The source of Hansen’s outraged and slanderous attack on the International Committee of the Fourth International is the desertion by Wohlforth, ex-national secretary of the Workers League, following his fully substantiated charges of negligence on internal security.
His article explicitly defends the method—or lack of method—employed by Wohlforth in protecting the Workers League from infiltration, disruption and provocation by state police agencies.
At the same time, he raises a frenzied witch-hunt against the International Committee and in particular, Comrade Gerry Healy, general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Where Wohlforth undermined the internal security of the Workers League, Hansen sets out consciously to whip up a lynch atmosphere of violence to threaten the external security of the Workers League and the International Committee.
There is not a shred of politics in the attack on Comrade Healy. Hansen is incapable of that. He resorts to personal abuse of the most slanderous kind with no other purpose than to frame him.
A long time ago, Hansen earned a reputation for this kind of scurrilous abuse. In 1966, the Newsletter pamphlet Problems of the Fourth International quoted a member of Hansen’s Socialist Workers Party as saying:
When it comes to normal polemicizing against opponents there are all sorts of comrades who can undertake this task, but when Cannon wants to sharpen things up, with a real dirty below the belt job, all eyes on the committee turn automatically in the direction of Joe Hansen. (Problems of the Fourth International, August 1966. Printed in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 4, New Park Publications, 1974.)
Hansen joins Wohlforth in a dubious crusade which says that if the revolutionary leadership raises political vigilance on questions of security, it is, by definition, “mad.” Hansen writes:
Wohlforth describes Healy’s performance as “madness.” Would it not be preferable, and perhaps more precise, to use a modern term like “paranoia”?
If the term fits, then the true explanation for Healy’s obsessions about the CIA, police agents, and plots against his life, as well as his rages, “extreme reactions,” and strange version of dialectics is to be sought not in his politics, philosophical methodology, or models like Pablo or Cannon, but in the workings of a mind best understood by psychiatrists. (Intercontinental Press, March 31, 1975.)
These are gross slanders on Comrade Healy which have not the slightest foundation in fact. They must be repudiated. He has no “obsession” about CIA agents, nor has he ever voiced any fears about plots against his life. They are figments of Hansen’s imagination produced to titillate the fraternity of sleek philistines and well-heeled anticommunist liberals in his entourage.
The use of the terms “madness” and “paranoia” to avoid a scientific materialist analysis of the class basis of a political leadership does not signify an episodic aberration on the part of Hansen. On the contrary, it is an expression of extreme, incurable and slanderous subjectivism, the complete disorientation of a petty-bourgeois revisionist and impressionist who tries to substitute intuition and belief in myths for the existence of a real material world independent of his mind.
This method employed by Hansen is not new and is itself an expression of the social and political crisis.
Let us remember that one of the best known epithets hurled against the defendants in the Moscow Trials was “mad dogs” and that Lenin too was subjected to an unprecedented barrage of lies by renegades and revisionists in October 1917, who described the seizure of power as the work of “people in the grip of madness.” (See Lenin by D. Shub, p. 300, Pelican, 1966.)
When Trotsky was fighting against enormous historical odds to build the youthful Fourth International under the continuous threat of assassination by Stalin’s GPU, he had to contend with the slanders of the Stalinist and “liberal” press which accused him of “persecution mania.”
In fighting against any complacency on security questions in the building of revolutionary parties, the International Committee is carrying forward the tradition and principles of Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism. If this is suddenly derided as “madness,” then it is not the International Committee which has strayed, it is an expression of the complete political degeneration of Pabloite revisionism.
The International Committee is the continuator of the struggle for Trotskyism. Its firmness on questions of discipline, learned from Trotsky himself, can be illuminated historically by checking our record. Let us start with the split in the Fourth International in 1953. At that time, the majority Trotskyists in Britain, led by Comrade Healy, were faced with a Pabloite minority controlling the party’s publication, Socialist Outlook. When the Pabloite-dominated editorial board refused to implement the policies of the majority, they were expelled. It was clearly impermissible for the minority to run the newspaper according to their own factional ends by violating the democratic centralist principles of the revolutionary movement. Both Cannon and Hansen agreed.
On September 5, 1953, James P. Cannon wrote to Comrade Healy:
You are at a decisive turning point in your whole life-time activity as a revolutionist right now. All the fruits of all your previous work and struggle to consolidate a principled cadre are threatened by this disloyal attempt to intimidate you by pointing the pistol of an opposition faction at your head. You know that the same thing was tried in the SWP, and you know how we responded to it. I most earnestly recommend to you the same procedure, and I assure you that there is no other way.
I know very well that constructive workers, eager to build a movement in open struggle against the class enemy, are always strongly tempted to hope that in the internal situation things will work out for the best; that good faith and good work will prevail; and that factionalism will somehow or other disappear of itself, without taking time out to meet it on its own ground and knock it down. But that is a terrible mistake.
I have given much time and thought, during my past year’s residence in California, to a review of the whole past experience of our movement and of my part in it, as well as to the prospects of its future. I truly believe that the best service I ever rendered to our party, to help prepare it for its great future, was rendered during this past year. And the essence of this service, as I see it, was my determined and unceasing effort to make the party members in general and the leading cadre in particular, understand the mortal danger of permitting an unprincipled faction to grow and develop without forcing it into the open, calling it by its right name, and declaring uncompromising war on it.
The hardest part of all my struggle during this past year, and as I judge it in retrospect the most important part, was my insistent warnings to the constructive elements in the party, in the leadership as well as in the ranks, against the fatal illusion that factional brawlers can be overcome by good works in the class struggle alone.” (Letter from James P. Cannon to G. Healy, September 5, 1953. Printed in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 1.)
Hansen was no less strident in his defense of the British majority. In an article entitled, “Pablo ‘Answers’ The Open Letter,” Hansen wrote in 1954:
Some months ago, Burns, one of the outstanding leaders of the British section of the Fourth International, indicated his sympathy with the political position of the majority of the SWP in its struggle with the revisionist minority headed by Cochran. Burns also indicated that he disagreed with certain revisionist views held by Pablo.
He was ordered to keep his mouth shut and not reveal his differences to the British rank and file. When Burns refused to obey this Stalinist-type ukase, Pablo immediately organized a “with Pablo” faction in England that sought to cut Burns down. To accomplish this aim the faction did not hesitate to publicly violate party discipline in the pattern of the revisionist Cochrane faction secretly fostered and inspired by Pablo in the Socialist Workers Party. (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 2, pp. 118-119.)
And who was the “outstanding leader” fighting against the Stalinist techniques of the Pabloites? None other than Comrade Healy, alias Burns!
Further acclamation came from James P. Cannon in a letter to Farrell Dobbs, May 12, 1954:
In England, the fight is still going on, and, different from our situation, has to be fought out in the mass movement. But to judge from the published polemics, the issues are becoming crystal clear and they will have to be fought out on English grounds. England is by far the most important sector of the international struggle at the present time. The only way to win there is by an all-out fight…
There is no difference between Collins (Lawrence) and Pablo except that Collins, in his desperate fight for survival, imposed upon him by the decisive action of the orthodox Trotskyists there, is “skipping over the stages” of Pabloite liquidationism and “telescoping the nuances of the process.” (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 2, p. 143.)
It is a matter of historical record that, notwithstanding these statements of principle in relation to the struggle for revolutionary theory and practice in the working class by the British section, Hansen and company found their way to an unprincipled “reunion” with Pablo in 1963.
In dealing with the Pabloite disrupters in 1953, the British section rightly received the backing of Cannon and Hansen. As we have shown, they wrote approvingly of the firmness that was shown in party organization and discipline.
We have never veered from this revolutionary method. It has been consistently fought for in the building and training of the Workers Revolutionary Party and its forerunner, the Socialist Labour League.
It was this same method which determined the fight against the “factional brawlers” like Thornett during the latter part of 1974. This clique, led by Central Committee member Thornett, set out to disrupt the work of the party, defy the constitution and slander the party leadership with gossip and rumors.
This could not be tolerated. Thornett was expelled, a decision which was upheld unanimously at the first annual conference of the Workers Revolutionary Party on December 15, 16 and 17, 1974. His supporters were asked to accept the authority of the party’s leading bodies and the constitution and to attend the conference and put forward Thornett’s or any other political position. They wouldn’t do so. They automatically put themselves outside the party.
The same revolutionary method which determined the fight against the Thornett clique was observed in the fight against the Pabloites in 1953. If there is now a “revision” of this method, it is not in Britain or in the International Committee. It is with Hansen and the Pabloite revisionists.
(Compare this principled handling of the Thornett affair by the Workers Revolutionary Party with the summary expulsion of more than 120 SWP members in 1974 who supported Mandel on a Control Commission charge that they comprised “a party within a party” without the furnishing of any other evidence let alone a thorough discussion in the party.)
In attacking the International Committee and the Workers Revolutionary Party, Hansen is attacking his own history. It is Hansen who is losing his grip. He can no longer remember what he said or did during the crucial split in the Fourth International in the 1950s. These kind of “blackouts” indicate that it is Hansen who is a suitable case for treatment.
There are also signs of a deep-rooted inferiority complex. He thinks so little of what he writes, that he does not believe that other people remember them.
Take the incident in 1959 when the Trotskyists led by Comrade Healy were arbitrarily expelled from the Labor Party by the right-wing reformist bureaucracy in a series of unprecedented purges.
Who sprang to the defense of the British section? Why Hansen!
In an editorial comment from the April 4, 1960 issue of The Militant, the American socialist weekly, Hansen wrote:
A wide section of the British Labour Party membership has vigorously protested the attempt of the right-wing officials to proscribe and ban the Socialist Labor League and its paper, the Newsletter. Because of this, the one-year-old drive to expel the revolutionary socialists from the Labor Party and the unions has not gained much ground.
Unfortunately, however, a number of groups and individuals who call themselves socialists—including the leaders of the British Communist Party—fell in with the witch-hunters. They violated the first principle of socialism which demands solidarity when the capitalist class or its labor henchmen attack any section of the workers’ movement.
A particularly odious example of the violation of the solidarity principle was provided by the paper of the British Independent Labor Party, the Socialist Leader. The ILP has made it a principle to stay out of the Labor Party, which is a mass organization of the British workers and is based on the unions. But the ILP leaders have found no difficulty in combining their sectarian purity with the performance of dirty chores for the bureaucrats.
In an editorial March 7, 1959, the Socialist Leader declared: “We have never disguised our opposition to the Labour Party. But, if Transport House has had enough of the Newsletter group and kicks its members out of the front door or, for that matter, the back door, we shall not utter a word of criticism.”
The Socialist Leader not only kept its word not to criticize the hounding of militant workers out of the factories, unions and party, it opened a campaign of slander on its own against the SLL and its leadership.
When Peter Fryer, one of the founders of the SLL, suffered a breakdown in the face of the witch-hunt, became disoriented and walked out of the organization, then turned up in the capitalist press making vague and unspecified accusations against the SLL leaders, the ILP solidarized itself with him—and with the boss class which eagerly exploited Fryer’s “charges.” The Socialist Leader printed article after article presenting matters as if the main problem facing the British socialists was not the witch-hunt against the SLL, but some alleged “Stalinist methods” of Gerry Healy, the SLL secretary.
Now the witch-hunt in Britain is not the exclusive concern of British socialists, it is also of great importance to revolutionary socialists throughout the world. In such a situation it is customary—and in fact obligatory—that Trotskyists in other countries take their stand on the side of the victims of the witch-hunt, even if they have no organizational ties with the latter or are in disagreement over certain aspects of policy.
Unfortunately, again this hasn’t been the case in the current witch-hunt against the SLL. As we have indicated before in The Militant, the Trotskyist group in Europe headed by Michel Pablo came dangerously close to aligning itself with the witch-hunters, when it apologized for the conduct of the grouping in the Liverpool unit of the Labour Party, which had formed a block with the right-wingers to bar support for the SLL. The motion the Liverpool group advanced protested bans and prescriptions in general—but without offering to defend the specific victims of the right-wing’s drive to strangle party democracy.
We repeat what we have said before: we think it is Pablo’s duty to defend the SLL against the witch-hunters, despite any disagreements he may have with the SLL’s policies. This, it appears to us, is elementary.
In repudiating their own history Hansen heaps slander on the International Committee to obscure the vital political issue of security, to weaken the party’s vigilance and to open the door to another and more potent slander—violence and provocation.
This is not a matter to be treated lightly as there are precedents in the history of the SWP which it would be stupid to ignore or belittle.
Only recently a group led by Lynn Marcus (who split off from the SWP a few years back) calling itself the National Caucus of Labor Committees and including some of the most dubious and unstable declassed elements, launched savage physical attacks on the Communist Party and even SWP stewards at a public meeting in New York. The maiming of Stalinists is not inconsistent with their “principles.”
This pathological hatred of the working class which refuses to recognize any essential difference between rank and file Stalinists and their leaders and deliberately and falsely depicts Trotskyists as Stalinists is not confined to the Marcus group. The Spartacist League, led by James Robertson, and also infected by this middle-class hysteria, has made a specialty of provoking incidents outside public meetings in order to invite police intervention and the breaking up of these meetings.
Hansen’s attack is entirely in conformity with confusion, distraction and disorientation which afflict the middle class and backward workers as the world slump and uncontrolled inflation spur the working class into revolutionary struggles for power. Although the campaign has, up till the present, had no tangible effects, there must be no complacency in relation to our perspective and the struggle against revisionism in all its forms.
In trying to frame the International Committee with lying accusations of violence he is doing his best to create an atmosphere for such violence to take place against the International Committee by all kinds of provocateurs.
Thus, he writes with malicious intention:
Linked with the disregard of facts is the disregard of cadres and people. They are treated as if they are manipulated and in the way they are browbeaten or subjected to violence.
In the final analysis the party, too, is bent and hammered to conform to the image projected by the sick mind. The “tough” (sadistic?) way is seen as the necessary means of building it. In actuality the party is doomed ...* (Intercontinental Press, March 31, 1975, p. 443.) And again:
It would be more accurate to say that “holding opposites fast” means calling a group of critical members into the Center for “interviews” and giving each one a good clobbering. “Holding opposites fast” can also mean holding idealists like Wohlforth in the organization until the last drop is squeezed out and they are dropped into the bin marked “Vaporized Lemons.” (Ibid., emphasis added.)
This does not exhaust Hansen’s gambit on “violence,” but it will suffice. It shows only too clearly what the purpose of his slanders is. By depicting every measure to strengthen and defend the philosophical and programmatic bases of the ICFI as “violence” and the product of “paranoia,” Hansen consciously seeks to undermine the ICFI sections in anticipation of intense witch-hunts and repressions. Hansen consciously articulates the political interests of the US ruling class—albeit in a pseudo-Marxist manner—when he launches his slanderous tirade against the democratic-centralist principles of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the ICFI.
What seems as a casual and episodic slander, under different conditions can be exaggerated and distorted monstrously and assume the forms of a pogrom which could destroy the party and become the rallying cry for every counterrevolutionary.
This is how Trotsky, for example, analyzed the slanderous campaign unleashed under the Kerensky regime to discredit the Bolsheviks in July 1917 and prevent the seizure of power:
The July slander against the Bolsheviks least of all fell down out of a clear sky. It was the natural fruit of panic and hate, the last link in a shameful chain ... All the insults of the ruling group, all their fears, all their bitterness were now directed against that party which stood at the extreme left and incarnated most completely the unconquerable force of the revolution ... The revelations of the retired ensign from the intelligence services were only a materialization of the ravings of possessing classes who found themselves in a blind alley. For that reason the slander acquired such frightful force. (History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2.)
The slanders of July 1917 were an inseparable part of the preparations of the counterrevolution to repress and smash the Bolshevik “head” of the revolution. The slander—no less than the subsequent repression of the Bolsheviks—failed only because of the correct tactical and strategical evaluation of the Bolshevik leadership which, despite waverings in some quarters, refused to be drawn into any adventures or entrap themselves in any bogus commissions of inquiry called for by the Mensheviks, SR’s and other compromisers.
In Germany, too, the weapon of slander was wielded against Bolshevism—but with far different and disastrous results for the German revolution. In Germany, the counterrevolution utilized the political and organizational weaknesses of the Spartakusbund to murder Luxemburg and Liebknecht and inflict the most grievous defeat on the German working class, a defeat for which the German working class still continues to pay its price.
In Germany, however, it was not only the press of the bourgeoisie and the Junkers who took the initiative to slander the revolutionary leaders but the press of the SPD, the German Social Democracy.
Paul Frolich in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg describes this campaign and its relation to the offensive of the bourgeoisie:
Alongside the military preparations for civil war were the “moral” preparations. After the bloody 24th December, a frenzied campaign of incitement against Spartakus flared up again in the press, and, with the social-democratic Vorwarts leading the way, it reached new heights every day. The victims of the Christmas Eve attack on the People’s Naval Division were buried on 29 December, and untold masses followed the coffins to the cemetery. The SPD chose just this day for a counter-demonstration, and the leaflet issued for the occasion reads as follows:
“The shameless doings of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg besmirch the revolution and endanger all its achievements. The masses cannot afford to wait a minute longer and quietly look on while these brutes and their hangers-on cripple the activity of the republican authorities, incite the people deeper and deeper into a civil war, and strangle the right of free speech with their dirty hands. With lies, slander and violence they want to tear down everything that dares to stand in their way. With an insolence exceeding all bounds they act as though they were masters of Berlin...”
At this demonstration, the Burgerrat distributed leaflets containing a further scarcely veiled instigation to murder Liebknecht:
“The Christmas pranks of the Spartakus group will lead directly into the abyss ... The raw violence of the band of criminals can be met only by counter-violence. Do you want peace? Then see to it, every man of you, that the violent rule of the Spartakus people is ended. Do you want freedom? Then see that the armed loafers who follow Liebknecht do no more damage! ...”
A few days later the Anti-Bolshevik League put up public notices with a price of 10,000 Marks on the head of Karl Radek. Tremendous sums were poured into this civil war propaganda... (Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, p.287.)
The reactionary and unconscionable tradition of the SPD, however, did not die with Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske. It has been resurrected and revitalized by Hansen with the direct complicity of the renegade Wohlforth.
Thus, the considerable progress of the ICFI in four continents, at a time when Hansen’s supporters in the Unified Secretariat are disintegrating rapidly, is completely distorted and dismissed with: “It is obvious that the ‘International Committee’ actually consists of not much more than a rubber stamp hanging at the side of Healy’s desk.”
Why a rubber stamp? Because one man, Wohlforth, his companion and his dog split from the Workers League rather than subordinate himself to its discipline and constitution.
One man’s meat ... another man’s arsenic! Having set out to discredit the International Committee and the Workers Revolutionary Party, Hansen now becomes chief defendant and apologist of every cowardly desertion from, and every cynical blow struck at, the Trotskyist movement.
Hence nobody should be surprised at the blatant anomaly revealed in Hansen’s vicious attack on the International Committee’s alleged obsession with the CIA, on the one hand, and his curious silence on the OCI slanders of CIA-GPU complicity against the Varga group in Paris. This vile witch-hunt did not prevent Hansen from maintaining the most cordial fraternal relations with the OCI and entering into unity negotiations with them. If there was any sign of “paranoia” in Paris, Hansen certainly never mentioned it.
“To a dog,” said Engels, “his master is divine, though his master may be the biggest scroundel on earth.” To Hansen, now gripped by an insatiable hatred for Trotskyism, even Pablo appears in a benevolent—though not exactly divine—light. Deliberately ignoring the sordid history of Pablo’s bureaucratic intrigues against the OCI, the SWP and the British section (for example, the violent expropriation of the PCI property in 1952, before the split, by hired goons), Hansen now conveniently describes Pablo as a “materialist” and denies his subjective idealism strenuously.
Yet if any leader of revisionism could be justly accused of subjective idealism and complete abandonment of a materialist and dialectical approach to political problems, it is Pablo.
This subjectivism was aptly epitomized in his infamous verdict that nothing could happen in the United States until seven million people were killed in an atomic war! Of which Hansen is undoubtedly aware but now, in the interests of a joint disruptive operation against the International Committee, prefers to forget!
Hansen’s explicit defense of that international fraternity of Mensheviks—Tate, Robertson, Thornett, Wohlforth and Pablo—and his ingrained and remarkable indifference to police surveillance combined with his deep hatred for the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party, confirms the extremely reactionary and politically suspect nature of the Socialist Workers Party leadership.
Hansen’s slanderous attacks on the International Committee in general and Comrade Healy in particular are an expression of the morbid cynicism and class hatred of the reactionary American middle class and the imperialist bourgeoisie against the conscious efforts of the most advanced sections of the international working class to build revolutionary parties to smash capitalist rule and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The essence of this fight today is to defend the democratic centralist structure of the party from its detractors and, in this way, resist the infiltration of police agents and provocateurs and prepare the party and the working class for its historic tasks.
This struggle is inseparably interwoven with the political exposure of the slanderous lies, half-truths and deceit of Hansen, not to mention his obscene sneers at the justified and essential security precautions of the movement.
This struggle is indispensable and urgent because we believe, together with Trotsky, that the “lie in politics, as in daily life, serves as a function of the class structure of society” and that “revolution explodes the social lie. Revolution speaks the truth. Revolution begins by giving things and social relationships their real names.”