[The farcical position of the Workers Revolutionary Party-an…]

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The farcical position of the Workers Revolutionary Party-an organisation of no more than a few hundred active members-standing 60 candidates in the Election has been shown up by events.

In many areas, where WRP presence was clearly restricted to the candidate and agent, little or no canvassing was done.

Even election addresses, freely distributed by post, were not sent out.

Abortive

And WRP "public meetings" attended by: WSL members proved to be either completely abortive or to be attended by audiences numbered in single figures.

Of course the "60 candidates' stunt was designed to capture TV time and thus portray the WRP as a mass organisation.

But this impression did not have much impact on voters.

Even the WRP broadcast's presenter, Corin Redgrave, pulled only a derisory 152 votes.

Corin Redgrave Elsewhere WRP candidates received votes mainly ranging from 45 (Luton East) to 200.

An exception was Ormskirk, where Simon Pirani standing against only Labour and Tory candidates attracted 800 votes.

And in four areas WRP candidates-who presumably did mount a campaign-won over 400 votes.

But in the main the 60 candidates avoided standing in areas where the WRP had previously campaigned. Where this was not the case-as in Vanessa Redgrave's campaign in Moss Side-the WRP vote actually fell.

An interesting the local council was the success in of Labour candi Timson-a Socia supporter.

Timson objected

• STILL AVAILABLE A WSL pamphlet Price 45p plus from WSL, 31, Dartmouth I London NW5 117 victory in Nuneaton date Ivor list Press the official policy statement punted by the Labour Party and secured agreement to distribute his own, alternative, leaflet.

Support for strikes

This included specific opposition to wage controls, support for direct action including occupations and strikes against social service cuts, the call for the opening of the books of private suppliers to the public sector to trade union committees, and for nationalisation of these firms and the banks.

Calling for a new leadership in the Labour Party and the labour movement as a whole, Timson went on to support the demand for workers defence squads to protect immigrant workers against racist and fascist violence, and to demand the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland.

Elected

An impossible ultimatum for the Nuneaton electorate? Hardly!

Timson was elected, while his two fellow Labour candidates, running on the official platform were defeated by Tories!

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Files of F.B.I. Showed It Harassed Teacher See Nixon and Aides August 8, 1976 June 25, 1976 said in If FBI Bugging Is Over Files on Informants in Suit. nation eulustice Depar the New York Fity offices of was plaind in us By JOSEPH VOIZ Rocky Mountain News Carter's stalling trial, people that sothing is going on." - that is al at least 92 occasions 1rem 1960 Ment Testifying before e August 28.1977 thing is going on or is say whether August 1, 1976 day. "I don't want to American Page One the pose supervisor isdict order resulting from a bul. Judor financial backers of in here the party the New Y Cited in earlier this monih It was " Hed BOUDIN ladicter. et the August 5.1976 Around Comet against the Weather Unde Kaled FBr inte operations the trit lime an unexpur. lu the "Mr hare Comet... MY MARVIN ANGLON Judge Says FBI Gave False Answer in Suit S$ The Now York burglaries. SWE Will Bell Carter said Break-in said. NEW YORK POST, SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1971 (rom wiretapper СтаН lice Departener squad alie group cen has been made Cleresce the documents ti Despite Inere s no fl officien told Redfearn lo that there are nutaber thorization and th la = distinet posibility that *red Redfearn acted F. B. I. Reportedly Harassed Radicals cell matt, which 1a a 837 millon demage suit deonder. locuments had been eltzined BETA in 1e PEI kne to jail? that rabbich "and the -til after th twe turned:

charte tal order, the conduction :.. Dant In produced" Do No bean ordered to give a surges depositice ho are still : ¡tarier, break-ins. of illegal bur. his coro dracti і на гостів м... Ketley's communications in Hold all of tre intre. bangler Some examples of the way in which the SWP law suit has publicised FBI crimes even in bourgeois press "When in doubt-lash out'. This has been the consistent motto of the leadership of the Workers cratically expelled 200 members who supported a return to the method and principles of the Trotskyist Transitional Programme.

The chief target of the WRP's increasingly frenzied political attacks has been the Workers Socialist League, which was formed by a nucleus of those expelled forces and today alone carries forward principled struggle for the Trotskyist programme in the British workers' movement.

Our movement has been falsely accused of a whole spectrum of crimes dreamed up by the fevered imagination of leading WRP sectarians-varying from our supposed "softness" on social democracy and the trade union bureaucracy, through alleged WSL collaboration with the Stalinists of the Communist Party, to imagined 'adventures" and even "provocations" which they claim have been carried out by WSL members in British Leyland's Cowley car factories.

Falsified

Our political positions have been falsified; quotes from our press bowdlerised; our members slandered; and photographs of them have been offered up in the WRP's press for witch-hunting employers and But never, until last week, had the WRP quite sunk to the depths of accusing the WSL and its leading members of acting as paid police agents.

This fresh departure took place in an article "FBI Discover an Oxford Attorney: The Strange Case of John Lister' in Newsline of Tuesday May 1.

The article, itself a classic example of WRP falsification and double-think, marks a further extension of the WRP's efforts to avoid political discussion by throwing around wholesale allegations that political opponents are not legitimate opponents but "police agents"

Article

The Newsline attack takes the form of a reply to an article by Socialist Press editor John Lister in issue 147, which dealt with the crisis point reached in the. 5½ year $40 million lawsuit brought by the US Socialist Workers Party against the FBI.

The case stands at present at a stalemate, caused by the adament refusal of the Carter's Attorney General Griffin Bell to comply with a court order to hand over files on a sample of 18 FBI informers who operated in and around the SWP during the FBI's 16-year programme of illegal harassment and disruption.

Lister's article, headlined "US Appeal Court rules the FBI above the Law". set out to draw à balance sheet of the court struggle so far-which has brought to light 180,000 pages of hitherto unknown documents, and whole dossiers on FBI disruption programmes, as well as forcing the highest law enforcement officer in the USA into a brazen defiance of the courts in order to keep the identities of FBI informers secret.

Lister contrasted this balance sheet of achievement with the political method of the SWP, which now threatens to WRP leader Healy allow Bell and the FBI to keep the 18 files land those of the other 1,300 narks and stool pigions used illegally by the state against the SWP over 16 years) safely under lock and key.

The SWP opportunists have proposed a possible $5 million settlement, linked to an injunction debarring the FBI from continuing its illegal programme of surveillance, harassment, infiltration, phone-tapping and sabotage of the SWP, along with a formal government declaration of the SWP's legal status.

Newsline editor Mitchell Lister's article pointed out that a March 19 Court of Appeals ruling that upheld Bell's decision to with-hold the 18 files, effectively rules that the FBI and its "dirty tricks" are above the law.

It therefore shows beyond doubt that an injunction against FBi harassment along the lines proposed by the SWP is not worth the paper it is written on.

"Such a settlement would amount to little more than an opportunist truce" wrote Lister, who also challenged a statement by SWP spokesman Larry Seigle which claimed the question of the identities of the 18 informers was "a secondary issue in this case':

"though it may appear as a "secondary issue" to the SWP the massive cover-up of the 18 informers by the FBI has emerged politically as the main question at stake" " stated Lister.

The Socialist Press article went on to attack the failure of the SWP to take the campaign and the lessons of the lawsuit against the FBI into the organised US labour movement. Lister called clearly for a full-scale challenge to the Appeal Court ruling, backed by a labour movement conference on the issue.

"Rather than seeking any kind of settlement with the capitalist state, the SWP should be seeking means of exposing more clearly to workers that this repressive state machinery, supported by both Republican, and Democratic parties, can be The late Joseph Hansen defeated only through the construction of a Labour Party based on the organised strength of the trade union movement with the task of representing workers' independent interests.

There is, however, little likelihood of any such change of course by the SWP leadership, which is tied to the opportunist politics of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International (to which it is prevented from affiliation by reactionary US legislation that should also be challenged).

As a result of this political weakness, a campaign that could still strike further heavy blows at the FBI's network of political sabotage seems likely to be kept alive in the next period more through the Carter regime's heavy handed refusal to concede on the issue than any such rigid stand on the part of the SWP But these sharp criticisms are too political for the liking of the WRP leadership.

In any event the WRP's slander-merchants had scented a faint chance of bracketing the Workers Socialist League with the SWP, a party whose veteran leaders have for years been vilified by the WRP as "accom. plices of the GPU" and "agents of the FBI"

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The anonymous Newsline article therefore rips out a couple of partial quotes from Lister's article to distort its content, before moving in for the kill. The author baldly pronouncing that:

'the agents being protected by the FBi are the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party"

Without pausing for breath' or thought, the Newsline rushes on to claim:

"Lister knows this [!] but he has written this article as a friend and political accomplice of the international network of police agents whose centre is located in the SWP Political Committee"

So not only the SWP leaders but now Lister, are branded "police agents" with a stroke of the pen!

Invented facts

Groping round for an explanation to fit this tissue of invented 'facts' the WRP hacks have only this to offer:

"[Lister) tries to pose as a 'left critic' of the SWP in order to soften the impact of the international exposure of its role as an instrument of the FBI and the US State Department".

Of course, Lister's article actually exposed the SWP leaders as opportunists, whose Pabloite methods make them incapable of utilising even the exposure of the US capitalist state by their own lawsuit as an agitational weapon in the American working class.

It takes the crazed sectarians of the WRP to see such a political attack as simply a left cover'. The main issue in the WRP's eyes is much simpler: to denounce the entire SWP leadership as FBI agents!

They go on lyingly to claim that «Lister has no objection at all to the SWP's willingness to take blood money from the US government."

But it is the conclusion to the Newsline article which The Now York Times July 19. 1973 The incuments say that the called nicebd Оет 'Harassment unable in provide "an aceurate socialist ly filed a lavesuit in Federal paIrips" from the time of World ar Bur tir Kelles said the beeokprotection of the country me. I will derelep a system House Govern.

dell, big. I wouldat kam "me foundation oficial said tu John J. Kearney. into detall adout approred the "The Washington Post, the t Page One February 28. 1977 marks a new depth of filthy slander carried out through transparent inuendo.

"A question which naturally arises is; why has Lister decided to assume this role?

Is it because Lister himself and the WL would be prepared to take this kind of ruling class blood money if the occasion should arise?

Or is it, perhaps, because the FBI leaders of the SWP have promised Lister himself a cut of the proceeds if and when the blood money is delivered?"

In this one, squalid, rhetoricai question -without a scrap of proof for any of its assertionsHealy demonstrates how far he has regressed from the principles and traditions of Trotskyism to the smear tactics and frame-ups of the Stalinist But at the same time he digs himself further into a trap woven from the WRP's own tissue of lies and distortions.

Of course we have never wanted to deny the possibility the SWP leadership contains an FBI infiltrator-any more than the WRP leaders can be certain that one of their number is not an undercover cop. The Bolshevik Contrai Committee was infiltrated up to the very eve of the revolution itself.

But Healy goes overboard. Ask yourself, for example, if the FBI really does run the SWP, then how can Healy explain the fact that the $40 lawsuit was begun in the first place, 5½ years ago?

Remember, prior to the lawsuit, the FBi operated underground with impunity and no chance of being exposed: but since the lawsuit 100,000 pages of documents, revealing an inkling of the extent of illegal harassment of the SWP and radical movements have been forced into the open: whole books have publicised the FBI's spying programme, alerting people to the danger in an unprecedented way.

of informers in politica! the These are strange tactics indeed for FBI agents supposedly controlling the SWP! But there is stranger still.

A major recurrent form of surveillance revealed in these documents is the technique of breaking into local SWP offices and stealing or photographing membership lists, etc., at considerable risk and expense to the FBI.

But if FBI agents really ran the SWP, why go to such trouble and expense to obtain information that well placed agents inside the Party could obtain openly?

Nor can Healy's slandermongers demonstrate any way in which the SWP's Pabloite policies reflect the interests of the FBI or the US state machinery. In fact, while successive US imperialist regimes have stoked up witch-hunts and maintained economic blockade against the Cuban revolution, the SWP leaders-foremost among them supposed "FBI" man the late Joseph Hansen-have slavishly and almost uncritically defended Castro's Stalinist As US imperialism mounted its major war effort in Vietnam, the SWP for all its weaknesses in programme, emerged in a central role in the huge antiwar movement amongst students and radicals-a role which, as released FBI documents show, the FBI was particularly anxious to sabotage.

Strange tactics indeed for "the FBI leaders of the SWP"!

Double bluff?

Let us even assume for a moment that the lawsuit against the FBI was a bizarre FBIinspired double-bluff that backfired; but why did the , "FBI leaders of the SWP" press ahead with it for five solid years, revealing more and more damning information about their own organisation's clandestine activities?

. 1975 *d not learn of really go the radical

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Heinesdar 9 Mar, 1979 Southall demonstrators mourn Blair Peach W KI members in tre as training TGWU were meanwhile civil war".

Garners picket line-WRP tells members not to participate butchers As for the WRP's argument that the $5 million settlement is a cranky way of making the remaining informers the "best paid" capitalist agents inside the workers movement, it all falls a bit flat when News/ine concedes that the SWP opportunists are:

"Publicly asking for $5 million, privately asking for $1 million, and willing to settle for much less"

This of course leads to the question of whether there will really be any: "blood money" to share out among the WRP's growing list of supposed SWP/ FBI accomplices.

For this to be the case, the Carter administration would in effect formally have to concede defeat.

Though they might secure the security of the 18 files, the payment of even the more likely one dollar damages would still represent a political defeat which the US bourgeoisie seems stubbornly unwilling to concede.

This means that there will further legal stages to through.

The WRP, of course, takes no sides in the lawsuit. For them it is a simple [?) question of the FBI on the one hand suing the FBI on the other.

Newsline puts forward no demands to further the fight ¡against the Court of Appeal's ruling: it scarcely bothers to mention the fact that it is the istate which has blocked the release of the 18 files, and not the "State Department" SWP.

Healy's attacks on the SWP, in short, serve neither to clarify political questions for the Party's thousands of members and supporters in the USA (and its thousands of co-thinkers in the Pabloite 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International) nor to advance one iota the class struggle or . the political consciousness of the workers' movement in the USA.

Cover for Carter

Indeed if anyone can be said to be providing a cover for Carter and the FBI, it must be the WRP, with their absurd claim that the files are being withheld not by the US state machine but on the instigation of the SWP leaders themselves!

Finally, it is : worthwhile Nooking at the WRP's overall Ietratany of muddlinninn se on strategy mudsinging as all ¡easy alternatıve to political analysis and polemic.

The question must be asked; even if the WRP were actuaily correct, and the SWP is headed by a panel of FBI agents, then what is the best way of winning the honest militants from the SWP's large periphery and membership in the USA towards (Trotskyism?

Hysteria

Is it through hysterical allegations that their political leaders are police spies? Or is it not rather through patient ¡ political exposure of the opportunist politics of the SWP, and ite ahiine inshilit, ta affar a its oovious inablty to оттег а revolutionary lead to the US working class?

The answer is obvious to all but the most hare-brained : Healyite factionalist.

But then Healy has lost all interest in: challenging the politics of the Pabloites.

His own deals and grotesque alliances with anti-communist and even feudal despots in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi go far beyond even the worst political compromises proposed by arch revisionist Michel Pablo.

The whole sorry episode highlig its the growing questic n mark that must be placed over the WRP recent period.

Which side of the class lines is this supposedly "Trotskyist" party really on? What does the WRP represent in class terms in its practice in the class Again and again Healy's pernicious blend of sectarianism and opportunism have been seen to lead WRP members onto the wong side of the barricades.

But at each point Healy has covered up by accusing others of the crimes he himself was committing.

Framed

In 1974, when the founder members of the WSL. were expelled, we were framed with the charge of being "soft on social democracy" and seeking to "cuddle up to the trade union bureaucrats".

Healy even produced a set of falsified Central Committee minutes to "prove" that such a position had been taken.

What was the reality? Within months of the expulsions it was a WRP Central Committee member, Tom White who plunged into British Leyland's class collaborationist "participation" scheme in Cowley.

wing slate White was also consciously selected for the slate of anti-communist "moderates" in the deputy convenors elections by witch-hunting right wing convenor Reg Parsons.

Last year saw the WRP reinforce their role as the lackeys of the TGWU bureaucracy by carrying extensive lying attacks on the supposed "adventurism" of militant Cowley TGWU shop stewards who were facing a witch-hunting "enquiry" and possible expulsion from the union at the hands of top No support instructed not to support the Cowley 9 Defence Campaign-even though White himself was one of the nine accused!

Instead White looked vainly for ways of getting the capitalist courts to intervene into the union and preserve his position. • Yet it was the Defence Campaign that played the kęy role in preventing the planned wholesale victimisations going ahead.

Organised abstention Elsewhere the WRP's record in the class struggle is one of organised abstention, covered over by skillful use of the Newsline to create the impression of involvement in struggles.

The abstentionism has reached the level where WRP members have even been instructed not to join picket lines supporting the Garners Steak Houses strike!

But worse by far was the scurrilous WRP attack on the thousands of Asian workers and youth who turned out to drive the National Front out of Southall.

Branding anti-fascist demonstrators as "wild eyed [!] middle class protestors" the WRP slammed the massive mobilisation against the NF-in which ANL supporter Blair Peach was murdered by police-as a protest stunt.

"This isn't political struggle. This is sheer bufoonery!". proclaimed the armchair critics of the WRP, who have lifted not so much as a finger for the recent anti-fascist demonstrations.

The Asian masses of Southall get no more than an arrogant back-of-thehand from Newsline:

"Who cares whether 59 members of the NF meet in a hall or not?"

Stay at home

And the WRP effectively urges its • abstentionist members and supporters to stay at home during antifascist marches:

"Do not fall for the provocations of the NF and the police. They simply want to use these episodes exercises IOT ANTONE Coupled with this brazen attack on Southall antifascists is an equally scurrilous attack on ANL leader Paul Holborow, who attempted to raise funds to fly Blair Peach's parents from New Zealand for the funeral by selling photographs of him to the Tory press at £250 Not only is this entirely permissable behaviour from Holborow-facilitating the maximum publicity for the case, and raising money in the process-but the WRP's protests are entirely hypocritical.

Healy knows full well that during the 1974 national press witch-hunt against Alan Thornett-then a WRP member victimised from his deputy convenor's position at BL's Cowley Assembly plant-it was Healy himself who pressurised Thornett for agreement to sell pictures of him to the Tory gutter press!

Prime target

Had Thornett agreed and such pictures been published in the midst of the media barrage against Thornett, he could have become a prime target for any crazed right winger in the town.

But now Healy has the gall to object to Holborowfor perfectly legitimate reasons-selling photographs of Peach that could not harm or jeopardise him in any way at all.

Again and again Healy accuses others of the crimes he himself is committing. He accuses us of compromises with Stalinists-and then himself uncritically endorses the Vietnamese Stalinist regime's invasion of Cambodia and whitewashes its history of murdering Trotskyists.

He accuses us of refusing to support anti-imperialist struggles-but himselt produces a 1979 Election Manifesto that signally fails to call for defence of the Soviet Union or the deformed workers states of East Europe, Asia and Cuba.

He accuses .. us of "revisionism"-while Newsline daily pumps out policies on the Middle East and other issues which are diametrically, opposed to Correct postens any as le years ago.

And, most brazenly of all, Healy falsely accuses us of being paid agents of the FBI, while the Newsline unmistakeably become the obedient mouthpiece for butcher nationalist regimes throughout the Bloodstained We have time and again asked the WRP to explain to the workers' movement: what is their relationship to the bloodstained Iraqi Ba'athist regime, which officially reprints Newsline articles while it executes Communist Party members and jails militants?

What is their relationship to the Syrian Ba'athists, whose army props up the Lebanese capitalist state and represses the actions of the PLO against the Zionists?

What is their relationship with the Gadaffi dictatorship in Libya that outlaws political parties in general and Marxist parties in particular?

Why did Healy and Redgrave visit the feudal Sheikhdoms of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, only to return and launch an extravagant election campaign, standing one candidate for every five or. six WRP members, with many of them not even pretending to carry out any campaign?

Why won't the WRP reply to the extensive critique of their political positions on the Middle East In carried in Socialist Presscontrasting previously correct positions taken by Healy to his present abject grovelling?

The answer is clear: they cannot honestly face the workers' movement with the squalid fact that their so-called Trotskyist party has become simply a tool in the hands of oil-rich "left' nationalist fakers; that it is cut off from the class struggle in Britain and internationally, and struggling to retain control of its dwindling and demoralised membership and preserve its top heavy apparatus and daily paper.

Suppression

This is the explanation for the slanders, the lies, the strange silences and suppression of all discussion within the WRP itself.

WRP members and supporters who wish to fight for Trotskyism must take note. The Trotskyist banner is still held aloftbut no longer by Healy, the puppet of Ba'athism.

Only the Workers Socialist League offers an analysis of the WRP's degeneration, a principled record in the class struggle and a perspective for the reconstruction of the Fourth International on the basis of Trotsky's Transitional lurence sparham, IFL

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PUBLIC SER END LON GMWU leader Basnett at the head of the January 22 demonstration NUPE ambulance driver looks at £60 nge PHOTO: Laurence Sparham IFL A London the record struggles.

SOCIALIST PI DES of the recent public sector pay IS, Wednesday 9 May, 1979 strike pay; and most important, it allowed management to step in and victimise a divided workforce.

This happened at the Westminster Hospital NUPE branch, where management were able to provoke an all out strike on their terms by suspending the six domestics who blacked the private patients' wing as part of the branch's selective action.

Only WSL members and sympathisers in NUPE put up a consistent, relentless opposition to the policy of selective action, both in propaganda-by demanding that the leadership call all-out action right from the beginning of the campaign in June 1978-and in practice.

All out action WSL member John Seymour, steward for the Cressy Road refuse section of Camden General NUPE branch put up a tireless fight along with other WSL sympathisers in London to force the London Divisional Council to call for all-out indefinite action.

At the same time the Cressy Road section took all-out action -despite the branch's suicidal policy of trying to win the claim by pulling out only four petrol pump attendants!

This contributed to bringing the whole branch out along with other refuse sections in Brent and Barnet, and played a large part in winning almost the full £60/35 hour week claim in The Camden victory is held out by the NUPE leadership to be a shining example of how the full claim can be won-yet the fight for all-out action in Camden had to be waged against the open hostility, sarcasm and manoeuvrings of the London NUPE leadership.

Largely because of the Cressy Road initiative, the London Divisional Council held an emergency meeting in January where the call for all-out action was defeated only by the chairman's casting vote.

Although they did finally aum ass heard meeting nice put out the call ane ordanised

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