Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 158 (20 May 1977)

Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi

Something stinks in News Line, daily garbage organ of the British Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) -and it's not simply that it continues these political bandits’ unsavory record of sectarianism, Stalinist gangsterism and egregious opportunism. Ever since News Line’s inception on May 1976, it has been a mouthpiece for the megalomaniacal ravings and “people's democracy” pretensions of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Month after month articles in News Line have lauded the dictator in weirdly shameless fashion, hailing his “agricultural revolution,” his support to the “Arab Revolution,” detailing his every attack on the “high treason” of Egypt's Anwar Sadat, and so forth.

Thus a brief article in the 26 February News Line hailed the London publication of the Libyan strongman's Green Book as “an uncompromising rejection of parliamentary democracy in favour of ‘the authority of the people’.” Two Labour MP's who pushed the book were taken to task for giving it “a patronizing send-off”; their praise of the Green Book as “challenging, stimulating, moral” is evidently insufficiently fulsome for the WRP’s taste. Qaddafi’s Healyite press agents complain that his “writings and his drive towards people's democracy hardly received the attention they deserve.”

The WRP has in the last year been making up for that with a vengeance. Over 20 articles on Libya have appeared in News Line, not to mention a considerable increase in “special reports” from Tripoli and attacks on Sadat’s Egypt. News Line's castigation of Egypt, described as “near bankruptcy,” for its repression of leftists is completely in accord with Qaddafi's feud with Sadat – and contrasts sharply with the Healyites’ silence on repression in Libya.

An article in the 14 October 1976 News Line, for instance, discussed a BBC television interview with Qaddafi and dismissed the interviewer's inquiry into political prisoners in Libya as one of the bourgeois media’s “stock-in-trade questions.” News Line smugly added, “Gaddafi was unmoved, saying that they were ‘enemies of the revolution’.” The Healyites praised the program for having “broken at least part of the Gaddafi enigma and answered some of the US State Department and Zionist lies,” but complained that the interview was not shown on prime time:

“Miss Kewley's profile rightly belonged in the BBC’s prestige slot, ‘Panorama’.
“It is a measure of the censorship on television that it was squeezed into
the ‘religious programmes’ department where it could not do justice to the subject of Islam or its leading advocate.”

What is perhaps most curious is that Workers Press, the previous Healyite daily –which folded in February 1976 with the presumption of “lack of funds” – paid little or no attention to Qaddafi and his so-called “Revolutionland.” In the six months prior to its collapse, we could locate only one article in Workers Press dealing specifically with Libya, and this was implicitly critical of Qaddafi, reporting a protest by Libyan students in London against the police slaughter of “at least 16 students” at a demonstration at Libya’s Benghazi University (Workers Press, 14 January 1976). On 8 September 1976 News Line carried a centerfold spread on Tripoli’s “anniversary celebration” of Qaddafi’s military coup. Boasting huge photos and snide comments about the bourgeois press’ lack of coverage of the glorious event, News Line’s spread on “Libya's Day” was a sharp departure from the silence of Workers Press the year before. Something has changed, and it wasn’t the Qaddafi regime.

“Revolutionland”

We are more than happy to give Qaddafi’s policies “the attention they deserve.” Qaddafi is fanatical in his devotion to the Koran, which sanctifies the feudal enslavement of women and prescribes legal punishments such as cutting off the tongues of liars and the hands of thieves. At least 700 political prisoners have been reported held in Libyan jails. Regarding one trial of 17 prisoners (acquitted in 1974) against whom Qaddafi personally intervened to impose new sentences of life imprisonment and death, Amnesty International recently noted: “The accused were allegedly Marxists, Trotskyists, and members of the Islamic Liberation Party” (Intercontinental Press, 4 April I977). Qaddafi's 1973 “cultural revolution" laid out his “Five Principles,” including:

“We must purge all the sick people who talk of Communism, atheism, who make propaganda for the Western countries and advocate capitalism. We shall put them in prison.”

And:

“We live by the Koran, God’s book. We will reject any idea that is not based on it. Therefore we enter into a cultural revolution to refute and destroy all misleading books which have made youth sick and insane.”
– New York Times, 22 May 1973

Qaddafi’s idea of “refutation” is simple: he ordered “the burning of books that contain imperialist, capitalist, reactionary, Jewish or Communist thoughts” (New York Times, 18 April 1973).

Grotesque

The sordid history of the Healyites is replete with examples of slavering enthusiasm for left-talking “Third World” nationalists and Stalinists. Workers Press gratuitously proffered “leftist” cheerleading to assorted petty-bourgeois anti-working-class formations, from the Maoist Red Guards to the Angolan MPLA. But the WRP’s pandering to Qaddafi is surely a new low.

Perhaps the most disgusting was a full-page “special News Line interview” with Hamied Jallud, general secretary of the “Libyan trade union federation, equivalent of the British TUC” (14 September 1976). To News Line questions about collective bargaining and the right to strike, the Qaddafi bureaucrats replied, “The role of the trade unions in socialist countries is completely different from capitalist countries”! After all, “the responsibility of the trade unions is to educate the workers and increase production”; Qaddafi's “General People's Congress” will look after the workers' interests. The WRP’s shameless presentation of Qaddafi's repression of the Libyan working class leaves no doubt of its utter subjugation before this capitalist dictator.

News Line hailed the “General People's Congress” held in early March in Shebha, a small desert village distinguished by Qaddafi’s having gone to school there. Fidel Castro was the guest of honor as the “Congress” renamed Libya the “People's Socialist Libyan Arab Public” (sic) and kicked off Qaddafi's “Third Universal Principle” which he modestly claims solves “the problem of democracy.”

The Healyites have had some “problems” with “democracy” themselves; their solution has generally been to beat up political opponents. Qaddafi, who-unlike the WRP-holds state power, has worked out a more elaborate schema. His little Green Book explains that “both administration and supervision become popular” through “committees everywhere” – while Qaddafi becomes head of the “General People's Congress” which runs everything and is so “popular” that it meets once a year. The sinister meaning of this “solution” comes out in the slogans pasted up around Shebha: “Parliaments are defunct.” “representation is a fraud” and “Parties are treason” (London Guardian, 3 March 1977).

“Parties are treason” – what about the Workers Revolutionary Party? In this “People’s Public” where communists are to be jailed and butchered and their books burned, ostensible leftists would have to do some pretty peculiar things to survive – and News Line has made it clear the WRP would be more than willing to do them. The London Times (6 September 1976) reported:

“The repression... in Libya has not, of course, weakened the interest of
left-wing groups in other countries. Representatives of Miss Vanessa Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party, for instance, have visited Libya three times in the past twelve months. Nor has it diminished the affection of those countries like Malta, which feel, with some reason, that Colonel Qaddafi has proved to be their only friend.”

Malta’s reasons are obvious. About to be impoverished by the closing of NATO bases, Malta is now dependent on Qaddafi's aid to remain solvent. The mendicant guerrillas who flock to Tripoli seeking Soviet-made arms and Libyan oil money reportedly have included Muslim secessionists from the Philippines and Ethiopia, opponents of anti-Qaddafi Arab regimes (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco), the Provisional IRA and various Palestinian organizations. Naturally, such groups do not bite the hand that feeds them and have accorded Qaddafi a high place in the pantheon of “anti-imperialist” leaders.

Corrupt

Workers Press, which folded on 14 February 1976, titled itself the “Daily Organ of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party.” Heavy publicity in the preceding months for the paper’s “Crisis Fund” and dire warnings that “the future of the paper is in doubt” would lead to the presumption that it closed up shop for lack of funds. Yet the “Final Edition” Editorial Board statement does not explicitly say so; instead, the Healyites tersely announce that their printing firm, Plough Press, will cease operations.

The Healyites, normally so fond of denying inconvenient reports on the grounds of their bourgeois sources, hid behind an abstract and irrelevant set of statistics from one of the great bourgeois interests, the British Printing Industrial Federation, on “rises in general expenses” increasing printing costs. For two and a half months no Healyite newspaper appeared. Then News Line sprang to life – but not as any kind of party organ – with a format which included paid advertising. At about that same time Healy was replaced by Mike Banda as WRP general secretary.

The WRP ranks have been kept busy with the usual treks across England – and lately the “Children's Crusade” across Europe – designed in part to keep them too exhausted to notice their corrupt leaders’ maneuvering. But even a cursory look at News Line’s year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.

Healy's 'Yellow Brick Road' to Revolution (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 155 (29 April 1977)

Give Him a Brain!

Healy's “Yellow Brick Road” to Revolution

“...We can confidently say that no force on earth can challenge the analysis made by the ICFI [International Committee] of this crisis.”

So boasted the Workers League (WL), American satellite of Gerry Healy's IC, in a recent perspectives document, under a heading appropriately called “The World Crisis.”

For some sixteen years now, the American Healyites have been crisis-mongering with strident regularity. To those who protested the WL's cynical efforts to gear up its dwindling band for one last sacrifice by invoking the “crisis” just around the corner, the WL hacks replied by charging that their critics must believe in the fundamental stability of capitalism. But of course the decaying capitalist system cannot escape periodic severe crises. Finally the WL has got its long-awaited “crisis,” but their general situation recalls the unfortunate boy in the fable who cried “wolf”; vindication is likely to do the WL about as much good as it did him.

The WL's incessant cries of “crisis” have a political function which is more than inspirational. For the WL, “The Crisis” means that it is okay to support reformists and “lesser evils,” because even a tiny tap is supposedly sufficient to topple imperialism in this epoch. Thus the WL's Bulletin was full of enthusiasm for... Jimmy Carter's electoral victory!

“The intensification of the world economic crisis is the direct cause of the election of Jimmy Carter... The election of Jimmy Carter is a clear sign of the political radicalization of the working class... Millions of disillusioned working class Carter voters are heading for a revolutionary confrontation with this administration.”
- Bulletin, 8 February

Now the WL is similarly enthusing over the electoral victory of the bourgeois Janata Party in India. “On the Road to Revolution” screams the 24 March Bulletin headline for the article on the Congress Party defeat. While dutifully noting the “right-wing” character of the Janata Party, the article claims that its victory “dealt a smashing blow to the economic policies of the Indian bourgeoisie,” and that “the radicalization of the masses now opens the door to the most powerful revolutionary struggles in India.”

Truly the WL has outdone even the Pabloist substitutionalists whom it professes to oppose from the left. But no amount of enthusing for popular petty-bourgeois currents can obscure the fact that it was the absence of proletarian leadership in India which allowed the just rage of the bitterly oppressed workers and peasants to be channeled into support for a bourgeois party every bit as dedicated to the preservation of capitalist class rule as was its predecessor.

WL Exclusionism Wrecks Own Meeting (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 147 (4 March 1977)

WL Exclusionism Wrecks Own Meeting

TORONTO – The tiny local branch of the Workers League (WL), reinforced by a goon squad of its cronies from Detroit, forcibly prevented members of the Trotskyist League of Canada (TL) from attending a so-called “public” WL, meeting February 19 at the University of Toronto. Although a showing of the film “Trotsky: His Life and Work” was the drawing card for the meeting, its real purpose was revealed once the WL had corralled about 40 people inside. It was simply a forum to continue the vicious slander campaign of the Healyite International Committee (IC) against United Secretariat (USec) leaders George Novack and Joseph Hansen.

As usual, the Workers League was concerned above all with spreading its lies without having to face exposure by supporters of the international Spartacist tendency. At the entrance to the meeting a WL goon announced, “Everyone is welcome who is not a member of the Trotskyist League.”

To protest this Stalinist exclusion, the TL and its supporters initiated a militant picket line, 40-strong, in front of the meeting site. They chanted: “Let the communists in,” “Down with Stalinist exclusionism – For workers democracy,” “On Sadlowski, Miller and Ho Chi Minh – IC and USec are brothers under the skin,” and “Down with the Healyite slander campaign – Reforge the Fourth International.”

Inside the meeting a supporter of the TL demanded to know why the Trotskyist League was excluded and protested this cowardly act as a blatant violation of workers democracy. WL goons immediately rushed him, pushing him out the door. Two others who protested the exclusion were also thrown out. WL honcho Fred Mazelis took the floor, ranting that anyone who disagreed with the exclusion should “go out and join the protest outside,” at which point six more people left.

Mazelis cynically offered to let the TL have one speaker. But later when a TL delegation came to accept this offer, four goons at the door mumbled, “You're too late.” The remaining audience was treated to over an hour of the WL’s crisis-mongering and GPU agent-baiting of Hansen and Novack before the movie. When one person asked when the film would start, Mazelis replied: “If you don't like it you can leave.” At that point ten more people walked out.

The Workers League’s penchant for slandering and hysterical crisis-mongering is as notorious as its longtime Stalinist exclusion of opponent tendencies from “public” WL forums. Its recent hypocritical appeal against violence in the socialist movement (see “Look Who's Calling Us Comrade,” WV No. 143, 4 February) is belied by its continuing practice of exclusionism.

The Workers League fortunately has no impact on the working class. Its capitulation to the right-wing social-democratic New Democratic Party and its chauvinist refusal to recognize Quebec's right to-self-determination are but Canadian adaptations of its appeals to arch-reactionary labor traitors such as Meany and Abel to form a labor party in the U.S. However marginal this group is, its recourse to lies and slander instead of political debate is a poison that must be vigorously combatted, while its exclusion of and thug attacks against opponents on the left are Stalinist provocations that cannot be tolerated in the workers movement.

WL/SL Exchange on Workers Democracy (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 143 (4 February 1977)

Look Who's Calling us Comrade

New York, N.Y. , January 23, 1977

Dear Cde. Robertson:

I wish to call to your attention that in recent weeks members of your organization have sought to disrupt both the political work and public meetings of the Workers League and Young Socialists.

On Saturday, December 4, 1976, your organization staged a provocative demonstration outside the election headquarters of the Workers League in Los Angeles. One of our members was physically attacked and thrown through a pane-glass window. The actions of your organization resulted in bringing the police to the scene. As you know, the police raided these election headquarters over the summer, and your demonstration gave them still another opportunity to harass our members.

Less than a week later, in Toronto, two members of the Canadian Workers League were physically attacked by 12 Spartacist members - some of them Americans - as they attempted to distribute leaflets on the university campus to advertise a public meeting.

On Wednesday, January 19, 1977, 13 members of Spartacist physically threatened members of the Young Socialists and prevented them from holding a meeting at California State University in Los Angeles.

Such provocations and use of violence play into the hands of the police and the most reactionary class forces. They can only damage the socialist movement. I urge you to abandon this provocative policy and call your members to order.

Fraternally,
David North, National Secretary, Workers League
New York, N.Y., 27 January 1977

D. North, Workers League

Dear Comrade,

We have received your letter of 2nd January. It is evidently either (a) itself a provocation designed to facilitate frame-up attempts by you in connivance with bourgeois police authorities, and/or (b) a tacit announcement, possibly as a result of the current relationship of forces between us, that your organization is contemplating some change in your years-long standard practice against us (as well as other socialists). Both in the U.S. and abroad this has consisted of the eager use of your own violence, limitless slander, and where possible, the employment of the police to do your dirty work. These are facts which can, for example, be testified to first hand by sellers of any other socialist newspaper at your meetings over the years.

We have commented as appropriate in our public press on the motives and purposes behind your long and unbroken record of all-sided attempts to suppress and destroy the processes of workers democracy and we see no reason to pursue these matters here.

As for the particulars which you presently allege, our Workers Vanguard has already noted the very different reality of such incidents (and many others).

Especially significant is the fact that the last two major assaults by your people that we know of were centrally against cameramen in front of Healyite meetings. These comrades were attempting to deter or failing that document your calculated violence against other socialists (see WV No. 130, 22 October 1976 and WV No. 137, 10 December 1976).

To the extent that your organization does not continue to try to deprive us of those rights necessary to the socialist and labor movements, you can assure yourselves that the concerns so hypocritically expressed in your letter will automatically disappear. And we note that in any case we will continue to defend your own legitimate rights should they be threatened from any quarter.

Corresponding to your violence against us has been your previous justification that we are “police agents,” “fingermen of the world bourgeoisie,” etc. (Just try physical assault on genuine police agents sometime!) We therefore find your closing paragraph, with its appeal to us as fellow socialists to stand against provocations and violence, particularly obnoxious and hypocritical. Truly your situation must be precarious for you to certify our “socialist” legitimacy in any case, and in honor of our present elevation by you, we too are giving salutations to you as “comrade” and “fraternally,” although since you also identify us as accomplices to the SWP leaders who are “GPU accomplices” according to your currently most active slander campaign, we do so with repugnance.

Fraternally.

J. Robertson

Confessions of a Rubber Stamp (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 145 (18 February 1977)

Confessions of a Rubber Stamp

On January 14 a host of ostensibly Trotskyist dignitaries got together in a London public meeting to denounce Gerry Healy, the self-styled “anti-revisionist” whose Stalinist-style organizational practices have made him notorious as a gangster and slanderer. The meeting's ostensible purpose was to protest Healy's despicable slander campaign to smear the American SWP's Joseph Hansen and George Novack as “accomplices” of the Stalinist secret police in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (see “Fake Trotskyist Family Reunion,” WV No. 141, 21 January). The meeting's real purpose was to buttress the assembled revisionists' pretensions to Trotskyism, using Healy as a convenient foil. The hypocrisy of the participants' avowed concern for “workers democracy” was demonstrated when the meeting refused to grant Healy the floor to reply to his attackers.

But surely the most shameless of all the hypocrites was Tim Wohlforth, who for some dozen years headed Healy's American satellite. As Healy's chosen instrument, Wohlforth happily emulated every corrupt trick in Healy's book, sanctimoniously parting about the “Marxist method” while arrogantly intimidating any and all opposition to his high-handed tinpot despotism and cynical opportunism. He flinched from nothing in his master's service, until at last a denunciation of himself stuck in his throat.

Wohlforth's testimonial to the crimes of Healy was truly heart-rending:

“I got up in the middle of the meeting and said I disagreed with the proceedings. Which was the hardest thing that I have ever said in my life because of the atmosphere. And yet, and any of you here who have ever been in the Socialist Labour League could understand this, and yet I ended up, as those who have been in the Socialist Labour League have done and still do, I ended up voting against my convictions!
"I voted for my own removal; Nancy Fields voted for her own suspension. And then, two minutes out of that meeting, we went back to our cabin with Comrade Slaughter and we told him we disagreed with the way we voted. We just could not say it in front of such a meeting in such an atmosphere.” [emphasis in original]
- Intercontinental Press, 7 February

Heaylite methods are indeed brutal and debasing. But we would like to remind Wohlforth that, despite the intimidating “atmosphere” which is a hallmark of the Healy-Wohlforth school, there is an alternative to sniveling self-denunciation.

In London in 1966, at a conference of Healy's “Inernational Committee,” Healy - an an attempt to guarantee a totally subservient puppet organization in the U.S. - launched a bureaucratic attack on James Robertson, the spokesman for the Spartacist delegation to the conference, for missing a session due to exhaustion and illness. One contemporary account described the incident:

“(1) He was charged with being absent from a session.
“(2) He admitted his guilt.
“(3) A motion was passed demanding that he apologize and admit having committed a 'petty bourgeois act.'
“(5) The escalation proceeded. Healy, according to Rose J., scored Robertson's absence and his refusal to vote for his condemnation, characterizing it as a 'petty bourgeois, reactionary act expressing the chauvinism of American imperialism, etc.'
“(6) Robertson was threatened with expulsion if he did not voice approval of the motion branding him with the alleged class nature of his crime.
“(7) The dazed man still said, no.
“(8) He was expelled.
- “Healy 'Reconstructs' the Fourth International"

The author of these words was none other than Joseph Hansen, who has now gathered into his revisionist fold the very same Wohlforth who in 1966 joyously echoed the slanderous call of his master's voice to lock up his cherished franchise as the head of American Healyism.

For loathsome creatures of the Wohlforth ilk, there was never any choice but to vote “against my convictions,” pleading the “atmosphere” in extenuation. For the principled Leninist politicians of the Spartacist tendency, there was never any choice but to uphold our convictions, in the terrain of organizational pratice as in the terrain of program. Wohlforth was, in Hansen's own words, “a rubber stamp for a Healy.” True enough. And depite a decade of denouncing Hansen's revisionism, look whose rubber stamp Wohlforth is now!

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!

Joe Hansen is an Honest Revisionist (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 141 (21 January 1977)

“Hypocrisy is the Homage that Vice Pays to Virtue”

Joe Hansen is an Honest Revisionist

We reprint below a leaflet distributed by London supporters of the international Spartacist tendency at a January 14 meeting to protest Healyite slanders of SWP leaders Joseph Hansen and George Novack.

Considering the notorious scoundrels who mainly comprise the speakers tonight, this is not a company that we of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) would freely choose to be among. But Trotsky has taught us that if the issue is just, one can unite with “the devil and his granddam” (taking due account of the old folk saying that “when you sup with the devil, use a long spoon”). But the ostensible purpose of this meeting – to protest and expose the infamous slanders against Joseph Hansen and George Novack of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) by Gerry Healy and his Workers Revolutionary Party – is at most only one of its purposes. For the speakers have another, overriding common denominator: they are all, to a man, revisionists and destroyers of the Trotskyist movement, not merely guaranteed to be oh-so-diplomatic about one another's betrayals of Marxism, but actively in pursuit of new combinations and configurations of revisionism (the stresses of an internationally rising line of class struggle having deeply undermined their old alignments).

It is only abstractly nauseating to think of speaking from the same platform as e.g., a Pierre Lambert, whose organization continues to practice endless physical violence against the “Vargaites” in the streets of Paris; or a servile Tim Wohlforth; now speaking for the shamelessly reformist SWP, who has spent fifteen years as a leading practitioner of Healyite slander and violence; or, above all, a Michel Pablo (sometime arch-enemy,of the former two), who personally has done quite as much as any other living human being to destroy the Trotskyist movement from within and turn “Trotskyism” into a cesspool.

Nonetheless a meeting “for workers democracy” and “against frame-ups and slanders” – even including such elements as these – could be a good thing, only providing that it was an honest meeting with full freedom of criticism.

Unfortunately, as the speakers’ list guarantees, this is not the case here. It is the omissions which tell the story. For example, when Hansen’s Intercontinental Press (6 September 1976) published the statement “A Shameless Frame-Up” signed by a long list of individuals and organizations, IP in its informational breakdown identified from among the hundreds of signers sixteen as “internationally known Trotskyists.” Of these, eleven were supporters of the United Secretariat (USec), two were from the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) of Pierre Lambert, two were from Lutte Ouvriere and one was from the iSt. But only some of the USec leaders, and Lambert from the presently ingratiating OCI, and that master of intrigue, Pablo himself, are to speak tonight. Particularly objectionable to the meeting’s sponsors would be a spokesman of the iSt – the group which at the level of workers democracy campaigned earliest against the Healyite slanders (picketing with our slogan “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?”) and which helped initiate the impartial Commission of Inquiry into the affair of the highly dubious Varga vs. the slanderous OCI.

It is not enough to describe Healy, as Hansen does, as a paranoid. The conduct of Healy’s organization demands political explanation. The Healyite combination of crude opportunism and fake-Trotskyist “orthodoxy” has repeatedly lost out to the slicker USec, whose internally warring wings are led by Joseph Hansen and Ernest Mandel. In his slander campaign, Healy no doubt thinks he has gone V. I. Lenin one better. Lenin exposed Karl Kautsky as a revisionist through careful and savage analysis. It would therefore have been inconceivable for Lenin, as a Marxist, to have substituted the false and gratuitous – and so simplifying – accusation that Kautsky was an agent of the Kaiser. Healy cannot follow this principled course toward the USec revisionists, for comparable analysis would indict his own conduct. He resorts to contemptible slander which merely brings ostensible “anti-revisionism” into disrepute. As always, Healy is the horrible example which Hansen feeds off, for his own purposes – in this case, an unprincipled attempted international “regroupment” parading as a rally for workers democracy.

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. Of course, as in the 1930's when the centrist London Bureau zig-zagged through the no-man’s-land between Trotskyism and the mass reformist parties, so today one finds more leftist ephemeral groupings which seek to straddle between a revolutionary course and the accommodationism common to all tonight’s speakers. The overriding characteristic of these groups is negative: not to stand for a common and coherent international program, but to posture against those (such as tonight’s speakers) whose betrayals have become too overt. Thus for example there is the “Necessary International Initiative” bloc (including one Roberto from Italy, Sean Matgamna’s recently split International Communist League, the disintegrating German Spartacusbund and maybe somebody else).

Their tendency to themselves capitulate under pressure to popular frontism aside, they have hardly a point in common among their component factions and individuals except their objection to the manifest revisionism of the USec (and to the “sectarian” intransigence of the iSt).

With the renewal internationally of massive proletarian unrest, the popular front is again in the air. And all revisionists must try, in their own ways, to accommodate on the central question of class collaboration and, with their “new mass vanguards” or self-serving descriptions of mass reformist parties as simply “workers parties,” to pave the way for new betrayals.

The 1930s centrists of the London Bureau, which Trotsky condemned, had to verbally separate themselves from the popular front rather more than such types do today:

“The Popular Front practised by the Second and Third Internationals is a form of class collaboration between the proletariat and the Liberal bourgeoisie (and the petty bourgeoisie which depends on this latter) on a capitalist basis which subordinates and sacrifices the class interests of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie to those of monopoly Capitalism.... In consequence, the Revolutionary Socialist Movement rejects the Popular Front as being absolutely contrary to the historic interests of the working class. To Capitalism we must oppose Socialism! To the Popular Front we must oppose the United Workers Front.”
– Resolution adopted at the"Revolutionary Socialist Congress" of the
London Bureau, February 1938

Thus despite their anti-Trotskyist obliteration of the necessity of the proletarian vanguard party, the London Bureau was perforce compelled to make a categoric class counterposition to the popular front and did not expect the Stalinist and reformist parties to somehow turn into their opposites. But instead of, and in opposition to, the Trotskyists’ hard, bleak struggle for the Fourth International, those centrists counterposed to reformism their innocuous and impotent phantom, “the Revolutionary Socialist Movement.” This is why the organizations of the London Bureau, 'though nominally disposing of forces one hundred times that of the Trotskyists, are a barely known historical footnote whose descendents must masquerade today as Trotskyists.

The hard lessons of the victorious October Revolution retain their full force on our planet. Lenin and Trotsky did not enter or tail the provisional government of socialists and liberals – they overthrew it on the basis of soviet power.. The international Spartacist tendency stands today with Lenin's Third and Trotsky's Fourth International in insisting not only that the issue of state power is class against class, but that without the struggle to create a programmatically united and disciplined Fourth International the workers are left to wander into the new traps of capital – and, as in the 1930's, with the assistance of their revisionist would-be “leaders.”

[Authorized text] 14 January 1977

international Spartacist tendency
Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria de Chile
Trotskyist Faction (expelled) of the Spartacusbund (Germany)
London Spartacist Group BCM Box 4272 London WCIV 6XX England