This is the third part of the lecture on the degeneration of the US Socialist Workers Party in the years following the publication of the initial findings of the investigation into Security and the Fourth International, delivered at the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US). The first part, titled “The Carleton Twelve,” was given by Tom Mackaman. The second part, “Hansen builds a world network of agents,” was delivered by Andrea Lobo. The third part, “The Barnes group and the decline and fall of the SWP,” was delivered by Patrick Martin. To accompany the last part, the WSWS is publishing three supplementary texts: “A Provocateur Attacks Trotskyism,” “The Case Against the SWP: What the Facts Show,” and Chapters 9 and 12 from “The Mark Curtis Hoax.” These documents are essential reading for the education of Trotskyist cadre today.

This lecture will be somewhat out of the chronological sequence, since it will trace the political course of the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the wake of the launching of Security and the Fourth International and the initial findings on Joseph Hansen, Mark Zborowski and Sylvia Franklin, and the publication of The Carleton Twelve.

It focuses on the final break by the SWP from any even rhetorical connection to Trotskyism, and the purge of the older members, virtually all those who had joined when the SWP was actually a Trotskyist party, and the organization’s long slide into political oblivion which has followed, up to the present day. We will return to the further development of the investigation into Trotsky’s assassination, beginning with the Gelfand case, in the lectures that follow this one.

Comrade Tom Mackaman has outlined the takeover of the SWP leadership by the 12 students from Carleton College led by Jack Barnes. We now know that there were actually at least 14, including Dave Wulp and Beverly Scott, who left Carleton in 1961, transferring to Indiana University, where they were in charge of a Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) group. This is the same campus which later featured the activities of Barnes, John R. Glenn, and the Bloomington Three defense campaign. Wulp moved on to Boston, succeeding Peter Camejo as the leader of that branch, and Scott moved to New York, where she was for many years the business manager of The Militant.

I have had the occasion over the past year to read a number of memoirs written by former leaders of the SWP that shed light on the internal life of the organization in the 1970s and 1980s, the period when the Barnes group consolidated itself as the leadership of the party.

The following comes from North Star, the memoir of Peter Camejo. He relates how the SWP filed its lawsuit against the FBI in July 1973, before federal judge Thomas Griesa, in the wake of the COINTELPRO revelations about FBI spying and infiltration in the 1960s. Camejo was the SWP’s presidential candidate in 1976. He writes:

The SWP’s lawyers told the judge that they suspected the FBI had planted paid informants among my campaign staff around the country. In disbelief the judge asked the FBI’s attorney if it were true. The FBI requested a week to respond and when the time was up, they announced that there were indeed paid informants among the campaign staff—sixty-six in total. The judge was shocked and ordered the FBI to remove all the informants on a specific date.

One of those who was NOT removed was the chairman of Camejo’s campaign, Edward Heisler, who in June 1980 would send a letter to Barnes admitting he had been an FBI informant.

Camejo later describes how in June 1976, while campaigning in the Bay Area, he discovered that Asher Harer, a longtime SWP leader in the seaman’s union, had in his possession some old microphones and wires he had found hidden in the ceiling of the SWP office, which were going to be sent to New York as evidence for the suit.

I took a look at the microphones and wires and thought, old as the story was, if it were linked to the SWP lawsuit and all the new revelations of FBI criminal activity, we might be able to parlay it into some Bay Area press coverage. So I called the San Francisco Chronicle and offered them an exclusive if they put the story on their front page and included a photo of me with the microphones.

The next day Barnes flew out to San Francisco and angrily confronted Camejo over a minor distortion of the SWP’s politics made by the Chronicle reporter, who had written that the SWP were opposed to the “Communists” (i.e., the Communist Party). Camejo draws the conclusion that Barnes was a sectarian obsessed with doctrine and didn’t see the value in the front-page story. The actual source of the anger—front-page publicity providing real physical evidence showing the scale of FBI spying on the SWP—seems to have escaped Camejo entirely.

Another SWP member and friend of Camejo’s wrote about the atmosphere in the leadership:

Jack Barnes controlled the SWP with a personal clique that was the large majority of the Political Committee. The Barnes’ clique lived in close proximity and frequently spent evenings socializing together. By the time a Political Committee meeting was held, they had already discussed and agreed on the decisions that would be made … In frustration, at one point Peter proposed at a PC meeting that the PC be reduced in size to the exact number of the Barnes clique. Peter said that Jack became apoplectically angry and in retrospect he thought that this was the point where Barnes determined to get Peter out of the party.

A similar description is offered by Les Evans, who played a prominent role in the 1970s writing for The Militant and as editor of International Socialist Review, in his memoir Outsider’s Reverie. He describes a 1979 meeting in Minneapolis with Ken Shilman, an emissary from the SWP national office.

He made a last effort to recruit me to the Barnes secret faction: “There’s a party within the party,” he said. “The real party is the inner core, who understand the centrality of the Cuban revolution and the anti-imperialist struggle. Everybody who has been in the party ten years or more will have to be expelled. Maybe a few of them can be reeducated.”

Evans had been shipped out of New York to take a job in the Minnesota Iron Range as part of what Barnes called the “turn to industry.” Hundreds of SWP members were sent out to take industrial jobs in unionized factories, from 1979 on, in auto, steel, aerospace, garment, meatpacking, as well as railroads. Their success in getting hired was especially astonishing at key defense plants. In all these jobs they would sell The Militant openly for a few years, proselytize as “Communist” supporters of the Cuban revolution, attend union meetings, but never seek union office of any kind. In three years or so, they would move on, usually to a new city and a new industrial job, in a different industry.

Here is the trajectory of one SWP member, Cheryl Goertz, who joined the party in Chicago, before moving on to Boston, Salt Lake City, Tampa, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Alabama, and finally Atlanta. And similar maps could be developed for hundreds of SWP members.

We later wrote about this process in relation to the Mark Curtis case:

SWP members entered the factories and, by proclaiming themselves socialists and communists, made contact with the most radical-minded and militant workers. The names of these workers were then passed on, through the government agents in SWP headquarters, to the computer data banks of the FBI and the corporations, for surveillance and possible victimization. The SWP members moved on to new locations, while the workers who had the misfortune to come around them suffered the consequences. At the same time, local trade union bureaucrats, who could not but be aware of the influx of SWP members into their plants, were reassured that these supposed communists would not threaten them.

Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration should consider the fact that the individual in overall charge of the SWP’s trade union work during the launching of the “turn to industry,” who was receiving the regular reports from the branches, was the same Edward Heisler, a self-confessed longtime FBI informant.

The three-year rotation follows the practice of the State Department and the CIA, as explained by Philip Agee in his book Inside the Company. Three years gives the agent time enough to become familiar with a particular arena for gathering information, while not staying so long as to become unduly attached to it, or to be exposed and subject to retaliation.

The expulsion of the old guard

Joseph Hansen died in January 1979, severely damaging the political rudder that had guided the operations of the Barnes leadership. Hansen was a skilled political operator, with more than 40 years inside the SWP, experienced in fighting against Trotskyism and the International Committee. He had been trained in both the Stalinist and imperialist schools. After his death, Barnes & Co. had neither the political ability nor the desire to maintain any longer the pretense that the SWP was a Trotskyist party.

Beginning in 1980-81, a factional struggle broke out within the SWP leadership, as two distinct groups, one led by Nat Weinstein and Lynn Henderson, the other by Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell, initially opposed a tendency on the part of the Barnes leadership to accord the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua the same status as the Castro regime in its early days, hailing it as a “workers and peasants government” on the road to establishing a full-fledged workers’ state. Both groups eventually came to oppose the SWP’s trade union policy, which cut across their own activities in the teachers’ unions and white collar unions like AFSCME, where they had gained some positions in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy.

Organizational bloodletting began at the SWP national convention in August 1981, when 33 of the 78 members of the National Committee were dropped, most in their late 30s and early 40s, and replaced by younger Barnes’ loyalists who had been groomed at the Party School which he established in January 1980, selecting the students, teachers and curriculum for an offensive against Trotskyism.

After the convention, the national office proposed a series of internal party classes on Lenin’s writings between 1905 and 1917. Barry Sheppard, in his execrable two-volume memoir of that period, writes:

… these classes introduced a pernicious novel practice. Any mention of Trotsky’s views was forbidden, and any attempt to do so was subject to disciplinary action. In this way the classes became an indoctrination of the view that Lenin’s conception was superior to Trotsky’s of the same period. Hitherto, we had the reverse view.

Then an article appeared in the party’s theoretical journal, International Socialist Review, written by Doug Jenness, on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Jenness wrote that Lenin’s pre-1917 conception of the revolution was the sole correct one, without mentioning Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution or Trotsky’s central role in the 1917 revolution.

Over the next 18 months, Barnes and his Carleton associates carried out an organizational rampage without parallel, expelling hundreds of members, including all those who claimed even the slightest allegiance to the ideas of Trotsky and the traditions of the Fourth International. A good summary of the effects of the purge is provided by Dave North in the pamphlet, The Case Against the SWP—What the Facts Show, against the repudiation of Security and the Fourth International by Mike Banda, general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). 

The list of those expelled from the SWP includes virtually every member with ties to the James P. Cannon era, including Harry De Boer, one of the 18 party leaders sent to jail during World War II; George and Dorothy Breitman, founding members of the SWP; Jimmy Kutcher, the central figure in the celebrated Case of the Legless Veteran; Jake Cooper, one of Trotsky’s guards in Coyoacán; and George Lavan Weissman, editor of The Militant during the 1950s and also a founding member of the SWP. 

Kutcher, a 71-year-old paraplegic, was expelled from the SWP on the incredible charge of “violence.” While sitting in his wheelchair during a branch meeting, Kutcher found his view of the speaker obstructed by another member, Berta L. He touched her on the back in order to attract her attention and asked her to move. This was observed by one of Barnes’s lackeys who then filed charges against Kutcher, accusing him of having “punched” Berta L., an allegation strenuously denied by the supposed victim of this “attack.”

“Members on trial have the right to honest reports by the leadership,” Kutcher wrote. “The members sitting in judgment at my trial and I were both cheated out of our rights by a lying leadership. ... For the second time in my life I was being declared a security risk.

The first time was in 1948 when the government fired me from my clerical job with the Veterans Administration, not on the basis of anything I had done (other than belonging to the SWP) but on the basis of a bureaucratic decision, without a trial, that I might do something threatening security. Now the EC was taking similar action against me, without the slightest evidence in the world that I would ever do anything to harm the interests or security of the party I have supported and tried to build most of my life.

Dave North concludes:

Kutcher’s document is but one among dozens which record the complete obliteration of any form of democratic centralism within the SWP. An unchallengeable political dictatorship exists within the SWP, in which absolute control is exercised by the Carleton group and their hand-picked cronies.

Barnes denounces Permanent Revolution

As has been emphasized throughout this school, Security and the Fourth International was not primarily a forensic exercise. It arose organically out of the defense of the political principles for which the Trotskyist movement has fought throughout its existence, and particularly our insistence on the counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism and, accordingly, the need to defend the revolutionary movement against the danger of infiltration, surveillance and violence, whether perpetrated by the capitalist state or by the Stalinists.

While the ICFI was exposing the sinister formation of the SWP leadership, that leadership was carrying out its main political assignment for American imperialism: completing the destruction of the SWP as a party with any connection to Trotskyism. In December 1982, Barnes gave his notorious speech to a YSA conference repudiating Trotsky and Permanent Revolution and predicting that no one would call themselves Trotskyists by the end of the decade. He said:

Permanent revolution is not a correct generalization, or an adequate one, or one that doesn’t open up more problems than it solves, as to what our program is.

We will get much, much more by reducing the permanent revolution, by pointing out, in my opinion, that it is not correct and not useful as a general term for our program.

He went on to declare that the vast majority of those calling themselves Trotskyists are “hopeless, irreformable sectarians. What is being done in the name of Trotsky and Trotskyism is horrendous.”

Already in March 1982, in a speech to the SWP national committee, he declared that the SWP was part of a common movement with the FSLN of Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the Cuban Communist Party, and revolutionary nationalist groups in El Salvador and Guatemala.

In the pamphlet A Provocateur Attacks Trotskyism, the Workers League analyzed Barnes’ speech to the YSA as the culmination of the path taken by the SWP over three decades, repudiating the principles laid down by Cannon in the 1953 Open Letter that declared war on the Pabloites. As earlier lectures have explained, in 1963, under Hansen’s leadership, the SWP broke with the International Committee and reunified with the Pabloites on the basis of suppressing any discussions of the issues posed by the 1953 split, using the Cuban Revolution as the supposed basis of agreement.

A Provocateur Attacks Trotskyism, written by Comrade North, explicitly elaborated the understanding that the Russian Revolution was successful because Lenin rejected the old Bolshevik formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and adopted the program, “All power to the Soviets,” i.e., the seizure of power by the proletariat, which arose from Lenin’s own analysis of the experience of the revolution and the theoretical spadework carried out by Trotsky in his theory of Permanent Revolution.

We exposed Barnes as an outright liar, who wrote that Trotsky had falsified Lenin’s position by claimed that he had abandoned the formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” Barnes claimed: “I have yet to find anyone showing anywhere, anything Lenin ever wrote where he ever said this … Why Trotsky believe this to be the case I have no way of knowing.”

Our statement quotes from Lenin’s famous “Letter on Tactics,” written in April 1917 and included in Volume 24 of Lenin’s Collected Works, in which he rebuked those Bolsheviks who clung to the outmoded slogan, “reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality…

The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times; consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeois against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” prerevolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”).

The Workers League statement then explained the continuity between Marx’s conception of the “Revolution in Permanence,” based on the betrayal of the 1848 revolutions against feudalism and monarchy by the bourgeoisie in Germany, France and other countries, based on their fear of the revolutionary proletariat, and Trotsky’s conception of “Permanent Revolution.” Dave North wrote:

The task of strategic prognosis is not to deduce the concrete stages and episodes but to formulate the basic tendency of revolutionary development. The basic tendency is indicated by the formula of permanent revolution.

This was based on three concepts: a) the national bourgeoisie invariably goes over to the other side of the barricades; b) the petty bourgeoisie cannot play an independent role; c) under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the bourgeois-democratic revolution passes over into the socialist revolution, which is itself linked inextricably to the world revolution.

The Workers League statement concluded: 

The question of what political forces represented the historical struggle for Trotskyism—Hansen and his Pabloite allies or the International Committee and the Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy—has been answered decisively by Barnes himself in his New Year’s Eve speech: “We are not Trotskyists.”

It is important to note in passing the specific historical situation in which this statement was issued, in July 1983. It was not only directed against Barnes and the SWP but sought to give the defense of Permanent Revolution new visibility within the International Committee itself, under conditions where Comrade Dave had already begun to raise differences with the political and theoretical line of the WRP. This process is explained quite well in the lecture delivered by Comrade Tom Peters to our previous school in 2023.

The strange unanimity of the Carleton clique

I would like to conclude this portion of my report with a final observation on the operation of the Carleton Group in the course of this political explosion within the SWP.

In the pamphlet The Case Against the SWP—What the Facts Show, we cite a letter written by Milton Alvin, one of the SWP veterans expelled by Barnes. The case against Alvin was a particularly despicable one, as Tom Kerry, a longtime leader of the SWP, had died in 1982, leaving a $5,000 bequest to Alvin. Barnes, however, had got hold of the money, and claimed it was a donation to the SWP, i.e., he stole the money for himself.

In a document dated July 12, 1983, Alvin wrote the following:

The secret faction functions under a cover of legality provided by a party body of one kind or another, such as the political committee, secretariat or organizational bureau. In this way, those who belong to it can meet, discuss and make decisions in what appears to be a normal and legal way. Only completely naive people will believe that the various revisions that have taken place in the party were spontaneous revelations that occurred to one or more members of the faction.

These decisions are arrived at beforehand in secret meetings where all kinds of plots are hatched, including those that involve expulsions of comrades from the party for ridiculously flimsy reasons. Only people who are ready to believe anything can have confidence in the “legality” of the way the secret faction functions. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear will understand that it is impossible to carry on the kind of campaign of liquidation of virtually all our ideas without secret meetings on the part of the revisionists. [Emphasis added]

What is the explanation?

Comrade North then makes the following critical observation:

Alvin’s points were absolutely correct, but he didn’t go far enough. One more question must be posed: what legitimate explanation exists for the complete unanimity among the members of the Carleton clique on the total repudiation of the SWP’s historic connection with Trotskyism?

If one were to assume that their political credentials are in order, it would mean that the Carleton students joined the SWP because they were won to Trotskyism—which, in the early 1960s, the SWP claimed to represent. How, then, is it possible, that all these ex-Carleton students, simultaneously, arrived at the decision that the theory of permanent revolution must be repudiated and Trotskyism abandoned?

This is much more than synchronized swimming. Fourteen Carleton students join the SWP, supposedly on the basis of its program of the early 1960s. They move together in lockstep, through all the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of the most tumultuous political changes. And then, again moving as one, they all reach the same decision on abandoning any connection with the program of Trotskyism, without a dissenting voice.

Dave concludes: “There is no record of any differences on questions of program or tactics within their ranks. This is compelling political proof that the Carleton group observes an internal discipline, independent of the SWP and its official program.”

By the conclusion of the purge, the SWP had been reduced to a political shell, with the expelled members going on to establish a series of Pabloite organizations, Socialist Action, Socialist Unity, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, with further splits and recombinations producing the group called Solidarity, which publishes Against the Current and Labor Notes, and a remnant of the FIT, which published the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism until 1998.

The chart above gives the basic outline of this political splintering.

In all these splits and divisions, with so much mutual criticism and denunciations of the SWP and in particular the leadership clique around Jack Barnes, none of these political fragments broke with the position of the SWP, Hansen and Barnes that any concern for security was “agent-baiting,” supposedly doing more damage than any agent could. Given what we had written, it should have been plain as day that Barnes was a provocateur. But none of them would address the documents uncovered by Security and the Fourth International, exposing the police-infested SWP.

In the background to all this, the SWP lawsuit against FBI and COINTELPRO, filed before Judge Griesa, dragged on. The Carter administration and then the Reagan administration stubbornly refused to identify a single one of the more than 300 agents inserted into the SWP. At one point, Carter’s Attorney General Griffin Bell defied a court order to do so. Ultimately, the Barnes group settled the lawsuit, in January 1988, without a single agent being named or, so far as can be determined, leaving the organization, with the sole exception of Heisler. 

Instead of a political exposure, the SWP received an unprecedented payoff from the US government: a check for $280,544.95 was handed over, as well as legal costs coming to $415,000. Much of that went into the SWP’s coffers as well, since many of its lawyers were party members, including the lead attorney, Margaret Winter.

We wrote at the time that both the payment and the SWP’s decision to accept it demonstrated the real character of this organization. 

… any class-conscious worker will recognize that the US government, the bastion of anticommunism and capitalist domination on a world scale, would never voluntarily pay nearly $700,000 to a revolutionary organization fighting to overthrow it.

This huge government subsidy to a party which claims to be socialist and even “communist” is unprecedented in the history of the workers’ movement. It provides powerful additional evidence to substantiate the charge by the Workers League that the SWP is a government-controlled organization which functions in the labor movement as an instrument of political spying and provocation.

We now turn to the disgusting and politically criminal provocation carried out by the Socialist Workers Party around the case of Mark Curtis, an SWP member who was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa in February 1988, in the midst of a sexual assault on a 15-year-old black working class girl, Demetria Morris.

Demetria’s 11-year-old brother Jason, who was in the house at the time, called 911 to report a man attacking his sister. When police arrived one minute later, they interrupted the assault, Demetria fled the house unclothed from the waist down, while Curtis was arrested on the spot. There was no question of misidentification, as Curtis was present in the front room of the Morris’s home, and he was later identified by Jason, Demetria and the two cops.

When the initial report about the arrest of Curtis appeared in The Militant, and the SWP launched a defense campaign, based largely on a photograph of Curtis’ face after allegedly being beaten by the police, the Workers League responded cautiously. We had long become skeptical about SWP defense campaigns, which seemed to be waged more to give the person they were defending a political “reputation” rather than fight back against actual police repression. This was evident in the Hector Marroquin case, and in many others.

We published a Political Committee statement on August 5, 1988, titled, “The Strange Case of Mark Curtis.” It began by rejecting any automatic defense of Curtis, citing the failure of the SWP to provide any serious account of the events leading up to Curtis’s arrest.

The Workers League has no independent evidence on the Mark Curtis case and is not in a position to determine whether he is innocent or guilty of the charge of rape. However, having followed the reports on the Curtis case in the SWP’s newspaper, The Militant, the Workers League has decided that it will not support this defense campaign. Many disturbing questions are raised by the SWP’s own presentation of the Curtis case, which is by no means persuasive or credible.

The statement pointed out that the SWP had made no effort to examine or rebut the prosecution case against Curtis. It was not following in any way the example set dozens of times in the American workers’ movement in the exposure of notorious frame-ups, directed against Big Bill Haywood, Mooney and Billings, Sacco and Vanzetti, against the Rosenbergs during the McCarthy witch-hunt, and more recently against Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, John Artis and Gary Tyler.

We then recounted Curtis’s own story of how he had ended inside the front room of the Morris’s home—an enclosed front porch. He said that he had been driving to the grocery store, was accosted at a stop light by a young black woman who said she was fleeing a dangerous attacker and asked him to drive her home. This turned out to be a drive of only three blocks, after which she went into the Morris’s house to see if it was safe, leaving him waiting in the front room. At that point, the police burst in, arrested him, and pulled down his pants. At no point, according to Curtis, had he ever seen either Demetria or Jason Morris.

We pointed out the impossible contradictions in this account, which portrayed Curtis as the unwitting victim of a police conspiracy to frame him up. We posed a series of questions, based on the fact that Curtis himself made all the decisions which took him to the Morris home where he was arrested. Here are some of them:

• How did the police know that Curtis was going to abruptly leave his house in the middle of the night to buy food?
• How did they know he would drive by himself?
• How did they know which store he would go to, and which route he would take?
• How did they know that he would be stopped at a particular red light, where he could be accosted by the girl?
• How did they know that he would agree to let the girl into his car?
• How did they know that he would agree to drive her home?
• How did they know that when he arrived at her home, he would get out of his car, go to the porch, and then wait placidly to be arrested?

We also noted:

Moreover, there is a real danger that working class and socialist organizations who support the Curtis defense may be provoking justifiable anger among Des Moines-area workers, and thus creating a split between the working class and the socialist movement.

This was no exaggeration. When we arrived at the courtroom for the first day of the trial, I went up to the Morris family and Keith initially thought I was from the SWP and moved to lay hands on me. We explained that we were from the Bulletin, a socialist newspaper hostile to the SWP, and gave him a copy of the Workers League statement. He read it carefully, then shook our hands, and introduced us to the family. Later, we were invited to the Morris’s home, where I took this picture.

This is a fundamental class question. Dozens of individuals and groups from the pseudo-left milieu rallied round the SWP campaign in defense of Mark Curtis. Thirty years later, these same groups supported the #MeToo campaign, based largely on unsubstantiated allegations of rape or sexual assault against well-known figures in the arts and academia.

In 2017, these forces all insisted that the basic principle was to “believe the women” making the charges and proceeding immediately to punishment of the accused. They denounced basic democratic principles like due process and the presumption of innocence. But in 1988, they took a diametrically opposite stand: they ignored or discounted the testimony of the victim, Demetria Morris, and insisted instead that Curtis’s account, ludicrous when examined carefully, had to be taken as good coin. 

None objected when Jack Barnes proclaimed, at a rally for Curtis, “You are not innocent until proven guilty. You are innocent.” In other words, Curtis was to be defended, despite the overwhelming evidence against him, simply because he was a member of the SWP.

I won’t go in any detail over the trial, which I and two other Trotskyist journalists attended, although I would be happy to take questions later. This book, The Mark Curtis Hoax, is based on our reporting, on the transcript of the trial and the accounts published by the SWP. I will just call your attention to a few incidents that took place during the trial, which showed both the bad faith of the SWP and the contempt of the leadership for the working class. Barnes himself attended the trial, as well as several other top leaders.

During the testimony of Demetria Morris, a teenaged girl testifying about a horrible experience, SWP members repeatedly got up, moving about in the back of the courtroom, laughing and talking, to the point that the judge angrily demanded that they be quiet and instructed the bailiff not to allow anyone else to enter or leave the courtroom until the disruption was ended.

At another point, again during Demetria’s testimony, defense attorney Mark Pennington switched places several times with his client, in an effort to confuse her identification of Curtis. 

As you can see, Pennington and Curtis have at least a passing similarity resemblance, both thin-faced, with small mustaches, and roughly similar builds. This stunt, an attempt at confusing the witnesses, was a complete failure, however, as Demetria, Jason and both cops identified Curtis as the man arrested at the Morris’s home.

The trial was an utter fiasco for the SWP. Even Curtis’s own lawyer admitted that it was unusual for someone to maintain his or her innocence in the face of such overwhelming evidence. He sought to turn this contradiction on its head, in what we called a “defense of brazenness”: the very fact that Curtis refused to plead guilty should be enough to produce reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. But the jury ignored such arguments and returned a guilty verdict on all counts.

We had then the same experience as in the previous exposures of FBI penetration, Hansen’s ties to the GPU, the cover-up of Sylvia Franklin, and so on. Every one of the pseudo-left organizations rallied to the defense of Mark Curtis. When a member of Socialist Action, Charles Adams, made his own inquiries into the case, however, entirely independent of us, he found near-universal opposition to the Curtis defense campaign among Des Moines-area feminists, trade unionists and the Socialist Party of Iowa. 

Marti Anderson, head of Polk County Victim Services and a long-time counselor of rape victims, particularly objected to the SWP’s claim that Curtis was “convicted solely on the testimony of a cop who was a proven liar.”

“In their account the girl disappears, she doesn’t exist. It’s as if her word, her story, her experience, counts for nothing,” she told Adams. “When your gut reaction is to sympathize with an accused rapist of a young girl (and Black) then you have to investigate not only the facts but such a reaction.” 

For making public his study, “Labor Defense and the Mark Curtis Campaign,” Adams was expelled by Socialist Action.

But there was a sharp political divide. When Keith Morris and the Workers League informed union officials, civil rights and civil liberties groups, virtually all rescinded their endorsements of the Curtis campaign. Some expressed anger at the SWP for its systematic cover-up of what had happened to Demetria Morris. Even Democratic Party politicians, including three members of the Detroit City Council, rescinded their support.

The case became a political debacle. And we can take notice of the fact that the SWP has never waged a public defense campaign since the Mark Curtis campaign blew up in its face.

The SWP: A party of ultra-right provocation

Over the past nearly 40 years, the SWP has sunk into irrelevance from the standpoint of socialist politics. It still publishes The Militant as a weekly, printing it as well as posting articles on its web site. It is still led by four surviving members of the Carleton Twelve, Barnes, Waters, Betsey Stone and John Benson. Four others have died, one after leaving the SWP for Socialist Action. Four others have apparently left politics altogether, including Larry Seigle and Doug Jenness.

But unlike the pseudo-left groups that hover around the Democratic Party, the SWP is a political satellite of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. It has moved from defense of rape in 1988 to defense of genocide in 2023-2025.

Here are a few way stations along that route.

This is The Militant’s response to the events of January 6, 2021, buried towards the bottom of an inside page. It describes the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, spearheaded by fascist paramilitaries like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, in these terms: “a relative handful of conspiracy theorists and would-be paramilitaries, confederate flag carrying rightists and a few over enthused Trump supporters occupied the Capitol Building.”

Note the scare quotes around “insurrection.” This headline makes the reaction to Trump’s coup, not the coup itself, the main danger. Like all its coverage in recent years, the article portrayed the timid half-measures of the liberals against right-wing violence, not the brazen provocations by the fascists, as the main threat to democratic rights.

The SWP newspaper declared:

Liberal Democrats and capitalist bosses are using the action by some Donald Trump supporters who entered the Capitol Jan. 6—falsely claiming it was an “insurrection” or “fascist coup”—to escalate their attacks on freedom of speech and political rights more broadly. Their main target is not Trump, but working people.

Here’s a particularly bizarre example of double-talk from the SWP. On the left is The Militant cover of December 4, 2023, in which the SWP condemns the referendum in Ohio which placed the right to abortion into the state constitution. On the right is The Militant cover of December 11, 2023, one week later, in which the SWP condemns the attack on abortion rights by the Putin regime in Russia. 

The first article is written from the standpoint of cuddling up to the fascist right, even declaring, “Workers should reject the push to use abortion as a means of contraception. At issue with abortion is a potential human being.” The second article is written from the standpoint of support for the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia, saying that the “Putin regime is trying to offset plummeting birthrate, high casualties in Ukraine war by curbing women’s access to abortion.”

As many comrades are aware, the SWP has from the beginning defended the Israeli war in Gaza and the genocide of Palestinians, which began following the Hamas break-out from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Here The Militant publishes a photo of the platform at an SWP public meeting in New York, which featured, on the left, Professor Shai Davidai of Columbia University. Davidai is a particularly odious witch-hunter, who appears to regard every pro-Palestinian organization on college campuses as the equivalent of the Hitler youth. He has spearheaded a campaign at Columbia which resulted in the university suspending Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. His call for the “eradication” of pro-Palestinian student organizations, was retweeted by the Israeli government. 

Second from the right in the photo is Ariana Pinsker-Lehrer, a leader of the Zionist student group at Columbia.

Even more convoluted and preposterous is the SWP Political Committee statement published in The Militant dated July 7, 2025, which supports the Israeli attack on Iran while pretending to oppose the US attack on the same country! It carries the dual headline, “Defend Israel’s battle to prevent another Holocaust! US troops, bases and warships out of the Mideast!” as though the joint US-Israeli war against Iran could be separated into two completely different components. 

Moreover, all the bombs dropped by the military forces of both countries, and the warplanes used to drop them, were all produced by the US arms industry, which sold them either directly to the Pentagon or by license from the Pentagon to Israel directly. But according to the SWP the bombs dropped by Netanyahu are to defend Jews, while the bombs dropped by Trump are to defend imperialist interests.

Remarkably, the statement declares: “The course of the US imperialist government, including Washington’s aerial and submarine missile strikes on Iran, has nothing to do with Israel’s life-or-death battle.”

It is widely understood that the Israeli and US attacks were closely coordinated, that the Israelis took down Iranian air defenses as a means of exposing Iran’s nuclear production and refining facilities to attack by American military forces, which possess bunker-busting and earth-penetrating bombs and missiles that Israel does not possess. Moreover, the Israeli air strikes were facilitated and guided by US satellites and radars, and there was a continuous exchange of data which meant that Israeli and US forces functioned as virtually a single unit.

The SWP statement goes on and on, attempting unsuccessfully to square the circle and portray the state of Israel as an anti-imperialist bastion and refuge for the Jews:

Nothing could be further from the truth than the claims by those on the bourgeois and petty bourgeois left that the State of Israel is a pawn of Washington. Israel’s capitalist government, as proven again in recent weeks, does not subordinate defense and survival of a refuge for Jews to any other state power anywhere on earth. “Never again!” isn’t a catchphrase in Israel. It’s the determination of the Jewish people that the “Final Solution” shall not come to pass.

In its coverage of the Middle East crisis, The Militant has gone so far as to characterize Iran as “the main reactionary power in the Middle East.” This label not only whitewashes the role of the genocidal Israeli regime, the brutal monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and the blood-soaked military dictatorship in Egypt. Most importantly, it provides an amnesty to US imperialism, the “main reactionary power” not only in the Middle East, but all over the world.

This is the political graveyard in which the SWP has ended. Agents did “good work,” but from the standpoint of imperialism and Stalinism only. They destroyed the SWP, which has become an ultra-right organization absolutely hostile to socialism and the working class. Security and the Fourth International was not simply an investigation, but a successful struggle to defend Trotskyist principles and prepare the working class for the coming socialist revolution.