D. North's “Left” McCarthyism (1998)

Workers Vanguard No. 702, 4 December 1998

David North’s “Left” McCarthyism

It's not often that the New York Times, liberal mouthpiece mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, deems letters from ostensible socialists “fit to print.” But the Times (22 October) clearly saw some value in publishing a missive by David North of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP, formerly Workers League). Having ceased publication of his fake-Marxist International Workers Bulletin last year in favor of a pseudo-academic Web site, the national secretary of the now organless SEP descended from cyberspace to engage in polite “debate” with professional anti-Communist Ronald Radosh. Radosh has made a career out of retrying, reconvicting and re-executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as “Soviet spies” in 1953 in an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic witchhunt.

In commenting on a Times (18 October) “Week in Review” piece titled “Rethinking McCarthyism, if Not McCarthy” which cited Radosh, North whines: “Mr. Radosh’s assertion that the debacle of the American Communist Party has discredited the entire Socialist movement is indefensible.” North begs to set the record straight: “In fact, before the cold war, anti-Stalinism was associated principally with the Socialist left — above all with Trotskyists. Long before anti-Stalinism became fashionable among liberals, who had previously embraced ‘popular front’ alliances with the Communist Party, left-wing anti-Stalinists had insisted that the Kremlin’s policies had nothing in common with Marxism or with the Socialist program.”

And North’s SEP has nothing in common with Trotskyism — the Marxism of our time. “With the approval of North,” the SEP Web site assures us, his letter was abridged by the Times to omit even passing references to anti-Communism or the October Revolution of 1917. But even the unabridged version does not so much as hint at the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union when it existed — nor, to be sure, of the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) today — against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. Nor does North raise a finger in defense of the heroic Rosenbergs in the face of Radosh’s calumnies. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Radosh replied to North in ever so polite terms that McCarthy “gave a bad name to the very legitimate cause of anti-Communism” (New York Times, 24 October). In fact, this aptly captures North’s own view.

North falsely amalgamates revolutionary Trotskyism with that wing of the “socialist movement” which opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and supported its “own” imperialist rulers in World Wars I and II, as well as with the liberals who were the left wing of the post-WWII anti-Communist crusade. He reduces Trotskyism to an anti-Soviet loyalty oath. Polemicizing against North’s forebears in a 1947 article titled “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism,” James P. Cannon, leader of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), wrote at the onset of the Cold War witchhunt:

“We Trotskyists, as everybody knows, are also against Stalinism and have fought it unceasingly and consistently for a very long time. But we have no place in the present ‘all-inclusive’ united front against American Stalinism. The reason for this is that we are anticapitalist. Consequently, we can find no point of agreement with the campaign conducted by the political representative of American capitalism in Washington, with the support of its agents in the labor movement and its lackeys in the literary and academic world. We fight Stalinism from a different standpoint.
“We fight Stalinism not because it is another name for communism, but precisely because of its betrayal of communism and of the interests of the workers in the class struggle.”
— Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century (1977)

As Cannon pointed out, the Stalinists paved the way for their own isolation during the red purge by their class betrayals — in league with the social democrats — in the service of U.S. imperialism, from support to Democrat Roosevelt’s “New Deal” coalition in the 1930s to the wartime no-strike pledge. But while fighting for proletarian political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy and politically combating the Stalinist syphilis in the labor movement, the Trotskyists rallied to the defense of Stalinist and other militants driven out of the trade unions (of which not a word in North’s letter) by “left-wing anti-Stalinists” like Walter Reuther. The SWP denounced the murder of the Rosenbergs as “a bestial act of capitalist class terrorism intended to help intimidate into silence all who would criticize or oppose Wall Street’s policies abroad or at home.”

The heritage North defends is not that of Trotskyism, which was embodied through the 1950s in the now-reformist SWP, but of anti-Communist renegades like Irving Howe and George Orwell, who spied for His Majesty’s secret service against “Soviet totalitarianism.” During the 1980s Cold War against the Soviet Union, North’s outfit was on the same side as social-democratic witch-hunters like Radosh — cheering CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, marching lockstep toward capitalist counterrevolution with clerical-nationalist Solidarność in Poland, enthusiastically promoting the fascist-infested Sajudis in Lithuania and the rest of the reactionary Baltic “captive nations” trash.

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The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class.
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North was schooled in the political banditry of Gerry Healy’s International Committee (IC). In 1979, North joined Healy in hailing the execution of 21 members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the bourgeois-nationalist Ba’ath regime, while Healy’s outfit spied on Iraqi oppositionists in Britain. When the flow of petrodollars from various Arab regimes for services rendered dried up, Healy’s outfit imploded and North modestly proclaimed himself leader of the international proletariat.

Shortly before that, in 1983, the IC whipped up an anti-Communist furor against British miners leader Arthur Scargill over his correct denunciation of Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist.” This crusade, picked up by the capitalist media and right-wing labor misleaders, was aimed at isolating the miners union on the eve of a bitter strike against the Coal Board and the government of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, North & Co. wrote off the trade-union movement as a whole as a tool of bourgeois rule, while extolling scabs as those who have the insight to recognize the “futility” of union struggles.

North’s own witchhunting credentials are impeccable. Beginning in the mid1970s, he devoted over a decade to the crazed “Security and the Fourth International” campaign launched by the corrupt, thuggish and megalomaniacal Healy with the aim of smearing the SWP leadership (primarily Joseph Hansen) with supposed complicity in Trotsky’s assassination by Stalinist agents in 1940. In the 1980s, North’s outfit virtually prepared the prosecution brief which resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of SWP trade unionist Mark Curtis on frame-up rape charges. Meanwhile, the “Socialist Equality” Party spits on the fight against the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals and national minorities.

The McCarthyite witchhunt was aimed at preparing the country for war against the Soviet Union and driving the reds out of the unions. The “anti-Stalinist” social democrats embraced by North shared that aim but opposed McCarthy for going “too far” by targeting Cold War liberals as well… It is notable that Radosh’s hatchet job, The Rosenberg File (co-authored by Joyce Milton), was published in the early 1980s to facilitate a new Red Hunt as U.S. imperialism again geared up for war against the Soviet Union (see “Cold War Rad-Libs Embrace FBI Frame-Up: They’re Trying to Kill the Rosen bergs All Over Again,” WV No. 340, 21 October 1983). It is also notable that North’s Workers League never appeared on the FBI’s ADEX list of organizations — including the SL and a range of other groups — to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.”

The current grotesque “rehabilitation “ of McCarthyism, seizing on CIA “revelations” that those who were witchhunted and murdered got what they deserved because they were indeed “Soviet spies,” is part of an all-sided attempt to again demonize communism. Even as the bourgeoisie and its mouthpieces proclaim that “Marxism is dead,” they seek to warn off militant workers and radicalized youth from revolutionary politics, aware that the growing gap between the rich and poor and the other enormous contradictions in this society have created seething discontents and are leading to a revival of labor militancy.

The kind of respectability North now craves can only come to those who did their bit in aiding the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, a historic defeat for the world’s working class. As Leninists, one of our primary responsibilities is to expose especially the “left” (should North remain so positioned) opponents of proletarian revolution, who today join in seeking to bury the legacy of the October Resolution under a mountain of lies while rehabilitating the bloodsoaked imperialist world order. Indeed, a rapprochement between North and Radosh might well be possible — perhaps even a new joint Web site, “godthatfailed.anticom”.

"Socialist" Apologist for Scabbing (1996)

Workers Vanguard No. 637, 19 January 1996

David North, “Socialist” Apoologist for Scabbing

Four years ago, the organization known as the Workers League, led by one David North, decided to write off the trade unions, saying “to define the AFL-CIO as a working class organization is to blind the working class” (Bulletin, 10 January 1992; see “Workers League vs. the Unions,” WV No. 580, 16 July 1993). Now, in the context of the defeated 17-month-long Caterpillar strike and the four-month battle by Liverpool dockers against union-busting, North & Co. have taken this formulation out of the realm of theory and shown it for what it really is: an open prescription for strikebreaking.

Early last month, as dock workers unions from North America to Australia announced their refusal to handle ships loaded in Liverpool by scabs, North’s followers in the British International Communist Party (ICP) wrote a scurrilous article, “Dockers Must Reject Fake Internationalism” (International Worker, 2 December 1995), calling this basic declaration of solidarity a “fraud.” Yet some two weeks later, American trade unionists of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) turned back a scab Atlantic Container Lines ship from three U.S. ports by honoring picket lines put up by dock workers who had flown in from Liverpool, giving a huge boost to their strike.

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North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.
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As a cover for their anti-internationalist, anti-working-class line, the Northites point to the ILA’s “history of working with the U.S. State Department and CIA backed operations abroad.” This is pretty cheeky coming from these political bandits, who took up the cause of every imperialist-backed anti-Soviet movement from the Lithuanian nationalists to the bloodthirsty Afghan mujahedin reactionaries. North’s Workers League spent decades crudely fawning after the anticommunist labor tops, calling on the likes of George Meany to form a “labor party.” Now, when the world’s capitalist rulers are escalating their war against the unions, the poor and immigrants following the destruction of the Soviet Union, North’s followers tell workers that any struggle by the trade unions against these attacks is useless.

The link between the Northites’ current anti-labor line and their historic anti-Sovietism was captured in a recent appeal by ICP National Secretary David Hyland to the deeply reformist Militant Labour group for a “mass socialist party,” Openly calling to “destroy the influence and control of the old unions,” Hyland offers as proof that any “trade union perspective” is bankrupt… “the example of Solidarność in Poland” (IWE, 11 September 1995). Solidarność, in fact, was a counterrevolutionary political movement masquerading as a “union” on behalf of its CIA and Vatican bankrollers, which was cheered by the Northites as it organized Polish workers behind a program of capitalist restoration.

Never ones to differentiate the trade unions from the pro-capitalist bureaucracy that keeps them chained to the exploiters and their state, North & Co. have now become lawyers for scabbing. Reporting on the Caterpillar UAW strike, which was betrayed outright by the UAW bureaucracy, their American newspaper writes, “UAW officials have attempted to absolve themselves of blame for whar has happened by diverting the anger of strikers towards the ‘scabs,’ i.e., those union members who decided to cross picket lines” (International Workers Bulletin, 18 December 1995). Putting quotation marks around “scab” is no slip. In fact, the article justifies scabbing, claiming that “the large majority of the 4,000 union members who returned to work were not right-wing or anti-union. Most simply recognized the futility of the policies being pursued by the UAW, which had, after all, abandoned the previous strike.” Now that corporations are shelling out billions every year to hire union-busting law firms and private police, are the Northites offering themselves as PR agents for the growing army of strikebreakers?

The “hot-cargoing” of scab shipping by dockers internationally is an example of the kind of genuine solidarity in action which can fortify the unions against the worldwide capitalist offensive. Our perspective is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement as part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. This requires a hard political struggle to drive out the sellout bureaucracy — the “labor lieutenants” of the bosses — that is undermining and destroying the unions. That fight must also be waged against scab “socialists” like the Northites, who spit on the best traditions of working-class struggle as they stand on the side of the capitalist union-busters.

Workers League vs. the Unions (1993)

Workers Vanguard No. 571, 12 February 1993

Workers League vs. the Unions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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