Agent-baiting: a hysterical slander from David North

Front page of Newsline, Oct. 30, 1985, reporting on Healy's expulsion

by Alex Steiner

On September 17, 2024, David North posted a review of a book by Aidan Beatty, The Party is Always Right. [1]

I am not at this time writing a review of Beatty’s book.  Nor am I going to comment on the numerous criticisms of Beatty’s book cited by North. I may do that in the future, but at this time I am only responding to a hysterical and deranged outburst of slanders and threats launched against me by David North in his review of Beatty’s book.

The first thing to be said is that the author of this book is Aidan Beatty, not Alex Steiner.      The fact that I agreed to an interview with Mr. Beatty  and provided him with factual information about the history of a movement in which I once participated does not make me in any way responsible for its content.  It’s an obvious point but one worth repeating in the face of North’s insinuation that all the people who were interviewed by Beatty were a pathetic lot of embittered haters who gladly conspired with him in trashing the reputation of a figure who North considers a great revolutionary leader, namely Gerry Healy. To put some historical perspective on these events it should be kept in mind that Healy, who died in 1989, was North’s mentor and teacher until differences between North and Healy emerged in 1982. North finally split with Healy shortly after Healy was expelled from the organization he led for many years, the UK-based Workers Revolutionary Party.  Healy’s expulsion came about when his sexual and physical abuse of dozens of female comrades over many years was exposed. [2] North is furious with Beatty for writing what he considers a one-dimensional portrait of Healy as some kind a “monster” (his words). His point is that Beatty failed to recognize that Healy was, in addition to his dark side, also a great revolutionary leader prior to the 1980’s. (While North does acknowledge that Healy degenerated politically and personally in his later years, he all but ignores in his review the sexual and physical abuse inflicted by Healy.)  By extension North also condemns all those who were interviewed by Beatty. As North says,

The testimony upon which Beatty’s oral history is based consists exclusively of allegations made by Healy’s political enemies, and whose subjective hatred of Healy is embedded in their repudiation of revolutionary politics decades ago.

Now whether we think that Beatty’s assessment of Healy is fair or not, it should be obvious to anyone but the willfully blind that North’s wholesale trashing of the dozens of people interviewed by Beatty is the mark of a person who has long since abandoned any notion of science, objectivity or fairness. North apparently feels that he literally owns this history, as if it were a sacred script to which no one has a right to contribute but him and his appointed proxies.  On the other hand, North thinks that any “unauthorized” contribution to this history can only be made by “Healy’s political enemies, and whose subjective hatred of Healy is embedded in their repudiation of revolutionary politics decades ago.”

In a section of his review devoted to the circumstances of the split with Wohlforth, North claims that the information I provided Beatty was false and I was being deliberately “dishonest” in presenting a distorted picture of the history of the Workers League and the Workers Revolutionary Party because I am a “political renegade who abandon[ed] and betray[ed] the ideals of …[my] youth” and I “developed a pathological hatred of ...[my] former comrades.”  That North descends into such hyperbolic insults based on his amateurish attempts at psychoanalysis is a clear indication of his own dishonesty and lack of objectivity.  

North’s case that I was a “dishonest witness” revolves around Beatty’s account of the events of August 30, 1974, and August 31, 1974, in which Tim Wohlforth, the long-time National Secretary of the Workers League, was removed from that position and his companion, Nancy Fields, was suspended.  Beatty does make one minor factual error in recounting those events when he writes that Wohlforth was “expelled”.  I had nothing to do with that factual error.

In relation to those events, Beatty writes,

The WRP’s American sister party, the Worker’s League, expelled its own leader, Tim Wohlforth, in 1974 when it was discovered that his partner, Nancy Fields, had an estranged uncle who worked for the CIA. Wohlforth’s account of this is genuinely disturbing (and is confirmed by Workers League member Alex Steiner, who was also present): Healy’s accusations were produced during a stage-managed move against Wohlforth at an international party meeting in Montreal. Allowing tension to build over several days, Healy finally dropped his bombshell during a marathon all-night meeting, when attendees were bleary-eyed and exhausted and more liable to go along with Healy’s actions. [3]

What I “confirmed” to Beatty was not that “Wohlforth was expelled”, as North insinuates, but  that I thought that as far as the facts were concerned of what happened on August 30 and August 31 Wohlforth’s account was largely correct.  And if you read Wohlforth’s own account, he never said he was expelled either.  Here is the relevant passage from Wohlforth’s memoir,

I will entertain a motion," it was Healy's voice again, "to suspend Miss Nancy Fields from party membership pending a full investigation by a control commission of her CIA connection and to remove Tim Wohlforth as party secretary due to his failure to follow proper security procedures and therefore endangering the world movement." "So moved." It was Mazelis, my old friend and comrade. "All in favor raise your hands." The hands went up, all of them. All eyes were upon Nancy and me. Then Nancy slowly raised her own hand. My hand followed. I do not know why. It just went up in the air. It was 2 A.M. and the meeting was over. [4]

Nor should it be any shock for North to hear that I thought Wolfforth’s account of the facts in his memoir were largely credible. Where his memoir described experiences of which I was a part, they coincided with my recollection of those events. I said the same thing some 15 years ago when I pointed to North’s own distortion of the history of the Workers League. I wrote then,

In his self-serving memoir, The Prophet’s Children, Wohlforth provides a good description of the disorientation and the sickness that had gripped the movement in this period [1973-1974].[5]

Whatever you may think of Wohlforth’s behavior and subsequent political evolution, his factual description of the events of the daily life of comrades in the Workers League during this period is true. One example is the following selection from his memoir,

Our typical member worked a full day at his or her job and then, instead of going home, headed for the party office, bringing a slice of pizza or a hamburger for supper. Then, together with one or two others, the comrade would go to a dangerous poor neighborhood to sell papers, knock on doors for subscriptions, perhaps pick up half-a-dozen teenagers to hold a youth meeting, organize a dance or basketball game or just to talk at great length and try to convince someone to do something. Then it was back to the office to talk it all over and finally head for home. Sometimes even at home the comrade would have to try to keep awake to work up a small article for the newspaper. This wearying schedule was not kept only one night a week, either; it could be every night! [6]  

My comment about this passage was,

Although Wohlforth somehow manages to avoid facing up to his own responsibility for this disorientation [that led to such a destructive practice A.S.], his description of the day-to-day toll this had on comrades is accurate enough. [7]

I also made the point that while Wohlforth was being evasive as to his own responsibility for this state of affairs, the main culprit was Healy since Wohlforth was only carrying out on American soil what Healy was doing in the UK.  The daily life of comrades in the Workers League that Wohlforth describes could have just as easily been written about comrades in the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK during that period. Behind what could only be considered an abuse of the comrades in the U.S. and the UK was a false perspective of the nature of the period. And this false perspective came from Healy and the entire leadership of the International Committee. That perspective, affirmed at various Congresses and resolutions of the ICFI and its sections, was that we were then (in the 1970’s) entering into a period of civil war where the immediate question of power would shortly be posed.  It was therefore necessary for all sections of the ICFI to be transformed into mass parties that could lead the working class.  With the exception of the WRP in Britain and the group in Sri Lanka, all the other sections of the ICFI, in the U.S., Germany and Australia, were small propaganda groups having no more than a few dozen members that struggled to publish a weekly newspaper let alone dream of a daily paper.  Even the WRP only had a few hundred active members and were hardly in a position to become a mass party. The huge gap between the actual capabilities of these small groups and the false perspective of the “objective requirements” to prepare for  revolution and civil war created a frenzy of pragmatic activism that resulted in many comrades burning themselves out. 

Ever since the split with Healy in 1985 North has been embarked on a campaign to sanitize the history of the Workers League and the International Committee from the period starting in 1970 until 1982 when North first challenged Healy. In North’s reconstructed narrative, the crisis of the Workers League in 1973-1974 was solely due to the destructive conduct of Wohlforth and his companion Nancy Fields. That was also Healy’s version of events. This revisionist narrative artificially separates Wohlforth’s activity – which was indeed destructive – from Healy’s leadership of the International Committee.  From the premise that all that was wrong with the Workers League in 1973-1974 emanated from Wohlforth and Fields it follows, according to North’s reconstruction, that once Wohlforth was removed and a new leadership trained by Healy took over, the Workers League was restored to a healthy existence having learned the “lessons” of the struggle against Wohlforth.  But this fairy tale version of history flies in the face of the facts. The false perspective under which the ICFI was operating in the period leading up to Wohlforth’s demise continued afterwards.  As evidence, take the following excerpts from the  Manifesto of the 7^th Congress of the ICFI in 1977, some three years after Wohlforth left the Workers League:

The International Committee, because of its intransigent record in rejecting all forms of protest and adaptation to bureaucracy represented by revisionism, is now a pole of attraction to the revolutionary forces being thrown up in the Middle East and Africa and in all the advanced capitalist countries. (p.4)

From proclaiming that it was “a pole of attraction” to revolutionary forces throughout the planet, a statement for which there was not a shred of evidence, the document went on to declare – employing Healy’s pseudo-dialectical language - that all cadre of the ICFI now bore direct responsibility for the success of the coming civil war,

Now, the accumulated contradictions explode to the surface of the class struggle, creating an unprecedented world situation requiring a revolutionary practice of cognition able to abstract essential objective knowledge of the new content and tempo of the revolution, a negation at a higher level of the revolutionary period of October 1917 and the first five years of the Communist International. At this level all the intervening developments of counter-revolution and the struggle against Stalinism are subsumed, cancelled and overcome at the same time. (pp. 6-7)

There are also indications in this document of the gross capitulation to bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism that mark this period of the International Committee. For instance, it takes the following swipe against the Socialist Workers Party,

To this disgusting mockery of socialism and proletarian internationalism the Socialist Workers Party apologists of imperialism have added an even viler parody. They have openly sided with the malicious State Department inspired campaign against the revolutionary Cambodian regime, depicting it as a government of ‘mass murderers’… (p. 24) [8]

The reference was to the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia which was responsible for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century against its own people. While it might be correct to point to the attempts of the State Department to manipulate public opinion about Cambodia, to call this regime of mass murderers “revolutionary” is nothing short of nauseating.

So while it is true that Wohlforth failed to face up to his own responsibility for the disastrous disorientation of the Workers League in that period, it is also true that David North has always sought to airbrush this period of the history of the Workers League and blame everything on Wohlforth, thereby absolving Healy and the perspective of the International Committee of any responsibility for this calamity.  He did that in what passes for his “official” historical narrative of the Workers League, ‘The Heritage We Defend’ and he continues that trope in his review of Beatty’s book.

North’s account is also guilty of factual errors that are far more serious than Beatty’s. He writes,

Steiner arrived at the camp with a substantial number of former Workers League members on the afternoon of August 30, 1974. A meeting of the National Committee was then held, at which Healy asked that the committee entertain a motion for the readmission of all these former members. The motion was adopted unanimously, and the reinstated comrades were warmly welcomed. They then left the camp and were not in attendance at the subsequent meetings of the National Committee.

Now the meetings North recalls took place 50 years ago almost to the day, but I still recall  them vividly.  North’s account of these meetings is a bare-faced lie. The group of returned comrades, which included me, were actually in attendance at the meeting where we were re-admitted into the party. When that meeting began, we were asked to stand a few feet outside the area where the meeting was convoked in view of the fact that we were not yet members with a right to attend the meeting. But as soon as the vote to re-admit us was taken, we were invited in to join the remainder of the proceedings.  And North’s statement that we “then left the camp and were not in attendance at the subsequent meetings of the National Committee” is simply false. We returned to our hotel rooms after that meeting, but we also returned to the camp the next day and participated in the meeting of the National Committee where the vote was taken to suspend Fields and remove Wohlforth as National Secretary.  When I was re-admitted as a member the previous day I was also reinstated as a member of the National Committee and so was able to participate in the debate and the vote to suspend Fields and remove Wohlforth.  

To provide a taste of the atmosphere of this meeting, I distinctly remember the gleeful look on Healy’s face as he said, “It’s Christmas!” as if he was about to take a bite out of the unfortunate roasted pig with the apple in its mouth laid out on the dining room table.  At the time I did not understand Healy’s  reaction but years later it became clear to me that Healy took sadistic pleasure in bringing down Wohlforth in front of the party members that Wohlforth  had led for more than a decade. To be honest I was also happy to witness Wohlforth’s downfall. So were the vast majority of those participating in that meeting. It was a natural reaction to the abuse we suffered, personally and politically, at the hands of Wohlforth and Fields.  That abuse resulted in 50% of the members of the Workers League leaving in a period of less than a year.  But it was not a thoughtful and objective reaction. Had we stopped to reflect on the causes of Wohlforth’s behavior we would have naturally had to ask what the role of his mentor Healy was.

Thus, when North says that,

In fact, Steiner was not, and could not have been, present at the National Committee meetings of August 30 -31.

…he is lying.

So much for North’s statement that I am a “dishonest witness”.

But this bit of prevarication is small potatoes when it comes to North’s next malicious slander against me.

He writes,

Beatty reports that I “was blessed with cultural capital, as well as raw economic capital.” [p. 138] His main informant for this inquiry into my family is Alex Steiner, whose political hostility is seasoned by personal animosity and subjective jealousy. The FBI will appreciate Steiner’s services as an informer.

Beatty nowhere says that I was his “main informant” for information about North’s private life and North gives no indication why he thinks that is the case.  In fact Beatty in a footnote cites his major sources as various publications, some from Trinity College which relied on information provided by North himself! [9]  In any case, I could not have been Beatty’s “main informant” for the information he reproduces since I never knew most of those details about North’s background in the first place.  Of course I had some general knowledge of North’s background given our work together over the years, i.e.  his upper middle-class upbringing, the importance of classical music in his family, his years at Trinity College, etc., but I certainly knew nothing about the name of his grandfather or the fact that his father died when he was three! I’m sure I knew less about North than other members of the Workers League.  And what is it about any of the information Beatty cites, all of which is part of the public record, that North finds so threatening?

It is also odd that of all the people North earlier characterized as, “Healy’s political enemies … whose subjective hatred of Healy is embedded in their repudiation of revolutionary politics decades ago” I am the only one that North specifically names - falsely – as the source of Beatty’s information about his private life.  Does this have something to do with the fact that my colleague Frank Brenner and I have written dozens of essays over the years exposing the fact that North and the organization he heads, the International Committee, is a sectarian outfit hostile to the working class that has been spectacularly unsuccessful in building a movement? [10]

Finally, I must ask, why would North use the manufactured lie that I am Beatty’s “main informant” about his private life to insinuate that I am or could be an FBI informer?  North has been around the movement long enough to know that insinuating without any evidence, that someone is or could be a police agent is one of the worst things you can do. It goes beyond mere slander. You are in effect jeopardizing that person’s physical safety by creating suspicions about whether they are informants.  He knows perfectly well that saying someone’s name in the same sentence as “FBI informer”, even if you don’t explicitly accuse that person of being an FBI informer, puts a target on their back, especially in this day of social media where every rumor is exponentially amplified. 

Inside his party North is completely intolerant of any criticism or opposition, and anyone who raises differences is expelled. (For a recent example, see the statement by Samuel Tissot,  Anatomy of a sect: ICFI expels a leading member of French section. ) It isn’t surprising that a leader who operates that way will lash out with hysteria and slander when faced with external criticism. But this latest slander linking me to the FBI is a new low, the verbal violence of a political thug.

 

 

Notes:

[1]  David North, Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, World Socialist Web Site, Sept 17, 2024.  Unless otherwise indicated, all further quotes from North are taken from this review.

[2]  The charge of Healy’s abuse of comrades was investigated by a Control Commission of the Workers Revolutionary Party whose findings ratified Healy’s expulsion.  See  the account published by Norman Harding, a rank and file member of the Workers Revolutionary Party who presided over the Control Commission, Staying Red: Why I remain a socialist, Chapter 16,Uncovering and Overcoming the Horror: 1984 TO 1986,  https://stayingred.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/16.pdf

[3]  Aidan Beatty, The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, Pluto Press, London, 2024, p. 62.

[4]  Tim Wohlforth,  The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American Left, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1994, p. 245.

[5]  Alex, Steiner, The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International,  Chapter 3, page 65, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch03.pdf

[6]  Wohlforth, op. cit., p. 223.

[7]  Steiner, op. cit., p. 65.

[8]  Manifesto of the 7th Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International: May 21-28, 1977, Published by the International Committee and printed by Astmoor Litho Ltd, Runcorn, Cheshire, U.K., 1977.

[9] Beatty, op. cit., p. 204. Text of Note 9:

The information on North/Green’s early life is taken from: ‘Open Semester Program’, Trinity Reporter, Vol. 1,    No. 6, January 1971; Trinity Tripod, 28 January 1969; ‘“I Personally Am Very, Very Dissatisfied With American Society”: College Students Decry “Passivity” of the Past, Defend Today’s Activism’, Trinity Alumni Magazine, Summer 1968 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/musicshow/david-waghalter-green/6877784; ‘I. Waghalter, 68, Long a Conductor’, New York Times, 8 April 1949; Waghalter, Toni [Obituary], New York Times, 1 December 1964; https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/beatrice-waghalter-green-geb-1913-857929.html ; information on Trinity itself is taken from Peter J. Knapp; Anne H. Knapp. Trinity College in the Twentieth Century: A History (Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2000).

[10]  For Steiner and Brenner’s  comprehensive analysis of North and the International Committee, see Marxism Without its Head or its  Heart  and The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The reader can also find a list of the key essays on the theory and practice of the International Committee up until June 2018 referenced at the end of my essay, The Gutter Politic of David North. For a first-hand account of the authoritarian internal practices of sections of the ICFI, see Samuel Tissot’s report of his expulsion from the French section of the ICFI, in Anatomy of a sect: ICFI expels a leading member of French section. Tissot’s account also sheds light on the dishonest picture painted by the World Socialist Web Site of the French section of the ICFI as a fighting force within the French working class. In reality this “section” consists of no more than a dozen members who have not been able to recruit a single person since it began its existence several years ago.