CANADIAN TROTSKYISTS DEMAND SLL ANSWER ON TATE CASE
{The following is” the text of a letter which the League for Socialist Action addressed to the National Committee of the Socialist Labour League in London. The letter deals with the beating of Ernest Tate in front of a meeting held under the auspices of the SLL. This was first reported in World Outlook December 2, 1966. Subsequent developments have been reported in succeeding issues.
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1 Cumberland Street
Toronto 5, Ontario
January 1, 1867 To the National Committee of The Socialist Labour League
Comrades:
We are astonished to see that you have not responded in any positive way to the appeal issued by the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, and which you acknowledge receipt of in the December 3 issue of your official organ, The Newsletter. They asked you to place your national secretary on trial and that you expel from your ranks everyone involved in the hooligan attack against Ernest Tate outside your meeting at Caxton Hall on November 17.
For our part we do not question for one moment that Comrade Ernest Tate is telling the truth when he states that he was viciously assaulted as he was attempting to encourage those attending the meeting to purchase, so they could study, a pamphlet entitled Healy “Reconstructs" the Fourth International. As a leader of our movement, the League for Socialist Action, he informed us that a group of persons. known to him and other witnesses as members of the SLL, and under the direction of your national secretary, assaulted him and gave him such a working over that he had to be hospitalized. It was only by good chance that he was not killed and appears to have suffered no permanent injury.
You see, we know Comrade Tate. We know him as a revolutionary socialist, as a Trotskyist of the highest integrity and the firmest dedication to the cause of the international working-class movement that bears the name of Leon Trotsky and numbers within its ranks such fearless fighters as Hugo Blanco.
Aside from the political and moral credentials of the accuser, and they are impeccable, your political committee published a statement in your official organ on August 20 that sustain his charge. It is in fact a directive to members of your movement to act as Tate claims they did against him. It declared publicly in your name that, "We shall not hesitate to deal appropriately with the handful of United Secretariat agents who hawk it-around the cynical fake-left in England." Since then your paper, in its November 12 issue, reported an incident where a revolutionary was beaten-up and thrown out of a meeting where your national secretary was the featured speaker because
he wanted to defend his organization from the attack and revilement that had ‘been leveled at it throughout the meeting. Instead of denouncing the assault of this revolutionary and his associates, the Newsletter approved. It seems clear to us that these incidents sustain Tate's charges.
Even should you believe that Tate has concocted his story, and that others, such as the Voix Ouvriére, have concocted their stories for reasons unknown to us, it is obvious that you yourselves must initiate the action suggested by the SWP or some alternative action which will make it possible to ascertain the truth of Tate's charge.
Failure to do so, you must admit, tends strongly to affirm the truth of the charges leveled against your national secretary and certain members of your movement.
Do not think that this is a small matter, an incident that will blow over or that can be permitted to be overlooked by serious revolutionary socialists committed to the herculean task of building a new society. And do not justify your failure to act along the lines of the SWP proposal with any kind of rationalization that to do so would be a form of capitulation to the pressure of the SWP, that it would amount to some kind of "win" for the SWP, which for many months now you have been abusing in the columns of your press.
This would truly be spite that amounts to cutting off your own nose to save your face. ,
Even should you feel that the SWP has taken up this matter, not at all in the interests of world Trotskyism, but for some petty factional consideration -- and nothing whatsoever in our long and close association with the SWP permits of such an interpretation -- you should seriously consider how your failure to act will be interpreted by all those across the world who consider themselves to.be Trotskyists. Think what it means to those sections of the British left who have already heard or will yet hear of this accusation. Think what it means to the internal life of your own movement.
We take it for granted that you are familiar with the longstanding and tested policies adhered to by any movement that calls itself Trotskyist in respect to the denocratic rights of members of this movement, of working-class opponents, and even of exponents of views that can be said to be petty-—bourgeois opposition views. Our movement has always stood for a full and free discussion of ideas. It has always rejected absolutely all attempts of any kind to infringe on, to curtail, or to suppress this process in any way, not to speak of violent physical suppression. We have taken this stand not at all because it has long been the Trotskyists who have been denied a hearing, whose rights have been trampled on, suppressed, and whose activists have been beaten up and even murdered. We have taken this stand because the movement required to carry out the task that we have set ourselves cannot be built on any other principle -- because no characterizations of us or our ideas hold any terror for us, because we have nothing, not anything to hide.
: If you have any doubts in this respect we would refer you to the conduct of the SWP in collaboration with Trotsky himself in respect to one James Burnham. And since the Newsletter on occasion has seen fit in its personal vendettas against leaders of the United Secretariat to dip far back in the history of such sections as the French -we would refer you to Trotsky's intervention in the Molinier incident.
Instead of responding to the SWP's very simple and logical request that you face your national secretary with Tate's charges, that you place him on trial, you have allowed your leadership to go to the courts. Not to a court of labor and socialist opinion composed of trade unionists, socialists, whose collectivity would assure impartiality and the determination of the truth, but to the bourgeois courts, the courts of the class enemy.
The first result of this violation of elementary working-class principle has already heaped ignominy on you. What. satisfaction there must be in knowing that you have succeeded in wringing 21 guineas out of two working-class papers for having published a letter by Tate protesting the assault on him, and in winning the threat of worse should they comment on the Tate incident!
We cannot help but recall to your mind when you were taken to court, and the capitalist judges handed down awards against you. In the tradition of working-class solidarity with victims of capitalist court injustice, when you were the victim we responded to your appeal to the full limit of our resources. We welcomed your national secretary on our platform. We launched a special financial drive through the ranks of our members and sympathizers and gave you a very large sum of | money. :
And now having forced, with bourgeois court orders, the working-class press of Britain into silence, your victorious solicitors have, upon the advice of Gerry Healy, threatened our comrade with a court injunction restraining him from circulating information relevant to his case, including the contents of this letter, we assume, or suffer the consequences. You should know that no single issue in Canada today, not wages, not working conditions, but court injunctions unites the ranks of the working-class opposition to capitalisn.
Let us assure you that we are as fully behind Comrade Ernest Tate as we were behind you when you were being harassed by the courts. We will not have him silenced and we will aid him in his efforts to the fullest extent of our resources.
What a legacy of hatred for your movement, what awful precedents are being set by the course that your leadership launched you upon by their action in front of your meeting just last November at Caxton Hall. Where will you go from here? What was the logic of the course that was set then? Are you prepared to send Comrade Tate to jail for defiance of a court injunction? Stop now! Turn back! Act on the suggestions of the SWP -- or you will be forever lost to the ideology of which you claim to: be the sole practioners.
Comradely ,~~
Ross Dowson
Executive Secretary
League for Socialist Action