CONCERNING ERNEST TATE CASE
The four documents printed below all concern the assault committed on Ernest Tate at the entrance of a meeting sponsored by the Socialist Labour League in London Novenber 17. The importance of the case lies in the fact that from all the evidence, it appears to have been deliberately incited and even planned by the leadership of the Socialist Labour League.
The documents are largely self-explanatory. All that needs be added is a brief indication of the nature of the dispute among those involved.
Ernest Tate is the manager of Pioneer Book Service, the main source of Trotskyist literature in England. Politically he is with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.
The Socialist Labour League is an ultraleft sectarian formation that refused to
abide by majority decision in 1963 when the bulk of the world Trotskyist movement decided, on the basis of a statement of principles reaffirming the program of Trotskyism, to heal a split that had existed for almost ten years. Since this reunification, the SLL leaders -- and this boils down in practice to Healy -- have carried on a bitter war against the Fourth International.
Pierre Lambert is the head of a grouping in France that agrees with Healy in this, although the group has displayed less energy in pursuing the subject.
The Socialist Workers party supported the reunification of the world Trotskyist movement and shares the political outlook of the United Secretariat on the major current political questions, such as opposition to U.S. aggression in Vietnam and defense of the Vietnamese revolution. The Socialist Workers party is not affiliated to the Fourth International because of reactionary legislation in the United States.
Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson were members of the Socialist Workers party. They disagreed with the reunification of the world Trotskyist movement. In addition they developed serious political differences with the Socialist Workers party on a number of questions, particularly in relation to the Cuban revolution.
Both Wohlforth and Robertson moved closer and closer to Healy's position. This involved them in violations of discipline that were incompatible with membership in the Socialist Workers party and they were eventually expelled.
However the two developed their own differences. Healy sought to play the role . of arbiter between them for a time but finally chose Wohlforth as the more pliant of the two. At an international conference organized by Healy and Lambert, Robertson was thrown out in quite unceremonious fashion.
A number of documents related to this expulsion and similar events at the conference were compiled as a pamphlet and published under the title Healy _"Reconstructs" the Fourth International. A preface was supplied by Joseph Hansen, "Sectarianism and Tinpot Despotism -- an Example for the Textbooks." The preface examined the happenings at the conference in detail and drew some general conclusions as to what had been revealed about the political positions of the participants.
Completely unable to answer, still less refute, this small forty-page pamphlet, which was published last June, the leadership of the Socialist Labour League responded instead with charges, thought up around Healy's desk, the flavor of which can be sampled from phrases like the following: The United Secretariat of the Fourth International "now emerges as the 'left cover' for bureaucracy and imperialism, and calls in the police to deal with the Young Socialists who commemorate the Hungarian Revolution"; by offering critical support to Herbert Aptheker, a candidate of the Communist party, the Socialist Workers party "is merely covering up the fact that it is initiating a sly stage-—by-stage orientation towards the Democratic Party itself"; "When you say A. for Aptheker, you will be soon. shouting P. for the police"; "Any revisionist tendencies which in one form or another adapt themselves politically to the Stalinists are, in our opinion, mortal enemies." These are taken from a single article signed by Healy and published in the November 5 Newsletter.
The pamphlet itself was greeted with nothing less than a statement by the Political Committee of the SLL charging the Socialist Workers party with having "capitulated to imperialism," and "sold out the anti-war movement" and with acting as "finger-men for the State Department." The pamphlet was called a "provocation" that "constitutes a complete and irreversible departure even from revisionism." The course of action decided on by this body was indicated as follows: "We shall not hesitate to deal appropriately with the handful of United Secretariat agents who hawk it around the cynical fake-left in England."
From "theory" -- if it can be called that -- it was but a small step to practice. Healy's politics thus became reduced to the level of physically assaulting those whom he is incapable of meeting on the plane of ideas and arguments.
SWP NATIONAL COMMITTER