Gelfand has no case

"The Gelfand Case" is a collection of documents pertaining to a bizarre lawsuit brought by one Alan Gelfand against the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This is the first volume of what is really a two-volume set.

Gelfand had been expelled from the SWP in 1979, after expressing support for "Security and the Fourth International", a smear campaign against the SWP initiated by Gerry Healy's British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Healy and his American co-thinkers, David North's Workers League, claimed that the SWP was controlled by FBI agents. One of the supposed "agents" was the party's national secretary Jack Barnes! They also accused prominent SWP-er Joseph Hansen of being a former Soviet agent, who later began working for the FBI. (For some reason, both the SWP and the WRP refer to the Soviet secret police during the 1940's with the anachronistic designation "GPU".) The initial charges in this absurd slander campaign had been thoroughly rebutted by Hansen and others in "Healy's Big Lie", published by the SWP in 1976. The Healyites, unperturbed, published new documents secured from the U.S. State Department which supposedly "proved" Hansen's guilt. At this point, the SWP were no longer interested in responding to the Healyite allegations, forcing the WRP and the Workers League to raise the stakes considerably.

Alan Gelfand was probably a Healyite plant inside the SWP. At the very least, he started to collaborate with the Workers League about six months before his expulsion. He was thrown out of the SWP in 1979, after publicly agent-baiting the party in an "amicus curiae brief", ostensibly filed in support of the SWP during the party's lawsuit against the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. After being expelled, Gelfand promptly sued the party and the U.S. government, claiming that his expulsion had been engineered by FBI agents in the SWP leadership. Therefore, Gelfand reasoned, the court should order the SWP to readmit him as a member, and remove the agents, i.e. most of the elected SWP leadership! Judge Mariana Pfaelzer allowed Gelfand's lawsuit to continue for years, despite its obviously frivolous character. Pfaelzer was an old opponent of the SWP from another lawsuit, and presumably cherished the idea that two left-wing radical groups were going to tear each other apart in her court room. In 1983, Pfaelzer finally awarded the wreath of victory to the SWP, but the case apparently dragged on until 1989 on some technicality over attorney's fees.

Despite their legal defeat, the Healyites nevertheless saw the court case as a great promotion success. They had forced Jack Barnes and other SWP leaders to testify in court or during depositions, asking them bizarre questions about the SWP's supposed collaboration with the FBI and Soviet intelligence. Gelfand also forced the U.S. government to release two old transcripts of grand jury interrogations with Sylvia Franklin, who had been SWP leader James P Cannon's secretary during the 1940's. In one of her testimonies, Franklin claims to have been a Soviet agent. The SWP's position is that Franklin was framed, something Gelfand believes proves that the party was knowingly shielding GPU agents!

Most of the other "evidences" in the Gelfand case have a similar surrealistic-paranoid quality. Thus, the FBI sent their "secret" instructions to Hansen by mail to SWP's headquarters, a rather silly mistake if Hansen had indeed been an FBI agent specially assigned to infiltrate the SWP. Gelfand speculates that perhaps the letter was forwarded to Sylvia Franklin, who then gave it to Hansen in perfect mint condition. Why a Soviet spy would want to help an FBI agent who had recently defected from the GPU is less clear, but I'm sure Gelfand has an "explanation" for that, too. Sometimes, the Healyites' obsession with "security" becomes unintentionally humorous, as when they demand to see internal SWP documents authorizing Hansen's contacts with the FBI and the GPU. Does this mean that the Healyites meticulously document any secret meeting they might have with intelligence agencies? Perhaps they properly file the documents in triplicate at the British National Archives? So much for Healy's "security", LOL.

The first volume of "The Gelfand Case" contains 11 FBI-related documents mentioning Hansen and the murder of Trotsky. It also contains Gelfand's increasingly provocative correspondence with the SWP leaders, his bizarre amicus curiae brief, and some documents relating to his expulsion and the ensuing court-case. Actually quite interesting, but only if you like loony lefty weirdlore. In reality, Citizen Gelfand really had no case.