Joseph Hansen, the leading Pabloite revisionist of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, has written an article of unparalleled political lies and slander against the International Committee of the Fourth International. (“The Secret of Healy’s ‘Dialectics’,” Intercontinental Press, March 31, 1975.)
The malicious and hysterical language of this article marks a new stage in the erosion of the revisionist forces internationally as the heat of the class struggle roasts them on the spit of history.
It is not a polemic; it is a tirade. It does not set out to explain different political points of view, but to frame one man, Comrade Gerry Healy, general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and to create conditions for provocations against sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Hansen has compiled this seven-page outburst, not because he had been attacked by the International Committee. We have been continuously doing that since 1963, when Hansen concluded his unprincipled “reunification” with the Pabloites to fight the International Committee, and before that as well.
What has immediately sparked Hansen’s frenzy is that Tim Wohlforth was replaced as national secretary of the Workers League on August 31, 1974. One month later, on September 29, 1974, he resigned from the Workers League, which maintains fraternal relations with the International Committee.
The Workers League Central Committee voted unanimously, Wohlforth’s vote included, for his removal as national secretary. The decisions on Wohlforth were unanimously upheld at the Workers League national conference in New York in January 1975.
The International Committee of the Fourth International supports all the Workers League decisions in relation to Wohlforth, although the Workers League is prevented by US law from being a member of the IC. On March 22, 1975, the International Committee issued a statement on Wohlforth’s replacement and resignation. (Published in Workers Press, April 2, 1975.)
What has been unanimously accepted throughout the IC in all its sections has inflamed Hansen into his vilest-ever attack on the International Committee.
The reason? Behind Wohlforth’s replacement and subsequent desertion were vital questions of the security of the movement.
Could the leadership in any section of our movement knowingly harbor on the Central Committee and Political Committee a member who had previous family connections with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) without a party investigation which established a security clearance?
The Workers League said “no” and so did the International Committee. Wohlforth said it was “unimportant,” but then changed his mind and voted for his own removal.
Hansen’s approach is quite the opposite. He praises the renegade Wohlforth to the skies. “His sincerity is undeniable and one can only wish him better luck in his next venture,” Hansen writes in Intercontinental Press (March 31, 1975). At the same time, he buries completely the security issues involved and labels the International Committee “paranoid.”
Let us again recapitulate on the facts concerning Wohlforth and the security question which arose inside the Workers League. (Full IC Statement published in Workers Press, April 2, 1975.) It concerned a certain Nancy Fields who had previous family connections with the CIA. She was on the Central Committee and Political Committee of the Workers League without these previous family connections being made known to other leading comrades. In May 1974, she attended an important international meeting in London without Wohlforth having first obtained a security clearance for her.
Throughout that year, she, with Wohlforth’s collusion, acted as hatchet-woman in closing down Workers League branches, driving out members and expelling others, some of whom were of long standing in the movement. In all, the League’s membership was depleted by about 100 in a few months. These actions caused grave disquiet. She had a brutal attitude towards members, summed up by one comrade who said, “She treated us like dogs.”
On August 18, 1974, at a meeting in London, Wohlforth was asked point-blank whether she had anything to do with the CIA. Wohlforth replied, “no.”
Later that same month, Wohlforth was found to be telling lies. He now admitted he knew that she had previous family connections with the CIA, but said that these were “unimportant.”
They may have been “unimportant” to Wohlforth, but not to the other members of the Workers League Central Committee. They voted to replace him. Wohlforth also voted for his own removal. So did Fields.
The Workers League Central Committee then voted unanimously to set up an inquiry commission to look into the security questions that had been raised and to suspend Fields from membership pending its findings.
Her previous family connections with the CIA were proved beyond doubt. The commission reported:
The inquiry established that from the age of 12 until the completion of her university education, Nancy Fields was brought up, educated, and financially supported by her aunt and uncle, Albert and Gigs Morris. Albert Morris is head of the CIA’s IBM computer operation in Washington as well as being a large stockholder in IBM. He was a member of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, and worked in Poland as an agent of imperialism. During the 1960s, a frequent house guest at their home in Maine was Richard Helms, ex-director of the CIA and now US Ambassador in Iran.
In refusing to report Fields’s previous family connections to the IC prior to the May 1974 meeting in London, in failing to tell his own comrades in the leadership of the Workers League, Wohlforth was placing his own personal relations with Fields above the security considerations of the revolutionary movement.
In the revolutionary party, this is not possible. Until the security issue is decided one way or the other, the benefit of the doubt rests with the party and the revolutionary requirements of the working class.
Wohlforth and Fields refused to take part in the inquiry commission that they had voted to set up. Indeed, his resignation came only five days after the arrangements were made for the commission to start its inquiries in New York. Both of them refused to give verbal or written testimony.
When it reported, Wohlforth rejected the findings out of hand. He refused to return to his place in the Workers League and take up his responsibilities as a leader in the movement. Fields, who had been cleared of having any links with the CIA, took the same reactionary position.
Wohlforth made an unprincipled and unserious attempt to return to the Workers League in December 1974, under conditions in which he wanted to lay down the terms of his membership. There is no special status of membership in the revolutionary party for Wohlforth or anyone else. The Workers League Central Committee unanimously rejected his verbal request and all the decisions in relation to Wohlforth and Fields were upheld unanimously at the League’s national conference in January 1975.
There, you might have thought, the renegade Wohlforth’s political career would end, with not an ally in sight. The circumstances of his replacement as national secretary and his subsequent desertion were of such a character that no one would want to touch him or Fields with a barge pole. They were both politically thoroughly discredited.
But barge poles appeared aplenty — from Hansen, leader of the Pablotite revisionist Socialist Workers Party, and from Robertson of the “Spartacist League.”
After a decade, at least, of mutual political hostility, Hansen and Wohlforth, in a matter of weeks, were transformed into admiring political collaborators.
Hansen is not new to this. He executed the same somersault in relation to Pablo in 1963 when they founded the so-called Unified Secretariat for the sole purpose of trying to smash the International Committee after spending 10 years of verbal “warfare.”
Hansen’s relations with Pablo have been so solidarized that he can say in the March 31 Intercontinental Press article: “He (Pablo) was a materialist and remains one to this day,” a reference to the man who is today the bagman for Andreas Papandreou’s politically dubious reformist party in Greece, and who spent part of the 1960s as bagman for Ben Bella in Algeria.
But Hansen’s merger with Wohlforth takes place under vastly different conditions from the unprincipled factional alliance with Pablo. In rushing to defend Wohlforth, Hansen sets out to deliberately obscure the vital questions of security of the national sections of the Fourth International.
While he is screaming “paranoid” at the IC, he fails to give a straight opinion on whether the Workers League Central Committee was right to replace Wohlforth, suspend Fields, and set up an inquiry into Wohlforth’s nondeclaration of Fields’s previous family connections with the CIA.
Because he does not give a straight answer, it does not mean that he has no answer. He has. Hansen’s article demonstrates from beginning to end that he is violently opposed to raising security questions in the building of revolutionary parties in the working class.
Hansen’s position is all the more criminal since the Trotskyist movement has suffered so devastatingly from the murderous attacks of the secret police of the capitalist class and Stalin’s GPU. Trotsky himself fell victim to a Stalinist assassin in circumstances which showed a lack of security vigilance.
Hansen himself is a case in point. He was one of the guards in Trotsky’s headquarters-in-exile in Coyoacan, Mexico, when the GPU agent Mercader struck his fatal blow with an ice pick. Hansen goes down in history, in the words of one of the guards, Harold Robins, as “the man who couldn’t find his gun,” although he had the reputation of being a “crack shot.”
But despite this appalling penetration of the early movement, and many other historical examples, Hansen comes forward today to launch a frenzied attack on the International Committee for its dedicated attention to questions of security.
In this period, Hansen sets out to deliberately distort the history of security dangers to miseducate and weaken the revolutionary movement. It comes at a time when the FBI has yielded up some 3,000 documents covering three decades of surveillance, penetration and disruption of Hansen’s own party, and the CIA is being exposed daily for its conspiracies against the working class and the left in countries all over the world.
One thing the published FBI documents show beyond doubt, is that they reveal only the tip of the iceberg. These doctored and highly selective documents are undoubtedly reinforced by spies who are already and have been for some time inside Hansen’s party.
Our insistence on security training is entirely consistent with the traditions and principles of the revolutionary movement as fought for by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Security is not an abstract or secondary question. A party that is not founded on revolutionary discipline in its own ranks cannot command the support of the working class in confronting the capitalist state machine, overthrowing it, and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is not to present security in a one-sided way. It is to be seen as a central political question in the training of a revolutionary cadre in the working class. A serious revolutionary party does not indulge in panic in dealing with security questions in its ranks, because it cannot organize its ranks properly to repel police penetration under panic.
This means vigilance at all times on questions of security in the knowledge that a trained revolutionary party, deeply embedded in the working class, is the biggest single guarantor against the counterrevolutionary conspiracies of the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6, etc.
Hansen’s article enables us to reopen vital pages in the history of Trotskyism. We are obliged to present this history, warts and all, since our movement has, in the past, paid a terrible price when it has ignored and derided security training in its ranks. These are the pages that Hansen wants to suppress.
Trotsky was murdered by Stalin’s GPU because the objective conditions placed the Fourth International in considerable isolation from the masses and, consequently, his personal safety was endangered continuously. While he was surrounded by the most devoted political following in history, some were nevertheless lax in security matters, which enabled the GPU assassin to strike.
The objective conditions are quite the opposite today. The working class is undefeated and militant, the worst possible situation for the ruling class and the Stalinists to face the revolutionary upsurge in the working class. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has the opportunity to build big parties in every country which are capable of defending themselves from the class enemy and its counterrevolutionary agencies, by organizing the successful overthrow of the capitalist state and seizing the power. The achievements of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the building of sections of the IC in a number of countries is what enrages Hansen and the revisionists everywhere. This is what forces Hansen and Wohlforth together in a bloc to belittle and deride security in the movement. It is their reactionary way of currying favor with the liberals and anticommunists.
The International Committee of the Fourth International is not going to be intimidated by the shouts and screams of the revisionists. They can call us “sectarians” and “paranoids” until they are blue in the face. In using these labels, they are in fact attacking the IC’s fight for principles and its attention to discipline and security vigilance in our ranks. We are not building a bucket-shop for middle-class free-booters and adventurers, which is the hallmark of Hansen’s international groupings. That road is an open invitation to the CIA and penetration by the police, because it is precisely among such elements that the police agencies operate so breezily.
Hansen wants to hide the security question; we want to elevate it in the training and building of our movement. That is why we feel it necessary to reopen the pages of history of Trotskyism to explain the background of why action was taken against Wohlforth and why similar steps will be taken again in the future if the necessity arises.