There is no historical process more complex than the formation of a revolutionary leadership in the working class.

Those who enter the revolutionary movement do so not as an expression of free individuality but as the representatives of vast social forces.

The formation of revolutionary cadres necessarily reflects all the explosive contradictions of the class struggle. There is no such thing as ready-made Trotskyists or made-to-order cadre.

The constant transformation and renewal of forces which any real revolutionary movement experiences is determined objectively by the development of the class struggle, the resulting changes and shifts in the relations among different classes and the molecular process of development within the working class itself.

In his 1923 series of lectures on the “History of the Bolshevik Party” G. Zinoviev dwelled on this very point:

Now I shall direct your attention to yet another circumstance. It should not be thought every class immediately puts forward as it were a ready-made party corresponding to its interests as a whole.

It would be a mistake to think that things are just as simple as follows: class no. 1 with party no. 1; class no. 2 with party no. 2. In social life and conflict things develop in a much more complex way.

Individual people can make mistakes. It sometimes seems to them that they belong heart and soul to one class but when put to the test and a decisive moment arrives it can turn out that in fact they are in their whole being of another class.

Their road follows a zigzag path. In certain periods of their development they put forward definite policies. In the course of time and under the influence of the turmoils of the class struggle and the whirlwind of great events; when hidden layers of the particular class heave up and sharply pose new questions, deep down inside these people regroupings, shifts and crystallizations take place.

And it is only a long while afterwards in the critical years that the basic questions powerfully emerge and divisions are finally created which really correspond to the given class.

That is why if you approach the question too schematically and too simplistically you will meet many contradictions in your way. This basic question of our life has to be approached scientifically as befits Marxists — that is by rejecting from the outset an excessively mechanical approach to social phenomena.

One has to understand that a party is not born overnight, that it takes shape over years, that inside its ranks definite social regroupings occur and that individual groups and people will sometimes fall accidentally into this or that party, will then leave it and others will take their place.

And only in the process of struggle when we are confronted with a more or less completed cycle of development can it be said that a particular party fully corresponds to a given class ... It is born amid sharp pangs and it is subject to perpetual crystallizations, regroupings, splits and trials in the heat of the struggle before it finally takes shape as a party of the proletariat, as a party of a given class and then only with the reservation which I have already made, namely that the process is still not finally completed since the departure of some groups and the adherence of others continues for a long time to follow.

“All this we can observe in the fate of our party as well.”

(History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, pp.8-13).

Nothing even vaguely resembling the process described above is to be found in the history of the SWP over the last 15 years.

The Carleton group — along with Sheppard, Camejo, Horowitz and Jones — has held together since it was assembled and brought into the SWP at the highpoint of the party’s political crisis in the early 1960s.

Hansen injected this group into the SWP at precisely the most crucial turning point in the movement’s history: when it was carrying out its unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites and breaking its political ties to Trotskyism.

It is significant that the preceding decade during which this abandonment of revolutionary principles and program was prepared had been marked by a breaking up of the old SWP cadre. Demoralized retirements, unexplained resignations and politically unclarified splits characterized the internal life of the SWP from the mid-1950s on.

But this comes to a halt following the 1963 split with the International Committee. The boys and girls recruited by Hansen from Carleton College and through the Fair Play for Cuba chapters in the Midwest took control and have remained in control.

The old saying, “The more things change, the more things remain the same,” applies with the greatest accuracy to the SWP.

This “stability” finds no legitimate political explanation. The SWP leadership, in terms of its class origins, comes from the most unstable section of the population: the middle class.

But this socially determined instability — verified countless times in the historical experience of the revolutionary movement — is not reflected in the SWP leadership.

All political parties experience shocks and crises under the impact of great social upheavals. The composition of party leaderships will reflect the movement of different social layers and their mutual interaction.

This historical sifting of class forces is to be observed even in the bourgeois parties. Certainly over the past two decades, the explosive political crisis has wrought havoc in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

It is difficult to think of a single major capitalist politician who has successfully made the transition from the 1960s to the 1980s. Assassinations, political scandals, military defeats, economic crises have devastated every presidential administration since Eisenhower’s — the last to survive the tradition of two four-year terms.

Out of the middle class during the past two decades has emerged a wild kaleidoscope of organizations, protest groups, ad-hoc committees and countless causes of one description or another.

But every such formation — no matter how great its initial successes or how pretentious its initial pronouncements — always fell victim to its organic inability of the middle class to fashion an independent political course.

Even when sections of the middle class are drawn to the revolutionary party of the working class, as a consequence of great historic events, the process of their transformation into disciplined and selfless Trotskyist fighters is protracted and difficult. Not a few fall by the wayside.

The development of the crisis produces no differentiation within the leadership of the SWP because they are not, in fact, a legitimate party leadership.

They constitute a network of agents who are responding to all changes in the political situation on the basis of directives received from the State Department, the CIA and other agencies of the capitalist state.

This lack of political differentiation does not mean that harmony reigns in the Political Committee of the SWP. Hardly, the atmosphere hums with bureaucratic in‑fighting, endless gossip and byzantine intrigue.

The decomposition of the bourgeois state beneath the hammer blows of the insurgent masses is unavoidably reflected inside the SWP. But the leadership maintains its unity on whatever political line is set by the State Department.

There is not a single case of a political difference emerging among those who constitute Hansen’s network. No matter how often the SWP shifts pragmatically from one position to another, the Hansen team retains its unanimity.

It is sufficient for them to agree on one thing — that for which they are paid by the US government — that is, “anti‑Healyism.” The struggle against Trotskyism — the International Committee of the Fourth International — is the single unifying basis of the SWP leadership.

The discipline with which it carries out this struggle is the discipline of officers of the capitalist state. This discipline is sustained — of this there can be no doubt — by generous financial contributions to secretly‑held bank accounts.

In addition, the Carleton background of the most important of these agents provided a strong anti‑communist ideological indoctrination.

There have been only two drop‑outs from the Hansen network. Both occurred after the death of Hansen in January 1979.

The first was Dan Styron. In April 1979, he was found on the floor of a Houston apartment with a plastic bag over his head. Inserted under the bag was a piece of tubing connected to the gas stove. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.

Considering the fact that Styron had been in the SWP for 16 years — during which time he had served on the National Committee and represented the SWP as a senatorial candidate — he was given remarkably short shrift.

One obituary article appeared in the Militant followed by a short notice of a memorial meeting in Houston. Styron’s name has not appeared again in the Militant.

Though it would have been entirely appropriate for one of Styron’s Carleton “comrades” to write an appreciation of his life, none of them ever did — not even his first wife, Mary‑Alice Waters.

The second drop‑out, Ed Heisler, wrote a letter to the SWP National Headquarters dated June 9, 1980, admitting his role as an FBI informer.

The agents in the Political Committee suppressed this information from the workers’ movement for three months. Not until the issue of September 12, 1980, did the Militant publish a single word on Heisler’s self‑exposure as an FBI agent.

In this article, reference to Heisler is buried near the end of the edited version of a report — eight newspaper pages long — given by Larry Seigle at the recent SWP educational conference in Oberlin.

As has been the case in every one of the internal reports to SWP members given by Seigle on the Heisler case, his self‑exposure has been presented as a “victory.”

No explanation has been given for Heisler’s extraordinarily successful career in the SWP, spanning 19 years, during which he emerged during the past decade as the single most prominent spokesman of the SWP.

While Seigle, in this latest report, refers to some of the positions held by Heisler, he covers up the fact that Heisler, after leaving Milwaukee, was part of the team of rising YSA leaders in Chicago that consisted of Barnes, Jones, Britton and Horowitz.

Heisler did not have to worry about being exposed as an FBI agent.

As his colleagues assumed control of the national office of the SWP in New York, he was promoted to the position of national trade union chairperson of the SWP.

He was nominated to run for Senate; he was selected chairman of the 1976 Presidential campaign; he was sent to Washington, D.C. to testify against the nomination of George Bush as director of the CIA.

The FBI paid Heisler $400 per month plus expenses for his services.

Whether the pay scale of the FBI provides greater remuneration for the SWP National Secretary, the Intercontinental Press editor or for the spokesman on legal affairs remains to be determined.

Perhaps the FBI pays a flat rate to the entire Political Committee which is then divided up according to seniority and work load.

But what has been established is that the network which consists of the members identified in this article is the product of a state intelligence operation set up by Joseph Hansen beginning in 1960, using the bogus issue of Cuba as a cover for the infiltration of agents into the SWP via the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

These agents represent an immense danger to the entire workers’ movement, within the US and internationally.

They enjoy the protection of the capitalist state and will kill to maintain their spy network — just as they organized the October 1977 assassination of Tom Henehan, 26‑year‑old member of the Workers League Political Committee.

A Commission of Inquiry must be established to investigate every member of the SWP leadership — beginning with the ex‑students from Carleton and their main associates: Sheppard, Camejo, Horowitz, Jones and Britton.

Public hearings must be organized before the world workers’ movement to expose the murderous activities of these agents.

The evidence uncovered by the International Committee of the Fourth International through its five‑year‑long investigation into Security and the Fourth International must now be utilized as the irrefutable factual foundation for the indictment and public conviction of the SWP leadership as police agents of US imperialism.