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

Workers Vanguard No. 493 (12 January 1990)

As Solidarność Cracks the Whip against Polish Workers…

Walesa’s “Left” Fans Run for Cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pope’s “Trotskyists”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Political Bandits at the End (1989)

Spartacist No. 43-44 (Summer 1989)

Some Political Bandits at the End

22nd March 1988

Dear Comrade,

Obviously, it is important that we gain the maximum support for the campaign to get the Russian government to release all documents relating to Leon Trotsky and the Moscow trials: Truth must out. The trail of blood left by Stalinism needs to be acknowledged by all, even if it is unpalatable to some communists.

By the same token, we must see that errors of a similar type are not committed in this country by people purporting to be Trotskyists. That is why the current issue of the Syndicalist journal, Solidarity, is so alarming. It contains a secret internal report of the WRP.

This shows that the WRP received large infusions of funds from Libya and other Middle East governments. Apparently, a total of at least £1,075,163 came from these sources.

Even more disturbing, the secret report reveals that the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein wanted information about the activities of opponents of the regime living in Britain. So members of the WRP acted as spies for their Iraqi paymasters. As a result, Iraqi left-wingers, returning to Baghdad, were tortured and executed.

In my opinion, it is vital [for] working-class organisations, as a matter of urgency, to make the following demands:

First, that the full facts be revealed about the WRP's associations with Colonel Gaddafi and other Middle East dictators.

Second, that the names of all those involved be made public.

Third, that both the WRP and these individuals be asked to account for their actions.

The principles of glasnost should not be confined to the precincts of the Kremlin. Unless we are a bunch of hypocrites, the British left must see to it that the same principles of frankness and openness operate in this country. Otherwise how can we expect Mikhail Gorbachev to reveal all?

Yours fraternally, Raymond Challinor

Spartacist replies: We thank Raymond Challinor for his letter, originally sent to the editors of both Workers Press and Revolutionary History and printed here with his agreement. The “secret internal report” of the WRP to which Comrade Challinor refers is the by now infamous report of the David North-dominated “International Committee” Control Commission, dated 16 December 1985. Substantial excerpts of this report were published in the Spring 1988 issue of the British anarcho-syndicalist journal Solidarity. Subsequently, the British Workers International League (WIL) published the report in full in the April 1988 issue of their newspaper Workers News. The WIL is the only one of the remnants of the implosion of Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (there are currently at least seven publishing journals in Britain) to have made the report available to the international workers movement. Interested readers who wish to obtain a copy of the report can order one directly from the WIL (1/17 Meredith Street, London EC1R OAE, England).

From the time Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) imploded spectacularly in the fall of 1985 (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86), it has been clear that none of the myriad cliques and tendencies which spun out of it were interested in a real reckoning with the WRP's despicable record of political banditry. For 20 years the Healy cult, with a brutal internal regime held together by mind-numbing “dialectical” mumbo-jumbo, violence and security fetishism, was a mill for the cynical destruction of those leftists who made the mistake of joining it. Healy was infamous for his capacity for wild swings in political line in pursuit of egregious and often mutually contradictory opportunist appetites. (In “Wohlforth Terminated,” Workers Vanguard No. 61, 31 January 1975, we cited the Healyites’ high-turnover operation in lumpen youth milieus as the political context for their programmatic oscillations in the early 1970s.) By the late 1970s the WRP had become shameless apologists for Near Eastern dictators and oil sheikdoms. But to the extent that the Healyites had a coherent political core they were cringing legalist/Labourite economists and virulently anti-Soviet in concrete program. Those who had stuck it out for years with Healy, through every twist, turn and betrayal, could not be expected to function very differently without him.

Soon after the implosion the dubious David North, who came to replace Tim Wohlforth as leader of the tiny American Workers League in 1976, stepped into Healy 's misshapen shoes as lider maximo of the WRP’s “International Committee” (IC). North claimed the allegiance of the German and Sri Lankan IC sections, the majority of the Australian section led by Nick Beams, and a minority of the old WRP under David Hyland. North expelled the rump of the post-Healy WRP led by Cliff Slaughter, which retained in its international orbit only a minority of the old Australian IC led by Phil Sandford.

The Northite IC has clung to every despicable hallmark of Healyism, from the use of the capitalist cops and courts against opponents in the workers movement, to the “Security and the Fourth International” slander campaign against leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who the IC claims are and were (even in Trotsky's time!) agents of the capitalist and Stalinist secret police. Not only does the shadowy North, who won his spurs in the Healyite organization as mouthpiece for “Security and the Fourth International,” continue to retail the Stalinist slander that Trotsky was killed “by his own people,” but his organization has made its sinister efforts to aid the American capitalist state in railroading SWP member Mark Curtis on phony rape charges into its chief international activity (see “The Workers League and Mark Curtis,” Workers Vanguard No. 480, 23 June 1989).

___________________

Healy's long-time lieutenants, none of whom ever objected at the time to any of the betrayals perpetrated by the WRP in order to get money from Near Eastern bourgeois governments, moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.
______________________

From the time the old WRP started up its subsidized daily News Line in May 1976, its pages full of uncritical adulation of the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, it was clear that Healy's organization was on the take from the Libyan regime. Slaughter's rump WRP was forced to admit as much in the aftermath of the implosion and with the membership clamoring for the truth, an International Committee Control Commission was convened to investigate. The Commission’s “Interim Report,” dated 16 December 1985, was more of an exercise in damage control than a real attempt to get at the truth; its revelations were used by David North in his cynical IC powerplay and the Commission didn’t even attempt to investigate allegations that other IC sections had also received Near Eastern oil money. Moreover, the Commission never aimed to hold accountable the WRP leaders who were implicated. All names were deleted from the report except those of WRP members who had split along with Healy, presumably so North would have plenty to hold over Slaughter et al. in the future.

The report documents the WRP’s receipt of a total of £1,075,163 from the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as the governments of Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Iraq from 1977 to 1983. No surprises here. More damningly, the report reveals some of the concrete services to be provided by the WRP to obtain the alliance with Qaddafi: in an April 1976 secret agreement with the Libyan government the WRP agreed to provide intelligence information on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the Control Commission report acknowledges that this agreement had “strongly anti-Semitic undertones, as no distinction is made between Jews and Zionists and the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” So the WRP agreed to in return for Arab gold. Healy’s organization became spy on leading British Jews in return for Arab gold. Healy’s organization became agents for Qaddafi, and a lot more than publicity was involved.

The Control Commission reports that in connection with this agreement, the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press. The Control Commission says it was unable to find any documentation that this money was received. But the WRP did launch the daily News Line a month after the agreement was signed and did (according to the report) spend £188,500 to buy two Hunter offset presses some time in the period between September 1974 and April 1981.

The London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) obtained a copy of the report and exposed the WRP as having been “paid to spy for Gadaffi.” An ex-WRP member told them that the WRP had called information on leading “Zionists” from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya, What was the response of the Slaughter WRP to the Sunday Times revelations? A statement (Workers Press, 13 February 1988) that “no worker with any sense will believe such rubbish.... There is no evidence that the party when led by Healy ever spied on ‘Jews’, prominent or otherwise,” On the contrary, the £542,267 that the Control Commission documented the WRP got from Libya is a hell of a lot of evidence. The April 1976 spying agreement is what cemented Healy's alliance with Qaddafi.

Perhaps the most vicious crime of the Healy-led WRP was the fulsome support they gave to the Iraqi Ba’athist government's execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979. Both the Australian and American IC sections reprinted articles from News Line hailing the execution of these working-class militants: the Healyites positively gloried in it, portraying the Communist oil workers, the most class-conscious section of the Iraqi proletariat, as agents of counter-revolutionary Stalinism. Whet the WRP imploded, some members reported that they had been assigned to take photographs of a London protest against the Iraqi government, photographs which they believed had been turned over to the Iraqi embassy. About this deed, the Control Commission reports “a receipt for£ 1,600 for 16 minutes of documentary footage of a demonstration is in the possession of the Commission.” Who was the receipt made out to? Needless to say, we aren’t told. The perpetrators should be brought to proletarian justice. But that is the least concern of any of the Healyite remnants.

What Are North and Beams Covering Up?

After the IC Control Commission delivered its report, Cliff, Slaughter and his followers immediately began to cry foul. In a 14 January 1986 letter to all WRP members, Slaughter wrote:

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments? Which other sections did so?

“Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousand [sic] of dollars) in 1983? (We do not say of course, that to seek such assistance is always wrong, it is wrong when political principles are sold for the maintenance of such relations).

“Is it not a fact that the receipt of this. money by the Australian section [w]as reported to the Central Committee of the SLL (Australia) only in the month before the IC meeting of Dec 16? And is it not a fact that the IC delegate, Cde Beams, was told by his CC in Australia to report this matter to the IC?

“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North? That is what happened.

“Finally: is it not true that Comrade North and Beams agreed the matter should not be raised at the IC because they considered it did not constitute a “class betrayal”? How did they differentiate between the class betrayal of the WRP in this matter - on which was based the argument for suspending the WRP from the IC without charges and without a hearing — and the actions taken on behalf of the SLL(Australia)?”

Slaughter’s accusations have the ring of (self-serving) truth. The Central Committee of the Australian SLL did censure Beams, at a meeting held in February 1986, for failure to report receipt of money from Arab regimes to the IC, and according to Phil Sandford, Beams even voted for the motion (Socialist Labour League Internal Bulletin, February 1986). Sandford, who soon after led a split from the Northite SLL to found the Communist League in solidarity with Slaughter, claims in the same bulletin that “the SLL carried out a class betrayal in identical terms to that carried out by the WRP, but it is not possible to discuss that here for obvious reasons.” In an article in the December 1986 Socialist Press (journal of the Communist League), Sandford recounts the story of SLL leader Greg Adler’s 1979 trip to Baghdad, where Adler had been instructed to ask for $100,000 to buy a printing press. Sandford claims that Adler didn't ask for the money, but nonetheless Gerry Healy gave him quite a dressing down for daring to poach on his preserve. Sandford goes on to report:

“The SLL’s relations with the Libyan regime require a separate article. Suffice to say they were more productive financially thanks to an even more slavish public relations job in the pages of Workers News and such things as the memorable, Libyan-financed brochure entitled Libya - the true story.”

As part of their turn to “commercial enterprise, commercial print work,” the SLL also took money to print The Bell of Saigon, organ of the fascistic Vietnamese thugs who have attacked Australian leftists and labor meetings.

One thing is for sure, the Australian Healyite remnants are complicit with North and Slaughter in hiding the real truth. A letter of Simon Pirani (for the Slaughter WRP Central Committee) to the Northite IC dated 21 July 1986 cynically asks “whether the Control Commission has completed its work.” The equally cynical Peter Schwarz replies for the Northites, “You know as well as I do that the ICFI Control Commission was refused any access to any further information as soon as it had given its interim report” (correspondence published in March 1987 issue of Northite Fourth International). Both sides blame each other for the “incomplete” work of the Control Commission because neither side wants the whole truth revealed.

Why Did the Healyites Implode When They Did?

Another document in our possession sheds a lot of light on events in the WRP in the fall and summer of 1985, immediately predating the implosion. It is a “Financial Report” by Corin Redgrave, dated 8 October 1985. While Redgrave’s testimony must be taken with a grain of salt, he certainly gives the flavor of things:

“In the financial year 1984-85 scarcely a single rent or rates demand was paid on time. Bailiffs took walking possession of print shop, the party bookshops, and on one occasion at east, the party headquarters at Clapham. The total cost to the party in one financial year from court charges, solicitors’ fees, bailiffs’ fees and interest, was more than £7,000.”

On 3 April 1985 British Rail, to whom the WRP owed £25,515.58 for carriage charges, suspended credit to Astmoor Litho, publishers of News Line, and demanded cash payments before it would ship the newspaper. By 1 July 1985, not a single major wholesale supplier would deal on credit terms with New Park Publications. By October, the WRP owed £30,000 in back fees to their accounting firm, which was refusing to keep up the books. Redgrave claims that the mess was all the fault of the WRP financial apparatus who, unbeknownst to Healy (!), had been financing WRP operations though a £35,000 bank overdraft negotiated in October 1982. Redgrave also claims that from 1984 on, the financial apparatus had been selling and mortgaging party property, all apparently in a desperate effort to keep things afloat.

By the summer of 1985 the whole stinking house built by Gerry Healy was about to come tumbling down. And everyone in the leadership knew it. It was doubtless no accident that Aileen Jennings, whose infamous letter charging Healy with sexual misconduct touched off the implosion was a linchpin in the WRP’s financial apparatus. The WRP Political Committee originally labeled her letter a “provocation.” It was only when the WRP’s financial debacle could no longer be hidden that Slaughter et al. decided to use its revelations against Healy.

An emergency meeting of the international Committee was called in August 1985 to discuss the WRP’s financial crisis. Healy tried his usual trick of soaking more money out of the tiny IC satellites. The slimy David North, who was in on all the backstabbing intrigues in the WRP leadership from the beginning, saw that things were about to explode. North pledged to contribute £30,000 and, according to Savas Michael (leader of the Greek IC section. who stuck with Healy), he then didn't turn over the money (Marxist Review, May 1986). North knew exactly what he was doing with this maneuver, and in the aftermath of the implosion his “Control Commission” smugly documented the WRP's financial impasse, confirming the picture painted by Corin Redgrave.

Redgrave dates the WRP’s escalating financial crisis from October 1982. The “Interim Report” of the IC Control Commission details the drastic dropping off of Near Eastern oil funds between 1982 and 1983 (£271,217 in 1982, only £3,400 in 1983; nothing in 1984 and 1985). Thus the immediate motive seems clear. Healy's long-time lieutenants, none of whom ever objected at the time to any of the betrayals perpetrated by the WRP in order to get money from Near Eastern bourgeois governments, moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.

Why Should Anyone Believe David North? (1989)

Workers Vanguard No. 485 (13 October 1989)

What is the Workers League?

Why Should Anyone Believe David North?

In our article “The Workers League and Mark Curtis” (Workers Vanguard, No. 480, 23 June) we asked: “...why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why?” North’s Workers League made an international campaign out of helping railroad Mark Curtis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, into 25 years in prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. In its lame response to our article the WL’s Bulletin (14 July) protests, “But the issue is not whether you believe the Workers League.” Of course for them it can’t be. Anybody the least bit familiar with David North and his minions would have to be completely deranged to believe anything they say.

To frame the rest of its lies, the Bulletin claims that the Spartacist League maintained a “15-month silence” over the Curtis case. On the contrary — Workers Vanguard publicized the Curtis case in the Partisan Defense Committee column in our 1 July 1988 issue (No. 456). Here we noted that the PDC had sent a letter demanding the charges against Curtis be dropped and had contributed $100 to his defense. Others were urged to do the same. It is hard to imagine that the megalomaniac North missed this issue given that it also featured an article about himself entitled “Anatomy of a Healyite Russia Hater — David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son.”

Who Is Whose Agent?

The Bulletin sneers, “Spartacist even raises its eyebrows because a 1976 FBI index of leftist groups does not list the Workers League, as though this was some sort of necessary credential.” The FBI’s 1971 ADEX file was not some kind of “honor roll,” it was the government’s hit list of those targeted as “enemies” of America. War at Home, a recent pamphlet on “Covert Action Against U.S. Activists,” details the government’s dirty war against everyone from the Black Panthers to pacifist preachers and grandmothers. Yet somehow the Workers League, which advertises itself as the most proletarian, the most internationally connected, indeed the sole repository on the face of the planet of “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” didn’t get included in the FBI’s ADEX file — the “short list” of Americans these official hitmen had lined up in their sights.

How come? If the Workers League wasn’t on that list then where were they?

This is all the more suggestive given the Northites’ claim that the U.S. government took over the SWP in order to destroy... the Workers League. In “The Carleton Twelve,” a demented saga retailed as “proof” that SWP leader Jack Barnes and his coterie at a Midwest college were groomed by the FBI (in league with Joseph Hansen) to infiltrate the SWP, we read that “The State Department’s greatest fear was that Trotskyism, as embodied in the International Committee, would emerge as the revolutionary alternative to the Stalinist bureaucracies.” Well then, how is it. that the U.S. government wasn’t concerned about the Workers League when it drew up the ADEX list?

In a recent scurrilous piece, “The Militant and the Miners,” the Bulletin (29 September) names SWP members working in the coal fields and smears them as “part of an intelligence- gathering operation on behalf of the government and the coal bosses.” Why? Because they were hired! The fact that SWPers get industrial jobs at all, when they are members of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, is offered as proof positive that they are police agents.

In concocting this paranoid conspiracy theory against the SWP the Workers League presents reality through the prism of the McCarthyite I950s, i.e., when anyone with even vaguely socialist leanings was run out of their job. What About Ed Winn? He worked for the NY Transit Authority but ran as the Workers League’s candidate for president. By the WL’s measure this should make him a cop. And how did Mark Curtis end up getting thrown behind bars for 25 years when, according to the Bulletin, all SWP. members are either cops or police dupes? How come Curtis got jail and Ed Winn got a presidential candidacy?

Witnesses for the Prosecution

Then there’s the question of a state attorney from Des Moines, Iowa eagerly taking the line of argument from the Bulletin, a “communist” newspaper, to convict a leading member of the SWP. In our article we asked if it was simply “One More Coincidence?” that prosecuting attorney Catherine Thune used virtually the same words in her summation at the Curtis trial as those that appeared in the Bulletin article “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis” (5 August 1988). The Bulletin replies: “The statement was reported by the Des Moines Register, the principal daily paper in the city, and evidently read as well by the prosecutor, who incorporated the seven questions into her closing argument on September 9.” Doubtless the state’s attorney reads the daily newspaper. The problem is that the seven questions raised in the Workers League’s statement which were picked up by the prosecutor could not be found there.

The Des Moines Register did run substantial quotes from the WL’s “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis.” The 18 August 1988 issue featured a piece entitled “Socialist newspaper calls Curtis’ claims incredible” which highlighted quotes from the Bulletin arguing that Curtis could not possibly have been framed up by the cops. Here was an apologia for the Des Moines cops, who viciously beat Curtis, coming from a “socialist” newspaper. The question still remains as to how the prosecuting attorney got her hands on the whole text. Who gave it to her, the Workers League, or someone else?

The Bulletin claims it was “compelled” to write the Curtis article. which would become the script for the prosecution, because “the Workers League was seeking ballot status in Iowa for the first time... and the first question which many workers in Des Moines raised was the party’s attitude to the Curtis case.” This is odd. Previous to “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis,” one can find no mention of the Workers League seeking ballot status in Iowa. They didn’t take their election campaign to Des Moines until after the Curtis article had been published.

Besides, why are they protesting so much? This wouldn’t be the first time that David North and his Workers League have used the agencies of the capitalist state to “get” the SWP. There’s the matter of one Alan Gelfand. RWL agent, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP’s Los Angeles branch in 1977 after filing a “friend of the court” brief in the SWP’s suit against the FBI, based on the wild-eyed Healyite conspiracy theory (as told by Healy and co-authored by North) that the SWP was government-controlled.

Gelfand appealed to the courts of U.S. imperialism to reinstate him as a member, to review minutes, finances and other internal business of the SWP, and to remove members and leaders from the organization. Two of the key character witnesses in the Gelfand suit, which the Workers League boasted was a “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts,” were ex-cops from the notorious LAPD red squad.

Now they retail the testimony of two Des Moines cops against Mark Curtis as unimpeachable evidence. No answer in the Bulletin reply to our question: “What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were ‘The Truth’?” By the Workers League’s lights the cops, prosecuting attorney and court were the instruments of “workers justice” in jailing Curtis.

The “Heritage” North Defends

“What is the substance of this claim that the Workers League, and David North in particular, are ‘shadowy’ and ‘sinister’?” asks the Bulletin. How about this for starters. David, who calls himself “North,” made his political career out of loyally serving as the American stooge of Gerry Healy. He made his way to the top by co-authoring the “Security and the Fourth International” smear that SWP leaders were government agents. He carried out Healy’s orders to pursue the expensive Gelfand provocation. When Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi CPers by the Ba’athist regime, North’s Bulletin duly followed suit. The payoff for these crimes was millions in money from a variety of Middle East regimes including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi.

This whole dirty business hit the fan following the downfall of Healy’s WRP as accusations flew fast and furious between Healy’s former lieutenants. A Control Commission of the International Committee delegated to attempt to control the damage reported that the sum of 1,075,163 British pounds sterling had been received from an assortment of Near East colonels, sheiks and dictators.

Here it was revealed that among other services offered was an agreement with the Libyan government to provide intelligence on the “activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere” by “Zionists.” Even the IC Control Commission noted the “strongly antisemitic undertones” of this agreement in which “the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position.” An ex-WRP member told the London Sunday Times (7 February 1988) that the Healyites had taken information from the Jewish Yearbook and the Jewish Chronicle and sent it to Libya.

In return the WRP demanded £50,000 from the Libyan government to buy a web offset press, and a month after the agreement was signed the WRP’s daily News Line was launched. So much for the Bulletin’s protests that the Workers League is neither “shadowy” nor “sinister” because it has lots of campaigns and a weekly newspaper.

Of course, the findings of the IC Control Commission, an investigation carried out by the guilty, can only be the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless it was too hot for the Northites to publish in their press. Could it be that North was worried that his current colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labor League, would be exposed as not only complicit but on the front lines shoveling Arab gold into his section?

And let’s not forget one of North’s other former collaborators, Alex Mitchell. Mitchell, who worked with North on “Security and the Fourth International,” now plies his pen for the Sydney Sun Herald in columns attacking striking airline pilots. The Australian Healyites and the Northites call Mitchell a “literary prostitute.” Nothing new here — the Healyites have long been someone’s hired pen whether as PR agents for Mideast regimes or as the servants of Thatcher’s redbaiting, union-busting press. The Healyites’ “expose” of British miners’ leader Arthur Scargill’s remark that Solidarność was “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure to knife the union on the eve of the 1984-85 coal strike.

And what about North himself? When Healy was overthrown by his conniving henchmen, North, who was among this number, tried to claim that he and he alone had fought the glorious “founder-leader” over “dialectics.” But the only difference North ever had with Healy was whether 2+2=4.67 or 4.83, and they compromised on 4.5. As for the oil money received from despotic Near East regimes, none of Healy’s epigones objected to the vicious betrayals perpetrated by their organization to get the money when it was coming in. On the contrary, as we point out in an article in the latest Spartacist (No. 43-44, Summer 1989), they “moved in to depose Healy not because of the receipt of that money, but because that money dried up.”

This is the only “heritage” David North defends. Nonetheless even the practiced liars who write for the Bulletin were incapable of squaring this history with their fulsome defense of the “integrity” of the Workers League leader. Quotes taken from our article are cut to conveniently disappear any mention of Gerry Healy. But North was nothing if not loyal to Healy. (Now he says that Healy has “placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB.” If North really believes this maybe he’s worried that “glasnost” might go too far and fill in the “blank spaces” that would explain the Workers League.)

How did David come to call himself “North”? When his predecessor as WL leader, Tim Wohlforth, was getting the chop he whined, “I was even attacked as being an American pragmatist for purchasing an American rather than a British web offset press.” To parody the Bulletin, we could ask whether Healy named North after “Lord North” the British prime minister during the American War of Independence who proclaimed that he would see “America prostrate at our feet” — to curb against further excesses of “American pragmatism.” Or whether David christened himself “North” as a show of fealty to his British master.

As we noted in our article, the men North today denounces as “renegades” — i.e., Healy, Banda, Slaughter, Wohlforth — taught him everything he knows about practicing politics with no concern for honesty, principles or consistency. The Bulletin chooses not to respond to any of this. But for flavor look at what North himself wrote of one of his former mentors, Cliff Slaughter:

“Slaughter, a consummate cynic and hypocrite, epitomizes in his political and personal life all that is corrupt and perverse in the British petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. He is, therefore, a specialist in gathering into his net the most degenerate human specimens produced by this decadent social milieu: from hallucinating journalists, alcoholic university professors, and aging film directors of unfulfilled promise to neurotic middle class ladies who blame Trotskyism for their unsuccessful love affairs and failed marriages. “
— Bulletin, 9 December 1988

Yet it was Slaughter who the Northites once held up as the pre-eminent authority on “Security and the Fourth International,” who Alan Gelfand included on his list of witnesses as “an expert.” Now, it is the obviously twisted North who is calling Mark Curtis a “depraved rapist”!

If one were to try to match the luminaries of the Healy cult with the more notorious Stalinists it would roughly translate into Gerry Healy as Joseph Stalin, Slaughter as Mikhail Suslov, Michael Banda as Georgi Malenkov, Wohlforth as William Z. Foster, Freddy Mazelis as Earl Browder. This leaves David North as a jumped-up, creepy little Lavrenti Beria — for now the only master of “Security.”

Bandits and Renegades

It is quite ironic that the Bulletin retails the Bolshevik Tendency’s grotesque slanders of the Spartacist League. The BT is a collection of embittered ex-members of our organization who trickled out of the SL under the early pressures of the Reagan years. Claiming political agreement with us, they needed an excuse to alibi their cowardly departure. So they “discovered” the “regime question” and their model was... Gerry Healy, a ready-made horrible example of megalomania, paranoia, gangsterism and unbridled greed. Now David North, who rode Healy’s coattails and helped build the cult of the loathsome “founder-leader,” happily quotes the BTs self-serving attempt to smear the SL with the colors of Healyism.

Of course the BT can supply no evidence for its slanders. Here’s one example of how they tried to handle it. In an article advertised as “SL and the WRP Split” (1917, Winter 1986) the BT, after noting the Healyites were notorious for beating up internal opponents, wrote, “This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge,” while claiming that “intimations of such appetites are increasingly common”! This is like asking “When are you going to start beating your wife?”! The added fascination with “finances” shared by the petty criminal mentality in the BT leadership has also lent something to its lurid tales about the SL.

It says a great deal about the unscrupulousness of North & Co. that they would attempt to pass off parodies of their own, only too true, revolting history as the “truth” about the SL. The Bulletin uses the BT’s lies to condemn our call to stop Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland, while now with the reins of government in its hands Solidarność has openly declared its drive to restore capitalism. They both denounce us for hailing the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against the darkest imperialist-backed feudal reaction. They equally find repugnant our work to bring the power of labor and blacks to bear in successful mobilizations that have stopped the fascists — the BT calls it “ghetto work,” the WL claims it is “an obsession with race.” They both look instead to the good offices of the racist labor bureaucracy.

Despite differences in style, and insofar as one can find any political logic to either group, the Workers League and the BT have some overriding things in common: a shared hatred of Soviet Russia, an abiding hostility to the black working class in America, a bloodthirsty, vicarious enthusiasm for the death of others and a distinct smell of provocation.

Political Struggle by “Other Means”...

Having failed through episodic and flawed political struggle to uproot the Pabloite revisionism that destroyed the Fourth International, the Healyites substituted their psychotic “Security and the Fourth International” campaign, centered particularly on the charge that former SWP leader Joseph Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the GPU and the FBI who recruited Jack Barnes and a bunch of other students at Carleton College to run the SWP for the U.S. government. But while one might have to look elsewhere to explain the Northites, the Barnesites have had a linear political consistency since their inception.

They started as student cheerleaders for Castro and were recruited to the SWP, where their positions found an echo. By that time the SWP was pretty much a doddering and vulnerable organization. The brutally bureaucratic Barnes regime persisted until they had cleaned out all centrist vestiges and holdovers, i.e., any nominal Trotskyism, and completely took over.

As for the role of Joseph Hansen. Far from being the tool of both the Kremlin Stalinists and the U.S. imperialists in the destruction of the SWP, Hansen played the centrist lawyer who tried to keep a cover of “Trotskyist” orthodoxy on the galloping opportunism of the SWP. And far from brain-trusting Barnes, Hansen was the last obstacle to the full-fledged emergence of the anti- Trotskyist Barnes gang.

Barnes hasn’t changed his political positions since he joined and neither has the circle of people he was sufficiently able to also recruit. They have a central political core based on a radical program alien to Trotskyism — a Fidelista fan club of American agrarian-labor reformers. In contrast, the Northites have taken political positions all over the map as served their own convenient and grotesque opportunist ends.

In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term for a phenomenon like the Healyites: “political bandits” or, if you like, political pirates, i.e., who 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.

The mendacious practices and assertions of the Workers League (and the Bolshevik Tendency) say a great deal about the Stalinist-derived breakdown and perversion of the “far left” both in terms of proletarian morality and any connection with the class struggle. When it has suited their own episodic interests North, his past masters and present collaborators have turned to the capitalist courts and taken subsidies from oil-rich regimes, have served the Queen and the venal right-wing British trade-union bureaucracy by smearing the leader of desperately striking unionists, and have generally crawled before alien class forces.

Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality North and his gang can and will say or do anything. And these are the guys that did their level best to get Mark Curtis 25 years.

The Workers League and Mark Curtis (1989)

Workers Vanguard No. 480 (23 June 1989)

Why Should Anyone Believe David North?

The Workers League and Mark Curtis

Mark Curtis, a 29-year-old member of the Socialist Workers Party and union activist at the Swift meatpacking plant in Des Moines, is doing 25 years in an Iowa state prison on charges of burglary and sexual abuse. David North’s Workers League, meanwhile, has been relentlessly working to undermine defense efforts for Curtis in the workers movement, here and internationally. Claiming that the “government-controlled” SWP is covering up for a “depraved rapist,” the WL is vilifying leftists and trade-union leaders who sign statements or speak out on his behalf, Currently, the WL’s Bulletin is running a weekly series on “The Mark Curtis Hoax,” already in its eleventh installment. This campaign is now the Workers League’s major activity.

What is going on? Mark Curtis was convicted on 14 September 1988 in a Des Moines court of third degree sexual abuse and first degree burglary, based on the state’s charge that six months earlier Curtis forced his way onto the porch of the residence of a black family and attempted to rape 15-year-old Demetria Morris. But according to no account, not even that of the police or the young woman, did a rape ever take place, nor was anything stolen, nor was there a weapon, and there is no physical evidence of contact between Curtis and the alleged victim. Yet a young socialist militant faces 25 years of his life behind bars – for what? And why is David North’s Workers League running point for the prosecution? Isn’t there something weird here?

Let’s look at their targets. The Workers League has attacked the Socialist Workers Party as “a police-infested organization which works among politically diseased and disoriented layers of the middle class typified by the rapist Curtis” (Bulletin, 25 May). They have labeled our organization, the Spartacist League, a “politically deranged petty-bourgeois group,” claiming: “The defense of this depraved rapist has become the rallying point for a political provocation against the Workers League, the most frantic exponent of which as always, the Spartacist League” (Bulletin, 6 January). What set off this tirade was our noting that “the Northites have suddenly and cynically discovered the use of black oppression in order to get a white SWPer in Iowa sent to prison for 25 years on a dubious rape charge” (WV No. 467, 16 December 1988).

The Socialist Workers Party is a reformist political organization of the left. It was one of 16 groups singled out for special scrutiny by the FBI’s so-called “administrative index” (ADEX) a “subversives” list set up under Nixon to consolidate the earlier “Subversives Index” and “Communist Index.” In 1973, at the height of liberal reaction against the government’s Watergate “dirty tricks,” the SWP filed a legal suit against FBI spying and disruption, particularly under the infamous COINTELPRO program. Testimony and documents uncovered during the “Watersuit” revealed that between 1960 and 1976, the FBI committed 206 burglaries at SWP offices or homes, stole 12,600 documents and tapped telephones for at least 20,000 days. In August 1986, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in favor of the SWP, ordering the FBI to pay them the not very munificent sum of $264,000 in damages for its 38-year-long campaign of harassment.

The Spartacist League was also listed on the ADEX file, targeted by the government for “special” attention. The ADEX code included a group designated “SPL,” along with the Communist Party, SWP, Black Panthers, Progressive Labor, SDS and others (see illustration). The FBI’s definition of “SPL” claimed the Spartacist League “does not openly advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government at this time,” implying that we were some kind of secret terrorist conspirators. The SL, too, sued the government, in a 1983 suit over the Attorney General’s “Guidelines for Domestic Security/ Terrorism Investigations.” And in 1984 we won the case by forcing the government to delete its slanderous and deadly “definition” of the SL, thus conceding that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism.

What about David North’s Workers League? Unlike the SWP and the SL, they don’t appear on the ADEX file. And while the SWP was in court fighting, in its fashion, against government surveillance and provocation, what was the WL doing? North and his godfather Gerry Healy’s International Committee were mounting their own smear campaign, “Security and the Fourth International,” cop-baiting SWP leaders as simultaneously agents of the FBI and the Russian secret police! When a WL agent. Alan Gelfand. was expelled from the SWP in 1977, North & Co. dragged the SWP into court, demanding that the capitalist state carry out a fishing expedition, prying into the party’s minutes, finances and membership lists. It takes effrontery to haul groups into court who are the object of vicious governmental repression.

One has to ask, who benefits – cui bono?

And one has to ask, who’s doing the talking?

The rather shadowy David North is the latest in a long line of now infamous and sinister characters who have been prominent in the Gerry Healy tendency in Britain and their organization in the U.S.. the Workers League. Let us see how North now describes his illustrious predecessors. Tim Wohlforth, who was axed in 1974 as lider maximo of the WL amid allegations of CIA connections, is reviled as a “petty bourgeois American philistine.” Following the 1985 blowout in the Healyite organization, North dismissed Michael Banda. Healy’s top hatchet man, as one of many “politically diseased petty-bourgeois renegades.” Cliff Slaughter, another of the Healyites’ ex-leading lights, is described as “a consummate cynic and hypocrite” who “epitomizes in his political and personal life all that is corrupt and perverse” in the British intelligentsia, “gathering into his net the most degenerate human specimens produced by this decadent social milieu” (Bulletin, 9 December 1988).

These were David North’s mentors who showed him the ropes. Alex Mitchell, a fellow hack in the Healyite slander mills who together with North penned most of the “Security” smear job against the SWP, resurfaced with a column in an Australian bourgeois paper, the Sydney Sun Herald. Peter Fryer, who got out of the Healyites before the really dirty business got started, is described as “a degenerate middle-class journalist.” Freddy Mazelis, who did a brief stand-in performance as WL honcho after Wohlforth was axed, has so far escaped being satanized, but only so long as he serves as North’s toady. As for Gerry Healy, the evil sorcerer whose apprentices have run amok, in the 1985 implosion of the Healyites it was proven that he determined the party line in accordance with money from Arab colonels and sheiks. Now Healy is called a “political agent of the Kremlin” who is welcomed in Moscow “because he has placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB” (Bulletin, 20 November 1987). Vanessa Redgrave is thrown in as “the Kremlin’s New Leading Lady.”

This is quite a record in treachery. As we have noted, “Stalin never claimed that all the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the October Revolution were counterrevolutionary spies and traitors. Exempted were Lenin, a few who died early and a couple who lucked out and died a natural death at old age” (“David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son,” WV No. 456, 1 July 1988). But David North claims that every one of his predecessors is degenerate, if not an outright agent – Wohlforth, Banda, Slaughter, Mitchell, Redgrave, Healy, and don’t forget the arch-“renegades” Pierre Lambert and Michel Varga. If, as North writes, Banda “can no longer be counted among the living,” when it comes to “Marxism and the struggle for socialism,” this must make North himself a zombie. He is the only True Believer, descendant of a long and complete line of traitors.

With this “authority” the WL pro claims Mark Curtis a “sociopath,” a “vicious rapist,” a “sadistic rapist,” a “white middle-class rapist,” and above all a “convicted rapist” and a “proven rapist” convicted and “proven” by the bourgeois courts. The SWP is labeled “a sociopathic organization, a watering hole for all sorts of degenerate elements, social criminals, filled with hatred of the working class,” of which “Curtis himself – a drug user and rapist – is a perfect representative” (Bulletin, 28 April). In the pages of the Bulletin, they endlessly regurgitate the words of the prosecution. Stranger yet, in her summation at Curtis’ trial Iowa state prosecutor Catherine Thune regurgitates virtually the exact words of the Bulletin (see illustration). They seem to be working from a common script.

Mark Curtis was a subject of FBI surveillance as an activist in CISPES in Birmingham, Alabama. At Swift, where Curtis worked in Des Moines, federal agents had been working with management for three months reviewing personnel files before staging a raid which seized 17 foreign-born workers at the meatpacking plant on March 1. After work on March 4, Curtis had participated in a meeting of workers at the plant protesting the roundup. A couple hours later he was arrested and charged with rape. Curtis says the cops grabbed him, pulled down his pants, beat him brutally at the jail, then lied in court. Mark Curtis maintains his innocence, declaring, “I am not a rapist, but a fighter for women’s rights. And I am not guilty of the crimes I have been charged and convicted of.”

So why should anybody believe David North? Who is the Workers League to say that Curtis is guilty, and why? How does the WL come to possess such influence with the prosecution? What kind of purported socialists retail the cops’ story as if it were “The Truth “? We and many of our readers have some relevant experience on the nature of these paid thugs of the racist capitalist state. Under the circumstances we must believe Mark Curtis is innocent.

Political Bureau, Spartacist League/U.S. 12 June 1989

* * *

[facsimile illustration]

On August 5, the Workers League asks:

• How did the police know that Curtis was going to abruptly leave his house in the middle of the night to buy food?
• How did they know he would drive by himself?
• How did they know which store he would go to, and what route he would take?
• How did they know that he would be stopped at a particular red light, where he could be accosted by the girl?
• How did they know that he would agree to let the girl into his car?
• How did they know he would agree to drive her home?
• How did they know that when he arrived at her home, he would get out of his car, go to the porch and then wait placidly to be arrested?

- Bulletin, 5 August 1988

...A month later, the prosecutor’s summation:

“How did the police, or how did Demetria and Jason or their family, know that the defendant was going to abruptly leave his home, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00, to buy food? How did they know?
“How did they know that the defendant would get into a car and drive by himself?
“How did they know that the defendant would go to the HyVee store to do his grocery shopping? How did they know what route he would take?
“How did they know that he would be stopped at a particular red light, where a girl could approach him? How did they know the light would be red?
“How did they know that the defendant would agree to give this girl a ride to help her out?
“How did they know that he would agree to drive her to her home, or a home, in what the defense has brought out to be a bad or unsafe neighborhood?
“How did they know that when he arrived at the home, he would get out of the car, agree to go to the porch, and then wait calmly to be arrested?”

- Bulletin, 16 September 1988

What Was WL Doing at 207th St.? (1988)

Workers Vanguard No. 467 (16 December 1988)

What Was the Workers League Doing at 207th Street?

The day before the November 5 mobilization that stopped the Ku Klux Klan and skinhead racists from terrorizing, the streets of Philadelphia, a woman comrade selling Workers Vanguard was surrounded by six white thugs outside the 207th. Street transit barn in New York City.

They physically tried to prevent her from talking to the members of this heavily black shop about coming down to Philadelphia on November 5. They screamed that the Partisan Defense Committee’s call to bring out labor and black power against the KKK night-riders made the Spartacist League “antiwhite racists.” They could have been members of Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, whose psycho skinhead killers scream about “anti-white racism.” But they weren’t. They were members of David North’s shady and sinister outfit, the Workers League.

Members of the powerful New York City Transit Workers Union, Local 100 proudly served in the front lines of the November 5 mobilization against the KKK. They came with their own banner calling for “Labor/ Black Defense to Smash Racist Terror!” TWU members were part of the disciplined and effective union defense guard which lined the perimeter of the rally to defend against fascist provocation. Those who couldn’t make the bus to Philly bought seats for others.

Both the United Motormen’s Division and the Track Division of Local 100 voted overwhelmingly to endorse the “All Out to Stop the KKK!” mobilization. At the October 19 evening meeting of the motormen, a Workers League supporter was the only one to vote against endorsing. At the morning meeting another WL supporter, Allen Cherry, abstained. Outside, he denounced the November 5 mobilization to a group of workers as “divisive” and “black nationalist.” In fact it is the Northites who are united with the frenzied black nationalists in loathing the sight of the integrated power of labor and blacks mobilized in class struggle.

After the Spartacist League initiated a 5,000-strong labor/black mobilization that stopped the Klan from marching in Washington, D.C. in November 1982, the WL dismissed this victory as an “adventure which played right into the hands of the police”! They wrote that the Spartacists separate “the struggle against racism from the struggle of the working class.” And in. 1986, a Bulletin smear job on the SL indicted us for “An Obsession With Race” – in this deeply racist country!

The Northites are cynical hustlers who have for years been trying to recruit among minority youth while in the unions they push “colorblind” economism reflecting their obsession with tailing after the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. In Local 100, when the class-struggle militants of the Committee for a Fighting TWU mobilized support for union action in defense of token clerk James Grimes, framed by the company and the D.A. for defending himself against muggers, the Bulletin fingered Grimes for not following “required” procedure.

Currently, WL supporter Allen Cherry is once again running for office in the motormen’s division, on a program which says not one word about racism. And this is in Ed Koch’s New York City, where TA cops killed black artist Michael Stewart, son of a retired transit worker, where a police “decoy” unit set up hundreds of black and Hispanic men, where transit police frequently shoot black youth as “farebeaters,” where black transit worker Willie Turks was beaten to death by a racist mob near the Coney Island yards. About all this the Workers League has nothing to say.

In the pursuit of their outrageous years-long vendetta against the reformist Socialist Workers Party, the Northites have suddenly and cynically discovered the issue of black oppression in order to get a white SWPer in Iowa sent to prison for 25 years on a dubious rape charge. Beware of those who peddle conspiracy theories like the WL’s claim that the SWP is “FBI-controlled”; such cop-baiters are not only frequently deranged, but are thoroughly divorced from any working-class principles or elementary morality. For their despicable purposes they will do or say just about anything.

The class line is like a revolving door for the Northites, who more often than not find themselves on the wrong side of it. In their rabid opposition to the anti-Klan protest, the Workers League which yesterday hailed the murder of Iraqi Communists by the Ba’athist colonels now find themselves in the company of the Zionists, the racist cops and their bourgeois masters. But when a TWUer reported back at a union meeting on the successful November 5 mobe that stopped the fascists in Philly, transit workers applauded their victory. They know where the class line is.

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

Workers Vanguard No. 456 (1 July 1988)

Anatomy of a Healyite Russia-Hater

David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Counterrevolutionary Through and Through”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David North: A Joseph Hansen of the Second Mobilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Principles” of Political Bandits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David North and the Law (1987)

Workers Vanguard No. 430 (12 June 1987)

More Healyite than Healy

David North and the Law

For over 20 years the gang of political bandits led by Gerry Healy shamelessly used the capitalist courts to disrupt, harass, frame up and bankrupt political opponents within the workers movement. Now the American Workers League’s David North, who rushed to claim this heritage as his own after his former British boss Healy was ousted a couple of years ago, is squealing like a stuck pig over how “anti-communist” appeals to the courts will “undermine democratic rights.” Why? Because it looks like the WL is going to get saddled with the court costs in one of the Healyites’ most infamous lawsuits: the sinister case of Alan Gelfand vs. the Socialist Workers Party.

An agent provocateur of the Workers League, Gelfand was expelled from the SWP in 1979. Then, backed and bankrolled by North & Co., Gelfand sued the SWP in federal court claiming that his expulsion was the work of U.S. government agents in “control” of the organization. Citing the Healyites’ notorious “Security and the Fourth International” slanders that central leaders of the SWP were agents of the FBI and the Stalinist secret police, Gelfand demanded that the court reinstate him as a member and “remove” particular SWP leaders and members from the party. As well as appealing to the class enemy to determine the membership of a self-proclaimed socialist organization, the Northites also called on the court to pry into the SWP’s minutes, finances – in short, every aspect of its functioning! Two key “character” witnesses for the Healyite prosecution were former cops from the notorious LAPD red squad, the Public Disorder Intelligence Division.

As we wrote in “The Strange Case of Provocateur Alan Gelfand - Healyite Slanders and SWP Cowards”: “It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by this case, which if upheld would give the capitalist state a license to ‘regulate’ the internal life of working-class organizations” (WV No. 321, 14 January 1983). While the court has yet to come down with a final decision, the SWP has asked for an interim settlement of $101,000 for legal costs. This has North screaming foul, declaring that “The actions taken by the SWP since the trial could only be taken by police agents who are deliberately seeking to undermine democratic rights through legal actions which have far-ranging implications” (Bulletin, 3 March). So what does that make David North who boasts that he alone went all the way with Gelfand in his obscene appeal to the agencies of the capitalist state to police the left and labor movement? Whose agent is he?

A Calculus of Marxist Decency

Opposition to the use of the bosses’ courts within the workers movement is among the most elementary of class principles. It is axiomatic for Marxists that the state is not “neutral” but the armed fist of the ruling class. Any worker who has ever faced the strikebreaking force of the courts and cops knows this. David North wouldn’t know the class line if he tripped over it, as he frequently does – because more often than not the Healyites have put themselves on the wrong side of it in the pursuit of their own advantage. In their two-volume opus on the Gelfand suit, the Workers League brags that this was a how-to “model” in “making use of the capitalist courts.” But now North and Gelfand are yelping that the same courts they used against the SWP could make them pay.

When the forces of capitalist “law and order” suit their convenience the Healyites have been willing and even wanton in using them. But when they’re on the receiving end, as in the case of the SWP motion (which we hardly condone), like a dying man who finds religion the Healyites suddenly discover class principles. Back in ‘83, in the midst of suing a British leftist newspaper, Socialist Organiser, Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party cynically announced that “the principled policy of the WRP” was to “close ranks in defence” of any “section of the labour movement” under attack by the class enemy! The WRP, you see, was begging for left support against a BBC program reporting on their financial ties to a variety of “Third World” Arab nationalist regimes.

Running to the state against their political opponents became the stock in trade of Healyism two decades ago with the vicious beating of Ernie Tate. In 1966, Tate was set upon by Healy’s goons outside a Healyite meeting in London for distributing SWP leader Joseph Hansen’s pamphlet “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International.” The pamphlet documented the trumped-up expulsion of Spartacist from the 1966 London conference of Healy’s International Committee.

When Tate circulated a letter of protest against this hooliganism the WRP sued him and threatened libel suits against left-wing publications in Britain who printed the letter! In 1975 the Healyites’ well-heeled movie star “angel” Vanessa Redgrave dragged former WRP member Alan Thornett through the courts over an outstanding personal loan.

In 1981, again in the name of Healy’s celebrity Redgrave, the WRP brought their libel suit against Socialist Organiser editor Sean Matgamna after he published a scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the suit took no objection to Matgamna’s charge that the Healyites were the paid agents of Libya’s Qaddafi. When the WRP went on a campaign against the BBC for reporting the same charges, Matgamna coyly asked, “Will the WRP Sue the BBC?” Of course they didn’t. A year later, Healy’s “expose” of British miners leader Arthur Scargill for criticizing Polish Solidarność as “anti-socialist” was timed for maximum exposure on the eve of the 1984-85 miners strike through the redbaiting, hysterically anti-Scargill Fleet Street gutter press.

“Security” and Healyism

For over a decade the Healyites plied their loathsome “Security and the Fourth International” campaign aimed in particular at veteran SWP leader Joseph Hansen who was slandered as an accomplice in the Stalinist GPU murder of Trotsky. Echoing the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was killed by one of his “own people,” the “Security” slander campaign was an attack on the revolutionary heritage of American Trotskyism. If Hansen was simultaneously an agent of the FBI and the GPU, then why not SWP founder James P. Cannon? Or for that matter Trotsky himself?

Hansen, a skilled polemicist, had tweaked Healy’s tail on more than one occasion. But the “Security” campaign was more than just a vendetta. It embodied the whole method of Healyism. The purpose of these cascading wild-eyed and paranoid lies was to keep the membership politically and morally straitjacketed, not to mention scared witless. Either you accept and defend the lies – all of them – or you yourself might be denounced as an agent of the CIA, FBI, GPU,... Indeed, David North’s road to power in the Workers League was paved by the termination of Healy’s former American toady, Tim Wohlforth, whose companion was framed as a CIA agent. And it was as the accomplice in and a main mouthpiece for “Security” that North won his spurs as Healy’s new American lackey.

Two years ago the political whorehouse that Gerry Healy built in his own image, the so-called “International Committee,” came crashing down when the self-declared “founder-leader” was ousted through the intrigues of his lieutenants (including North). With the lid blown off the Healyite rotting garbage can, the whole sordid history of physical violence against members and the scandalous pursuit of Arab capitalist gold was openly admitted (indeed Cliff Slaughter alleged that the WRP had acted as fingermen for the Iraqi Ba’athist regime against supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party).

The latest installment in this despicable saga is the jailing of Phil Penn, a founding member of the WRP and Healy’s former chauffeur. Penn, who went with the Slaughter wing, was thrown behind bars for four months on charges of assault brought by the Healy-Torrance wing (now sans Healy, who has split). Penn says he was assaulted by four of Healy-Torrance’s goons. We can’t claim to know what transpired in the incident. All sides have been well trained in the Healy school of gangsterism, brutal organizational practices and cynical lies to cover their tracks.

The Slaughterites argue in a letter protesting the jailing of Penn that “no organization calling itself socialist would collaborate with the police against members of the labour movement.” True enough, but for 25 years as Healy’s mouthpiece Slaughter was doing exactly that. According to North’s Bulletin, Slaughter was “among the leading protagonists and most forceful advocates” of the smear job on Hansen and offered to testify as a witness on Gelfand’s behalf. Since the WRP split, Slaughter has shamefacedly disavowed the “Security and the Fl” and the Gelfand case, claiming they were “frameups.” For his part North has clung to every despicable hallmark of Healyism.

David North loves the law. Last year, after our special issue of English-language Spartacist (No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86) on “Healyism Implodes,” we found ourselves vilified at great length in a 14-part series in North’s Bulletin. The first installment defended Hormel strike leaders for filing a court suit against the scabherding International, coyly commenting, “We will consider the Spartacist position on the use of the capitalist courts in a later article” (Bulletin, I April 1986). As we noted in response, the Northites “will be hard put indeed to consider the elementary labor principle that the bosses’ courts are not the vehicle for solving disputes in the labor movement” (“Lord of the Fleas,” WV No. 412, 26 September 1986). And of course they didn’t. It’s not just the courts, the Workers League also loves the cops. In 1971 the WL championed the New York City cop “strike,” aimed at increasing bonapartist terror against blacks and working people!

For more than 20 years, the Spartacist League has exposed the Healyites’ crimes against the workers movement. When Ernie Tate was beaten we raised the biggest outcry we could, printing his account and appeal for workers democracy together with an editorial, “Oust Healy” (Spartacist No. 9, January-February 1967). We campaigned against the “Security” smear campaign, including picketing Healyite meetings with signs asking, “Who Gave Healy His Security Clearance?” and defending Joseph Hansen as an authentic revisionist. When we first heard of the sinister Gelfand suit, which the SWP shamefully kept under wraps for close to four years, we immediately sought to defend the SWP and the workers movement against this criminal provocation. The SWP refused our appeal for more information. Now they’re appealing to the judge for retribution, with all the cringing faith in the capitalist courts of their “Watersuit” against the FBI where the SWP sought a legal license for its quirky brand of reformism.

For David North to rail against the SWP takes real chutzpah. In relation to any Marxist proletarian principles, the Healyites have all the programmatic and moral stance of a revolving door. Or as comrade Trotsky put it in speaking of the “morals” of the social democrats, liberals and anarchists who railed against Bolshevik “amoralism”:

“...they are ready for any baseness – rejection of convictions, perfidy, betrayal – in the name of ambition or cupidity. In the holy sphere of personal interests the end to them justifies any means. But it is precisely because of this that they require special codes of morals, durable, and at the same time elastic, like good suspenders”
(Their Morals and Ours).

To the pursuit of the Healyites’ base interests, rank opportunism and financial advantage correspond base means – like dragging leftists through the capitalist courts and other eager forays across the class line. Their support for the mythical “Arab Revolution,” beginning over the 1967 Mideast war, provided an elastic enough concept for the Healyites to fill their pockets and to embrace any act by any of the colonels, sheiks and oil-rich strong men according to who was dispensing the patronage. He who pays the piper calls the tune. And in 1979 the Healyites grotesquely heralded the murder of 21 Iraqi Communists by the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, a monstrous crime against the international working class. Later the Healyites supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in its war against Iraq, as they have backed every anti-Soviet force on the perimeter of the USSR – from Mao’s Red Guards to the CIA-backed mullahs in Afghanistan to the Solidarność failed counterrevolution in Poland. This is all part of the “heritage” which North defends.

Insofar as the Workers League can claim a coherent political core, it is virulent anti-Sovietism and gross capitulation to the worst elements of the pro-imperialist, racist labor tops. As we concluded our article “Healyism Implodes”:

“‘Morality’ for Marxists is inextricably tied to program. The Spartacists’ unwavering adherence to revolutionary Trotskyism – our genuine, concrete defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and against the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy, our commitment to building an international party of proletarian revolution – this has been our political compass. From that also comes a certain superstructure, a certain morality.”
Spartacist, No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86

Anything goes under the mantle of Healyism, and North, a Healyite’s Healyite, could go anywhere. This gang has traversed the class line so often that who or what they are is forever dubious. On those rare occasions when they talk of principles and feign Marxist orthodoxy, it’s time to “hold fast to the opposites” – to borrow a page from Healy’s shell game “dialectics” – and above all hold on to your wallet.

* * *

Bulletin

– 11 February 1986:

"Resolution on Security and the Fourth International

The 8th Congress of the WRP, held in Hammersmith, 8th and 8th of February 1888, reaffirms Its support for the ICFI investigation, Security and the Fourth International.

We reject the attacks by the Bands-Slaughter group, who no longer represent the British section of the Fourth international, and who are attacking Security and the Fourth international, as part of their continuing attack on the ICFI.

We call on the ICFI to continue the fight to expose the role of state agents in the workers movement throughout the world as a central task in the building of the revolutionary leadership internationally.

This congress sends its warmest fraternal greetings and support to Alan Gelfand for his struggle to expose the state agents within the SWP In America.

In this struggle, he doesn’t act as an individual, but represents the struggle of all workers for their democratic rights."