Trotskyist Scandal

Those who read my post on Venezuela a couple of days ago, will have probably understood that I am not too fond of the sectlet known as the Socialist Equality Party, better known for running the World Socialist Website. For all my dislike of them however, I never could have possibly imagined what I read about them today while browsing a marxist community on Live Journal. While I am not entirely sure of the original source's credibility, it just makes too much fucking sense to ignore.

Enjoy:

http://community.livejournal.com/marxism/300825.html

WSWS/SEP
From alt.politics.socialism.trotsky

EXHIBIT 1

http://www.grpinc.com/grandriver-people.html

EXHIBIT 2

http://www.irisolutions.com/pressroom/best-places/2003_Crains.BPTW.pdf

(see page 2)

EXHIBIT 3

http://www.weandrews.com/wwwAndrews/Docs/RRD_piworld_1.pdf

(see page 9 of 14)

Some years ago, the communist political cult to which I used to be a
member
for one year (then known as the Workers League, now known as the
Socialist
Equality Party) made an interesting "turn" in its political line.
According to SEPtic,
the unions were no longer organizations of the working class.

I found this "turn" to be quite startling. Upon further thought,
however, it sorta
made sense. David W. Green ("North"), the cult leader of SEPtic,
having run
the cult since the mid 1970s, had been a complete ineffectual. He and
his cult
never organized any workers, ever gained any influence in the labor
movement,
never accomplished anything. So, in a strange way, it made quite a
bit of sense
that "North" was now writing off the unions altogether.

Still, I wondered, how was it that "North" managed to keep control
over a dedicated
cluster in the top leadership.

Today, playing around on the web, I found a possible answer. It seems
that David
W. Green is CEO of the 241st largest printing company in the USA.
EXHIBIT 1
is a link to the company's site. EXHIBIT 3 show that in 2005 the
company generated
$21mm in sales. EXHIBIT 2 has pictures of "David North" and his wife
in Crain's,
touting them as some of the best employers in the city.

The "puzzle" now makes sense.

Question: why does the North cult solicit members for donations when
they run
a profitable enterprise that could conceivably fund the SEPtic web
page activities?
Is there any sort of democracy in SEPtic? Were a faction to take over
the cult,
what would be the impact of the North crew vis-a-vis the company
activities?

It's interesting that CEO North now tells workers that unions are no
longer organizations
of the working class. This same "line" is probably echoed by CEOs at
all unorganized
companies.

I'm not posting this for the sake of "exposure and denunciation" for sectarianism's sake. I do feel ashamed when certain con artists perpetrate massive frauds on wide sections of the hard left and the youth.
Based on anecdotal evidence (which is unfalsifiable yet will make sense to anyone who has been involved in similar groups) members of the "SEPtic" were expected to empty their pockets to fund their local chapters, while the Good Ship WSWSEP was run rather brusquely, and undemocratically, by Cap'n Green/North.
Already the "Friedrich Engels, too, was a capitalist" defense is being brandished by SEP internet agents, as well as "Don't believe everything you hear on the internet [WSWS notwithstanding]", and "[non-SEP]Splitters are the FBI/CoIntelPro's best tools".
This scandal ranks up there with the Ukrainian fraud (http://www.internationalist.org/ukraineimpostors0803.html) in the US Trotskyist hall of bloopers, and rivals the transgressions of SEP/Workers League's former guru Gerry Healy. Marxists and working-class militants must regroup beyond the scope of sterile orthodox commentaries, academia, and abstentionism. For every David North, Bob Avakian, and James Robertson there are hundreds of disillusioned youths and workers -
Down with MLM [Multi-Level Marketing]!

Wait, there's more!

http://community.livejournal.com/trotskyism/3890.html

A Tale of Two Men
By Joe Hargrave

Here is a story you might find interesting:

I know of two men. One of them is the leader of a small Trotskyist political party in the United States. He is known as David North. The other is the CEO of Grand River Printing & Imaging, a company that earns 25 million dollars a year according to its website. They call him David W. Green.

For nearly 30 years, Mr. North ran his political party and Mr. Green ran his business. Mr. North gave speeches about the exploitation of the working class. Mr. Green exploited his workers, deriving surplus value from their unpaid labor. Mr. North thundered against the corporations that dominate American political life. Mr. Green sought those corporations out as clients, and probably did lunch with some of their executives. Mr. North would talk about the disgusting climate of corporate greed that pervaded the American cultural atmosphere. Mr. Green helped actualize that corporate greed by printing advertisements to help them push their products on consumers.

Of course Mr. Green was no black-hearted tycoon. No, surely Mr. North would have to exempt from his tirades against the corporations that dominate American politics and exploit the entire world certain capitalist leaders who stood out as genuine pillars of their community. Why, Mr. Green had gone to great lengths to make his workers as comfortable as possible. He invested in their training and education, he included them as part of his "larger vision". But surely Mr. North, who understood Marxism very well, would point out the absence of democratic control of the workplace, or the usual separation of the worker from the instrument of production that is the requisite of capitalist production. After all, his party published in statement after statement that the aim of socialism was to create a democratic economy. Yet none of the reports on Grand River suggested anything about "democracy" or "worker ownership" - Mr. Green may have been a nice man who saw the value in keeping his work horses happy, but he was also a businessman. So surely, should Mr. Green and Mr. North ever meet one another, they would disagree on a great many things.

Unless, of course, they were the same man.

Could it be a case of multipule personality disorder? Not exactly. You see, David Green, alias David North, is a fraud. He is the biggest fraud to hit the socialist movement since James Robertson of the Sparticist Leauge or "Chairman" Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He owns a multi-million dollar corporation, and the upper echelons of his political cult and members of their family occupy key executive positions.

The rank and file members of the party are completely unaware of the existence of North/Green's corporate empire, which includes Grand River Printing, Merhing Books, and who knows what else. They assume that the party sustains itself through the donations that it begs for on its website and at its conferences, as well as the regular contributions that members are expected to "pledge" every month. I was exempt from this particular requirement only after I reminded one of its leaders of the considerable amounts of money I had invested in my own local branch. How nice of them. I can only imagine the giddy internal glee that North/Green must have felt every time some naive sucker wrote the SEP a check for a few thousand dollars. To North/Green, and the other party leaders, such donations were in fact chump change.

I can also only begin to imagine the difficult decisions that had to be made on a daily basis, such as, "how little can we put into this whole socialist thing to keep it viable while we live in the lap of luxury?", and, "should I use a 50 dollar bill or a 100 dollar bill to do this next line of cocaine?" All kidding aside, anyone who is serious about building a revolutionary movement, and who also happened to own a multi-million dollar company, would invest the maximum amount of profits into the former.

What I mean to say is, I could accept the fact that North/Green exploits the labor-power of his workers if the surplus value created by their unpaid labor was being used to build a movement that would one day end all exploitation. The ends, as I generally believe, justify the means if the ends themselves are justified. But this is obviously not taking place. The SEP has full branches in three cities - LA, NY, and Detroit. With the profit margins we can assume a 25 million a year company is capable of, there should be a fully-staffed branch in every major city in the United States. There should be an SEP radio station, a public access program on television, etc., etc., etc. Those profits, in sum, should be used to promote the movement, to expose not tens of thousands but millions of people to socialism.

What could possibly account for a failure to do these things? There is only one inescapable conclusion - that North/Green and his cronies enjoy the good life more than they do the revolutionary life. And they enjoy that life at the expense of the wage-laborers they employ. To dance around these uncomfortable realities they invent all sorts of paternalistic schemes where they provide top quality education and training for their workers - while, of course, "keeping wages competitive". To read the website of Grand River Publishing & Imaging is to be sickened. Every line is infused with phony corporate enthusiasm and politeness, in order to impress the equally phony corporate clients looking to get their ads published and printed. Contrast that to what you normally read on the WSWS. How can these people sleep at night? They might respond like the fictional Renier Wolfcastle: "On top of piles of money with lots of beautiful ladies".

It seems that every other week brings some new revelation about this political cult that I could have only wished I had known earlier. I tell you these things so that you can avoid my mistakes.

David North bio

Fucking hell. I was never under the illusion that the SEP(s) consisted of proletarians, as an organization numbering less than a thousand people globally could hardly be able to sustain a daily updated website like the WSWS if its members lived on an ordinary worker's wage. Also, actual workers hardly ever walk up to people who have given decades of their lives to the socialist movement calling them "middle class radicals".

But this?

Their sectarian ultra leftism, their sickening arrogance and first world chauvinism suddenly make perfect sense. Not in the manner implied by the author of the above articles, namely, that North/Green whatever his name is doesn't really give a flying fuck about the socialist movement - which might very well be true - but in that this pitiful excuse for socialist politics held by the SEP is exactly the kind you would expect from a... CEO's revolutionary consciousness.