Fight against slander suit continues
Government seizes opening
One critical aspect of the Gelfand suit is the attempt by the U.S. Justice Department to get Pfaelzer to issue a sweeping ruling that would give the FBI unrestrict-
At its September meeting the United Secretariat of the Fourth International heard a report on the defence campaign being carried out by the
Socialist Workers Party of the USA in a legal case brought against the party by Alan Gelfand and others.
The meeting decided to ask for an article written by the SWP explain-
The following article first appeared in ing the situation in the case.
Intercontinental Press, November 12, 1984.
Doug JENNESS
October 24 marked one year since the last hearing was held on a lawsuit filed more than five years ago against the U.S.
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) - and still no ruling has been made.
The suit, filed in July 1979 by Alan
Gelfand, a lawyer for Los Angeles County in California, is a major part of an international disruption campaign against the
SWP and the Fourth International. This campaign has been the principal activity of the British
Workers Revolutionary
Party (WRP) and its U.S. branch, the
Workers League (WL), for nearly a
Gelfand, who entered the SWP in 1976 to disrupt it from within, was expelled from the party in January 1979 after he filed a legal brief in federal court charging that the SWP is a front for the FBI.
This slander is at the heart of the WRP-
WL disruption operation against the SWP.
After Gelfand's expulsion, the WRP-
WL initiated the lawsuit against the SWP, asking a federal judge to remove the party leadership and reinstate Gelfand into membership. The spurious grounds for this demand is the claim that Gelfand was expelled by U.S. government agents who had taken over the SWP. He claims that his constitutional rights were violated, and the WRP-WL presents the suit as a significant civil rights case.
If the court were to rule in favor of
Gelfand, it would mark a big blow against the constitutional right of freedom of association and the fundamental right of a political party to determine who its members are and to freely choose its own leadership. It would mean that the government can dictate to a political party whether its activities are in conformity with its stated program and historic goals. It would open the door to the government intervening in the decision-making process of unions, civil rights groups and all other similar organizations.
For four years U.S. District Court
Judge Mariana Pfaelzer rejected every effort by the SWP to have the case thrown out of court. She asserted that
Gelfand was entitled to his "day in court."
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While Pfaelzer delayed setting a trial date, the SWP was forced to divert big financial and personnel resources to defend itself. For example, Gelfand's attorneys, the Los Angeles law firm of Fisher & Moest, subpoenaed many SWP members in order to take more than 350 hours of depositions. In addition to draining SWP resources, this harassment was designed to produce an court record" that can be selectively published at a future date.
The case finally came to trial in March 1983 in Los Angeles. During the days leading up to and during the trial, a nationwide campaign supported by unionists, civil rights activists and civil libertarians demanded that Pfaelzer halt the intervention by the courts into the SWP's functioning and throw Gelfand's case
This public pressure conto Pfaelzer's admission at the conclusion of the trial that Gelfand had never produced "one shred of evidence" to support his slanderous charge that the SWP's elected leaders are FBI agents. No ruling at trial
She declared to Gelfand and his at-
"You have not proved anything that you said you were going to prove. Nothing...I can only assume that there was a motive somewhere in here to paralyze the Socialist Workers Party. don't know how much the rival political party [the WRP-WL] paid for your attorneys fees. -I suppose in another forum that will come up as an issue....
"The whole aura of facts in here leads me to question the motivation for the lawsuit. If I had been presented with one single piece of evidence that [the SWP leaders] are agents of the Government, that would be an entirely different matter. I haven't a single piece of evidence given to me.
Despite these statements, Pfaelzer made no decision on the case.
At a federal court hearing a couple of weeks after the trial, she stated that she would give favorable consideration to a motion by the SWP that she require Gelfand and his attorneys to pay the ed legal rights to use informers and provocateurs against the SWP and other working-class organizations.
To bolster its claim that the Gelfand suit is aimed at government agents, the WRP-WL named the FBI and CIA as defendants. But they were only nominal defendants. The government lawyers sat for four years with their hands folded. They were satisfied that Gelfand, with the aid of Fisher & Moest and the connivance of Pfaelzer, was doing a good job of harassing the SWP. But after the March 1983 trial, when the disruption operation seemed to be coming to an end, the FBI and CIA mouthpieces jumped right into the situation.
filed a document requesting that Pfaelzer issue a legal opinion affirming that the use of informers within political parties like the SWP "does not constitute a violation of individual rights," and "may not be enjoined." They asked her to rule that "the identities of informants who have conducted activities within the Socialist Workers Party are protected from disclosure by the informant privi
More than a year later Pfaelzer has not issued an opinion on the government's requests.
In spite of their claim to be defending "constitutional rights" and their protests about government agents in the SWP, Gelfand and the WRP-WL have not condemned this attack on democratic rights.
The legal issues the government has put before the judge are exactly the ques tions at the heart of the SWP suit against the FBI, CIA, Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies. That case, known as SWP us. Attorney General, has been pending since 1973. The trial in that case was held before Judge Thomas Griesa in 1981. has not yet issued his ruling and will not say when he intends to do so.
During the March 1983 trial, Gelfand admitted on the witness stand that he had collaborated with leaders of the WRP-WL for at least seven months before his expulsion from the SWP. He testified that Workers League leader David North promised to raise money for the suit. The WRP-WL also has been promoting the Gelfand case in its press.
Several decades ago the WRP, then called the Socialist Labour League, led by Gerry Healy, was a Marxist organization that belonged to the Fourth International. How did it degenerate into the
International Viewpoint 26 November 1984
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USA
antiworking class formation that it is one of his own followers.
today?
Cuban revolution is touchstone
Key to understanding the WRP's degeneration is its repudiation of the
Cuban revolution in 1959. Healy and his grouping contended then, and still do, that the team of leaders around Fidel Castro were not revolutionaries. did not lead the Cuban revolution to overturn capitalist property rather they established a capitalist regime like those of Chiang Kai-shek in China and Jawaharlal Nehru in India.
The Healyites maintained that socialist revolutions are only possible if they are led by Trotskyist parties. In other words, when the living class struggle turned out different from the Healyist schema - they solved the contradiction by denying reality.
The SWP and the Fourth International, in contrast, hailed the Cuban revolution and its revolutionary leadership as a historic step forward for the working class internationally.
The sectarian stance of the Healyites toward Cuba soon led them to sectarian positions on the Algerian revolution in the 1960s and the colonial revolution in general, the Labour Party in Britain, and the rise of revolutionary Black nationalism in the United States.
Their repudiation of the Cuban revolution was at the heart of their rapid degeneration. Opposing a genuine workers revolution cannot but throw a party claiming to speak for the interests of working people off the rails. By not correcting their erroneous position on the Cuban revolution and its leadership, but rather sticking to it over the years, Healyites wandered further and further from Marxism. Healy frames up Joseph Hansen
From the early 1960s the Healyites attempted to cover their break from Marxism by waging a vitriolic polemical campaign against the SWP and the Fourth
This campaign took an insidious new turn in 1975 when the WRP asserted that Joseph Hansen, a longtime leader of the SWP and the Fourth International, was complicit in the 1940 assassination of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trot-
Hansen was the author of many of the SWP's principal resolutions and public articles on the Cuban revolution.
He was serving as a secretary for Trotsky in Mexico at the time of the assassination, which was incontestably proven to be the work of Joseph Stalin's secret police. Assassination has long been one of the Stalinist methods for dealing with political opponents in the workers
The Healyite charge paralleled the accusation the Stalinists made at the time of the assassination. In order to direct attention away from their own guilt, they asserted that Trotksy was killed by International Viewpoint 26 November 1984
When George Novack, another longtime SWP leader, wrote an article defending Hansen, he was also labeled an "accomplice" of the Soviet secret police.
The Healyites later slander campaign the charge that Hansen
The Healyite presses rolled out article after article and pamphlet after pamphlet
"documents" and "evidence" to bolster their frame-up. But there was not one bit of truth to any of it. It was entirely a concoction of lies.
The WRP-WL's operation is based on the notion that if a lie is repeated over and over and broadcast wide enough some fools will be persuaded that there must be something to it. Yet when they presented their entire case in the courtroom, even Judge Pfaelzer had to concede that they had not presented her "with one single piece of evidence that ment.* cople are agents of the govern-
From the beginning, the SWP has waged a counteroffensive against this slander campaign. Hansen wrote several major articles refuting each lie and exposing the entire frameup nature of the
These articles as well as many statements and articles by other leaders and sympathizers of the Fourth International and by leaders of other groups considering themselves Trotskyist were published as a pamphlet, Healy's Big Lie -The Slander Campaign Against Joseph Hansen, George Novack, and the Fourth
[This pamphlet is still available from Pathfinder Press, 420 West Street, New York, N'Y. 10014. dollars plus 75 cents for postage.]
A meeting of 1,200 was organized in London in January 1977, where Fourth International leaders and other speakers condemned the Healyite slander campaign.
When Hansen died in early 1979, the Healyites proceeded to charge that Hansen had recruited and trained a younger group of government agents and had "elevated" them into positions of leadership responsibility in the SWP. With this frame-up the Healyites have been able to keep their slander campaign against the SWP up-to-date. There has been no let-up in their barrage of lies. Their disruption operation against the Fourth International, the SWP, and other remains their reason for existence.
One of their methods of disruption against the Fourth been to tailor their slanders so as to echo and distort political discussion and debates going on among Fourth Internation-
For example, the extension of the Cuban revolution to Nicaragua and Grenada and the emergence of the revolutionary struggle in El Salvador brought a new acid test for revolutionists. This has led to an ongoing discussion - and new divisions among revolutionists - on the lessons to be learned from these revolutions and the orientation to take to their
These lessons were the subject of a speech given by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes in December 1982 entitled "Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist
Continuity Today." It was subsequently published in the fall 1983 New International, a magazine published by leaders of the SWP and the Revolutionary Workers League, the Canadian section of the Fourth International. A diverse range of opinions about Barnes' speech was expressed by members of the Fourth International, including some that were
The WRP-WL, for their own antiworking-class immediately intervened by orienting their smear campaign to this discussion among revolutionists, seeking to disrupt it. The Healyite are designed superficially echo some of the positions raised in the discussion by those who disagree with the SWP. But the WRP-WL twists its accusations to lead to the conclusion that the reason the SWP leaders are wrong is that they are FBI agents.
The Healyites published a pamphlet on the Barnes speech, A Provocateur Attacks Trotskyism, which charges that:
"An unbridgeable political chasm sep arates the present-day Socialist Workers Party from Trotskyism. Not a single programmatic conception upon which the founding of the Fourth International was based is still accepted by the SWP: not that of the permanent revolution, of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism and the necessity for the political revolution, of the decisive historical role of Trotskyism. In its present form, the Socialist Workers Party is the antithesis of the party that was founded 45 years ago by James P. Cannon in closest collaboration with Leon Trotsky."
Their assertion that the SWP has sub-
"Castroism for revolutionary Marxism" is a central axis of the pamphlet.
The conclusion reached by the Healyites is that "the political line of the SWP leaders does not contradict their role as government agents but confirms it."
It chides revolutionists who disagree with the views of the SWP for being "unable to explain the political evolution of Broad support for SWP defense
The fight to defend the SWP from the Gelfand lawsuit, which is presently at the center of the Healyite disruption operation, continues. At any time Pfaelzer could rule in favor of both Gelfand and the U.S. government, thus giving the green light to the courts and the Justice Department to step up their disruption of the SWP and other working-class • organizations.
The SWP, aided by the Political Rights Defense Fund and other defenders of the Bill of Rights, is waging a campaign to defend its constitutional rights and to help deter similar lawsuits against other working-class organizations.
In the period around the March 1983 trial, broad protest rallies were held in
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