Qaddafi, Billy Carter, Healy (1979)

Workers Vanguard No. 231 (11 May 1979)

Qaddafi, Billy Carter, Healy, Idi Amin

Who’s Behind WL Provocations Against Spartacist?

“Q: What Do Idi Amin, Billy Carter and Gerry Healy have in Common?
“A: The Qaddafi Connection!”

On May 6 trade unionists and supporters of the Spartacist League demonstrated at the Hotel Taft in New York City and the Alameda County Labor Temple in Oakland, California against new provocations against workers democracy by the notorious Workers League (WL), American cohorts of the British-based “International Committee” (IC) of Gerry Healy/Mike Banda. Once a claimant to the mantle of “anti-revisionist Trotskyism,” the Healyite WL/IC has in recent years placed itself in the service of Muammar Qaddafi, megalomaniacal strongman of Libya, utilizing on behalf of its patron the characteristic “method” of the Healyite political bandits – gangsterism and slander.

Demanding “Defend Workers Democracy Against WL Provocation!” the militant demonstrators outside the WL’s May 6 meetings (called ostensibly in celebration of May Day) were replying to a pathological smear article in the WL's yellow journalism Bulletin (1 May) entitled “The Spartacist League: Provocateurs Against Trotskyism and the Iranian Revolution.” This I2-column tirade was the Healyites’ frenzied reaction to the SL's exposure of the WL/IC’s press agentry on behalf of its oil-rich Libyan patron. Last issue, WV had excoriated Healy/Banda for their efforts to justify the bloody suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party at the hands of the Qaddafi-allied bourgeois-nationalist Ba'ath regime (see “Healyites: Kill a Commie for Qaddafi,” WV No. 230, 27 April). Also goading the Healyites to new paroxysms of slander was the SL’s political offensive against Qaddafi’s pal Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, highlighted by the widely publicized tour by Fatima Khalil, the Near Eastern communist who spoke in eight cities on “No to the Veil! For Workers Revolution Against Islamic Reaction!”

Hoping to egg on the Muslim fundamentalists who have mounted physical assaults on Spartacist forums several times over the past few months, the Bulletin takes the SL’s Trotskyist line on Iran as the excuse for a new orgy of cop-baiting slander:

“[The Iranian revolution] has earned the hatred of the CIA, the U.S. corporations, the military and the entire Carter administration. Nowhere is this hatred expressed more viciously however, than in the pages of the revisionist press The Militant, published by the Socialist Workers Party [SWP], and Workers Vanguard of the Spartacist group.

“Utterly degenerate both politically and morally, it may be said without exaggeration that these groups represent not so much a political tendency within the workers movement, as an out-and-out provocation against the entire working class.

“Upon reading the articles on the Iranian Revolution in both of their newspapers, one cannot help but wonder aloud, In what police academies did these writers complete their educations?...

"If the antics of the Spartacist were directly orchestrated by the FBI and CIA, they could not be more provocative. And, in fact, there is every reason to believe that they are....

“[SL national chairman] James Robertson, an unmitigated degenerate....”

These vile slanders are intended to provide a “political” cover for physical gangsterism against the SL, befitting the Qaddafi henchmen who applauded the Iraqi colonels’ execution of Communist militants and who now endorse Khomeini’s butchery of Kurdish nationalists in the name of preserving the territorial integrity of “Iran, Iraq and Syria, all centers of anti-imperialist revolutionary activity.” These tools of the capitalist Arab dictators – the worst enemies of the Arab working masses – will stop at nothing to still the voice of authentic Trotskyism.

Lynn Marcus, Gerry Healy – Brothers Under the Skin

Of course, cop-baiting is nothing new for the Healyites, who slandered the SL as “the fingerman for the world capitalist class” as early as 1966. But the Bulletin article represents the full flowering of Healyite paranoia to an extent reminiscent of ex-leftist cultist Lynn Marcus:

“[The SL] is a small sect that was set up by the late Joseph Hansen, the proven FBI agent who for many years ran the Socialist Workers Party, for the specific purpose of organizing provocations against the International Committee of the Fourth International and, in the United States, against the Workers League.

“The activities of Spartacist are intimately bound up with the massive infiltration of the SWP by FBI agents. For many years, Hansen and other FBI agents within the top leadership of the SWP used Spartacist to carry out those sordid political operations with which they preferred not to be associated publicly.

“It must also be said, that if the Spartacists did not exist, the Stalinists of the Communist Party would have had to invent them. Indeed, because of the history of the infiltration of the revisionist movements by the Soviet secret police as well as the FBI, it is not unlikely that the Stalinists did have a hand in the birth of this diseased organization....”

The present slanders thus carry forward the scurrilous campaign to smear Hansen as an “accomplice” of the Stalinist secret police in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky. This slander campaign, ludicrously dubbed “Security and the Fourth International,” has constituted the WL/IC's main activity for four years. The SL replied to these provocations with demonstrations demanding “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”

To support this grotesque paranoid schema, the Bulletin must now create the SWP’s Iran line out of whole cloth. As everyone knows, the SWP has enthused over Khomeini’s reactionary clericalist regime in Iran with only the most perfunctory finger-wagging when the mullahs sought to reimpose the veil and suppress the national minorities. Only the WL/IC can justly claim to be more vulgarly nationalist, more slavishly pro-Khomeini, more programmatically reactionary than the reformist SWP.

And no wonder. The SWP’s pro-mullah capitulation represents mere opportunism; that of the WL/IC is dictated by its sinister ties to Qaddafi. Like the Stalinists whose political line is an apology for the foreign policies of the Sino-Soviet bureaucracies, the WL/IC takes its cues from the Libyan government – with one significant difference: the regimes the Stalinists seek to defend through suicidal “peaceful coexistence” are deformed workers states; the Healyite homeland is a theocratic, militarist, capitalist dictatorship.

The Shoe Fits You, Gerry!

The May 6 SL protest demonstrations reaffirmed the SL’s commitment to defend workers democracy for all tendencies in the workers movement, not only the SWP and the Stalinists but also ourselves. The chants and slogans included:

• What Keeps Billy Carter Out of the Workers League?
• WL Cheers as Iraqi Ba'athists Murder Communists
• Khomeini Attacks ‘Satanic Marxism’ – WL Hails Khomeini
• Lynn Marcus and Gerry Healy: Brothers Under the Skin?
• Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi
• Gangsterism and Slander – Hallmark of Provocateurs
• For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

At both demonstrations the picketers far outnumbered the WL supporters and easily rebuffed the WL’s attempts to provoke violence.

The WL/IC cop-baiting succeeds only in demonstrating how well the shoe fits them. Organizationally, their “method” of gangsterism and slander has long since been an open invitation to provocateurs. Politically, they sold their soul to the bourgeois “Arab Revolution” so many years ago that when it came time to auction off the stinking body, only the wretched Qaddafi was bidding. It seems likely that the present Bulletin attack was “made in U.S.A.” (or in London) rather than in the Libyan embassy, but it’s getting harder and harder to tell.

Fake-Trotskyist Family Reunion (1977)

Workers Vanguard 141 (21 January 1977)

Opposing Healy Slanders, Suppressing Workers Democracy

London Meeting: Fake-Trotskyist Family Reunion

At a London meeting attended by some 1,500 people last Friday, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Lambert, Michel Pablo and representatives of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were to have shared the same platform for the first time in over 25 years. Behind the speakers was a banner proclaiming, “For Workers Democracy – Against Frame-Ups and Slanders,” and the ostensible purpose of this reunion of renegades from Trotskyism was to condemn the outrageous accusation by Gerry Healy that SWP leaders Joe Hansen and George Novack were “accomplices of the GPU” in Stalin’s 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky.

To be sure, Healy’s disgusting slanders deserve nothing but utter contempt from revolutionists as they are manifestly absurd and groundless, and, moreover, serve to fuel the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was murdered by “one of his own.” But the main purpose of the meeting's organizers lay elsewhere. Planned at an October 1976 session of the “United” Secretariat (USec), at the same time as an abortive pact was worked out between the USec and the French OCI (see “No Tango in Paris,” WV No. 137, 10 December 1976), Friday’s meeting provided a forum for the chieftains of the squabbling factions of competing revisionists masquerading as Trotskyists to publicly bury the hatchet.

Much of the meeting was an orgy of indignation against Healy and his Stalinist practices, from gangster attacks against other leftists to pernicious cop-baiting and character assassination. Healy richly deserves the harshest condemnation for his venomous slanders and thuggery, but the ex-Trotskyist dignitaries who use his travesty of anti-revisionism to justify their own maneuvers have little to boast about as partisans of workers democracy.

Starring in the role of “saved” sinner and prodigal son was former Healy lackey Tim Wohlforth. After a dozen years as servile Gauleiter of American Healyism, Wohlforth was blackjacked by his master (and perforce accused of harboring a suspected “CIA agent”).

Wohlforth, now a book reviewer for the SWP’s Militant, appealed for sympathy because of the trials and tribulations he and his companion Nancy Fields faced after being dumped by Healy (“no one knocked on our door”). In the, process he inadvertently revealed his own moral cowardice and total unfitness to be a revolutionary leader. According to Wohlforth, “the hardest thing that I ever said in my life” was to get up in a meeting with Healy and say that he “disagreed with the proceedings.” But this “disagreement” was not sufficient to prevent him from voting (“against my convictions”) for his own removal as head of the Workers League. By his own testimony, then, Wohlforth demonstrates that he would have stood in the front ranks of the capitulators to Stalin in the 1920's. If he cannot stand up to Healy's blustering, how could he have resisted the onslaught of Stalin, who had the full resources of state power at his command, or the pressures exerted by the bourgeoisie?

You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours

In the chummy atmosphere of a family reunion, the meeting also celebrated the “growth and vitality of the Fourth International.” Mandel put it most clearly: the meeting was not called to refute Healy's vile frame-up, but “to defend the Fourth International through our solidarity with comrade Hansen and comrade Novack... because it needs defending.”

The intervention by Lambert of the OCI – by far the most political of the evening – gently chided the USec majority for refusing to discuss with the OCI so long as the latter refused to characterize the Mandelites as “revolutionaries” (after all, he pointed out, terms such as “centrist” are a legitimate part of political debate among ostensible Marxists). But at the same time he abandoned the OCI's anti-Pabloist tradition and accepted the USec's ultimatum by several times pointedly referring to this gang of revisionists as “the Fourth International.”

Lambert went out of his way to imply that the OCI had never considered the Socialist Workers Party as anything but revolutionary. He claimed that in 1963 when Healy characterized the SWP as centrist the OCI had rejected this label. This bald assertion cannot alter the fact that during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the OCI referred to the SWP as “revisionist.” Moreover, in 1962 Healy had split the Revolutionary Tendency (RT – predecessor of the Spartacist League/U.S.) of the SWP when the RT majority refused to sign his dictated statement avowing that the SWP was revolutionary and not centrist.

Mandel in his closing speech returned Lambert’s compliment, stating that he must “give credit where credit is due” and praising the OCI for having played “an excellent, excellent leading role" in the campaign to free Leonid Plyushch and to defend other left dissidents in the Soviet Union. Referring to the liberation of Plyushch last February, Mandel assimilated the OCI to the USec by triumphantly proclaiming, “we got him out.”

Michel Pablo, the dean of anti-Trotskyist revisionism, did not show up, no doubt to the secret relief of Mandel and Lambert, since Pablo no longer maintains any pretense of Trotskyism or adherence to the Fourth International and might therefore give the game away. His message read at the meeting was in many ways the frankest of all He disparagingly, referred to “this nasty quarrel” which was “symptomatic of a certain ideological decomposition in the movement of epigones, who have not succeeded in linking themselves up seriously with the natural movement of the class.” But after denouncing the “exacerbated sectarianism of the sects,” in the spirit of the evening he went on to propose “our common task” which was to “search with the utmost determination for what can unite us and not divide ourselves.” All that was necessary, said Pablo, was a “common program which corresponds to the current necessities.”

The speakers wholeheartedly took up Pablo’s admonition. Lambert declared that he didn’t wish to discuss “who was correct” in 1953, when Pablo caused the split and destruction of the Fourth International with his liquidationist program of “deep entrism” in the Stalinist and social democratic mass reformist parties. Mandel, recalling Pablo’s 1950s talk of a “new world reality” in which the Stalinists could no longer betray, discerned that “Eurocommunism” has introduced “new and tremendously vulnerable elements of division into world stalinism,” which can have “fairly big effects in favor of Trotskyism.” He therefore proposed that “all comrades present here, of all different tendencies, factions and organizations," undertake a “common political campaign” to “ask” the European Stalinists to “immediately, openly and publicly rehabilitate all the victims of Stalin, all the victims of the Moscow trials,” and to call on the Spanish Communist Party to expel Trotsky’s assassin! After all, “it can’t hurt to ask”!

Following hard on the USec's prostration before a new wave of popular-frontism in Europe and Latin America, Mandel is proposing a “broad front” of the “family of Trotskyism” to fight “what remains [his emphasis] of the poison of Stalinism today in the working class movement, in the Communist parties and the trade-union organizations” in Europe. As the Stalinists seek to prove their reliability to the imperialist bourgeoisies, in classic Pabloist fashion Mandel capitulates to their talk of classless “democracy” rather than exposing its pro-capitalist essence. Is he preparing for entrism in the “Eurocommunist” parties?

Workers Democracy or Bureaucratic Suppression?

Any remaining doubts concerning the real purpose of the meeting were dispelled after the scheduled speakers had finished. As chairman Tariq Ali was announcing the end of the proceedings, Gerry Healy rose from the audience and demanded speaking time to answer the chorus of attackers. All serious defenders of workers democracy – purportedly the central theme of the meeting – would have wanted Healy to speak, but Ali, with the practised sleight-of-hand of union bureaucrats and shell game operators, called for an immediate vote amidst the uproar, then declared that “workers democracy” had upheld him.

As Healy continued to protest, with considerable support among the audience, the chair demagogically silenced him by bursting into the Internationale to close the meeting.

This outrageous violation of elementary workers democracy – at a meeting allegedly called precisely in order to defend it – again exposes the USec's rotten bureaucratic maneuvers. Moreover, it is only because the decomposition of the “United” Secretariat has reached such a point that it barely exists that this meeting was held at all. Today Mandel and Lambert exchange compliments on the podium and defend the integrity of Hansen and Novack; but when the SWP first sought statements denouncing Healy's slanders a year and a half ago, it took Mandel & Co. quite a while before coming up with a statement.

None of the organizers of this meeting are true defenders of workers democracy or of the Fourth International. The OCI systematically uses thug violence against its ostensibly Trotskyist opponents on the left. Pablo and his acolytes (today the Mandelite USec majority) refused to defend the Chinese Trotskyists jailed by Mao in 1949-51, slandering them as “refugees from a revolution” for their courageous defense of proletarian democracy against the bureaucratic Stalinist regime. As for the SWP, it responded to Castro's jailing of the Cuban Trotskyists by remarking, in the words of Barry Sheppard, now SWP national secretary, “There are Trotskyists and there are Trotskyists. But if I were in Cuba, I wouldn't be arrested.”

While the USec and OCI use Healy's despicable slanders as a convenient excuse for a reunion of the “family” of ex-Trotskyists, the international Spartacist tendency insisted that a genuine and principled programmatic regroupment of authentic Trotskyists can come about only through hard, open debate. A leaflet distributed at the meeting by the London Spartacist Group – cosigned by the iSt, the Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria of Chile and the Trotskyist Faction (expelled) of the German Spartacusbund – pointed out that “The real political issues which place all these squabbling, slander-mongering, violence-prone elements at one pole and the iSt at the other are currently posed by two decisive considerations: the popular front and the Fourth International.”

Exposing the speakers’ false pretensions to defending workers democracy, the leaflet explained that behind this lay their capitulation to reformist programs of class collaboration. It concluded, “without the struggle to create a programatically united and disciplined Fourth International the workers are left to wander into the new traps of capital... with the assistance of their revisionist would-be ‘leaders’.” Forward to the rebirth of the Fourth International!

WL Goon Assault Backfires (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 137 (10 December 1976)

Workers Democracy Defended in Los Angeles

WL Goon Assault Backfires

LOS ANGELES, December 4 - Spartacist League reporters and salesmen were wantonly attacked today by club-wielding Workers Leaguers outside the WL's poorly attended “Fifth Anniversary Conference and Disco” held at the Twilight Zone Bar in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles. The WL's Healyite goons were courageously repulsed by defenders of workers democracy. Finally the frustrated WLers took refuge behind the “protecting” mantle of the racist L.A. cops.

The incident began as SL supporters outside the bar were selling WV and Australasian Spartacist detailing Healyite thug attacks on Spartacists and other leftists in Australia (see WV No. 134, 19 November). Anticipating possible trouble from the notorious political bandits of the WL, who have repeatedly provoked similar confrontations in L.A. and elsewhere, the WV salesmen were accompanied by SLers and others who support the right of working-class tendencies to distribute their literature and who oppose thug violence within the workers movement.

Shouting “we don't want your cameras here,” a frenzied WL goon lunged at a WV photographer. Then a gang of WL thugs brandishing wooden clubs and jagged broken pool cues attempted unsuccessfully to assault the photographer. After a brief scuffle during which a plate glass door was broken, the Healyite goons were repulsed and retreated into the bar. The SL supporters resumed selling their literature. Then “somebody” called the cops. Four squad cars arrived, accompanied by a police helicopter overhead. Recent WL congressional candidate Sheila Leburg brazenly accused the SL of attempting to “disrupt” the meeting.

Not even hiding behind the cops can the WL shield itself from the revolutionary criticism of the Spartacist League. Working-class militants must continue to instruct the WL hooligans in the principle of workers democracy. Stalin-style gangsterism and attempts to suppress the expression of political views must be expunged from the workers movement!