BY PAUL MAILHOT
"Supporters of Mark Curtis and backers of democratic rights around the world have won an important victory," Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes told the Militant.
Barnes said that attorneys for the Workers League, a small Michigan group with a long history of disruptive activities within the labor movement, have been forced to pull back from a probe against the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists. At the end of last year, the Workers League had threatened the party with a lawsuit unless the Young Socialists, a revolutionary youth organization, immediately stopped using that name.
Since the mid-1970s the Workers League has targeted not only the SWP but also other vanguard fighters in the unions. Striking workers from the meatpacking plants in Minnesota, to the paper mills in Pennsylvania, to the coal mines of West Virginia have first-hand experience with the methods and aims of this group.
For the past eight years, one of the Workers League's main efforts has been to promote the frame-up of Mark Curtis and keep him behind bars. In 1988 Curtis, a unionist and socialist, was convicted in Des Moines, Iowa, on trumped-up charges of attempted rape and burglary and sentenced to 25 years in jail. At the time of his arrest he was involved in a fight to defend immigrant workers at the meat-packing plant where he worked and in the city.
On Dec. 6, 1995, just a couple of weeks after Iowa authorities ruled that Curtis was eligible for parole, New York attorney Daniel Kornstein wrote Barnes, stating that "it had come to the attention of our client [the Workers League] that Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, is publicizing meetings and other activities by the `Young Socialists.' "
Kornstein said that the Workers League had "established the Young Socialists as its youth organization in December 1971," and he demanded that the SWP "cease and desist from further use of name `Young Socialists,' which serves to mislead and confuse the public."
Michael Krinsky, attorney for the Socialist Workers Party, replied to Kornstein on December 22. Krinsky wrote that he found "your client's claim to be lacking for at least the following reasons:
"1. The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for the actions of the Young Socialists," which is an independent youth organization in political solidarity with the SWP.
"2. The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for the actions of the Militant newspaper," which is a socialist weekly "whose reportage is in any case protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"3. Based on the representations in your letter and our own research, we believe that the Workers League cannot make a valid claim to the right to exclusive use of the term `young socialist' or `young socialists'...."
Krinsky pointed out that groups calling themselves "young socialists" have functioned actively in politics across the United States before, during, and after the formation of the Workers League group. A newspaper called the Young Socialist was published and distributed nationwide from 1957 through the closing years of the 1980s. That paper was widely distributed by the Young Socialist Alliance and its chapters across the country.
The new nationwide socialist youth group targeted by the Workers League is planning its first national convention for April 6-7 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
A highlight of that Young Socialists gathering will be the opening rally of the 1996 Socialist Workers campaign of James Harris for president and Laura Garza for vice president. At the convention, Young Socialists leaders have announced they will propose that members of the YS from Georgia to Michigan to Washington state petition and campaign for the socialist alternative to the twin parties of big business between now and November 1996.
Earlier disruption efforts
In 1975, the Workers League's sister organization in Britain
headed by Gerry Healy began an agent-baiting campaign against
a prominent founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party,
Joseph Hansen. Hansen, one of the party's outstanding writers
on the Cuban revolution, was charged by Healy and the Workers
League with complicity in the 1940 assassination of Russian
revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky. Hansen was serving as
Trotsky's secretary in Mexico at the time of the
assassination, which was incontestably proven to be the work
of Joseph Stalin's secret police.
A broad array of forces in the communist movement and democratic-minded circles internationally roundly condemned the slanders against Hansen and the Socialist Workers Party.
In response to the latest probe, legal counsel for the Socialist Workers Party also brought to the attention of the Workers League attorney an earlier victory by the SWP against another attack on its rights. Alan Gelfand, a lawyer who had been expelled from the Los Angeles branch of the SWP, petitioned the Federal courts in 1979 to throw out the entire SWP Political Committee, claiming they were all FBI agents.
The purpose of Gelfand's suit - funded and publicized by the Workers League and its international supporters - was to tie up the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in court and drain the party's financial resources.
After allowing the case to drag on for almost a decade, Federal Judge Marianna Pfaelzer was forced to admit in 1989 that Gelfand's case "is groundless and always was." The judge ruled against Gelfand and awarded the SWP some of its court costs.
Victory for all
"The decision by the Workers League's attorney not to pursue
the threat made in Kornstein's letter to me nearly four months
ago," said SWP leader Barnes, "comes as a result of the
strengths of the party and the previous victories it and its
co-thinkers worldwide have scored in defending political
rights. A success for Gelfand would have dealt a blow to the
freedom of political association of all, as would this more
recent effort to weaken the SWP and deprive a political
organization of the right to function with its chosen name."
As part of the effort to turn back the renewed Workers League probe, an Education for Socialists bulletin was issued at the end of last year documenting the Workers League's record of disruptive activities. This booklet helped alert democratic-minded fighters around the world to this new threat against the communist movement and against their own rights as well.
The refusal by members and supporters of the SWP or Young Socialists to be intimidated by the Workers League's threats, and their rapid steps to quickly inform the broader working- class public, helped silence the new legal guns aimed at communist workers and youth.
Government-inspired disruption campaigns of this sort often coincide with stirrings in the labor movement, aiming to drive a wedge between vanguard fighters and communist workers battling alongside them.
"The victory in turning back this latest probe," said Barnes, "registers the welcome fact that the relationship of forces has shifted further against the Workers League, limiting still more the effectiveness of their antilabor and anticommunist activity."