Crisis in the WRP

HO K HR RK MH MR MN KK MM RK HK ee OO OO OR ee Oe

S07

Articles by WORKERS POWER

CRISIS IN THE W.R.P

THE POLITICAL ROOTS OF THE SPLIT IN THE WRP.

The Collapse Of British Trotskyism 1946 - 1949

The History of ‘Socialist Outlook’ (1948-53)

Extracts From the History of the Fourth International

_ - How Pablo/Mandel and Healy/Lambert/Cannon destroyed the Fourth International

—the international Committee

- Programme, Tactics and the Revolutionary Party

_ Workers Power - What we stand for

Cliff Slaughter and the present leadership ‘of the

WRP date the degeneration within the SLL/WRP to the 1970s. Its political roots lie far deeper and further back in time (as does Healy's violations of democracy and revolutionary morality), They date to the disintegration of British and International Trotskyism in the years 1946 - 53. They lie in confusion over perspective, in revision of the Transitional Programme and abandonment of Leninist norms of organisation, WORKERS POWER reprints the following extracts and reprints to aid the discovery of the whole truth by members of the WRP.

yo meee Entryism:

THE COLLAPSE OF RITISH TROTSKYISM

AFTER THE WAR

This article in our. series on the tactic of “entryism”, looks at the role that the misapplication of this tactic played in the collapse of sritish Trotskyism in the 1940s. This period of British Trotskyism is an underexplored one. Leaders of left groups today like Ted Grant of the Militant, Tony Cliff of the SWP and Gerry Healy of the WRP, have more interest in obscuring the history of this period, in which they were participants, than in shedding any instructive light upon it. Their mistakes of this period are crucial in understanding how and why British Trotskyism got shattered into a host of centrist fragments. To admit these mistakes would mean admitting a departure from revolutionary communism - hence the silence of Grant, Cliff and Healy.

The mistaken method developed in 1945-51, a period of Labour government, over the question of “entryism”, is being repeated by centrist organisations today. ‘Socialist Organiser’ and “Socialist ‘Actiqn ‘’ are in the forefront of this process. Whether or not they admit it, their attitude to the Labour Left, their abandonment of fundamental revolutionary positions and their fantasies about the “evolution” of a ‘hard’ reformist “left”, have precedents in the 1945-57 period of British, and eventually, international Trotskyism.

in our view this period saw a qualitative degeneration of Trotskyism into centrism. On the question of strategy and tactics with reyard to the Labour Party, the co-sponsors of the centrist revision of Trotskyism were Thomas Gerard Healy (Gerry Healy) and Michel Raptis (Pablo). The former was leader of the Minority Faction of the Revolutionary Communist Party (British Section of the Fourth International); the latter was Secretary of the Fl itself. Though history was to cast Pablo in the role of the great Satan of Revisionism and Healy as the patron saint of ‘‘Anti-Pabloism’’, in the key period which prepared and executed the centrist liquidation of Trotsky’s programme, they were close allies - who moreover had the 100% support of Jim Cannon of the American Socialist Workers Party, the other main figure in world Trotskyism.

We will follow this article with a further one on the practice of Healy's group during the “Socialist Outlook” venture, from 1948 to 1954. This period, following tha collapse of British Trotskyism, provided irrefutable evidence of the centrist practice of the Heaiy group.

ary

Nem et ee £11 arena eer atest sat ae mnt arm Nai hee att

THE ENORMOUS SOCIAL weight of raformism Pre-Conference 1946, Sacond Cangress 19481, an tha in Britain has proved a tremendously disorian- Westin of perspective fell decisively balow tts pro-

ting factor for revolutionaries. Among British Trotskyists, as with their predecessors in the Sociai-Democratic Federation (SDF} and the British Communist Party, the great strangth of Lanourism produced huge pressures toward aither sectarian isolation or opportunist liquidat-

grammatic and tactical positions. The Fl's strength in the latter Jay in its firm adherence to Trotsky's positions. Yet, paradoxically, a similar fidelity to Trotsky’s 1938-40 parspectives and prognoses iad to serious problems.

Trotsky’s perspective in 1938/40 was one of war and re On as immediate prospects. Ha correctly

ion. The question of the Labour Party exercised foresaw ‘the catastrophic effects of the war on both

a central influence in the early days of British Trotskyism.

Between 1934 and 1936 splits over work in the Independent Labour Party {ILP} or the Labour Party {LP} completely derailed the mavement. From 1936 - 39 there were at one moment or another at least ten “Trotskyist” groupings in Britain. Where more than personal

intrigue was involved, the Labour Party question

was usually at the heart of differences.

The “Peace and Unity’ Conferance of 1938 centered on Labour Party and ILP perspactives. The immediate collapse of the resultant Revolutionary Sacialist League (RSL) - official sectian of the Fourth International (F{} - partly stemmed from unresolved differences on this score.

The 1944 Fusion Conference which produced the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was deeply divided over the quastion and the party was to remain $0, The majority reporter to the 1946 National Conference complained of : “the tramendous energy which has bean consumed by tha Party, and which partly consumes the Party, in tha factional struggle especially insofar as it related to the quastion of antry or non-entry into the Labour Party." (Special International Buitetin Sept. 46).

The fusion which produced the RCP was a move of great promise, bringing together detegates representing some 490 members. Whilst this figure was an overestimate, as was Jater recognised {the figure being nearar 350}, the RCP had a solidly proletarian ctass composition, and was weil-roated in the trade unions, Untike the European sections the RCP had not been the victim of massive rapressian; its cadre was intact.

Yet none of this was to save the ACP from political collapse over the following five years. in part this was due to building on insecure foundatians, Despite the historical differences over the entry question a vail was drawn over the experience and therefore over the political lessons of the preceeding ten years. The fusion conference agreed not “to opan up old wounds and go over starile discussions of the past which can have value aniy for the archive rat or the historian of the future, but which would only intro: duce the antagonisms of the past into the fused party, and therefore be @ godsend to the professional faction tighter.”

Such agreements to disagree’ have been a hall-mark of unifications throughout the last 30 years of British “Trotskyism”, They amount to a decision not to decide on crucial tactical questions - usually on the Pretext that “ooly tactics” are involved. Yet political fife has yet to produce a way of carrying out @ strategy except by maans af tactics. Since fighting reformism - in Britain at jeast - is a central question, ihe tactical questions cannot be left aside.

Tactics can be applied in either a principled or an unprincipied fashion. if the latter is the case then they corrupt and disintegrate the revolutionary stratagy of

the capitalist states and on the USSR. He considered that the Kremlin bureaucracy ang its totalitarian apparatus wauld break up undar the blows of the war; that rotten to the core bourgeois democracy would collapse, bringing down with it the reformist parties and trade unions. These, threatened or realised catastrophes would open up the necessity and possibility of the F! assuming revolutionary [eadership of the masses during and after the war.

Of course this was not a “prediction” tike a horoscopes, Above ait it war not a description of a Procass which would happen regardless of the axist-

" ance or actions of the revolutionary party. In 1940 Trotsky wrote that: ‘The capitalist world has no way cut unless a prolonged death agony is so conajdered. 11 is ‘necessary to prepara for iong years, if not decades, éf war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars, and new uprisings... The question of tempos and time intervals is of anormous importance; but it altars naither the genera} historical perspective nor the direction of aur poficy’’. Ha conciuded that “the great historical problem will not be sofved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the

head of the prolatariat” and that the Fi's task to this and was to educate and organise the protetarian vanguard,

Se

~ turned Tito an epochal @ver-present phenomenon:

Horsemen

Taken in epochal terms Trotsky's perspactive and

Strategic conclusions were correct, Statad thus at the Leginning of a world war, they were a justifiable Perspective full of revolutionary optimism and will. However, as Trotsky pointed out in the same docu: | { ment: “What characterises a genuine revolutionary | { Organisation is above all the seriousness with which © _ it warks out and tests its political fine at each new test of avants”. The Fourth international however clung to the validity of Trotsky’s perspective well beyond the and of the war. The failure of a revolutionary situation to materialise in an exhausted, occupied and divided Germany, where the ramaining Prestige of Social Democracy and Stalinism were thrown into the scales to support the huge armies of the occupying powers, seriously undermined the projected ravalution. The prestige of Italian and French stalinism gained both by the partisan’s fight against the Nazis and the victory, of the Red Army, headed off ravolutionary situations in both of these countries. In Britain and tha USA, no prerevolutionary crises comparable to the post-1918 situation emerged. In 1918-26 in Britain, 192,250,000 days were lost through strike action. tn 1945-61 the figure was 14,260,060, in the USA there was a massive strike wave but it was under constant bureaucratic control, and achieved economic concessions but resulted in the passing of harsh anti-union laws jike the TaftHartley Act. Clearly by 1847, no revolutionary or pre-ravolutionary situation existed in the principia imperialist countrias. The leaders of the Fi, and especially its Secratariat members Pablo and E. Germain (Mandal}, clung

which they are a part. Thus strategy and tactics da not ramorsetessly to Trotsky’s perspective of economic

Inhabit separate realms - indead cansigning them to mutual isolation is the first sign of cantrism. How this disease destroyed British Trotskyism is integrally linked to a paratiel process within the Fourth tnternational as a whole, Indeed in some respects the British experience pre-figured the issues and events

of the graat schism of 19514 to 1963 when tha Fourth International split in two.

THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL

An important preparatory stage in the centrist degeneration of the Fi look piace in its process of reconstruction after the war. Between 1944 and 1948 it raised a correct, indeed courageous, ravotutionary programme for Europe in the aftermath of the Imperialist War. However, the work of its canferences and Congresses (European Conference 1944,

crisis and stagnation daspite these developments. They linked to it a perspective of revalution. The 1946 document “The New. Imperialist Peace and the Building of Parties of thea Fi" stated these erroneous views unequivocally: “The war has aggravated the disorganisation of capitalist economy and has destroyed the jast possibilities of a retatively stable equilibrium in social and international relations,..if tha war did not immodiately create in Europe a revolutionary upsurge of the scope and tempo we anticipated, ft is nevertheless undeniable that it dastroyed capitalist equilibrium on a warid scaie, thus opening up a jong revolutionary period”.

These formulations were in stark contrast ta

Trotsky’s warnings to differantiate between different .

situations and periods, and to orient the programme accordingly. The longer the crisis and the revolutionary period extended without producing real crises or revolutions, the more Pablo and Mandel emptied these terms of any specific concrete content.’'Crisis” they

“Revolution” became 8 process whose protagonists became “forces”, “currenta” and ‘tendancies",

rather than parties grouped around programmes. -

The precision of definite revolutionary or pre-

revolutionary situations, of parties, leaderships, programmes, were dissolved in the name af fidelity to Trotsky’s perspectives.

By 1950 Pablo extended this mathod into a new pespactive of war-revolution; of centrist tendencies roughly adequate to ravoltuionary tasks. if the Implementation of theie positions only began in 1952 on an international scale, the forging of the underlying method took placa in the eariler pariod, With Healy as his loyal jocal representative, Pablo discovered in Briain a “‘pre-ravolutionary crisis’; a centrist current {Beyanism); a new tactic, total entry for a jong period; a new programme - “transitional damands to mobilise thousanda’!; @ new vehicie for reyolution - the Labour Party, suitably transtormed.

PABLO’S “NEW TYPE” ENTRYISM

Thus in February 1952 Michel Pablo, Secretary of the-Fourth International, in introducing his “special type” entrism painted to the pilot-run entrism of the British and Austrian sections. He notes that in the period 1944-47 the work of the International was onc of “essentially independent work”. This wark was,: in Pablo‘’s view, based on a perspective of “the masses deserting ‘the old reformist parties” and ‘“‘disiiiusionen with Stalinism. Here h@ remarks that England and Austria ware “special cases’ and “did not fai) to attract the attention of the intarnatiqnal’’, For Pablo this wark pretigured his later tactics (entrism sui generis - entrism of a special type): “---in the entry into the Lahoyr Party the Internations) embarked on the course of = tpng-tarm work within thaga mevemants and organisations through which fiew - and most probably wil fiow for another period - the fundamantal palitical current of the oles.” (Entrylem of a Special Type: international Secretariat. Documents Val.i p32}

Pabio's conception of Jongterm entry was based a: a dafinita perspective that be advanced at tha time. “The assential forces of the reyolutionary party would sppear through differentigtion ar ¢xplosion in these mass organisations. “This tactloal conception was and is based of oguree on the wee of the sv olution of the international situation aa they boaap to be clarified for us at the beginning of the ‘cotd war’; the retatively short period bafore the war break out; the new and decisive character of this war; the accelerated crisis of the capitalist regime which will in any casa acquire a generally exptosive character is the war itself.” . . Pablo's perspective was false on avery count. The “cald war” was a retrenchment of the spheres of influence agread at Yalta and Potsdam with conflict only in tha areas where no agreement existed, Given tha resclution of the intéer-imperialist contradictians, the massive destruction of productive torces in Europe and the uncontested economic hegemony of the USA idissolution of the French and British colonial ampires and their transference ta the status of US semi-cotoniss) the likelihood, fet alone the probabitit, of a new worid war was 8 thoroughly false basis for & perspective, Certainly Marxists could not easily “pr dict” the long boom that lay ahged but to atake all, and to revise fundamental principles in the operation of cruciat tactics (entrism} on such undialectical schema-mongaring led straight to disastar, From this false perspective, and using the tame method with which he had elaborated it, Pablo predicted a “process of differentiation within the social-democratic and Stalinist parties, Since these parties ‘cannot be smashod and replaced by others in the relatively short time between now and the decisive conflict” they must be transformed by differentiation. This itself would take place by stages; first “Bevanism”, and then at a later stage a “genuine revolutionary tendency", But the iatter stage lies at a distance whose arrival cannot be foreseen. Therefare “it will i first be necessary to go through the experiance (of ' Bevanism - WP) by penetrating it and helping it : from tha inside ta develop its last resqurces and > censaquences,” This is the basis of entryism of a “different kind from the entrism practised before the war", one | based on a desire ‘from the Inside of these tendencies

to amplify and accelerate their teft centrist ripening’. In this process the Trotskyists were to compete for leadership of these centrist tendencies, Gone was the fight for a revolutionary tendency, able and willing to criticise and expose ail shades of centrism and reformism, Gane was Trotsky’s specific, concrete ‘ ; perspectives and the principled entry tactics appropriate to them.

THE ROAD TO RUIN FOR THE R.C.P.

Pablo's entrism sui generis produced an “explo- | sion and.a differentiation” all right - but it was within} the ranks of the Fl not those of the social democrats and stalinists. Alas this differantiation did not go to the roots of the matter because the leaders of tha “Anti-Pablaite” forces, particularty Cannon and kealy ware thoroughty embroited in the pioneering case of British Labour Party entry. it was only when the “special ontry”was applied to Stalinism at the height of the Cold War, that, belatedly, Pablo’s tactics were discovered to be liquidationist.

‘2 Yet Healy - with Cannon’s blessing - had waged ig

four year struggle to destroy the RCP and develop

© precisely the fundamentals of “Pablo’s method”. Can- %

* non in 1953, looked back on this period: ‘The whole |

Haston (leader of the RCP - WP) system had to be

—blowe up before a ganuine Trotskyist organisation {

could get started in England......kf one were to undartake to write the real history of British Trotskyism, he would have to set the starting point as the day and date on which your group finally tora itself loose fram the Haston ragime and started its own indepen: , dent work”. {Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Vol.1. p.262)

What was this splendid struggle in which Cannon acted as midwife at the birth of British. Trotskyism? The fact that this lusty infant turned out to be Healy. ism should give us pause.

The first majority Labour Government was elected in a landstide victory in July 1945. 48% of the vote had given it 393 seats, 146 more than the combined Opposition. The British working class exprassed its desire for fundamental change, tts desire not ta return to the dale queues of the thirties in a massive electoral show of strength but one that had little or no counterpart in direct action in the factories and streats. In the first 15 months after World War 2 there were 12 times fewar strikes than in 1918-1913.

Labour's 1945 programme declared that the “‘Labour Party is a Socialist Party and Proud of it” but its programme in ganeral reflected the social and political consensus of the leadars of the wartime coalition. There was-a Liberal-Tory-Labour agreement on such things as full employment and social security and a national health service. These were the first priorities of the Labour administration, its nationalisation progranane for the coal, electricity and gas industries reflected the ruling class’ willingness to extend the advantages of state capitalism (earned during the war} to the toss making industries and pubfic utilities.

it was in this context that the ACP leadership around Jock Haston and Ted Grant tried to orient the group. Fraction work had been carried out in the ILP by the Trotskyists since 1940 when thare was a marked turn to the jeft in repulsion from the Coalition, For a short while the ILP even tried to intervene in industrial disputes. However, the RCP {and the WIL/RSL before 1944) intervened as a serious independent force in the industrial disputes with the much stronger CP scabhing on them all. The Tynesida Apprentices strike was, perhaps, their qraatest success,

In 1945 and 1946 Haston and Grant turned more of theic resource; away from the ILP towards the LP whose grass root organs were beginning to came alive again in the wake of the election. There was a steady increase in individual membership and trade union affiliations but their activity remained within the bounds of those of an electoral machine. At the time the Labour League of Youth was much smaller than the CP's youth organisation. At the peak of the fraction work the RCP, in 1946, had 20% of its mem: bers (66} operating in 46 wards. in this work they were guided by Trotsky's advice in 1934 when he said: “Aiongside independent propaganda work, all

means must be employed - always in keeping with

the concrete situation - to link up with tha masses, push them forward, and consolidate new revolutionary cadres from their ranks, Abovo all this includes i} Systematic fraction work in the trade unions under the slogan of trade unity. The opportunity to reach and influence worker masses is better here than in any party....ii) Systematic fraction work in all workers’ parties and organisations, not just by forming fractions out of sympathisers already present there but also by sending in really solid claments.” (Tasks of the ICL, Writings, 1934-35),

rising rapidly, Capital investment far exceeded the inter-war high by 1946. Pablo and Healy held rigidly to this perspective basing a schematic , dogmatic pal: itical strategy on it. There would be an inevitable clash between workers compelled to defend their living standards in slump conditions, and the Labour leaders which would a “crystallisation of 4 left-

wing . Based on the Labour Party’s “unique” relation, ship to the unions, this radicalisation would “inevitably” make itsalf felt in the Party. This therefore, w. the rationale for total antry. Healy argued in 1945:

£"The tuen to indapandent work could only be a tem-

There was clearly not a situation in any way com 7 porary phase until the Labour Party sprang to life

parable to the mid-30s in France {see WP newspaper 0.37) in which total entry of the Trotskyist forces was both necessary and justified.

Major strikes did occur in 1945-6 particularly in the Docks and Transport but the RCP was able to relate to these independently on its own programme. There was no evidence that these struggles had any major effect within the Labour Party. A balance sheet of the RCP's LP fraction work during these strikes was revealing: “Despite the fact that the majority of the transpost strikers lived in the North and North-: East district of Loadon, and through their trade un- | ions, ara affiliated members of the Labour Party, it has not been reported that one single deputation appfoached the dozens of Labour Pasties in the area... The strikers did not attend the LP maatings to seek solidarity and bring pressure to bear on the Government.”

With this tactical perspective the ACP leadership sought to pursue its independent activity. ft had campaigned in the General Election for ‘‘Break the Coalition:..Labour to- Power’! and advanced a series of demands focused towards workers’ contral. Given the nationalisation programme of the Labour Party and the belief of workers in the socialist character of these measures, it was a correct emphasis. in the Municipal Elections iater in 1945 the RCP stood its own candidate in Newcastle. In thair manifesto thera was a sharp differentiation between Labourism and Trotskyism that was to be absent in Healy four years falter:

“Tha Labour Party is not a socialist party ..but a party of capitalian. It is navartheless a workers’ party and is based in tha unions...and we wilt unita with the Labour Party to defaat the representatives of capital. But we do not think, nor have we ever said, that the Labour Party is capable, or aven wants to, carry out this policy of ending capitalism and introducing sacialism’. °

Labour's colonial policy is attacked aad the following demands outlined: “No compensation to pit awners, operate the pits under the control of workers and technicians committees.”

“No compansation to Bankers.“

“Operate a sliding-scale of working hours without reduction af wages.”

“Open the closed plants”.

“Committeas of housewives, co-ops, smali shopkeepers and workers in the distributive trades to oversee rat: ioning.””

Although the manifesto is weak in not clearly stating its position on the question of government and partiament, its transitional demands are backed by the call for independent struggle to achieve them.

Gerry Healy did not take up an oppositional position on these questions prior to the Labour Government’s election. He voted for the majority resolution on Labour Party work at the fusion confsrence, which outlined the nead for fraction work. However Healy, unlike the Haston-Grant majority, wholeheartedly agread with the International Secretariat of the Fourth International's (ISFl’s) 1944 International Conference Theses on International Perspectives which argued that: “The revival of economic activity in capitalist countries weakened by the war.,.wili be characterised by an especially slow tempo which will keep their economy at levels borderiny on stagnation and slump.”

This perspective was to be refuted by the develop: ments which took place after 1946 in Europe. The war itself had created new conditions for an upturn. The enormous praductive capacity of US imperialism, undamaged by the effects of war, together with a chronic shortage of goods in devastated Europe, combined to ensure relative stability. Alraady by 1946

industrial output had exceeded pre-w lavels and was

satin Shaanti,

snenncadmerattnseivamnenieraneinr ae

* once again,”

Attacked by the majority of the RCP and unable to adduce any conerete evidance of a centrist clavel-

| Opmant in the Labour Party, Healy soon gave up this

whole approach. Instead his justification became thor: oughly opportunist. For Healy the ‘‘dangers” of fractian work were hammered home by the expulsian of leading ACP members from the Newcastle ILP in 194£ on the charge of “Trotskyism’. McNair, the {LP ieader rasponsible was, as it so happened, @ very close friend of none other than Marceau Pivart.Healy’s reac: tion to thease expulsions paralleled Motinier and Frank’ tactics when faced with the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the SFIO in 1936. (Sea WP newspaper 38). He wanted at ali costs to avoid a “provocation”, Healy beliaved that the real problem with fraction work was it presuppasad an independent party. This, he argued, would Jeave them open to the charge that they were not “sincere”. It also allowed ammunition for the bureaucracy. Therefore, he conctudad, only total entry would avoid tha problem. Healy scoffed at the RCP leaders for believing that: “whilst maintaining that ‘independent’ Party it will be possible to work in these organisations with the object of winnin, comrades over to tha outsida party, thereby laying tha basis for tha mass party at some futura date. The conception is antrialy erronaous.” Pa

One of the faitures of both sides in the faction fight was that the programmatic significance of the entry tactic received virtually no consideration. The debate ravalved primarily around organisatianal questions, namely, what proportion of ACP members to devote to Labour Party work. Byt on what programme was that work to be conducted? The leadership never speliad out any separate programme for entry because they doubtless assumed that existing ACP poli- + tics Would be the basis of LP work under all canditions. But no such implication could be assumed from the 1SF1 or Healy. In a debate over entry work in the [LP Sam Gordon, the official ISFI representative (and Cannon's confidant) in Britain argued: “The programme is not at issue. With minor concessians the basic position of the Fi is alraady acceptable to the native left-wing.”

Pabto and the ISFI intensified their support for Healy. The June 1946 Plenum of the ISFI passed a resolution on tactics in Britain. It was rejected by the RCP leaders. In January 1847 Pablo again insisted on total entry. The opportunism behind Healy and Pablo’s motivation deepened. They reiterated the siumpcrisis parspective as an immediate threat:“the death ayany of capitalism is an ever-present factor in the world now, in the very midst of tha conjunctural revival.” The 1946 upturn was a “revival without any perspective of real stability’. |

Driven by the logic of his polemic Pablo began to revise the entry tactic of Trotsky: “Under these - circumstances the question of entry takes on an gn~” tirely new aspect from previous times, it seems to us. Whereas previously the antry of evolutionists into the LP of necessity had more circumscribed and timited objectives - the winning over of relativaly rastricted layers of advanced workars to the programme of Trotskyism....the present situation sets new objectives for entry: the setting into motion of the entire awakened British working class along the path of revolutionary action, this time within the framework of the Labour Party itself.”

By 1947 there was no longer any pretence of relating to any existing centrist current 8s in the 1930s. Rather the task was to “anticipate” it by capturing key leadership positions in the facal Labour Parties 50 as to be there when the centrist current emerged. Pablo himself wrote testily to the RCP leaders explai-

ning this in dune 1947: (“It is High Time to Find a Solution’) “The whole problem for the Gritish Tratskyists consists in antering now into the Labour Party armed with this perspective without waiting for the Left-Winy to crystallisa around centrist Jeaders or a centrist platform.”

Six months earlier the International Secretariat had made the implications of this clear: “Entry into the Labour Party today therefore signifies for the Trotskyists a campaign of relatively lang duration.” Thus Pablo and Healy completety revised the whole political method that Trotsky had applied to entry tactics before the war. For Trotsky fraction work in the social-democratic and Stalinist parties was a norm as long as they contained serious working class forces. Total entry, of necessity, could not be predicated on a tong term perspective.

The party exists to defend and fight for the programme. its formal independence could only be abandoned therefore if it could be raplaced by a revolutionary fraction or tendency ete within the mass retormist parties. This would onty be possible in periads when the reformist masses were sufficiently radicalised to defend the revolutionaries and the reformist leaders were driven to acopt centrist camouflage. However for Trotsky the revolutionaries should not tailor their programme, the tactics they advanced for the class or their criticism of the reformist leaders of the feft and right. For him there coutd be no question of making the object of the entry tactic staying in the reformist party for any particular length of time. To do so implicitly builds into the perspective the surrender of revolutionary positions for a centrist or even left-reformist disguise. Although at first Pablo and Healy talked of mobilising thousands

around transitional demands, in fact that they coun- -

lerposed to this ‘'the winning over of individuals

here and there to the full programme of Trotskyism.” This was the shape of things to come. In fact Pablo

and Healy confused the tactic of the united front on

certain immediate and transitional demands with the

building of a revolutionary party or tendancy.

The RCP majority resolutely refused to accept tha entry tactic so at the end of 1947 Pabto and the ISFi split the RCP, allowing Healy to enter and pursue his tactic as he saw fit. This was to open a procass which effectively destroyed the RCP, the only sizeable unified Trotskyist organisation there has been in Britain.

Less than two years after the split the majority of the RCP themselves decided to enter the Labour Party and join Healy. What led to this abrupt collapse? Was it in fact the impossibility of doing independent work with a grouping of a few hundred? One factor in the demoralisation of the Haston-Grant Jeadership was that from 1948 onwards there was a narrowing of the differences over economic perspectives. The RCP majority had never denied the slump perspec: tive, but refused to accept it as an immediate prospect between 1944 and 1947. At the end of 1946 the RCP majority replied to the International Secretariat: “How long can this upward swing last? Cartainly not for longer than a few years at the most. ..Far from the Revolutionary Communists of Britain pushing this ovarriding factor of dectine into the backyround...aur whale activity and oriantatian is based pracisaly on this factor. In the resolution of the RCP...we emphasise that:‘the orientation and Strategy of tha ACP js firmly based on the lonyterm perspective of crisis and decline.’ (Original emphasis.)

On this basis Haston and Grant did not of course exciude the possibility of total entry. This was always written into the resolutions.

From the end of 1947 the economic situation of the working class toak a serious turn for the worse. During the 1947/8 winter an austerity programme was introduced by the Labour government, dasigned to squeeze domestic consumption and boost exports. The Miners’ working week was extended by 2% hrs. Food imports were reduced; rationing extended to petrol and meat and there were increases in direct and indirect taxes, In 1949 there was £250 miltion at spending cuts.

The prosecution of this austerity programme was to fead to the eventual resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the cabinet in 1951.Meanwhiie the RCP itself stagnated. The Haston-Grant majority had expected growth from open work and an orientation to indi: try. Between 1945 and 1947 they could point to

Ste, cio vison Of strikes, to a peak of 2% million days lost. But after 1947 there was a steady dissipation of industrial action. In 1960 there were only 1% million days last in strikes,

On the other side, the steady escalation of individual membership of the Labour Party (rising from 0.6 million in 1947 to 1 million in 1952) and jump in trade union affiliation to the Labour Party (after the 1947 trade union reform abolished ‘contracting-in’} seemed to add weight to Healy’s old positions. The RCP could not reconcile itsalf to return to the jimitations of a propaganda group.

Since 1944 it had shared, with the whole FI, a perspective of a coming revoiutionary crisis and consequent growth into a mass force. Whilst the RCP majority had resisted Pablo and Healy's schematism, they wera not willing or perhaps able to thoroughly re-assess the perspectives or programme for the pastwar Fourth International,

In 1948 a major programmatic revision occurred. Pablo gavethe Yugoslav revolution and Workers state a ciaan bilo heaith on the basis of the Tito-Stalin split. The Haston-Grant leadership violently protested

“but found no response in the International as a

i,

whale.

in March 1949 the block between Hastaon and Grant broke up, Grant argued that the RCP must face a period of ‘becoming more and more a propaganda group but with the possibility of intervening, and in certain circumstances playing a leading and active role in relation to certain disputes’. Haston and Co could not face this retreat. However, their rejection of propaganda group existence was not in favour of revolutionary mass work. They argued for the closing down of “Socialist Appeai” (the RCP’s Paper) because it could not compate with the CP's Daily Worker. The left turn of the CP in the Haston group's view meant that “the prospect of creating, in the immediate period ahead, a third indepandent alternative party of the working class has been undermined”.

Only a politically bankrupt tendency could show such defeatism, The central question of programme, of defending Trotskyist politics against Stalinism and Social Democracy was thus reduced to mere organisational fetishism - a danger that always turked in their organisational conception of ‘building the party’. The need to propagandise for revolutionary politics as the minimum necessary activity was thus abandoned,

By the time of the RCP’s admission of political bankruptcy, Heaty’s grouping in the Labour Party had produced four issues of the centrist paper

“Socialist Qutiaok’’. Ht had a growing circulation. The {

ISFI eagerly sanctioned a “ra-fusion” of the groups

in 1949, and as a reward for services rendered, Healy's ‘

faction, stitl the smailer, was given the majority

{positions in the ieadership. Before a formai conference could take place in fate 1950, Heaty had used his position, and differences over the Korean War, to expel his erstwhile opponents. Grant was expelled. Haston left in complete potitical collapse. The conference never took place, and Healy reduced the nowdead RCP to a tiny conspiratorial cabal of a few dozen - “The Club”, whose “Trotskyist”’ politics were shrouded in secrecy and available only to the privileged few, less they prove a ‘‘provocatian” to the left-reformist allies in ‘“Sociaiist Outlook’.

The lessons of this periad need to be carefully digested and understood by authentic Trotskysists today. Underpinning many of the arguments of both sidas in the RCP dabate was the question “to be in or not to be in? ’. Taday’s epigones of Trotsky in the Socialist League {ex IMG) and WSL stiil insist that is the question.

It isn’t, and to pose it this way is to confess confusian at best and gross opportunism at worst. The whole experiance points to the need to return to Trotsky’s own advice on entryism.

Work by revolutionaries inside a reformist party is @ means to winning adherents ta communism. As such its programmatic basis (not its organisational execution} must come first. {t did not do so in the period of the break up of the RCP, and it certainly isn’t in evidence in the strategies advacated by the Socialist Challenge and the Socialist Organiser today. ™

by Keith Hassell and Daye Stacking

The colla pse o f British Trot skyis m - Part 2

BEVA

N’S T

r ROTSKYIS oEERLEADERS

pba

ba be

oat tot Se bathe”

iN THE LAST issue of Workers Power (No. 39), we traced the factional struggle within the British Revolutionary Communist Party {RCP) over ontry into the Labour Party. On tha one side, the majority around Jock Haston argued against total entry and for fraction work subordinated to “independent” RCP work around industrial struggles. Ranged against tham were the combined forces of the RCP minority - led by Gerry Healy - and the international Secratariat leadership of Mandel and Pablo, who from 1945 onwards argued ever more stridently for total entry and the liquidation of any open party.

Despite their vastly more concrete grasp of conditians within the Labour Party and within the unions, the RCP majority had at least, one fatal flaw, one that they shared with the Healy/tS opposition. it was this flaw that was to lead by 1949 to the destruction of the RCP and the disappearance of any public organ of “Trotskyism” for over eight years. .

As we have demonstrated Healy and Pablo whilst having no grasp of Trotsky‘s critical anclytical method, clung all the more rigidly to his political perspectives of the late 1930s. These envisaged enormous revolutionary upheavals as a result of the war; the death knoll of Statinism and social democracy and the transformation of the FI sections into mass parties, Disoriantated by the falsification of these Perspectives, yet deeply fearful of admitting this, the whole Fi resorted increasingly to vulgar apologetics designed to preserve: at al} costs a parspective of revolution and a mass FI just around the corner. When the revaiution failed to materialise and the Trotskyist groups stagnated and even declined, the Fl toaders iooked increasingly to false “perspectives’’ (catastrophic crisis, a third world war, etc) and to “new “ tactics and new forces that would carry Out the revolution, .

Healy re-discovered Trot’ky’s advice to the British Trotskyists of the 1930s regarding the desirability of entry into the Labour Party and ripped it out of context The “Inevitable” crisis and slump of British imperiatism would gatvanise and radicalise the British proletariat. The masses would “inevitably”’ express this radicalisation through the Labour Party, The task of Trotskyists was to “anticipate” this development, to capture leading positions in the Labour Party prior to this occurence, and put the organisational loyatty of tha working class ta the Labour Party to good purpose by revealing one’s “Trotskyism” at the right moment so a to direct the energy of the proiatariat against capitalism itaelf.

Healy's catastrophism provided an apparently ravolutionary cover for his opportunism. In 1945/ 1946 he insisted on cloaking his calis for dissolution of the RCP into tha ILP with analogies drawn from the 1930s. He could joyfully quote Trotsky'’s advice in 1933 that: “If we only send part of our mambership into tha ILP and keep a public organ going outside of it then we are in danger of getting our members expelisd from the ILP in a very short time,”

Healy could use the 1945 ILP expulsions of RCP members in Newcastle as evidence of the truth of this. But Healy ignored the fact that Trotsky had based this tactical advice on the existence of a revolutionary majority in the “left centrist” [LP of 1933-5. This in his view justified total antry. Moreover, Trotsky demanded no restrictions on political discussion. But by 1946 the 1LP had become what Trotsky knew it would if it was not won to the programme of the Fi,ie ‘‘a formed, homogenous party with a stable apparatus. “ In which case Trotsky argued that “entry in it would not only be uteless but fatal".

Trotsky drew this conclusion as early as 1936. Healy not only wanted to apply this mathod in 1946 but to transfer its application in 1946 to the Labour Party itself with its entrenched parliamentary and trade union buraaucracy.

Bath factions in the RCP heid to perspectives based on 4 rapid numerical growth of the party. The Haston-Grant majority saw the source of that In

, ade union work, The Healy minority saw its rea-

lisation as coming through tha Labour Party, Both sides seriously mis-estimated the nature and tempo of the class struggles theag were to produce Increased recruitment. After the war ACP mambership dropped each year, while no revolutionary strugglas erupted. Indeed the onset of the Coid War and the witch hunting initiated by the Labour and Trade Unlon bureaucrats created, if anything, 8 democratic counter-ravolutionary situation. The post-war series of state-capitatist nationalisations and sacialwelfare reforms ground to 6 hait. Working clase re-

sistance was limited to isolated union struggles against

wage Iimits but the TUC-Labour Party bloc held

_ flem against rank and file pressure, Full empioy-

ment and socis! reforms proved a powerful base from which Bevin, Attlee and Morrisson could isolate their Stalinist and Trotskyist opponents.

The Trotekyists undertook virtually no thorough-

going perspectival and programmatic re-assassment othar than the analysis of Eastern Europe. Other debates centered on tactical questions premised on a

’ fatsa understanding of tho period that post-war

Trotskyism confronted.

Healy’s opportunist appetite with regard to the Labour Party stemmed from his impatience, His schamatism, and denigration of propaganda tasks ware evident as early as December 1945:“The high hopes entertained at the time of the conference in the future of opan' work, the glowing future for the independant Party depicted by so many speakers have not so far bean realised, nor ia there any sig-

nificant pointer in this direction, The rate of growth

of the RCP since the conference (aniy 4 months previously - WP) can do nothing but demonstrate the impotence of a smali propaganda bady to affect the vital course of the political struggle. The tempo of events, rapid on a world scaie,

in this country stiit lags behind Europe and Asia, but

this cannot last long... The already overburdened economy of Britain will collapse catastrophically and the Labour Party will be thrown into utter

confusion.”

AN OPPORTUNIST OUTLOOK

This outlook was in no sense based on the objective conditions of the time which had unayoidably marginalised the ravolutionary communists. Formaliy it may oppear similar to the ravolutionary optimism of the Transitional Programme, but tha

psriod was complately changed by the vary outcome of the war, the strengthening of Statiniam and social

democracy. it was not the hall-mark of Trotsky to ba forever predicting breakthroughs of the G Healy type. On the contrary, In October 1922 after the

wave of revolutionary unrest in Europa had subsided

Trotsky aid of the British communists that they were “a successtuily functional educational and Propaganda society but not a party capable of directly leading the masses.’ And this was when the CPG8 was ten times larger and more strategicaliy implanted in the working class movement than the RCPi

The ACP majority, however, had no operative alternative to Healy's opportunism, The gradual foundering of their hopes for mass growth through

the unions, appeared to confirm Healy's parspective

at the cerrect one. By 1948 they were a spent force. The RCP's open paper “Socialist Appeal” disappeared and a clear field was left for Healy's centrist “Socialist Outlook’ venture.

“Sociatist Outlook” was launched in Oscamber 1948 a3 0 4-page monthiy.Whilst stil pursuing his faction fight against Haston and Grant, Healy insisted in self-protection that total eatry into the Labour Party would nevertheless be to fight for the programme of the FI. But once the exigencies of factional in-fighting were over this pretence was rapidly dropped. “Socialist Outlook” described itseif ae The Paper of Labour's Left-Wing\’ it was not a Trotekyist organ. Nor, within Healy's per-

1 t

spective could Tt be Since a mass left-wing did not yet exist in the Lobour Party, the role of the papar was to coax one into being. Such @ current it was hoped would be e centrist one at first. A centrist current therefore needed a centrist paper,

Haaly convinced the Constructianal Engineering Union (CSE) Secretary wick §tantey to co-found the paper Healy, Stanley, John Law nce ("’Club” mamber) and later Tom Braddogk, formed the Editorial Board, Braddock was 8 Labque MP until he fost his seat in the 1960 Generat Election. After that the NEC refusad to endorse his candidature any where alsa because of thig,deftism and he became even more closely involved in “Socialist Outlook" Various left Labour MPs contributed to SO, several with definite pro-Stalinist leanings who could not be accomodated in tha pages of the “nautralist” “Tribune :

No debates of or features on the Fourth International were found in SOs pages. The politics of the paper refiected left-iabourite concerns and the pro-Stalinist sympathies of people like Staniey and Braddock. This of course mergad well with the pro-Staliniem of the Pablo Fi after 1948. A year after the launch of SO, Etlis Smith MP and a core of SO writers took the initiative in launching the ‘Socialist Fellowship " (SF). SO was nat the official paper of the SF, nor did Healy contral it as he did in fact control the paper, but the Followship drew in “broader” forces, Ona hundred dalegates from. 29 towns attended tho first conference and by mid-1950 it claimed 1,000 members. At the poak of its influence In early 1951 SO claimed to be selling 9-10,000 copies a month though Mark Jenkins’ book “Bevanism” asserts that it was probably nearer 5,000.

HOPE THE LEFTS FIGHT

While SO itself had No programme the Fallowship advocated 6 loft-refprmist platform. The “Trotskyists” succeeded in getting a cail for a sliding scale of wages and benefits into the platform. However this hint of “Tratskyism” had no real revolutionary content. It was divorced from war: kere’ contra! damands, and in a period of low inflation was little more than a cosmetic refonn which even Bevan managed to support in relation to benefits, SO itself did tittle to add any damands far workers’ control, elther in cqnnection with the siding scale, or the government's nationalisations.|t went as far as calling for “more industrial democracy in our scemas of nationalisation.” (January 1949) but diptomatic evesiveness shrouded every sfogan put forward.

in the SO Editorial of August 1849 on the

“Way Out of the Economic Crisis” , in place of the clear demands for a sliding scale of wages operatad by the working class we are toid : “Wages can be improved...if the government is prepared to attack the wealth and privileges of the capitalists.” The question of workers’ control over industry is posed thus: “The basic industries of the country must be operated as part of a national plan. The workers’ themselves, with the ald of technicians and Government rapresaatati pan Operate thase industries...” This concession, which effectively

— amounts to workers’ participation, was a classic

centrist amaigam of Trotsiasitm and left reformism. It played straight into the hands of the left-retormists who were arguing then, a¢ Bevan was to argue. after the 1961 election defeat, thet it was “a constitutional outrage” to “entrust these (nationalised) industries to Boards...of Clvli Servants, leaving only @ power of general direction to the Ministers.”

{in Place of Fear, 1962,pp.97-8}.

it was ‘government representatives’’ that the jeftreformists wanted, nat warkers’ control, It was un: derstandable that Bevan should. identify goveramental or ministerial control with socialism, but for Trotskyists - ‘government representatives” whether Labour or Tory should have been stigmatised as agents of the bosses. ©,

SO repeatedly engaged in iNusion-mongering about the achievemants of the Labour Government and the prospocts of socialism through the Labour Party and Parliament. Indeed workers’ iliusians in the Labour Government as a workers’ government introducing socialism were consciously bolstered. Thus, the Editorial of May 1949 trumpeted:" Labour Believes in Socialism”. “In Britain we have taken 8 great step forward towerds socialism by defeating the Tories and establishing for the first time in our history a majority Labour Government.” And this was after nearly four years of Labour rule on behalf of the capitalistal in an Apri! 51 Editorial, it was claimed that the Labour Government was “itself engaged in freeing Britain from the exactions of the capitalist class..." in the Editorial of January 4950 the Labour Government was urged ‘to abolish capitalist exploitation and replace it with planned socialist co-operation..” and in the October 1951 Election supplement, workers were urged to vote Labour: “as an expression of your confidence in the workers’ ability to govern this country...and to act so that the Labour Government will destroy capitalism.”

Bit by bit the Trotskyist programme was trimmed to fit the rhetoric of the fefts. Every constitutional, parliamentary illusion was nourished in the pages of SO, The notion of direct independent working class action as alone capable of arecting a workers’ state on the ruins of tha bourgeois state found no place in SO’s columns. in its place its readers were treated to the mutings of Mr. H. Davies’ MP’s “Week in Westminster” or Tom Braddock’s socialist romanticism.

industrial disputes were given axtensive coverage by Sociatist Outlook. The resistance to the austerity programme of the Labour Government was supportec. However the goal of the resistance was deciarad to be a replacement of the leadership of the Labour Party with a “aft” one. This was seen as the answer to the conflict. Evary radical phrase, avery loose leftist remark, or sign of discontent in the PLP was seized upon as proof of the possibility that the lefts in the LP would fight the right for leadership.

it came as no surprise that the “deep entry” parspective undermined the betief of these ‘Trotskyists” in the need for even a hint of political independence from Labourism. The whole togic of the perspective and practice feads in the direction of total liquidation, Indeed, SO was a conveyor belt for many out of revotutionary politics. One Jeader of the RCP, who fought Healy’s early opportunism but Jater succumbed, was Jock Haston. His resignation letter eloquently summed up the logic of Healy's liquidationist project; “Pubjicatly in the paper it is argued, not by right or lef¢-wing Labour Party members, but by Trotskyists, that the Labour Party is a socialist party, the mass party of the working class to which all workers must loyally adhere; and that this party can transform society through Parliament. But privately within the confines of the group, the oppasite is advocated. Ailagodly on the basis of Marxist theory, it is categorically deniad that it is possible to transform this party into an instrument for the overthrow of capitalism, and that parliament can be used as the vr hicte for such a transformation. The line in the paper ...is aither ‘a capitulation before the pressure ot bourgeois-democratic public opinion’ or a tacit admission that this aspect of ‘fundamentals’ is not applicable.”

Haston and others were to conclude it was the fatter. Those that remained could sustain their centrism onty by reducing Trotskyism to a private faith based on a mixture gf economic catastrophism and political ‘procesgism’ itich would guarantee eventual success,

“Saciaiist Outlook” was marked by a passive acceptance of the classic reformist divide between trade union and political struggle and could only think of making trade union struggles “potitical” by subordinating them to Labour Party routinism. Thus articles in SO could declare: “tt is not possible for a militant trade unionist to struggle politically unless he dogs it through the Labour Party.” (SO no.66, P. WiJijams.}

Despite the fact that shop stewards and leading

militants wrote for the paper, no Trotskyist critique of the trade union bureaucracy was advanced, Extreme right-wingers, like Arthur Deakin of tha TGWU were denounced but the political Hmitations

of the trade union bureaucracy as 8 distinct social caste was never painted to or warned against. In practical struggles the steps necessary to achieve rank and file political independence were never advanced. The fact was that Healy was compromised by his aitiance with “‘ieft’’ bureaucrats like Stanley within SQ. The alliance was on Stantey‘s terms.

ESTABLISHING FRIENDLY CONNECTIONS

The limitations this imposed were again highlighted when Labour was in opposition after 1961. The “lefts” as usual indulged in more radical phrases now they were free from the responsibility of office. Conference became the scene of sharp left/right tussies. The Labour Party right-wing relied upon the trade union block vote to stymie constituency party aspirations. What was needed was a campaign for democratising the unions and seizing the block vote from the likes of Deakin and placing it in the hands of the political ievy-paying rank and file trade unionists. The Healyite editorial control of SO could not, however, risk making this cail and ambarassing the trade union bureaucrats upon whom SO relied, AH that was proposed was for the left in the PLP and constituencies to win over feft bureaucrats to wield the block yote for progressive policies : ‘if the Left Wing in the Unions now allies itself to the Left Wing in the Party and the Co-ops, the ‘block vote’ which kas carriad so many right wing motions in the past CAN NOW SE WIELDED FOR SOCIALISM” . (SO. No.41 May 1952.)

This proposal, like everything else in SO, was utopian. [t reliad upon the “revotutionary’’ qualities of the Jeft-wing of reformism. After Labour's defeat in 1951, the illusions placed in the lefts in the PLP and the unions mounted and served to underline the distance that Healy and the ‘’Club”’ had travelled from Trotskyism. This accormmadating view of the Labour “lefts” did not, of course, develo with Labour's defeat but had been a theme of Healy’s from the early days of the faction. Perhaps the sharpest statement is found in the reunification statement of the factions in March 1949; ‘Certain lefts have developed some prestige as a result of their criticiams of the right wing leadership's policy on one or othar aspect. As problams become more intense, these jefts will ba more bold and outspoken as a reflection of working class pressurg. Workers in the unions and the LP will gravitate towards then individuals in seurch of a solution to their problems teens As LP members we will be able to establish friendly connections and through them with the trends around them.” (our emphasis).

In this every last elament of Trotsky’s warnings on the role of the “lefts” is turned upside down. Trotsky warned that the ‘‘lefts” will ultimately deceive and seek to reconcile the workers with the Party teadership and through it to the state. They not only reflect the pressure of the workers but they seek to divert it into harmless voting bases for their own partiamentary ambitions.

This accommodatian was a travesty of the united front and obstructed the development of a revolutionary wing in the Labour Party. Trotsky was erysial clear that conciliation to feft leaders would result in a weakening of the ravotutionary forces. His attitude towards Bevan‘'s more radical predecessors - Purcell, Lansbury and Wheatley - damonstratas this: ‘The ideological and organisational formation of a really revolutionary party, on the basis of a mass movement, is only conceivable under conditions of a continuous, systematic, unwavering, untiring and naked denunciation of the muddies, the compromises, and indacisions of the quasi-left + taaders of ali stripes”.

As Minister of Labour Bevan was finally responsit for the imprisonment of 10 gas workers for striking in 1950, and charging 7 dockers with organising an

illegal strike in 1961. On a range pf issues the othr jefts had shown themselves to be of a similar iik. 5 Healy refused to make any untiring and unwaverin criticism of them. He dubbed the Bevanites “cen-

triste, and maintained frigndiy relations with the His approach to the lefts was that of a Stalin or a Bukharin rather than a Trotsky, tt was an infallibi sign of his centrism.

Labour lost the October 1951 Ganeral Election despite registering their highest ever vate. As usual the fefts in the PLP tock the advantage of & pario: in opposition to campalgn for “left” policies. Mor often than not the friction which results within th Labour Party is not wholly bad from the standpoint of the reformist bureaucracy. Even if the policy changes arg resisted by tha right, the advan: of the Jeft does have the effect of restoring warn credibility during the period of office. This was no less true of “Bevanism” than it was of Cripps’ “Socialist League’’ in the 1930 wilderness, or of Benn after 1970 and 1979. Experience shows, how ever, that in each case, the “Trotskyist” centrists are a key component in strengthening rather then testing the illusions that these left reformists generate. Healy's self-appointed roig was to maintain “friendly relations” with Bevanite MPs and assist them to organise their supporters. °

Bevan’s credit in the working class movement rested above ali on his construction of the Nationa Haalth Service and his opposition to re-arymament as part of the American cold war drive, It was the linking of these issues which was to lead ta his resignation from the Cabinet in Aprif 1961. When Gaitskill's 1951 budget pushed defence expenditur beyond 14% of GNP and involved clawing back £23 million fram the NHS to help do it, Bevan resigned. This gesture was the start of the Bavanite movement. Organisationally, Bevanism was always extremely weak, its core being up to 50 or 60 Lab our MPs. Bevan was loathe to organise the constituency rank and file and it was “Tribune” which in 1962 and 1953 organised the “Brains Trusts” moet ings for these MPs. But these were no more than public meetings. Thera were no organised factions within the constituency parties. Bevanism was even weaker in the trade unions. Appealing over the heads of the trade union bureaucrats was out of the question for Bevan and Co. Nor was thera at this time a discontented layer of trade union offici. who could be related to, as with Benn after 1979. Certainly there was @ powerful if beleaguered CP network, but in Cold War circumstances Bevan and Co. were terrifed of tha red smear.

IN PLACE OF CRITICISM

Politically Bevan's oppositional stance was sums. up in his book in Place of Fear (1952). The politics of this book were timid. His criticisms of parliamentary democracy were insignificant and lackec evan the limited refarms advocated by todays Bennites. His proposals an nationalisation were much lass radical than Cripps’ of twenty years earlier. In summary Bevanism stood domestically for a “reaso able” favel of defence spending, against NHS charges and for a moderate extension of nationalisation On the foreign policy front Bevan was opposed to Garman rearmament and Gritain's involyment in SEATO. Whilst in opposition the Bevanites exciusis arenas of “struggle ware the 1962-64 Labour Par Conferences and tha House of Commons. in the various conferences Bevan‘s nationalisation proposu were soundly beated by the block vote although 6 of the CLP NEC seats went to Bavanites each time.

His policies amounted to a “little England’ revolt from becoming the subordinate partner of American imparialism during the Coid War, It was his stance on foreign policy, rather than his domestic policies, that brought down the wrath of the Labour right and the Tories. He threatened to reduce British imperialism to a fourth rate power. To tham the joss of tha Empire meant that a junio: partnership with the US was the only realistic imperialist foreign policy that would preserve an influential role for Britain in the world,

Tha right wing counter-offensive to Revan began in October 1952 when thay voted to ban groups within the PLP. Bevan accepted immediately and the PLP group became ‘clandestine’. The weakness of Bevanism was obvious here. Rather then campaign for their right to organise Bevan complied. “Socialist Outlook’ calmly accepted Bevan's retreat. This was no surprise. The fake Trotskyist John Lawrence had praisad the decision of the Socialist Fellowship not to fight when they were proscribed in early 4961 - a sacrifice to electoral credibility by Labour’s NEC. Lawrence had opined ; "They (the Socialist Fellowship - WP} have vory wisely decided not to be driven out of the ranks of the Labour Party but to stay inside and fight it out.” (SO, May 1951). Some fight, the first move of which is to dissolve your own army! Warming to the task of apotagists for capitulation, the SF wrote to the NEC in September 1961:“As loyal members of the LP whe have never had any interests separate and apart from the Labour Party we are obliged to accept the decisions of the NEC.” Secret connoisseurs of Marxism will catch the allusion to the Communist Manifesto’s “They (The Communists - WP} have no interests separate and apart from the proletariat as a whole.” The sleight of hand whereby “praletarjat’’ becomes Labour Party speaks volumes. These “Communists” certainly did not “disdain to conceat their aims.” in true Walter Mitty fashion they consoled thamsolves with fantasies of power and success ‘The SF may be gone but the ideas for which it fought will, we are sure, become the officiaj pol-* isy of the movement in a shorter time than the witch-hunters imagine.’ {May 1951)

COVERING THE RETREAT

This covering up of the impotence and retreat of the left persists throughout the rest of ‘Socialist Outlook's life. The political programme of the paper was reducible to ‘the return of a naw and moro socialist Labour Government” (No.41,19623. The guarantee of its socialist character would be the victory of the feft around Bevan, whose potitics were equated with socialism, Despite the defeat of the jeft at the 1952 Morecambe Conference, 'Soctalist Outtook"’s headline exploded: "BEVAN GIVES FHE LEAD THE WORKERS WANTS The Editorial below blithely stated: The first two days’ proceedings at Morecambe hava shown that the LP is turning resolutaty to tha socialist road....the dalegatas came to Morecambe fooking for a cloar alternative

to the old politics. Aneurin Bevan gaye them sich. ry 4

a tend hi his speech of the first day.” (SO, No.61, Oct, 1952), The following month SO proclaimed {No.56): “Aneurin Bevan Damands a Real Socialist Policy.” This ridiculous groveHing before such a timid left reformist programme and leader existed alongside fantasies aDout the growing successes in the fight against the fight. tn 1963 {No.69} SO detected ‘'a gathering triumph of the vast majo-" rity of the rank and file of the Party over those

few lordiy leaders who would drag the movement behind the tail of the Tories...sociafists in the Party are bound to- triumph in the end." This was despite the steam-roiler defeats at each Conference at the hands of Atlee, Gaitskill, Deakin and company, and despite the NEC's squeiching of “Tribune's” Brains‘ Trust as “contrary to the spirit and intention of the recent decision of tha PLP." Healy's schemas

never have, and no doubt never will, brook inter- (erence fram vulgar “appearances.”

Through 1963-4 as Bavan‘s conciliationism became pronounced SO continued to faud him, The economic crisis, it was thought, would soon produce a mass radicalisation. This nonsense was expressed by Lawrence in an SO Editorial in 1953, at a time whan tha post-war boom was well underway: “Many of the points in Labour's programme ara goad in themselves, but their realisation is stil] envisaged as being acheived within the framework of a continuing prosperity of the wastern (capitalist) world.

11 ie precisely this which makes tha programme entirely inadequate and even Utopian in the present ;

. physical fights between Lawrence and Healy, By

world realities. As everyone now admits, the American recegsion, that Js, slump, is now here!” (SO, Nov. 1953). Healy and Lawrence's predictions had eoquired the scientific value of Old Moore’s Almanac.

The and of the “Socialist Outlook” projact came at the crossroads of two events; one within “the Club”, one within the left~ing of the Labour Party.

The split in “tha Club” between Healy and Lawrence In 1953 was a reflection of the long-term crisis within the Fourth international itself. Digoriented by the expansion of Stalinism the leadarship of the Fi, after the Tito-Stalin split, capitulated to Stalinism. in @ritain this capitutation was modified to encompass the “left centrist” Bevan.

During the first two years of SO’s life an svenhanded conciliationism to Lakourism and Stailnism had prevailed. it actually suited many of the lefts such as Braddock, many of whom were distinctly pro-Stalinist, especially “lefts” in internationgl affairs. However, Britain's involvament in the Korean War changed things dramatically. The Labourites swung, by and large, behind the British Governmant. John Lawrence, the editor of SO, swung the paper towards, an anti-war stance, This produced schisms within the SO periphery.

Prominent figures in the Socialist Fellowship, like Fenner Brockway and Ellis Smith, resigned.

The Bevanites, long-time pacifists now showing their true social patriotic calours, began to distance themselves fram Healy and his paper. Healy tolerated the pro-Stalinist line of the paper until, in 1963, Pablo proposed that the British, along with other soctions, should enter (“antryism sui generis”) the Stalinist parties. This proposal split the “Ciub” wide open . Lawrence acted as Pabio’s agent while Healy with ali his might resisted since his opportunist appetite could not be sated by work in the isolated rump of British Staliniam when Labourism was the mass forca in the Gritish working class, The struggle within “the Club” didn’t last very tong with Haaly winning a majority of tha members- probably now less than 100, so “successful” had the SO tactic been. But there was 6 protracted fight for' “Socialist Gutlook", between Nov. 1959 and April 1954. This was not an idaplogical battle - the pages of SO hardly changed at ail, But the battle over the contro/ of the paper which Healy eventually won, was fierca, evan lsading to

tha time of Healy‘s ‘ victory” events within the LP and the Bevanite movement were signaling the end of the ling for SO. The first two to three years of

4 ° e

Socialist Qutlook

Bevan Gives the Lead

That Workers Want ‘Socialist planning

is the only answer

“SLUMP 5 FROM TQ ENG!

Shep Siena workers am meas Bee

KOREA: ‘The Mark of The Beast’ !

gs id

t ‘

SO were the most infiuential; its gai itt yp to

8 claimed 9,000 a month. By the ment the strug: gle for control of SO the paper was a weekly with a sala of around 4,600. The major change in its fortunes came with the defaat of the Labour Gavern: ment in 1961. From then on the “neutraligt’ “Tribune”, also a weakiy by 1962, was outfianking SO

in its flattery af Bevan as an “organisar’’ af the . amorphous left. By 1954, davoid of any distinetive revolutionary politics to win readers away from Bevenism, “Socialist Outlaok” was simply a second: rate “Tribune”. The timing of SO's demise was dictated by the exigencies of Transport Hause’s offensive against Bevan. SO was proscribed by the NEC by way of a warning shot acrgss the qows of Bevan and his supporters.

Healy and his supporters meekly bowed thelr necks to the axe, if not with @ glad heert, than at least with the sansa of relief that the dwindling band of “Club members remained Party members and that the “mass radicalisation” of the working class would still hg able to crystatiise around “Tribune.” To ba there when the masses arciyed, Healy and Co. took the logical step of occasionally writing for and selling Michael Foot's “Tribune” for the next three years, pathetically undasiining the “good bits" in copies to sell to working Glass readers! :

Haaly’s Successful liquidation af the only united and significant revolutionary Trotskyist grouping in the late 40s and sariy ‘50s was ubtedly a tragedy. It was part of the international tragedy of the destruction of Trotsky’s Fourth international by the generatian of epigones Pabiq, Mandel, Canngn, Hansen, Lambert etc. The rapetitian af gut anherionce by Socialist Organiser and ni Ociaiist Action, bids fair to r t ‘ second time as farce." SPMBE ENS huctpry “the

by K. Hassel}

Bevan on his way to his first cabinet meeting

EXTRACTS FROM:-

THE -

DEATH AGONY . OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

and the tasks of Trotskyists today

WORKERS POWER IRISH WORKERS GROUP

q.

The epigones destroy the Fourth International -.

In 1944 several of the European sections of the Fi regrouped at a conference held inside Nazi-occupied Europe. They adopted the “Theses on the Liquidation of World War 2 and the Revolutionary Upsurge’’. These testified to the continuing revolutionary potential of the sections of the Fourth international. The theses, written at a time when antiGerman chauvinism and pro-allied sentiments were growing rapidly in Europe, espoused a defeatist position in the war. They indicated that the reconstruction of the Fl on a revolutionary basis was a real possibility. However, severe disorientation over the crucial question of perspectives, obstructed this development from taking final shape.

The aftermath of the Second World War was nol as Trotsky had predicted it. Key elements of his perspectives, when he wrote the

‘ Transitional Programme, for the period ahead were:

a) a massive revolutionary wave - particularly in Germany, Italy, France, Britain and the USA;

b)} the qualitative transformation of the Fl into mass force able to use the Transitional Programme to relate to and win leadership in the revolutionary upsurge;

c) the death agony of capitalism or its survival only on a totalitarian busis ;

d) the destruction of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR either by Political revolution or by a victorious imperialism;

e) the disintegration of the old leaderships of the working class - the social democrats and the stalinists, aS their material] roots disappeared - crumbs from the table of imperialism and bureaucratic privilege in the USSR.

As we have shown,the Transitional Programme was not a collection of timeless Marxist truisms, if was a “‘manual of action’. As such it was necessary to constantly test its demands, tactics and perspectives against reality, and to develop the programme accordingly. The followers of Trotsky repeatedly failed to do this after the war.

Trotsky’s perspective at the beginning of the Second World War was that it would engender revolutionary upheavals as greal as,or greater than those succeeding the First World War, Capitalist economy, bourgeois sociely and its reformist parasites would be thrown into mortal crisis. Likewise, the Stalinist bureaucracy, if it survived a miltary debacle at the hands of the imperialist aggressor, would succumb to the political revolution of the proletariat aroused by revolutionary events in the west. Criticisms can certainJy be made of Trotsky’s telescoped limetable for the historic exhaustion of US monopoly capitalism. However, this

is an error Marx, Engels and Lenin made before hiin, and is a risk of error inseparable from revolutionary optimism.

Thus Trotsky considered an earlier error of perspective (al the Thad World Congress of the Comintern) in the following way: ‘We had not predicted o solar eclipse, i.e. an event beyond our will and entirely independent of our actions. Involved is ‘an historical event which can and will occur with our participation. When we spoke of the revolution resulting from the world war, it meant that we were and are striving to utilise the consequences of the world war in order to speed the revolution in every way possible’’.?°

Trotsky’s perspective was falsified by events after the war. Firstly, by powerful objective factors of the first magnitude. Whilst Britain and France, two of the three “‘democrattc imperialisms” proved as rotten and prone to instability as Trotsky had observed, this was far from being the case with the United States. The collossal scale and dynamisin of its productive forces enabled it to sustain the moribund British Empire and raise French imperialism from the grave - as client or subordinate powers, unable to challenge their Wall St masters.

Likewise in the Russian workers’ state, planned economy proved stronger than the sabotage and bungling of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Though Stalin and his clique brought the workers’stale to the edge of the abyss in 1941, the heroic resistance of the proletaria! and the rallying to the workers’ state of the peasantry and the nalionalities, despite Stalin’s crimes, and because of fascist atrocities, gave the USSR victory, This victory, however, strengthened not only the state but also the bonapartist bureaucracy. The advance of American and Russian armies across the European continent placed foreign armies hostile to proletarian revolution amongst the proletariat of France, Italy and Germany. The victory of Stalinism and Anglo-American (democratic) imperialism, strengthened the political forces dependent on these tendencies.

On the one hand, the openly bourgeois parties and social democtacy were revivified due to the victory of the democracies’. On the other hand, the Stalinist parties with the weight of Russian victory and their own partisan struggles were likewise strengthened. Far from these forces facing the loss of their material basis, or suffering political demise and organisational disintegration, they emerged from the war much stronger than they were in the late 1930s. Moreover, the politics of class collaboration - established via the Popular Front before the

war, and having behind it the prestige of the Second and Third Internationals, were not disrupted unlil 1946/7, when the post-war crisis had been overcome, The whole weight of bourgeois democracy and Stalinism was thrown into the scales against proletarian revolution.

Gnce the immediate potentially revolutionary situations were weathered, the enormous economic power of the USA was brought to bear in the West through Marshall Aid, and the Kremlin bureaucracy sealed off its East European glacis and began the process of transforming them into degenerate workers’ states, having expropriated the proletariat politically in advance. in Germany the working class upaurge was very weak and was suppressed immediately by Allied and Russian military means. In ltaly and France the Stalinists demobilised the partisan militias. In Centra] and Eastern Europe a varied combination of Soviet forces and indigenous Stalinists and their popular frontist allies were able to prevent any revolutionary upsurge from occurring.

Thus not only were the Trotskyists weak and disorganised, but the conditions for them to emerge from the situation of marginalised propaganda groups did not materialise. Instead, the counter-revolutionary social democracy and Stalinist parties grew in strength, isolating the Trotskyists yet again. Thus social democracy and Stalinism exerted tremendous pressure on the tiny and disoriented forces of the Fourth International,

Whiist it was certainly possible to expect renewed political and social crisis with a further capitalist crisis - clearly by 1946/7 a new assessmeat of perspectives, an accounting for the failure of the previous ones, was necessary. Had this been done, it is unlikely that such a onesided, false perspective would have emerged based on catastrophic crisis, an immediately renewed war and the delayed revolution. The transformation of the Marxist understanding of crises, of war, of revolution from events into long processes was the result of 2 purblind empiricism which sought at all costs to prolong the “revolutionary perspective”.

The isolated and defeated Fi leaders could not face the fact that they were passing from an aborted revolutionary period (1944/5), to a counter-reyolutionary period, albeit one of democratic counterrevolution in the principle imperialist countries, rather than bonapartist or fascist reaction. The majority of the old FI leaders simply shut their eyes and heid on to “orthodoxy”. However the new European and then International leadership around Michel Pablo and Emest Germain began to transform Trotsky’s tactics, strategy and programme in a piecemeal and empirical fashion under the cover of an apparent fidelity to his revolutionary perspectives. To preserve these, “revolution” became a world objective process which chose here the Stalinist bureaucracy, there the Titoite partisans, elsewhere the Bevanite parliamentarians, as its agents for a whole historic stage. It was only a matter of time before nes piecemeal revision was systematised, This Pablo attempted in 1950 - $95},

The F! developed perspectives for after the war based on a combination of dogmatism and blind optimism. This dogmatism spawned a series of errors which oscillated between sectarianism and opportunism. In time the political vibrations broke up the F1 into two factions both equally tainted with these errors. Despite the signs of economic boom in the USA, Cannon insisted that the American revolution was imminent, Furthermore the perspective of a third world war meant that the world tottered on the verge of a permanently prerevolutionary situation. The documents of the 1946 International Congress clearly reveal this tendency in the FI. Thus in “The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of Parties of the FI’, they argued: “The war has aggravated the disorganisation of capitalist economy and has destroyed the last possibilities of a relatively stable equilibrium in social and international relations”.?" And again: “If the war did not immediately create in Europe a revolutionary upsurge of the scope and tempo we anticipated, it is nevertheless undeniable that it destroyed capitalist equilibrium on a world scale, thus opening up a long revolutionary period”.*? This ‘long revolutionary period" became an ever-expanding one, and as such ceased to have any useful specific meaning. .

The potential for rectifying these errors of perspective and of reconstructing the Fl on a revolutionary basis existed within the forces of Trotskyism, There were challenges to the leadership's rigid adherence to Trotsky’s perspectives, In the SWP, for example, Felix Morrow led

‘an opposition that argued; ‘Trotsky tried to teach us to understand

that it is necessary to make a prognosis but equally necessary to understand that it is impossible to guess the tempos in advance for a prolonged period, and hence one must introduce the necessary correctives into it in the course of experience",

Similarly the British RCP (4 product of a 1944 fusion between the RSL and the WIL) argued against the “New Imperialist Peace’? document, that Stalinism had been strengthened and not thrown into mortal crisis, It pointed to the danger of disorientation that the failure to recognise this could lead to. The SWP contended in 1946 that the

war was still on, The FI hesitated before calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from occupied territories, Initially, it rejected a British amendment to this effect, though it later corrected its position, The French section argued that the USSR, in 1946, was more threatened than at the darkest hour of the war. Perhaps more astonishing was the answer the Trotekyist ‘Neuer Spartakus” g* to the question: “Why does Stalin rob? Because he Jost the war".*4 Also on the question of the immediacy of imperialism's own economic crisis, the RCP contended “But in a resolution that seeks to orientate our own cadres on immediate economic perspectives - from which the next stage of the

later abuse of the earlier perspective was absolutely connected to its essential falseness. The optimism about the likely spontaneous transformation of a war into a civil war embodied a key methodological error committed by the post-War F]. Trotsky’s perspectives and prognoses were turned into a prophecy that had to come true in the short term. The collapse of capitalism and the eruption of a revolutionary tide were designated as the inevilable outcomes of an unfolding objective process to which Trotskyists had to relate,

However, whilst capitalist crises and upsurges of working class struggie clearly do arise out of the objective contradictions of capitalism, there is no “objective process’’ which resolves such crises. Without the victory of the subjective factor - the revolutionary party - there can be no lasting victories for the working class, courtesy of the ‘objective process”’ alone.

The F] did not lead the working class in any country in 1948. Furthermore, the revolutionary or pre-revolutionary crises of the immediately post-war period were clearly over. Yet the FI held to its perspectives. At the 1948 FI Congress, the Theses on Stalinism did not describe the events in Eastern Europe (including Yugoslavia) as part of any revolutionary process, This retention of the earlier perspectives was what allowed the Fl to maintain its orthodox political standpoint. As such we stand by the programmatic declarations of the 1948 Congress as well as of the 1938 Congress. However, as the FI jeadership’s world view became increasingly at variance with reality, so their orthodoxy became ever more fragile. All that was needed to dislodge the FI from the orthodox positions it held until 1948 was a sharp twist in world events.

That twist in events came almost immediately after the 1948 Congress, In the summer of 1948 the Tifo-Stalin split was made public. The Yugoslavian Communist Party (YCP) was expelled from the Cominform and was denounced as, variously, ‘‘Trotskyist” and ‘‘Fascist’’, Out of the Yugoslav events thé Fl developed centrist conclusions and positions. They saw in them only a confirmation of their wrong perspectives. Thus, according to the FI leadership, Yugoslavia demonstrated the crisis of Stalinism that they had been predicting since 1944, Further,the whole development was a part of the successful revolutionary upsurge that had always been a key component of their perspectives. The partisan war was now described, post facto, as a “proletarian revolution" (initially only by Pablo, but, by 1951, by the whole of the Fl leadership). The state established by that ‘‘revolution’’ was a workers’state which was seen to be suffering from merely quantitative deformations, i.e., it was not seen as a qualitatively degenerate workers’ state. Tito’s parasitic bureaucracy was, correspondingly, not a counterrevolutionary factor but a “Leninist’ friend who needed the FI's advice - not its revolutionary opposition. The Open Letter from the international Secretariat requesting attendance rights at the YCP Congress of July 1948 declared ‘We understand exactly the tremendous responaibility weighing upon you, and...we consider it our communist duty to assist you in resolving the present crisis in communism along proletarian and Leninist lines".?®

Michel Pablo, the leader of the FI at the time, used the Yugoslav affair 10 attack a number of key positions of the Trotskyist movement; on Stalinism, on the revojutionary party, the nature of revolutions and on the tactic of entryism and,through a distortion of this tactic, he attacked the communist premises of the united front tactic. Further, he argued that the process occurring in Yugosiavia (which was genuinely revolutionary according to him), would also take place in the rest of the Eastern European “buffer zone” as well; indeed, he already saw it taking place in China.?°®

Pablo’s positions on Yugoslavia were adopted by the Fi at its Third World Congress in 1951. They were subscribed to by all the major sections and leading figures of the Fl, There was no revolutionary opposition to Pablo’s centrist position that ‘in Yugoslavia, the first country where the proletariat took power since the degeneration of the USSR, Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers’ movement which, however, does not exclude its possible re-emergence

under certain conditions”.?°

IO

Essential to Pablo’s position was a revision of the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism, i.e. that it is invariably a counterrevolutionary force. This does not mean that Stalinism can never carry

_ Out progressive measures, even up to the transformation of property

relations, What it does mean is that always, under all conditions, the Stalinists will obstruct the working class from taking political power

directly into its own hands and using that power in its own class interests. In place of this appraisal of Stalinism, Pablo argued in his Report to the 1951 Congress that “We have made clear that the CP's ase not exactly reformist parties and that under certain exceptional conditions they possess the possibility of projecting a revolutionary orientation”.?* Pablo combined this revision with an attack on Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the epoch of wars and revolutions. He replaced this with a formuls that was ridiculous both as an immediate perspective and as a description of a defining feature of the epoch: “In their stead, it is the conception of Revolution-War, of War-Revolution which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest”.

Using this theoretical ‘‘rearmament” {i.e, revision) as his pretext, Pabio embarked upon 2 tactical course which involved the complete liquidation of the Trotskyist programme. This liquidation was necessitated by the organisational and political concessions that were involved in Pablo’s “entrism sui generis” (“entryism of a special type", based on long-term entry and the hiding of the revolutionary programme). Pablo argued that the imminent War-Revolution left no time to buiia Trotskyist parties, but that this was no longer 4 crucial problem because in the coming period a variety of political formations could embark on the struggle for power. The Stalinists, for example, could be forced as parties to project a revolutionary orientation, Entryism was needed in © order to generate the necessary pressure. In other formations, such as social democracy or petty bourgeois nationalism, the perspective was

_ one of centrist splits away from the parties. Here entryism was necess-

ary in order to prepare and develop such a split. In both cases the entryism thal was to be undertaken was not that advocated by Trotsky, around the time of the “French Turn”, that is entryism conceived of as a united front tactic to win leftward moving workers to the communist programme, a tactic that could not be a long-term one, The entryism “of a special type” had to be deep and long term, the open fight for the revolutionary programme had to be “temporarily” abandoned,*4

This thorough-going opportunism propelled the FI along a sharp, rightward-moving centrist course. In 1951, Pablo characterised the Peronist movement in Argentina as “‘anti-capitalist”. The Chinese Communist Party soon became, like the YCP, a revolutionary factor.

In Britain, the left reformist Aneurin Bevan became a “left centrist", In 1952, Pablo instructed the French section to make a deep entry into the PCF, to integrate itself into the working class movement “as it was”. Such concessions inevitably entailed the abandonment of any fight for principled politics against the leaderships of the parties or movements into which the Trotskyists entered.

By 1953 the Pablo-led International Secretariat (IS) was leading the International into headiong programmatic liquidation: “entryism sui generis’, the “revolutionary” nature of Stalinism, the epoch of ‘WarRevolution’, the subordinate role of the Party; all of these were Pablo's contribution to the FI’s centrist collapse.

The principal forces who organised the 1953 split with the Pablo-

led 1S - the SWP (US), the PCI (France) and the Healy group in Britain were not a revolutionary “Left Opposition”. The International Committee (IC) that they formed does not constitute a ‘continuity’ of Trotskyism as against Pabloite revisionism. They failed to break decisively with the liquidationist positions of the 1951 Congress which paved the way for Pablo's tactical turns. They did not criticise (i.e. including self-criticism) the post-war reconstruction of the FI and the undermining of Trotsky’s programme and method that this involved,

’ The IC embodied the nationai isolationism of its three largest components, each of which only opposed Pablo’s bureaucratically centralised drive to implement the perspectives of the 1951 Congress when it affected them. In the IC itself they rejected democratic centralism outright, Moreover, by not going beyond the framework of a public faction, they refused to wage an intransigent fight against Pablo-Mandel.

The split of 1953 therefore, was both tao Jate and tag early. Politicaily it was too late because all the IC groups had slready endorsed and re-endorsed the liquidation of the line in the period 1948-51. It was too early in the sense that it came before any fight within the framework of the Fl to win a majority at the following congress, Indeed, the decision to move straight to a split pre-empted such a fight. The IC groupings had no distinct and thoroughgoing political alternative to Pablo—Mandel and, therefore, they remained immobilised in'a position where factional heat was a substitute for political light.

Despite acceptance of the 1948/51 revisionism, the IC was able, un occasion, to make isolated but valid criticisms of the IS. However, such crilicisms, born out of both factional point-scoring and revulsion at IS betrayals, only occasionally went beyond a sterile defence of what they called “orthodoxy”. In reality this was a revisionist melange of catastrophism, Stalinophobia and softness on social democracy - a mixture that Cannon, Bleibtreu-Favre** and then Lambert and Healy had long pioneered. An examination of each of these groups’ record before and during the split proves this conclusively.

The SWP had political agreement with Pablo right up to 1953. On Yugoslavia they had fully supported Pablo's orientation to Tito, and endorsed the 1951 Congress resolution on Yugoslavia. As early as 1948, an SWP NC statement insisted that Tito had been ‘‘compelled by the logic of the struggle” and had ceased to be a Stalinist. ?® Thus when the PC] contacted Cannon to help them resist Pablo's policies and bureaucratic manoeuvres, he had no hesitation in replying: “I think that the Third World Congress made a correct analysis of the new post-war reality in the world and the unforeseen turns this reality has taken...It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement for which they deserve apprecistion and comradely support, not distrust and denigration’’.2* ‘

This was the same leadership that was to declare in the “Open Letter" of November 1953 (the de facto split document) 27 thal this very same

leadership was ‘an uncontrolled, secret, personal faction in the adminis: tration of the Fourth International which has abandoned the basic programme of Trotskyism’’.

Yet the SWP document ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’? 2* accepted all of the tenets of Pablo's positions. The Second World War produced a revolulionary wave of ‘greater scope, intensity and resistance than the First World War’? we are told. This produced “the revolutionary victories in Yugoslavia and China’. 3

The principled positions against Stalinism that the “Open Letter” took were compatible with the SWP's centrism. Their opposition to the Stalinists’ betrayal of the French General Strike, their position for the withdrawal of Russian troops from East Germany after the 1953 rising © there, and their refusal to accept the post-Stalin liberalisation in the USSR as good coin, were all in themselves principled positions. A revolutionary opposition would have shared these positions.

However such an opposition - unlike the SWP and the IC - would not have pretended that the failure of the IS to hoid these positions was the result of the influence of one man - Pablo - as the Open Letter insisted, On the contrary, they would have located these errors in past errors. This the SWP.would not do in 1953, These issues, as can be seen by the later unity overtures made by the SWP towards the IS, were merely the pretext for the split.

The rea! cause was, in fact, an organisational one. The SWP turned against Pablo only as a result of his “interference” in the SWP (via the Cochran-Clarke faction), True to their national-isolationist tradition {revealed previously during the war) the SWP leaders refused to be treated as a “‘branch office’ of the FI; that is,they refused to undertake a tactical decision that had been agreed by the majority of the leadership of the Fl at an International Executive Committee meeting. The breaking point came when Pablo supported the CochranClarke faction. The SWP leaders discovered a number of political disagreements and went straight for a split. Prior to this Cannon had believed that his previous support for Pablo would ensure that the SWP would not be subjected to IS discipline. That discipline had been alright for the PCI in France, but not for the SWP. He declared in May 1953: “But what if Pabio and the 1S should come out in aupport of the minority. If mach a thing could occur - and F'm not saying it will; I'm juat assuming that the absolutely incredible arrogance of the Cochranites is based on some rumour that they are going to have the support of the IS - if that should occur, it would not oblige us to change our minds about anything. We wouldn't do so"',4°

When this did occur a few months after Cannon made this speech, he was true to his word. But even then he failed to nail the methodological and programmatic errors of the IS and the Cochran-Clarke faction. In true IC fashion, he criticised them and their degeneration from a purely sociological standpoint, The Clarke group were petitbourgeois (true). The Cochran group were tired workers in retreat (true). Both were intent on liquidating the party (true), All of these failures were important and Cannon was right to point to them. But he

was wrong to conclude that these factors contained the essence of the

problem and by extension the essence of “Pabloism", For when it became clear that Pablo had not liquidated - i.e. organisationally dissolved - the FI, the road back to the Pablo-led IS was again open. The essence of Pablo’s politics was to be located in his programmatic premises first, his tactical conclusions second, and his organisational methods last. On the SWP’s part, therefore, the split stemmed from national considerations and centred for the most part on organisational questions, It was not a definitive, principled political split, deapite Cannon’s oaths to the contrary.

With the Healy group in Britain the American pattern was followed almost exactly, The lack of serious political differences on the issues at stake was reflected in more than just the fact that Healy, like Pablo, had a portrait of Tito in his office! Healy himself had been Cannon's man in the RCP from 1944/7, He worked closely with Pablo to destroy the Haston/Grant leadership - a process urgently speeded up after Haston had expressed criticisms of the softness shown by Pabio’ towards Tito. In particular, Healy could make no “root and branch"’ criticism of ‘‘entryism sui generis’’ since he and Lawrence had actually pioneered this from 1947 onwards. This ‘tactic’ flowed from a “‘perspective’’ which foresaw the evolution to centrism of the left reformist leaders, Behind them a mass movement would be created which would force the removal of the right-reformist leaders, The task of Trotskyists in ail this was to amalgamate with the left and assist in this development, To do this required the public abandonment of the Transitional Programme, the Fil and the revolutionary party, and it meant not producing a specifically revolutionary propaganda organ. In their place there was to be a highly secret faction’and a public left-centrist grouping publishing a newspaper which would express the politics appropTiate to such a formation. This policy was put into practice by Healy after the cotlapse of the RCP. The British section was turned into “The Club”, a secret Trotskyist grouping. The broader, public grouping known as the Socialist Fellowship included Labour MPs and union bureaucrats, gathered around the newspaper “Socialist Outlook’’. Pablo approved of this tactic and embodied its experience in his “entryism sui generis” which applied to Stalinist parties as well as to social democrats.*'

This new type of entryism was explicitly demarcated and distinguished from that advocated by Trotsky. That had been based on the open building of a revolutionary tendency within » reformist party in circumstances where the evolution of the class struggle and the influx of subjectively revolutionary proletarian elements made it possible to unfuri the banner of the Fl, at least temporarily. Trotsky recognised that such &n entry would last for a limited period, possibly s' mere episode.

When one comes to look at the Healyites' own account of their split with Pabloism*?, the political questions are less than clear. The dispute arose when Lawrence (like Clarke in America) became a direct agent for Pablo and chailenged Healy's leadership. Over the Korean war he pushed a pro-Stalinist position on the Editorial Board of

“Socialist Outlook”, in alliance with the ‘‘centrists” (Healy's term for left reformists). This breach of discipline and its consequences form the substance of “The Struggle in the British Section”.4*

No politica] documents appeared at the time of the split itseif . It was an organisational battle in which the number of legal shareholders in “Socialist Outlook” counted for more than the errors of the 1951 Congress and before.

However, the political differences underlying the split were real enough With the advent of the Korean war in 1950, Pablo saw the realisation of his ‘‘war-revolution” perspective as imminent. The British’ section made sure that Socialist Quttook followed the Pablo line, with a number of pro-Stalinist articles appearing. Healy and Lawrence coexisted peacefully at this time. However, after the tactical turn towards entryism into Stalinist parties in 1952, Pablo, having succeeded in wrecking the French section, began to foist his tactic on other sections. By 1953, Lawrence, in cahoots with Pablo, was pushing for a much more definite pro-Stalinist orientation in Britain. Healy's longstanding and long term orientation to the Bevanites conflicted with this tactical turn, Fearing a Pabloite victory, Healy threw in his lot with Cannon, who feared similar moves in the US. He mhoved against Lawrence in Britain and, eventually, Pabto internationally.

ae :

The PC! in France differed from the SWP and the Healy group insofar as it had waged a limited political fight against Pablo from 195} onwards, For their efforts, the leadership of the PCI were connived against by Pabio, Healy and Cannon! But the politics that the PCI fought fought on were not revolutionary politics.

In June 1951 the PCI jeader Bleibtreu-Favre, supported by Pierre Lambert *4 and the majority of the organisation, produced a response to Pablo's revisionist document “Where are we going?’’. The French document ‘Where is Comrade Pabto going?" 4° was delayed in its publication by Germain (Ernest Mandel). He had duplicitously pretended to oppose Pablo on ‘‘democratic” grounds, but warned Bieibtreu-Favre against provoking Pablo into taking disciplinary measures by pulting out the document. Because Bleibtreu-Favre, Lambert and the others supported Germain’s document “Whal should be modified and what should be maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism? " (the famous ''Ten Theses”)*® the French accepted his advice. The result was that Pablo, in collaboration with Germain, built up a Pabloite minority faction around Michel Mestre.

Pablo effectively isolated the French majority after refusing to circulate Bleibtreu-Favre’s document before the Third World Congress. The French were Jeft declaring their support for the “Ten Theses”, which were not voted on at the Congress. in January 1952, Pablo proposed that the PCi should carry out an “‘entryism sui generis” tactic in the PCF - then in a leftist phase. The French majority, preferring an orientation to the looser SFIO, opposed this turn on tactical grounds. After a struggic, in June 1952, Pablo, Germain and Healy (with Cannon's approval!) expelled the majority of the French Central Committee!

However much we would sympathise with the PCI as a victim of bureaucratic methods, their struggle was, in the end, a vacillating, politically incorrect one. First, by supporting what we have described elsewhere as Mandel’s “Orthodox Revisionism’*? Finding the idea that Stalinist parties had led what the FI regarded as healthy revolutions-to

uvictory in Yugoslavia and China, unpalatable from an ‘‘orthodox” standpoint, Mandel revised the Trotskyist position on Stalinism. It had a ‘‘dual character’' - a good side and a bad side. The pressure of the masses could serve to allow the good side to win out. Thus:“The Yugoslay and Chinese examples have demonstrated that, placed in certain exceptional conditions, entire Communist Parties can modify their political line and jead the struggle of the masses up to the conquest of power, while passing beyond the objectives of the Kremlin. Under such conditions these parties cease to be Stalinist in the classical sense of the words”.4@ ”

Bleibtreu-Favre’s document expressed an identical view, particularly with regard to the Chinese bureaucracy. They bitterly attacked the Chinese Trotskyists for failing to enter the CCP (which was imprisoning Trotskyists at the time} quickly enough. In other words, the French accepted Pablo's analysis of Yugoslavia and China. What they could not accept was that these states were dominated by Stalinist parties. It was

for this reason that they, like everybody else in the Fl, were prepared to

endorse the 1951 Congress position on Yugoslavia, a position that liquidated the programme of Trotskyism.

Criticising Pablo's ‘objections’, the French introduced their own. China, they argued, proved that “The reality of the class struggle will prove more powerful than the Kremlin apparatus, despite the nonexistence of » revolutionary party”.** The reason was because the CPs were subordinated to the Kremlin. If they went against the Kremlin then they could not be Stalinist: “In any event it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still] more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China’ ”.®

Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as contradictory but predominantly counter-revolutionary even when it breaks up along social patriotic lines was junked. The PCI leadership capitulated to Stalinist parties and then, to save their ‘Trotskyist’? souls, conveniently concluded that these parties were not Stalinist at all.

In 1951 the centrist positions of the Third World Congress on Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and general perspectives (the impending “civil war’ perspective) proved, beyond doubt, that a programmatic collapse of the Fourth International had taken place. The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav resolution - the cornerstone of all the errors - is a fact of enormous significance. The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism. From this point on, the task facing Trotskyists was the refoundation of a Leninist-Trotskyist International on the basis of a re-elaborated programme of revolutionary communism, Manoeuvres to replace the leadership of the FI were entirely insufficient. The programmatic basis of the Fil had to be changed. The manner by which this

could have been done in the early 1950s is a matter of tactical speculation. What is decisive for us is that it was not done. The historical continuity of Trotskyism was shaltered - as was evidenced by Pabio’s use of the Congress documents at the Tenth Plenum of the International Executive Committee in February 1952, to usher in “entrism sui generis”

The opposition in America, Britain and France that did emerge in 1952-3 was subjectively committed to opposing Pablo. However, they have to be judged not by their impulse but by their politics. Their “orthodoxy’’ was both sterile and based on post-war revisionism, prompted by the Yugoslav events. It was not authentic Trotskyism. Thus we cannot view either component of the 1953 spiit as the “continuators” of Trotskyism. Both were centrist,

The IC, itself developing in a rightward direction (e.g. Healy’s work in the Labour Party} was distinguished fram the IS by the pace of its development. St recoiled from the most blatant expressions of liquidationism issuing from the IS, but not from the right-centrist documents that underpinned that liquidationism. Therefore the IC did not constitute a ‘left centrist” alternative to the IS.

The IS was a right-ward moving centrist group using the 1951 positions to draw what were entirely logical conclusions, The correct positions on East Germany and Hungary taken by the IC may have determined the tactics of a Left Opposition if it had existed. It could

= not have determined its estimate of the IC.

Disorientation after the war led to a programmatic collapse of the FI, After the Ci’s programmatic collapse, Trotsky's Left Opposition maintained a reform perspective because the CI contained within it a mass movement. After the FI's programmatic collapse, and the failure. of anOpposition to materialise, the Fl was left without a programme - and had never contained a mass vanguard within it. The FI, unlike thy CI, was in an essential sense its programme. That is why we say that after 1951, whatever the tactics that may have been employed, authentic Trotskyists had to elaborate a new programme and thus build the International anew.

DEATH AGON ¥ OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL.

THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE

As we have seen neither the [C nor any of its principal components constituted a revolutionary opposition to the Pablo led IS, They constituted one of the degenerating fragments of world Trotskyism, not a force for principled regeneration. Certain groupings today claim that the IC in 1953 did represent, albeit in a partial and inadequate manner,an attempt to regenerate Trotskyism. Further, they would argue that the“IC Tradition” represents the continuity of Trotskyism, not withstanding the criticisms that might now be made of that tradition with hindsight. Not surprisingly it is groups emerging from, or at some point involved with,the IC tradition that hold to such positions - the British WSL, the iSt, groupings within the OCRFI/FI (ICR) tradition etc, These judgements stem from a refusal to recognise that ‘‘Trotskyism’, if it means anything, is the continuity of revolutionary comsmunism. The formal adherence to dogma that characterised the IC was not revolutionary communism; in tactics, strategy and programme the IC groupings subverted communism.

The first thing to note about the“IC Tradition” is that it is a myth. It simply does not exist. The IC was never a coherent, programmatically united and democratically organised tendency. In the name of “orthodox Trotskyism” which was defined at the purely abstract level of being in favour of the building of Trotskyist parties (something the “Pabloites had never had any real difficulty in accepting and articulating) - the 1C groups split the FI without a political fight in the sections or at the scheduled World Congress. Apart from the SWP’s“Open Letter" and a handful of documents from the French and the Americans against “Pabloite Revisionism’ - all of which dctually centre on con~ junctura) events and do not draw up a political balance sheet of the method and emergence of “Pabloism”- no major documents of the iC were produced in 1953 or for a long time after. Several short resolutions were produced in 1954 and 1955 on Vietnam and Algeria, but that was ail. The large sections of the IC- the SWP, the French and the British-gave no central direction to the smaller groups in Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Argentina (Moreno’s POR), Iceland, Switzerland, Greece and the Chinese exiles. The French, and then the British, held the secretaryship but were unable or unwilling to galvanise the IC into active life as an international organisation.

In fact, the IC’s lack of democratic centralism, or even a common internal or external organ, resulted in its sections being, in reality, national sects which developed along their own lines and adapted to the peculiarities of their respective countries on the basis of the Pablo/Mandel method. The smaller groups tended to suffer political colonisation by one or other of the larger ones; the Latin Americans by the SWP, the Europeans by either the British section (Socialist Labour League - SLL « after 1959), or the French PCI (OCI after 1966, PCI again in 19821}. The SWP, the group with the largest resources, published only six international discussion bulletins in ten years and‘‘led” the IC much in the same way that it had‘‘ted''the FI after Trotsky's death. There

was only one IC congress whilst the SWP.were members, It was heid

in Britain in 1958. On behalf of the SWP, Farrell Dobbs attended but refused to participate on a political basis. By this time the SWP was manoeuvring to cut loose from the IC and reunify with the IS . The Healy group produced no major attack on the politics of Pabloism until 1957 with W. Sinclair’s (Bill Hunter) “Under a Stolen Flag’. This belated reply to the Pabloites'analysis of Stalinism repeats the need for political revolution, warns against making concessions to the bureaur cracy, but fails completely to trace the roots of Pablo's analysis of Stalinism. The failure to do this later allowed the SLL to accommodate to the Chinese stalinists during the Cultural Revolution and sowed the seeds of Healy’s support for the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy. By this time the SWP, hungry for unity, had ceased criticising the 1S publicly at all. Indeed public polemic was halted in June 1954!

Thus the IC Tradition'’as such cannot be said to have existed as a coherent body of politics in the 1950s at all. To all those who point to this non-existent tradition as the‘‘continuity of Trotskyism” we throw back the question - in what documents, theses or positions?

The incoherent nature of the IC was demonstrated by the fact that a principal leader, Cannon, re-opened discussions with Pablo and the 1S (via the LSSP) in 1954 (seven months after the split), He wrote to Goonewardene in May 1954 that “there... .. is still chance for te unification if only the world congress were postponed 3, That is, Teunification was now only blocked by an organisational consideration. This, despite the fact that the 1953 split was described thus, in the “Open Letter” “The lines of cleavage between Pablo's revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organisationally.” 74

IB

In a word, this was rhetoric purely for public consumption. By 1956, Cannon and the SWP were again pushing for unity. In 1957, Cannon proposed’ a “sweeping organisational compromise, which would permit the formal unification of the international movement before the dispute is settled, This organisational compromise cannot be left to the chance decision of a Congresa."7 — In fact, from early 1957, while Cannon and the SWP had not changed their mind about Pablo’s intolerable regime, they were drawing closer to the Mandei/Frank/Maitan axis, whose greater“formal orthodoxy” and verbal anti-Stalinism was gaining ground in the 18 after the Hungarian revolution. This event rudely disturbed illusions of an uninterrupted process of reforms within Stalinism. Khruschev and company were starkly revealed as the butchers of the Hungarian proletariat; Nagy and Gomulka as the treacherous misleaders of powerful political revolutionary movements. This did not, however, prevent the IS from describing the Gomulka-ites as‘‘a centrist tendency evolving to the Left”,

The triumph of Mandel’s harder” positions convinced Cannon that a deal could be struck. This, however, would have seriously endangered the separate national projects of Lambert and Healy who, consequently now revived their interest in the fight againstPabloism”. it was this that prompted Healy to print Hunter’s ‘Under a Stolen Flag'’ which declared that'’ the gulf between Pabloite revisionism and ourselves grows wider and wider.*7® Healy pushed for a conference of the IC. When it took place in 1958, the one thing the SWP did ensure was that it did not proclaim itself “The Fourth World Congress of the FI” as the British proposed. ,

What did unite the IC groups in the 50s was their enmity towards Pablo and their resistance to his attempts to interfere with their national tactics. The Lambert La Verite group had been expelled by - him in 1952. The British and Americans had witnessed his agents at work trying to foist a Stalinist oriented perspective on their organisations, at a time when they were working with union “progressives” in the US and left reformists in Britain. They all saw him as a challenge to the “constituted” national leaderships -i.e.Cannon, Healy and Lambert. - Thus the SWP talked endlessly of the ‘cuit’ of Pablo. Gerry Healy explained to the SLL in 1966 that: “ Then, in 1951, came Pablo”. 7? Actually Healy had, at that time been working closely with Pabio for at least five years, The interminable series of splits that were later to take place within the IC arose because there was no common political basis to this‘tanti-Pabloism’? Each group had their own view of what the“essence of Pabloism” was.

For the SWP, Pabloism equalled the “‘liquidation” of the party, that is the organisations] dissolution of the party. Whatever else Cannon proved himself willing to junk, he was determined to hang onto “the party’. The problem for the SWP arose when the IS did not liquidate the FI or its sections. The barrier to unity was effectively removed. For the Healy group the essence of Pabloism was an ever changing variety of things. It was capitulation to Stalinism, failure to build parties, an“objectivist’ view of the revolution. All of these assessments changed as the Healyites own activities and political positions changed, often into what had once beeen characterised as“ Pabloite” by Healy . Thus, Healy was driven to discover the“‘roots’ of Pabloism, His post1959 discoveries concentrated on the question of “method and “dialectical materialism".

Building on Trotsky's strictures to the SWP to fight against pragmatism, Healy developed an abstract “philosophical” critique of Pabloism and of the Americans’ later submission to it. This enabled him to turn his back on questions of programme and tactics where his own record was so compromised that it would not bear any serious inspection. In 1966 he argued: “The differences between revisioniam and revolutionary marxism today boils itself down to the differences between idealism and dialectical materialism and not what this individual or that individual is supposed to have done”.”® Very convenient for Healy! His “method” enabled him to wipe his own slate clean. But it was a far cry from Trotsky's method which always started with and returned to, experience, the supreme criterion of human knowledge.

For the French, the Lambert-led OCI, Pabloism jwas in essence neither liquidation of the party, nor a wrong philosophical’ method, Their initial and abiding hostility to Pabloism lay in their Stalinophobia. In their ;

most refined definition of Pabloism, the OCI declared that Pablo's » ~ “formal” marxism and his mechanical application of Trotsky’s perspectives “had its finished expression in the conception of a finished

Fourth International and parties, endowed with a pryramid atyle hierarchy, with world congresses, of ultra-centraliat status, which had only

to strengthen itself progressively", 7®This definition - a systematisation and’a defence of the IC’s history of complete federalism - was claborated, as usual, to suit a factional purpose. The OCI had no intentions of i

falling under the ‘democratic centralist” control of an SLL-dominated iC in 1966.

In all three groupings we find a shifting analysis of ‘‘Pabloism’’. The definitions produced were virtually all motivated by conjunctural, factional considerations. Of course there were a number of shared assumptions. The ridiculous idea that all evil stemmed from the person of Pablo, and that this was due to his petit-bourgeois class origins was a common thread inside the IC. This was merely a useful means of diverting attention from the programmatic issues at stake. We assess the nature of somebody’s political positions first and then deduce and demonstrate the class origins of those positions. This was how Trotsky dealt with the Burnham/Shachtman faction. The IC inverted Trotsky’s approach, yelling petit- bourgeois at Pablo first, and giving his political positions only scant attention second.

In sum, we can see that “anti-Pabloism” is a meaningless term, an unscientific, non-political term. To assess the worth of the IC, therefore, it is necessary to look at the separate politics of its constituent parts.

As we have shown, from 1954 onwards the SWP lapsed from a position of fighting the IS, to one of fighting to re-unify the IC with the 1S. Only organisational considerations were raised as an obstacle to early reunification. Ignoring the supposed political issues of the 1953 split, the SWP hagiographer Les Evans explained: “By 1956 their public line (i.e. the 1S's -Eds) became very close to that of the International Committee, and the leadership of the SWP concluded that, on the political positions on which the two sides stood, continuation of the split could not be justified. It was time to consider re-unification”.*°

Following this “turn” by the SWP, Joseph Hansen carried out pioneering work to show that the SWP could outdo the 1S in its capitulation to Stalinism. In 1958 he crisply summed up what the IS had obfuscated with sophistry - namely that the political revolution was merely a series of reforms. In his “Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy” he wrote: “It is much closer to reality to view the programme of political revolution as the total series of reforms, gained through militant struggle, culminating in the transfer of power to the workers”.*!

Hansen really got his teeth into this theme after the Cuban revolution, Empirically registering the existence of an economy which was in essentials identical to Eastern Europe in Cuba, and noting the absence of a “Stalinist” leadership in the July 26th Movement, Hansen concluded that Cuba was a healthy workers’ state. Strong on pragmatism, but hot too hot with dialectics, Hansen decided that there was no need for

a Trotskyist party in Cuba, that Castro was an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’ and that,therefore.the programme of political revolution did not apply to Cuba. We have dealt elsewhere with the Cuban revolution and Hansen’s analysis of it."? Suffice it to say that Hansen “overlooked” the absence of independent working class action and organisation in the Cuban revolution - soviets, a real workers’ militia, workers’ control in the planned economy, etc. He overlooked the stages of the Cuban revolution during which Castro became assimilated to Stalinism, he overlooked the demobilisation of the working class consciously carried out by Castro after the Bay of Pigs invasion. In short, he held a completely anti-Trotskyist view of the Cuban revolution.

This particular piece of revisionism not only cleared the way to re-unification with the IS in 1963. It provided a theoretical justification for the guerrilla-ist turn of the USFI in the late 1960s (despite Hansen’s opposition to that turn). Today it has brought the SWP to the threshold of an abandonment of even the trappings of formal ‘‘Trotskyism’’. Attacks on the theory of Permanent Revolution by Doug Jenness, a leader of the SWP, is a sign of things to come. The SWP is lurching ever. closer to crossing into the Stalinist camp via the “Cuban road”.

By 1963, with agreement on Cuba and the “Dynamics of World Revolution Today”, the SWP quickly and unceremoniously cut loose from Healy and Lambert. Cannon, who had praised Healy’s Labour Party work in 1962 was denouncing that same work as “Oehierite” in 1963, A tirade against ultra-leftism was launched, and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International was formed.

The history of the iC after the desertion of the SWP in 1963 to form the USFI, and the history of the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OCRFI - CORQI) after the split between Lambert and Healy in no way represents the continuity of the Fourth International of Trotsky. lt was not a more healthy current than the USFI. The topic at the heart of the split with the SWP - Cuba - was itself inauspicious. Healy and Lambert were unable to differ in method from the Hansen-Mandel analysis and were, therefore, forced simply to deny that an overturn in property relations had taken place in Cuba,

Healy and Slaughter insisted that Cuba was state capitalist, and Castro a bourgeois bonaparte like Nasser or Peron. To defend this curious and inconsistent position, they borrowed ‘‘normative"’ arguments from the new class theorists, and hid them under a barrage of Hegelianised ‘‘dialectics’. The OCI, on the other hand, decided that a “phantom bourgeoisie’ held power in Cuba, via Castro. Such positions

i.

prevented any serious or searching analysis of the roots of the degeneration of the Fl after the war, The SLL and the OCI, therefore, built into their politics different elements of the 1948-51 revisionism, Whilst the IC was united only by the hostility to the USFI, and expressed this in a vacuous “‘anti-Pabloism”, the two key organisations within it, the OCI and the SLL, were politically very different organisations which were moving in different directions,

Each filled the vacuum of “‘anti-Pabloism” with its own content. To understand the later turns of these organisations, to understand the

entire process of their degeneration, it is necessary to trace their history | prior to the split.

The Healy group, after the 1953 split, carried on for a short period with their own version of entryism sui generis, around the paper “Socialist Outlook”, From 1954 when the paper was banned, Healy had no problems in switching his group into the Tribune milieu, selling Tribune until 1957 when the group supported the launch of “‘The Newsletter”, supposedly an independent newspaper.

After the Hungarian revolution, defections from the British CP and the creation of loose socialist forums provided Healy with a new audience and recruits. After 1957, the Newsletter also served to rally a number of rank and file trade union militants around it. The theoretical journal ‘“‘Labour Review” attracted some able intellectuals. Originally, Healy had insisted that both publications were not “sectional Trotskyist publications”, This was in line with his earlier “deep entry” project. The prospect of recruitment from the CP, however, modified this perspective and pushed the Healy group to more of an independent orientation. In 1959 the Socialist Labour League (SLL) was founded as an independent group, although 100 of its 159 founding members were still in the Labour Party, A relatively open and pugnacious campaign followed in the Labour Party’s new youth organisation, the Young Socialists. 1t was led by SLL members, and resulted in the closing down of the YS and mass expulsions in 1964.

The same period had seen the SLL carrying out active trade union work, attracting 700 delegates to a rank and file conference in November 1959. The SLL also grew as a result of its active intervention within the CND. Here it dropped criticisms of the ‘‘disarmament” slogan in order to recruit, despite having levelled sharp criticisms of the IS in 1954 for having supported similar disarmament slogans.

By 1963, flushed with success, the Healy group returned to catastrophist perspectives of the type that Pablo had pioneered in 1950.

The difference lay in the conclusion drawn from the imminent collapse. Healy substituted for Pablo’s and his own former deep entry, 2 hysterical “third period” style fetishisation of “building the party”. At its Fifth Annual! Conference in 1963, the SLL Perspectives declared: “The problems of the British economy sre so acute, and the relations between capital and its agents so full of contradictions, that the problem of

power is in fact continually posed, provided there can be built a leadership".** This involves a total confusion of the objective and the subjective.

A revolutionary situation in which the question of power is posed can materialise without a revolutionary leadership having been built in time to resolve the question in a communist direction, Furthermore, the suggestion that there was an immediate possibility of a revolutionary situation developing in Britain in 1963 was laughable. No matter, both parts of this formulation served to justify a dramatic turn towards “building the leadership” - an exaggerated party fetishism that was justified by the “impending catastrophe”. The fact that reality repeatedly confounded this perspective was overcome by “philosophy”.

That which had exorcised Pablo proved useful in exorcising reality from the SLL's perspectives documents. Such philosophy ‘saved’ the SLL from allowing “‘surface reality” (i.e. the continuing long boom and its effects or the working class) to obscure its “iunderstanding” of the impending revolutionary crisis out of which the SLL would be ready to lead the workers. Hence the daily paper, hyper-activism and a huge turnover in membership. Error began to turn into paranoia. Bad philosophy not only meant mistakes, it resulted in its adherents becoming enemies of the SLL, and therefore the raw material for.,.police infiltration. The SLL’s/WRP's ludicrous elevation of ‘‘philosophy” in the name of party building, to a level way beyond the real world, inevitably produced not only sectarianism, but also twisted fantasy: “From time to time it is possible for the method of subjectivism and gossip to make an impact on cynics and tired refugees from the class struggle, but this is purely temporary...It is also very easy to exploit those tendencies who slander and gossip. The police do this constantly. They simply send agents into these groups (reference to the Cliff and Grant groups - Eds) who will be prepared to join heartily in condemning the SLL...1t is simply that the irresponsible anti-SLL factional climate in their group assists the police”. * Bya sleight of hand, opposition to the SLL becomes assistance to the bourgeois state - and thus absolves the SLL from political debate with its opponents,

The SLL’s catastrophism led inexorably to pronounced sectarian practice. From 1964 the SLL’s perspectives were coupled with a profound misunderstanding of the socio-economic roots of reformism and a grossly schematic view of the “‘betrayals” of the Labour and trade union leaders, These leaders were presented as being constantly on the verge of completely discrediting themselves. As a result the party had to be fully ready to take over, and could be built by exposure (ie by purely literary means) of those leaders, The united front was rejected on the spurious grounds that it was only possible between mass parties,

They defined it as “a relationship between mass workers’ parties of a temporary character for the purpose of winning the masses to the communist party”.®5 This was a narrow, one sided and false view of the united front, It led directly to the abandonment of organising a rank and file movement in the unions, In place of this, the SLL built the All Trades Union Alliance as its very own trade union organisation that put on impressive rallies, attracted unsuspecting militants and tried to rope them into the party.

This sectarianism was also extended to the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC). By the late 1960s, the VSC was mobilising thousands on the streets against US imperialism's slaughter of the Vietnamese. The masters of the dialectic, however, understood better the real nature of such demonstrations. In his ‘‘Balance Sheet of Revisionism”, SLL/WRP “theoretician” Slaughter declared: “The content of the October 27th demonstration, the essential aim of the VSC and its political directors was, remains, the rallying together of some alternative to the building of the Socialiet Labour League as the revolutionary Marxist party, and its daily paper nee

Such sectarian hysterics did not stand in the way of profoundly opportunist politics. The Healyites supported the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy during the “Cultural Revolution”. They refused to recognise the struggle as one between wings of the bureaucracy with the masses being demagogically used as a stage army. After the Arab/Israeli war, the SLL began to venerate the ‘Arab Revolution” as part of their factional struggle with the OCI. By the 1970s, this veneration had turned the SLL/WRP and its press into the cheerleaders of the national bourgeoisies in Syria, Iraq, and most of all, Libya. :

After the iranian revolution in 1978/9, the WRP’s newspaper, “Newsline”, became a constant apologist for the butcher Khomeini. The evolution of the SLL was a living proof of Trotsky’s understanding of sectarianism , divorced from reality, leading to extreme factional irritability. This led, in the mid 1970s, to a full-scale conspiracy theory, which included an explanation of all the major problems of the FI as

being the result of the activities of GPU and FBI agents in the SWP(US).

The La Verite group, later OCI, now known as the PCI, gave its own particular stamp to “anti-Pabloism”. Under Lambert's leadership, the French group developed a thorough-going Stalinophobia, as an antipode to Pablo's Stalinophile revisionism. This was combined with a remarkable softness towards social democracy. Under the pressure of the Cold War, they turned to (and to this day remain active within) the anti-Communist union federation, Force Ouvriere.

Despite their “‘anti-Pabloism”, the OCI capitulated to nonrevolutionary communist forces in the anti-imperialist struggle. During the Algerian war of independence, the Lambertists supported the MNA

of Messali Hadj. The French inspired the 1955 resolution of the IC which declared: “In the person of Messali Hadj, the oppressed and exploited of the world possess a living symbol of this (antiimperialist/working class- Eds) struggle”.®7

They supported the MNA against the Moscow-supported petitbourgeois nationalist FLN, on the grounds that the MNA had a proletarian orientation, La Verite offered to defend “the genuine Algerian revolutionaries against FLN killers”.®"® Their ‘‘anti-Pabloism” thus led the OCI to support a group of vacillating nationalists around Hadj against the more consistent nationalists of the FLN. The truth was that the MNA soon became a pawn in the hands of the French government against the FLN and the national struggle. The MNA ended up in a block with the OAS. Their “working class”’ orientation, presented by the Lambertists as a token of their revolutionism, did not prevent them from betraying the anti-imperialist struggle. The Lambertists belatedly were forced themselves to admit this. However, it led them into a sectarian position with regard to anti-imperialist struggles. They refused to cali for the victory of the NLF in its battle with American imperialism in the Vietnam war. In the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, the OCI condemned both sides as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and took a dua} defeatist position,

A product of the OCI’s Stalinophobia and softness on social democracy, was its chronic tendency to substitute democratic programmes for the Transitional Programme. In France after de Gaule’s 1958 coup, Lambert advanced “Defense des Acquis’ - a strictly democratic pro-

IS”

gramme. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, the Constituent Assembly demand was turned into a strategic demand, In the 1980s this demand was advanced in a potentially counteér-revolutionary way in the context of the political revolution in Poland. In Nicaragua after 1979 it was used as the central slogan, at the expense of demands focusing on building soviets and the struggle for workers’ power.

Furthermore, the OCI/PCI has, in a number of cases, supported forces of reaction against Stalinism, In 1969, it refused to support the CP Presidential candidate who was then the left’s main candidate against Pompidou, In 1980, they supported the pro-imperialist Mullah-led Afghan rebels against the PDPA/Soviet troops.

Flowing from these positions is the transformation of the United Front into a strategy. The OCI/PCI calls for the “unity” of the workers’ parties, for a CP/SP government, which they characterise as a workers’ government, for class against class, However, by using these slogans in a strategic sense, the OCI/PCI present them in purely literary terms. The “workers’ government” and united front slogans bear no relation to working class action. They are passive slogans and can lead to abstentionism. Thus, where unity in action was posed in the stormy days of May 1968, the OCI raised class unity slogans as an alternative to joining the batties against the state. On the night of the barricades, the OCI held a meeting and decided to march to convince the students not to continue fighting. When the students refused, the OCI marched off, consoling themselves with chants of working class unity.

This policy was an equal and opposite reponse to the SLL’s abandonment of the united front. Dramatically opposite, it was equally removed from a revolutionary communist position, Thus the OCI's Central Committee declared in 1971 of the united front: “It is a strategic line in the sense that it is always (that is, independent of circumstances, relationship of forces, tactical considerations in the strict sense of the word} present in a revolutionary party”.

Finally, the OCI's inveterate hostility to any centralism in the IC indicates their essentially ‘‘national Trotskyist’ outlook. Using the pretext that the FI was destroyed by Pabloism - a discovery only announced at the Third Congress of the IC in 1966 - the Lambertists insisted that democratic centralism had no place in the IC, as it was not the Fl, They admitted the existence of federalism, arguing: “The SLL has had its own international activity, so has the OCI. Germany and Eastern Europe have remained the “private hunting grounds” of the OCI in co-operation with the Hungarian organisation”.®° They wanted to keep things that way so as not to come under SLL control, and keep their channels open to the “Pabloite’’ USFI.

Undoubtedly, it was Healy who led the IC until the late 1960s and imposed the SLL's views upon its public pronouncements. Lambert was increasingly opposed to Healy and Banda as they inclined more and more towards Third Worldism. Lambert himself would have preferred to reject the Arab revolution in favour of accommodation to Zionism (recognition of the ‘ self-determination” of the Jewish workers), Lambert, to boost himself, sought to bring into the IC Guillermo Lora's POR of Bolivia. Healy at first stalled the 4th Congress of the IC,‘and then staged a split at the Internationa} Youth Rally at Essen. Healy — seized on the pretext of Lora’s concessions to the CP in the Popular Assembly and the two groups engaged in a ludicrous argument over whether dialectical materialism or the transitional programme was the golden calf to be worshipped by the IC faithful:,“Is, or ie not, the transitional pnogramme of the Fi the highest expression of Marxiam?”, asked Lambert.*! After the 1971 split, the IC existed solely as a backyard to the SLL (WRP after 1973),whilst the OCI set up the loose, federal OCRFI, rechristened the Fourth International (International Centre of Reconstruction) after a failed fusion with the Moreno split from the USF, .

The Transitional Programme of 1938 was not re-elaborated to meet the tasks of the post-war period, It was however revised piecemeal and, by 1951, systematically in a series of theses and documents which were accepted by the whole International. None of the breaks and ‘ splits from 1953 onwards has disavowed these revisions or traced to its roots the centrism into which the FI collapsed. The revolutionary, programmatic continuity of the FI was decisively broken. The task of developing a new programme based on the fundamental doctrine and method of the 1938 programme is a task which directly faces us. Only on this basis can a new Leninist-Trotskyist International be founded.

IG

PEUE3] PROGRAMME TACTICS & THE PARTY

THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMME The programme of revolutionsry communism - Trotskyism - is a transitional gramme must therefore include all the major elements of the full programme, i programme. its scientific character stems from the recognition of (he imperialiat charting the strategy from present conditions and struggles to the struggle for epuch as one of transition between capitalism and socialism. In periods of state power, But it is sharply focussed to the specific circumstances facing a imperialist crises, such as the present one opened up in the 1970s and 1980s, given section of the proletariat, or facing the whole proletariat at » given time. n . d . . : . : sas , . ‘ So trmeres ae the immediate demands of the working class clash with capitalist priorities, It is based on a carefut appraisal of the needs, political strengths and weaknesses

Hence, direct action for such demands poses the possibility of developing intoa ‘ struggle for power. of the proletariat.

a he heart of the programme isa syatem of interlinked transitional ln this way we enrich our work and practice through lesting (he vital prodemands. Every demand is linked to the struggle for workers’ control and the grammatic work we are carrying out in the class struggle. Indeed, it is only along

formation of independent, class-fighting bodies. In and through these, each partial this path that genuine revolutionaries can construct @ programme which atands solution, each concession wrenched from the bourgeoisie, raises the political stakes. UPON the shoulders of Trotsky, Lenin and Marx. Only this way will it be possible Each gain deepens the confrontation between the classes, exacerbates the crisia 10 pul an end to the foraging among the ruins of the Transitiona) Programme so and poses more sharply the need to struggle for total victory. . characteristic of the centrist epigones of Trotsky’s Fourth International.

Workers Power secks to develop its programme in line with the method . employed by Leon Trotsky. The 1938 “Transitional Programme’ of the Fourth MAJOR TACTICS IN THE CLASS STRUGGLE

International was both a culmination and a summation of the programmatic The Marxist strategy - for the achiev ; . . work of previous generations of revolutionary Marxists, In its turn, the 1938 revolution, the destruction of the DOUrgCore Stale ea it proletarian programme stood upon and enriched the earlier Marxist programmes; the workers’ stale based on soviets and a workers’ militia - requires tactics fo ‘ Communist Manifesto, the declarations of the Bolshevik Party and the theses implementation. By tactics we mean the methods used for winni attic ls of the revolutionary Comintern in its first four Congresses. battles in the class war. Principled revolutionary tactics are therefore sub. " The histone advance of the Transitional Programme was that it successfully ordinate lo the revolutionary Strategy. They are those which raise the political resolved the programmatic problems inherited from the Second International. class consciousness of the proletariat, consolidate its vanguerd and pre ore ic These probiems involved the gap between the struggle over immediate and Organisationally for the seizure and exercise of state power. pre pertial demands and the struggle for full working class power. The old “minimum’’ Since the degenerati : . programme was limited to demands which did not transcend the concessions dominated by reformisin, Sines the wollsaat Of rhe rane es movernent has been posible within the framework of bourgeois society. This programme became the has been uu organised revdlutionary cadre on an internatic vere ci where property of trade union functionaries and the jeaders of social democracy. The meant that at least {wo generations af proletarian mmilitante hase Re s ry perspective of proletarian power was separated off. This “final goal'’ was the in an incorrect, falsified understanding of the communist a x re e ueated subject of abstract Propaganda and was replaced in practical terms by the iso- their principled application as developed and codified by the first four eonaecses isolated tactic of social reform. 7 ; of the Comintern and the F) in its revolutionary period before the end ef the The 1938 programme bridged the gap of the minimum and maximum pro- 1940s.

grammes, In developing our programme, we affirm this method, We therefore reject altempts to plunder individual demands, rip them from their place in the programme, and treat them as isolated trade union demands, robbed of their transitional content and thew role as steps towards woskers’ control. We also affirm the premise of the 1938 programme - the crisis of proletarian leadessiup. For that reason we, like Trotsky, consider it casential to start from today's needs, not from the current consciousness of the working ciass. We also affirm the internations! character of the Transitional Programme. The proletarien revolution cannot de successful if isolated within the framework of national bartiers.

The Transitional Programme was not a catalogue of truisms, good for all times and situations. Rather, it corresponded to # situation of acute economic

; Because incorrect tactics can lead to strategic defeat, it is of paramount

importance that the tactical Jessons jearnt by the communist movement be

fe-asserted. Because the immediate practice of political groupings consists of

tactical operations iC is af this feve] thal underlying strategic conceptions are

first visible. For this reason the regroupment of revolutionary forces must pro-

cede as much from agreement on the major tactica} questions as from agreement

on the axioms of revolutionary theory or strategy. In this category of “major

tactical” questions we include those tactics which, while they can never be

programmatically imperative in the manner of strategic questions such as the

seizure of stale power through insurrection will, necessarily, have to be included

in the operations of a revohutionary party.

. The united frogt

crisis, impending war, the rise of fascasm and the collapse of the Communist . G

International under the dead weight of Stalinism. Thus the 1938 programme This tactic is applicable where revolutionaries do not yet constitute the

was focussed upon the tasks facing the working class in the pre-tevolutionary majority of the proletarian vanguard, Hs aim is to mobilise workess to gain

situation that would soon open up as a result of these objective circumstances. This Necessary objectives and, in so doing, break them from their reformist or centrist

focussing «as only possible because the Transitional Programme embodved the leaders, by exposing these leaders’ inadequacy even in defending elementary class

lessons of the successes and defeats of the proletariat during the previous twenty interests. The method of the united front is the proposal for joint action by

years communists snd non-communists to achieve goals which meet the felt ncede of Consequently, the task of revolutionaries today is not to fetishise the 1938 the masses. Crucially it can be used in periods of capitalist offensive against the

programme, bul fo ulilise 18 methad to te-elaborate and refocus the programme Workers, when established leaders come under intense pressure from their

of revalutionary communism to deal with the renewed period of impenalisi supporters to defend workers’ interests.

crisis. which opened up some fifteen years ago. To be operated in a principled fashion, the following guidelines must be

The degeneration of the Fourth international resuited from the failure to observed: re-elaborate the 1938 programme in the light of the changed conditions after ®* The a s of i ; . the Second World War. Simple affirmation of the validity of the 1938 programme ™ Pogue ae ome Tonk be addressed to the established lea derahips is insufficient. A new programme is needed, one which is both # continuation * The demands must be for joint action, not propaganda and a development of the Transitional Programme. An adequate programme * The communists must retain, and use, the right to criticise their ‘allies’ at a} today must accomplish several tasks. Jt must develop cieal positions on the times during the united front as weil as after it, and must campaign for their expansion of imperialism after the war, on the strengthening of, and renewed OWN communist programme. ' crises within, Stalinism, it must extend and ennch the Transitional Programme's * The communists must break the united front wherever their “allies” shrink condensed conclusion on tactics and strategy of permanent revolution in the from or sabotage the demands and struggle for the united front semi-colonial world; it must se-state and further the tradition of communist work These criteria govern all usages of the united front,from the level of the in the trade unions and reformist parties, it should excavate and develop the isolated iocal action to that of government. They govern the anti-imperialist Bolshevik positions on the movements of the oppressed. Last but not least, united front, as dealt with in @ previous section, and the workers’ united today’s programme must embody the conclusion of a careful analysis of the front in the im perialist countries. ,

key revolutionary situations of the last period and the use and misuse of tevoluhianary tactics within them.

OF course, this does not mean that communists cannot intervene and give Jeadership Jo the class struggle unts) all programmatic work is complete. This would mean waiting forever since the communist programme is, in a sense, never complete. it is tested and corrected in the bght of experience. The Comintern was able to lead mighty struggles without a finished programme. The movement for the Fi attempted to shape the course of events in Spain in the 1930s before the Transitional Programme had been wnitten, The class struggle does not wait for « finished programme, Rather, it 1s a consiant spur to develop the programme. In no sense does this mean that revolutionanes should abandon their programmatic work’ far from it. Even while attempting to chart a victorious course in Spain, Trotsky worked untiringly to re-eiaborate the communist programme end lay the basis for the Transitional Programme.

The workers’ government ‘

As well as being # description of the revolutionary government communists Sirive to achieve, the “workers' government” (or workers’ and peasants’ goverment) can be operated as a united front tactic in circummanoes in which the question of power is posed, but when the working class remains under the leader ship of reformists or centrists.

Revolutionaries would demand the formation of a government of the worken and demand that the reformists break with the bourgeoisie. We would call for a workers’ government that would arm the workers, base iteelf on and be answerable to their councils of action and to other renk end file organisations. {t would also take steps to expropriste the major capitalists and introduce workers’ contro! of production. Only if s “united front" government took auch measures could it be designated as a ‘workers’ government”; that is, one Following this method, we recognise the centrality of programmatic work which cominunsets would sive political support 6, and under certain conditions

bul constantly focus that work and the legacy of tactics and demands , thal we (et. eens complete independence of agitation), eater. Under no arcum have from the Marxist tradition, into specific Action Programmes for particular stances do we designate as “workers'"’ governments, governments of social

eriods of class struggle, or particular sections of the working class democretic and labour parties (or coslitions with Stalinist or petit-bourgeais P OF : ing pationalis! parties) which fail {0 carry out the above measures.

in producing and attempting to utilise such programmes in the class struggle, we are using the method applied by Trotsky when he produced the Action Programme for France in 1934. We apply our overall strategy - the Marxist programme for proletanan power - to particular areas of work. An Action Pro-

VT

x “fave! op : , ” communists must fight alongside reformist and centrist workers, in all their ~

: { ts 1 ne on ou involvement. However, at all times we counterpose to the metho 5, Lara “re esignate 8 uch gove ene waren soverameats lov a slogans and goals of the reformists and centrists, those of our own revolutionf 2 he reformists € comm erg polos! ary action programme. In this way, we seek to build a revolutionary commun OF the relor mists. ist leadership in the rank and (ile movement, with the avowed aim of turning

We regard it as most improbable that reformists would form a workers’ A : inst capitalism. government, in a period of acute revolutionary crisis, except under the greatest the trade unions into organs of struggle again P m

pressure from an aroused working class, organised in eoviets. However, as a The revolutionary struggle of the working class must break aut of the conunited front demand in a critica! situation, the workers’ government slogan fines of industrial trade union organisation if it is to succeed in smashing the would expose the misieaders, and prepare the working class for power. Jn this capitalist state. To this end, in all major struggles, we call for and try to build, sense, the slogan has an “algebraic” character. By this we moan that the com- councils of action comprising delegates from workers in struggle and workers position of such a government is not declared as fixed in advance. If, in the supporting them, Such delegates should be directly elected deputies and should unlikely event, a workers’ government othe than the dictatorship of the prolet- be recallable. They must be authoritative representatives of the workplace. To ariat came into being, then it would merely be # prelude or bridge to such a ensure victory in any generalised strike action against the bosses, we urge these dictatorship, In no sense is the workers’ government 8 necessary historical stage councils to be organised in every locality and for them to organise the armed thal bas to be gone through, prior to the dictatorship of the proietariat. defence of the working class through a workers’ militia. In circumstances of class

wide struggle, we call for the creation of a national central council of delegates

from all local workers’ councils to co-ordinate and lead the struggle. Conflict

that has reached such a level will, of necessity, pose the question of which class

rules in society, We answer that the workers must rule. They musi seize power ~~ and rule through workers’ councils.

Soviets can arise only at a time when the masses enter onto the road of revolutionary struggle. They can survive only on the basis of a revolutionary situation. In ail the major revolutionary struggles of the exploited and oppressed, embryos of soviet-type organisation have been created. The task of revolutionaries is to extend those fighting organisations of the masses into a fully-developed soviet form.

The gencra) strike The general strike is the second most powerful weapon, after the insurrection, available to the working class. It is qualitstively different

from other forms of strike action in that it objectively poses the question of slate power, il paralyses the functioning of society, requiring the proletariat

to go beyond its normal forms of organisation. A general strike calls down the full force of the state machine on the working class which, consequently, must develop its own military capacities, ifs own ability to organise food supplies etc.. While the general strike puts the question of insurrection on the order of the day,

it is not itself the insurrection. The slogan of the general strike has to be raised Soviets unite the representatives of al} fighting groups,and throw open their where the issues confronting the working class go beyond partial or sectional doors to ali the oppressed and exploited. All proletarian political currents questions. The initial objective of the general strike must have a class-wide compete within them on the basis of the widest possible democracy. Individual rejevance, even if this consists of supporting a key section of workers against a delegates must be responsible to and recallable by the base units of the government (as happened in Britain in 1926). exploited and oppressed. The leading bodies of the soviets, in their turn, must However, the logic and dynamic of a generat strike can take if rapidly beyond be recallable by the soviets themselves. Only thus can the soviels be protected ils initial objectives. Revolutionaries seek to develop this dynamic and prevent against bureaucralisation or incorporation into the bourgeois state. any atlempts lo limit the scope of a general strike once it is mobilised. This : The very existence of soviets immediately creates a Dual Power situation. By dynamic 1s precisely to pose the question - who shall be master of the house, their nature, they pose the potential of establishing the dictatorship of the who shail rule in society? While it dovs not, in itself, resolve this question, the proletariat and the socialist re-construction of society. But only revolutionary importance of the general strike for Marxists is that in posing it, it can poten- communists have a programme for the final victory of the soviets. Reformists tially open up the road to the insurrection and the seizure of state power. This and Stalinists will seek to stamp out the embryos of soviet-type organisation, is the goal revolutionaries strive for in every general strike. For this reason the turning them either into means for re-establishing bourgeois rule (as in Russia general strike slogan must always be accompanied by slogans for the creation after the February revolution and Germany in 1918), into trade union type or mobilisation of the workers’ organisations - militias, councils of action - negotiating bodies (as was the case with the leadership of Solidarnosce after the necessary (0 allow for the revolutionary development of the potential of the formation of the inter-faclary committees), of into stage-managed adjuncts to general strike. . . . . the Stalinists as organs of so-called ‘Popular Power’, We fight ta prevent any Whether or not it is preceeded by a general strike, working class revolution =f these forms of demobilising the masses. Sovicts without revolutionary leadermust take the form of insusrection, the armed seizure of power by the workers ship will not bring about the socialist revolution, For this reason, we fight to organisations, under the jeaderstup of a revolutionary party. A central component — puiid a revolutionary communist party with deep roots in the working class. of all tactics deployed by revolutionanes, therefore, must be the preparation of Only with such a party al its head will the creation and consolidation of the the military capacity of the working class. From the first formation of picket class rule of the proletariat be possible. defence squads to the creation of armed workers’ detatchments and the winningover of key sections of the regular armed forces, the arming of the working THE CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP OF THE WORKING CLASS ; P : ¥ The world is ripe for revolution. Socialism is on the agenda. There can be no THE ORGANISATIONS OF STRUGGLE OF THE WORKING CLASS question that ina world in which millions starve, and sre deprived of the right to work, while capitalism stunts the development of the productive forces and The trade unions are the bedrock organisations created by the working class indeed threatens the destruction of the planel in order to safeguard profits for to defend and improve their living slandards and working conditions under capit- a handful of people, that the objective pre-requisites for socialism exist. The alism. To this extent they are instruments for domesticating the working class working class, the only force that can destroy capitalism, is held back from within capitelism, They are imbued with narrow divisions between crafts and victory over capitalism by its bureaucratic and reformist leaderships. The working skills, They are the base of a privileged trade union bureaucracy which has a masses have, time and again, moved into action against the bosses - France 1968, material interest in maintaining the wage contract between capital and labour. Chile 1973 and Portugal 1974/75 are but the most recent examples. Yet, in cach This contract gives the bureaucracy its reason for being. It arbitrates and nogo- case,the masses have been held in check, or treacherously turned upon, by their liates within the framework of capitalism. As such, the bureaucracy can be existing leaderships. The workers have been outflanked because within their own characterised as a caste, with interests distinct from the rank and file and tanks there has not been an alternative revolutionary leadership. coynterposed to them. Despite willingly engaging in ferocious struggles with the class enemy, ona A‘ organisations thal mobilise large numbers of workers against the employing — world scale the working class has remained potitically weak. it is dominated pol class, the unions also have the potential of being transformed into organs of itically by agents of the class enemy, and it has not been able to defeat these struggle against capitalism. Theis craftism and bureaucratisation can be tran- agents. This political weakness creates the conditions in which buyesucracies have

scended, In all major battles betwoen the proletariat and capitalism, the interests been able to get away with betrayals. However, in the face of attacks from the of rank and file trades unionists conflict abarply with those of bureaucrats. Only employing class, the masses have shown a repeated willingness to fightback with through struggle againat the trade union bureaucracy can the trade unions them- direct action. This creates the possibility of transcending the political weakness selves be taken into the hands of rank and file workers and their directly elected of the working class, by pitting the rank and file against the leaders. It creates and accountable leaders, and turned into effective organs of class struggle. the best gonditions for smashing all bureaucratic obstacles to revolutionary

We fight for the construction of democratic industrial unions in which all struggles. The inevitable conflicts with capital that erupt are the conflicts officials are elected, accauntable and recallable, and are paid nu more than the within which @ revolutionary party can and must be forged. = . average rate of pay of their members. We fight for the formation of factory The mortal enemy of that party will be seformism in either its Stalinist or social committees in every plant and workplace, representing all unions and all workers 4¢mocratic guise. In the imperislised world, petit-bourgeois nationslists will siso in the workplace. These factory committees need to fight to defend the interests PFOVe to be the enemy of the revolutionary communist party, We have demon-

of all workers in the workplace, and crucially, they must struggle {0 impose strated the nature of Stalinism and petit-bourgeois nationaliem snd their threat to workers’ control of production, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution. the victory of revolution. Social democratic reformism - for example the Labour The struggle for control pases the question of which class rules - a question that Party in Britain or the Socialist Party in France - is no less an enemy of the cannot he resolved within the confines of one factory of industry. Hence we struggle for genuine workers’ power.

struggle fo commit the unions to the struggle to overthrow capitalism and fight Socia) democratic reformism is the political expression of trade union negoagainst those who would wish to give the unions an unpolitical, neutral or tiation with capital, and has its origins in the Second International. It has a contrareformist character. dictory nature; it is socially rooted in the working class - in particular its privi-

To co-ordinate such a struggle, and to work for the defeat and replacement of Jeged strata, the labour aristocracy - but it is commitled to the bourgeois state the bureaucrats with genuine representatives of the rank and file, an opposition = and the defence of bourgeois property relations. Social democratic parties are, 1s needed in every union and across unions. We fight to build a united front of therefore, ‘bourgeois workers’ parties''. The highest aspiration of social democ-

mubtanis against the bureaucrats. Wilhin the trade unions, the form of the racy is to manage capitalism in the interests of “the people’. Its political stratunited front, in present conditions, will be a rank and file movement, 2 egy, therefore, is the creation and maintenance af a bourgeois democracy within lighting alliance of rank and file militants. By this we mean that revolutionary which it can be elected into government. A social democratic government is

a 4

totally committed to the defence of capitalism against the interests of the projetariat, Such a government is a ‘bourgeois workers' government”’.

S «

It will drown the working class in blood either by carrying out the counterrevolution itself, as in Germany in 1918, or by politically and physically disarming the proletariat in the face of the counter-revolution, as in Chile in 1973. We reject the idea that there can be a peaceful parliamentary road (0 socialism. This tenet of social democratic reformism has proved itself time and time again disastrous for the working class. The working class must rid itself of reformism if it is lo avoid future catastrophic defeats.

in all its forms, reformism is politically consistently bourgeois. Centrism, by contrast, is characterised by inconsistency, wavering between the needs of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie. In this it reflects the social position of the petil-bourgeoisie.

Centrism's vacillations mean that it can never be a stable force. It is incapable of building or evolving into a revolutionary parly, because it can never develop & revolutionary programme. Faced with a decisive test of the class struggle, mosl especially the test of power, the choice of either/or, centrism will shatter into a thousand pieces. Insulated from this choice, centrism can enjoy long periods of existence, but in doing so it does not cease to be an unstable, vacillating force entirely capable of going over in whole or in parts to the camp of reformism and the class enemy. To become a revolutionary communist Organisation, a centrist group must make a decisive break, or series of breaks, with its past centrist politics and practice.

An understanding of the direction in which a centrist organisation is moving is vital for Marxists. Is it moving to the left - in which case we should encourage it, or is it moving to the right - in which case we should denounce it? The direction and pace of its movement, of course, depends on the tempo of class struggle. Under all circumstances, Marxists make no concessions to the politics of centrism, though the tone of criticism may vary depending ‘on the ‘ direction in which a centrist group is moving. .

Centrism’s fatal flaw is its faith thal the historical process absolves it of the task of consciously leading revolutions. Bul fatatism, faith in the historical process, always jeads lo defeat. That is why neither ieft nor right centrism can ever adopt a correct, systematic revolutionary course. There can be no question . thal 4 broad centrist group is in any way a substitute for the revolutionary. party.

While the working class remains under the leadership of reformism, centrism or petit-bourgeois nationalism, it will be defeated. lt will remain trapped by a crisis of leadership. The socialist revolution cannot be victorious spontaneously. }t is @ conscious act, requiring a proletariat conscious of what it is fighting to achieve. Only if the crisis of leadership is resolved by winning the vanguard of the international proletariat to a revolutionary party, will the victory of socialism be assured. For this reason revolutionaries direct all their efforts to building a party rooted in the must class-conscious layers of the working class, those - constantly renewed in sisuggies as they break out - who Jead the rank and file in action against capitalism and the reformist bureaucracies,

The revolutionary party is not an Optional extra in the struggie for pawer. It is the key weapon of the working class, Countless revolulionary situations have turned into their opposite - bloody counter-revolution - thanks lo the absence of a party based on the programme of communism, grouping under its banner the most class conscious working class militants. The party sets as its tasks overcoming the unevenness of working class experience and consciousness, the fighting of bourgeois ideas within the working class, the presentation of the Jessons of past struggles and the bonding together of all the fragmented struggles that spontaneously occur under capitalism. It carries out these flasks with the aim of developing a conscious and coherent offensive against capitalism,

A revolutionary party must consis! predominantly of revolutionary working class militants. Jt must be the real vanguard of the class. Building such a party in Britain and internationally is the primary task of the Workers Power group in Britain, and of ous fraternal organisation in Ireland, the ‘Irish Workers Group.

Our programmatic work on Stalinism, socia]) democratic reformism, centrism, the trade unions, women, and imperialism, is geared towards providing rock solid foundations for such a party. Without such foundations, all talk of a party is nonsense. AS we have repeated many times, however, foundations without anything built upon them are useless. Our programmatic work is designed to win us rectuits from the working class. Passive propaganda, however will nol achieve this. A vigorous intervention into the actual struggles of the working class, the focussing of our programme and propaganda to those struggles, an active commitment to the victory of those struggles, however partial they may be, will win us recruils. We are a fighting, nol a passive, propaganda group - fighting to pass beyond our present limitations of size and resources and to develop into becoming a factor in events in the class struggle. To help us achieve this goal, we urge all revolutionary-minded militants to contact us, discuss our activities and our ideas with us, and join us.

EXTRACTS FROM FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF OUR PROGRAMME "PERMANENT REVOLUTION" Number 1.

_ ee me tr,

‘THE 1984/5 MINERS’ STRIKE & THE WRP

There is another contender for the role of revolutionary party who are not at all reticent about raising the cali for the general strike or offering political leadership: the Workers’ Revolulionary Party (WRP) and its daily paper Newsline. The WRP has previously been @ proponent of the slogan “General strike 10 kick out the Tories’. This slogan obviously gains a sympathetic response from workers already in struggle agains! the hsted Tories. The problem is that it is a negative slogan about the question of government. Whilst it embodies militant hatred of Thatcher, it. also contains a vacuum - who or what should replace her? Pohtics like nature abhors a vacuum. Whilst the “Trotskyist” framer of the slogan may have in mind the proletarian dictatorship, the masses of still-reformist workers have in mind “forcing a general election’’. Scargill himself raises this perspective for the miner’ strike. As a disguised revolutionary slogan it is totally inadequale. To gain power for the working class needs more than the mightiest negative act (the general strike). I needs a positive act: the armed overthrow of the bourgeois state. Thus as a “revolutionary slogan" it is misleading and inadequate.

As a reformisi slogan it is a complete disaster, even if it were capable of jumping over the objections of workers imbued with illusions in parliamentary democracy. The general strike is indeed the highest form of struggie shart of the direct armed struggie for power (the armed insurrection). To suggest in advance thal it should be tied to the objective of a general election is ta foreclose on its further development. Instead of clarifying the “question of who rules” in a revolutionary manner, it assists the reformists in translating this into a purely parliamentary question - one which will only resolve which bourgeois party will hold office, not which class shall hold state power.

in this sense an election would be a massive step backwards away from mags direct action and back onto the terrain of bourgeols democracy. It allows the alomised oleciorate - bombarded by the media - to decide the issue of @ clags battle. it exchanges the massive capital of class-wide action - holding as it does the potential for revolution - for the smail change of electoral politice. Ut risks leaving the reformiat traitors at the top of the labour movement firmly in the saddle.

This then is an ambiguous slogan. The inadequate revalutionary” interpretation has been kept and “improved” by the WRP - as we shall see. The reformist interpretation haa been unblushingly embraced by the Socialist League. Only they have trimmed the rather-Loo-revolutionary all out general strike to... a day of action! Indeed, they seem to have had a bad attack of calling on the TUC to'Name the Day!"", Like partners to an overlong engagement, their paper Socialist Action has beon tiresomely pleading with the TUC for three months. On 23rd March they asked the TUC to "Name the day for solidarity action wilh the NUM”, They did the same on April 301h and several times thereafler, By May 18th they threw caution to the wind and asked the TUC to “name the day for a general strike - with the promise of further action”. Let us hope the miners can hang on! Socialist Action may get there in the end! Yet oven if it docs, the goals it sets for this struggle are utterly reformist: ‘The labour movement must force s general election! No pact and no coalition with the SDP/Liberal alliance! For a Labaur government piedged to socialist pulicies!”.*

This is the reality behind the radicalism of the “General Strike lo kick out the Tories” slogan. 11 poses the election of a Labour government es the objective of the atrike. We reject thie entirely. A Labour government is not a higher good than the immediate goals and demands of the working class. Labour governments - even those pledged to vacuous “socialist policies” - that are not accountable lo councils of action and workers’ defence organisations remain bourgeois governments. There is no guarantee that the election of such a bourgeois government will lead to the fulfillment of the demands of the working class. The [974-9 Labour government was a classic example. With the help of the

trade union bureaucracy it flouted its “socialist pledges, demobilised the working vlass and proceeded to attack its jobs and services, Struggle wil] decide what sort of government emerges from a genera} strike. We struggle for a revolutionary outcome.

As we explained earlier, the demands of the general strike need to be, at this stage, clear and specific united front demands. The WRP eschew the opportunism of the SL and pase as the goal of the genera} Strike now the kicking out of the Tories and the establishment of a “workers’ revolutionary government”. AS early as 1983 over the NGA fine they called on the TUC to “organise a political general strike whose purpose will be the struggle for power and the establishment of sociatiam’”*

This remarkable demand on the TUC - perhaps it is meant ta expose them when they fail to carry il out! - has become even moe iudicrous in the tight of a WRP statement of three months later. Here we are told that “by their nature, trade unions are organs of defence of the working class and its living standards and cannol rise (o the conscious revolutionary task of overthrowing the ruling class, smashing the capitalist siate machine and establishing socialism",”? By May 1984 the objective of the gencral strike had become “to bring down the hated Tory dictatorship" © which 1s defined as “Bonapesiist”.

We had always thought, alone with Marx, Lenin and Tratsky that a Bonapartist regime was called into being when the vous , geois parties could no longer rule via a parliamentary majority and were obliged to rest directly on the inililary and the state bureaucracy, pretending to be a regime “above Politics”, Such

a regime, whiist pretending to arbitrate between the classes in fact uses the state forces, unhindered by “normal” legality, against the working class, There can be relatively weak Bonapartisms, which cannot tolally suppress the workers’ Organizations, and which balance uneasily between the bosses and the workers. There can be very strong ones that crush the unions and the parties of the proletariat completely. But Thatcher's government is neither of these. I( rules by right of its huge and very stabic parliamentary majority. It uses this (o legally repress the miners, Vt isa demucratic (i.e. a bourgeois democratic government),

The WRP's phoney “dialectics” altempl to deny this in vain: “Ali the weight of Tory class inws and the actions of Thatcher af GCHQ have abolished independence (of the trade unions from the atate - WP) and have made the atate spparatus independent of any control of parliament - every action of the trade unions is now illegal”.® This is a self-contradictory tisyue of confusion. Tory Jaws passed by parliament have apparently made the state apparatus independent of any control from Parliament. When did parliament pass this emergency decree gutting itself, and above all why, since the Tories have a “rubber stamp” majority . in parliament?

In fact, this politically illiterate characterisation is necessary for the fake-dialecticians of the WRP to hide from themselves a very unpalatable truth - millions of workers have illusions in Thatcher's “democratic mandate” for her anti-working class policies. I is a childish attempt to alter reality in order to Cit the currently unrealisable slogan of “a general strike 10 install a workers. revolutionary government”.

Another group to raise the question of the general strike in a confused and opportunist fashion is the Labour-oriented fragmenting “alliance” around Socialist Organiser. They demand an immediate “one day general strike” but argue that things are nol hot enough yet for an’ all-out general strike. All that can be done now is to call on the TUC to “prepare for” and “organise fos" a general strike, Tas on March 28th we were told “A one day all out stoppage should be called immediately, Ef this strategy were sdopted victory would be in aight."""® This could iead to bigger things: “a campaign on these lines could aiart developing the perapective of an all out General strike. But right now whet's essential is io push the dispute another few miles

A few miles further on (two months to be precise) and Suciatist Organiser wus still stuck in the same ald cut: “What's needed is to develop the struggle towards a general atrike”"'?, Indeed, but the question ix how to develop it? How to get “towards” a generat strike? Well, calling for one - in every union, =; in every workplace - agitating and propagandising - shouting for

it outside the TUC General Council, on the mass demonstrations, might help! On the other hand, to cali on bureaucrats to" repare” a strike lets them off the hook. Every left faker on the TUC will tell you he’s “organising for" a generat strike or that i he has a “perspective” for a strike. Indeed, many will say that it is impossible to do anything (like call out their own members) until sufficient “preparation” for a general strike has been carried out. The demand is totally unspecific. It ties the bureaucrats, and particularly the lefts, 10 no concrete actions whatsoever. The call to “prepare for a general strike” is @ hollow one, a sign of cowardice, a refusal to fight now for what is desperately needed. It is a slogan that reflects the outiook of the union snd Labour bureaucracy, not that of revolutionary communists,

Let us repeat: the call for a general strike does not contsadict the everyday and immediate tasks of militant support for the miners on the picket lines, or solidarity action euch as blacking and shopfloors collections. It does not replace the attempt toStimulate a mass slrike wave by bringing forward each and overy claim and struggle. But given the Tory laws and the peatly . strengthened police pick¢t-buster, we need the weapon of the Pa general strike, : os ws

That weapon lies locked up and rusting, in an armoury whose key is in the keeping of the TUC. Therefore we have @ duty to mobilise ihe mass forces of those Slruggling now in this dispute, in all disputes, 10 force the do-nothing “pew realists” to yr tet us use our unions and funds, to decisively help the miners to 1 victory and to smash the Tory laws. The general strike - as an intrinsically political class-wide weapon - will enormously raise and accelerate the political consciousness of the working class, - ! Even if it gets no further than a widespread call, this itself will have a spin-off effect in terms of solidarity and the prosecution of other sectional struggles, If it does take place it will work s s¢a-change on the reformist consciousness of the British working class. And when that happens, to paraphrase Engels: “These will be communism again in Britain".

Footnotes

. Workers Power No 8 September 1979 } Rasa Luxemburg Selected. Political Writings {.ondon 1972 p.155 } » Leon Trotsky On France New York, 1979 p.400

. Socialist Review Muy 1984

Socialist Action 11/5/84

Newaline 16/12/83

Nowaline $/4/84

- Newsline 1/5/84

. Newsline 9/4/84

4 E oO : 5

WORKERS POWER is a revolutionary communist organisation basing itself upon the programme and principles developed by Kari Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century, by V. |. Lenin and the first four cangressas of the Communist International in the first decades of this century, and by Leon Trotsky and the first two congresses of the Fourth International in the years up to 1948.

Capitalism is a system based on the systematic exploitation of the proletariat. It is doomed to recurring crises caused by the contradiction between the enormous expansive powers of socialised production and the fact that private ownership determings that such production must be far profit.

The compatitive struggle between capitals brings anarchy into national and world econamy. Millions starve while food is destroyed to maintain prices. Commodities rot or rust unsold in a world of acute want for the majority of humanity.

In its final, imperialist stage, the major capitalist powers - USA, tha EEC countries and Japan - cruelly exploit the ‘Third Warid", crippling its economic development within the limits that can realise super-profits for the great banks of Wall Street and the City of London, and the transnational corporations.

Oniy tha aLotition of private property in the large-scale maans of production, and the creation of a planned aconomy can end forever expioitation and oppression. Only the abolition of class society Can remove the root causes of the

oppression of women. it is not men, as a sex, who

developed and perpetuate this oppression, ss femin-

ists claim. Working class men are the natural allies of working class women, They are not the enemy. It is a class system based on private Property in

the means of production that requires for its continued functioning the use of women as unpaid domestic labourers that ensures the continued existance of this oppression.

Only the working class can laad the oppressed masses of the planet to the achievement of this historic task. To do so requires a social revolution that smashes the armed power of the capitatist Class - its state, replacing «1 with the dictatorship of the proletariat, founded upon workers’ councils and the armed militia of the working class.

Such a revolution must be Permanent. Whilst starting from the immediate tasks facing the workers and peasants - which in the “Third World” includes the iand question and national independance - it cannot stop at intermediate “democratic” stages without the working class suffering a heavy defeat. The political power of the proletariat {in altiance with the other Oppressed classes such as the poor peasants) is essential to resolve thase “capitalist tasks as well as to move forwards towards a planned economy and socialism. The latter is indaed impossible to achieve within an isolated nation. Thus the revolution must be international - its fundamental task is its extension.

The so-catied “communist” countries are in tact degenerate workers’ states. They sre workers’ states in that the bourgeoisie has been overthrown and capitalist exploitation suppressed.

Vet their planned economies remain hampered by a parasitic caste of bureaucrats. This caste has usurped political power from the proletariat and pursues 5 counter-revolutionary international strategy - “socialism in one country’. The “Communist Parties” in these states, and their supporters throughout the world, are Staiinists. While

revolutionary communists {Trotskyists} defend unconditionally the workers’ states, they are also a force for political revolution within them to smash the bureaucratic caste and restore or create workers’ democracy based on soviais - workers’ councils.

In the advanced capitalist states, the proletariat is repeatedly held back from the struggle for power by the sacial democratic {or Labour) Parties, the trade union bureaucracy and the Stalinist parties. These bodies - whilst based an the workers’ @rganisations - pursue a bourgeois Policy, sacrificing the historic aims of the proletariat to reforms within capitalism. However, in periods of crisis, capitalism seeks to recoup these concessions and a crisis of leadership ensues in the labour movement, which the proletariat must resolve in order to win.

To this end we fight inside the warkers' movement to link existing struggies - aven ones for. only partial demands - to the Struggle for working class power. In each struggle for pay, against closures, for political rights, wa fight for torms of organisation and elements af workers’ control that bring workers into conflict not anty with an individual capitalist, but with capitalist power, and the capitalist systam. Through trans: itional demands the masses can find a bridge between their present struggles and everyday demands, and the tasks of socialist revolution.

20

On the basis of these Principles we give unconditional suppart to ail national liberation struggles, including that of the Republican movement in Northern treiand.

We stand for no platform for tascists. Against all immigration controls. Against discrimination, Geporataions and haramment meted Gut ta blacks by the police. For the right of blacks to organise in their own defence, and for the duty of the labour mavement to Practically assist them. Against racism and racists in the trade unions.

We fight for complete social, legal and political equality for women, Equal pay for equal work. Free abortion and Sontraception on demand. We stand for 8 working class womens’ movement that can fight as an integral Part of the labour movemant tor workers’ power, Oniy working class power can socialise domestic labour and release woman from their centuries’ old Oppression.

Wea fight for the liberation of Gays from the persecution and discrimination that is their tot under capitelism. We fight against the Oppression

and super-exploitation - via the family, the state and at work - that youth suffer.

in the unions we fight for the total independance of the trade unions from the state, for militant class policies, for immediate, partial and transitional: damands which link today’s Struggles under capitatism to a united and coher: ont offensive to overthrow it.

We stand for a rank and fite movement of the militant minority to win the regular efection and recaliability of ali union officiats and the fixing of their salaries at the averaye of their mem: bers.

We fight to build a revolutionary alternative leadership in the unions, and a revolutionary wing in the Labour Party and the LPYS as part of our fight to build a revolutionary party. Our goal, as our name prociaims, is workers’ power and nothing jess,

Workers Power and its fraternal allies, the irish Workers’ Group, the Gruppe Arbeitermacht (Germany) and the Groupe Pouvoir Quvrier {France} are by no means yet parties capabie of challenging Stalinism and social democracy for jeadership across the whole range of working class struggies, We are restricted by our size to arguing for our programme, our tactics and Strategy with the proletarian vanguard, who stili, by and large, give ailegianca either to the reformists parties or fo various centrist organisations. But we seek at the same time the maximum involvement in the class struggle. We fight for our ideas whilst rendering the maximum assistance to workers in action.

As weil as new revolutionary parties, the working class needs a new revolutionary inter: national. The last revolutionary international, the Fourth, coliapsed into cantrism between 1948 and 1951, and disintegrated organisationally in 1953. Only its degenerated fragments exist. today. What is needed is a democratic cantralist international, & true world party of socialist revolution. oa

As a first step along this path, Workers Power with its irish, German, Franch and Chilean cothinkers has founded the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist international (MARCH, with the object of achieving an international democratic-centralist tendency, On this basis we can and will go further slong the road to building national revolutionary parties, a revolutionary international, and the establishment of the world socialist order. @

Siac nat pitta

SUBSCRIBE!

NAM, ocsscreccreccannesecccnecavsesevecae

ACESS. seccrnssscccscersnaverenscnsanes SHRAASAROAPAAEESESEEREEECEEREESEOES SORES

PADMA OA ROFL EE DENDOSAEREDA OEE ROCESED SAE TECEREON

Send £4 to the address beiow and receive tO issues of the paper, Make cheques payable to: Workers Power and send .to: Workers Power

BCM 7750

Landon

WCIN 3XX

Reports & Analysis from every front of the class struggle.

OTHER MAJOA PUBLICATIONS FROM WORKERS POWER -

THE PERMANENT DEATH AGONY REVOLUTION

OF THE FOULKTH Sen eo nc INTERNATIONAL

and the tasks of Trotskyists today

mel Somme tags 1144

Workers Pawer Jesh Workers Geoup

Reformism - the bourgeois workers’ party

Fhe world Kanomy den 6 Galan the fhatches sofution @ Furdanaoiel pemigln ut i peoyeemome @

The Degenerated Revolution - the origins Permanent Aavatutian Noa, t and nature of the Stalinist States

£1,50 plus 50p p&p . £2.00 pius 50p p&p

The Death Agony of the Fourth taternatianal and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today £1.50 pius 50p p&o

PUBLICATIONS FROM THE MOVEMENT FOR A REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

Just Published by the Irish Workers LISEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS? KONNEN SIE DEUTSCH LESEN? . roup: 3 CLASS STRUGG La nouvelle publication de la Groupe errant tet Pouvoir Guvrier:

mene rae seine woneees cases RANE “L’ARGENTINE, LE MORENISME, THE THREAT OF WAR ET LA LUTTE POUR UNE INTERCENTRAL AMERICA NATIONAL REVOLUTIONNAIRE” Pouvoir Ouvrier No 5, juin 1984. James Connolly's ,

ésUSTED LEE ESPANOL?

Poder Obrero - Publecaceones Andes: “LA DESINTEGRACION DE LA DICTADURA Y LAS TAREAS DE

LOS REVOLUCIONAREOS

AOY DIA"

“DE TAREAS AOY DIA : UNA REFORMULACEON DEL PROGRAMMA ES NECESAREA”

Ali publications of the MRCI shown above are available

from Workers Powers, price SOp each, plus 25p postage. Make cheques/POs pavable to Workers Power “GRUNDLEGENDE PRINZIPIEN