shown with the following few statistics for Britain and France (taken from Herbert Feis, Europe – The World’s Banker 1870-1914 [1964]). The income derived by British capitalists from their foreign assets increased from 4 percent of total British national income in the 1880s to 7 percent by 1903 to almost 10 percent on the eve of World War I in 1914. Foreign investments were concentrated in Britain’s own colonies (especially India, South Africa, Canada and Australia) as well as in the United States and, to a lesser extent; Argentina. By 1914, total productive assets held by British capitalists outside Britain amounted to well over one quarter of the capital stock within Britain itself!

While the globalization of pre-1914 British capitalism was historically unique, the role of foreign investment for French capitalism in this period likewise greatly exceeded that of any present-day imperialist country. Between 1909 and 1913, almost 5 percent of French national income was derived from French investments abroad (mainly in Russia, Turkey; the Balkans and France’s own African and Asian colonies). By 1914, the total value of French long-term foreign investment (45 billion francs) amounted to 15 percent of the productive wealth within France (295 billion francs).

Now let us look at comparable figures for the United States at present. In 1994, total income derived from the foreign assets of American capitalists, both direct investment and stock and bond holdings, was $167 billion. That amounted to slightly less than 2percent of the U.S. gross domestic product of $6.7 trillion. The current total value of American direct foreign investment is about one trillion dollars, slightly less than 10 percent of the $10.5 trillion in privately owned industrial assets (plant and equipment) within the United States. In the case of Japan, the relative weight of foreign investment is even less than it is in the U.S., and in the case of Germany it is substantially less.

World War I and the Russian Revolution

As the above figures indicate, World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought about a profound and long-lasting disruption of the world capitalist economy. To begin with, the war killed off the gold standard. All combatants financed their huge, unprecedented military expenditures by printing money while imposing tight controls over all international transactions. When the war ended in 1918, price levels in the major capitalist countries bore no relation whatsoever to either prewar foreign-exchange parities or real purchasing power.

An attempt to resurrect the gold standard in the mid-1920s was buried under the wreckage of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That decade saw the collapse of world trade, the rise of “beggar thy neighbor” trade protectionism, the widespread use of foreign-exchange controls (especially in Nazi Germany) and the establishment of regional economic blocs dominated by a single imperialist power (e.g., Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”).

Added to the effects of the Great Depression and intensifying interimperialist conflict were the consequences of the Russian Revolution. Not only had a major country been ripped out of the sphere of capitalist exploitation, but the imperialist bourgeoisies were now imbued with a fear of “red revolution” elsewhere; especially in backward countries where social and political conditions were manifestly unstable. The huge losses suffered by French financiers and other holders of Russian tsarist bonds cast a long shadow over world capital markets in the 1920s and ‘30s. Lending to semicolonial countries like China and Mexico was inhibited by the perceived danger of revolutionary turmoil and left-wing governments which would repudiate the country’s foreign debt. The only significant foreign investment in China during the interwar period was undertaken by the Japanese in Manchuria – after they had conquered and occupied this region in 1931.

From World War II to the Cold War

The struggle of the major capitalist powers to redivide markets and spheres of exploitation led in 1939-41, as it had in 1914, to an interimperialist world war, though this time one in which a chief combatant was a (degenerated) workers state, the Soviet Union. (Thus, while taking a defeatist position toward all the imperialist powers in World War II, as in the previous world war, revolutionary Marxists called for unconditional military defense of the USSR.) The outcome of the Second World War perpetuated and deepened the disruption and segmentation of the world economy. By defeating its main imperialist rivals, Germany and Japan, the United States became the hegemonic capitalist power. But the global hegemony of American imperialism was blocked by the Soviet Union, which had emerged from the war as the second-strongest state in the world: From East Asia to West Europe to South America, the course of economic developments between 1945 and 1991 was integrally connected with the Cold War.

In West Europe and also Japan, the devastation of the war combined with the leftward radicalization of the working class militated against a return to the “free trade” and “free market” policies of the pre-1914 era. Except for the U.S., all major advanced capitalist countries engaged in a high degree of state intervention in economic activity during the first phase of the postwar period. Almost all foreign-exchange transactions in West Europe were subject to strict government regulation and bureaucratic approval The pound, franc and deutschmark did not become “freely” convertible until the late 1950s.

Currency convertibility is a basic economic precondition for large-scale foreign investment in manufacturing and services, since the revenue generated from these activities is usually denominated in the currency of the country in which the investments take place. The oil extracted by Exxon in Saudi Arabia is sold on the world market for dollars. But the automobiles produced by General Motors in Germany are sold to Germans for deutschmarks. Thus, it was only in the 1960s – after the introduction of convertibility gave them the option of repatriating their profits – that American corporations bought out or built industrial plants in West Europe on a significant scale. The total value of U.S. direct investment in manufacturing in West Europe went from $3.8 billion in 1960 to $12.3 billion (discounting for inflation) by the end of the decade.

It was, however, in the economically backward regions of the world that the postwar period saw the most radical political changes affecting the international movement of capital. In the course of defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, the Soviet Red Army occupied East Europe. Over the next few years, under the hostile pressure of American imperialism, these countries were transformed, bureaucratically from above, into “people’s democracies” – i.e., deformed workers states structurally similar to the Stalinized Soviet Union, based on planned, collectivized economies, the state monopoly of foreign trade, etc.

Bureaucratically deformed workers states also emerged in China, North Korea and Vietnam, as a result of indigenous, peasant-based social revolutions led by Stalinists. It was above all fear of war with the Soviet Union which prevented Washington from using its nuclear weapons against Mao’s China during the Korean War in the early 1950s and a few years later against the Viet Minh forces which were defeating the French colonial army in Indochina. A large part of the world was thus removed from the sphere of capitalist exploitation, although still subject to the powerful political, economic and military pressures of imperialism.

At the same time, radical political changes also took place in those economically backward countries which remained within the sphere of capitalist exploitation. The weakening of the West European imperialist, states caused by World War II combined with the radicalization of the colonial masses led to the “decolonization” of much of Asia, the Near East and Africa. State power in these regions now passed into the hands of indigenous bourgeoisies, who sought to pursue their own national interests within a global context dominated by international finance capital.

Despite some CIA-organized coups (e.g., against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953), the ability of U.S. imperialism to control the governments of the former colonial and semicolonial countries was. limited by the countervailing power of the. Soviet Union. Moscow’s backing allowed bourgeois-nationalist regimes like Nasser's Egypt, Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s India and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to exercise a degree of political and economic independence of the imperialist powers which they could not have attained on the basis of their own national economic. resources.

During the 1960s, Soviet funds and engineers helped build the Aswan High Dam – one of the largest in the world – in Nasser’s Egypt. By the early ‘70s, the USSR had become the largest market for India's exports, while Moscow provided the New Delhi regime with over 60 percent of its imports of military hardware. At the same time, Western and Japanese corporations were discouraged from investing in countries like Egypt and India for fear of punitive taxation, restrictions on the repatriation of profits and the possibility of nationalization without adequate compensation. The 1960s and ‘70s thus marked the heyday of economic nationalism and statified capitalism in what was then called the “Afro-Asian bloc.” But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer even a partial counterweight to Western/Japanese imperialist domination in the Third World. The 1991 Gulf War signaled that, without the protection of the USSR, those bourgeois-nationalist regimes which flouted the dictates of Washington would be subjected to the devastating power of the Pentagon war machine.

However, even with the relatively greater room for maneuver they had when the Soviet Union still existed, the bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Third World did not and could not chart a course truly independent of imperialism, nor could they bring about the economic and social modernization of their countries. Despite their “non-aligned” posture and even “socialist” rhetoric, the semicolonial bourgeoisies remained tied to the imperialist bourgeoisies by a thousand strings, subordinated and subservient to the power of the imperialist world market. Thus, India’s exports remained concentrated, as in the colonial era, in light manufactures produced by unskilled labor. Egypt remained economically dependent on the export of cotton (as well as tolls from the Suez Canal), Ba'athist Iraq and Qaddafi’s Libya on the vicissitudes of the world oil market controlled by the “Seven Sisters” monopolies. And Algeria under the radical-nationalist FLN regime relied heavily on money sent back by Algerians working in France. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of the local bourgeoisies, as part of a perspective of world socialist revolution reaching into the imperialist centers, can these countries achieve true independence from imperialism.

The End of the “American Century”

What is now termed economic “globalization” was rooted in the recovery of Germany and Japanese capitalism from their devastation and defeat in World War II. By the 1960s, German and Japanese manufactured goods were making huge inroads into world markets, including the American market. The competitive position of U.S. imperialism was further weakened in this period by the inflationary pressures generated by its long, losing colonial war in Vietnam. America's large, permanent balance-of-trade deficits, especially with Japan, fatally undermined the use of the dollar as the global medium of exchange and store of value – the international monetary system, originally set up at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Nixon's August 1971 devaluation of the dollar in terms of gold, and the subsequent recourse to fluctuating exchange rates, signaled the end of the short-lived “American Century” of U.S. imperialist hegemony in the capitalist world.

The weakened competitive position of U.S. capitalism was further exposed by the large losses experienced by corporate. America during the 1974-75 world economic downturn. The American bourgeoisie responded with a concerted drive to increase the rate of exploitation. An anti-labor offensive was marked by “giveback” contracts, two-tier wage systems for younger workers and outright, union-busting. Unionized plants in the Midwest and North, which paid relatively high wages, were shut down as production was shifted to the “open shop” South and Southwest.

At the same time, American industrial capital undertook a major expansion in East Asia and Latin America. Between 1977 and 1994, there was a five-fold increase in manufacturing plant and equipment owned directly by U.S. corporations in Third World countries, from $11 billion to $52 billion (in real terms, discounted for inflation). Japanese industrialists soon followed their American competitors in going offshore. By the mid-1980s, Matsushita was producing many of its TV sets and air conditioners in Malaysia, Yamaha its sporting goods in Taiwan, Minebea its miniature ball bearings in Singapore and Thailand, TDK its magnetic tapes in Taiwan and South Korea, etc.

Nonetheless, investment by Western and Japanese corporations in neocolonial countries was still inhibited by the uncertainties of the Cold War. A popular uprising or even an election or military coup could suddenly bring about a left nationalist regime backed by Moscow. For example, in 1979 a revolution in Nicaragua toppled Washington's puppet dictator Somoza and brought to power the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist Sandinistas. At the same time, a major leftist insurgency was raging in neighboring El Salvador. Thus, even Yankee imperialism's own “backyard” was not secure for Wall Street banks and the Fortune 500 corporations.

Economic “Globalization” and Capitalist Counterrevolution

A fundamental political condition for the present triumph of capitalist “globalization” was the retreat of Soviet global power under Gorbachev, the disintegration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. It was no accident that the electoral overthrow of the Sandinista regime in 1990, capping a contra war armed and organized by Washington, coincided with the beginning of a massive investment boom by U.S. banks and corporations in Mexico. At the same time, capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet sphere has opened up a new, huge sphere for exploitation, especially for German imperialism. A few' years ago, a spokesman for German industry exulted: “Right on our own doorstep in Eastern Europe, we have for the first time a vast pool of cheap and highly trained labor.”

During Cold War II in the 1980s North’s IC joined in the imperialist anti-Soviet chorus along with other pseudo-Trotskyists like the United Secretariat of the late Ernest Mandel, as well as mainstream social democrats and Eurocommunists. Having done all within their means to promote counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the Northites now proclaim that the restoration of capitalism there – a historic defeat for the international proletariat – was objectively determined. Their 1993 pamphlet, The Globalization of Capitalist Production & the International Tasks of the Working Class, informs us: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the first major political convulsion produced by the transformation of the forms of production. The qualitative advances ,in the integration of world economy dealt the final blow to the autarchic national policies of the Stalinist regime.”

By their own terms, for the Northites the Soviet working class simply did not exist as even a potential factor in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union. The IC has effectively repudiated the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as even a historical possibility in this supposedly new era of “globalized” capitalism. The 1938 Transitional Program, written when the Soviet Union was relatively far more economically backward and geographically, isolated than in the 1980s, stated, “either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new form of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

What did Trotsky mean here about opening “the way to socialism”? Wouldn't a Russian-centered Soviet workers state, even if administered on the basis of proletarian democracy and governed by a genuinely communist vanguard party, still be surrounded by hostile and economically more advanced capitalist states? Yes, of course. However, the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the Soviet working class, under the banner of proletarian internationalism, would have reawakened and inspired revolutionary fervor among the workers, rural toilers and oppressed peoples throughout the capitalist world. And a communist government of the USSR would have provided invaluable political, economic and, if necessary, military support for proletarian revolutions in capitalist states, including the imperialist powers.

For Proletarian Political Revolution In China!

As against all the various pretenders to Trotskyism, not least North’s IC, our tendency unambiguously and consistently called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, as we do today in regard to the remaining deformed workers states – Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. The International Communist League mobilized all the limited resources at our command during the political turmoil in the East German (DDR) deformed workers state in 1989-90, fighting for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy which, in league with West German imperialism and its Social Democratic lackeys, pushed for a capitalist reunification of Germany. Uniquely, the ICL opposed capitalist Anschluss (annexation) down the line, calling instead for a “Red Germany of Workers Councils” as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.

And during the terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in the USSR, our tendency actively intervened in the Soviet Union with the program and perspective of proletarian political revolution to “open the way to socialism.” The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union was no more objectively inevitable in 1991-92 than in 1941, when the USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany. The direction taken by Russia, the Ukraine and other Soviet republics when the Kremlin bureaucracy disintegrated under Gorbachev, while conditioned by the pressures of the world capitalist market, was determined by the struggle of living social and political forces. A decisive factor in the outcome was a retrogression in the political consciousness of the Soviet working class brought about by three generations of Stalinism in power. Widespread apathy and cynicism as well as, to a certain degree, illusions in Western-type bourgeois democracy among the masses allowed the ascendancy of the counterrevolutionary forces centered around Boris Yeltsin in Russia and around anti-Soviet nationalists in the non-Russian republics.

In the case of the USSR, the Northites maintain that the capitalist counterrevolution which actually did take place was inevitable. In the case of China, they maintain that a capitalist counterrevolution has already taken place when it has not yet occurred. A major article in their Fourth International (Winter-Spring 1994), titled "The Political Background of the Restoration of Capitalism in China," asserts:

“The state which issued from the Chinese Revolution no longer defends or maintains the limited gains won by the workers and peasants in 1949....
“The Chinese state is not, even in the most distorted sense, an instrument for the defense of the working class.... The state defends the interests of the bureaucracy as a privileged social layer: increasingly linked to the rising capitalist class and, through them, the interests of imperialism itself.”

Despite the significant inroads made by capital, both domestic and foreign, over the past several years, the People's Republic of China remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The author of the article quoted above, one Martin McLaughlin, is here plagiarizing without attribution the Maoist doctrine of “capitalist roadism" and applying it to Mao's one-time chief rival within the Beijing Stalinist regime, Deng Xiaoping. Significantly but predictably, not once is the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution mentioned in this lengthy article, which purports to cover the entire history of China in the 20th century.

In contrast, a “Perspectives and Tasks Memorandum” adopted by our international tendency in January 1996 states:

“The next period is likely to see the breakdown and terminal crisis of Stalinist rule in China as powerful elements in the bureaucracy, directly tied to offshore Chinese capital and actively supported by Western and Japanese imperialism, continue to drive toward capitalist restoration. The Chinese working class, although heretofore limited by police repression to actions at individual workplaces, has in recent years exhibited massive discontent with the social degradation, insecurities and blatant inequalities generated by Deng’s ‘market socialist’ program. The rural economy has experienced the rise of a class of relatively wealthy peasant smallholders while an estimated 100 million landless peasants have flooded into the cities. We can thus foresee monumental class battles leading either to proletarian political revolution or capitalist counterrevolution in the most populous nation on earth.”

“Transnational” Corporations and Imperialist States: Antagonists or Partners?

A central element in the theory of a new “globalized” capitalist economy is that transnational corporations have supplanted nation-states as the dominant institutions in world power politics. In his latest book, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (1994), leading American left-liberal intellectual Richard J. Barnet maintains:

“The architects and managers of these space-age business enterprises understand that the balance of power in world politics has shifted in recent years from territorially bound governments to companies that can roam the world. As the hopes and pretensions of government shrink almost everywhere, these imperial corporations are occupying public space and exerting a more profound influence over the lives of ever larger numbers of people.”

A more extreme version of the same thesis is presented by another American rad-lib intellectual, David Korten, in his 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World. The current view of the International Committee is essentially similar, as North stated in a 1992 speech:

“Under the aegis of imperialism, the globalization of production collides against the nation-state form within which capitalist rule is rooted.... “The web of alliances being formed by various transnational corporations, such as Toshiba, IBM and Siemens, expresses the organic drive of the productive forces to organize themselves on a world scale. But the other side of the same process is the growing antagonism among nation-states and the eruption of various forms of national and communal conflict.”
– Capital, Labor and the Nation-State (1992)

Transnational corporations are here counterposed to imperialist nation-states. Moreover, the former are presented as (relatively) progressive, since they serve as agents of global economic integration, while the latter are viewed as reactionary and obsolete. North’s statement is diametrically counterposed to what Lenin argues in his Imperialism. In particular, North’s view of the capitalists as an international class flies in the face of the Marxist understanding that the bourgeoisie cannot transcend national interests (for further discussion, see “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness,” Spartacist No. 24, Autumn 1977).

In the Barnet/Korten/North view, corporations like IBM, Siemens and Toshiba are devoted solely to maximizing their profits on a global scale; their directors and stockholders supposedly don't care whether their actions strengthen or weaken the American; German and Japanese bourgeois states. This view expresses a liberal idealist outlook since it implicitly assumes that capitalists do not need state power – i.e., armed bodies of men – to protect their property against challenges from both the exploited classes and rival capitalists. in other countries. Wall Street bankers and the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations understand (as Richard Barnet and David North apparently do not) that Mexican and South Korean workers are not devout believers in the sanctity of private property. Replying to similar arguments at the time, notably by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, Lenin in his 1916 study of imperialism quoted the German economist Schulze-Gaevemitz:

“Great Britain grants loans to Egypt, Japan, China and South America. Her navy plays here the part of bailiff in case of necessity. Great Britain’s political power protects her from the indignation of her debtors.”

The same applies to the U.S., Germany and Japan, whose armed forces are prepared to act as “bailiff in case of necessity.” Whether undertaken by corporations, banks or other financial institutions, foreign investment depends on the political, economic and military power of the states controlled by the owners of these capitalist enterprises.

North & Co. have not yet revised or repudiated the position that the Republican and Democratic parties represent the interests of the American bourgeoisie. Why then do the political leaders of these parties continue to expend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the U.S. armed forces? Even an old-fashioned liberal like Russell Baker has observed: “The era of big government is over except for the Pentagon” (New York Times, 24 September 1996). That’s because the Pentagon provides and organizes the security guards, so to speak, to protect the property of American capitalists in other countries. Citibank and Exxon are no more independent of, much less antagonistic to, the American imperialist state than Barings Bank and Royal Dutch Shell were independent of the British imperialist state in the pre-1914 era.

Indeed, if the recent merger announcement by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas demonstrates anything, it is that “multinational” corporations – especially so in strategic industries like electronics and aerospace – are very much rooted in their own nation-states. This monopolistic merger is aimed not only at reinforcing the U.S. aerospace and weapons industry but at increasing its competitive edge against rivals like the West European Airbus conglomerate.

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

Spartacist Pamphlet (1990)

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

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

[part 2]

The Political Bandits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1938 Trotsky observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Balance Sheet

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This article is dedicated to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walesa’s “Left” Fans Run for Cover (1990)

Workers Vanguard No. 493 (12 January 1990)

As Solidarność Cracks the Whip against Polish Workers…

Walesa’s “Left” Fans Run for Cover

Eight years ago, almost every self-declared “Trotskyist” organization in the West took the imperialists’ Cold War rallying cry of “Solidarity with Solidarność” as their own. They heralded Solidarność as a glorious uprising of the Polish working people against Stalinist “totalitarianism,” as an example for the American labor movement, as the inspiration for revolutionary struggle around the globe, ad nauseam. The international Spartacist tendency (now International Communist League [Fourth Internationalist]) stood virtually alone in recognizing Solidarność for what it was - “a company union for the CIA and bankers.”

Walesa & Co. hardly kept their program for capitalist restoration a secret. At its first national congress in September 1981 Solidarność opposed any mention of “socialism” in its constitution, while taking up the CIA call for “free trade unions” and “free elections” in the Soviet bloc and demanding that Poland join the bloodsucking International Monetary Fund. Lane Kirkland, the hardline Cold Warrior who heads the AFL-CIO, was invited to attend. So was Irving Brown, the CIA’s main “labor” operative in smashing Communist-led unions in Europe after World War II.

A month after the Solidarność congress, Lech Walesa secretly met with top American corporate executives at a posh restaurant outside Paris (see “Friends of Lech Walesa, Inc.,” WV No. 296, 8 January 1982). Meanwhile Solidarność was getting millions through various CIA conduits, including the German Social Democracy and the AFL-CIO “International Department” (see “‘AFL-CIA’ and $olidarność,” WV No. 490, 24 November 1989). The tapes of the secret Radom leadership meeting in December 1981, publicly broadcast by the Jaruzelski regime, exposed Solidarność plans for a counterrevolutionary coup.

Our call to “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!” provoked howls of outrage from the left. Now Walesa openly brags, “We are setting out... to return to the prewar situation when Poland was a capitalist country, after having gone through a long period of socialism” (Il Messaggero, 22 August 1989). Cracking the whip for Western bankers the Solidarity-led government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki has begun to slash wages and subsidies for food, housing and social services – the price of coal for home heating has already been jacked up by 600 percent! Whole industries are to be dismantled, with up to one million workers laid off. If Walesa, Mazowiecki & Co. got their way, conditions of life in Poland would make Ceausescu’s Romania look tame by comparison.

So now Walesa’s former “left” fans are trying to bury their years of cheer-leading for Solidarność. Not surprisingly the award for the most consummate hypocrisy and cynicism in this endeavor has to go to David North’s Workers League.

An editorial in the Bulletin (15 December 1989) entitled “Eastern European Revolutions Threaten World Capitalism” warns against the “program of capitalist restoration and mass impoverishment... imposed through the joint collaboration of the sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialist stooges like Lech Walesa.” But a few years back, under the heading “Lech Walesa Speaks,” the Bulletin (2 January 1981) rhapsodized over this imperialist stooge as a veritable working-class savior: the “son of a carpenter,” who “had to live in a tiny two-room flat...with his wife and five children” but now “leads of [sic] union of 10 million workers which has... the bureaucracy trembling in its boots.”

Today Walesa’s program is “capitalist restoration and mass impoverishment.” But when Solidarność decisively took the road of capitalist restoration at its first congress, the Bulletin (15 September 1981) crowed “Poland: On the Road to Political Revolution” and heralded “an undaunted, young, vigorous and independent trade union movement – the strongest in Eastern Europe – Solidarity.”

Now the Bulletin asks “What Is Lane Kirkland Doing in Poland?” and points out that “Kirkland’s specific assignment on behalf of the White House is to setup a CIA-run trade-union bureaucracy to brutally suppress the struggles of Polish workers.” But in 1981 they somehow “neglected” to mention that Kirkland was invited to the Solidarność congress. Even now the Northites’ German outfit, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, damns the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands for “slander[ing] the mass movement of the working class in Solidarność as a ‘company union for the CIA’” (Neue Arbeiterpresse, 15 December 1989)!

Meanwhile the Australian Northite press is attacking United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel as “an agent of capitalist restoration” who is “absolutely hostile to questions of political principle” for his support to Solidarność! When the Northites talk about “political principle,” hold on to your wallet! The Workers League has consistently stood on the side of every and any force hostile to the Soviet Union from Walesa to the ayatollah Khomeini to the CIA’s Afghan mujahedin. Vitriolic Russia-haters, the Healy/ Northites hailed the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’athist regime in 1979, as only one among many of their paid services for a variety of Middle East despots.

The Pope’s “Trotskyists”

Of course the USec took a back seat to no one in its enthusing over Solidarność. Mandel called Walesa & Co. “the best socialists in the world,” while the U.S. Mandelites in Socialist Action were so inspired by Walesa that they took the Solidarność logo as the masthead for their paper. In a 1984 speech to commemorate the birth of Solidarność, Socialist Action’s Larry Cooperman declared, “For us, Polish Solidarity has been and is a reminder of the ‘socialism we want”‘ (Socialist Action, October 1984). Now we read that “Walesa steps in to direct attacks on Polish workers” (Socialist Action, September 1989).

In yet another American Mandelite group, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, support to Solidarność seems to be causing some friction today. In the December 1989 Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, an article by Samuel Adams chafes that FIT leader Steve Bloom “tends to make light of Solidarity’s rightward thrust.” “Let’s Not Forget the Role of the Masses,” replies Bloom, dismissing Solidarność’ program for capitalist restoration as “a purely abstract possibility raised by Mazowiecki in his public pronouncements”!

The bottom line for Walesa’s “left”enthusiasts was “ten million Polish workers can’t be wrong.” Like their support to the ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic revolution” – which they also now seek to deny – they couldn’t resist Solidarność because it too was a “mass movement.” Above all, support for Solidarność was the ideal calling card for getting hired on as waterboys by the anti-Communist U.S. labor bureaucracy.

Spouting revolutionary jargon does not a revolutionary make. Those incapable of swimming against the stream when the masses are intoxicated with backward consciousness will not be capable of leading them to victory when a revolutionary opportunity arises. As we wrote at the time of Solidarność first national congress:

“The choices facing revolutionaries over Poland in the absence of a mass Trotskyist vanguard are not attractive even if they are clear. Abstentionism is not a choice; it is backhanded support to counterrevolution. No less a danger is abandoning the perspective of struggle for the conscious factor in history, for the international proletarian vanguard.”
– Stop Solidarity’s Counterrevolution!” (WV No. 289. 23 September 1981)

Today there is an opening for common struggle between the workers who were the base of Solidarność and those in the much larger, formerly Stalinist-led trade unions against the unholy gang of Stalinist bureaucrats and Solidarność leaders who are controlled by the bloodsucking international capitalists of the IMF. While necessarily beginning around immediate economic demands for survival, what is posed implicitly is a working-class struggle for political power. What is desperately needed, as we wrote eight years ago, is a genuine Trotskyist leadership “reforged in a reborn Fourth International by revolutionaries who defended the gains of October when the danger was near, the situation complex and need for programmatic clarity and backbone urgent.”

David North: Joseph Hansen's Natural Son (1988)

Workers Vanguard No. 456 (1 July 1988)

Anatomy of a Healyite Russia-Hater

David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son

Workers League leader David North has made no small effort to ensconce himself as the undisputed “leader” of the shattered remnants of Gerry Healy’s corrupt International Committee (IC). To do so of course requires that North declare all of the other former leading lights of Healyism (including the “founder-leader” himself) to be hopeless “renegades.” Never mind that North was trained, tutored and installed as a leader by the same crew he now denounces in order to proclaim himself to be the sole surviving repository of Healyite “orthodoxy.”

One of the most recent installments of this cynical charade is North’s book The Heritage We Defend. Ever so modestly described as “A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International,” in reality it is a 500-page treatise against Healy’s longtime hatchet man Michael Banda. Against Banda’s ignorant, anti-Trotskyist “Twenty-Seven Reasons Why the IC Should Be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built” – a way station on Banda’s road to becoming a Stalinist PR man – North attempts to claim as his own the revolutionary heritage of James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party. This is really egregious considering that the Workers League published hundreds of pages written by their former leader Tim Wohlforth, sneering that Cannon was a barely Marxist, vulgar “window smasher.” This was Wohlforth’s way of making himself out to be, in effect, the first real American Marxist.

As for North, he was specially chosen by Healy to be the WL “leader” as a reward for his eager services as mouthpiece for Healy’s obscene “Security and the Fourth International” campaign – a psychotic smear job impugning the integrity of the old, revolutionary SWP and Trotsky himself. Slandering the SWP’s Joseph Hansen as a conscious agent of the FBI and the Russian secret police, and an accomplice in the murder of Trotsky, the Northites have for over a decade echoed the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of his own.

“Security and the Fourth International” grew straight out of Gerry Healy’s own particular combination of years of political banditry and paranoid megalomania. It was Healy’s way of “explaining” his International Committee’s failure to definitively expose and defeat Pabloism, the revisionist current originated by Michel Pablo which in the early I950s abandoned Trotskyism with the perspective of liquidation into the mass Stalinist and social-democratic parties. In the 1960s Joseph Hansen became the main spokesman of the Pabloite degeneration of the SWP as it abandoned the struggle for an independent proletarian vanguard. But instead of political struggle the Healyites concocted their devil theory that Hansen had been hired by the U.S. government and the Kremlin Stalinists to destroy the SWP.

Declaring themselves to be the Fourth International, Healy’s IC kept up a vicious vendetta against the long-since reformist SWP, including the use of the capitalist courts. This is not the only time they crossed the class line. A secret report (which surfaced as part of the fallout from the Healyites’ spectacular implosion) by an IC Commission to investigate “the corruption of G. Healy” details payoffs that were received for services rendered to a variety of oil-rich Arab despots. This included supplying photographs to the Iraqi embassy of a demonstration of opponents of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq. The report of the IC investigation says that while the “Commission has not vet been able to establish all the facts... a receipt for £1,600 for 16 minutes of documentary footage of a demonstration is in the possession of the Commission.” An indisputable and monstrous fact is that the Healyites hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi Communists by Ba’ath rulers in 1979. Healy’s payoff was blood money!

As the Spring 1988 issue of Solidarity, a British journal of “libertarian socialism” which leaked the secret IC report, notes: “It is certain that the anti-Healy camp know far more about the dirtier aspects of the WRP’s past than they have so far publicly admitted.... These include North, who has resolutely chosen not to make public even the skeletal information we publish....” Of course he hasn’t. Of all Healy’s former lieutenants, North is uniquely the one who clings to the real “heritage” of Healyism – in particular the scandalous “Security and the Fourth International” campaign.

“Counterrevolutionary Through and Through”

But North could well be hoist on his own petard. In The Heritage We Defend he writes that “Trotsky had branded the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘counterrevolutionary through and through’....” One can look through everything Trotsky ever wrote and never find this falsely and stupidly one-sided formulation. On the contrary, as he said in “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933): “Whoever fails to understand th[e] dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has understood nothing.” The formulation “counterrevolutionary through and through” which North embraces was the work of... none other than the devil incarnate of Healyism, the arch-agent himself – Joseph Hansen.

It first issued from the big and unwise mouth of Dave Weiss (D. Stevens) during the 1952-53 fight against the pro-Stalinist liquidators in the Cochran-Clarke faction in the SWP. And it was Hansen who landed the assignment of defending Weiss’ statement. This Hansen did with his usual quite capable vigor, including the amplification that the Kremlin Stalinists were not only “counterrevolutionary through and through” but “to the core” (“What the New York Discussion Has Revealed,” Joseph Hansen, SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 4, February 1953). Indeed Hansen was the biggest exponent, if the number of pages count, of the view North falsely ascribes to Trotsky. Yet who in the Soviet Union could be characterized as “counterrevolutionary through and through”? Only an out-and-out Great Russian fascist, something out of the present-day Pamyat or perhaps a CIA mole in the KGB could fit this bill. But this certainly doesn’t describe the Stalinist bureaucracy. A conservative nationalist caste resting on the proletarian property forms established by the Russian Revolution, the Kremlin bureaucracy is the product of and reflects the contradictions of a bonapartist regime issuing from the degeneration of a workers revolution in a backward country surrounded by imperialism.

In “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937), Trotsky explained:

“The proletariat of the USSR is the ruling class in a backward country where there is still a lack of the most vital necessities of life. The proletariat of the USSR rules in a land consisting of only one-twelfth part of humanity; imperialism rules over the remaining eleven-twelfths. The rule of the proletariat, already maimed by the backwardness and poverty of the country, is doubly and triply deformed under the pressure of world imperialism....

“In its capacity of a transmitting mechanism in this struggle, the bureaucracy leans now on the proletariat against imperialism, now on imperialism against the proletariat, in order to increase its own power. At the same time it mercilessly exploits its role as distributor of the meager necessities of life in order to safeguard its own wellbeing and power. By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism of transmission of the oppression – the bureaucracy.

“If in the words ‘a ruling and at the same time an oppressed class’ there is a contradiction, then it flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very situation of the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the theory of socialism in one country.”

Far from characterizing the bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through,” in the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote that “all shades of political thought are to be found among the bureaucracy: from genuine Bolshevism (Ignace Reiss) to complete fascism (F. Butenko)” The dual nature of the Kremlin oligarchy is fundamental to the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union combined with the call for political revolution to oust the bureaucracy.

Trotsky presented his fullest analysis of the contradictory nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the last political battle of his life, against the repudiation of Soviet defensism by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman/Burnham opposition in the SWP in 1939-40. Even in the context of some of the most heinous counterrevolutionary crimes of the Soviet government – the destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the strangulation of proletarian revolution in Spain by the Kremlin bureaucrats, the beheading of the Red Army – Trotsky never characterized the bureaucracy as “counterrevolutionary through and through.” But Shachtman certainly did.

Defending Baron von Mannerheim’s Finland against Soviet intervention, Shachtman argued that in Poland the Red Army had acted only as a “counterrevolutionary force.” Trotsky, who saw the possibility for a social transformation in Finland coming with the Red Army intervention, pointed to the expropriation of the capitalists and large landowners in Eastern Poland which took place despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state. Against Shachtman he argued:

“the Kremlin with its bureaucratic methods gave an impulse to the socialist revolution in Poland.... This impulse in the direction of socialist revolution was possible only because the bureaucracy of the USSR straddles and has its roots in the economy of a workers state.”

As Trotsky noted, the seizure of Eastern Poland was both “a pledge of the alliance with Hitler” and “a guarantee against Hitler” through the nationalization of semi-feudal and capitalist property. To understand this means understanding real dialectical materialism as opposed to the cynical shell game of “dialectics” employed by the Healyites. For years they were distinguished by obfuscating, idealist lectures on the ever-mystical “dialectic” which nobody could understand – except Healy. Only the self-declared “founder-leader” was meant to understand, just as only he could determine “security” clearances. “Dialectics” and the “Security” slanders were the underpinnings of the Healy cult, designed to keep the membership completely confused and above all intimidated by their omnipotent leaders.

David North: A Joseph Hansen of the Second Mobilization

But just how is it that David North has come to embrace the politics of Joseph Hansen – a man he has reviled as the sinister arch-nemesis of Trotskyism and slandered as the number one agent responsible for the supposed infiltration and takeover of the SWP by the U.S. government? Applying the demonology of Healyism to North himself one can only ask: can he be far behind? Not subscribing to the paranoid conspiracy theories that are the stock-in-trade of Healyism against their opponents, we can trace the political genealogy of Hansen/North’s shared anti-Soviet revisionism back to the source. In his 1953 document “What the New York Discussion Has Revealed,” Hansen proclaims,

“I trace the current differences back to the discussion on Eastern Europe....
First of all, in taking the position that Stalinism had brought about an overturn in property forms in these countries, I raised the question myself as to how this affected our estimate of the political character of Stalinism. My answer was that the power to make such changes did not require us to revise the concept of Stalinism developed by Trotsky. Stalinism still remained counterrevolutionary to the core.”

Leaving aside Hansen’s wrongful attribution to Trotsky the view that the Kremlin bureaucracy was “counterrevolutionary to the core,” his analysis of the differences that developed within the SWP and the Fourth International are quite to the point. The SWP had a very hard time for a couple of years explaining how deformed workers states were created in Eastern Europe. So did the leadership that emerged at the head of the Fourth International in Europe where the most promising cadres had been killed by war and by fascist and Stalinist repression. As we noted in “Genesis of Pabloism” (Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), they were confronted with the question:

“...is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the
victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism.”

Empirical evidence tore a gaping hole through the Trotskyists’ post-WW II attempt at wooden orthodoxy. The impressionistic Pablo simply threw overboard “the old Trotskyism” and declared that the Stalinists could play an “objectively revolutionary” role; his conclusion was deep entrism into the Stalinist and mass reformist parties in Europe. During 1951-53, Pablo’s liquidationism led to the destruction of the Fourth International. The SWP (with Healy in tow) waged a belated and partial fight against Pabloism, splitting out the anti-liquidationist International Committee. But a few years later over the Cuban Revolution the SWP followed suit and Joseph Hansen was the main theoretical apologist. The need for a Trotskyist party was dropped as Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrillas were embraced as the modern-day equivalent of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.

In the name of combatting Pabloite revisionism the Healyites reacted by simply putting a minus where the SWP put a plus. Making a caricature of the sterile, formal “orthodoxy” that had characterized the post-World War II SWP, the Healyites argued that since there was no Trotskyist party in Cuba no social transformation had taken place – in short they stood Pabloism on its head. In contrast the Spartacist delegation to the 1966 conference of Healy’s international Committee argued:

“...the petty-bourgeois peasantry under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable could achieve no third road, neither capitalist, nor working class. Instead all that has come out of China and Cuba was a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counter-revolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the degeneration of the October. That is why we are led to define states such as these as deformed workers states. And the experience since the Second World War, properly understood, offers not a basis for revisionist turning away from the perspective and necessity of revolutionary working-class power, but rather it is a great vindication of Marxian theory and conclusions under new and not previously expected circumstances.”
– ”Spartacist Statement to International Conference,” Spartacist No. 6, June-July 1966

The Healyites’ opposition to the SWP over the Cuban Revolution had little to do with fighting the Pabloist liquidation of Trotskyism. In fact Healy’s line was that the Fourth International had been rebuilt, the International Committee was it, and Pabloism was simply proto-Stalinism. In contrast the Spartacist delegation to Healy’s 1966 IC conference argued that the actual reconstruction of the Fourth International could only he achieved through completely rooting out this revisionism: “Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites: the impact of events alone, no matter how favorable objectively or devastating to revisionist doctrines, will not do the job.” As we pointed out: “The ‘orthodox’ movement has still to face up to the new theoretical problems which rendered it susceptible to Pabloism in 1943-50 and gave rise to a ragged, partial split in 1952-54.” This was borne out in the Healyites’ embrace of various “Third World” Stalinists like Ho Chi Minh and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.”

For daring to raise our political differences openly in 1966, we were denounced by Healy as petty-bourgeois American chauvinists, and expelled for refusing to confess to the charge. False confessions were a matter of “discipline” in the political cult of the megalomaniac Gerry Healy, the man whose shoes David North is desperate to fill. Almost two decades later Healy himself was ousted amidst lurid charges of moral turpitude leveled by his former lieutenants. In an interview “On the 1966 Split” in Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) covering the subsequent rather spectacular implosion of Healy’s British Workers Revolutionary Party, comrade James Robertson commented:

“...we have some stuff to say now, because we were the principled people the whole way. And I would suggest that the main reason is not some morality associated with Americans versus English persons, but that over a long period of time, through many fights, through one tendency after another, we stood concretely for the defense of the Soviet Union, against imperialism, and against the damn Russian bureaucracy. That has in fact been our political compass, and it also generates a certain cultural superstructure and a certain morality.”

The “Principles” of Political Bandits

The Healyites had no such compass. Despite their inverted Pabloism over Cuba, denying that a social revolution ever took place, Healy’s International Committee had a perfectly Pabloite tailist line toward the Vietnamese Stalinists and went on to herald Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” It was their support to the mythical “Arab Revolution” in 1967 that provided the theoretical preparation for their various forays across the class line, some of which have come home to haunt them. And it was under the cover of “anti-Stalinism” that the Healyites hailed the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’athist regime.

While they lined their pockets with Arab gold and availed themselves of the forces of the bourgeois state against leftist political opponents, the Healyites would still invoke Leninist “orthodoxy” when it suited their purposes. Last year saw North screaming foul at the SWP for using the capitalist courts against the workers movement, to wit wing the Workers League for costs in North’s years-long court suit against the SWP (see “David North and the Law,” WV No. 430, 12 June 1987). More recently, witness the 1988 “Election Manifesto” of the Workers League’s candidates for president and vice president. The call to “establish the political independence of the American working class from the capitalist class” is rather remarkable from an organization which continues to drag leftists through the bosses’ courts.

The WL’s election manifesto also demands that “The working class must defend the Soviet Union.” But repeatedly over the past two decades North’s Workers League has taken the side of virulently anti-Soviet forces – with Khomeini’s mullahs in Iran, with the CIA’s company union Solidarność in Poland, with U.S. imperialism’s Islamic cutthroats in Afghanistan. To cover for their anti-Sovietism the WL has invented a global conspiracy between Washington and Moscow. Or rather they borrowed it from Pierre Lambert Healy’s one-time bloc partner, who regularly vituperates against a “counterrevolutionary Holy Alliance, sealed a Yalta,” supposedly uniting the White House and the Kremlin. They just leave out the Cold War, and for a reason.

“Down with Imperialism and Stalinism! Unite Soviet and American Workers” was the front-page headline of “Workers League Political Committee Statement” in the 27 May Bulletin. This slogan, equating the bureaucratic misleaders of the degenerated/deformed workers states with the capitalist class enemy, comes straight out of Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste. “Long live the struggle of the youth against the Stalinist bureaucracy and imperialism!” was the clarion call for the Lambertistes’ 1971 Essen Conference. The OCI’s Stalinophobia led straight into the camp of the most right wing Cold War social democrats. For example, several dozen of the OCI members, including Lambert himself served as paid functionaries of the French social-democratic union Force Ouvrière, which has been linked to the notorious CIA operative Irving Brown going back to 1947.

Applied to the U.S. the Northites’ resurrection of this slogan leads straight to the State Department “socialism” of Norman Thomas and Max Shachtman in his later years. The Bulletin writes that “Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) are the road to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the transformation of Stalinist bureaucrats into capitalists.” Evidently, for the Northites, no counterrevolution to overthrow the remaining gains of the October Revolution would be required, just a cold transformation of the Soviet degenerated workers state into a capitalist state imposed from the top. As Trotsky argued, this is to run the film of reformism in reverse, positing a peaceful transition from a workers state to capitalism.

The Northites’ “analysis” of where Gorbachev’s Russia is going is unmitigated Third Campism, which parenthetically is a quintessential expression of petty-bourgeois American chauvinism – the charge which Healy came up with and North continues to trumpet against the Spartacist League. North’s view is reality seen through the prism and under the pressure of U.S. imperialism. As Trotsky argued against Shachtman and Burnham in “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party”:

“A vulgar petty-bourgeois radical is similar to a liberal ‘progressive’ in that he takes the USSR as a whole, failing to understand its internal contradictions and dynamics. When Stalin concluded an alliance with Hitler, invaded Poland, and now Finland, the vulgar radicals triumphed; the identity of the methods of Stalinism and fascism was proved! They found themselves in difficulties however when the new authorities invited the population to expropriate the landowners and capitalists - they had not foreseen this possibility at all!”
– L. D. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism

Healy and North also charged the Spartacist League with ‘being “agents” of Joseph Hansen because we were among the first to protest Healy’s despicable “Security and the Fourth International” slanders. In protest demonstrations outside Workers League meetings we defended Hansen as “an honest revisionist.” That’s more than we can say for North and his gang who have grievously crossed the class line so many times that who, what or where they are is forever a subject for debate.

We waged a relentless political struggle against Hansen’s anti-Trotskyist revisionism. Healy could never have done so because it would mean confronting his own politics. So he “explained” the SWP’s degeneration by slandering Hansen as a government agent who was hired to infiltrate and destroy the SWP. Yet here is North peddling Hansen’s “counterrevolutionary through and through” line. Any of the WL leader’s acolytes who accept the demented logic of his “Security” scam ought to be asking some nervous questions. How did it happen? Did Hansen secretly recruit North? And who will the next “great leader” be?

Consider the fate of North’s former lideres máximos. Yesterday’s self-declared “founder-leader” Gerry Healy is today’s KGB agent, according to the Bulletin. In North’s eyes, every one of Healy’s lieutenants (except North him self, of course) has become a demoralized renegade - from Banda to Cliff Slaughter, the longtime “theoretical” mouthpiece for Healyite crimes, who now admits that the “Security” slanders were a fraud. And let’s not forget Tim Wohlforth, Healy’s former hapless American toady, who warmed the seat North now occupies at the head of the Workers League. Wohlforth was axed amidst allegations of CIA connections through the family of his girlfriend Nancy Fields. Actually, to say he was axed is unfair to the real character of Wohlforth-he even voted for his own expulsion. Truly the son of “the god that failed,” in 1981 Wohlforth resurfaced in the pages of New Left Review in the role of saved-again social democrat denouncing Soviet totalitarianism.

Stalin never claimed that all the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the October Revolution were counterrevolutionary spies and traitors. Exempted were Lenin, a few who died early and a couple who lucked out and died a natural death at old age. David North, the new boy of the IC leadership, declares that every well-known leader of the British Healyites (SLL/WRP), and not least the leading American satellite, Wohlforth, are degenerate if not deeply flawed or downright wrong from the beginning. Thus North claims that he is the legitimate heir to what? At least Stalin, by hiding Lenin’s break with him, could claim the great Lenin. Moreover, Stalin could cite himself as an “Old Bolshevik.” But North, until the final implosion of the WRP, was a self-confessed toady to the “great” Gerry Healy and the heir to Tim Wolhforth.

Only someone who wanted to be “the leader,” no matter of what, would be so desperate to claim the heritage of authentic Healyism. To any rational elements in North’s WL and IC we can only say: Your organization is rotten through and through and to the core! North is attempting to secure his position at the head of an organization with a heritage of corrupt links with various murderous Arab colonels and sheiks. That this is not a suitable vehicle for the socialist liberation of mankind is a vast understatement.