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The ICFI Defends Trotskyism

1982 -1986

Documents of the Struggle against the WRP Renegades

Fourth International: A Journal of International Marxism. Volume 13. Number 2. Autumn 1986

Editorial
A Contribution to a Critique of G. Healy's "Studies in Dialectical Materialism" | by David North | October 7 - November 7, 1982
Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North | December, 1983
Letter from David North to Cliff Slaughter | December 27, 1983
Letter from David North to Mike Banda | January 23, 1984
Political Report by David North to the International Committee of the Fourth International | February 11, 1984
Letter from Aileen Jennings to the Workers Revolutionary Party Political Committee | June 30, 1985
Letter from Cliff Slaughter to Sections of the ICFI | October 5, 1985
Joint Communique from the Greek and Spanish Sections of the ICFI | October 21, 1985
Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Crisis of the British Section | October 25, 1985
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Expulsion of G. Healy | October 25, 1985
Special Congress Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite) | October 26, 1985
"Split Exposes Right-Wing Conspiracy Against Party" |Statement by the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite) | October 30, 1985
"Morality and the Revolutionary Party" News Line article by Michael Banda | November 2, 1985
Letter from the International Committee to the Central Committee of the Workers Internationalist League, Greek Section of the ICFI | November 9, 1985
Letter from the Workers League Central Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee | November 21, 1985
Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North | November 26, 1985
"Revolutionary Morality and the Split in the WRP" | News Line Report on November 26 London Public Meeting | November 29, 1985
Letter from Peter Schwarz to the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party | December 2, 1985
"Nothing to hide... or fear" | News Line Comment by Geoff Pilling | December 6, 1985
Letter from the Workers League Political Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee | December 11, 1985
Resolution of the International Committe of the Fourth International on the Suspension of the Workers Revolutionary Party | December 16, 1985
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International | December 17, 1985
Resolution of the Workers League Central Committee | December 22, 1985
Letter from David North to the Glasgow North-East Branch of the WRP | December 23, 1985
Letter from the ICFI to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee | December 27, 1985
Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee | December 29, 1985
Document of the Workers Revolutionary Party 8th National Congress | January 1986
Letter from Tony Banda to the Workers League Central Committee | January 23, 1986
Resolution 1 of the WRP Central Committee | January 26, 1986
Resolution 2 of the WRP Central Committee | January 26, 1986
A Letter to All Sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International and to the Members of the Workers Revolutionary Party | Resolution of the Workers League Central Committee | January 27, 1986
Letter from Cliff Slaughter to Peter Schwarz | January 30, 1986
Resolution of the Central Committee of the Socialist Labour League (Australia) | February 1-2, 1986
League of Socialist Workers (BSA) Affirms Principles of Trotskyism | Statement of the Central Committee of the German Section of the ICFI | February 2, 1986
"In Defense of Security and the Fourth International" by David North | February 2, 1986
Statement of the National Committee of the Young Socialists (Britain) | February 3, 1986
"For a Public Discussion on Healy's IС" | Workers Press article by Dave Good | February 7, 1986
Resolutions of the 8th Congress of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Internationalist) | February 8-9, 1986
Resolution of the 8th Congress of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Slaughter-Banda) | February 8, 1986
"British Trotskyists Defend Internationalism, Reject Banda-Slaughter Splitters" | Bulletin Editorial Board Statement | February 11, 1986
"Behind the Split in the Workers Revolutionary Party" | Bulletin article by David North | February 21, 1986
Statement of the National Committee of the Young Socialists (Britain) | February 21, 1986
Dissolve the International Committee | Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Slaughter-Banda) | March 1986
Anti-Trotskyists Split from SLL | Statement of the Political Committee of the Socialist Labour League (Australia) | March 4, 1986
"Michael Banda, A Renegade from Trotskyism" | by K. Balasuriya, National Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist League (Sri Lanka) | March 5, 1986
"Michael Banda: A Political Obituary" | Bulletin article by David North | March 7, 1986
"The Case Against the SWP - What the Facts Show" | Bulletin articles by David North | March 11,14,18, 1986
Resolution of the Revolutionary Communist League Central Committee on the Resolution of the Liga Comunista Central Committee | March 28, 1986
Liga Comunista (Peru) Breaks with Trotskyism | Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International | June 1, 1986

1. Editorial

In this issue of Fourth International, we reprint the major documents of the struggle within the International Committee which culminated in February 1986 with the desertion of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These documents were originally published in the internal bulletins of those sections representing the majority of the International Committee, and were thoroughly discussed among the entire membership.

In our previous issue, we published the International Committee's exhaustive analysis of the degeneration of the Healy-Banda-Slaughter leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party. This statement, "How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism: 1973-1985," established that the collapse of the Workers Revolutionary Party in the autumn of last year was the product of opportunism. Based on a meticulous analysis of the political line of the WRP over more than a decade, the International Committee proved that Healy, Banda and Slaughter had, from the early 1970s, abandoned the struggle against Pabloite revisionism, rejected proletarian internationalism, and repudiated the theory of Permanent Revolution. On this basis, the statement established, the WRP had systematically betrayed the working class internationally and in Britain, and worked consciously to destroy the International Committee.

It has come as no surprise to the International Committee that this document has been greeted by all factions of the renegades with a stony silence. Neither the two competing factions of the WRP led by Healy and Slaughter, nor the so-called Communist Forum of Michael Banda, have acknowledged its existence. Their mutual silence is just one expression of their own inability to provide any Marxist analysis of the fate of the organization over which they presided jointly for so many years. Even more damning, neither Healy, Slaughter nor Banda have yet produced a coherent explanation of their supposed differences on questions of program and perspectives. This is one case where sound and fury have, indeed, signified nothing. For all the organizational bloodletting, none of them have explained, from the standpoint of the strategy and tactics of the world socialist revolution, why they split. The reason for this is that their essential differences are not with each other, but with the International Committee.

When the old clique leadership was confronted with a massive organizational crisis inside the WRP which could no longer be controlled, Banda and Slaughter broke with Healy on an utterly unprincipled basis — cynically using the middle-class slogan of "revolutionary morality" (initially introduced by Bill Hunter) to avoid any analysis of the real source of the political crisis. Prior to September 1985, Banda and Slaughter collaborated with Healy to impose a right-wing opportunist line upon the International Committee and to bureaucratically suppress and destroy all those who sought to defend Trotskyism. From the moment Banda and Slaughter realized that a decisive majority on the International Committee would not accept a phony bureaucratic settlement of the crisis inside the WRP and was determined to restore the program and principles of Trotskyism within the British section, they worked feverishly to split the WRP from the ICFI.

The documents reprinted in this issue comprise a comprehensive record of the struggle waged by the International Committee and its sympathizing section in the United States, the Workers League, against the political betrayals of the WRP. It demonstrates irrefutably that this struggle has been based on a defense of Trotskyist principles and program. On the other hand, the position of the WRP, before and after 1985, has been characterized by a virulent hostility to these same principles. Despite what appears at first glance to be a massive upheaval in the WRP, its political trajectory today is not substantially different from what it was prior to the split. For years the WRP leadership sought to conceal its abandonment of Trotskyism by bolstering the prestige of Healy, which had been originally based on his identification with the revolutionary principles he had defended against the Pabloite-SWP reunification of 1963. On the eve of the explosion inside the WRP, there existed no fundamental difference between its line and that of the Pabloites. The collapse of the Healy regime broke up the old ruling clique of Healy, Banda and Slaughter; but it did not produce a change in the revisionist orientation of any of its constituent elements.

Among the most outrageous lies circulated by Banda and Slaughter to justify their decision to split from the International Committee was that the ICFI did not really want to fight Healy and was only reluctantly drawn into the battle after it had been initiated by a group of conspirators from within Healy's apparatus. This myth became the basis for the Banda-Slaughter line that the ICFI sections and the Workers League did not want to break from their own "Healyism." These slanders are refuted by the historical record represented by the documents in this volume.

The editors believe that the documentary record speaks for itself, but we offer this brief introductory outline to assist the reader. Between 1982 and 1984, an extensive critique of the opportunist line of the WRP and the subjective idealist distortion of materialist dialectics upon which it was based was presented by David North, the national secretary of the Workers League. The fact that there exists no written reply on the part of the WRP to these criticisms proves that North withdrew them only because the leadership of the British section, which still dominated the International Committee, threatened to immediately sever all organizational relations with the Workers League. After first informing North in October 1982 that they agreed with his critique of Healy's writings on dialectics, Banda and Slaughter almost immediately came to an agreement with Healy to suppress further discussion of the differences on philosophy and their clear political implications.

From then on, Slaughter attempted to mount an offensive against the Workers League based on spurious allegations that it failed to appreciate the significance of Hegel in the development of dialectical materialism. As soon became clear, his alliance with Healy and his factional activities were based on political positions that were essentially Pabloite. His letter to North in December 1983 attacked the "very heavy emphasis" placed by the Workers League on the struggle for the political independence of the American working class during the US invasion of Grenada, and claimed that such emphasis "will become a weapon in the hands of all those who retain the mark of pragmatism." [See p.27] In a reply dated December 27, 1983, North warned that the position advanced by Slaughter "would lead, if accepted by the Workers League, straight toward outright opportunism." He added:

"I must admit that I am disturbed by the very suggestion that an emphasis on the 'political independence of the working class' could be characterized as 'very heavy' within the International Committee — especially in relation to the report from a sympathizing section in a country in which the working class has not yet broken politically from the liberals. All the organizational, political and theoretical tasks of a Marxist party — above all, in the United States — are directed precisely toward the achievement of this political independence.

"...The whole fight against the SWP since 1961 — not to mention the entire history of the struggle of Bolshevism — has hinged on this very issue. Far from embracing the concept of the political independence of the working class, it is under relentless attack by Stalinists and revisionists all over the world today. The neo-Stalinism of the SWP does not originate in the head of Mr. Barnes, but is a very definite response of US imperialism to the new stage of the capitalist crisis and the revolutionary upsurge of the world proletariat. In this way Pabloism serves as a medium for the transmission of imperialist pressures into the workers' movement. As I have heard you insist so many times in the past, it is at precisely such a point that the International Committee must be on the alert for any trace of the revisionist outlook within its own ranks and at the same time intensify its political and theoretical assault against Pabloism. As you will certainly agree, this fight against Pabloism is by no means behind us." [See pp.32-33]

There was no reply to this letter nor to that written by North to Mike Banda, the WRP's general secretary, one month later. North reported that the Workers League was "deeply troubled by the growing signs of a political drift toward positions quite similar — both in conclusions and methodology — to those which we have historically associated with Pabloism." [See p. 35] He called for "a renewal of our struggle against Pabloite revisionism — above all, against the manifestations of its outlook within our own sections" and declared that "The time has certainly come for the International Committee to issue its reply to the attacks of the SWP neo-Stalinists on the theory of Permanent Revolution and to demonstrate that it remains the indispensable scientific foundation for the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution." [See p.38]

On February 11, 1984, at a meeting of the International Committee (from which a number of sections had been arbitrarily excluded by the WRP), North explicitly warned the WRP that its political evolution mirrored the repudiation of Trotskyism by revisionist groups, spear-headed by the SWP, all over the world. He listed the most glaring examples of the WRP's descent into the crassest opportunism.

There was no reasoned response to the criticisms of the Workers League; only the threat of an immediate split. However, insofar as the WRP had any defense to make of its abandonment of a Trotskyist program, it was made by Cliff Slaughter. In the resolution he prepared for the 10th Congress of the International Committee, Slaughter asserted that "in today's historic conditions the lines drawn between a revolutionary party based on dialectical materialist training on the one hand, and groups formally adhering to Trotskyist program on the other, are lines between preparation for revolution and preparation to serve counterrevolution."

This insidious formulation, aimed at blackguarding the Workers League and anyone else who defended a Trotskyist program as budding counterrevolutionaries, exposes the crucial role played by Slaughter as the high priest of the Healy cult — devising the theoretical line which justified all manner of revisionism by the WRP. Slaughter, who insisted in private correspondence with Healy on the need for a "no holds barred" struggle against the Workers League [See p.93], defended the old charlatan's travesty of dialectics because it provided a smokescreen for the WRP's relentless attack on Trotskyism and the International Committee.

The record of the conflict between the WRP and the Workers League from 1982 to 1984, despite its bureaucratic suppression by Healy, Banda and Slaughter, disclosed the fundamental political and theoretical differences within the International Committee and is essential for an evaluation of the development of the struggle in 1985-86.

The dirty scandal which erupted inside the WRP leadership on July 1, 1985 — when Healy's depraved sexual abuse of female cadre, some of them underage, was exposed with the arrival of a letter written by his long-time personal secretary — merely brought to the surface the extent of the political rot inside the highest bodies of the organization. For a period, Healy, Banda and Slaughter contrived to suppress the crisis by trying to head off efforts by party members — principally WRP Central Committee member Dave Hyland — to convene an investigation by the Control Commission. As late as August 17, 1985, the WRP leadership called a meeting of the International Committee to raise vast sums of money to overcome a financial crisis in the British organization — without saying a word about the scandal in the leadership.

But in September and October, as news of the scandal became known to more and more members of the WRP, the sections of the International Committee gradually learned about the real state of affairs inside the British organization. With the entire clique leadership totally discredited, the International Committee alone possessed authority in the eyes of the WRP rank and file — especially as it learned for the first time of the suppressed political and theoretical criticisms which had been made by the Workers League over the previous three years. Lacking any platform of their own, Banda and Slaughter played for time by declaring their unconditional solidarity with the International Committee. In a written statement to all sections of the International Committee dated October 5, 1985, Slaughter declared that North had his "complete support and confidence, and that this support and confidence are shared by Comrade M. Banda." [See p.48]

Claiming absolute loyalty to the International Committee and full agreement with the positions of North, Slaughter wrote: "We hope that you will subject what Comrade North has to say to a thorough and objective analysis, and then join us in summoning up every ounce of revolutionary energy and resource to face up to, and go beyond the stage the IC has reached.

"We have complete confidence that this will prove the most decisive and positive step in the history of the IC, and that together we can arm all our sections for a decisive turn to the working class and real gains in the building of the International Committee." [See p.48]

At that time, a contrite Cliff Slaughter had not yet hit upon the idea that the whole IС was a degenerate Healyite organization. He readily acknowledged that the WRP had betrayed the ICFI and sought to subordinate it to the national interests of the British organization. He even offered, in the best parliamentary traditions, to resign from the secretaryship of the International Committee. When he returned to Britain, he delivered a report to the WRP Central Committee on October 12 which consisted largely of material which he plagiarized from the documents written by North between 1982 and 1984. He also told the Central Committee that "However bizarre and idiosyncratic the inner mechanics" of Healy's degeneration, "the process itself has a definite and political character — Pabloite revisionism and the destruction of the cadres of the International Committee."

The work of the International Committee in October 1985 — the period when Healy was charged and expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party — is described in detail in the letter of the Workers League Political Committee, dated December 11, 1985, to the WRP Central Committee [See pp.77-100]. This statement — whose factual accuracy was never challenged by the WRP — records the efforts of the ICFI to create the conditions for a discussion within the WRP between the contending factions and its opposition to precipitous organizational solutions. It shows the stark difference between the precision with which the ICFI assessed the crisis inside the WRP and the utter prostration of Banda and Slaughter — neither of whom were able to present any explanation for the collapse of their organization. It was during this period, when Slaughter and Banda realized that the ICFI would not accept a factional solution to the inner-party crisis that buried the essential political issues, that they made their first moves to split from the Internationa] Committee.

However, they were still too weak to move openly against the International Committee in front of the WRP membership. On October 25, after carefully reviewing irrefutable evidence of Healy's willful abuse of cadre in the WRP and international movement, the ICFI passed a resolution for expulsion. Banda and Slaughter, representing the majority on the WRP Central Committee, voted for another resolution which called for "Thе re-registration of the membership of the WRP on the basis of an explicit recognition of the political authority of the ICFI and the subordination of the British section to its decisions." [See p.50]

This meeting was boycotted by the Greek and Spanish sections of the ICFI which declared that there existed no authority within the ICFI except the personal dictates of Gerry Healy. One day later, the representatives of the pro-Healy minority split from the WRP and the ICFI.

The development of the struggle after October 25 is exhaustively documented in this volume and it need not be reviewed here in detail. The record shows that almost within hours of the split with Healy the WRP began moving to repudiate the Resolution of October 25 (which had been unanimously endorsed by the WRP Central Committee on October 26 and then passed with no votes against at the WRP Special Conference on October 27) and break with the International Committee. Just as Healy would not accept an International Committee not dominated and controlled by the British organization, neither would Banda and Slaughter. From the moment they realized that there could be no return to the status quo as it had existed before the explosion inside the WRP, that the International Committee would oppose the continuation of the opportunist line that had been pursued by the WRP before the split with Healy, that the IC would insist on a resumption of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism and the restoration of a Trotskyist program inside the WRP itself, and that the WRP would have to function as a disciplined organization within the International Committee on the basis of democratic centralism, Banda and Slaughter began working for a split.

It was Slaughter, with the assistance of Bill Hunter and a number of university lecturers (G. Pilling, T. Kemp, and C. Smith), who played the major role in carrying this through. Capitalizing on the disorientation of the WRP membership, which was almost totally uneducated on the foundations of Trotskyism and knew nothing about the International Committee, Slaughter and others in the WRP apparatus initiated a hate campaign against the ICFI, which was built around the lie that there had been equal degeneration throughout the International Committee. This was nothing other than a reactionary diversion cynically employed to organize the split with the ICFI and begin regroupment with Pabloite, centrist and even Stalinist organizations in Britain and all over the world.

Without any prior discussion on the ICFI, Slaughter chose a public meeting in London's Friends Hall on November 26, 1985, attended by hundreds of revisionists, to publicly attack the International Committee and call into question its Security and the Fourth International investigation into the penetration and takeover of the American SWP by the police agencies of US imperialism. The Friends Hall meeting showed clearly that the WRP was moving rapidly to regroup with all sorts of Pabloite, centrist and Stalinist forces. This was symbolized by Slaughter's public handshake with a leading Stalinist and specialist in anti-Trotskyism, Monty Johnstone.

Prior to the Friends Hall meeting, Slaughter had never indicated the slightest disagreement with Security and the Fourth International and its findings. Indeed, just six weeks earlier he had emphatically defended it in front of the Central Committee of the Workers League. Slaughter had played a major role in the initiation of the investigation and was the featured speaker at the first public meeting held in the United States, in 1975, on this issue. He carefully followed the development of the investigation in all its stages. Slaughter was fully apprised of all the facts relating to Alan Gelfand's lawsuit against the United States government and its agents inside the SWP. On the eve of the trial in March 1983, in official papers on file with the District Court in Los Angeles, he was even designated, with his agreement, as an potential "expert witness" on Gelfand's behalf.

The attack on Security and the Fourth International was cynically utilized for two purposes: first, as a factional weapon against the Workers League under conditions in which a judicial decision on the Gelfand case was still pending; and second, to remove what few barriers remained between the WRP and revisionist organizations all over the world. For Slaughter, the burning historical and political questions arising from the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940 — about which he himself had written at length — were an obstacle to his immediate political goals.

A witness to Slaughter's performance at Friends Hall, Peter Schwarz of the German section of the ICFI, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA), warned the WRP Central Committee:

"Having closely watched Comrade Slaughter's actions during the last six weeks I am more and more convinced that he follows his own political course, which he does not intend to discuss with anybody, thereby using the political confusion prevailing in the WRP after the expulsion of the Healy group to break it up.

"It is a course of liquidating the WRP into a 'broad left,' which would become indispensable for the bourgeoisie to control the working class, should a Labour or Labour coalition government come to power. In this way the conditions for a popular front type formation emerge.

"This is not a repudiation of the political degeneration that took place under Healy's leadership, but a continuation in another form." [See p.74]

In December the interim report that had been prepared by an International Control Commission established that the WRP had entered, behind the back of the International Committee, into mercenary relations with reactionary and non-proletarian forces and was responsible for direct betrayals of the working class. Because these actions were based on an anti-Trotskyist line for which the entire leadership of the WRP was responsible, the International Committee voted, on December 16, 1985, to suspend the British section. In doing so, it made clear that the WRP's membership would be restored if its leadership worked to "reassert the basic principles of internationalism within the WRP."

The ICFI thus called on the British delegation — which consisted of Slaughter, Simon Pirani, Tom Kemp and Dave Hyland — to support a resolution reaffirming the WRP's support for the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism, which the ICFI defined as "the decisions of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International (1919-1922); the Platform of the Left Opposition (1927); the Transitional Program (1938); the "Open Letter" (1953); and the documents of the struggle against the bogus SWP-Pabloite reunification (1961-63)." [See p. 102]

With the exception of Hyland, the leader of a minority tendency inside the WRP which supported the International Committee, the British delegates opposed this resolution. Slaughter, Pirani and Kemp flatly refused to give any explanation for their vote on this resolution, which, presumably, merely reaffirmed principles with which the WRP claimed to agree. But the political meaning of their action was clear: in repudiating the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism, they were declaring their solidarity with the whole Pabloite opportunist line that had been the content of the WRP's policies prior to the split with Healy. The vote proved irrefutably that the Slaughter-Banda faction was continuing the same opportunist anti-Trotskyist course that had characterized the line of the WRP during the previous decade. That is why the split between the International Committee and the Workers Revolutionary Party became unavoidable.

The manner in which the split was carried out in January-February 1986 — with the Slaughter-Banda faction repudiating the resolution of October 25, violating the constitutional rights of an official minority, and calling the police to bar the supporters of the International Committee from the scheduled Eighth Congress of the WRP — exposed the real class content of Slaughter's and Hunter's "revolutionary morality" and expressed the completeness of the WRP's programmatic break with Trotskyism and its desertion to the camp of revisionism.

The political platform upon which the split was carried out was supplied by Michael Banda, whose document "27 Reasons Why the International Committee Should Be Buried and the Fourth International Built" represented the most vicious denunciation of Trotskyism ever written by an individual associated with the Fourth International. Even as he was writing this document, Banda was in Sri Lanka renewing political relations with the arch-opportunist Colvin De Silva, one of the architects of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party's 1963 entry into a bourgeois coalition government. Banda's diatribe was followed by publication of a resolution, "Dissolve the IС," which characterized the International Committee as an "anticommunist" organization.

Subsequently, Banda split from the WRP to form a neo-Stalinist discussion group called the "Communist Forum." Not a single public statement explaining the split has ever been issued by the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Slaughter, Pirani and Hunter would later try to distance themselves from the smell left behind by Banda by claiming that his "27 Reasons" as well as a front-page denunciation of the International Committee and David North was printed in the February 7, 1986 edition of their Workers Press without the authorization of the WRP Central Committee. In any Marxist organization, such a breach of discipline would be immediate grounds for expulsion. But it was not Banda and his supporters who were expelled. Rather, Slaughter, Hunter and Pirani collaborated with Banda to bar a legitimate minority from the WRP Eighth Congress and then expel them from the party.

The role of Hunter deserves special mention, inasmuch as his lame critique of Banda's diatribe has recently made him something of a literary lion in revisionist circles. His "Michael Banda and the Bad Man Theory of History" is agreeable to the Pabloites because his disagreement with Banda is confined only to events which occurred before 1953; that is, he makes no defense whatsoever of the International Committee and its struggle against revisionism. This was, of course, no oversight. As we have pointed out, he was one of the prime movers of the "revolutionary morality" campaign — and attempted, in a particularly banal manner, to claim that it constituted the "axis" of the Transitional Program: "Every comrade who was incensed at Healy's activity and participated in his expulsion was answering the question: What sort of leader does the working class and its revolutionary vanguard need?" This is the language of a petty-bourgeois democrat, not a revolutionary Marxist.

Writing rhapsodically about the development of the WRP between October 1985 and February 1986 — as it was completing its break from Trotskyism — Hunter wrote: "A great development in thinking is taking place in our Party as a result of the reality of struggle. It is the split which has brought every comrade to thinking on basic problems."

It is now possible to evaluate the outcome of this "great development" of thought.

Since the split with the International Committee, the WRP has transformed its Workers Press into a public bulletin board in which every revisionist and Stalinist group is welcome to post their anti-Trotskyist notices. No attack on Trotskyism is too grotesque to be rejected. Every week carries a new denunciation. In the July 26 issue, there is a letter from one Geoff Barr, who, in the course of a wild misrepresentation of the well-known difference between Lenin and Trotsky on the trade union question in the Soviet Union, claims: "The position of the WRP under Healy was closer to Trotsky's in the 1920-21 trades unions debate than to Lenin's."

In its August 2 issue, the pages of the Workers Press were thrown open to a Stalinist group, members of the British Communist Party, who publish a rag called The Leninist. These reactionaries took the opportunity to denounce Trotskyism for its "manifest irrelevancy" — a product of its refusal to recognize that the Stalinist parties all over the world are the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. Denouncing Trotsky's break with the Comintern in 1933, The Leninist declared:

"The new orientation toward the construction of a 'Fourth International' was in fact a defeatist desertion of the advanced section of the proletariat, organized then, as now, mainly within the communist parties."

The letter went on to leave unanswered the question "Whether the killing of Trotskyists is justifiable or not..."

On the opposite page of the same issue, there was a letter from one Tom Cowen, who wrote:

"It is the illusory concept that Trotskyism is a Revolutionary Marxist tendency that has decapitated the revolutionary working class leadership and turned potential class leaders into tail-ending the agents of capital and abettors of the leadership crisis."

In the issue of August 23, Cyril Smith — one of Healy's long-time academic toadies and another born-again "revolutionary moralist" — openly attacked Trotsky's conception of the political revolution. In an article commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, Smith had this to say about the position taken by the International Committee in 1956:

"...I think we were limited by our resources, both theoretical and material, to defending the positions of Trotsky of two decades earlier.

"We struggled to force the new world of the 1950s into the theoretical framework of the 1930s...

"We were always too easily satisfied with having the theory that was 'correct' in Trotsky's day, instead of doing what he himself had done, fighting at every stage to take this theory forward."

The August 30 issue of Workers Press welcomed another letter from Tom Cowen, who, with unsurpassed ignorance, declared that Trotsky "mistook the Russian bureaucracy with all its weaknesses as the true substance of the Soviet system."

"Trotsky did not penetrate below this surface and recognize that the Soviet people, the human embodiment of the Socialist system being developed, constituted the true substance of the system."

Advocating capitulation to Stalinism, Cowen asserted:

"The great weakness flowing from the Trotskyist analysis of the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism, is that it deprives the movement of a world revolutionary perspective, in the struggle for revolution of a backward, isolated country such as Bolivia, Ceylon, etc. particularly during a period of revolutionary ebb on the world scene.

"Who can doubt that the revolutions in the Caribbean would have been defeated shortly after birth but for Soviet aid? One cannot mark time waiting for world revolution; one cannot always exist in isolation.

"This lack of perspective for close ties with the Soviets leads Trotskyism to hesitation, vacillation and finally to unity with dubious 'left' elements and world social democracy as an international base and protective cloak from world imperialism. The results we know only too well, as demonstrated in Ceylon and Bolivia."

These are not merely the views of the nonentity Tom Cowen. He is simply a convenient vehicle utilized by those in the leadership of the WRP who want pro-Stalinist propaganda published inside the Workers Press. This flows from the fact that the WRP leadership has rejected in toto the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. Healy's rejection in practice of the theory of Permanent Revolution has now been officially ratified by the WRP leadership. Blaming the corruption and betrayals of Healy on Trotskyism itself, Simon Pirani wrote in the July 12 issue of Workers Press, "At the root of the problem was the movement's political degeneration: the theory of Permanent Revolution, formulated by Trotsky out of the experience of the Russian Revolution to show how struggles for democratic and national aims flow into the international socialist revolution, was referred to in articles and speeches but never developed to answer the problems of the post-second-world war era.

"The developments in the class struggle — particularly the expansion of Stalinism in eastern Europe, the Chinese revolution and the various national liberation struggles — did not fit neatly in to the formulas worked out by Lenin and Trotsky."

Aside from the standard philistine reference to things not fitting "neatly" into the formulas of Lenin and Trotsky — neither of these great Marxists viewed their theoretical conceptions as "formulas" into which reality was to be "fit," neatly or otherwise — Pirani's definition of the theory of Permanent Revolution is patently false. It does not merely explain how "democratic and national aims flow into the international socialist revolution." Rather, it establishes that within the backward country itself the democratic program of the bourgeois revolution cannot be completed except through the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Pirani's misrepresentation of the theory of Permanent Revolution serves to justify a political line in relation to bourgeois nationalists which is, in all essentials, identical to that championed by Healy. Where Healy adapted to bourgeois nationalism in the Middle East, Pirani adapts to Irish Republicanism, using almost exactly the sophistical formulations previously utilized by Healy to cover his betrayals:

"I am not trying to speak for Sinn Fein or the IRA: they can do that themselves.

"Besides they have a different view of the national struggle and of socialism from ours; they are not Marxists and don't claim to be."

What Pirani does not say is whether the views of the IRA advance the interests of the working class or not; whether their views can lead the national struggle to victory or not.

The final triumph of the intellectual exertions of the WRP since the split with the International Committee was celebrated in the September 13 issue of Workers Press, which featured the following pronouncement by Cyril Smith:

"(i) I think that the term 'revisionist,' once a term with scientific significance for Marxists, has now become just a term of abuse.

"(ii) We should stop using the designation Pabloite' in talking about the organisations associated with the United Secretariat. It can only foul up the discussion.

"(iii) The characterization of Cuba as some kind of bourgeois state (we never realy explained just what kind) is nonsense."

The time has long since passed when Slaughter and his associates could claim with a straight face that the exposure of Healy's personal corruption — about which Slaughter, at any rate, was extremely well informed for years — provided anything more than the circumstantial setting for the explosion inside the WRP. The anti-Trotskyist opportunism that was nourished by Healy, Slaughter and Banda for more than a decade has now found its consummate expression in the unrestrained repudiation of every principle of revolutionary Marxism and the unabashed capitulation to revisionism.' People like Smith do not even feel the obligation to explain the development of their own thinking. For more than two decades they opposed the Pabloite designation of Cuba as a workers' state as a revision of Marxist teachings on the nature of the state. Now, Smith, an academic vagabond, dismisses all this as "nonsense." Full stop. A man who operates on this level is a definite social type: the corrupt middle-class intellectual whose services are for sale. Not least among Healy's crimes is that he allowed such people to remain in the WRP and even occupy influential positions. In return, they bolstered his prestige and defended him against criticism.

The personal role of Slaughter in these developments should be noted. Significantly, since the split with the International Committee, not a single article has appeared under Cliff Slaughter's by-line. He has offered no political explanation for how he has come to reject theoretical positions with which he had been identified for 25 years. As recently as 1981, Slaughter wrote (in a book co-authored with Albert Dragstedt, a member of the Workers League):

"This petty-bourgeois democracy, totally subservient to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state, is the class content of the Stalinist movement today, and it is on the same basis that 'Marxists' of the 'New Left' variety (including some who, like Ernest Mandel, still avow themselves adherents of Trotsky's Fourth International) are now to be found in the same camp as the Stalinists on the question of the state and bourgeois democracy. The petty-bourgeois democratic current now ideologically dominant in the Stalinist parties, epitomised by Johnstone [Yes, the same Monty Johnstone whose hand was taken by Slaughter at Friends Hall] in the British Communist Party, has the closest relations with the followers of Mandel in the spurious 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International.' The 'theoretical' vehicle for this tendency in Britain is the New Left Review of Perry Anderson...

"Anderson, Blackburn and their friends find in the New Left Review a greater freedom' for their rejection of Marxism than is provided by the programmatic and policy statements of Mandel's 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International.' It is a division of labour. The political statements of the United Secretariat must, for reasons of tradition as well as sheer deception, pay lip-service to the classic positions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky on the state and democracy. Anderson has no such restraints: his political allegiance to Mandel is kept out of sight and he is left to make the rejection of Marx and Lenin much more explicit and extreme than can at this stage be done by Man-del." (State, Power & Bureaucracy, New Park Publications, pp. 14-15)

In another passage, Slaughter charged that Joseph Hansen had "already anticipated the petty-bourgeois democratic distortion of Marxism now enshrined" by the United Secretariat; and that "Hansen gives aid and comfort to the Stalinists, with their myth of a road to socialism through parliamentary majorities." (Ibid., p. 19)

Will Slaughter now claim that these presumably mature judgments were forced upon him by Healy? Or perhaps Slaughter will declare that the exposure of Healy's personal corruption has forced him to reconsider, in a more favorable light, Mandel's attitude toward bourgeois democracy. If that is the case, Slaughter would not be the first to blame Marxism for the crimes of those who betrayed it and, on this fraudulent basis, desert openly to the camp of bourgeois democracy. Such a movement on Slaughter's part has already been foreshadowed in his efforts to focus attention not on the political and theoretical aspects of the WRP's degeneration but rather on the grotesque personal forms of Healy's political decay (as in his letter to North, dated November 26, 1985, where he claimed that "the bullying and brutality of Healy personally was the form through which this class political and theoretical content was most crudely and perfectly expressed.") [See pp.66]

As early as last December, the Workers League took issue with Slaughter's claim that Healy's supporters "are close to every fascist position on the rights of human individuals, rights which for them are reduced to nothing by the requirements of the party." In reply, the Workers League warned: "If Comrade Slaughter re-reads this passage carefully, he will notice its strong similarities with the anti-communist rhetoric of bourgeois liberals. What does he mean by the 'rights of human individuals'? The confused non-class terminology demonstrates — and here we are being generous — that he has not thought his analysis through to the end and is working on the level of superficial comparisons and analogies." [See p. 90]

Needless to say, Slaughter never answered that political point nor any other raised by the International Committee. At any rate, we need not wait for Slaughter's formal and public resumption of relations with the official Pabloite organizations to prove our contention that his alliance with Healy against the ICFI was not based on fear of Healy's "bullying and brutality" but on agreement with his revisionist line. The proof is already provided in a study of the political line of the WRP before and after the split with Healy. In the meantime, Slaughter's WRP passed a resolution at the third session of its notorious Eighth Congress in June, which insisted that "we should work out a definite attitude towards the revisionist United Secretariat of the FI..."

It should be added that despite his public silence Slaughter has not been inactive. Quite the opposite: he has been travelling all over the world — most recently completing a trip to the United States — attempting to create an international association of centrist organizations with which to attack the International Committee. Among those with whom he is collaborating most closely — again, without producing a single public statement explaining the political basis upon which he has developed this alliance — is the extreme right-wing Pabloite tendency led by Nahuel Moreno, whose capitulation to Peronism played a major role in the betrayal of the Argentine working class in the period leading up to the establishment of the bloody military dictatorship. The American supporters of Moreno, with whom Slaughter has recently conducted political discussions, function openly as members of the petty-bourgeois Peace and Freedom Party. Their major activity is centered on organizing electoral blocs with Social Democrats and Stalinists within the precincts of this capitalist party. Slaughter's relations with what amounts to nothing less than the left wing of the Democratic Party show the real political content of his hatred of the Workers League and his longstanding objection to its "very heavy emphasis" on the political independence of the American working class.

After the Peruvian Liga Comunista repudiated the theory of Permanent Revolution, broke with the International Committee [See pp. 190-194], and dissolved its own organization, Slaughter rushed to Lima to organize an electoral alliance between the anti-ICFI renegades and the Morenoites on a purely petty-bourgeois democratic program.

All of these developments irrefutably prove that the political evolution of the Slaughter faction represents a continuation and qualitative deepening of the degeneration that sparked the collapse of the WRP between July and October 1985.

Of necessity, the bulk of the material in this volume deals with the struggle against the Slaughter-Banda tendency. We save, for a future volume, a more extensive analysis of the evolution of what remains of Healy's tendency. Such an analysis will confirm that the warnings made by the ICFI over the unprincipled desertion of the Greek Workers Internationalist League, led by Savas Michael [See p. 57] have already been confirmed. Since its theatrical transformation into the "Workers Revolutionary Party," the Greek Healyites have moved to the right at break-neck speed. The ICFI had warned that the political motivation underlying Michael's alliance with Healy and his refusal to fight for his positions loyally within the world party was a desire to establish his freedom to maneuver in Greece without having to answer to the international Trotskyist movement.

Since November 1985 Michael has exploited the Greek WRP's "national" independence in order to direct the organization toward popular-front style electoral coalitions with the Stalinists, centrists and petty-bourgeois radical organizations. A four-month campaign to form such a front in the port city of Piraeus, on a minimal nonsocialist program, collapsed when the Stalinists reached a private agreement with a group of ex-PASOK trade union bureaucrats and centrists whom the WRP had been ardently wooing. This escapade would be almost humorous if it did not involve the fate of the Greek working class.

This volume is a collection of all the principal documents of the struggle waged by the International Committee against the WRP's betrayal of Trotskyism. It places before all those who genuinely desire to build the Fourth International the real record of the struggle against the betrayal of Trotskyism by the Workers Revolutionary Party. This record testifies to the historical fact that there did exist within the ICFI, despite the cynicism and criminal treachery of Healy, Banda and Slaughter, a Trotskyist nucleus which these imposters could not destroy. The criticisms made by the Workers League in 1982-84 did not fall from the sky and the fact that a majority of the ICFI rallied in the autumn of 1985 to defend the historical conquests of Trotskyism was not an accident. That such a Trotskyist nucleus existed can be explained only by the fact that the founding of the International Committee in 1953 and the struggle led by the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the WRP) between 1961-63 against the unprincipled reunification of the American SWP with the Pabloite International Secretariat did create a powerful theoretical and political foundation for the development of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It is this heritage that the ICFI defends and builds upon.

A final editorial note: We have included the main documents of the WRP, with the exception of Banda's "27 Reasons" and the related piece by Hunter. This editorial decision is based on the fact that to include the 26 chapters of the reply ("The Heritage We Defend") which have been published in the press of the ICFI sections since last April would have doubled the size of the present volume. Moreover, that reply, whose size is in direct proportion to the number of lies it has to answer, is still not complete. The editors have no objection to reprinting the full text of Banda's and Hunter's articles. But when we are obliged to print the lies of anti-Trotskyist renegades, we believe that our readers should have the opportunity to study their refutation. This volume does reproduce the IC's reply of March 1986 to that portion of Banda's diatribe which was devoted to an attack on Security and the Fourth International. Inasmuch as what Banda had to say on this matter is fully and accurately quoted in North's article [See pp. 172-189], there can be no suggestion or accusation that Banda's views were misrepresented.

2. A Contribution to a Critique of G. Healy's "Studies in Dialectical Materialism"

October 7—November 7, 1982

by David North

I. Preliminary Analysis

October 7, 1982

1. "Fifteen years earlier (1924) Trotsky was involved in a life and death struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Stalin had raised the demagogic demand of the need to 'Bolshevize the party' at a time when he was going all-out to consolidate bureaucracy and prepare the physical destruction of Trotsky's Left Opposition. The demand for 'Bolshevization' was nothing but a cynical cover behind which Stalin was plotting not only to physically eliminate his opponents but to terminate the democratic rights won by the Soviet working class and impose his own personal dictatorship over the Soviet masses." (Article I, p. 1)

This is an interpretation of the role of Stalin that contradicts the analysis made by Trotsky and to which the Fourth International has always adhered. Trotsky never held that Stalin, as early as 1924, was deliberately plotting the destruction of his opponents in order to establish a personal dictatorship.

As Trotsky wrote in his biography of Stalin: "If Stalin could have foreseen at the very beginning where his fight against Trotskyism would lead, he undoubtedly would have stopped short, in spite of the prospect of victory over all his opponents. But he did not foresee anything. The prophecies of his opponents that he would become the leader of the Thermidor, the grave digger of the Party of the Revolution, seemed to him empty imaginings (and phrase-mongering)." (p. 393)

2. "Now, with only months to go before his assassination, he was insisting once again on the necessity for a serious attitude towards the training of revolutionary cadres in the spirit of Hegel, Marx, Engels and Lenin." (I, 1)

This simple identification of Hegel with Marx, Engels and Lenin is unjustified and needlessly confuses the boundaries between materialism and idealism. Hegel was a great precursor of Marxism. But historically, politically and theoretically, it is wrong to state that Trotsky sought to train cadre in the spirit of Hegel. In fact, in the very writings to which the author refers, Trotsky writes: "Study Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Franz Mehring." (In Defense of Marxism, p. 98) In order to preserve the rational content of the Hegelian system, Marx had to fight against the spirit of Hegel, as it was manifested in the pupils who uncritically accepted his system, which was thoroughly idealistic. Nothing is added to the stature of Hegel, but such a formulation does invite theoretical confusion within our own ranks. Moreover, this is a formulation which never had been employed in our movement. Its introduction at this point would suggest an evaluation of the Hegelian system different from that made by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Moreover, if we wish to include Hegel among those in whose spirit the IC cadre is educated, why not Spinoza and the French materialists?

3. "When it came to the dialectical materialist method and reading 'Hegel materialistically' Trotsky was a staunch Leninist. He walked in the footsteps not only of Lenin but of Marx and Engels as well." (I,1)

This distorts the relationship between Trotsky and Lenin, unintentionally diminishing the former. Before Trotsky joined the party, during the long period where he was in sharp disagreement with Lenin, Trotsky was a dialectical materialist. To put the matter otherwise would be to suggest that Trotsky only became a Marxist once he became a Leninist, i.e., a member of the Bolshevik Party. Moreover, Trotsky was not at all comfortable with the term Leninism, as if it was a special brand of Marxism. It should be added that Trotsky did not really walk "in the footsteps" of Lenin. He was Lenin's contemporary and made his own independent contributions to the development of Marxism — above all, the theory of Permanent Revolution, which more exactly anticipated the character of the future revolution in Russia.

4. "Whilst this does not of course mean that every worker member of the Party will become a conscious dialectician, we do insist that the revolutionary Trotskyist leaderships in all countries must be trained in the dialectical materialist method." (I,1-2)

I recall that in 1972 criticism was made of Trotsky for conceding this very point to Burnham.

5. "These remarks by Lenin are very important for dialectical training. The development of consciousness in the past by Hegel and the founders of our movement must be understood as an infinite process." (I,2)

This remark seems to contradict the quote from Lenin's What the Friends of the People Are, in which Lenin speaks of the systems of relations ('relations of production') which (to use Marx's terminology) "is the basis of society which clothes itself in political and legal forms and in definite trends of social thought."

If we truly start from the system of production relations as the foundation upon which the ideological superstructure rises, we will not speak of the "development of consciousness by Hegel and the founders of our movement." Again, Hegel and the Marxists are more or less identified.

Furthermore, we should not comprehend the "development of consciousness" as simply an "infinite process." It is both finite and infinite. Hegel's contribution to the development of consciousness is necessarily finite, limited, in the sense that he lived and worked in a definite historical epoch. The development of human knowledge is infinite in the whole historical development of human culture. The infinite development of consciousness proceeds through the finite thought of individual men. Engels answered Duhring on precisely this question. (See IX, Morality and Law)

6. "The founders of our movement have bequeathed to us a scientifically-derived revolutionary theory of knowledge which is presently the core of our dialectical training. Not only is the development of consciousness an infinite process, but the cognition of the external world is an infinite process as well. The process of cognition today enables us to stand on their shoulders as it were, and complete the historical tasks they set out to accomplish." (I, 2)

Cognition is simply an infinite process only if there are no finite men to contaminate its purely infinite development. We are now clearly in the realm of the movement of pure consciousness.

The founders of our movement did not simply bequeath us a revolutionary theory of knowledge, but this, perhaps, can be accepted for the purpose of emphasis. However, the following cannot be accepted:

"The process of cognition today enables us to stand on their shoulders as it were ..."

It is the objective development of the world capitalist crisis and the revolutionary movement of the working class that enables us to stand on the shoulders of Trotsky and all the earlier generations of revolutionary workers and fighters.

To credit our position in world history to the process of thought is to take an entirely idealist position.

II. Continuation of Preliminary Analysis

October 8, 1982

Comrade G proceeds from an elaboration of Hegel in an idealist manner. Thrashing through the eclectic formulations, the disjointed presentation, the arbitrary transitions (accomplished through use of words such as "therefore," in the Hegelian style), a clear theoretical line emerges:

1. Hegel is put on the same historical line as Marx, Engels and Lenin — a founder of Marxism in whose spirit revolutionary cadres are trained. This essentially denies the revolution in philosophy accomplished by Marx through his break with Classical German Philosophy.

2. The study of "objective logic" is declared to be the highest task of humanity, altering Lenin's declaration that "The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features..." (Vol. 14, p. 325);

3. The history of man, we are told by G, is the history of "the growth of the creative element...", not the struggle of classes;

4. The principle of objectivity is proclaimed to be the "basic difference between materialism and abstract idealism," rather than the primacy of matter over thought;

5. The development of consciousness is declared to be an "infinite" process, ignoring its finite character in the actual thought of individual men;

6. The process of cognition, not the processes of the world capitalist crisis, is proclaimed as the source of our transcendence of past generations of Marxists;

7. Subjective cognition (i.e., self-consciousness) "conditions itself as substance...", exactly as presented by Hegel;

8. The thinking body is substituted for social man;

9. "The theoretical Notion" is presented as "the external world itself."

10. The "speculative nature of cognition" (i.e., thought emerging out of its own self-movement) is "emphasize(d).";

11. Knowledge is gathered "dialectically and materialistically" from "empiricism";

12. The process of cognition is presented strictly in accordance with the logical schematism of Hegel, much the same way E. Duhring proceeded in the 1870s;

13. Knowledge of the logical categories replaces real knowledge of the concrete movement of phenomena; the essential connections are presented as logical categories. This method proceeds as follows: we discover the logical categories that are the essence of historical phenomena, and then reveal "its relations as a stage of knowledge in relation to other categories such as necessity, probability, possibility." In other words, the real content of all phenomena is its logical thought content.

14. Briefly summing up, what G presents is crude Hegelianism which is thinly disguised with occasional references to the material world. However, its primacy is seen as conditional: "Under these conditions, 'Being' is primary, consciousness is secondary." In other words, there may be conditions when consciousness is primary and Being is secondary. (I, 2)

15. All in all, a clear retreat from materialism via an uncritical regurgitation of Hegelian phrases; consciousness is presented as a form of logical phenomenology in each individual; of social consciousness — nil; historical materialism is ignored. All the errors of the Left Hegelians and the weak Proudhon (i.e., "Philosophy of Poverty") are repeated. The real significance of Marx standing Hegel "on his feet" is not grasped. In analyzing G's articles, the criticisms of Lassalle's work by Marx and Lenin are very appropriate.

(As a result of all this, we finally arrive at a presentation of the origins of Stalinism that contradicts the analysis made by Trotsky. This is a very disturbing sign, because the mystification of history was a characteristic of the Left Hegelians.)

III. Notes on G. Healy's "Studies"

October 9-11, 1982

1. Dialectical Materialism, the theory of knowledge which constitutes the theoretical foundation of Marxism as a world scientific outlook, was the outcome of the supreme intellectual achievement of the young Karl Marx, that is, the critique of the Hegelian dialectic and philosophy as a whole.

2. The supersession of Hegel by Marx, both a precondition for and inseparable from the elaboration of the materialist conception of history, was achieved between 1843 and 1847; and this supersession may be traced through a study of the following works: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843); The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; The Holy Family (1844); The German Ideology (1845); and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).

3. The significance of this achievement was explained by Engels:

"Marx was and is the only one who could undertake the work of extracting from the Hegelian logic the nucleus containing Hegel's real discoveries in this field, and of establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealist wrappings, in the simple form in which it becomes the only correct mode of conceptual evolution. The working out of this method which underlies Marx's critique of political economy is, we think, a result hardly less significant than the basic materialist conception." (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, p.218)

4. At the very time when Marx publicly declared himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker," he clearly explained:

"My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.' With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." (Capital, Vol. 1, "Afterword to the Second German Edition," Progress Publishers, p.29)

5. Marx and Engels treated with derision those epigones of Hegel, first the Right and Left Hegelians, later Proudhon, and still later F. Lassalle, who "assimilated only the most simple devices of the master's dialectics and applied them to everything and anything, often moreover with ridiculous incompetence." (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 222) Of Lassalle's uncritical use of the Hegelian system of Logical categories, Marx wrote: "He will learn to his cost that to bring a science by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically presented is an altogether different thing from applying an abstract ready-made system of logic to mere inklings of such a system." (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Progress, p. 102)

6. That classic of Marxism, Anti-Duhring, was directed against that eclectic impostor who combined vulgar materialism with logical schematism based on uncritical recapitulation of Hegelian categories.

"... We find that Hegel's Logic starts from being — as with Herr Duhring; that being turns out to be nothing, just as with Herr Duhring; that from this being-nothing there is a transition to becoming, the result of which is determinate being (Dasein), i.e., a higher, fuller form of being (Sein) — just the same as with Herr Duhring. Determinate being leads on to quality, and quality on to quantity — just the same as with Herr Duhring." (p. 61)

7. In 1914, Lenin set out to read Hegel's Logic as a materialist, i.e., from the standpoint of Marxism, which means, of course, basing himself on the achievements of Marx in attempting to continue the task of "extracting from the Hegelian logic the nucleus containing Hegel's real discoveries in this field ..."

8. Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks advance beyond the critique of Hegel made by Marx 70 years before. His Notebooks are a critical reworking of the Logic, the results of which are profound discoveries that provide the foundation for the unification of logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge.

9. Lenin's attitude toward the study of Hegel was identical to that of Marx and Engels, as is seen in his review of Lassalle's study of Heraclitus:

"One can understand why Marx called this work of Lassalle's 'schoolboyish' (see the letter to Engels of...); Lassalle simply repeats Hegel, copies from him, re-echoing him a million times with regard to isolated passages from Heraclitus, furnishing his opus with an incredible heap of learned ultra-pedantic ballast.

"The difference with respect to Marx: In Marx there is a mass of new material, and what interests him is only the movement forward from Hegel and Feuerbach further, from idealistic to materialistic dialectics ...

"Marx in 1844-47 went from Hegel to Feuerbach, and further beyond Feuerbach to historical and (dialectical) materialism. Lassalle in 1846 began (Preface, p. III), in 1855 resumed, and in August 1857 (Preface, p. XV) finished a work of sheer, empty, useless, 'learned' rehashing of Hegelianism!" (Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 38, pp. 339-40)

10. Cde. Healy's "Studies in Dialectical Materialism" suffer from one decisive defect: they essentially ignore the achievements of both Marx and Lenin in the materialist reworking of the Hegelian dialectic. Thus, Hegel is approached uncritically, essentially in the manner of the Left Hegelians against whom Marx struggled.

11. In approaching Hegel in this manner, the distinction between materialism and idealism is not only effaced; Comrade Healy explicitly passes over to idealism in expounding Hegel as a Left Hegelian. Thus we have "consciousness" as "an infinite process"; "Subjective Cognition [i.e., self-consciousness] conditions itself as substance similar in example to positive and negative electricity" (i.e., thought becomes matter, or, as Hegel wrote, "The alienation of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood ...", see the Phenomenology); "Subjective cognition is a decisive impulse"; "the mental world"; "The Abstract Notion is obliged to unavoidably become a 'positive or theoretical Notion' "; "The theoretical Notion is the external world itself; "The 'leap' is to practice under conditions in which 'consciousness creates it' "; "To further emphasize the highly-speculative nature of cognition ..."

12. Cde. Healy does not take into account the oft-repeated warnings of both Marx and Engels that the Hegelian dialectic was unusable in the form it was left behind. Thus, Cde. Healy seeks to explain the process of cognition directly from Hegelian Logic. This is a false approach. The process of thought cannot be explained from the Logic any more than the nature of the State could be explained from the Logic. Cde. Healy fails to take note of Marx's discovery that Hegel's idealist system affected the exposition of the movement of the Logical categories; that is, Marx does not take the categories of Hegel as given. They themselves must be reworked in the spirit of consistent materialism. I.e., Marx reworked the category of contradiction, which, as a result of Hegel's idealist mysticism, loses the content of real struggle in the Logic. Hegel's logical resolution of contradiction through the mediation of a third is accomplished through sophistry. Cde. Healy, however, treats contradiction as a Hegelian: "Mediations now take place at all stages of cognition, and it is here that the method of 'dialectical logic' is used for analysis."

13. The chief defect of Cde. Healy's articles — ignoring the achievements of Marx and Lenin — is glaringly apparent in his virtual indifference toward historical materialism. Cognition is treated as a movement of thought concepts outside the law-governed, historically developing social practice of man.

a. The Spinozaist concept of a "thinking body" is introduced in the third article, without any explanation of its philosophical source. (It appears in a passage lifted, without citation, from Ilyenkov's Dialectical Logic. Only one change is made. Substance is referred to "as a dialectical category" which gives the uncited Spinoza a Hegelian slant.)

b. Cde. Healy writes that "The history of human beings is organized in society as the history of the growth of the creative element, man's initiative, both employers and working class. The higher the consciousness of people, the higher their cognition of the objective laws of nature and history." He goes on to write of "The activity of dialectics..." Here, history is explained from consciousness, not from the material production relations of which social thought can only be a reflection. The "creative element" is, of course, consciousness; and here Cde. Healy is only repeating the position of the Left Hegelians, the "Critical Critics" — who substituted their critical activity for the "uncritical" practical revolutionary activities of the masses.

c. "In the early stages of dialectical materialism as a scientific study," writes Cde. Healy, "we quickly arrive on the scene of a study of concepts." Who the "we" is, is unclear. But for Marx and Engels, dialectical materialism begins not with a study of concepts, but with a study of real man.

"In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but of setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process [i.e., concepts]." (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 36)

d. The real starting point is not the concept of the material world, but the material world itself. Otherwise, the approach can only be that of a Hegelian — divining the movement of the real from the movement of concepts. But we do not reconstruct the movement of the real from the movement of thought. This is not possible, at any rate, for thought is by no means a "pure" reflection of the external world. Thought is always social thinking. Thus, we show concepts to be the reflection of the material world within the mind of socially-active man. Otherwise:

"These concepts — leaving aside their real basis (which Stirner in any case leaves aside) — understood as concepts inside consciousness, as thoughts inside people's heads, transferred from their objectivity back into the subject, elevated from substance into self-consciousness, are — whimsies or fixed ideas." (Vol. 5, p. 160)

14. The essentially idealist distortion of dialectical materialism is shown clearly in Comrade Healy's treatment of the following passage from Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

a. Comrade Healy quotes as follows:

"Every individual producer in the world economic system realizes that he is introducing this or that change into the technique of production; every owner realizes that he exchanges certain products for others; but these producers and these owners do not realize that in doing so they are thereby changing Social Being.

"The sum-total of these changes in all their ramifications in the capitalist world economy could not even be grasped by 70 Marxes. The most important thing is that the laws of these changes have been discovered, that the objective logic of these changes and their historical development has in its chief and basic features been disclosed." (Volume 14, p. 325)

Cde. Healy continues as follows:

"This process is objective 'in the sense that social being is independent of the social consciousness of people.' 'The highest task,' wrote Lenin, 75 years ago, ' ... is to comprehend this objective logic' (Volume 14, p. 325)"

Comrade Healy's manner of quoting has changed the content of Lenin's argument in a manner which adapts it to Hegelian idealism. Starting with the sentence which contains the words "been disclosed," we shall quote Lenin and place in brackets those passages not quoted by Cde. Healy:

"The most important thing is that the objective logic of these changes and their historical development has in its chief and basic features been disclosed [ — objective, not in the sense that a society of conscious beings, of people, could exist and develop independently of the existence of conscious beings (and it is only such trifles that Bogdanov stresses by his 'theory'), but] in the sense that social being is independent of the social consciousness of people. [The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely.] The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic [of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one's social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible."] (p. 325)

b. Thus, rather than the objective logic of economic evolution, we have the objective logic. Of what? This becomes clear in the very next passage written by Comrade Healy:

"The principle of coincidence enables us to define the objective content of a given category by revealing its relations as a stage of knowledge in relation to other categories such as necessity, probability, possibility."

By "the principle of coincidence," Cde. Healy means, as he stated immediately before the quote from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, "the coincidence of dialectics, logic and the theory of knowledge."

It is clear from these passages and the selective quotation that Cde. Healy views the logical categories and their inter-relations, as the essential content into which historical movement is distilled. Once the logical thought content of each material event or fact has been discovered, we can then reveal their essence "as a stage of knowledge in relation to other categories such as necessity, probability, possibility."

Here we have the entire logical mysticism of Hegel uncritically reproduced, and this, in fact, is the essence of Cde. Healy's entire approach to dialectics in these most recent articles. Everything becomes a matter of following the sequence of the categories of Hegel's Logic. The material content is to be developed out of the Logic, rather than, as Marx insisted, the logic out of the content.

Comrade Healy has merely reproduced the very errors of Proudhon that were analyzed by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy:

"... Thus the metaphysicians who, in making these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and who, the more they detach themselves from things, imagine themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrating their core [i.e., "as a stage of knowledge in relation to other categories..."] — these metaphysicians in turn are right in saying that things here below are embroideries of which the logical categories constitute the canvass...

"Just as by dint of abstraction we have transformed everything into a logical category, so one has only to make an abstraction of every characteristic distinctive of different movements to attain movement in its abstract condition — purely formal movement, the purely logical formula of movement. If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things, one imagines one has found in the logical formula of movement the absolute method, which not only explains all things, but also implies the movement of things.

"It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms:

" 'Method is the absolute, unique, supreme, infinite force which no object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself again, to recognize itself in every object.' (Logic, Vol. III)

"All things being reduced to a logical category, and every movement, every act of production, to method, it follows naturally that every aggregate of products and production, of objects and movement, can be reduced to applied metaphysics. What Hegel has done for religion, law, etc., M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy." (pp. 99-100)

15. The phrase "standing Hegel on his feet" should not be used to diminish the profound scientific achievement embodied in this task. What was involved was nothing less than the establishment of the materialist world scientific outlook through which laws of nature, society and consciousness are cognized. The chief concern of philosophy was no longer the "matter of Logic" but the "logic of the matter."

Marx clearly revealed that the Hegelian logical schema, when utilized as given, leads inevitably to sophistry, via the manipulation of logical categories and the further manipulation of empirical facts to fit the pre-existing categories.

Especially in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Marx demonstrated the necessity of a critical reworking of Hegelian concepts. With Hegel, the categories of identity, particularity, the general — have only an abstract, and therefore, untrue content. Hegel passes from an unreal antithesis to an imaginary identity. In this way, Hegel is able to unite in Identity the general state interest with the particular private aim. The ultimately reactionary uses to which Hegel's system was employed arise out its idealist structure. The Identity of the Universal and the Particular cannot be established in logical categories except as abstractions devoid of real content. In such a form, any general can be united with any particular, to provide, on demand, an abstract, and, therefore, unreal identity. Therefore, the connections between categories cannot be established in thought, as a form of Logical schematism. As forms of the reflection of the external world in thought, the real dialectical content of general, particular, antithesis, subsumption, etc., must be abstracted from nature (and history) itself through scientific analysis. Speculative idealism discovered the general abstract forms of the reflection of the world in man's social, historically-developing, consciousness, and the isolation of these forms provides us with the logical categories of the Hegelian dialectic. But these categories cannot be left suspended from mid-air. Their material content must be extracted from the study of nature and history.

16. Marx wrote that "comprehending does not consist, as Hegel imagines, in recognizing the features of the logical concept everywhere, but in grasping the specific logic of the specific subject." (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol 3. p. 91) This was Marx on the threshhold of his Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy As A Whole.

17. Comrade Healy's "Studies" are not a materialist reading of Hegel. Rather, there are lengthy reproductions of Hegel in which significant concessions are made to idealism.

a. "The principle of OBJECTIVITY in the approach to the external world constitutes the basic difference between materialism and abstract idealism." (Article I) This is not true. Hegel's standpoint was that of objectivity as well. The basic difference between materialism and idealism (abstract is superfluous) is the primacy of matter over consciousness.

b. " 'Being' is matter which exists independently of consciousness and is the source of all sensation. Under these conditions 'Being' is primary, consciousness is secondary." Can there be conditions in which "Being" is not primary? Hegel also recognized "Being" as the source of sensation, and this is in fact the starting point of the Phenomenology. Hegel could acknowledge the primacy of Being in that sense. But then it is consciousness which becomes primary.

c. "Not only is the development of consciousness an infinite process, but the cognition of the external world is an infinite process as well." Can the "development of consciousness" be anything else but "the cognition of the external world"? Why does Comrade Healy present us with two different infinite processes: the "development of consciousness" and "cognition of the external world"? Moreover "the development of consciousness" (in the cognition of the external world) is both finite and infinite. It can only be simply infinite as the self-movement of thought independent of all the finite generations of finite men through whom thought has historically developed. Comrade Healy's "infinite" is the "development of consciousness" separate from "the cognition of the external world", i.e., the movement of the Absolute Idea.

d. Comrade Healy quotes Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks: "... the practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the repetition of the various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms." (Vol. 38, p. 190)

Comrade Healy then comments: "Subjective dialectical thought becomes submerged in the objective situation thousands of millions of times so that the 'consciousness of man' can attain the 'significance of axioms'." This is an idealist interpretation of the passage by Lenin. The latter begins with the practical activity of man, from which consciousness then emerges. Comrade Healy begins with "Subjective dialectical thought," leaves out the practical activity of man, and then transforms consciousness into "an axiom." But this approach simply reproduces the illusion of idealism that arises in the historical development of man.

As Engels explained: "But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws which were abstracted from the real world, become divorced from the real world, and are set up against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside to which the world has to conform. That is how things happened in society and in the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure, mathematics was subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection — and it is only just because of this that it can be applied at all. That consciousness "can attain the significance of axioms" was the conception of Duhring. (See Anti-Duhring, p. 54)

18. In Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, he explained the fundamental weakness of his idealist dialectics: in every area of concrete study to which Hegel turns his attention, we always have before us the Logic. Thus, the movement always proceeded from thought and therefore the connections are those of the abstract logic. As he explained in relation to Hegel's treatment of the State:

"The transition is thus derived, not from the particular nature of the family, etc., and from the particular nature of the state, but from the general relationship of necessity and freedom. It is exactly the same transition as is effected in logic from the sphere of essence to the sphere of the concept. The same transition is made in the philosophy of nature from inorganic nature to life. It is always the same categories which provide the soul, now for this, now for that sphere. It is only a matter of spotting for the separate concrete attributes the corresponding abstract attributes." (Marx-Engels, Vol. 3, p. 10, emphasis added)

19. It is this very idealist procedure which Cde. Healy employs in effecting the transition from sensation to consciousness. Being, Not Being, Becoming, Cause, Effect, and inner movement of negation in general are employed to explain the transition from sensation to conscious thought (as well as the movement of the value form). After "Absolute essence (Negative Semblance) confronts our 'theory of knowledge' which becomes Positive Semblance as they face each other in antithesis," Cde. Healy declares: "we have ended the sensuous stage of the Cognitive process." All this has been accomplished simply through reference to categories of the Hegelian Logic; in other words, we have a mystical process presented as the real process. Cde. Healy, though he quotes a fragment from Lenin on page 283 in Volume 38, leaves out a very significant remark by Lenin which appears on page 281:

Hegel, the supporter of dialectics, could not understand the dialectical transition from matter to motion, from matter to consciousness — especially the second. Marx corrected the error (or weakness?) of the mystic.

Not only is the transition from matter to consciousness dialectical, but also that from sensation to thought, etc.

20. Lenin develops this criticism further in a positive proposal for how the theory of knowledge should be developed. He includes both "psychology" and "physiology of the sense organs." It should be noted that the latter two are added to his proposals for histories of "the separate sciences, the mental development of the child, the mental development of animals, language NB:" and he states: "These are fields of knowledge from which the theory of knowledge and dialectics should be built, in short, the history of cognition in general, the whole field of knowledge." (p. 351)

21. That is how Lenin conceived of the development of dialectics; this was his proposal for a materialist deepening of the dialectics first elaborated by Hegel. The essential weakness of Comrade Healy's approach is that he has proceeded in the opposite direction: back to the mystical construction of Hegelian categories, which are then used as a master key. In other words, he preserves the mystical system. This approach cannot be correct.

IV. Further Notes on G. Healy's "Studies"

October 11-16, 1982

"Idealist thinking is always speculative because it excludes Contradiction." ??? (Pt. I, p. 12)

This is wrong in two respects: Idealist thinking is presented as excluding contradiction, and this is said to be its speculative nature.

1. It was idealism which first enunciated contradiction and made it the foundation of Logic; this was, in fact, the great achievement of speculative thought. The dialectical method is the outcome of idealist speculation.

2. Hegel clearly counterposed "ordinary" to "speculative" thought in that the former "abhors contradiction ..." (Science of Logic, p. 442)

3. It was mechanical materialism which excluded contradiction, and that was its chief defect.

4. "... the process of Cognition interprets consciousness as not merely a passive reflection of 'Being'..." (Pt. I, p. 10)The PROCESS OF COGNITION is endowed with a human personality; it is no longer a process, it has become a person, who interprets!

5. "Every qualitatively distinct object has its own quantitative object. It has its own quantitative attributes, which are both immobile and immutable." (Pt. 3, p. 6)

There is nothing in nature that is either immobile or immutable; for motion is the mode of existence of matter.

6. The passage is made even more obscure by what immediately follows:

"This very mutation, is of necessity bound by certain limits..."

We have gone from immobility and immutability to "This very mutation"!

7. "The self-movement of matter is responsible solely for the movement of thought through Semblance, Appearance and Actuality, once the stage of the abstract Notion is reached, practice itself generates the self-movement of matter."

The self-movement of matter is the mode of existence of the universe. Practice, human practice, is part of the movement of nature. Does the self-movement of matter have no responsibility for practice?

8. "Without the capacity for the interaction of particles at all levels, matter as such could not exist." (Pt. 3, p. 7)

From the standpoint of science, this is an absurd statement. As Engels wrote: "NB Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of account the qualitative differences of things in lumping them together as corporeally existing things as the concept matter. Hence matter as such, as distinct from definite existing pieces of matter, is not anything sensuously existing." (Dialectics of Nature, p. 55)

"Matter as such" does not exist; and the very use of the term indicates the extent to which Comrade Healy has become wrapped up in the Hegelian mystical mode of expression — at the expense of abandoning dialectical materialism.

A dialectical materialist would have simply noted that natural science has established that the interaction of particles is a universal property of matter in motion.

9. "If we are to avail ourselves of the deepest aspects of material gathered from empirical observation and examination under conditions in which the knowledge dialectically and materialistically gathered from empiricism yields ever richer and wider sources of knowledge, we must be prepared to 'grasp the nettle' where it stings the most." (Pt. 3, p. 8) (emphasis added)

This goes beyond even Hansen's consistent empiricism = dialectical materialism. Now, we gather knowledge dialectically and materialistically in empiricism. The two opposing methods are united by using dialectically and materialistically as adverbs of empiricism's action. How can we train cadre if we teach that Empiricism, a definite trend in bourgeois ideology, gathers knowledge dialectically and materialistically. If we mean to state that all knowledge is gathered dialectically and materialistically, in the sense that man is part of dialectical nature whose thinking proceeds in accordance with its objective laws, then we are talking about "unconscious dialectics" which, as Trotsky pointed out, applies both to the peasant woman tasting broth as well as the fox taking the measure of a chicken. But dialectical materialism is a conscious method and it develops in struggle against empiricism, and there is nothing gained by combining the two.

10. "When Subjective Cognition interpenetrates through antithesis the 'theory of knowledge' it conditions itself as substance similar in example to positive and negative electricity." (Pt. 3, p. 6)

This is out-and-out mystical Hegelianism. Man is transformed into "self-consciousness," which Cde. Healy chooses to refer to as Subjective Cognition. Subjective cognition is not an attribute of man any longer; rather, it is transformed into an independent subject, which is able to "condition[s] itself as substance."

From there, Cde. Healy proceeds to substance "as a dialectical category" — thereby mystifying the Spinozaist conception of substance, which is no longer substance as substance, but substance "as a dialectical category" — as a mode of Subjective Cognition. In other words, we have Spinoza a la Hegel.

Without being conscious of it, Cde. Healy has managed to reproduce, virtually word for word, the whole course of Critical mystification against which Marx fought in The Holy Family.

"A few quotations will show that by overcoming Spinozaism Criticism ended up in Hegelian idealism, that from the 'Substance' it arrived at another metaphysical monster, the 'Subject', 'Substance as a process', 'infinite self-consciousness', and that the final result of 'perfect' and 'pure' Criticism is the restoration of the Christian theory of creation in a speculative, Hegelian form." (The Holy Family, p. 170)

Interestingly, virtually the entire terminology is to be found at some point or another in the "Studies": "perfect", "infinite consciousness", "Substance", "Subject", etc.

"... Herr Bauer makes 'Substance emerge from its logical simplicity and assume a definite form of existence in the power of the community.' He applied the Hegelian miracle apparatus by which the 'metaphysical categories' — abstractions extracted out of reality — emerge from logic, where they are dissolved into the 'simplicity' of thought, and assume 'a definite form' of physical or human existence; he makes them become incarnate. Help, Hinrichs!" (Ibid., p. 170)

"Bauer's self-consciousness too, is Substance raised to self-consciousness or self-consciousness as Substance; self-consciousness is transformed from an attribute of man into a self-existing subject. This is the metaphysical-theological caricature of man in his severance from nature. The being of this self-consciousness is therefore not man, but the idea of which self-consciousness is the real existence. It is the idea become man, and therefore it is infinite. All human qualities are thus transformed in a mysterious way into qualities of 'infinite self-consciousness'. Hence, Herr Bauer says expressly that everything has its origin and its explanation in this 'infinite self-consciousness', i.e., finds in it the basis of its existence. Help, Hinrichs!" (Ibid., pp.171-72)

11. Examine the following passage by Cde. Healy as an illustration of the method described above:

"... Subjective cognition is a decisive impulse, through antithesis and interpenetration it is negated into the 'theory of knowledge' and into the mental world [!] embodying [!!] the individual in which Causality and Substance build up to Reciprocal action through necessity to the leap to the abstract Notion." (Pt. 3, p. 6)

Subjective Cognition to 'Theory of Knowledge' into 'mental world' which 'embody[s]' the individual. Simplified, Subjective Cognition (thought) is negated (or alienated) into the mental world which embodies the individual. This is sheer idealism: the individual is embodied in the mental world; man is self-consciousness.

12. Just so there should be no doubt about the speculative construction of the entire argument, let us pass on to a passage a bit further down:

"The abstract notion completes the dialectical process of thought within the self-relation between individual and Universal and vice versa. The theoretical notion is the external world itself which supplies the positive side to the Notion. The practical impulse has emerged from subjective self-impulse, which is thought to objective practice."

We have already been informed that the mental world embodies the individual. The individual, at best, can only be Subjective Cognition. What is the self-relation between the individual and the Universal. In Hegel it is between Absolute Spirit and the dialectical movement of consciousness. To go on, the theoretical notion, we are told, is the external world [!!], which merely "supplies" the Notion with its "positive side."

The whole conception upon which this is based arises from the recognition of man only as self-consciousness, as thought. As in all idealism, "the movement of the universe only becomes true and real in his ideal self-movement." (Ibid., p. 177)

Hegel "substitutes self-consciousness for man, the most varied manifestations of human reality appear only as definite forms, as determinateness of self-consciousness. But mere determinateness of self-consciousness is a 'pure category'; a mere 'thought', which I can consequently also transcend in 'pure' thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel's Phaenomenologie the material, sensuously perceptible, objective foundations of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are allowed to remain. The whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously perceptible real world, by transforming it into a 'Thing of Thought', a mere determinateness of self-consciousness, and can therefore also dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the 'ether of pure thought'. The Phaenomenologie is therefore quite consistent in that it ends by replacing human reality by 'absolute knowledge' — knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, and because self-consciousness is considered the only mode of existence of man — absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows only itself and is no longer disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, i.e., of man living also in a real objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limitations, which nevertheless remain in existence for bad sensuousness, for real man. Moreover, everything that betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness — all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world — is necessarily held by him to be a limit. The whole of the Phaenomenologie is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality." (Ibid., pp.238-39)

"Finally, it goes without saying that whereas Hegel's Phaenomenologie, in spite of its speculative original sin, gives in many instances the elements of a true description of human relations, Herr Bruno and Co. on the other hand, provide only an empty caricature, a caricature which is satisfied with deriving any determinateness out of a product of the spirit or even out of real relations and movements, changing this determinateness into a determinateness of thought, into a category, and making out that this category is the standpoint of the product, of the relation and the movement, in order then to be able to look down on this determinateness triumphantly with old-man's wisdom from the standpoint of abstraction, of the general category and of general self-consciousness." (Ibid., pp.239-40)

V. Notes for a Critique of Comrade G. Healy's "Studies" (continued)

November 4, 1982

Article I: "Subjective Idealism Today"

1. "Dialectical Materialists get to know the world initially through a process of Cognition."

What is meant by "Dialectical Materialists" as opposed to all other human beings? Is it being suggested that "Dialectical Materialists" get to know the world initially in a manner different from everyone else?

What is meant, at any rate, by "get to know the world initially through a process of Cognition"? Both historically and in their individual biographies, men "get to know the world initially" through practice. It is the historical development of social practice that gives rise to consciousness and its specific forms through which the external world is cognized.

2. "As forms of motion and change of the external world, these images are processed as concepts of phenomena. Upon negation through their dissolution from the positive sensation into their abstract negative, they are negated again as the nature of semblance which is the theory of knowledge of a human being. During this interpenetration process, the images as thought forms are analyzed through the science of thought and reason which is Dialectical Logic."

Comrade G. employs the language of Hegelian mystification to wind up with a purely idealist and ahistorical conception of the development of knowledge. He presents, in mystical language ("their dissolution from the positive sensation into their abstract negative, they are negated again..."), the empty abstract form of the movement of thought as the real process of conceptual thinking. But in doing so, he tells us nothing at all about how real concepts have been and are being developed. Let us ask, "Upon negation through their dissolution from the positive sensation into their abstract negative," whereupon "they are negated again as the nature of semblance," are we formulating the concept of a strike, a state, or a bee's sting on our arm?

What is meant by "the images as thought forms are analyzed through the science of thought and reason which is Dialectical Logic." This is not materialism, certainly, and it isn't even Hegel.

3. More idealist mystification: "From synthesis, which is implicit in the science of dialectical perception, Dialectical Logic takes over [??] and reveals concepts [?] and categories for analysis, thereby activating the science [???] and the theory of knowledge and historical materialism. [???] Thus, the ever-changing properties of thought in Dialectical Logic in self-relation [?] between [?] subject and object, coincide materially with the theory of knowledge."

Dialectical Logic is presented as an independent subject, which activates not only the theory of knowledge but historical materialism as well!!

4. Then, the next section, entitled "Historical Materialism as a method," we are told:

"Historical Materialism is a method for the building of the Revolutionary Party, based upon the Cognition of its object, which is society consisting of conscious human beings with the will to go on changing the world independently of each other as individuals."

Historical materialism cannot be correctly defined as a "method" for the building of the Revolutionary Party ..." It is, as Lenin explained, "the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena ..." which "made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses" and which ascertained "the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations..." (Vol. 21, p. 56)

Its "object" is not "society consisting of conscious human beings with the will [??] to go on changing the world independently of each other as individuals."

The philosophical foundation of historical materialism is that social being exists independently of social consciousness. The reference to "conscious human beings" muddles everything, and is directly opposed to the very conceptions advanced by Lenin in Volume 14, which Cde. Healy praises but does not understand. Lenin wrote: "In all social formations of any complexity — and in the capitalist social formation in particular — people in their intercourse are not conscious of what kinds of social relations are being formed, in accordance with what law, they develop." (Vol. 14, p. 323)

The reference to "will" is also a complete departure from historical materialism; history cannot be explained from either the "will" or intentions of men. The historical "will" of social men can only be understood as arising out of definite material conditions.

As for "changing the world independently of each other as individuals," it would appear that Cde. G. has just abolished social man. Instead of history developing through the collective social practice of man independent of consciousness, we have a history arising out of willful and conscious human beings who change the world independently of each other as individuals!

5. "The 'relations of production' are sometimes referred to as the mode of production, whilst the material productive forces may be called the means or tools of production."

In fact, it is the unity of the material productive forces and the relations of production which constitute the mode of production.

This astonishing ignorance of the most fundamental conceptions of historical materialism provides, it might be said, the key to a real understanding of GH's subjective-idealist mutilation of Marxism. The transition of Hegel to Marx cannot be understood as a sort of empty logical evolution from objective idealism to dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism must not be reduced to historical materialism, but the working out of the world outlook of dialectical materialism proceeded through the development of historical materialism. As Marx himself noted in his brief intellectual autobiography, the beginning of his intellectual break with Hegel came after he found himself "in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests." (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 19) The political struggles which arose therefrom led him to "a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law... My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of the so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life..." (Ibid., p.20) From there Marx summarizes his oft-quoted conclusions — the concise outline of the materialist conception of history. As the development of historical materialism proceeded through the critique of the official and left-Hegelian school, the foundations of dialectical materialism — that is, the work "of extracting from the Hegelian logic the nucleus containing Hegel's real discoveries in this field, and of establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealist wrappings" (Ibid., pp. 224-25) — were laid down. This process cannot be correctly conceived of in some sort of strict chronological sequence; rather, it was a truly dialectical process, in which the reworking of the Hegelian method proceeded simultaneously with the positive elaboration of historical materialism. In turn, the development of historical materialism requires a "correct mode of conceptual evolution" — "the method which underlies Marx's critique of political economy..." (Ibid, p. 225)

To believe that one can be a dialectical materialist without a real study of the real theoretical foundations of Marxism and its subsequent development is a dangerous misconception. Healy's problem is not simply that he is confused by Hegel. As Marx said of Proudhon, he "does not give us a false criticism of political economy because he is the possessor of an absurd philosophical theory, but gives us an absurd philosophic theory because he fails to understand the social system of today in its engrenement..." (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, p. 34) Marx stresses in his letter to Annenkov that Proudhon does not understand the real material foundations of man's historical development. Thus, "M. Proudhon, incapable of following the real movement of history, produces a phantasmagoria which presumptuously claims to be dialectical. He does not feel it necessary to speak of the seventeenth, the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, for his history proceeds in the misty realm of imagination and rises far above space and time. In short, it is not history but old Hegelian junk... The evolutions of which M. Proudhon speaks are understood to be evolutions such as are accomplished within the mystical womb of the absolute idea. If you tear the veil from this mystical language, what it comes to is that M. Proudhon is offering you the order in which economic categories arrange themselves in his own mind. It will not require great exertion on my part to prove to you that it is the order of a very disorderly mind." (Ibid, p. 36)

Unfortunately, this disorderly method has served to disorient the International Committee.

VI. Political Summary of Critique of G. Healy's "Studies"

November 7, 1982

1. "Studies in Dialectics" has brought into the open a crisis that has been developing within the International Committee for a considerable period of time.

2. For several years (in my opinion, this began in 1976 and only began to predominate in 1978), in the name of the struggle for dialectical materialism and against propagandism, the International Committee has drifted steadily away from a struggle for Trotskyism.

3. An increasingly one-sided and narrow concentration on the "process and practice of cognition" — almost entirely divorced from a concrete study of the objective situation — has led, as is expressed in "Studies," to a blatantly idealist vulgarization of dialectics, a caricature of Lenin's work on Hegel's Science of Logic, that reproduces the very forms of mystification that Marx criticized in his writings against the Left Hegelians 140 years ago (and which Engels exposed in his polemic against Duhring in the 1870s).

4. Historical materialism has been ignored. It has been forgotten that Marx and Engels, according to Lenin, "naturally paid most attention to crowning the structure of philosophical materialism, that is, not to materialist epistemology but to the materialist conception of history." (Vol. 14, p. 320)

5. As Hegel has been elevated within the International Committee to his present status alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin, Trotsky has been demoted: virtually no attention is now placed on a study of his writings. (This can be proven very simply: in all of the international conferences and cadre schools since 1978, how much time has been spent on a study of Trotsky's writings compared to Volume 14, Volume 38 and the Hegel Logic?)

6. Corresponding to a decline in the study of Trotsky's writings, the theoretical aspect of the struggle against Pabloism has been virtually abandoned.

7. A vulgarization of Marxism, palmed off as the "struggle for dialectics," has been accompanied by an unmistakeable opportunist drift within the International Committee, especially in the WRP.

8. The work of the IC in the Middle East, which has never been guided by a clear perspective of building the International Committee in that area of the world, has now degenerated into a series of pragmatic adaptations to shifts in the political winds. Marxist defense of national liberation movements and the struggle against imperialism has been interpreted in an opportunist fashion of uncritical support of various bourgeois nationalist regimes. The outcome of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has starkly revealed the bankruptcy of this approach. At the present time, the IC has been unable to make an assessment of the situation in the Middle East. The WRP has yet to take a clear position on the present diplomatic maneuverings of the Reagan Administration.

9. This has not developed overnight. The line of the IC is littered with unclarified questions:

a. The "alliance" with the Libyan Jamahiriya in August 1977;

b. The support of the Iraqi Baathists' persecution of the Stalinists.

10. During the six years in which the IC has conducted work in the Middle East, there has not been a single statement in which class relations in that area of the world have been analyzed. There has not been a single article in which the development of the working class has been analyzed. For all intents and purposes, the Theory of Permanent Revolution has been treated as inapplicable to present circumstances.

11. The same uncritical approach to developments had been manifested toward the independence struggle culminating in the establishment of Zimbabwe.

12. As for Iran, the greatest revolutionary upheaval in the colonial world since the events in China, the International Committee has produced not a single critical analysis since February 1979.

13. Out of all the pragmatic day-to-day shifts there is beginning to coalesce a political tendency that has a definite Pabloite taint. Thus, we find in a statement of the WRP Political Committee, dated December 11, 1981:

"But Gaddafi has politically developed in the direction of revolutionary socialism and he has shunned the palaces and harems of some other Arab leaders.

"For this reason he has become the undisputed leader of the Libyan people and bis name is now synonymous with the strivings of the oppressed in many countries." (News Line, December 12, 1981)

14. The dangers of such an impressionistic approach, against which we warned many times in the course of the struggle against Pabloism and the SWP, has been clearly shown in the events which followed the Israeli invasion.

15. The reaction of the WRP to the outbreak of the war in the Malvinas should be taken as a serious sign of political disorientation. With the outbreak of war, the oldest and most experienced section of the International Committee took an incorrect position, which was essentially pacifist, which was corrected only after nearly two weeks. Given all the work that has been carried out by the WRP in the Middle East in defense of oppressed nations against imperialism, it must be asked why the WRP had such difficulty recognizing the same issue in the Malvinas war.

16. These are not isolated incidents which can be overlooked. We are reviewing several years of work during which an increasingly definite opportunist tendency has become apparent in our work.

17. This does not mean that our work has been all wrong and that no achievements have been registered. That is, of course, not the case. But the rapid development of the world crisis, the desperate crisis of Stalinism, and the radicalization of the masses in all the major capitalist countries present an unparalleled opportunity for Trotskyism. However, we would be committing the greatest political error if, at this very moment, we pulled in our Trotskyist horns.

Appendix: On G. Healy's Use of Sources in "Studies"

1. Another "aspect" of Healy's articles deserves special notice, for it lays bare the charlatanry which underlies the entire operation. It turns out that GH is a plagiarist! Striving to achieve the heights of profundity, he is not averse to "borrowing" the ideas and words of others — without bothering to provide citations. Entire passages from the writings of Soviet authors are simply lifted and inserted into articles that appear in the "Studies."

2. On page 55 of the "Studies," we read a sentence which seems to be dropped in the article for no apparent reason: "The principle of coincidence enables us to define the objective content of a given category by revealing its relations as a stage of knowledge in relation to other categories such as necessity, probability, possibility."

But on page 255 of Dialectical Materialism and the History of Philosophy, by the Soviet theoretician Theodore Oizerman, we will find the source of this idea. "However, that is not all there is to applying the principle of coincidence, because the point is not only to reveal the content of a given category and stress its relativity as a stage of knowledge, but also to define its place among other categories and its relation to them. For example, when we deal with the category of necessity, we must define its relation to such categories as law, essence, possibility, chance, probability, basis, etc."

3. On page 63 of "Studies," we find: "Substance as a dialectical category has proved to be a necessary condition, without assuming which it was impossible in principle to understand, the mode of interaction between the thinking body and the world within which it operated as a thinking body."

What is the source of this "innovation": the "thinking body"? The inspiration is to be found on page 60 of E.V. Ilyenkov's Dialectical Logic. There we find: "Substance thus proved to be an absolutely necessary condition, without assuming which it was impossible in principle to understand the mode of interaction between the thinking body and the world within which it operated as a thinking body." This passage appears in Ilyenkov as part of a discussion about Spinoza. In Healy, the passage is just dropped in out of the blue, without bothering to mention Spinoza at all.

4. Perhaps the most obscure of all the sections of Cde. GH's very obscure articles is a section entitled "Empiricism and theoretical thinking." Those who accept the "Studies" in good faith may be excused for believing that only a genius could decipher this section. In fact, one needs only to have in one's possession the third number of the 1982 edition of the Soviet journal Social Sciences, which carries an article by one Vladimir Shvyrev entitled "The Empirical and Theoretical in Scientific Cognition."

On page 70 GH tells us that "Scientific knowledge at this early stage arises from an interaction between sensuality and thought, wherein the source of sensation is in the external world." In the original, S. writes: "Thus, scientific knowledge always presupposes an interaction of the mechanisms of sensuality and thought." (Social Sciences p. 128)

GH writes on page 72: "Our empirical investigation orientates cognition towards the identification of relationships between the conceptual apparatus of science and the reality which is beyond and which is seen through analysis as a whole as being beyond the conceptual field, only to be revealed in 'living contemplation.' Science, it must not be forgotten, provides a knowledge of objective reality and not some closed conceptual structure."

Very profound, it might seem, and certainly hard to follow. But how did he arrive at this insight, which bears little connection to what came before it? It is necessary to consult Shvyrev, who wrote:

"If, on the other hand, we take up the empirical investigation, its general characteristic, most likely, is the orientation of cognition towards the identification of the relationships between the conceptual apparatus of science and the reality which is beyond the conceptual sphere and which, in the final analysis, is seen in 'living contemplation.' The determination of such relationships is an indispensable function of the scientific cognition which is implemented precisely by empirical investigation inasmuch as science is not a closed sphere of artificial conceptual structures but a knowledge of objective reality." (Ibid. pp. 130-31)

GH writes on page 72: "Whenever the empirical and the theoretical concept interact, a very definite function takes place in the interaction. This is in accordance with the findings of observation and experiment with corresponding results through improvement in the cognitive process itself."

Shvyrev put it better in the original: "However, whenever there is a real interaction of the two, significant for the functioning and the development of science, the empirical has a very definite functional task in this interaction; it ensures the relationship of the theoretical conceptual apparatus with the findings of the observation and experimentation, with the results of 'living contemplation'." (Ibid., p.131)

GH writes on page 72: "Concepts such as elaboration and perfection constitute an act of singling out and penetrating objective reality, in an ever-fuller and ever deeper reflection of its substance."

All this must be incomprehensible to even the most experienced cadre, for the concepts referred to by Healy have never been utilized within the Trotskyist movement. As it turns out, GH has again plagiarized Shvyrev... badly. The Soviet author stated:

"In real fact, however, when we say that theoretical cognition is oriented toward the elaboration and perfection of the conceptual apparatus, we should not overlook that elaboration and perfection constitute an act of singling out and penetrating the objective reality, ever fuller and ever deeper reflection of its substance." (Ibid., pp. 131-32)

In the course of freely plagiarizing from Shvyrev, he renders the poor man incomprehensible; for GH "quotes" without concern for context — picking up parts of paragraphs and inserting them in his article for no apparent reason. For example, he writes on pages 72-73:

"In the early stages of dialectical materialism as a scientific study, we quickly arrive on the scene of a study of concepts. In this relationship, such a study provides guidance for an empirical examination in the proper sense of the word. That is why induction as a method in science, through which a general conclusion is drawn from a set of premises, must not be used at the empirical stage of science.

GH confuses induction with deduction, but the fault does not lie with Shvyrev who cannot be blamed if his article is not understood by the man who is plagiarizing from it. This is what S. actually wrote:

"The things which appear to be simple and clear for ordinary consciousness become an object of conceptual analysis in the early stages of scientific study. The important thing for us to emphasize is that this conceptual analysis gives guidance and directs empirical examination in the proper sense of the word. This is precisely why the inductivist model of cognitive activity is invalid at the empirical stage of science, as a 'linear process' of the gradual inductive ascension of facts to generalizations." (Ibid., pp. 134-35)

I suspect that there are other sections which are plagiarized from various Soviet sources. But what is the significance of this? Trotsky was fond of the Buffon epigram: "The method is the man." Plagiarism is, as a method of work, totally alien to Marxism. In Capital, Marx never failed to credit by name the author of every idea to which he had occasion to refer. This was in accordance with his dialectical materialist conception of the historical development of theoretical concepts. From the opposite standpoint, the charlatanry which permeates .GH's "Studies" finds its clearest expression in plagiarism, i.e., the perpetration of outright intellectual fraud. One can recall Marx's assessment of Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty:

"High-sounding speculative jargon, supposed to be German-philosophical, appears regularly on the scene when his Gallic acuteness of understanding fails him. A self-advertising, self-glorifying, boastful tone and especially the twaddle about "science" and sham display of it, which are always so unedifying, are continually screaming in one's ears ... Add to this the clumsy erudition of the self-taught, whose natural pride in his own original thought has already been broken and who now, as a parvenu of science, feels it necessary to bolster himself up with what he is not and has not." (Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 15 5)

The following from Marx's epitaph for Proudhon is worth quoting as well:

"Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry. In fact this hung together with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the petty-bourgeois is composed of On The One Hand and On The Other Hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, in his scientific, religious and artistic views. It is so in his morals, in everything. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition a gifted man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous or now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There only remains one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the attention of the day." (Ibid., p. 157)

3. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North

December 1983

Dear Comrade Dave,

The IC at its meeting on October 29 to 30 had to deal with a series of political and theoretical problems arising particularly from the reports of the German, Greek and United States sections.

The Greek comrades, having met with some initial successes in recruitment from the crisis-ridden Greek Stalinist forces, had to be pulled back sharply from a propagandist adaptation to this development.

At stake here was the conscious development of dialectical materialist analysis of every development revealed by practice, comprehending these developments as forms of appearance of the essential movement of the world revolutionary crisis; and from this comprehension arming the party's cadres for an enriched practice in the class struggle.

The German section's report shows the great dangers of a refusal consciously to develop the dialectical materialist method through the training of cadres to compare and analyze every new development as a manifestation of capitalism's world crisis.

Instead, these comrades applied "Marxist" labels to the living developments, in order thereby to abstain from the necessary intervention. Such is the depth of the crisis that this retreat from the IC's struggle for method and cadre-training now produces the crudest forms of economism and worship of spontaneity.

What is behind these problems, which, of course, we must expect to emerge in many forms and which require our attention, theoretical and practical. Their most general (universal) source, upon which all analysis is posited is the furious pace of development of the world crisis, always revealing new forms, and condemning to "tailism" all those who do not face it with the dialectical materialist approach to unity of theory and practice.

But, as was pointed out in the discussions in the International Committee, the crisis and its development take not only social, economic and political forms, but also ideological ones.

Every development of the class struggle brings new ideological reflections in the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, new "defenses" for the bourgeois order; and these are relayed into the working class, especially through the agency of the reformists, centrists and Stalinists.

The ideological pressure on the revolutionary party intensifies, creating the constant danger of opportunist and sectarian tendencies. As Trotsky insisted in In Defence of Marxism:

"In order not to give way under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, and police repression, the proletarian revolutionist, a leader, all the more, requires a clear, far-sighted, completely thought-out world outlook. Only upon the basis of a unified Marxist conception is it possible to correctly approach 'concrete' questions." (pp. 143-144) (My emphasis)

Now this brings us to the report which you made on the US section and the comments which I made then, followed by Comrade Banda's remarks.

The ideological pressure to which I have referred has the effect of producing a scepticism about the possibility of achieving the great tasks before us with our numerically small forces.

This scepticism takes the form of paralysis before the everyday necessity of making changes in the party's practice and the developments (sic) of the party's cadres.

It is precisely at that level of struggle for change that the clear, far-sighted, completely thought-out world outlook" of dialectical materialism must overcome the resistance of the pressure of the bourgeois order.

And the most fundamental level at which this struggle for cadre-training must be understood and consciously, explicitly fought for, is the level of method, of the dialectical comprehension of the forms in which the essential development of the world crisis and the world revolution, including our own activity and its effects, takes place.

In Defence of Marxism is the record of Trotsky's struggle to place these principled struggles at the base of the work of the movement.

My concern in the IC discussion was that your report showed the dangers that we are not holding fast to these very basic lessons of Trotsky's last struggle and the whole struggle of the International Committee.

Your own heavy emphasis on the "political independence of the working class," backed by a quotation from In Defence of Marxism, will become a weapon in the hands of all those who retain the mark of pragmatism, because it will be treasured by them as something more "concrete" than the explicit struggle to develop and comprehend the categories of dialectics as the method for that life-and-death matter of grasping the rapid and all-sided developments thrown up by the world crisis. We must be absolutely explicit and firm against all enemies, about where we stand on Trotsky's conclusion about the struggle and the American party:

"Not all comrades possibly are content with the fact that I gave the predominant place in the discussion to the matter of dialectics. But I am sure that it is now the only way to begin the theoretical education of the party, especially of the youth, and to inject an aversion to empiricism and eclectics." (p. 120) (My emphasis)

It is absolutely clear that the 1939-1940 struggle showed once again, that there is no "political independence of the working class," without, as its principal presupposition, the struggle to make the dialectical materialist method victorious over empiricism, eclecticism and impressionism, the combination of which is uniquely achieved in American pragmatism, an accomplished form of subjective idealism.

My aim in writing these things is to make as clear as possible the issue which was raised at the IC meeting. It is a continuation, at a much more developed stage of the revolutionary crisis, of the point made in my letter to you in April this year. There I drew your attention to a Bulletin editorial, in which Marx's dialectical materialism was characterized as a direct continuation of earlier materialist philosophy, thus excluding the crucial contribution of the dialectical method contained in Hegel's objective idealist philosophy.

In other words, we had Marxist philosophy presented in a manner doctored to meet the requirements of American pragmatism.

As your reply (July 21) pointed out, the fact that such a mistake could appear, despite the unceasing struggle of the IC's educational work for many years against exactly this misconception, was "not without significance." "We still have a lot of hard work to do against pragmatism in the United States." Now this "hard work" is continuous, in-ceasing (sic) and never completed, of course.

The concern which I and other comrades had at the October 1983 IC meeting, was that you concentrated on matters of program to the exclusion of an explicit treatment of the struggle for the dialectical method in the day-to-day fight with the party cadres, and that this can only bring dangerous letting-цр in the conscious struggle against propagandism.

This pragmatism, and its persistence against the achievements of a fully-worked out Marxist world outlook, is the most fundamental level at which bourgeois ideology fights our party from within, and must be explicitly combat-ted, above all by the daily struggle to develop the dialectical method in cadre-training.

In this way, the theoretical problems revealed in discussion in other sections' reports are repeated in forms characteristic of the class struggle and ideological history of the United States.

Comrade Banda then raised the question of the Bulletin's headline (Friday, October 28, 1983): "Reagan is a Liar." We are obliged, of course, to fight consciously against every new form of pressure of bourgeois public opinion, mediated by the petty-bourgeois ideologists, that you replied to Comrade Banda that the Workers League Political Committee Statement on the Grenadian invasion (on the inside pages of the same issue) did indeed take a firm defeatist line.

As for the front-page lead, this had waited for Reagan's TV speech and been written, including the headline, in reply.

This does not, of course, alter in any way the fact that the essential class line of the party must predominate and be carried on the front page. "Reagan is a Liar" is a propaganda response which actually does not differentiate us from all sorts of centrist and petty-bourgeois tendencies — emphasis on "political independence of the working class" notwithstanding.

To the extent that there is any letup — the day-to-day fight to comprehend dialectically all the new manifestations of the world crisis and of the pressure of the class enemy — to the extent that there is danger of our independent revolutionary line being lost, even if that happens through the mechanism of pulling back into a journalistic routine.

The fact that you had to be somewhere else and leave the job to someone else does not affect the argument.

After all, you were in the same position when another comrade in the leadership wrote the Bulletin editorial of April, and, as you yourself said then: "This is neither an excuse nor a justification for the editorial, but an explanation of how the editorial was written. Of course, it is in terms of crisis that the problems of the cadre are revealed most clearly..." Precisely.

This brings me to the final point. The statement of the Political Committee on Grenada is in fact by no means as explicit as you had thought. I am not raising this here as a matter for political dispute, but in order to direct your attention to the implications of all this, these theoretical questions which have been raised here. The PC statement "calls on the entire American labor movement to fight for the withdrawal of all US troops from that island (Grenada)."

This is of course correct, though it does not by itself differentiate our line from that of many who will say, "Bring our boys home!"

Your only direct reference to the defeat of US imperialism in this war is in Point 9: "US imperialism's naked aggression in Grenada and throughout the world cannot be defeated through protest, but only through mobilizing the strength of the working class in struggle against the capitalist system." There follows, again, the correct demand for immediate withdrawal of all US forces in Grenada.

What is needed here is a clear statement and brief explanation of the fact that the struggle of the workers in the US (and other advanced capitalist countries) and of the colonial and ex-colonial peoples is one, and that a defeat for US imperialist forces in Grenada would be a victory for the American working class and workers everywhere, making it clear that we are for unconditional support even of the military clique in power in Grenada.

This is not of course opposed in your resolution, but it is not clearly stated and emphasized. And it is not correct to say: "The main target of the policy of global counterrevolution is the enormous power of the American labor movement."

It is not a question of the "main target" at all. There is a tinge, here, of reservation about the anti-imperialist content of the colonial revolution, a tinge of reservation about the unity of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and the colonial-national liberation movements.

It is correct in general to insist, as your resolution's concluding section does, that "The central issue facing the American working class is the necessity to establish its political independence through the formation of a Labor Party, and the struggle for a workers' government committed to abolishing the capitalist system and establishing socialism."

Yes, but the road right now, to "establishing the political independence of the American working class" is by recognising that the "central issue" is to fight for the defeat of the US imperialist invasion of Grenada and its coming attack in Nicaragua.

That is what is established by a dialectical cognition of the crisis' latest manifestations and the consequent Party tasks. Grenada and Lebanon are real developments and must be comprehended as the suddenly rapidly developing drive to war and US imperialism's "global responsibilities."

It is not the same as referring to the Grenadian issue as the "central task of establishing the political independence of the working class."

Your PC statement in the Bulletin (for Tuesday, November 1, which I saw after writing this) does correct the formulation.

The two issues in the discussion are the issue of the dialectical method in training the cadres, and the issue of our line on the Grenadian invasion — are connected after all. The concentration on dialectical method and the great questions of program, strategy and tactics cannot be separated. Their unity is constituted by the cadre training of the revolutionary party.

"Without an extensive and generalized dialectical comprehension of the present epoch as an epoch of abrupt turns, a real education of the parties, a correct strategical leadership of the class struggle, a correct combination of tactics, and above all, a sharp and bold and decisive re-arming at each successive breaking-point of the situation are impossible. And it is just at such an abrupt breaking-point that two or three days sometimes decide the fate of the international revolution." (The Third International After Lenin, p. 65)

Fraternally, Cliff

4. Letter from David North to Cliff Slaughter

December 27, 1983

Dear Comrade Cliff:

Thank you very much for your recent letter which Comrade Mike has passed on to me. I appreciate the time you have taken to analyze the political and theoretical issues which arose at the last meeting of the International Committee. Your contributions to the political development of the Workers League are always welcomed and respected.

I take with extreme seriousness your concern that my report on October 30, 1983 indicated a drift toward pragmatism in the work of the American section, and that, despite my claims to the contrary, the failure of the Workers League, in your judgment, to take a clear stand for the defeat of US imperialism is the outcome of this rejection of the conscious struggle for the development of the dialectical method.

You write that my report — with its "heavy emphasis on the 'political independence of the working class'" — "showed the dangers that we are not holding fast to these very basic lessons of Trotsky's last struggle and the whole struggle of the International Committee."

Considering the entire history of the Fourth International and, within that, of the Workers League, I could not imagine a more serious admonition. Every struggle within the movement since 1939-40 has demonstrated that the rejection of the dialectical method MUST lead — sooner rather than later — to an abandonment of the principles of Trotskyism, no matter how loudly and frequently programmatic orthodoxy is proclaimed. The great achievement of the International Committee has been its defense of materialist dialectics against all forms of bourgeois ideology. It has been on this basis that the IC has withstood and defeated every challenge to Trotskyism. Whatever the problems in its own political development, the Workers League strives each day to base its work on the lessons of this history. The OCI's denial of the necessity of a specific study of the dialectical method as the Marxist theory of knowledge and its attempt to liquidate theory into program was no less reactionary than Hansen's effort to equate dialectical materialism with his so-called "consistent" empiricism. From somewhat different standpoints, both Hansen and the OCI — later to be joined by Wohlforth — were arguing for complete freedom from scientific method, that is, for pragmatic adaptation to the line of least resistance based on an uncritical worshipping of the surface appearance of phenomena.

The IC never rested on purely verbal affirmations of the dialectical method. In all the fundamental struggles against revisionism, it has — as Trotsky did in 1939-40 — demonstrated the essential link between method and political conclusions. As Trotsky insisted and as the IC has repeatedly shown, the method may be conscious or unconscious but it makes itself known.

For this reason, I found myself in complete agreement with your letter's opening remarks on the ideological implications of the development of the world capitalist crisis. However, it is with the way in which you relate these general conclusions to the problems of the Workers League that I take exception. It is one thing to urge that every effort be made to develop the dialectical materialist method. It is quite another to presume it is being abandoned and then base a set of political conclusions upon that assumption, without demonstrating either point or establishing the inner connection between false method and wrong conclusions.

While you state that it was my political report at the IC which raised your concerns, you say very little about the substance of that report. It dealt with the political implications of the latest stage in the development of Pabloite revisionism in the United States — in which the SWP's repudiation of the theory of Permanent Revolution is being accompanied by an ever-more open orientation toward the Democratic Party. I then attempted to explain the political basis for the decision of the Workers League to intervene for the first time in its history in a national Presidential election.

This is not a minor political step, and I thought it necessary to stress that the basis of this intervention must be the fight for the political independence of the working class. I also pointed out that opposition to this perspective was inseparable from revisionist skepticism about the revolutionary role of the working class, and it was within this context that I quoted the extremely important observation made by Trotsky on pages 14-15 of In Defense of Marxism. Permit me to add that I also stated, quite explicitly, that neither the political independence of the working class nor its revolutionary role could be grasped or established at the level of empiricism.

Nevertheless, you warn that the "heavy emphasis on the 'political independence of the working class' ... will become a weapon in the hands of all those who retain the mark of pragmatism, because it will be treasured by them as something more 'concrete' than the explicit struggle to develop and comprehend the categories of dialectics as the method for that life-and-death matter of grasping the rapid and all-sided developments thrown up by the world crisis."

You find in our response to the American invasion of Grenada the justification for this special warning.

Though you state that you are "not raising this here as a matter for political dispute," it would have to be and should be an urgent matter for discussion within the International Committee if the Workers League had drifted away from a clear position of revolutionary defeatism. But I do not agree with your analysis of our position.

In the issue of October 28, 1983, the political content of both the Political Committee statement (entitled "Mobilize Labor Against US Imperialism") and the front page statement itself took a clear defeatist line against the American invasion. Nothing in this issue justifies the very serious political accusation that the Workers League is retreating from a principled stand in defense of the colonial people against US imperialism on the basis of a policy of revolutionary defeatism. In this very issue, no less than 7 pages out of 16 were explicitly devoted to the struggle against the US invasion of Grenada.

Rather than simply take one issue, however, let us review the political content of the Bulletin in the two months prior to the American invasion.

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 6, 1983: There is a Political Committee statement entitled "Imperialist Provocation Against the USSR" which explicitly defends the USSR against the anti-communist hysteria whipped up over the shooting down of the KAL jet.

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 9, 1983: The headline is "Reagan Launches Lebanon War." It calls for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class to overthrow imperialism, and explains that the first step toward this goal is the building of a Labor Party.

On page 3, there is an article on the KAL incident, which declares: "The Workers League, as the Trotskyist movement in the United States, unconditionally defends the USSR, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy, as part of the struggle to mobilize the working class against imperialism."

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 13, 1983: On pages 2 and 3, there are articles defending the USSR in the KAL incident. One of these articles is an analysis of the anti-Soviet frame-up by Ron May.

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 16, 1983: Headline is "US Troops Out of Lebanon" and the article declares: "The American labor movement must come to the defense of the Lebanese and Palestinian masses against the Reagan Administration and its Zionist and Lebanese fascist clients. Labor must demand the immediate withdrawal of all US, Israeli and other imperialist forces from Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean and the cutting off of all aid to Gemayel and Israel." The statement then denounces the "unspeakable pro-Zionist policy of the Kirkland bureaucracy."

This issue carries a front-page ad announcing a September 25th meeting entitled: "Defeat Reagan's War Drive! Build a Labor Party!"

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1983: Headline is "Democrats Back Reagan's War" and the article declares that "The struggle of the Lebanese National Movement deserves the full support of the American working class and youth." It concludes with the call for the mobilization of the working class "against the imperialist policies of Reagan and the Democrats" on the basis of the fight for a workers' government.

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 23, 1983: Headline is "WAR POWERS CONSPIRACY."

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 27, 1983: carries a full page report on the WL Public meeting. It reports the statement of Cde. McLaughlin that "the WL stands for the defeat of US imperialism and its imperialist, Zionist and fascist allies in Lebanon and for the military victory of the Lebanese National Movement and the PLO." The article also carries extracts from my speech at the meeting, which emphasized both the program of revolutionary defeatism and the unity of the struggles of the colonial masses, the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, and the working class in the workers' states. It denounced pacifism and explained the Leninist policies of revolutionary defeatism. In a direct quote, the speech included the following:

"The choice of policies in the struggle against war is not at random. Just as the foreign policy of an imperialist ruling class is inseparable from its domestic policies, in that the ruling class defends on a world scale the same interests it defends on the national scale, the anti-war policies of the working class is dictated by the logic of the class struggle itself."

ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 30, 1983: The Bulletin provided a full page of detailed coverage of the Nicaraguan Sandinista leader's UN denunciation of US aggression in Central America.

ISSUE OF OCTOBER 4, 1983: A full page article on Page 5 entitled: "Defeat US-Syrian Conspiracy Against PLO!"

ISSUE OF OCTOBER 7, 1983: An article on the AFL-CIO Convention, concentrating on its support for imperialist foreign policy.

ISSUE OF OCTOBER 14, 1983: The editorial is entitled: "Kirkland Meets Major Blowtorch," and it denounces the AFL-CIO President's connections with US imperialism's role in Latin America. The connection between his alliance with the imperialist butchers and his betrayals of American workers is clearly made.

ISSUE OF OCTOBER 18, 1893: The headline is "Stop Terror Against Nicaragua" and the accompanying front-page article is a PC Statement. It again clearly calls for the mobilization of the working class in defense of the Central American masses and for the replacement of Kirkland and the CIA stooges in the labor movement.

ISSUE OF OCTOBER 25, 1983: Headline is "Withdraw Troops From Lebanon."

This is the record of the Bulletin in the period directly prior to the US invasion of Grenada. It shows very clearly that the WL continuously raised the issue of mobilizing the working class in the United States against imperialism and in support of the masses of the semi-colonial countries. I do not claim that this record, in itself, is a decisive reply to the criticisms which you have made. Great events do produce sudden changes in program and perspectives that reflect the pressure of powerful social forces upon the revolutionary vanguard.

But this record does show that the campaign against American imperialism and its war preparations did constitute the central political theme of the Bulletin and the political work of the Party. We directed this fight toward the working class in direct struggle against the AFL-CIO leadership, which, we are proud to say, has acknowledged our efforts by attempting officially to proscribe the Bulletin in the trade union movement. As for the impact of the invasion itself, there is no sign whatsoever that the Workers League retreated from its position of revolutionary defeatism.

However, you find inadequate the sentence with which point 9 of the statement begins: "US imperialism's naked aggression in Grenada and throughout the world cannot be defeated through protest, but only through mobilizing the strength of the working class in struggle against the capitalist system." I think this statement is clear enough, as we are directly speaking of the political means through which the working class will defeat imperialism. Moreover, your criticism that we failed to stress the unity of the struggles of the colonial masses and the workers in the advanced capitalist countries is simply contradicted by the paragraphs in section 9 to which you fail to refer.

Were it only a matter of taking exception to your criticism of our position, this letter would not be necessary. However, in the conclusion of your letter it becomes clear that there is a substantial difference between the perspectives of the Workers League and those which you advance.

Please reread. Comrade Cliff, how you formulated the central tasks of the Workers League in relation to the imperialist invasion of Grenada:

"It is correct IN GENERAL to insist, as your resolution's concluding section does, that 'The central issue facing the American working class is the necessity to establish its political independence through the formation of a Labour party, and the struggle for a workers' government committed to abolishing the capitalist system and establishing socialism.'

"Yes, but the road right now, to 'establishing the political independence of the American working class' is by recognizing that the 'central issue' is to fight for the defeat of the US imperialist invasion of Grenada and its coming attack in Nicaragua.

"That is what is established by a dialectical cognition of the crisis' latest manifestations and the consequent Party tasks. Grenada and Lebanon are real developments and must be comprehended as the suddenly rapidly developing drive to war and US imperialism's 'global responsibilities'."

I am astonished by this argument, which goes against everything that we have been taught by the International Committee and by you, personally. Taking issue with our assertion that the task at hand is the fight for a Labor Party and a workers' government, you argue, "Yes, but the road right now ... is to fight for the defeat of the US imperialist invasion of Grenada and its coming attack in Nicaragua."

This approach, which explicitly separates the fight for the defeat of the US invasion of Grenada from the struggle to establish the political independence of the working class, is identical to that of every revisionist and Stalinist group in the United States. Wasn't it against this invidious distinction that the Workers League and the IC based their struggle against the opportunist Pabloite conception of the "antiwar" movement? Do they not always claim that our "sectarianism" consists of our principled approach to all political developments, and our refusal to abandon a strategical line worked out over many years to suit what is happening "right now"? As Trotsky insisted in his reply to Shachtman, our politics is of a principled and not of a conjunctural character. Proceeding from the opposite standpoint, the SWP has always attacked our "fixation" with the Labor Party issue. Tom Kerry thought he was delivering a powerful blow against us when he noted sarcastically that the "hotshots" of the Workers League not only call for the Labor Party on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday as well.

Revolutionary defeatism is not simply a slogan which we print in our newspaper. It is a perspective that is bound up with definite practices within the workers' movement. As we understand revolutionary defeatism, it means that a Marxist party MUST WORK for the defeat of its own ruling class during war. In practical terms, this means that the Workers League must fight for the maximum development of the class struggle within the United States, and at the forefront of this fight must be the struggle for the political independence of the working class from the bourgeois-imperialist parties through the building of a Labor Party.

You state that "Grenada and Lebanon are real developments ..." Do you mean to suggest that the fight for the political independence of the working class in the United States is any less real? Is this not the classical form of pragmatic argument which counterposes "concrete" political events to "abstract" matters of principle and program? Far from being an example of "a dialectical cognition of the crisis' latest manifestations and the consequent Party tasks," your formulation calls to mind the impressionist worshipping of the "realities of living events" against which Trotsky so frequently warned.

I do not want to write more sharply than is necessary, but the approach you suggest would lead, if accepted by the Workers League, straight toward outright opportunism. After all, if Grenada and Lebanon are to be counterposed as "real developments" to the strategical line of the fight for the political independence of the working class, why not proceed in the same manner toward every other important new development in the class struggle.

For example, in the case of the Greyhound strike, we insisted that the central task is the industrial and political mobilization of the working class against the Reagan Administration and its Democratic Party allies. To which the SWP and various revisionist tendencies (such as the followers of Thornett) reply, "Yes, that is true in general, but right now we must fight for the victory of the strike." And on this basis they refrained from making any criticism of the trade union bureaucracy, silently walked on the picket line without selling their newspapers or identifying themselves politically.

Of course, you would never suggest such a political line, but your formulation, however unintentional, has a logic of its own.

As you certainly know, the "fight for the defeat of the US imperialist invasion of Grenada" — however "concrete" this slogan may appear to the pragmatist — is, from the standpoint of Marxism, little more than abstract phrasemongering when separated from the Labor Party struggle. Had the Bulletin of October 28, 1983 repeated 100 times the call for the defeat of US imperialism but left out the issue of the Labor Party as the central task facing the American working class, the Political Committee statement would have represented a centrist evasion of the real concrete tasks.

No matter how "abstract" the political independence of the working class may appear to revisionists, it is the only historically concrete strategical basis for a real struggle against imperialism. Though this is certainly not your intention, this perspective is belittled in your letter. For example, you refer to US imperialism's "coming attack in Nicaragua" as if it were already an accomplished fact. No doubt, such preparations are already at a very advanced stage. But we do take seriously the IC's insistence on the undefeated character of the working class in the imperialist centers, and it is our belief that the best-laid plans of the Pentagon can be disrupted by the development of the class struggle within the United States.

You also take exception to our statement that "The main target of the policy of global counter-revolution is the enormous power of the American labor movement." Taken entirely by itself, this statement could appear one-sided. But within its entire context, the statement is essentially correct, and, incidentally, it makes the very point that you claimed was lacking: "that the struggle of the workers in the US ... and of the colonial and ex-colonial peoples is one ..." The main enemy of the American bourgeoisie is at home, in the sense that US imperialism cannot establish global hegemony — a goal which requires the complete militarization of American industry — without smashing the labor movement in the United States. Unlike the revisionists, we firmly believe that this task is beyond the capacity of the Reagan Administration. The historically-necessary transition to more direct forms of Bonapartist military-police rule will not be accomplished without enormous internal crises which will facilitate the development of a revolutionary situation within the United States.

Finally, Comrade Cliff, you note "a tinge ... of reservation about the anti-imperialist content of the colonial revolution, a tinge of reservation about the unity of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and the colonial-national liberation movements."

I do not see why emphasis on the class struggle in the United States should be interpreted as a "reservation" about the historical and political significance of the struggles in the semi-colonial countries. Let me assure you that no such reservation exists. But is there any point in discussion of this issue at such a level? Neither of us believe that abstract declamations about "the unity of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and the colonial-national liberation movements" is a worthy substitute for a scientific political estimate of the class forces and the leaderships involved in each of the struggles. There is, without any question, a powerful anti-imperialist content within the colonial revolution, but that is not the only element within this historical phenomenon. All colonial-national movements are a unity of antagonistic class forces, and the relationship of each of these class forces to the main imperialist powers is by no means identical. The pressure of imperialism does not mitigate but rather intensifies the class struggle within the semi-colonial countries.

Again in contradistinction to the Pabloites and the Stalinists, we hold that the anti-imperialism of the colonial bourgeoisie is of a relative and not an absolute character, conditioned by the level of development of class contradictions within each of the oppressed nations. The objective anti-imperialist content of the colonial revolution and its historical unity with the proletarian struggles in the metropolitan centers must be strengthened and actualized through a consistent struggle against the bourgeois-nationalist leaderships of the mass movements within the oppressed countries.

This perspective of building independent Trotskyist parties to win the leadership of the national anti-imperialist struggle does not detract one iota from our unconditional defense of national movements in the oppressed countries, whatever the character of their existing leaderships. Our concept of unity is dialectical, i.e., it contains difference within it, and it is on the basis of the building of revolutionary parties of the working class in all countries that we establish, as revolutionary Marxists within the class struggle, the unity of all the oppressed.

At the very conclusion of your letter, you write:

"The two issues in the discussion — the issue of the dialectical method in training the cadres, and the issue of our line on the Grenadan invasion — are connected after all. The concentration on dialectical method and the great questions of program, strategy and tactics cannot be separated."

We do not deny this connection, but it is not explained by purely formal references to the dialectical method. Of that any pragmatist is quite capable. What must be studied and developed is the correct application of the dialectical method and historical materialism. However, this is by no means undermined by "heavy emphasis" on the "political independence of the working class." I believe that a serious study of all of Lenin's works — and, most explicitly, his earliest economic and philosophical studies — will reveal the inner connection between his concentration on the correct application of the dialectical method and his "heavy emphasis" on the political independence of the working class.

I must admit that I am disturbed by the very suggestion that an emphasis on the "political independence of the working class" could be characterized as "very heavy" within the International Committee — especially in relation to the report from a sympathizing section in a country in which the working class has not yet broken politically from the liberals. All the organizational, political and theoretical tasks of a Marxist party — above all, in the United States — are directed precisely toward the achievement of this political independence.

While you suggest that this emphasis "will become a weapon in the hands of all those who retain the mark of pragmatism," I see nothing that supports this conclusion. The whole fight against the SWP since 1961 — not to mention the entire history of the struggle of Bolshevism — has hinged on this very issue. Far from embracing the concept of the political independence of the working class, it is under relentless attack by Stalinists and revisionists all over the world today. The neo-Stalinism of the SWP does not originate in the head of Mr. Barnes, but is a very definite response of US imperialism to the new stage of the capitalist crisis and the revolutionary upsurge of the world proletariat. In this way Pabloism serves as a medium for the transmission of imperialist pressures into the workers' movement. As I have heard you insist so many times in the past, it is at precisely such a point that the International Committee must be on the alert for any trace of the revisionist outlook within its own ranks and at the same time intensify its political and theoretical assault against Pabloism. As you will certainly agree, this fight against Pabloism is by no means behind us.

It is precisely for this reason that I believe that a clarification of the issues you have raised in your letter is very necessary.

Comrade Cliff, we do not doubt or deny that the struggle against pragmatism is not a finished question inside the Workers League. However, we feel strongly that we have been able to develop a correct political line on Grenada and on other major developments because we have attempted to learn from the IC's struggle for dialectical materialism.

With warmest fraternal regards.
David North
cc:
Comrade Gerry
Comrade Mike

5. Letter from David North to Mike Banda

January 23, 1984

Dear Comrade Mike:

Somewhat more than 30 years have passed since the International Committee was formed in order to defend the Fourth International against the growth of a revisionist tendency, led by Pablo and Mandel, which challenged in theory and practice all the fundamental Marxist conceptions for which Leon Trotsky had fought and died. In 1953 Pablo directly challenged the historical role of the Fourth International as the "World Party of Socialist Revolution" and called into question the revolutionary role of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism and the builder of a socialist society. He put forward the position — at first surreptitiously but gradually with ever increasing boldness — that the independent revolutionary role ascribed by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky to the proletariat could be fulfilled by the Soviet bureaucracy — the parasitic social caste which Trotsky had declared to be counter-revolutionary "through and through."

Underlying Pablo's revisions of the essential programmatic conceptions of the Fourth International was the abandonment of the dialectical method and historical materialism of Marx and its replacement with crass impressionism supplemented by idealist speculation about the revolutionary socialist "potential" of non-proletarian class forces.

Less than eight years later, the British Trotskyists — led by Comrade Gerry and yourself — were forced to assume responsibility for the defense of the International Committee against the open resurgence of Pabloism in an even more dangerous form. The upsurge of the colonial revolution was interpreted by the Socialist Workers Party as "proof" that the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders, under whom limited victories had been won, could serve as a substitute for the development of Trotskyist parties of the working class. The SLL resolutely opposed the SWP's reactionary adulation of petty-bourgeois nationalists such as Ben Bella and Castro, and insisted that Hansen's positions represented an explicit repudiation of Trotskyism. The SLL was not intimidated by Hansen's provocative allegations of "ultra-left sectarianism" and refused to be stampeded into the unprincipled reunification of the SWP and the European Pabloites in 1963.

The stand taken by the British section of the International Committee was of historic significance — no less vital to the defense of Marxism and its revolutionary continuity than the founding of the Fourth International itself in 1938. All the considerable gains made by the Trotskyist movement over the last 20 years — in which we include the founding of the Workers League — were only possible as a result of that struggle. Therefore, we have always accepted as correct your insistence that the unrelenting struggle against Pabloite revisionism in all its forms — theoretical, political and organizational — is the vital and essential foundation for the building of sections of the International Committee in every part of the World. For the sake of clarity let us stress that this "building of sections" is not the mechanical accumulation of national parties, formally proclaiming adherence to the International Committee, but rather the continuous development of a politically-unified international practice based on a scientific conception of the world class struggle as a whole.

We are writing this letter to you because we are concerned that the International Committee is now in danger of losing the gains of its many years of principled struggle. We doubt that it is necessary to assure you of our profound respect and admiration for the comrades in Britain who have played such a decisive historical role in the building of the Trotskyist movement over the last 30 years. Every comrade in the Workers League is proud to be known as a "Healyite." But we must state that we are deeply troubled by the growing signs of a political drift toward positions quite similar — both in conclusions and methodology — to those which we have historically associated with Pabloism. We are not suggesting that any section of the International Committee — and least of all the Workers Revolutionary Party — is to be accused of any conscious retreat from Trotskyist principles. As far as the Workers League is concerned, the example of the WRP remains the political model upon which we seek to base our work each day. However, we do feel that the International Committee has for some time been working without a clear and politically-unified perspective to guide its practice. Rather than a perspective for the building of sections of the International Committee in every country, the central focus of the IC's work for several years has been the development of alliances with various bourgeois nationalist regimes and liberation movements. The content of these alliances has less and less reflected any clear orientation toward the development of our own forces as central to the fight to establish the leading role of the proletariat in the anti-imperialist struggle in the semi-colonial countries. The very conceptions advanced by the SWP in relation to Cuba and Algeria which we attacked so vigorously in the early 1960s appear with increasing frequency within our own press.

Characteristic of this worrisome trend within the pages of the News Line — which functions not only as the organ of the WRP but also as the authoritative voice of the International Committee — are the series of articles which have recently been published on the significance of the meeting held between Yasir Arafat and Hosni Mubarak. We do not agree with the way this issue has been approached. What we find so disturbing is not that you have defended Arafat's decision to meet Mubarak, but the manner in which this defense has been undertaken. Article after article in the News Line presents this visit as a strategical tour de force on the part of Arafat that has left his enemies confounded once again. Such an approach, however sincerely motivated by a determination to defend the PLO against its enemies, serves only to mislead and disarm our cadre and the readers of our press.

As Marxists our starting point in making political analysis is never the conscious intentions of political leaders; it must be the class forces they represent and the logic of the class struggle of which their actions are a necessary expression. The policies of Arafat inevitably reflect his class standpoint as a petty-bourgeois nationalist. He is maneuvering not only between different bourgeois regimes within the Middle East but also between the opposing class forces within the Palestinian movement. However great his personal courage and heroism, Arafat's policies cannot provide an answer to the great historic problems of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. While it is our duty to defend him and the PLO against the reactionary machinations of the Syrian Ba'athists, we are by no means obligated to hail his pragmatic turn to Mubarak as some sort of strategical masterstroke.

However, the News Line editorial of December 30, 1983, entitled "Arafat's role," provides little more than journalistic rationalizations for Arafat's meeting with Mubarak and for the political rehabilitation of the Mubarak regime. Denouncing Habash's "slanderous accusation" against Arafat, the News Line writes:

"These verbal assaults are the product of limited minds and narrow outlooks. Arafat's talks with Mubarak do not constitute support for Camp David. On the contrary. Arafat's audacious diplomacy has helped to undermine the treaty between Egypt and Israel, not strengthen it.

"The essence of the Camp David conspiracy between Sadat, Beigin and Carter was to ignore the existence of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and to dismiss the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination.

"This is why the treaty was so vigorously opposed. But now Mubarak has welcomed Arafat in Cairo. This is not a meeting of individuals. It signifies the Egyptian government's recognition of the PLO, its legitimacy in the Middle East struggle and its inalienable right to fight for the liberation of Palestine.

"Does this serve Camp David? Does it serve Zionist imperialism? Of course not. It is a severe diplomatic and political blow to the crisis-stricken Shamir regime, and that is why Tel Aviv has been angrily denouncing the Arafat-Mubarak talks."

Such analysis — in which phrases such as "Of course not" and "On the contrary" are presented as answers in themselves — has little in common with Marxism. The suggestion that Mubarak's meeting with Arafat somehow supersedes and cancels out Sadat's trip to Jerusalem and the signing of the Camp David agreement is a sophistry which has now been used by the Islamic Conference to excuse its resumption of relations with Egypt. We find it difficult to believe that the News Line could suggest that Mubarak has been transformed into a defender of the rights of the Palestinians. While the News Line refers to the statements of Shamir on the Mubarak-Arafat meeting, it says nothing about the far more important pronouncements of the Reagan Administration, which immediately hailed the meeting and referred to Arafat as a "moderate" leader.

Sadat's trip to Jerusalem and the Camp David summit represented an historical milestone in the degeneration of bourgeois nationalism in the Middle East. Camp David marked a definitive turn by the Arab bourgeoisie as a whole toward an abandonment of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and toward an unprincipled accommodation with imperialism within the Middle East. The Egyptian-Zionist agreement, achieved under the direct auspices of US imperialism, set the stage for the Zionist invasion of Lebanon and all the savage crimes that have been subsequently committed against the Palestinian people. Arafat's second exile from Lebanon within little more than a year is the consequence of the earlier betrayals of the PLO by the Arab bourgeoisie. Far from representing a repudiation of Camp David, Mubarak has insisted that the Arafat visit vindicates the course pursued by the Egyptian regime over the last six years. As the Wall Street Journal reports from Cairo:

"Now, Egyptian officials and the popular press are saying the ICO (Islamic Conference Organization) invitation is a vindication of the process that began in 1977 with the late Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem. The officials and the newspaper commentators are celebrating the ICO move with an exuberant 'I told you so' attitude." (January 23, 1984)

The stench of Camp David was not buried with Sadat. The Arab bourgeoisie — shattered by the virtual collapse of OPEC and terrified by the specter of socialist revolution — is searching desperately for a formula which will allow them to bury the hatchet with Egypt. Then the stage will be set for an accommodation with Israel itself. Thus, the cynical claims by Arab bourgeois leaders that Camp David is a dead issue is merely a face-saving device to cover up their own treachery. At any rate, the Egyptian government has explicitly rejected any conditions for its acceptance of the invitation to rejoin the ICO. However, putting aside all speculation about the concealed aims behind the present diplomatic intrigues, the historical fact remains that Camp David was a demonstration of the counter-revolutionary nature of the Arab bourgeoisie and its organic incapacity to wage a principled and consistent struggle against imperialism — of which the defense of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is the highest test.

This very point was made powerfully by the News Line following Sadat's initial trip to Jerusalem:

"This visit itself should only surprise those who still have illusions that the bourgeois national movement in the Middle East has some kind of future. Words such as Arab Nation, Arab homeland, Arab world, whilst expressing genuine national sentiment simply confuse the naked facts of the role of US and Zionist imperialism in a period when the world crisis of capitalism dominates and accelerates the tendency towards world slump. The bourgeois national struggle is insoluble in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world except through the socialist revolution." (November 21, 1977)

While indicting the PFLP for its "hopeless failure to grasp the great changes which have taken place in the Middle East since Sadat's execution," the News Line offers no analysis of those changes and does not explain why — from the standpoint of the class struggle within the Middle East — Arafat's meeting with Mubarak is politically correct. One development which would certainly deserve examination is the extent to which Egypt has become integrated into the Middle East military forces of US imperialism. Egypt has opened up its territory for American military exercises and provided logistical support for the US-backed French intervention in Chad. Another expression of the "great changes which have taken place" is the US financing of a Jordanian version of the Rapid Deployment Force. The actual relations between imperialism and its clients in the Middle East as well as the changes in class relations within each Arab country are not even referred to. Instead the News Line offers a purely journalistic appraisal that uncritically endorses a policy based on pragmatic maneuvers which evade the central problems confronting the Palestinian Revolution.

"Arafat has brilliantly managed to bring Egypt back into Middle Eastern calculations and, at the same time, to stay out of the clutches of both Damascus and Amman."

The conception that the course of history is determined by inspired acts of genius on the diplomatic chess board belongs to idealist bourgeois historiography and not to the materialist conception of history. Our calculations, if not Arafat's, are always based on an estimate of class forces and the potential of the working class for revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. For us, the salvation of the Palestinian Revolution does not lie in escaping from the "clutches" of Syria by leaping into the clutches of Egypt, Morocco and, in fact, Jordan — with whose King the PLO is presently engaged in intense negotiations and with whom Mubarak is now scheduled to meet next month. Are we now to welcome and place confidence in this new round of diplomacy? Our strategical goal should always be the mobilization of the working class — supported by the peasantry — against the bourgeoisie in each and every Middle Eastern country. But another perspective emerges in the News Line:

"We stand by the principle that the PLO has the right to political independence. And we give full credit to chairman Arafat for exercising his right to win a tactical ally in the Egyptian regime, boost the nationalist morale of the Egyptian masses and build the unity of the Egyptian and Palestinian oppressed."

In place of the Leninist principle of "March separately, strike together," we now seem to have adopted a formula which grants to the PLO a carte blanche to do what it likes — with our support guaranteed in advance. As used here, the slogan of "political independence" is reduced to an almost meaningless abstraction, which serves to cover up the danger that the political logic of the PLO's maneuvers — whatever Arafat's intentions — leads inevitably toward its subordination to the interests of the Arab bourgeoisie and world imperialism. Certainly it is our duty to at least raise this as a real danger confronting the Palestinian Revolution. Unless we clearly warn the Palestinian movement of the dangers raised by Arafat's playing of his "Egyptian card," the only "political independence" which we, in practice, guarantee to the PLO is "independence" from Trotskyist criticism!

Furthermore, why should we welcome the boosting of "nationalist morale" in Egypt under the leadership of Mubarak? Do we really believe that an alliance with Sadat's successor will gain for the PLO the allegiance of the Egyptian proletariat and the impoverished peasantry? This view is expressed somewhat more explicitly by our Australian comrades who, basing themselves on the New Line editorial, have written in the January 10th issue of Workers News that the meeting with Mubarak enables the PLO "to tap the strength of the 40 million-strong mass movement in Egypt."

This sort of argument simply writes off the class struggle within Egypt and adapts to the dangerous illusions of the PLO leadership, which clearly does not base itself on the class struggle of the Arab proletariat against the native bourgeoisie. In reality the unity of the Palestinian and Egyptian masses will be achieved not through alliances with Mubarak but in struggle against him. That this is not understood by Arafat and the PLO leadership is an expression of the weakness and fundamental class limitations of bourgeois nationalism within the Palestinian movement. With riots sweeping Morocco and Tunisia and with Egypt seething with discontent, not to mention the massive strikes shaking Israel, the cause of the Palestinian Revolution would gain far more from an appeal to the working class of Marrakesh, Tunis, Cairo and, let us add, Haifa, than from meetings with Mubarak, Hassan and Hussein.

Our point is not that Arafat should be condemned for acting as a bourgeois nationalist leader. BUT WE MUST NEVER FORGET THAT HIS POLICY IS NOT OUR POLICY, and that our analysis must always be directed toward the development of the Marxist leadership which is required to defeat imperialism and its bourgeois agents in the Middle East. This is precisely the conclusion that was drawn in November 1977:

"Let the fires of the social revolution be lit throughout the length and breadth of the feudal states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf Emirates, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

"It is only a matter of time when other 'devout' Moslem leaders such as Khaled, Assad and Hussein reach out for the prayer mats advertising Coca Cola at the Jerusalem Mosque supplied by kind permission of Menachem Beigin and Moshe Dayan in the presence, no doubt, of the CIA directors of the Jerusalem bottling plant.

"To light the fires of social revolution it is necessary to build revolutionary parties in all these countries with their trained cadres and military fighters.

"Whatever the sincere differences that exist over the development of Marxism, these will be overcome in that common struggle.

"The Workers Revolutionary Party believes that these parties can only be effective if they are part of the struggle to build the forces of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which is the nucleus of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

"That is the lesson which follows Egypt's capitulation to Zionist imperialism." (November 21, 1977, p.2)

However, the December 30th News Line editorial is directed against such a perspective. This is not an isolated mistake. An uncritical adulation of the PLO leadership characterizes virtually all our articles on the Palestinian Revolution. For example, the News Line has also printed, without comment, a statement issued by Arafat under the headline, "Arafat's Hedge to the Revolution." This statement — if taken at face value — advances political conceptions that cannot and will not advance the Palestinian Revolution one inch. We know that the News Line cannot possibly agree with Arafat's praise for the United Nations, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian-French initiative, Italy, and the Kremlin bureaucracy. And yet this statement is published as a "pledge" to the revolution!

Even more politically disturbing is another article, in which the News Line reports that Arafat's meeting with Mubarak had been criticized by the Fateh Central Committee. The News Line then hastens to reassure its readers that

"These mildly critical remarks form part of the PLO's diplomatic struggle in the Arab world and are intended for consumption in the Arab press. (!) In reality, it does not represent a serious rebuke to the PLO chairman or to his audacious visit to Cairo two weeks ago." (January 7, 1984)

Were the statements of the Central Committee nothing more than diplomatic snow jobs, it would hardly speak well of the PLO leadership, as it would mean that the Central Committee was attempting to deceive the Palestinian masses, who, after all, do read the Arab press. It is clear from the entire text of the communique that while the Central Committee rejected the slanders of Syria and Libya, it did criticize the "organizational error" committed by Arafat. Despite the very cautious wording, it is obvious that the communique reflects serious and legitimate differences within Fateh. Whatever its limitations, the Fateh Central Committee's statement represents a more serious analysis of the problems now confronting the Palestinian Revolution than that made by the News Line. Why, Comrade Mike, should we be less willing to make an objective analysis of Arafat's policies than his comrades on the Fateh Central Committee? Moreover, at a time when the PLO leadership is attempting to find a principled response to the serious problems it confronts within its own movement, have we not an obligation to provide them with the benefits of a scientific Marxist analysis of the present tasks of the Palestinian Revolution? If we have nothing to offer but our totally uncritical support, why should Palestinian workers and peasants — in the West Bank, Gaza, within Israel and throughout the Middle East — be drawn to the banner of the International Committee of the Fourth International?

In another article, the News Line of January 13th cites a public opinion poll that shows mass support for Arafat. What political conclusions are we to draw from this information? Should the outcome of an opinion poll determine our line on the visit to Egypt? We do not doubt the popularity of Arafat among the Palestinian masses. But did we ever accept popularity as a criteria for determining our political assessment of, for example, the Cuban Revolution? Was it not Hansen who told us that given Castro's vast popularity, it would be "suicide" for Latin American Trotskyists to criticize his regime. Nor are we quite sure what to make of the News Line's reference to the opinion of the Jerusalem Posts "PLO watcher Matti Steinberg" who declares that Arafat's "meeting with Mubarak has undoubtedly opened up new political vistas for Arafat..." By writing articles which serve only to justify what has already been done by Arafat, and which paint in bright colors this or that pragmatic maneuver, the danger arises that we are falling victim to a political outlook that calls into question the real necessity to build the Trotskyist movement in the semi-colonial countries and within the anti-imperialist national liberation movements. If Arafat, guided only by his intuition, can successfully lead the PLO, what need is there for the training of Palestinian cadre as dialectical materialists? Involved here is not a single article or merely the Arafat-Mubarak episode. We now have gone through years of experiences since 1976 which has shown again and again that emphasis on the special qualifications of this or that leader paves the way for serious miscalculations, dangerous errors and intractable contradictions in our political line. Let us merely note that among the staunchest supporters of Arafat's meeting with Mubarak is Saddam Hussein, whom we once enthusiastically supported but for whose overthrow we now regularly call, and that among Arafat's bitterest opponents is Muammar Gaddafi, who, until recently, received the same sort of praise we now bestow upon the PLO leader.

We feel that the basic problem is that the International Committee has not yet drawn up a real balance sheet on its work over the last eight years. Surely, we cannot simply go from alliance to alliance without making an analysis of each concrete experience through which the International Committee has passed. Without such an analysis we will face greater and greater confusion which inevitably, if not corrected, will produce political disasters within the sections. No matter how promising certain developments within the national work of the sections may appear — such as our own experiences in various trade union struggles — these will not produce real gains for the sections involved unless such work is guided by a scientifically-worked out international perspective. The more the Workers League turns toward the working class, the more we feel the need for the closest collaboration with our international comrades to drive the work forward. The degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party, culminating in the open split with Mandel, is the greatest historic vindication of the struggle you waged against Pabloism. We are proud to have been your students in this struggle. But the new stage in the crisis of imperialism and Stalinism and the break-up of revisionism poses the necessity of a great development in our theoretical work and practical activity. We believe that this development requires a renewal of our struggle against Pabloite revisionism — above all, against the manifestations of its outlook within our own sections. Let us begin this work by availing ourselves of the opportunity presented by the scheduled IC meeting to prepare the foundation for an exhaustive discussion on international perspectives, aimed at the drafting of a comprehensive international resolution. The time has certainly come for the International Committee to issue its reply to the attacks of the SWP neo-Stalinists on the Theory of Permanent Revolution and to demonstrate that it remains the indispensable scientific foundation for the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It might be of assistance to the preparation of the coming meeting if an agenda were drawn up and made available to the sections' leaderships before they arrive in London. We are looking forward to collaborating closely with you in beginning this work.

With warmest fraternal regards,
David North

cc: Cde. Gerry

6. Political Report by David North to the International Committee of the Fourth International

February 11, 1984

1. The 30-year history of the International Committee of the Fourth International has been the record of the continuous struggle of the world Trotskyist party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This has been a history of struggle against all those forces — Stalinist, Social Democratic, and Pabloite — through which the working class is subordinated to the bourgeoisie. The International Committee is based upon the traditions and principles established through the political, theoretical and organizational struggles of all previous generations of Marxists — and the way in which this continuity of the IC with these previous generations has been developed is through the struggle against every variety of anti-Marxism that has emerged within the workers' movement, especially within the Trotskyist movement itself. The form assumed by each of these struggles has always been determined by the actual content of the international class struggle. Basing itself on the dialectical method and historical materialism, the International Committee has constantly fought to uncover the class forces at work in each of these struggles and to expose in each new manifestation of revisionism the ideological forms through which imperialism seeks to vanquish Marxism.

2. Throughout the history of the revolutionary movement such forms of ideological attack on Marxism have emerged precisely when the class struggle was undergoing a rapid development and posed a very direct threat to the rule of the bourgeoisie. Bernsteinism emerged with the development of imperialism and the beginning of the epoch in which the socialist revolution would be posed (as was already seen very clearly in the 1905 Russian Revolution). Stalinism was the political and theoretical expression of the pressure of imperialism upon the first workers' state — the greatest challenge ever to the rule of the world bourgeoisie. Within the Trotskyist movement, the connection between the growth of revisionism and the pressing needs of imperialism have been even more direct. There was nothing "coincidental" about the emergence of Burnham and Shachtman at the very beginning of World War II — the point of the greatest crisis of imperialism. We have stressed many times the historical significance of Pabloism, which emerged within the Trotskyist movement precisely under conditions of the great post-war crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy which reflected the over-all crisis of world imperialism. The vulnerability of cadre to the class pressures which become exceptionally powerful at the point in which the imperialist contradictions become exceptionally acute is bound up with fundamental questions of method. For empiricists and pragmatists like Pablo and his American counterpart, Clarke,

who substitute their superficial impressions for a scientific study of class relations based on the dialectical materialist method and historical materialism, the need for a revision of Trotskyism and an abandonment of principled positions in line with the "reality of living events" becomes all consuming. Those who stand on principle are habitually denounced as "ultra-left" and "sectarian." In each stage of the struggle against Pabloism, however, its "new reality" was shown to be nothing more than an uncritical adaptation to the illusory stability of imperialism and those political forces who temporarily predominate within the workers' movement and the national liberation struggles.

3. The struggle waged by the Socialist Labour League against the SWP between 1961 and 1964 brought to the fore all the fundamental theoretical and political issues involved in the struggle against Pabloism: the rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism and the builder of a socialist society; the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the denial of the struggle against spontaneity and the necessity for a conscious struggle for Marxist theory; the renunciation of the historical role of the Fourth International. In its very first letter to the SWP, the national committee of the SLL issued this warning:

"The greatest danger confronting the revolutionary movement is liquidationism, flowing from a capitulation either to the strength of imperialism or of the bureaucratic apparatuses in the Labour movement, or both. Pabloism represents, even more clearly now than in 1953, this liquidationist tendency in the international Marxist movement. In Pabloism the advanced working class is no longer the vanguard of history, the center of all Marxist theory and strategy in the epoch of imperialism, but the plaything of 'world-historical factors', surveyed and assessed in abstract fashion ... Here all historical responsibility of the revolutionary movement is denied, all is subordinated to panoramic forces; the questions of the role of the Soviet bureaucracy and of class forces in the colonial revolution are left unresolved. That is natural, because the key to these problems is the role of the working class in the advanced countries and the crisis of leadership in their labour movements ...

"Any retreat from the strategy of political independence of the working class and the construction of revolutionary parties will take on the significance of a world-historical blunder on the part of the Trotskyist movement." (Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Vol. 3, pp.48-49)

In direct response to the efforts of the SWP to revise Trotskyism on the basis of the defeats inflicted upon US imperialism by Castro, the SLL wrote in May 1961:

"An essential of revolutionary Marxism in this epoch is the theory that the national bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries is incapable of defeating imperialism and establishing an independent national state. This class has ties with imperialism and it is of course incapable of an independent capitalist development. In national liberation movements the workers' organizations must follow Lenin's slogan: 'March separately, strike together' against the foreign imperialists and their immediate collaborators. Following Marx, we say: support the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties insofar as they help strike common blows against our enemy; OPPOSE them on every issue in which they want to stabilize their own conditions of existence and their own rule ... It is not the job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such nationalist leaders. They can command the support of the masses ONLY because of the betrayal of leadership by Social-Democracy and particularly Stalinism, and in this way they become buffers between imperialism and the mass of workers and peasants." (Vol. 3, pp. 64-65)

4. The speech delivered by Jack Barnes on December 31, 1982 and published in the first edition of "New International" is a powerful vindication of the struggle waged by the International Committee. The SWP, some 20 years after the split, is now stating unambiguously that it rejects the theory of permanent revolution and the programmatic foundation of the Fourth International as it was elaborated in the Transitional Program of 1938. Let us pay some attention to what Barnes has written, because the published edition gives us a much richer picture than the abbreviated transcription upon which the statement published by the Workers League this past summer was based.

5. Barnes claims that he is not rejecting the important role Trotsky played in the fight against Stalin's abuse of power, and he leaves open the possibility that "Trotsky's contributions will find their place in the political arsenal of the international communist movement as the world revolution progresses." (p.83) However, these "contributions" must be disentangled from Trotsky's error on the theory of permanent revolution.

"This usage of the term poses the biggest political problem for us, because it has brought weaknesses into our movement associated with Trotsky's wrong pre-1917 theory. Above all, it has led to a tendency to concentrate solely on the proletariat's alliance with the agricultural laborers and poor peasants against the rural exploiters, undoubtedly a central task in the countryside, to the exclusion of recognizing the centrality of the proletariat's alliance with the broadest possible layers [of] the rural producers in the fight against imperialism and against the landlord-capitalist regimes in the colonial world. The world class struggle since World War II, especially in this hemisphere since 1959, should convince us that to the extent those who are identified as Trotskyists base themselves on these weaknesses in Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, the door is open to leftist biases and sectarian political errors.

"Permanent revolution does not contribute today to arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist revolution. As a special or unique frame of reference it is an obstacle to reknitting our political continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the first four congresses of the Communist International. It has been an obstacle in our movement to an objective reading of the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin.

"If we are to learn what we can learn as part of the political convergence under way among proletarian revolutionists in the world today, and bring into that process Trotsky's enormous political contributions, then our movement must discard permanent revolution." (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 12-13)

What Barnes is saying is that Trotsky placed a one-sided emphasis on the class struggle of the proletariat at the expense of a correct appreciation of the anti-imperialist struggle which binds together the working class and all sections of the peasantry. According to Barnes, the post-war developments — above all, those beginning in 1959 with the victory of Castro — prove that the anti-imperialist movement as a form of struggle uniting all sections of the population is far greater than anticipated by Trotsky and the Fourth International's relations with such movements, and the prospects of a "convergence" of all anti-imperialist forces, have been limited due to the incorrect emphasis placed by the theory of permanent revolution upon the independent role of the proletariat and the class struggle.

6. Let us continue with Barnes:

"The Comintern taught us that the democratic, anti-imperialist, agrarian revolution, and the socialist revolution are combined in the oppressed nations. It charted a course toward building anti-imperialist united fronts and fighting for proletarian leadership of them. It taught us that communists, while supporting every concrete struggle against imperialism, no matter how limited or under what leadership, have to distinguish between revolutionary nationalist movements based on the workers and peasants, and bourgeois-dominated nationalist movements that are an obstacle to the oppressed toilers' fight for national liberation." (p.33)

"Trotsky counterposed the proletariat's alliance with the peasantry as a whole to an alliance with the rural poor. Lenin, on the other hand, pursued a course aimed at advancing the working class along a line of march that would enable it to lead the democratic revolution and be in the strongest possible position to move forward from there toward the expropriation of the exploiters. Unlike Trotsky, Lenin presented a strategy for the transition from the democratic to the socialist revolution based on a concrete understanding of the shifting class alliances at each stage of this gigantic process of political, social and economic transformation." (p. 44)

7. In placing this great emphasis on the democratic revolution as a distinct transitional stage, which he calls the workers' and peasants' government, prior to and apart from the dictatorship of the proletariat, the counterrevolutionary line of Barnes becomes absolutely unmistakable. What is involved here is not simply that Barnes is challenging some sort of theoretical icon of the Trotskyist movement. There are very definite political implications. In essence, Barnes rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat as the instrument through which the democratic revolution is achieved. He denies the class nature of the peasantry (which represents a fundamental repudiation of Lenin's teachings, which then' leads to a reactionary vulgarization and distortion of the pre-1917 conceptions of the democratic dictatorship), and ignores all class distinctions within the "anti-imperialist" movement, or claims that they are relatively unimportant. He clearly implies that without the prior establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from the "democratic" to "socialist" stages of the revolution can be peaceful and gradual, whereas, in reality, as history has demonstrated again and again, there can be no peaceful "growing over" from the rule of one class to another without a violent revolution. This was the basic flaw which Trotsky detected in Lenin's pre-1917 theory of the democratic dictatorship. Based on an analysis of the nature of the epoch, Trotsky foresaw that the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the peasant revolution could develop only through and under the leadership of the proletarian revolution.

All this is denied by Barnes in his critique of Trotsky:

"In combatting Stalin's rightist errors, Trotsky in 1928 injected some leftist erro[r]s. While not directly challenging the Bolshevik's pre-1917 strategy as applied to Russia, Trotsky in fact revived his own pre-1917 position, rejecting an alliance with the peasantry as a whole in the democratic revolution. He now applied this to China, and, by implication, to other countries in the colonial world. Trotsky's 1928 document had no concept of a transitional regime and period, based on this worker-peasant alliance. It advanced no strategy that would enable the Chinese workers to gain experience and lead their most consistent allies, the agricultural wage workers and poor peasants, in the expropriation of the exploiters and the establishment of new relations of production based on state property and planning." (p. 53)

8. Finally, Barnes sums up the conclusions he draws from the critique of Trotsky's permanent revolution.

"We believe that history has shown that in our epoch a workers' and farmers' government that will come out of a successful anticapitalist revolution. It is the first form of government following a victorious uprising against the bourgeoisie — a government that will not turn power back over to the capitalists, but will take power away from them and use it to open up the road to deepening the mobilization of the workers and farmers and the expropriation of the exploiters.

"But this is a process. In colonial and semicolonial countries, the initial tasks of the new revolutionary government are primarily those of democratic revolution — national liberation, agrarian reform, measures to improve the conditions and expand the rights of the working class and peasantry ... It is this all important transitional stage, and the rich concreteness of the class struggle and proletarian leadership of its allies during the transition, that is lost sight of when the workers' and farmers' government is rejected.

"To us, the workers' and farmers' government [NOT THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT -D.N.] is a decisive question." (p.76)

9. Barnes' position is not really original; it is based on the old conceptions of Stalinism, which the bureaucracy now puts forward under the slogan of "the non-capitalist road" to justify its unprincipled alliances with bourgeois nationalist regimes. The Stalinists are very explicit: there exists a "non-capitalist road" for underdeveloped countries which allows them to complete the democratic revolution and embark upon the tasks of socialist construction without the dictatorship of the proletariat.

"The tactics and strategy of the Communists must unfailingly cooperate with national-revolutionary and revolutionary democrats: this is an essential condition for the success of all anti-imperialist forces which do not regard capitalism as a remedy against age-old backwardness. Under these circumstances the slogan calling for a transition to the non-capitalist path is in fact orientation toward such a class shift to the left which would bring consistently democratic forces to power. They will fail to achieve their tasks without making 'steps toward socialism', but they will only be able to make these steps on the basis of 'left-wing bloc' tactics. In practice, this often amounts to the organization of mass pressure on bourgeois democracy thus helping it to realize its progressive potentialities, and at the same time the setting of democratic tasks which its most consistent wing that has become revolutionary-democrat or is capable of becoming such will be able to fulfill ... Thus the adoption of the non-capitalist path is a phased process and the Communists who are interested in it more than anyone else cannot bring about such a shift at will ... IT IS ALSO NECESSARY TO BEAR IN MIND THAT THE PROMOTION OF THE SLOGAN CALLING FOR THE ADOPTION OF THE NON-CAPITALIST PATH BY NO MEANS IMPLIES THAT IT ALSO CALLS FOR A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION, THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY AND THE ASSUMPTION OF POWER BY THE COMMUNISTS, FOR THAT WOULD AMOUNT TO ASSERTING THAT ONLY A PROLETARIAN TAKEOVER IS CAPABLE OF SOLVING THE PROBLEMS OF A DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION. BY PUTTING FORWARD THE SLOGAN CALLING FOR THE ADOPTION OF THE NON-CAPITALIST PATH, THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO DEEPEN DEMOCRATIC, ANTI-IMPERIALIST TRANSFORMATIONS AND AT THE SAME TIME ORIENT THEM TOWARD SOCIALISM." (Ulyanovsky, National Liberation, Progress, pp.51-53, emphasis added)

10. The evolution of revisionism completely vindicates the assessment made by the IC in the perspectives resolution of the Fourth World Congress in 1972:

"Inside the colonial and semi-colonial countries, revisionism again directly assisted the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist leaders as the revolutionary representatives of the masses. They completely rejected the essence of Lenin's position and the theory of Permanent Revolution: the construction of independent proletarian parties, leading the working class at the head of the oppressed peasantry, as the only force able to resolve the tasks of the democratic revolution and go beyond them to workers' power, as part of the international socialist revolution." (Vol. 1, p. 32)

11. The bankruptcy of Barnes' position: the "models" to which he refers as examples of "workers' and peasants' governments" or as the forces out of which the new alignment of "communists" shall emerge are the New Jewel Movement, the Sandinistas, the Farabundo Marti, and Castroism. In each case, the development of the world crisis of imperialism has had a devastating impact — and it shows the betrayals to which Barnes' position must lead. At any rate, our position is not based upon the disposition of forces within a single country — whether the immediate conditions seem favorable for the victory of insurgent forces — but on the perspective of international socialist revolution. This is the basis upon which we set out to resolve the crisis of leadership — never adapting ourselves to those political tendencies within the nationalist movement which immediately predominate. Moreover, we should not forget that the toppling of a reactionary puppet regime in a semi-colonial country does not, of itself, resolve the problems. As Lenin and Trotsky pointed out, in such countries far greater problems than the seizure of power emerge after the successful revolution. This has certainly been shown in Nicaragua and Cuba, not to mention Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, etc.

12. The development of the IC has proceeded through the struggle against revisionism. The struggle recorded in the six volumes published during the 1970s is the theoretical foundation for the training of our cadre, just as the writings of Trotsky during the 1920s formed the basis for the political education of the early forces of the Fourth International. The latest attack by Barnes on Trotskyism must bring this entire history forward; precisely because the International Committee has always recognized that such crucial developments within the ranks of the revisionists inevitably foreshadow great new chapters in the world socialist revolution. Moreover, we don't simply look upon revisionism as some sort of bacteria that exists inside a test-tube, safely stored in a laboratory. Precisely because revisionism has material roots in the actual development of the class struggle of which we ourselves are a part, because it reflects the pressure of alien class forces upon the working class and its revolutionary vanguard, our response to revisionism finds its highest expression in the analysis of our own political development.

13. It is for this reason that we feel the time has come to examine the whole development of the IC during the past decade. We are strongly of the opinion that we have steadily drifted away from positions for which we tenaciously fought for more than 20 years after the original split with Pablo. In a letter to Comrade Banda, written on January 23, 1984, I suggested that the time had come to draw a balance sheet on the entire experience of the IC in relation to the national liberation movements. I feel that such a balance sheet is necessary because there has been really no objective examination of our experience — as a World Party — with the various nationalist bourgeois regimes and liberation movements with which we have established relations. We feel that the record is one which merits a serious critique, in order to defend the continuity of the IC and to train the cadre in each of the sections. We are not here to assign blame, but to work for the development of the IC as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

14. In the summer of 1976, the IC first discussed initiating more active contact with the national liberation movements — principally the PLO. At the time the dangers inherent in such work were clearly stressed — that such movements were of a heterogeneous character, within which the imperialists and Stalinists worked actively. This approach was correct and principled. Further discussion at the Seventh Congress of the IC in May 1977, at which the work was guided by the newly published protocols of the Second Congress of the Communist International. Following the Congress, the IC sent a delegation to Lebanon. In July of 1977 the WRP signed an alliance with the Libyan Jamahiriya. Relations were then developed with the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq. It is clear that by mid-1978 a general orientation toward relations with nationalist regimes and liberation movements was developing without any corresponding perspective for the actual building of our own forces inside the working class. An entirely uncritical and incorrect appraisal began to emerge ever more openly within our press, inviting the cadres and the working class to view these bourgeois nationalists as "anti-imperialist" leaders to whom political support must be given.

15. Iraq — We assumed an increasingly uncritical attitude toward the regime of Saddam Hussein, providing political support for his struggle against the Iraqi Communist Party, including the execution of 21 members.

"The fact is that the CP members were executed according to military codes which the Iraqi CP discussed, approved and agreed to implement. To this day the Iraqi CP has not called for the repeal of the military laws which ban the formation of secret cells in the army. It has never contested the fact that the arrested officers were guilty of the charges brought against them.

"This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in the Iraqi armed forces for the purpose of undermining the regime. It must accept the consequences ... It is a principle with Trotskyists that we defend workers, whether they are Stalinists, revisionists or Social Democrats, from the attacks of the capitalist state. But, as the facts show, that has nothing to do with the incidents in Iraq." (News Line, March 8, 1979) This position was never rectified even though it had no precedent within the Trotskyist movement. We had simply ignored what Trotsky wrote about the role of the trade unions — whose leaders were among the victims of Hussein's purges — in the less developed countries. Our praise for Hussein continued unabated. In the summer of 1980, we published a six-part series in which the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party and Saddam Hussein were the subject of lavish praise. These articles were reproduced as a pamphlet, which was never repudiated.

These articles appeared on the eve of the invasion of Iran by Iraq. It is important to note our reaction to this development. Our own relations with the Iraqis were so well known that our own statements reflected the ambiguities within our position. We correctly opposed the war, but we did not denounce Iraq as acting on behalf of imperialism. Rather the WRP Political Committee statement declared:

"We call for full support for the national revolutionary movements including the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party and the Iranian Revolution in their fight against imperialism." (News Line, September 25, 1980)

16. We continued to oppose to the war and call for the end to hostilities. Then following an Iranian offensive which crossed into Iraq, the News Line of July 16, 1982 published an editorial which declared:

"The Iranian invasion of Iraq is a disservice to the besieged Palestinian and Lebanese fighters in Beirut and to the Iranian Revolution itself, and must be denounced."

17. By September 1983, we had come to shift our line completely. We adopted, without any serious analysis and explanation, a position of support for the military victory of Iran over Iraq. Responding to the sale of Exocet missiles to Iraq, the News Line declared:

"The Iraqi regime has been militarily defeated and comprehensively exposed as a tool of imperialism. It must be overthrown by the Iraqi masses without delay. Its continued existence is giving imperialism a military base and pretext for their war plans."

18. This has continued to be our line — which corresponds to an uncritical attitude toward the Islamic Republic, a position which directly contradicts the one and only analysis made by the IC of the Iranian Revolution — five years ago. The IC Statement of February 12, 1979 — published in the News Line of February 17, 1979 — issued a clear and unequivocal statement:

"The truth is that the masses were moved by CLASS questions, not religious ones.

"However, in the absence of an organized revolutionary leadership and because of the cowardly class-collaborationist policies of Iranian Stalinism in the Tudeh party, Ayatollah Khomeini and other religious leaders of the Shi'ite sect have been able to establish a virtual political monopoly on the opposition forces...

"The policies of Khomeiny reflect the contradictory and equivocal nature of the bazaar merchants and other elements of the Iranian native capitalist class and petty-bourgeoisie...

"But they cannot and will not challenge capitalist state power in Iran ... The Stalinists and centrists of all varieties will oppose the strategy of advance to the socialist revolution in Iran, on the grounds that the revolution there is first and foremost a bourgeois revolution, i.e., a revolution for democratic demands to abolish feudal and semi-feudal oppression and permit the free development of national capitalism and democracy.

"They will say it is 'sectarian' to advocate policies for the working class which are independent of and opposed to the bourgeoisie."

19. No further class analysis was ever made of the development of the Iranian Revolution. Our line came to consist simply of unconditional support for Khomeiny, despite the mounting persecution of every single left-wing organization in Iran. In the absence of any Marxist analysis of the development of this revolution, an obviously non-Trotskyist and revisionist line began to find its way into our international press — most notably in the articles written by Comrade Savas following his trip to Iran, which occurred in the midst of arrests and trials of Tudeh Party leaders. The tone for this series was set in the first article, entitled "The Rule of the Deprived." Among the first points made was the following:

"For a person coming from the West, especially from a country like Greece, that has gone through decades under the police state of the right-wing and through dictatorship, one fact is striking: nowhere can one see a policeman."

What we found striking was that a virtually identical observation was made by Mary-Alice Waters of the SWP upon her return from Nicaragua:

"The first thing you realize is that you're not scared of the police. Army, militia, police. They're all over the place. But you feel good about it, and so does everybody else. Almost everybody else. The 'forces of repression' are all laughing, smiling, joking with the hundreds of ordinary working people milling around." (Education for Socialists, December 1980, p. 5)

Assuming from the absence of police the absence of repression, the article made the following statement:

"If we consider the degree of popular support as a basic criterion for estimating the degree of political stability of a regime then, undoubtedly, the Islamic regime in Teheran must be considered as extremely stable. Its foundation is the masses. Between the masses and their leadership, especially Imam Khomeini, there are mighty bonds, forged in the furnace of the revolution.

"In the forging of these very deep bonds, an immense role was and is played by the influence of the ideology of Islam upon the masses. So, it is not accidental that the Western imperialist and also Stalinist propaganda are raging particularly against this."

20. This article is of exceptional significance for the IC and it deserves the closest and most ruthless critical analysis within every section. It is not only that the trip of Comrade Savas, which included a television appearance at a time of mass arrests, seriously compromised the IC in the eyes of the working class. Revealed in these articles is a method which reveals very clearly the real disorientation within the IC and its leadership. We have here an outstanding example of the complete and unabashed substitution of impressionism for Marxism. Class forces no longer exist. Everything has become the "masses" — a category which explains nothing about the class dynamics and contradictions within Iran. Analysis is reduced to casual observation: "I don't see any police so the state no longer exists!" The method of historical materialism, which strives to uncover the material bases of all political developments, is replaced with the eye of the journalist. As Trotsky once wrote, "Empiricism, and its foster brother, impressionism, dominate from top to bottom."

21. Not just the fault of Comrade Savas. One uncorrected error leads inevitably to others. Nothing essentially different from the dozens of articles which appeared in the News Line on the Libyan Jamahiriya between 1977 and 1983, in which there was never a single appraisal of class relations in Libya and the class nature of the Libyan regime. At the high point of our relations with the Gaddafi regime, the following assessment appeared in a statement of the WRP Political Committee, dated December 12, 1981:

"When Gaddafi and the Free Unionist Officers seized popular control in 1969, they set Libya on the road of socialist development and expansion ... Gaddafi has developed politically in the direction of revolutionary socialism and he has shunned the palaces and harems of some other Arab leaders."

Since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, our approach to Gaddafi has lost its previous enthusiasm. But throughout the recent fighting in Tripoli, we studiously avoided direct criticism of Gaddafi's role in the conspiracy against Arafat.

22. Now we have the trip to Egypt. This is hailed without any analysis whatever or reference to previous statements. We are disorienting our cadre and the working class. We are inviting cynicism toward our political line. The continuous shifts in our political line, in which no analysis connects a new conclusion with the one it both replaces and contradicts, are the hallmark of pragmatism. As Trotsky said of Burnham and Shachtman:

"The opposition leaders split sociology from dialectical materialism. They split politics from sociology. In the sphere of politics they split our tasks in Poland from our experiences in Spain — our tasks in Finland from our position on Poland. History becomes transformed into a series of exceptional incidents; politics becomes transformed into series of improvisations. We have here, in the full sense of the term, the disintegration of Marxism, the disintegration of theoretical thought, the disintegration of politics into its constituent elements." (In Defense of Marxism, pp. 114-15)

23. We are not raising these issues because we have noted this or that incorrect formulation in an occasional article. Every section makes its share of mistakes. But after a lengthy period in which mistakes go uncorrected, they become a tendency, and this tendency inevitably makes itself felt in every area of our political work. Just as the retreat of the SWP back toward Pabloism found its expression in an ever more open orientation to centrist and middle class radical elements with the United States, we must express the concern that the same tendency is manifesting itself within the work of the WRP in Britain.

24. The record of the Party on the Malvinas War — the line which was originally taken was absolutely wrong: This Is Not Our War. But no analysis of this position was ever made inside the IC.

25. We feel an explanation should be made about our relations with Livingstone, Knight and the GLC in general. What is our political assessment of these forces. Do we believe that the Labour group that leads the GLC deserves the unreserved political confidence that they have been given by the News Line? We are very concerned that the WRP is on the verge of being seriously compromised by the future actions of these social-democrats. We are concerned that we are making the very opportunist errors which led in 1926 to the betrayal of the General Strike. We have gone out of our way to compliment Livingstone, to suggest that he is very different from other Labourites. Our opinion is that while it is of course correct to defend local government against the Tories, we should not place any confidence in Livingstone at all. We are disturbed that neither the News Line nor the Labour Review has commented on the interview with Livingstone that was published in the July-August 1983 issue of New Left Review. The interview was conducted by none other than Tariq Ali. Nothing in this article suggests that Livingstone's "socialism" is anything more than an eclectic amalgam of petty-bourgeois protest politics, pacifism, left social democracy, and bits and pieces of Marxist phraseology. He is certainly not a Trotskyist, and his attitude toward the Labourite traitors is entirely apologetic:

"You've got to be fairly certain that someone has gone over to the politics of pure careerism before you start kicking them around the room. This is a congenital weakness of the Left. I suppose it is understandable given the almost permanent record of betrayal by Labour leader after Labour leader that people spend a lot of time waiting for the next one to go over. There are many cases, however, of people whom we've lost who might have been retained if we'd engaged in comradely debate rather than uncomradely denunciations. If your main function is building up your own membership it is inevitable that you end up with interminable attacks on other left groupings. The amount of time Left activists spend rolling around in hysterics reading the attacks made by one grouping against another has always amazed me. Unless this method of organization is altered it will be difficult to unite the Left."

We won't go into the idealist views propounded by Livingstone on the question of women's liberation, which he admits has been a major influence on his development ("I have always felt that the Labour Party's almost exclusive concentration on the employed male white working class was a weakness") or his vulgar views on the nature of class society ("I have come to leftwing politics not through a theoretical Marxist background but via a study of animal behavior and evolution.") No wonder he is interviewed by Tariq Ali! But the problem is that this man is being clearly boosted and unconditionally and uncritically supported by the Workers Revolutionary Party as a leader of the working class in London. We have provided both him and Knight with a platform. We are defending them against criticism on the left. We know less about Knight — except that until about two years ago I heard his name mentioned only in association with his desertion from the Party to join the Labourites. Now the impression is given that he is our man. That I am sure is not the case. His leaving us in 1963 could not have been accidental.

26. Our concerns about the relations with Livingstone and Knight and the GLC are heightened by the recent role played by the WRP in the NGA strike. We cannot agree with the way in which the WRP tail-ended the NGA leadership, covered up for them, put forward no independent demands, and, in the end, was compromised by their payment of the fine and their calling off of the Warrington demonstration. The WRP Statement attacking those who criticize the NGA was really unprecedented in the history of the British section.

"Through its determined fight for principles the NGA is marching in the footsteps of those pioneers who battled under conditions of illegality and state repression to build independent trade unions...

"Having raised the political level of the working class in this vital way, the NGA is now refusing to submit to the rule of the TUC class collaborators. It is fighting on and basing itself on the undefeated strength of the working class.

"The policy of the WRP is unambiguous — we salute the NGA for its courageous action and we stand in complete solidarity with its fight to defend the union from the Tories' legal conspiracy...

"The NGA has rightly taken the fight into the center of the TUC and shown who is selling the rights of the trade unions down the river. It is a craft union of politically moderate opinion, not a revolutionary party as the revisionists seem to think. And under the exceptional circumstances of state persecution, we believe they are acquitting themselves very well."

WHAT ARE THE "POLITICALLY MODERATE" OPINIONS OF THE NGA LEADERS? Are there not Stalinists and Social Democrats among them. These leaders are brought before the YS Annual General Meeting as "heroes" of the working class. Is this how young Trotskyists are to be trained?

27. During the strike, the WRP elaborated a truly incredible line on the nature of the anti-union laws. The speech given by Comrade Banda: we quote the News Line of December 7, 1983:

"But what was this law? asked Banda. Normally, all laws were made to defend the rights of individuals [!], or concerned the rights of individuals in relation to the public interest [!!]. But the Tory Employment Acts were unique. They were not just laws [!], but fundamental constitutional changes because they dealt with the relationship between classes [!!]... These Acts are completely illegitimate from an historical standpoint and a political standpoint. They are a declaration of war against the working class."

Now we are against "bad" laws which regulate the activities of classes and for "good" laws which defend the rights of individuals. If there had not been a single other quotation read at this meeting, this would be sufficient to warrant the most searching analysis of the political line of the WRP.

The political line of the WRP raises many questions. How do we now foresee the development of the social revolution? Should any political demands be placed upon the Labour Party and its trade unions. In relation to the latter, we waited as long as possible before calling for a General Strike. We did not demand new elections and the return to power of Labour. Our slogan of a Workers Revolutionary Government, under conditions in which we have not captured the leadership of any significant section of the working class, is very abstract. It appears very "left" but it is coupled with uncritical relations with right-wing "politically-moderate" trade union bureaucrats. We place no demands upon the Labour Party — as if the task of exposing them has already been carried out.

28. This has not developed overnight — long process of adaptation to petty-bourgeois forces. This does have definite theoretical roots — an empiricist method dressed up with Hegelian phraseology — but one which has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. The glorification of sense perception and the rejection of historical materialism. A serious critique must be made of Studies in Dialectics.

29. Slaughter's letter was taken by the WL leadership as a very grave warning. We are worried by the depth of political and ideological differences. But we believe that the problems can be surmounted through serious and honest discussion. What is needed is a real discussion within the IC and the leaderships of the national sections. Documents should be prepared and circulated. This is the way to proceed. The IC can only emerge strengthened. The Workers League is very anxious to participate and to learn from this discussion. We treasure our collaboration with the British comrades and with every section of the IC. Let us set a definite timetable for this discussion, and on this basis work toward an IC Conference.

7. Letter from Aileen Jennings to the Workers Revolutionary Party Political Committee

June 30, 1985

Dear Comrades,

During the course of action on the Manchester Area certain practices have come to light as to the running of Youth Training by a homosexual and the dangers this holds for the Party in relation to police provocation. I believe the Political Committee was correct in stating that a cover-up of such practices endangered the Party from a serious provocation.

Having realised this I must therefore say to the Committee that I can no longer go on covering up a position at both the office and in the flats at 155 Clapham High Street which also opens the Party to police provocation; namely that whilst for 19 years I have been the close personal companion of Comrade Healy I have also covered up a problem which the Political Committee must now deal with because I cannot.

This is that the flats in particular are used in a completely opportunist way for sexual liaisons with female members employed by the Party on News Line, female members of the International Committee and others.

On any security basis one of these or more has to be the basis of either blackmail by the police or an actual leak in security to a policewoman. I am asking the Political Committee to take steps to resolve the position for Party in the present political situation.

In 1964, after the Control Commission of Investigation Comrade Healy gave an undertaking he would cease these practices, this has not happened and I cannot sit on this volcano any longer.

Yours fraternally, Aileen Jennings

8. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to Sections of the ICFI

October 5, 1985

To Comrades of the German, Greek, Spanish, Australian, Sri Lankan and Peruvian sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International:

Comrades:

The International Committee has not met since the 17th of August. At that meeting, a report on the finances of the WRP was the basis for raising pledges of some £82,000 from the IC sections. Comrade North, who brings this letter to you, will report on the political and organizational matters underlying the calling of that IC meeting and the entirely false financial report which was made. I want to make it absolutely clear that Comrade North travels and speaks to the sections on these matters with my complete support and confidence, and that this support and confidence are shared by Comrade M. Banda.

At the center of the crisis in the WRP and the IC are the methods, practices and theoretical revisions of G. Healy. We in the WRP are engaged in a life-and-death struggle too put an end to those methods. The retirement of G. Healy is only the first step. The IC is directly involved in the same fight, and not simply as an "interested party" or merely by implication. Healy's work has for many years constituted a systematic destructive attack on the whole cadre of the ICFI — organizationally, politically, theoretically, and also physically. Since June of this year, incontrovertible evidence has come forward to the Political Committee of the WRP of gross abuses of comrades, of practices entirely alien to the Trotskyist movement. These practices have sustained a "theoretical" line in which so-called "dialectical cognition" has been more and more substituted for any political analysis. In consequence, individualist imposition of arbitrary and capricious notions replaced the development of Marxist analysis, strategy and tactics. Among the deadly serious consequences has been an unprincipled relation — politically and financially — to bourgeois national movements. This has been paralleled in the advanced capitalist countries — particularly Britain — by a "left" shouting about revolutionary situations and even civil war situations and "dual power," while at the same time giving uncritical support to and providing a mouthpiece for centrists and opportunists (Livingstone, etc.).

Behind this has been a clique method of leadership around Healy which produced a theoretical and political crisis in the IC. Its result has been the loss of any revolutionary perspective or any analysis of the world situation. The false theory was built up that some world-revolutionary "essence" now flowed into and determined uninterruptedly, without hindrance and without unevenness, the class relations in every country. This is, in fact, the only content of the 10th Congress Resolution. We must begin work immediately to reject and overcome it. We must put an end now to the old relations in the IC. Neither the WRP nor any other section is the "leading" section of the IC. The WRP has the same financial and political obligations to the IC as every other section. No section has any financial obligation to the WRP. That does not, of course, exclude financial assistance where necessary.

In Comrade North's report, gross abuses of individual comrades by G. Healy will figure. I must stress that these are not matters of love affairs, infidelities, or casual incidents, lapses of individual conduct. What is involved in [sic] the abuse of political authority and abuse of political confidence to bully and to debase, even corrupt, young comrades. This affected every sphere of the political life of the WRP and the IC. Interwoven with every political struggle have been unspoken motives involving the subordination of political principles to the basest personal interests by Gerry Healy. What we have witnessed, and must now overcome, I repeat, is a long-term and systematic attempt to destroy all the gains of the struggle for revolutionary Marxism, embodied in the cadres of the IC sections.

We hope that you will subject what Comrade North has to say to a thorough and objective analysis, and then join us in summoning up every ounce of revolutionary energy and resource to face up to, negate, and go beyond the stage the IC has reached.

We have complete confidence that this will prove the most decisive and positive step in the history of the IC, and that together we can arm all our sections for a decisive turn to the working class and real gains in the building of the International Committee.

Fraternally,

Cliff Slaughter

Secretary of the International Committee

9. Joint Communique from the Greek and Spanish Sections of the ICFI

October 21, 1985

The Central Committee of the Workers Internationalist League, the Greek section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and the Central Committee of the Workers Communist League, the Spanish Section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, declare our loyalty to the Tenth World Congress of the ICFI as the highest body of the ICFI and its policies and resolutions can only be changed by another congress.

The policies and the leadership of the Congress were attacked by a faction in the WRP led by Mike Banda and supported internationally by Dave North and Ulli Rippert who manoeuvred to expel comrade Gerry Healy without any discussion in the international nor in a committee meeting or in a conference but by manoeuvrings in the WRP Central Committee.

We affirm our confidence in the historic role of the ICFI and in the methods of dialectical materialism as the philosophy of Marxism.

The struggle for dialectical materialism establishes the historical continuity of Marxism and of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky.

We do not accept the expulsion of the most world-known leader of the International, Comrade Gerry Healy, behind the backs of the International.

We are calling Comrade Gerry Healy as the historical leader of this movement and as the leader of the Tenth World Congress as well as the most outstanding fighter for its perspectives to call an emergency meeting of the International Committee of the Fourth International and we will not recognise any other factional meeting called fraudulently in the name of the ICFI.

We are calling upon all leaders and members of all sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to support our communique.

10. Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Crisis of the British Section

October 25, 1985

The present political situation in the Workers Revolutionary Party has produced the biggest crisis in the International Committee of the Fourth International since its formation in 1953.

What is in danger are all the achievements made in the decades-long struggle to build the Trotskyist movement in Britain and internationally. None of those gains would have been made without the protracted and difficult struggle against Stalinism and Pabloite revisionism in which the leadership of the WRP and its predecessor the Socialist Labour League played the decisive role.

All the sections of the ICFI were formed as a result of the struggle by the British comrades against the attempt of Pabloite revisionism to liquidate Trotskyism.

At the root of the present crisis which erupted with the exposure of the corrupt practices of G. Healy and the attempt by the WRP Political Committee to cover them up, is the prolonged drift of the WRP leadership away from the strategical task of the building of the world party of socialist revolution towards an increasingly nationalist perspective and practice.

Once the corrupt practices of G. Healy were revealed in the June 30th letter of Comrade A. Jennings, the WRP Political Committee refused to confront the crisis in the Party in a principled manner.

Rejecting collaboration with its international comrades, and co-thinkers in the ICFI, the WRP Political Committee began a systematic campaign to cover up Healy's corruption both from the ICFI and the WRP Central Committee.

A meeting of the ICFI scheduled for July, to which evidence of Healy's corruption could have been presented, including his signed statement acknowledging the truth of the allegations, was cancelled.

The ICFI meeting of August 17th was given a false report of the financial crisis of the WRP. This bogus report was used to obtain pledges from the ICFI sections totalling £82,000 to assist the WRP. Not a word was said about the allegations of Healy's corruption, although all members of the WRP Political Committee knew them to be true.

Had the issue of Healy's corruption been brought to the ICFI, a proper investigation could have been carried out through the committees of the WRP and the ICFI.

The WRP Political Committee opposed this course of action, and instead worked to suppress the Jennings' letter, and prevent Party members from exercising their constitutional right to have a Control Commission investigation into Healy.

As a result there is now within the WRP a justified mistrust of the leadership, a breakdown of discipline in Party bodies, and the disruption of Party work.

The first step towards overcoming the crisis in the WRP is the recognition by its leadership and membership that it requires the closest collaboration with its co-thinkers in the ICFI.

In the past the WRP has correctly urged its international comrades to always begin from the needs of the world party and not from narrow national considerations.

Now the ICFI calls on all leaders and members of the WRP, whatever their legitimate differences on perspective and programme, to subordinate themselves to the discipline of our international movement and uphold its authority.

If this is not done, there is the imminent danger of a split without clarity on issues of principle and programme. Such a split would severely weaken the Party and create the conditions for provocations against the WRP and other sections of the ICFI.

Certainly the section which has played the leading role in exposing the activities of the agencies of imperialism and Stalinism in the Trotskyist movement cannot be unmindful of the dangers inherent in the present situation.

Political differences should be neither suppressed nor concealed. They exist and must be openly and fully discussed in a Party united under the leadership of the ICFI and the Central Committee of the WRP. In this way the cadre of the WRP and the entire international movement can be educated and the present crisis overcome in a way which will bring gains for the ICFI as a whole.

The ICFI puts forward the following measures:

(1) The re-registration of the membership of the WRP on the basis of an explicit recognition of the political authority of the ICFI and the subordination of the British section to its decisions.

(2) Full collaboration by every member of the WRP with an International Control Commission to investigate, but not limited to, the corruption of G. Healy, the cover-up by the Political Committee and the financial crisis of the WRP.

(3) All charges against members of either the minority or majority factions, which have arisen as a result of the eruption of the crisis in the Party shall be referred to the International Control Commission.

All disputes are internal to the WRP and the ICFI, and must remain so. The operation of this agreement shall be regulated by the ICFI and all violations shall be promptly reported to the International Control Commission which shall complete its report by 1st January 1986.

Upon acceptance of these proposals preparations must be made for the 8th Congress of the WRP early in 1986, starting with the circulation of documents by both the Majority and Minority tendencies.

We recognize that our British comrades work under enormous class pressures generated by the ruling class of the oldest capitalist country. These can be surmounted only on the basis of a truly internationalist practice.

We again appeal to all members of the WRP to recognize their historic responsibilities to the Fourth International, the international implications of their decisions, and to therefore accept these proposals.

11. Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Expulsion of G. Healy

October 25, 1985

The International Committee of the Fourth International carried the following resolution at its meeting of October 25, 1985.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) expels G. Healy from its ranks and endorses the decision of the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee to expel him from the British Section.

Healy grossly abused his political authority over a protracted period, using the cadre of the ICFI and the WRP for his personal purposes and violating their rights.

In so doing he abused the political trust and confidence placed in him by all sections of the ICFI.

The practices which he carried out constituted an attack on a historically selected cadre of the Trotskyist movement.

The ICFI has in its possession overwhelming evidence establishing the ground for Healy's expulsion.

The ICFI is by no means unmindful of or indifferent to the political contribution made by G. Healy, but these abuses are so great that it is the duty and responsibility of the ICFI to take this course of action.

There is no toleration of corruption within the ICFI. All leaders are accountable for their actions and cannot act outside the constitution of the Party.

Healy has at no time made any attempt to contact the ICFI in order to try to refute the charges or to argue against his expulsion.

On the contrary, in the recent period he conducted an unprincipled factional campaign within the ICFI exploiting personal contacts to portray himself as a victim of political conspiracy and to engage in a scurrilous slander campaign against leading members of the ICFI.

In expelling Healy the ICFI has no intention of denying the political contributions which he made in the past, particularly in the struggle against Pabloite revisionism in the 1950s and the 1960s.

In fact, this expulsion is the end product of his rejection of the Trotskyist principles upon which these past struggles were based and his descent into the most vulgar forms of opportunism.

The political and personal degeneration of Healy can be clearly traced to his ever more explicit separation of the practical and organizational gains of the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the historically and internationally grounded struggles against Stalinism and revisionism from which these achievements arose.

The increasing subordination of questions of principle to immediate practical needs centered on securing the growth of the Party apparatus, degenerating into political opportunism which steadily eroded his own political and moral defenses against the pressures of imperialism in the oldest capitalist country in the world.

Under these conditions his serious subjective weaknesses played an increasingly dangerous political role.

Acting ever more arbitrarily within both the WRP and the ICFI, Healy increasingly attributed the advances of the World Party not to the Marxist principles of the Fourth International and to the collective struggle of its cadre, but rather to his own personal abilities.

His self-glorification of his intuitive judgments led inevitably to a gross vulgarization of materialist dialectics, and Healy's transformation into a thorough-going subjective idealist and pragmatist.

In place of his past interest in the complex problems of developing the cadre of the international Trotskyist movement, Healy's practice became almost entirely preoccupied with developing unprincipled relations with bourgeois nationalist leaders and with trade union and Labour Party reformists in Britain.

His personal life-style underwent a corresponding degeneration.

Those like Healy, who abandon the principles on which they once fought and who refuse to subordinate themselves to the ICFI in the building of its national sections must inevitably degenerate under the pressure of the class enemy.

There can be no exception to this historical law. The ICFI affirms that no leader stands above the historic interests of the working class.

12. Special Congress Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite)

October 26, 1985

The Workers Revolutionary Party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, has been split in two by the anti-Bolshevik, unconstitutional and wrecking actions of the general secretary, Michael Banda [sic] and his academic attorney, Cliff Slaughter.

They have deliberately conspired to whip up a lynch mob atmosphere in sections of the party to frame and expel the founder-leader of our movement, Comrade Gerry Healy.

The chief instruments for this attack are an unscrupulous smear campaign against Comrade Healy and an attack on dialectical materialism spearheaded by D. North of the US Workers League.

Both attacks have failed: Comrade Healy's record as founder and builder of the International Committee of the Fourth International and of the Workers Revolutionary Party are matters of objective historical truth.

We reject with contempt Banda and Slaughter's conspiracy to drive him from the party, and are proud to proclaim him as a members [sic] of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Banda-Slaughter and their clique no longer represent the traditions of the Trotskyist movement. They have definitively broken from the principles of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

They have rejected dialectical materialism in favour of subjective idealism; violated the constitution flagrantly and replaced it with rank and fileism, freedom of criticism and rule from below; and set out to destroy the party, the Young Socialists, the News Line, the first daily Trotskyist newspaper in the world, by capitulating to social democracy and the "new reality."

But they cannot destroy the Workers Revolutionary Party, its theoretical foundations and its practical achievements in the working-class movement. It will go forward on the basis of:

1. Upholding democratic centralism embodied in the party's constitution.

2. Fighting for the resolutions of the 7th Congress of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the 10th World Congress of the ICFI.

3. Training a cadre in the working class and youth in the dialectical materialist method.

We call upon all members of the Workers Revolutionary Party to rally to the fight for these Marxist principles as the only guarantee of building the party of socialist revolution.

SIGNED:

Sheila Torrance, Richard Price, Corin Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Mitchell, Ben Rudder, Simon Vevers, Ray Athow, Frank Sweeney, John Eden, Claire Dixon, David Oatley.

13. "Split Exposes Right-Wing Conspiracy Against Party"

Statement of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite)

October 30, 1985

The Workers Revolutionary Party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, has passed through the biggest political crisis in its history.

But it has emerged with its revolutionary principles unimpaired, its fighting traditions upheld and its cadre politically and theoretically strengthened.

A necessary and long over-due split with the revisionist, anti-Trotskyist Banda clique has been carried out successfully.

Banda and Bradford University lecturer Cliff Slaughter have been left with a rump of politically deranged malcontents plus those individuals who are desperately seeking a way out of the intensifying class struggle.

The Workers Revolutionary Party will continue to fight on the platform of the perspectives unanimously decided at the Seventh Congress in December 1984, the Party constitution which embodies the Leninist principle of democratic centralism and the struggle for dialectical materialist theory and practice in the Party and the working class.

At a special congress on October 26, 1985, the Workes [sic] Revolutionary Party decisively split fro [sic] the Banda-Slaughter clique which had attempted to hi jack the Party, the daily News Line and the Young Socialist. (See Special Congress resolution printed on this page).

This impelled the Banda group a further stage in its anti-party frenzy and its rabid political degeneration.

They lined up with the forces of the capitalist state to bring down an unparalleled witchhunt on Trotskyism and its most outstanding post-war leader, Comrade Gerry Healy.

Lying charges against Comrade Healy were published in Banda's organ, delighting the Tory press, the Stalinists, revisionists and Trotskyist-haters everywhere.

The best elements in the labour and trade union movement are furious with Banda's cowardly attack on Comrade Healy. They have been outraged by the ferocity of Banda's onslaught on the Party that he once led as general secretary.

The source of this sudden and virulent attack from within the WRP itself is the immense revolutionary changes in the objective world situation.

The political and economic crisis is deepening all over the world. The Reagan administration has officially adopted pre-emptive terrorism as a weapon of its foreign policy in the Middle East and Latin America; the Israeli regime is lashing out to behead the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); the Botha dictatorship in South Africa is conducting a systematic slaughter of black militants; and the Thatcher regime is waging a policy of violent class war at home while carrying out murderous military intrigues in Ireland and against its adversaries in the former colonies.

Because of the emergence of Bonapartism in Britain, the capitalist state and its forces of mass repression are now in the forefront of every struggle facing the working class, the youth and the trade unions.

This has imposed new revolutionary tasks and political responsibilities on the Marxist leadership of the working-class movement, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

This is what lies behind Banda's renegacy and the strange coalition of ex-members, quitters and do-nothings that he now heads.

They have adopted the 'new realism' promoted by the Euro-Stalinists. It amounts to defeatism followed by capitulation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracies and to Stalinism.

Their right-wing politics is the real content of their frenzied attack on Comrade Healy and the Party.

To get to their new right-wing postures, they objectively had to try to smash the WRP, its daily News Line and all the great achievements of the Party since its formation in November 1973.

But this political conspiracy failed. They were decisively rebuffed because the cadre of the Party had been trained under Comrade Healy's leadership in the dialectical materialist method and the principles fought for by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

Fifteen members of the old Central Committee resolutely refused to be stampeded by the hysteria whipped up Banda, Slaughter and Workes [sic] League national secretary David North.

North, who heads an organisation of no more than 74 members, now presents himself as the 'leader' of the rump ICFI. If he has the same success reregistering Banda's faction as he has in the US, then the Banda clique will have a dwindling and short-lived existence!

We place on record our revolutionary greetings to the Greek and Spanish sections of the ICFI which unanimously rejected the Banda-Slaughter-North political coup and stood firm with the ICFI and Comrade Healy in the world movement.

We call on all those who stand by the revolutionary traditions, principles and history of the Party to rally immediately and to repel this orchestrated attack on Trotskyism, which serves only teh [sic] state and the ruling class.

We are confident that this struggle is going to strengthen the working class in Britain and internationally and open the way for the building of the ICFI as the world party of socialist revolution.

14. "Morality and the Revolutionary Party"

News Line Article by Mike Banda November 2, 1985

It is now four months to the day since Aileen Jennings' letter was read out to the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

In those four months the party has undergone an irrevocable qualitative change and the most traumatic and unforgettable experience. For the first time, and possibly the last, the party has been split not on tactical and programmatic issues, but on the most basic question of revolutionary morality.

The split has taken place on the relation between the sexes in the party and the right of the party to defend the basic rights of its members and to judge and discipline any leader who abuses his authority and the power vested in him by the party.

Any party or leadership which tolerates or condones in any way the abuse of political power for personal gratification is opening the door to bureaucratic degeneration.

The former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee Gerry Healy violated the most fundamental principle of Bolshevism, the principle on which Lenin split from the Mensheviks in 1903.

His refusal to answer to the Central Committee, the highest body in the party between congresses, was a total and irrevocable break with the principles which he had hitherto claimed to uphold.

Bolshevism teaches that no person can stand higher than the revolutionary party, the historically determined instrument of the struggle for workers' power.

As Trotsky put it in The New Course: "Leninism is genuine freedom from formalistic prejudices, from moralizing doctrinalism, from all forms of intellectual conservatism attempting to bind the will to revolutionary action.

"But to believe that Leninism signifies 'anything goes' would be an irremediable mistake. Leninism includes the morality, not formal but genuinely revolutionary, of mass action and the mass party.

"Nothing is so alien to it as functionary arrogance and bureaucratic cynicism. A mass party has its own morality, which is the bond of fighters in and for action.

"Demagogy is irreconcilable with the spirit of a revolutionary party because it is deceitful: by presenting one or another simplified solution of the difficulties of the hour, it inevitably undermines the next future, weakens the party's self-confidence."

These are the essence of the political differences between the Workers Revolutionary Party and the anti-party group. Their philosophy is based on the principle of "anything goes." It is positivism and pragmatism.

The essence of their position is that there is no such thing as principles, that there is no such thing as objective truth and therefore no absolute within every relative.

The criterion therefore is pure expediency and opportunism, where truth is purely what is considered profitable and useful to one individual or one particular clique.

It is a completely individualist philosophy which glorifies the will of the individual, of the great leader, and the cult of individual infallibility and counterposes it to so-called "mob rule" which is the movement of the masses expressing law-governed historical necessity.

This is not to deny the role of leaders and their will and perception in history. But the method and outlook of an anti-party group which rejects the will of a democratic majority in the party rejects the revolutionary role of the working class and above all its vanguard in the form of the revolutionary party.

As Trotsky said, again in his History of the Russian Revolution: "The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.

"Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program and even this still requires the test of events and the approval of the masses... Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore.

"They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organization the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box.

"But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box but the steam." (Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, page 18, Gollancz edition)

The arrogance, the cynicism, the perverse indifference and hostility to democratic centralism is not only a clear expression of the reactionary subjective idealist outlook of this group, but bears the unmistakable imprint of a reactionary middle-class clique.

It is not prepared to subordinate itself to the historic interests of the working class represented by the revolutionary party, its organizational rules and discipline.

Such a group cannot and never will lead a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism. But they are entirely capable of assisting the counter-revolutionary labour bureaucracy and imperialism itself against the revolution.

That was the essence of their unsuccessful attempts to mount a counter-revolution within the Workers Revolutionary Party. The morality of the revolutionary party is the indispensable foundation for the organization of the party, the mobilization of the masses and the overthrow of the imperialist state.

We will let Trotsky have the final word: "Bolshevism created the type of the authentic revolutionist, who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgements.

"The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty-bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion.

"At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education, and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it.

"Only this permitted the Boisheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible." (History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3. Page 166, Gollancz edition)

That is why the Redgrave-Healy group must and will be expelled and the party cleared of this corrupt bureaucratic degeneration as well as its reactionary subjective idealist outlook and method.

15. Letter from the International Committee to the Central Committee of the Workers Internationalist League, Greek Section of the ICFI

November 9, 1985

Dear Comrades,

We are extremely concerned that unless you change course immediately, you will complete a totally unprincipled split from the International Committee of the Fourth International, following the refusal of your delegates to attend the properly constituted ICFI meeting of October 25, 1985.

Such a split by you would constitute an enormous betrayal of the International and the Greek working class.

The refusal of the WIL delegates to attend the October 25 meeting, and the endorsement of this action by your Central Committee, left the IC with no alternative but to suspend the WIL as its Greek Section.

One thing must be made clear: this action was taken only because of the refusal of the WIL delegates to attend the IC meeting, and for no other reason. Therefore, as soon as the WIL undertakes to resume its proper place in the ranks of our World Party and to uphold the authority of its bodies, the suspension will be lifted. In order to clear away any possible confusion about the validity of the October 25 meeting, it must be understood that it was called by the ICFI Secretary, C. Slaughter, at the request of six IC sections. The position advanced in the WIL-CWL (Spain) joint communique of October 21, that only G. Healy can call a meeting of the IC, and that "We will not recognise any other factional meeting called in the name of the ICFI" is preposterous. Comrade Slaughter was elected IC Secretary at the 10th World Congress of the ICFI in January 1985. G. Healy was not elected to any position in the IC, took part only sporadically in the Congress proceedings, and was expelled by the WRP from its ranks on October 19.

You may, of course disagree with that decision, and with the October 25 decision to expel G. Healy, and fight for your position within the ICFI. We would remind you that the ICFI is the world party of socialist revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, and not a cult grouped around some individual "historic leader."

By refusing to attend the October 25 meeting of the highest body of our movement between World Congresses, the IC, the WIL delegates have arbitrarily denied members of the Greek Section their right to be informed of the position of the other IC Sections on the crisis in the WRP. Such a rejection of the internationalist principles on which our movement is based is essentially nationalism, expressing the pressure of the class enemy. At the same time, the action of the WIL delegates has denied the right of the ICFI and its sections to hear and discuss the views of our Greek comrades. If the WIL delegates considered that the other sections were being led into a trap or manoeuvre then their duty was to make these views known.

Refusing to recognize the authority of the ICFI, the WIL delegates engaged in an unprincipled collaboration with the clique which has split from the British section, the WRP. According to this clique's newspaper, they have "joined forces with the Greek and Spanish sections of the ICFI."

The fact is that the pro-Healy clique claimed and was given minority rights in the WRP on October 11, 1985. It used these rights, but then refused to attend the Central Committee of October 19, 1985 and the Special Conference of October 26. Since then its leading members have resorted to the capitalist state courts to seize the assets of the WRP.

In the week preceding the October 25 IC meeting, repeated attempts were made to establish contact with the leadership of the Greek Section in order to arrange an IC meeting at a time and place enabling all sections to be represented. We were informed on 18/19 October that Comrade Savas was not available and would not return from work in Northern Greece until late on Monday, 20 October. In fact he was in Barcelona collaborating with leading Spanish comrades, preparing against an IC meeting. While accusing the IC of organising a trap or manoeuvre he himself was leading a secret faction to split the IC. In the following days, between October 19 and the IC meeting of October 25, he was contacted by the Peruvian IC delegate. At that time this comrade had no documents or information on the issues in the WRP, and favoured no particular position. Comrade Savas worked to persuade her not to attend the IC. (This she ignored. She took a principled stand, attended the IC, and has supported the IC resolutions on Healy's expulsion, and the situation in the WRP, as well as on the sending of this letter.)

On Wednesday, October 23, IC comrades from five sections spoke by telephone to Comrade Savas, urging him to attend the IC, but without success. Instead, Savas attended the meeting of splitters supporting Healy, and issued a joint communique with the Spanish Section leadership, opposing the IC and the WRP and putting forward the proposal that only GH could call any international meeting. The Greek leadership thus provided a bogus international cover and platform for these unprincipled splitters, and must take major responsibility for the subsequent events, including the use of the bourgeois state courts and the media by the expelled minority in their attempts to destroy the WRP and the ICFI.

The IC meeting was not called to change the policies decided at the 10th Congress, nor could it. The policies of the ICFI can be changed only at the International Congress (the 11th in 1986), preparation for which has now begun.

The IC meeting on October 25 did expel Healy from its ranks after hearing a report from the British section. The WIL delegates could have taken what positions they wished on that issue and fought loyally for that position, as had been pointed out to them.

The ICFI also adopted a resolution to regulate the internal discussion in the leadership of the WRP and its ranks, with full rights for the then minority faction in the WRP. A representative of that minority was informed of the existence of these proposals and an attempt was made to arrange a meeting with the ICFI delegates. The WRP minority rejected discussion and openly split from the British section by convening a separate conference on October 26.

The issues are clear. The WIL is on the road to split with the IC on an unprincipled basis. This must be prevented at all costs.

We know there are principled Trotskyists in the leadership who will stand firm, and that the same is true of the ranks of the Greek Section. We call on them to act now to reverse the arbitrary decision of their ICFI delegates and return their section to the World Party.

The anti-internationalism which led to the refusal to attend the October 25 IC meeting must be rejected. If not, the WIL faces destruction as a Trotskyist party. The WIL is on the brink of announcing the "transformation of the League into the revolutionary party." Comrade Savas and the CC know that there are gigantic destructive dangers in founding a party on the unprincipled foundation of a break with internationalism. The very best interpretation which can be placed on Comrade Savas and the Greek CC's break from the IC is that they fear disruption of their work for the transformation into a party. Such a position, politically, means that internationalism, the foundation of our movement in every country, is rejected in favour of immediate national concerns as perceived by the WIL leadership.

A party formed on this basis could never be a section of the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International. It would attract all those petty bourgeois elements who reject our internationalist foundations. We urge you with all the force at our command to turn back from the path upon which you have embarked, to return immediately to the IC, and to conduct the work of founding the revolutionary party in Greece on this, the only principled basis.

Fraternally,

Lucia, Secretary Peruvian Section ICFI

Keerthi Balasuriya, Secretary Sri Lankan Section ICFI

Nick Beams, Secretary Australian Section ICFI

Mike Banda, Secretary British Section ICFI

Ulli Rippert, representing the German Section ICFI

C. Slaughter, Secretary ICFI

D. North, Secretary, Workers League (USA), in political solidarity with ICFI

16. Letter from the Workers League Central Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee

November 21, 1985

To The Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party

Dear Comrades:

At its meeting of November 17, 1985, the Central Committee of the Workers League discussed at length the crisis in the Workers Revolutionary Party and the decision to end daily publication of the News Line. You can rest assured that the Workers League stands fully behind the struggle against Healy and the renegades who have split from the party and who are now resorting to the capitalist courts in order to destroy it. These are the actions of petty-bourgeois elements who hate the principles of the Trotskyist movement, have contempt for the working class and have broken completely with the Fourth International. There will be no compromise with the renegades. All the political resources of the International Committee must be mobilized to expose and destroy this rotten clique.

But for this struggle to be waged requires the maximum clarity within our own ranks as to the historical and political issues which must be confronted in the aftermath of the split. For this reason we are troubled by your CC statement, published on November 12, 1985, and are in sharp political disagreement with the manner in which the WRP is conducting the struggle against the anti-party renegades since the split of October 26, 1985.

We are deeply disturbed by the mounting evidence that our comrades in the leadership of the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International have not yet begun to analyze the political issues raised by the split nor confronted the source and nature of the degeneration that has produced the explosion inside the WRP. Our great concern is that in the absence of such an analysis, which is the precondition for the theoretical rearming of the section, the split will remain at the level of a purely organizational break with Healy and his supporters. This would mean that the WRP will continue to drift further and further away from Trotskyism and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The basic source of our disagreement and the cause of increasing friction between us is that the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership is not prepared to acknowledge, except in a verbal and platonic form, the authority of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Precisely because it does not recognize that the most essential feature of Healy's political degeneration was his subordination of the international movement to the practical needs of the British section, the WRP leadership is in real danger of continuing, albeit in somewhat different form, the same nationalist-opportunist course.

Permit us to examine the Central Committee statement of November 12th, since it lays bare all that is wrong in the conduct of the WRP leadership.

After 16 years of continuous publication, the daily newspaper of the Trotskyist movement in Britain has been shut down virtually without discussion. Despite the fact that neither the Workers Press nor News Line could have been launched or sustained without the enormous sacrifices of the cadre of the entire World Party, the ICFI was not even informed in advance, let alone consulted, about the plan to liquidate the News Line. Comrade North was told over the telephone by Comrade Slaughter of the decision to end daily publication on November 11th, two days after the vote had been taken by the WRP Central Committee and Special Conference.

At the IC meeting held on Tuesday, November 5th — for which the delegates from North America made a special trip — not one word was said by the British delegation, which included Comrades Slaughter and Dave Bruce (standing in for Mike Banda who chose not to attend) about the imminent demise of the daily News Line. Both delegates must have known that the proposal to end daily publication was going to be put before the upcoming Central Committee. Only a few hours before the IC meeting, Comrade Banda had written a statement in which the General Secretary declared that the founding of the daily newspaper in 1969 had been a "colossal political mistake."

This and other liquidationist opinions expressed by Comrade Banda were not brought to the attention of the International Committee. While Comrade Slaughter, who knew of Banda's views, once referred obliquely to the danger of an organizational collapse, he also chose not to raise the question of the News Line's future.

Here, again, we have the continuation of the same unprincipled attitude toward the International Committee that has exemplified the political degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party. The leadership continues to believe that matters pertaining to the internal life of the WRP, above all, the discussions within its leadership, should not be the property of the International Committee. As for its decisions, the IC is of use only as a decorative rubber stamp.

No doubt Comrade Slaughter will object that the decision to end daily publication was forced upon the WRP for all sorts of irresistible reasons, i.e., shortage of money, shortage of staff, shortage of members, etc. Whether true or not, this is really beside the point. These reasons could have been presented on November 5th to the International Committee. At any rate, after the experiences of the Healy expulsion statement and the turn to the bourgeois press, we hope you will forgive us if we bluntly tell you that we are tired of being told, after the fact, of the necessity for actions which were taken without consulting the International Committee.

Your statement declares: "At present our party does not have the physical or financial resources to produce a daily revolutionary paper of the type required to lead the working class." On what information is this conclusion based? There has not been, as yet, any financial report given to either the WRP membership or the ICFI. The International Committee has only just begun an examination of the WRP's finances.

The Workers League is not contesting the right of the WRP to make an organizational retreat, if that is absolutely necessary, and temporarily suspend daily publication. But such a serious decision would have to be based on the most careful discussion within the International Committee, concentrating not only on matters relating to financial and physical resources but above all on questions of politics and perspectives.

The absence of political preparation is evident from the first issue of the twice-weekly News Line, dated November 16th. In a 16-page paper, four pages are devoted to sports and two to television. There is no editorial statement. The main foreign news story, on page 4, is supplied by Reuters. On page 5, we are surprised to find an article reprinted from the Irish Socialist Press, which, we presume, is the organ of a group in Ireland which is seeking to establish a relationship with the WRP. As far as we know, neither the politics of this group nor the nature of its relation with the WRP has ever been discussed within the International Committee. And yet a full page is made available to them in which they make the following politically-dubious remarks:

"This is the reality of capitalist Ireland. And there is one other factor. The Protestant working class is understandably totally opposed to a bourgeois 'united' Ireland. Make no mistake!

"We support them totally in this. Why should Protestant workers throw off the shackles of Paisley's form of religion to embrace the no less obnoxious religious repression in the south." (Our emphasis)

This is not the place where we wish to explain our objection to the above formulation, which could be taken as an indication that this group does not take an unequivocal stand on the right of the Irish people to self-determination. Nor do we find encouraging this group's reference to its on-going perspectives discussion "on the issue surrounding the United Front strategy in Ireland." (Our emphasis)

At any rate, the place for such an article is in an international discussion bulletin, not in the public organ of our British section, where it is printed without comment. If the editorial decision to publish the article was based on the fact that this group endorses the expulsion of Healy, we consider this unprincipled. Unfortunately, the publication of this article again reflects the fact that the political foundations of your work are not firmly embedded in the Trotskyist concept of a world party of socialist revolution.

This is why, in our opinion, you do not really understand that the daily News Line is a political conquest of the International Committee, and that its development is of the greatest concern to every section. If you do not believe that the International Committee should be consulted about a decision which not only affects every aspect of our British section's work and its relation to the workers' movement but also the political life of the entire World Party, then it is clear that we have very different conceptions of the historic role of the Fourth International.

The existence of a World Party is of no political or practical significance, and talk of the international character of the socialist movement loses all meaning, unless it implies, by its very nature, the right of communists of one country to not only advise, but also pass judgment on, the struggle of communists in other countries.

But this is precisely what the WRP leadership is not prepared to concede, and herein lies the enormous danger of continued and irreversible degeneration. We cannot help if you take offense, but we suspect that your refusal to discuss the fate of the News Line stems from a reluctance to submit the real political perspective of the leaders of the British section to international criticism.

Moreover, having studied Comrade Banda's private memorandum (which Comrade Bruce, to his political credit, at least made available to Comrade North the day after the IC meeting, and even expressed his disagreement with it), which he described as his "last Will and Testament," we have good reasons for doubting the statement's claim that "Proposals by the Central Committee on the relaunching of the revolutionary daily paper will be put before the Workers Revolutionary Party's Eighth Congress early next year."

The CC statement does admit a nationalist degeneration of the WRP over "several years," but otherwise says nothing about this, which is the essence of the matter. For all the appearance of bitter struggle within the WRP leadership under Healy, its political existence was that of a nationalist clique which rejected any form of supervision or discipline by the International Committee over its work. This was the fundamental significance of the British section's refusal to allow any discussion of criticisms of its work, made by the Workers League between 1982 and 1984, within the ICFI. Free of any control or supervision by the international movement, the WRP ever more openly rejected the fundamental principles of Trotskyism in relation to the Permanent Revolution, the Transitional Program, and the struggle against Stalinism, revisionism and centrism. While briefly referring to a "profoundly nationalist degeneration," the CC Resolution cannot honestly confront the nature of this degeneration nor explain why no one within the WRP leadership fought against it.

Instead, the Resolution dishonestly evades these fundamental issues by placing virtually all its emphasis on the personal degeneration of Healy and his supporters while attributing all responsibility for the demise of the daily newspaper to "past leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and in particular the group of renegades led by G. Healy, A. Mitchell, C. Redgrave and V. Redgrave."

We address this question directly to Comrades Banda and Slaughter: are you suggesting that present leaders of the WRP, above all, yourselves, do not bear substantial responsibility for the present crisis in your party and in the International Committee? For many years both of you played the decisive roles in defending Healy's politics and methods against correct criticisms both within your section and the ICFI. At least in the eyes of the international comrades, your unflagging support for Healy played a far greater role in building up his prestige and authority than anything said or done by Mitchell and the Redgraves, who, it must be remembered, only entered the revolutionary movement after both of you had been outstanding leaders of the British section and the International Committee for many years.

Perhaps the above observations will be taken as "un-comradely," but how can the confidence of the international working class and the cadre of the Fourth International be reestablished in the Workers Revolutionary Party if its leaders refuse to accept any responsibility for the crisis in their own organization? This attempt to evade responsibility is yet another serious warning that the WRP leadership is unwilling to make an objective analysis of the degeneration of the party, which would require not only condemnation of Healy, Mitchell, the Redgraves and Torrance but also a critical re-examination of the present leaders' political biographies.

Instead, attention is focussed on Healy's personal degeneration which the CC statement largely attributes to a "bureaucracy," whose existence, it claims "enabled his vile personal practices to continue."

In our opinion, this concentration on the question of bureaucracy is a facile evasion of the real problems confronting the WRP. Any attempt to attribute the political degeneration of Healy and the WRP as a whole to the existence of a Party "bureaucracy" is to make a mockery of Marxism. On the scales of the British labor movement, not to mention the German and American and those of the Stalinist variety in the deformed and degenerated workers' states, the "bureaucracy" upon which Healy rested is so miniscule as to barely deserve mention.

Moreover, when you attempt to extend this explanation to the Redgraves and Mitchell, it becomes truly ludicrous. We totally condemn their present political course which has led them to cross class lines and use the capitalist courts against the party. But no one can seriously claim that either Corin and Vanessa Redgrave or Alex Mitchell joined and remained in the British Trotskyist movement to find "personal prestige and privilege." And even if that were the case, it would be necessary to explain how such people were brought into the leadership of the party and allowed to remain in positions of authority for so many years.

This is where the real political content of the split emerges with such clarity. Healy has found a political base of support among those elements within the former leadership that have no connection whatsoever to the historical struggle of the ICFI against revisionism. None of them played a role in the theoretical fight against the American SWP or the French OCI. With the exception of Torrance, their rise to positions of authority within the party is entirely bound up with the SLL-WRP's retreat from the Trotskyist principles for which it had fought in the 1950's and 1960's. Vanessa Redgrave and Alex Mitchell are most of all identified with those policies and practices which exemplified Healy's conscious repudiation of the programmatic foundations of the Fourth International, i.e., the rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and the establishment of unprincipled and mercenary relations with bourgeois regimes in the Middle East.

Having been politically corrupted by these reactionary relationships, it is only natural that they should find nothing wrong with Healy's depraved abuse of the cadre of the Trotskyist movement. Nor should it come as a surprise that the renegades, after having carried out for many years under Healy's guidance a practice based on the rejection of a proletarian class line, now make use of the capitalist courts against the WRP. As for Torrance, the most "outstanding" feature of her political character has been her total indifference to the International Committee. Her only association with international work was when she helped to count the money collected from sections of the ICFI.

No, it is not a "bureaucratic degeneration" that we are dealing with; it is a political degeneration toward opportunism, which has been manifested in the resurgence of Pabloite revisionism at every level of the section's perspectives and which the renegades most completely personify. In our opinion, the most important lesson of the present struggle that must be grasped by every cadre of the International Committee is the enormously reactionary practical implications of any retreat from the defense of Trotskyist principles and the struggle against all forms of revisionism.

But it is precisely about this that the Central Committee statement says absolutely nothing: there is not a single reference to Pabloism! Instead, you have coined an entirely new political term, "Healyism." In what way does this new term enrich the theoretical vocabulary of the International Committee? We contend that this term is without a serious political content. It serves only to divert the WRP members away from an analysis of the growth of revisionism inside their party, and it deprives them of the historical perspective which they must have in order to comprehend this degeneration and fight to reverse it. We can assure you that we are not splitting hairs over terminology.

The theoretical degeneration of the WRP and the practices which this produced are bound up with the capitulation to the Pabloite attack on the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism. The specific forms this took within the British section, especially the WRP's totally unprincipled relations with bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East, must be concretely studied. Of course, this cannot be accomplished overnight. But by ignoring this entirely, regardless of your intentions and despite the organizational break with Healy, you allow this political degeneration to continue. Within this context we find highly disturbing the statement's failure to issue a call for a return to the theory of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program.

Unless the attention of the party is concentrated on these fundamental questions of the history, principles and program of the Trotskyist movement, the cadre of the British section and the international movement cannot be rearmed to defeat this revisionist attack. But instead of making them conscious of the crucial historical issues at stake in this struggle — the defense of the entire political and theoretical heritage of the Fourth International — the cadre are told by Comrade Banda that "the party has been split not on tactical and programmatic issues, but on the most basic question of revolutionary morality." (News Line, November 2, 1985)

If that were truly the case, we would have to state that the split was without any principled content; for how is it possible to discuss "revolutionary morality" apart from tactical and programmatic issues? It is entirely appropriate to quote Trotsky on this question: "A centrist readily resorts to pathetic moralizing to cover up his ideological emptiness; he does not understand that revolutionary morality can be formed only on the basis of revolutionary doctrine and revolutionary policy." (Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), Pathfinder, p. 234)

We find the roots of Healy's moral degeneration and his abominable abuse of comrades in his political degeneration, not the other way around. Insofar as dangerous tendencies toward subjectivism were to be observed many years before, these were for a long period held in check by the principled struggle waged by the British section for the building of the Fourth International. We will not accept any attempt to rewrite the history of the Fourth International from the standpoint of the moral depravity of Gerry Healy. For this reason we do not agree with the News Line's publication on November 8th of a document dealing with the 1943 expulsion of Healy, which, in the absence of an explanation, suggests that his expulsion at that time was correct, and that his readmission into the party was a tragic error that has taken the movement 42 more years to correct. This is a false subjective method which serves only to discredit the entire history of the International Committee.

In fact, in the light of Healy's subsequent degeneration, it would be worthwhile to review what James P. Cannon had to say about the issues raised in the struggles within the British section of the Fourth International during that period. He was addressing the right-wing faction inside the SWP led by Goldman and Morrow:

"Do you know what kind of regime your pals in England have? They have a minority led by Healy whose crimes consisted in the fact that he supported the unity line of the International Secretariat, that he broke with the sectarian nationalism of the WIL, and became a real internationalist, rejected their nationalist taint, and has been sympathetic in general to the Socialist Workers Party political position.

"Do you know what this regime calls Healy? A quisling of the Socialist Workers Party; that is, an agent of an enemy country." (James P. Cannon's Writings and Speeches, 1945-47, Pathfinder, p. 182)

It is Healy, not we, who spits on the history of the movement and who rejects the principles for which he fought for many years. If it was his earlier struggle for internationalism which enabled him to overcome, or at least suppress, his serious subjective weaknesses, it was his turn away from those same principles which produced a political degeneration that allowed those weaknesses to develop out of control and assume such malignant forms. Rather than printing childish anti-Healy cartoons, such as that which appeared in the News Line of November 16th, we should expose his revisionist politics, his rejection of the principled struggles upon which the movement is based.

Why do we insist on this approach to our history? Because our political relations and those of all other sections of the ICFI with the British movement have been based on principles, above all, on the agreement that the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution is the fundamental historical task of our epoch. The tradition created by the struggle to build the Fourth International still lives within the WRP, despite the political degeneration of the organization which found its most reactionary expression in Healy. But that tradition must be consciously revived and strengthened. This means, first of all, that the British section must reforge its relations with the International Committee.

This internationalist perspective must animate all aspects of the work of the Workers Revolutionary Party. We are convinced that once the WRP recognizes the necessity for the closest collaboration with the International Committee and fights to break consciously with the nationalist opportunism of the past period, it will quickly recover from the present crisis and acquire tremendous political strength. Armed with this perspective the present cadre of the WRP will generate out of the struggle for Trotskyism all the necessary physical and financial resources to produce a daily paper of the type required to lead the working class.

We trust that this letter will be taken as a fraternal contribution to the on-going discussion within the WRP. Accordingly, we kindly request that you make this letter available to all members of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Fraternally,

David North, on behalf of the

Central Committee of the Workers League

17. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North

November 26, 1985

Dear Comrade Dave,

As you know, the WRP Central Committee called a Special Congress on October 26th and 27th to discuss the situation surrounding the expulsion of G. Healy on October 19th 1985. This Congress was continued on November 2nd and again on November 9th. The discussion was not completed. Party tasks require that some time be left to comrades for their carrying out. The internal bulletin will be used to continue the discussion; and there will of course be the period required by the WRP Constitution for discussion preceding the 8th National Congress called for the weekend of February 9th, 1986. The contents of this letter (following our telephone conversation of some days ago) are based on notes I had prepared for the last session of the Special Conference, and I am submitting a copy of this letter for the written discussion, as well as for international discussion. I enclose also the transcript of my remarks at the London WRP Aggregate meeting of October 18th. In those remarks I used the term "near-fascist ideology" to characterize the conduct (not just the ideas) of the then minority. Since then you and others have made attacks on the use of terms such as this (near-fascist, neo-fascist, etc) saying that they are "leftist" in character, obscuring the real process of degeneration. Those who are saying this, however, choose not to present or analyze what was actually said. You will find, on reading my statement, that I go out of my way to point to parallel processes in the degeneration of the parties of the Comintern, that I cite Trotsky on the nature of these parallels, and that I do not call anyone a fascist. Not only that; I point out that a degeneration of the depth we have experienced must have its roots in the pressure of decaying capitalism, and not in "human nature" or any such thing; and it should not surprise anyone that the results are ideologically similar to the "culture" of fascism, which is itself the ultimate product of capitalism in decay. If you read carefully what I say, you will see that I do not use the word "near-fascist" to avoid or skate over an analysis but to expand it.

I suggest to you that your long speech at the first session of the WRP Special Congress on October 26th requires a very thorough criticism and self-criticism, and that it contains dangers, because it is very one-sided and misleading. It is indeed one-sided and misleading to such an extent that it tends to guide comrades into a much too easy and simple understanding of what is involved in the degeneration of Healy and Healyism and their effects on the WRP and the IC. It gives a picture of a WRP and WRP leadership corrupted to such an extent by Healy that no-one in the WRP could or would raise a criticism of Healy's anti-Marxist writings and practices, while D. North, on the other hand, had, at least since 1982, taken up arms or correct positions against Healy. If such a false picture is allowed to go unquestioned, we shall never understand and overcome the real process of degeneration of which Healy was the arch-representative. I propose therefore to take up your speech point by point. Before doing so, however, I must mention one or two points about the events preceding the Special Congress and your remarks there.

On returning home from a visit to the Central Committee of the Workers League on October 5th and 6th of this year, I was very glad to bring back with me 50 copies of your notes on Healy's Studies in Dialectical Materialism, which you published (following agreement with Comrade M. Banda and myself) together with letters from you to M. Banda and C. Slaughter. These materials were, we all agreed, of great value in opening up the necessary discussion in the WRP. What I did not understand was why you chose not to publish the letters to which you were replying. That would have helped clarify even further. I hope that any future publication of your letters will include Banda's and my own, since our mistakes can then be used for the movement's education. I must also say that your notes on Healy's Dialectics appeared without including the full 8 pages of your original notes which were concerned with "Lenin on Dialectics," written by me in 1962 and about which you wrote in 1982: "a major contribution to the struggle for dialectical materialism within the Trotskyist movement, and it remains, to this day, perhaps the best exposition of the general features of the dialectical method." For my part, I do not agree with that, but it would have been useful for the comrades who were just given your 1982 thinking on Healy's booklet to know your thinking on Slaughter.

The second point I want to make before turning to your speech at the Special Congress concerns the few days just preceding that Congress. We must correct the impression that by October 19th or thereabouts you and other IC comrades were for a resolute break with the Healy anti-party group and that the WRP majority leadership was somehow resisting a truly internationalist understanding and treatment of the problem. As you know, as late as October 25th, the very eve of the Healyite rump's calling of a split conference, supported by the leaders of the Greek and Spanish sections of the IC, you, together with comrades from Sri Lanka and Australia called for an approach which started from the perspective of uniting the Party. I remind you that the ex-minority, although taking full minority rights, had refused to attend the CC of October 19th which heard the charges against Healy and expelled him; and, furthermore, V. Redgrave had begun her recourse to the courts of the bourgeois state and C. Redgrave had attempted to lay claim to the College of Marxist Education. I will only add that when the IC met on October 25th to work for agreement on the IC Resolution eventually carried at the Special Congress, the original draft of this Resolution contained the following clause:

"(4) All actions involving the use of bourgeois state agencies by members of the WRP against other members must be withdrawn immediately. All disputes are internal to the WRP and the ICFI and must remain so."

(At this time of course there was still one day to go before the open split.)

As you know, WRP delegates on the IC (C. Slaughter, P. Jones, M. Banda) spoke strongly against this clause. Our opinion (developed below) was that resort to the bourgeois state put an unbridgeable gulf between Redgrave & Co. and the WRP. That is a class line, and it is fundamentally wrong to ask that such actions be "withdrawn" and "discussion" for "unity" resumed. This is an extremely important difference,. Internationalism consists precisely of laying down such class lines and fighting them through. My position, as I clearly stated it, was that the IC should declare that such actions, together with those of Healy which brought his expulsion, and also the crimes carried out through collaboration with the Iraqi regime and what lay behind them politically, should be split questions, and that the IC should issue an immediate statement to the WRP Special Conference to that effect, accepting as members of the IC section in Britain only those who also accepted our line on this question. We voted for the IC Resolution because that was all we could get agreement on. I consider the resolution inadequate. The split, is not only over internationalism defined as subordination to the IC, but over the whole programmatic base of Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin which preceded it. At the very center is the theory of permanent revolution and the Transitional Program. Because IC comrades were still toying with the possibility of "the standpoint of the unity of the party" they restricted the conception of internationalism to the formula of subordination to the IC. The importance of this point will, I believe, emerge clearly when we examine your Congress speech and it explains why one WRP comrade could legitimately ask the $64,000 question: "All right, we can't have unconditional confidence in the WRP leadership; why should we have confidence in the IC?" I answered this question by saying that in declaring subordination to the IC we were not at all saying that the IC was unaffected by Healyism — far from it — but we were affirming a basic general principle. That principle had been broken by us under Healy's leadership. As I stated clearly and unequivocally to the Workers League CC on October 5th this year, we have to say there is no leading section of the IC, that the WRP has the same obligations to the IC as does every other section, that these sections have no obligations to the WRP but only to the IC, and that the WRP is subject to the authority and criticisms of the IC just like every other section.

Now for the speech you (D. North) made at the WRP Special Congress on October 26th.

You said early in your report: "a split has taken place and this split is decisive because it's on the most fundamental political question of all: who is for the International Committee of the FI and who's against it? Now that reply has come very decisively this week." Now I have already said that I believe this to be too abstract and formal, and the same criticisms apply to the IC Resolution on the split. Without any doubt, the split exists on the IC as well as in the WRP: the Greek and Spanish sections' leaders, at this point, reject the expulsion of Healy and reject any collaboration with the IC. Their split has a basis in program and principle, on fundamental issues of Marxist politics and theory, and the rejection of the authority of the IC is the surest expression of that. They refuse to reject the gross anti-communist abuses — sexual and physical assault carried out systematically over decades, using Party and IC resources to degrade and destroy the cadres of the WRP and other sections of the IC. These resources were garnered and nourished by the sacrifices of hundreds of Trotskyists. Healy, acting on a theory and an ideology which represents directly the most foul degeneration of the bourgeoisie in the epoch of capitalist decay, set about abusing his authority and power in this movement to do the job for imperialism of breaking up and dispersing the cadres of Trotskyism in the WRP and the rest of the IC. Those who say that these are in any way not political issues are completely wrong. They could not be more political, more basic. The organized and willful corruption of generations of young leaders — this eats away at the most basic historical requirement of all: the gathering and training of all the alternative revolutionary working-class leadership, without which the working class cannot fulfill its revolutionary role, and thus without which there is no proletarian revolution and no socialism. This is not just a matter of two opposite positions in a verbal debate about morals; it is a matter of a fight to put a stop to the actual destruction of the WRP and the IC, and to the destruction of its cadres. This destruction consisted of a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution, rejection at the same time of independent leadership, rejection theoretically and physically of the necessity of the independent development of Marxism for the training of Party cadres. We must oppose all attempts to in any way separate the sexual and physical abuse from something called their politics. These abuses were a political war against Trotskyism. C. Redgrave and all those who argue that the revolutionary goal justifies such practices or makes us neutral in attitude to them, are anti-Marxists. They argue that the end, the aim, socialist revolution, justifies any means, any action carried out along the way. That is exactly what Trotsky denies and attacks in "Their Morals and Ours." The means we adopt and develop must be such that they really do prepare the working class for having the stature, unity and independence it needs to win power and build socialism. The bullying — sexual, physical, mental — practiced by Healy strengthens and defends and protects the apparatus and the "leader," but it destroys the revolutionary forces brought from the working class and the intelligentsia to the Party, and it continuously works to destroy the confidence between the revolutionary party and the working class. Who can say that all this in any way is non-political? Such a claim is absurd.

The relations of Healy (and, through him, the WRP) with national-bourgeois regimes were not separated politically, ideologically, or materially, from the vile practices at the center of the WRP up to June 1985. These relations with the rulers of Arab countries cannot be understood solely as concerned with an opportunist search for money at the cost of principles and independence of the revolutionary movement. Both in relation to Arab bourgeois leaders like Saddam Hussein (Iraq) and Gaddafi (Libya), and to the Labour left in the GLC leadership, Healy and the WRP were a long way down a political path which has been well-trodden before: the path of Pablo revisionism. The essence of it is: building of the independent revolutionary party by our small Trotskyist forces has proven too slow and difficult for the real tempo of the revolution, and this revolution may well pass us by. It is further argued that other, non-Marxist, even non-working-class forces can represent these revolutionary currents. The relations of the arch-bureaucrat Healy with these Arab-country bourgeois rulers were entirely opportunist. The real building of the revolutionary parties of the ICFI was abandoned, while Healy bargained for financial resources through relations with these bourgeois rulers. The content of the political degeneration is the same as that of Pabloite revisionism and liquidationism since the Second World War: namely to abandon the permanent revolution and liquidate the essential, central contents of the Transitional Program, the struggle to establish independent revolutionary parties to enable the working class to fulfill its revolutionary role. This content is to be found not in the occasional correct general statements of the WRP and the IC but in the material relations of GH's clique with the bourgeois-national movements, for which formal affirmations of correct positions provided a cover. (This did not of course prevent the descent into entirely false and open declarations which directly contradict the theory of permanent revolution: welcoming Gaddafi as "developing in the direction of revolutionary socialism" and justifying the butchering of members of the Iraqi Communist Party and Iraqi trade unionists in 1979.)

These developments are characteristic, and instructive, of the way Healy's practices worked to destroy the movement. Positive and theoretical work done by others (such as C. Slaughter, M. Banda, D. North and many others) became more and more separated from the actual conduct of the work of the IC, the WRP, and the News Line, which was directly governed by G. Healy from his London office and through the Parwich school. It is not just that such theoretical and political writing and speaking gets more and more barren because it is separated from the real working relations of the leadership. It becomes little more than a justification for the real material relations of plunder between Healy's WRP office and the IC sections and for the capitulation to the national bourgeois rulers and the abandonment of building non-independent revolutionary sections in their countries. While comrades wrote perspective documents and conducted IC Conferences (as in the 10th IC Congress where Slaughter, Banda and North worked without any differences with Healy to lay down the line and work of the Conference) they let Healy's unchallenged authority the WRP and IC continue to dominate the IC's practice. There is not the slightest doubt that every one of these leading comrades at more than one point in their political development found themselves faced with criticism and attack for raising criticisms and decided that they would not accept the (at that time) inevitable expulsion and isolation from the movement. The inevitable political compromise which resulted of course deepened the disorientation and degeneration, and it is only by the skin of its teeth that the world movement can now regenerate itself with any contribution from these comrades. This real contradiction, rather than attribution of blame and guilt, is what must be grasped.

It is this real contradiction and its analysis that is missing from your presentation, which left the definite impression of a history of lone protest and declaration of opposition by yourself against the degeneration. That is false, and dangerous. The corruption in relations between comrades, brutally expressed at its sharpest in Healy's sexual attacks on women cadres, cannot be separated as somehow not political or "less political" than this political and theoretical degeneration under Healy's leadership of the WRP, which was accepted by the WRP leaders and members, and of the IC sections and sympathizing organizations (like the Workers League, prevented by legal conditions from being affiliated).

The same extreme decadent capitalist ideology which led to cynical sexual abuse of women comrades, and the cynical justification of these practices by Healy's supporters, was reproduced in the way that the Political Committee of the WRP (on Healy's motion, and with only M. Banda opposing) supported the execution of Iraqi Stalinists in 1979. As Torrance said of one of the girls: "She was rubbish. She would have gone anyway." As Healy and his supporters said of the victims of Saddam Hussein, "They were only Stalinists." The thinking behind this is: our will decides what must be done, and everyone and anyone can be used, are expendable, and can be thrown away when finished with. All this, of course, was done in the name of Trotskyism and in the name of a battle against subjective idealism. It is in part an extreme expression of subjective idealism in its 20th-century degraded form: that of pragmatism and of the "will" (Bergson): the very ideology which inspired Mussolini.

The third fundamental issue involved in the split follows directly from this last point, namely the systematic and long-term revision of Marxist principles in philosophy and scientific world outlook (dialectical and historical materialism) by G. Healy over the last 20 and especially the last 10 years. This version was not "Hegelian" but subjective idealist in character, and it was, I repeat, a subjective idealism of the utterly modern 20th century form, in which arbitrary will and self-justification replaces subjectively interpreted "Reason" of the classical subjective ideology. Healy's "dialectics" is not a philosophy or a logic at all but only the mystified form of a cover and rationalization of Healy's corrupt practices and turn away from the working class. The cult of Healy's advanced and infallible "practice of cognition" was nothing more than a mechanism to justify and enforce the arbitrary control of the WRP and the IC by Healy and his immediate supporters, sealing off Healy from any accountability or criticism and also sealing the WRP off from accountability to the IC. By this mechanism the IC as well as the WRP was simply used and bled white for Healy's political and personal purposes. The "process of cognition" for Marxists, is not some special equipment of logical categories that the brain learns, enabling a person to then "speedily develop practices."

Engels says in "Ludwig Feuerbach" that Hegel's great discovery, taken over and developed by Marx, was that truth lay "in this process of cognition itself," and he then explains immediately that by the process of cognition is meant the whole history of science, of man's struggle to master and know nature and history. This is the very opposite of Healy's individualist "practice of cognition."

Fourthly, the bullying and brutality of Healy personally was the form through which this class political and theoretical content was most crudely and perfectly expressed. And this form reinforced the content at every point. It was when these forms could no longer contain and repress the problems forced through by developments in the class struggle that the conditions emerged to begin breaking up these forms. And this meant, concretely, breaking Healy's personal grip. During September and early October this struggle to break the very real domination of the movement by Healy's brutal practices clarified greatly what had to be done and what it meant: there had to be a break, a split, with this poisonous right wing. The political struggle in the CC and at aggregates, and the resort to bourgeois law by the Redgraves, clarified that, and I am not sure what you meant by saying that the IC needed to "create the conditions in which the whole cadre within the party and internationally could be clarified as to what this struggle is all about." You should in saying this, actually analyze and learn from the clarification already going on in the WRP before October 25. If this had been done, I believe, you could not have made the mistake approaching the (then) minority and majority in the WRP "from the standpoint of the unity of the Party," as you put it. And we would have had, then, a split not only on the general principle of subordination to the IC but on all the vital political and ideological questions.

In your remarks at the October 25 Special Congress you welcomed the opportunity to speak directly, for the first time except on public or ceremonial occasions, to the WRP membership. You might have added that it was the first opportunity you had had to listen to the WRP membership. However, you have spoken at meetings, Congresses, and schools, and on those occasions you were not the same David North as you are now. You were on those occasions bound by the as yet unbroken "discipline" of Healy's domination, and, like the rest of us, on many occasions you worked as the executor of his policies and methods. I am sure you can recall many examples. In this sense we too, like you, can say that for the first time we have the opportunity of speaking directly to the WRP membership and to each other.

You went on to say that with other comrades you decided in 1982 that Healy's "Studies" was rubbish. You then gained applause by saying that "we asked ourselves how was it possible that such rubbish could be printed and no one in the British section was putting a stop to it." I must say to you that you know the regime created by Healy, from your own experience, and you know why no one was doing anything about it. The applause you received expressed the entirely justified mistrust of the WRP delegates in the WRP leadership. But it is appropriate to ask, as one comrade did, is not mistrust in the IC equally justified?

You explained, for example, why you withdrew your criticism of Healy's "Studies" in 1982-83. This was because, considering the experience and authority of the WRP and of Healy, and being reminded of the political consequences of the OCI's opposition on similar questions, and fearful of a split and isolation from the movement, you withdrew — as I have said in a document dated October 12, you did so quite rightly.

Similarly in 1984, when you made correct criticisms of the WRP and IC positions on the national question, you found yourself presented with threats and ultimatums and the immediate danger of split. You said yourself that you then withdrew (February 1984) "influenced" by these threats and by the fact that you still were influenced by the fact that you had always seen the US section as loyal to the WRP and the IC. You added that Mike Banda pointed out that if these criticisms were true then you would have to conclude that the WRP had degenerated into a full-blown revisionism, and so you pulled back. And you conclude: "in fact the very way it was posed contributed very strongly to my withdrawing the documents." (See the speech you made, appended.)

My only point here — a major one, I think — is that this process that you went through has been true of many of us who have worked in the WRP and IC leadership. Opposition on any question brought bitter and ruthless attacks, and if comrades did not at a certain point agree to be wrong, or to put aside their criticisms, they faced only the prospect of isolation, expulsion, as you did. I do not believe that you were any less the victim of this than I, for example, was, and if I had persisted, on earlier occasions, with my criticism on perspectives or on philosophy you could until 1982 have joined in the attack mobilized by Healy.

Because of such considerations we all made extremely serious mistakes in the past, and the mistakes made by Cde. Banda in pulling back in 1982, and by me, at the same time, in not supporting your criticism, with which I agreed to a great extent, were undoubtedly among the most serious. If we do not all learn from these mistakes we cannot play any role in the necessary regeneration of the movement, we cannot learn anything or correct anything. If we paint a picture of one or more comrades having been correct all along the line, even for just the past four years, we tell a lie, and cannot get down to scientific analysis.

Now, I maintain that the one-sidedness and partial, selective nature of the account you gave to our Congress was disturbing and dangerous, and conflicts with the urgent necessity of facing up to and analyzing our responsibilities. You omitted several important political questions which have emerged in the last four years. To analyze these is essential to any clarification of the split. For example, you will recall that the Workers League leadership came to the point of abandoning the long-time perspective of the Fourth International towards a Labour party in the United States. Discussion on the International Committee corrected that. We all know that differences on basic perspective do appear in sections and in the IC itself, and the IC and its sections fight to correct these. But in giving an account of how you challenged Healy's and the WRP's positions and failed to get support in the WRP, it is entirely wrong to ignore this question, in which I think you will agree the IC and WRP comrades were right against you and whoever supported your position (which you corrected) in the Workers League. Later, in 1985, you followed with a lapse into an analysis of the trade union bureaucracy in the US which we challenged as being completely non-Marxist in its method and conclusions, and you eventually agreed. Nobody made you write that analysis, and you have presumably made some critical analysis of how you came to proceed in a thoroughly undialectical, completely empiricist and "objectivist" way, in the manner of bourgeois sociology, concluding that the "material base" of the American trade union bureaucracy was its vast empire of wealth, privilege and bureaucratic organization. But you did not incorporate any such invaluable self-criticism in your account of the developments in the IC since 1982. Yet surely there are social forces behind such a prostration before the accomplished fact, just as there are social forces behind Healyism (see the "Political Letter No. 1" issued to Workers League members by yourself on behalf of the Political Committee on July 8 this year).

Finally I must refer to the Workers League Conference of June 30/July 1 this year, which is the subject of your Political Letter to which I have referred. You presented to the Workers League 12th Congress a perspectives document which was nothing short of a total disorientation. When I began to discuss this document with you (you will recall that I had arrived in Detroit on the eve of your Congress, and until then, like the delegates, had not seen the document), I came very soon to the conclusion that the various formulations I found to be wrong or confused were in fact part of a perspective which could only be called Pabloite.

You had reacted to US government and presidential statements and preparations threatening war, and your conclusion was that the perspective for the Workers League was one of preparing a revolutionary defeatist struggle against the US imperialists when they went to war. This is the old Pabloite "war-revolution" thesis of over 30 years ago. You corrected this position even before the Congress began, and you did the right thing in announcing to the delegates that the perspectives were revisionist through and through, representing an abandonment of Trotskyist program and Marxist method. The written report which I submitted to the WRP on return said the same, and it also said that you worked in collaboration with me to turn the Congress round and achieve a strong unity by the end. You will recall that did not in any way use the two day Congress to turn anyone against you or to apportion blame or condemnation, despite the fact that you were personally responsible for this resolution.

I am now convinced, as you are, that such a gross revision of our basic positions resulted from the disorientation created by our own IC 10th Congress's false perspectives, and we must not in any way hold against you the development of these wrong positions in the Workers League. But all this is directly contradictory to the impression you created at our special congress, ie. that you were working along a correct line against us, It was not like that. Comrades will read your own Political Letter, attached here, on the Workers League Congress which met on the same weekend as Comrade Aileen Jennings' letter was sent, and ask themselves if it could have been written by the same comrade who addressed them on October 26th. Among the works you recommended for reading by every comrade in July, was, among others, Healy's "Studies in Dialectical Materialism." I don't ask you to explain why — we both know why. When I mentioned to you my opinions about this experience, you answered that at our Special Congress we were not discussing American perspectives. That is not the point. The American perspectives cannot be separated from world perspectives, as I am sure you agree, and the real point here is something else, namely, that what we are discussing is an objective analysis of that past which we have to negate and overcome. It must be objective, not one-sided and subjective, or we shall not avoid similar errors in the future. I am sure you would want to retract your remark that "we were not discussing American perspectives."

One small part of your speech is representative of the same argument. You said that when you visited Britain in August 1985 you were baffled by G. Healy's remarks about Comrade A.J.'s possibly having police connections, but that "we didn't believe that we could raise this with our section on the basis of doubts. We had a crisis which we had to confront, it was our crisis, the crisis of our daily newspaper." I understand the account of your experience and your thoughts very well, it is very familiar to me; but I fail to see why you can present it, correctly, as a true account of why your suppressed your doubts, while condemning others for having rationalized their hesitations on exactly the same way on earlier occasions. The same kind of thinking and self-imposed censorship in response to the pressure of "crisis" explains many actions by many comrades in the past.

In your speech you laid much emphasis on Comrade M. Banda's phone call to you on Sept. 3rd, 1985, when he said, "The time has come to renew the alliance." You used the word "alliance" to draw the conclusion that, "What we were dealing with in Britain was an unprincipled clique leadership that based itself on national considerations, that alliances were picked up and dropped on the basis of what was happening in Britain and that at one point we could be told we had an agreement on political questions (and) at another point we could be told we didn't. We could be told at one moment we had an agreement and one moment we didn't and then on the basis of developments within Britain we could (be) suddenly be called and asked to involve ourselves in an international alliance." You want us to argue that the fundamental issue in this whole experience is the subordination of the WRP to the IC — the opposite of what prevailed under Healy.

Your emphasis on M. Banda's use of the term "alliance" was linked to your earlier recounting of a conversation with Healy — which he had said, when you criticized him, "The alliance is over." In actual fact of course the content of M. Banda's remark was totally different. Rather than concluding that Banda was showing himself to be part of what you call an "unprincipled clique," why did you not conclude that he was taking a vital step out of that unprincipled clique by referring the matter to you and thereby to the IC? Developments of the kind we are discussing do not happen by individuals working out pure, correct positions and acting accordingly. Comrades come up against the existing forms in a real struggle and make breaks. However much Cde. Banda might hesitate before and after September 3rd, he was taking actions, such as contacting international comrades, which burned his bridges behind him. You should have based yourself on that objective logic of the break from the clique, with all its real problems and not on the verbal and formal similarity of the uses of the term "alliance." As you know, Comrade Banda, you, I and others actually did work together, and we all agreed that you, not us at that point, would make the international contacts. I gave you, as IC secretary, a letter backing your visits will full political confidence. Your work was our work. Remember that you were very definitely against an immediate meeting of the IC and in favor of discussions with the individual sections, giving them time to study the documents and experiences as well as to discuss with you or us. As part of this I visited your own Central Committee on October 5/6. These were certainly not unprincipled relations, and I cannot therefore accept your remark, "how could the leadership of the oldest section of the International Committee have such relations with us." The relations were conceived by us as relations of collaboration necessary in order to fight together as international comrades in one movement against Healy, his practices, his theoretical revisions, his clique domination over the movement. If you insist on characterizing this as using the IC as a weapon for regulating internal WRP disputes, you are wrong.

You say, and we agree: "We want not only Healy destroyed, we want Healyism rooted out of this party." But Healyism, as you yourself pointed out, had victims in all sections of the IC, not only the WRP, and the job cannot be done without facing up to the results of Healyism throughout the cadres of the IC. All the leaders of the IC were part of Healyism as well as its victims, and that must be confronted, analyzed and corrected. The test of leaders today is their ability to face up to, analyze, negate and supersede their own role in all that, not to prove that they were less sullied than others. You suggested in your speech that the WRP leadership (I think you mean Cdes. M. Banda and C. Slaughter especially) persist in trying to settle questions pragmatically, empirically, by way of impressions and pressing immediate national requirements, because, not yet freed of the Healy legacy, we reject, we reject control by the IC and the perspective of building the world party. We consider that that will only be tested in the struggle, but we do know that facing up to one's own responsibility for the present crisis is an indispensable requirement.

I can summarize part of what I have written so far by saying, bluntly, that the many comrades, who, for reasons we all know, are unfamiliar with the history of differences in the IC, have had built up for them a picture of Cde. D. North being right against Healy, at least since October 1982. You earned another round of applause when you asked why the British section leadership responded only when the abuses struck here, inside the WRP. This is just not based on fact. The abuses have been striking blows, vicious blows, against the membership of the WRP for decades. What changed in 1985 was that the systematic nature of these abuses in the name of Trotskyist leadership was exposed by the work of a small number of comrades. Their "subjective" preparations could grow and be successful because the whole bureaucratic and opportunist edifice was coming into irreconcilable conflict with the changes in the class struggle and the new demands forced on the WRP (I refer especially of course of the miners' strike). It is dangerous to use phrases like the rhetorical question you asked (why only when the abuses struck here? etc.), reaching out to the general mistrust in the Party, instead of working to analyze what actually happened.

For you the critical example comes with your description of how the IC requested and did not get a 24-hour delay in publication of the CC statement on Healy's expulsion. You seem to think that this clinches the argument that we could be going from the frying pan into the fire. I see it very differently. I do not accept that the relations between IC members in London on the one hand and WRP CC members in London on the other are more decisive historically, more important, than the actual issues on which Healy was expelled. We had been forced to recognize that an ultra-right cancerous tendency had set out to destroy us. High Court writs were in operation. In addition, you ignored the position inside our own ranks. The exposure of Healy had exploded so violently in the membership that a real rebellion had erupted, including the occupation and shutdown of our print shops. That was entirely justified and understandable, and you endorsed it specifically in your opening sentences. But you ignore its implications, the first of which, rightly, was "Get Healy!" You seem to want a perfect set of "internationalist" rules of procedure guiding every step of the real movement. It was not like that and could not be. There was behind this the other difference to which we have referred. You were in fact still looking for a discussion framework with the then minority, just as, earlier, you were not for the expulsion but for the suspension of Healy. This was a legitimate and important difference between us, and the issue was not simply one of delaying a statement until the IC could meet. In any case, as I have already pointed out, you had been until then not for an IC meeting but only for discussions. We finally arrived at a proposal for a meeting on Wednesday, October 23rd. Your response was that as the statement had now appeared, the meeting could wait until Friday, 25th. That did not stop some comrades, who think it useful to champion the IC against the WRP leadership, from asserting that the IC comrades were kept waiting the whole week in London. I may also remind you that until Wednesday, October 23rd, we were still trying to bring the Spanish and Greek sections to a meeting. Here it is relevant to mention once again that we wanted an IC meeting before the Special Congress of October 26th, in order to have the IC lay down the political conditions for a reregistration to the British section of the IC, and to exclude the supporters of Healy on political grounds. This would have had more content than a general affirmation of subordination of national sections to the IC.

You make a point of attacking what I am said to have said about "neo-fascist tendencies" in the WRP minority. This you say sounds very left, but has no content, being used as substitute for a real analysis. I have already discussed this in the context of Healy's "morality" as well as the question of the Iraqi executions. The "justifications" for these gross acts was of the most right-wing, amoral character, ideally suited to the requirements of capital. At a report from the Central Committee to comrades "lobbying" on October 12th I opposed those comrades who called some members of the Healyite minority "fascists." Fascists are organized into bodies of men to do violence to the working class and Marxism. What I spoke about (see my remarks at the London Aggregate) was the right-wing, "near-fascist" ideology involved. It had a close and directly relevant parallel in Paris, where several very "radical" leaders of the 1968 movement are now editing ultra-right-wing journals. It will not be correct to characterize the Healy clique and its apologists as only "nationalists." They are close to every fascist position on the rights of human individuals, rights which for them are reduced to nothing by the requirements of the party.

Now I would like to come back to an area where we appear to have easy agreement, but this proves decidedly not so. You say "...really there's not a single comrade here who can seriously believe that we have come and assembled to decide whether rape is a legitimate question [?] inside the working class movement." And you go on, "that's a settled question in this movement." We do have a difference. It is dangerous to stop at the level: "we were of course horrified" in reference to Healy's sexual abuses. We heard members of the expelled minority of splitters say almost identical things. Once again, it tends to put these abuses into a "non-political" category secondary to some other more "real," "political" issues. They are basic political questions. It is not at all true that "that's a settled question." We are not confronting a debate about this "settled question" but about the actual systematic crimes of leadership in destroying comrades, against this "settled question" for decades. And we must plumb that degeneration, a political degeneration, to its depths. These were "split" questions and they did produce the split. It is flying in the face of reality to suggest that we cannot say a split took place on the question of rape.

We are all aware, of course, of what you pointed out to the Congress, that Stalinism began with a revision of the Marxist position on world revolution, embracing instead "socialism in one country." But we also are aware that the material conditions for the development and victory of this revisionism were contained in the backwardness of the isolated Russian economy and culture, which nurtured bureaucratic privilege and repression. Thus backwardness and bureaucratic reaction, combined with the international defeats of the proletariat resulting primarily from the errors of Stalin's faction in the leadership of the 3rd International, formed the noose which tightened around the neck of the Left Opposition, says Trotsky. He certainly could not have been satisfied with an abstract assertion of the principles of internationalism.

You say the split has come on decisive categorical grounds. Yes, but it is, I repeat not just a question of the WRP's relation with the IC. Subordination of national sections in the IC is the necessary form of internationalist revolutionary practice. The content of this internationalism reaches down to the fundamental questions on which we have expelled Healy and his followers. It is the decisive work on these questions that will be most important. I cannot accept your assertion (it is no more than that) that the work of the IC "smoked out" the Greek leadership. Their definitive split from the IC is the consequence of the work of Healyism in the IC for two decades, and we must face up to the fact that we were unable to prevent it, despite your visit to Greece early in September. The work to expose the real questions before the membership of the Greek/Spanish sections remains still to be done.

As you can see I disagree with the whole emphasis of your statement. Your final round of applause was won by calling on the WRP membership to make clear to the WRP leadership that they must subordinate themselves to the IC. Why do you counterpose the WRP members to the WRP leaders in this way? Why not counterpose the members to the IC, which after all is the international leadership that carried out Healy's program and policy? But really it should not be a matter of counterposing anyone to anyone else; rather, we should be making clear that we are prepared to work and fight together to clarify ruthlessly the theoretical questions involved in order to rebuild the movement as the foundation of the development of Marxist theory.

I have said that I think that your "standpoint of the unity of the Party" in the week between Healy's expulsion and our Special Congress profoundly mistaken, because we had gone through intensive experiences in exposing the then minority. Because you did not share or study the implications of those struggles you draw the false conclusion that your search for an "objective" demonstration of the correctness of the majority's position was finally successful in the October 25th resolution agreeing subordination of the WRP to the IC. This is not true. The WRP delegates would of course have agreed to such a formulation at any time, just as any other section would. Such a declaration does not and cannot "objectively" decide anything whatsoever. I believe that you persisted in a dangerously over-formal line of "let the differences come out and be clearly seen" long after the minority had actually gone to the State and had split. This formalism led you to give little importance to the really basic class questions of the split, so that you could seriously propose, as late as 25th October, that Redgrave withdraw from the court action and resume her minority rights! Only afterwards, when the discussion had exposed this argument, did you assure us that you had meant it only to have a tactical role (defense of assets etc.). It was actually part of "your starting from the standpoint of the unity of the Party." That was never a possibility after Healy had been charged and this minority voted against charges. I know that you will consider seriously what I am saying here: that you dangerously underestimated the real questions involved in the expulsion of Healy, and that you are presenting internationalism in a formal way which obscures these issues. We shall find (I am sure the Australian section provides examples) many in the movement who will state or revert to the expelled minority's position, that the sexual abuses are an unpleasant, even "horrifying" incident but they are secondary and should be put aside. To encourage that in any way would be to ignore the gigantic force of reaction that is expressed by Healy's practices and by the position of those who justify his practice and ideas. If that is allowed to happen we cannot do what you as well as I want most of all to do: to drive out Healyism as well as Healy.

Yours fraternally,

Cliff

18. "Revolutionary Morality and the Split in the WRP"

News Line Report November 29, 1985

Many old and new faces were at the well-attended Workers Revolutionary Party public meeting held on Tuesday in the Friends Meeting House at Euston, London.

• OPENING the meeting, Dany Sylveire said: "I am proud to have been asked to chair this meeting. It is the first public meeting in the London district on revolutionary morality and the split in the WRP.

"It is an historic meeting because our party can stand and hold its head high, having broken with the corrupt bureaucratic clique which has dominated for so long. Only this way can we build a truly Trotskyist party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International."

• RICHARD GOLDSTEIN, speaking in a personal capacity as AUEW convenor at Gestetners, said: "I am proud to call myself a member of the WRP and particularly' proud to have participated with my comrades in the fight to have taken on Healy and his reactionary clique and defeated them."

Goldstein, a member of the WRP London district committee, explained: "Like a number of my generation I joined the Socialist Labour League (predecessor of the WRP) in the 1960s out of a rejection of the reformist bureaucracy led by Harold Wilson in the Labour Party, and John Gollan in the Communist Party.

"I joined the CP when I was 16 years old and gradually became disillusioned with its completely pacifist, cowardly and non-revolutionary line. The Trotskyist movement provided the only analysis of reformism and Stalinism from a revolutionary point of view."

Referring to the struggles against the anti-union laws in the 1960s, the 1968 struggle in France, the Vietnamese defeat of the US, and other developments of that period, Goldstein went on:

"This was the movement we chose to give our lives to. But we only had half the picture. We were half ignorant. We had read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky — but activism prevented us from real study.

"It was not a revolutionary situation. But according to Healy it was red alert all the time.

"Comrades were prepared to accept almost anything in the name of revolution. Such is the background that Healy took advantage of, and sexually and physically abused comrades."

It was not just Healy, he stressed. Former assistant secretary Sheila Torrance, now expelled, was "Healy's parrot — incapable of independent political thought. She carried out Healy's dirty work."

It was the miners' strike and the way it ended, Goldstein told the meeting, that created the political crisis within the WRP which eventually broke the stranglehold.

"We took up the questions of Livingstone on the GLC, the fight against state-funded secret ballots, opportunism towards Labour and trade union bureaucrats.

"Once we knew about Healy's real practices, we knew we couldn't build a movement whose leadership sexually abused women. We owe it to the working class to absolutely expose Healy and his clique and drive them out of the workers' movement for good."

• JOHN SIMMANCE, AUEW convenor at Charing Cross hospital, speaking in a personal capacity, told the meeting: "The split in our party took place over revolutionary morality — the opposition to this systematic abuse of comrades and whether leaders are answerable and accountable to the party."

He said the Healy clique still insisted that we are living in a revolutionary situation. In dealing with this question Simmance, who is WRP Paddington branch secretary, vividly recounted his trade union experiences.

November 26, he stated, held special memories for him. It was the date in 1979 when the strike by fewer than 40 workers at Charing Cross hospital came to a head.

"We had already been out on strike for six weeks. We were picketing 24 hours and in hospital. The press came in droves to witch-hunt us. Duffey (AUEW leader at the time) wanted to break the strike, and a counter-demonstration against us was organized from inside the hospital. We stood our ground.

"We refused to let an oil tanker through the pickets. The hospital already had oil. That night, Thatcher stood up in parliament and said, for the first time I believe, if we didn't allow the oil through she would call in the army. And there were 35 of us!"

This happened six months after the Tories won the 1979 election. In the six years since then we had seen the biggest changes since World War II.

But, Simmance pointed out, a revolutionary situation depended not just on economic prerequisites, but on the achievement of a definite state of consciousness within the working class.

"The Healyites have got problems on their hands," he continued. "Not only are they unable to distinguish between a revolutionary situation and a pre-revolutionary situation, but they cannot count. They are calling themselves the WRP, even though the vote on the Central Committee for charging Healy in order to expel him was 25 votes to 11."

• JULIE HYLAND, Young Socialists national secretary, told how the YS had taken up the fight to expose Healy and his supporters and drive them out of the movement.

When a meeting of the YS London Youth Committee had passed a resolution on October 7 demanding a control commission into Healy's practices, Claire Dixon — then a WRP Central Committee member, who has since gone with Healy — claimed the meeting was unconstitutional and threatened to bring disciplinary charges against Hyland for allowing the vote to go through.

"But the youth in London and all over the country stood absolutely firm against this and other examples of intimidation," said Julie.

The abuse was just one of Healy's crimes, she emphasized. While Healy and Torrance still led the WRP, the youth were unable to develop policies for the YS.

"We were stopped from actually participating in the struggles of the youth. A prime instance being when Torrance told us we could not take part in organizing school strikes — because, she told us, the youth would get victimized! Yet at the same time as this, over 60 miners had been jailed and youth were at the forefront of the fight against the South African regime.

"Youth in the YS would not accept that we had no right to fight for rights. Thatcher and the right wing of the Labour and trade union leadership had not been able to hold back, to subjugate the youth — and neither was Healy.

"With Healy, the YS had no real political life. But now, for the first time, we are discovering the historical basis of the YS and know we can set out to build and train a YS like never before."

Comrade Hyland quoted from Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International.

• CLIFF SLAUGHTER, WRP Central Committee member, began by saying that like everyone else on the platform he considered the expulsion of Healy to have been the most positive thing they could have done, adding: "Many here will say we should have done it a long time ago."

He went on: "I have written many things; many things I am very proud of, others of which I am ashamed. The best thing I've written was the charge against Healy that led to his expulsion."

Slaughter, who joined the Trotskyist movement after expulsion from the Communist Party in 1957, emphasized though that separation from Healy could not simply be carried out by expulsion.

What had been done so far since the expulsions could only be a start, he stated, and warned: "Anyone who tries to give a simple account of what had taken place — it just was not like that.

"Healy and his clique were expelled because the WRP and its paper were brought to the brink of ruin. I don't exaggerate. Above all, we had a party turned into a sect, a propaganda, opportunist sect.

"Healy did things without referring to any committee. He referred only to one or two closest to him."

The sexual abuse of female comrades and physical abuse of male comrades — especially the youth inside our party — was a direct manifestation of the most decadent form of bourgeois ideology.

Corin Redgrave, the meeting was told, had very recently visited a WRP member and told him: "The mistake Gerry Healy made was that three of the girls he had were daughters of party members."

In other words, said Slaughter, it would have been alright if Healy had not been caught. "Sexual abuse. Yes it took that to wake up this party to take action.

"No one should underestimate the damage that has been done. And no one should underestimate the moral side of it. It is political," he said.

"But it was entirely positive that this party did find the reserves to make a turn. We made that turn — Healy is not coming back."

Slaughter pledged: "We are at the beginning of an objective analysis, and all those who wish to really learn the lessons can certainly participate. We will examine all questions, as Trotskyists."

• QUESTIONS and contributions from the audience then took place, and among those who spoke were: expelled WRP member Alan Thornett, Connie Kirkby ("Socialist Action"); Harry Vince (Socialist Labour Group); Stuart King ("Workers Power"); Bob Pennington (formerly International Marxist Group); Monty Johnstone (CPGB); and David Bruce (WRP Central Committee).

An excellent collection for the WRP £60,000 Special Fund raised £572.38.

19. Letter from Peter Schwarz to the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party

December 2, 1985

Dear Comrades!

Having attended the London meeting on the expulsion of G. Healy on November 26 I am writing to you, because I am deeply disturbed by the contribution Comrade Slaughter made on that meeting. In my opinion it amounts to nothing less but a complete rejection of the history and traditions of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Made in front of the entire coterie of British revisionism by the secretary of the ICFI, I cannot help but take this speech as a clear indication that Comrade Slaughter wants to split with the ICFI altogether and rejoin the revisionist and Stalinist swamp.

Comrade Slaughter was present at the 1971 Youth Rally in Essen, when the OCI rejected an amendment proposed by the SLL and publicly sided with organisations hostile to the ICFI. This led directly to the split with the OCI. But this looks now like a minor incident compared to Comrade Slaughter's speech on November 26, which questioned the entire history of our movement in front of an assembly of its worst enemies.

I urgently ask the Central Committee of the WRP to demand that Comrade Slaughter states where he is going. Is he saying, that the ICFI, and the ICFI only, no longer represents the historical continuity of Trotskyism because of Healy's degeneration? Is he going to break with Trotskyism?

25 years ago, on January 2, 1961, Comrade Slaughter wrote: "It is because of the magnitude of the opportunities opening up before Trotskyism, and therefore the necessity for political and theoretical clarity, that we urgently require a drawing of the lines against revisionism in all its forms. It is time to draw to a close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend within Trotskyism. Unless this is done we cannot prepare for the revolutionary struggles now beginning." (Trotskyism vs. Revisionism, Vol. 3, p. 49) Does he now, after one quarter of a century has passed, say that these conclusions were wrong?

Everything he said on the November 26 meeting certainly points in that direction.

He put publicly a question mark on the investigation "Security and the Fourth International." He has no right whatsoever to do this. If he has any doubts on it, the only place to raise them is the ICFI itself.

In fact, Comrade Slaughter is acquainted with every bit of evidence produced during that investigation and has himself written extensively on it. Now he claims that we have only produced circumstantial evidence. But he knows full well that circumstantial evidence is not less powerful than direct evidence. Or did he expect Hansen to leave a letter behind, admitting that he was an agent?

Where is Comrade Slaughter going? Does he intend to side with those who defend Hansen's meetings with the FBI, who cover up for the GPU agent Sylvia Franklin, who refused to condemn the murder of Comrade Tom Henehan and in fact were accomplices to it? Is he going to join those, who despite their empty talk about "workers democracy" refused to answer one single item of the enormous amount of evidence we produced during the last ten years?

Even as recently as on its last meeting on November 5 Comrade Slaughter has not even hinted to the ICFI that he had any doubts on the validity of the findings on "Security and the Fourth International." But now he does it publicly at the very same venue where the revisionists had their shameful meeting on January 14, 1977.

I was deeply troubled to hear that before the meeting Comrade Slaughter shook hands with Monty Johnstone, a completely discredited Stalinist, who then, when he was allowed to speak to the meeting, promptly expressed his "great respect for Comrade Cliff." Comrade Slaughter, who broke with Stalinism in 1957, knows the implications of these actions very well. What separates us from Stalinism are not just some political or historical differences, it is a river of blood.

I cannot find a friendlier expression than to say that Comrade Slaughter spit in Friends Meeting House on our entire history. He explained that the founding of the ICFI in 1953 was a "right decision taken for accidental reasons," and I was ashamed that I had then to listen to an OCI-related group pointing out to him that the split with Pabloism was correct.

His final remark was that the split with the OCI has again to be investigated. This as well cannot be accepted. While it is certainly true that not all the necessary lessons were drawn for the training of our cadre when we split and that the opportunity to build a section in France was missed, there can be no doubt that the OCI represents a completely degenerated revisionist group. Having read the latest issues of their paper Information Ouvrieres, I can assure you that their present political line is so right wing, that even the line of the POUM during the Spanish civil war looks positively revolutionary compared to it.

Also Comrade Slaughter's repeated remarks that there was "no virtue" to stay in the party while it degenerated under Healy's leadership must be completely rejected. This is an attack on all those who despite Healy's degeneration defended the historical, political and organisational gains of the ICFI and is an open invitation to every renegade to rejoin in order to liquidate these gains.

I entirely reject Comrade Slaughter's remark, when speaking on Healy's corrupt practices, that "these practices went on in any other section of the IC." This is a foul slander with no foundation whatsoever.

I was also alarmed to see that Comrade Dany Sylveire, who was chairing the meeting, did not call on WRP members who wanted to speak, while welcoming every revisionist.

The kind of meeting held in Friends Meeting House has a definite political character. Comrade Slaughter is not new to politics and knows the class nature of this meeting and its political implications very well. What would the reaction of the WRP be, if any other section of the ICFI publicly discussed with revisionists, Stalinists or members of the Green movement?

Having closely watched Comrade Slaughter's actions during the last six weeks I am more and more convinced, that he follows his own political course, which he does not intend to discuss with anybody, thereby using the political confusion prevailing in the WRP after the expulsion of the Healy group to break it up.

It is a course of liquidating the WRP into a "broad left," which would become indispensable for the bourgeoisie to control the working class, should a Labour or Labour coalition government come to power. In this way the conditions for a popular front type formation emerge.

This is not a repudiation of the political degeneration that took place under Healy's leadership, but a continuation in another form. As before, none of these things are discussed in the ICFI. The WRP establishes its own relationships and presents them to the IC after the fact.

I therefore call urgently on the CC of the WRP to instruct Comrade Slaughter to put his political position openly before the next ICFI meeting, scheduled for December 16, 17. I also call on you to repudiate the positions put forward on the meeting on November 26 and to confirm your agreement with our history of struggle against revisionism, as contained in the seven volumes of Trotskyism vs. Revisionism.

I would like to remind you of the ICFI resolution of October 25, which was adopted unanimously by the Central Committee of the WRP and which said: "Involved in the struggle against the anti-party Healyite renegades are all the achievements made in the decades-long struggle to build the Trotskyist movement in Britain and internationally. None of these gains would have been made without the protracted and difficult struggle against Stalinism and Pabloite revisionism in which the leadership of the WRP and its predecessor the Socialist Labour League played the decisive role. All the sections of the ICFI were formed as a result of the struggle by the British comrades against the attempt of Pabloite revisionism to liquidate Trotskyism."

The defence of the ICFI, its history and principles is — despite many differences on minor questions which undoubtedly exist — the most fundamental question of all and the only basis on which the present crisis can be overcome.

The ICFI statement on the expulsion of Healy stated: "In expelling Healy the ICFI has no intention of denying the political contributions which he made in the past, particularly in the struggle against Pabloite revisionism in the 1950s and the 1960s. In fact, the expulsion is the end product of his rejection of Trotskyist principles upon which these past struggles were based and his descent into the most vulgar forms of opportunism."

And we warned: "Those like Healy who abandon the principles on which they once fought and who refuse to subordinate themselves to the ICFI in the building of its national sections must inevitably degenerate under the pressure of the class enemy. There can be no exception to this historical law."

After having expelled Healy and the Pabloite degeneration he represents, we certainly don't intend to liquidate the struggle against Pabloism and all the revisionist sects ourselves.

I am writing this letter to you as an IC delegate. I have discussed it in the Central Committee of our section, which fully approves its content.

Yours fraternally,

Peter Schwarz

cc: to all IC delegates

20. "Nothing to hide...or fear"

News Line Comment by Geoff Pilling

December 6, 1985

The bogus News Line put out by the Healy-Redgrave rump group carries an editorial in its issue of Wednesday, December 4 dealing with the public meeting held by the Workers Revolutionary Party at Friends Meeting House on Tuesday, November 26.

The WRP called this meeting to explain the circumstances in which Gerry Healy, the former leader of the Party, had been expelled from the movement.

Healy was expelled for systematic sexual abuse of female comrades in the Party, for the use of physical violence against Party members and for slander against David North, leader of the American Workers League, a sympathizing section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Healy had accused North of being a CIA agent. This accusation was later withdrawn unreservedly by the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Some members of the rump claim that these charges against Healy were lies, despite the fact that neither they nor anybody else in the Party denied them before the split and despite the fact that Healy himself gave a written undertaking to the Political Committee that he would cease these practices. This undertaking was subsequently broken.

Other of Healy's apologists maintain that his sexual abuse and resort to violence were "personal" matters, the result of some eccentricity on Healy's part.

They were nothing of the sort. Morals just as much as politics are an expression of the class struggle.

These gross abuses by Healy of his position of leadership and authority in the movement were symptomatic of a deep political degeneration in the party.

These matters are of concern not just for the Workers Revolutionary Party. They are issues vital to the future of the whole working class in Britain and internationally.

The Transitional Program — the founding document of our movement written by Trotsky in 1938 — states that "The world political situation as a whole is characterized by a historical crisis of leadership of the proletariat."

Healy's degeneration cannot but be of the utmost importance for the whole of the world movement, given his position of central leadership in that movement over several decades.

The Workers Revolutionary Party now has a historical responsibility to the working class as a whole to reveal all aspects of the party's crisis and to begin to make an honest objective assessment of its material roots. It is a responsibility we intend to discharge.

So when comrade Cliff Slaughter said at the meeting "We are at the beginning of an objective analysis, and all those who wish to really learn the lessons can certainly participate" that is precisely the point we are at.

It is no accident that Mitchell should take such exception to this statement.

Since he was charged, Healy has disappeared. He not only refuses to face the Workers Revolutionary Party. He cannot appear in public. He cannot make a public statement answering the charges made against him. He is not even available to his own rump organization.

This is because he knows that the charges are true in every particular.

Mitchell claims to be outraged at Alan Thornett's presence at our meeting. Thornett was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974.

Like many before and since, he was framed by Healy and expelled bureaucratically.

His "crime" was to raise a series of political differences with Healy inside the Party. These differences were never honestly discussed and evaluated in the movement and no real political capital was accumulated from the experience. (See the letter in the News Line December 3 from comrade Cyril Smith who was chairman of the fraudulent control commission which engineered Thornett's expulsion.)

Thornett, like Robin Blick and Mark Jenkins and all those who were victims of Healy's arbitrary and anti-communist methods, has every right to take part in the public discussion of the history of the movement which we are now organizing.

This in no way implies that we have political agreement with any of those concerned. It is a cheap slur, typical of the Healy method, that Mitchell should imply that this is the case.

Monty Johnstone was also present at the meeting. Johnstone is a notorious Stalinist, in the past an enthusiastic defender of the Moscow Trials and the methods of Stalin. In telling us this Mitchell tells us nothing new.

But what he fails to mention is that the Communist Party is a part of the working-class movement. It was established in 1920-1921 as a member of the Third International. Its subsequent degeneration into a counter-revolutionary instrument was part of the crisis which eventually destroyed the International as a revolutionary force.

Trotsky stood always for the fullest discussion in public about the unfolding struggle against Stalinism. The question of Stalinism, like that of every form of revisionist attack against Marxism, is the property not just of Trotskyism but of the whole working class.

We have absolutely nothing to fear from the most open and wide-ranging discussion with Stalinism. Indeed we have everything to gain. For it is only on the basis of such a discussion of all the political and historical questions involved that we can really educate the movement and clarify the best elements coming forward in the struggle for socialism.

This was not Healy's method. He always prided himself on having led the struggle against revisionism. Like most of his other claims this was a sham. Spying, frame-ups, expulsion and slander increasingly replaced any principled struggle or discussion within the working class movement. These methods virtually reduced the party to an opportunist sect. Healy's methods also explain why the theoretical and political level of the party fell to its present abysmally low level.

Two days after our meeting the Healy-Mitchell renegades held their own meeting at the Conway hall. On their platform was Lambeth Labour councillor Bill Bowring.

Until he went into hiding, Healy was by no means averse to such appearances and in the recent past shared many platforms with Labour Party members such as Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight.

Healy also spoke at the June 30 rally at Alexandra Pavilion with Mike Power of SOGAT, a prominent Communist Party member in the printing industry.

Not only this. It was Healy, enthusiastically backed by Mitchell, who defended the right of the Euro-Stalinists to maintain control of the Morning Star.

Since August 1914 social democracy has been a consistently counter-revolutionary force in the working class movement. It has been responsible for the death of countless revolutionary fighters and for the defeat of the working class in struggles in many parts of the world.

It has willingly collaborated with Stalinism in inflicting such defeats.

In the light of his comments on Johnstone how does Mitchell explain Bowring's appearance? Or Healy's past appearances? Of course he can have no consistent explanation.

The Workers Revolutionary Party is in no way in principle against participation on common platforms with either social democrats or Stalinists.

These are tactical matters, part of the struggle of the revolutionary party to find a road to the masses under conditions when they still remain tied to their old leaderships.

So we retract nothing about our public meeting. We intend to carry out a systematic investigation of every aspect of the movement's history, from the time of Trotsky's death onwards.

We believe that this will strengthen the whole movement immeasurably and lay the basis for repairing the great damage inflicted on the party by Healy's methods. We again repeat: any comrade who wishes honestly and truthfully to take part in this discussion is invited to do so either in writing or by other means.

Unlike Healy and his clique, we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

21. Letter from the Workers League Political Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee

December 11, 1985

Dear Comrades:

The Political Committee of the Workers League has received Comrade Cliff Slaughter's eight-page type-set letter, dated November 26, 1985, to Comrade David North. We believe that this letter constitutes an unprincipled attack on the Workers League and the International Committee, and — when viewed within the context of other recent developments inside the British section — makes it all too clear that the long and protracted political degeneration within the Workers Revolutionary Party which produced the explosion in October has not been ended with the expulsion of Healy and the organizational split with his supporters.

During the past three months, the Workers League has stated repeatedly that the political crisis within the Workers Revolutionary Party can be overcome only through the closest collaboration of the British section with its international comrades. Unfortunately, after years of systematic miseducation under Healy there are many comrades within the leadership of the WRP who view the International Committee with contempt, and consider the appeals of the IC for genuine collaboration and consultation as an unwarranted intrusion into the life of the British section. References to the "subordination of the WRP to the International Committee" evoke a hostile response from some comrades. Of course, we are not dealing with the subjective weaknesses of individual members. The existence of powerful nationalist tendencies within the WRP is a political reflection of the historical development of the working class in the world's oldest imperialist country. Insofar as they are recognized and consciously fought these tendencies can be overcome, and the responsibility for waging this struggle falls upon the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

The great danger that we now confront is that anti-internationalism is being encouraged by the leadership. The national autonomy of the Workers Revolutionary Party is being counterposed to the authority of the International Committee as the leading body of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. This is the real meaning of Comrade Slaughter's assertion, in his letter to North, that "Internationalism consists precisely of laying down ... class lines and fighting them through." But by what process are these "class lines" determined? Does it require the existence of the Fourth International? Comrade Slaughter's definition suggests — and this is the explicit content of his entire letter — that any national organization can rise to the level of internationalism by establishing, on its own, the "class lines and fighting them through." In another passage Comrade Slaughter refers to the subordination of the national sections to the IC as "the necessary form of internationalist practice" while "The content of this internationalism reaches down to the fundamental questions on which we have expelled Healy and his followers." It may at first appear that this formulation is more orthodox, but, in fact, it reproduces the fundamental error of the first quotation. In the first quotation, internationalism consists in laying down class lines; in the second, it consists of reaching down to fundamental questions. The organizational structure of internationalism — the Fourth International and its International Committee — is presented as merely an empty form which imposes no definite obligations upon any national section once it "reaches down" and determines the "class lines."

This separation of the forms of internationalism (the International Committee) from its supposed content (the class line) is stated most explicitly by Comrade Slaughter when he declares: "The split, is not only over internationalism defined as subordination to the IC, but over the whole programmatic base of Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin which preceded it. At the very center is the theory of permanent revolution and the Transitional Program." This is an utterly abstract and ahistorical conception of the development of Marxism. The International Committee of the Fourth International is the historical embodiment of the "whole programmatic base of Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin." The subordination of national sections to the IC is the organized expression of their agreement with and defense of that program. Those parties which uphold Trotskyism as the contemporary development of Marxist principles and program are organized in the Fourth International and accept the authority of the International Committee. To base one's definition of internationalism on the separation of the program from its organizational expression is to adopt the standpoint of all those revisionist and centrist opponents of Trotskyism who deny the continuity of Marxism, embodied in the ICFI, in order to retain freedom of action within their national theater of operations.

Compare Comrade Slaughter's definition of internationalism ("laying down class lines and fighting them through") with that of Trotsky: "Internationalism is no abstract principle but a theoretical and political reflection of the character of the world economy, of the world development of productive forces and the world scale of the class struggle." {Permanent Revolution, New Park, p.9) Herein lies the foundation of proletarian internationalism and the necessity of its organized expression in the World Party of Socialist Revolution. No national organization, no matter how loudly it proclaims its allegiance to Marxism, can develop and maintain a revolutionary perspective except through constant contact and collaboration with international co-thinkers. Democratic centralist discipline is an essential component of that collaboration. The statutes of the Communist International, far from being mere "forms," were indissolubly connected with the transition from free-competition capitalism to imperialism, the historical development of the proletariat and the international struggle against the social-democratic and reformist agents of imperialism within the workers' movement. They established the forms through which ideological and programmatic homogeneity of the revolutionary movement was to be sustained. This has been incorporated into the Statutes of the Fourth International. Those who rail against the subordination of national sections to the international movement upon which these statutes insist ignore the fact that the price of "independence" is subordination to the pressures of the national bourgeoisie and world imperialism.

This is no small danger in Britain. The defense of national autonomy against the discipline of the Fourth International has a long history within the British labor movement. It should hardly be necessary for the Workers League to call to the attention of the WRP the arguments advanced by Trotsky against the anti-internationalism of the ILP and the bogus internationalism of its London Bureau, led by Fenner Brockway. In opposition to the ILP, Trotsky wrote: "The International is not at all a 'form' as flows from the utterly false formulation of the ILP. The International is first of all a program, and a system of strategic, tactical and organizational methods that flow from it.... Without a Marxist International, national organizations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism." (Ibid., pp. 112-13)

No less relevant to the present crisis in the WRP and the International Committee is Trotsky's admonition to the Lee group in Britain (with which Healy was then associated) on the eve of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International. He was calling upon the Workers Internationalist League to accept the proposal of the International Secretariat for the unification of all Trotskyist groups in Britain. He explained that:

"The present conference signifies a conclusive delimitation between those who are really in the Fourth International and fighting every day under its revolutionary banner, and those who are merely 'for' the Fourth International, i.e., the dubious elements who have sought to keep one foot in our camp and one foot in the camp of our enemies."

Replying to the refusal of the Lee group to accept the authority of the International Secretariat and end its independent existence, Trotsky warned:

"Under these circumstances it is necessary to warn the comrades associated with the Lee group that they are being led on a path of unprincipled clique politics which can only land them in the mire. It is possible to maintain and develop a revolutionary political grouping of serious importance only on the basis of great principles. The Fourth International alone embodies and represents these principles. It is possible for a national group to maintain a constant revolutionary course only if it is firmly connected in one organization with co-thinkers throughout the world and maintains a constant political and theoretical collaboration with them. The Fourth International alone is such an organization. All purely national groupings, all those who reject international organization, control, and discipline, are in their essence reactionary." (Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, p. 270)

The fact that these fundamental conceptions are opposed by a substantial majority on the Central Committee reveals how little progress has been made in comprehending the social forces and political methods which underlie the degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Comrades have not yet made real advances in analyzing the process through which the WRP succumbed to the pressure of British imperialism and alien class forces, and turned its back on the conquests of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. An increasingly one-sided preoccupation with finding immediate practical solutions to the political problems of the British section provided fertile ground for the development of increasingly opportunist practices and policies. Fundamental questions of principle came to be judged on the basis of their immediate "use value" for the work of the British section. In so far as practical gains could be derived from relations with the Arab bourgeoisie, the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism — such as the theory of Permanent Revolution — were looked upon with growing skepticism as old propagandist crotchets with no immediate relevance to the pragmatically-defined concrete tasks of "party-building."

The politics of the leadership grouped around Healy became that of a petty-bourgeois nationalist clique. The gradual revisions in the political line — the accumulation of almost imperceptible shifts in tactics, ever-so slight softening of criticisms, unexplained omissions in the party press, unexpected faces on the platforms of our public meetings, etc. — assumed a systematic form, expressing a distinct turn by the WRP away from the struggle to establish the political independence of the working class on the basis of Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.

The organizational forms of this political deterioration were the inevitable expression of the change in the party's class line. A revisionist line could not be imposed "peacefully" upon a Marxist party. In one way or another the cadre — the leaven of past struggles — resisted the turn to the right. Hence the need for the degenerating leadership, conscious of the contradiction between the principles to which it still formally adhered and the opportunism of its practice, to subvert and destroy democratic centralism. Frightened by the political implications of any criticism, organizational measures against the membership replaced political discussion. A sort of subterranean civil war defined the relations between the petty-bourgeois clique and the party membership. Leadership was transformed into an almost institutionalized abuse of authority.

Within the International Committee, the political authority of the WRP and its leadership rested on their historical role in the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. The changes in the way that authority was exercised — at first serving as a means of educating inexperienced cadre in different countries and later on, with ever increasing arrogance and cynicism, becoming a means of subordinating the IC as a whole to the practical needs of the WRP — reflected the process of degeneration toward nationalist opportunism. Healy's contempt for the small sections of the International Committee — to which he referred not infrequently as "Trotskyite groupos" — expressed his growing disdain for the traditions of the Trotskyist movement.

Within the International Committee the British leadership sought to protect itself against political criticism through dishonest and vile organizational methods. It functioned as a law unto itself. While Comrade Slaughter "looked after" the interests of the WRP within the IC and maintained the facade of internationalism, the real foreign policy of the British section was conducted by Healy and Mitchell. Political alliances with bourgeois states were formed behind the back of the International Committee. Healy maintained an extensive correspondence with bourgeois nationalists within the Middle East which was never shown to the delegates of the IC. The financial aspects of the private wheeling and dealing were likewise kept secret from the international movement.

This was all part of a reactionary method of work through which the details of the political and organizational life of the Workers Revolutionary Party were systematically misrepresented to the sections of the IC. In so far as the WRP leadership provided information on its work within Britain, it was only to report astonishing achievements. These were counterposed, at virtually every meeting of the International Committee, to the pressing problems of the sections. From the WRP delegates the IC received glowing reports of a daily circulation of 17,000 copies of News Line, a dues-paying membership of nearly 10,000, apparently growing by the hour, expanding influence within the trade unions and labor movement, and immense financial resources. Not once did a single delegate from the WRP suggest to the International Committee that the internal life of the British section and its apparent gains differed in any way with the reports provided by Healy. There was, according to Healy, nothing the WRP had to learn from the sections of the International Committee, which had neither daily papers, thousands of members, nor impressive bank accounts.

And yet, without suspecting that the WRP leadership was lying about its organizational gains, questions about the political line and theoretical method of the British section began to be raised within the International Committee. These differences reflected the struggle of class forces within the Fourth International. The issues raised by the Workers League expressed the opposition within the International Committee to the pressures of imperialism on the Fourth International manifested in the political line of the Workers Revolutionary Party. It was an opposition to the British section's ever-more explicit abandonment of the Trotskyist movement's strategical orientation to the international working class as the gravedigger of capitalism and the builder of a socialist society.

The bitter reaction of the WRP leadership to those criticisms, its attempts to suppress them, did not simply arise from the subjective motivations of Healy. The political line that had been developed over previous years had already become anchored in definite class interests. The drift toward centrism was objectively connected with developments within the class struggle internationally and sharp changes within the British labor movement. The intervention of the International Committee between 1982 and 1984 cut across these new relations, of a politically-centrist character, which were being developed by the WRP, not only with the Arab bourgeoisie but with the left-talking reformists in the Labour Party and TUC. That is why Healy could only respond to the proposals for discussion of differences by threatening to split with the Workers League. The fact that not one leader of the WRP was prepared to support the Workers League's call for a discussion must be interpreted politically as an expression of the enormous class pressures bearing down upon the WRP at that time. The nature of these class pressures may be grasped in a more concrete form when we consider that the IC meeting at which the WRP leadership suppressed discussion of the Workers League's criticisms came just one month before the start of the national miners' strike.

It is this class approach to political questions that Comrade Slaughter now wishes to avoid. He does not want to talk about objective class forces — especially where the issue of his own role in the leadership of the WRP and the International Committee is involved. He is all for accepting "responsibility" as long as it is shared equally by everyone else on the International Committee — thereby divesting this "responsibility" of any real content. In the end, there is only the maniacal Healy imposing his "will" on everyone.

In the aftermath of the split with Healy, Comrade Slaughter should be in the forefront of the struggle to reestablish internationalism in the British section. Unfortunately, he is working in the opposite direction, seeking to build up a "case" against the International Committee and convince members of the WRP that they should have no confidence in the Fourth International. Slaughter is determined to prove that the International Committee and all its sections are all infected by "Healyism," that the process of political degeneration is one and the same in all sections, and that the International Committee, rather than focusing on the errors of the WRP, should subject itself to "self-criticism." Thus, he singles out for special praise the comrade who asked at the October Special Conference what Comrade Slaughter now glorifies as the "64,000 dollar question: 'All right, we can't have unconditional confidence in the WRP leadership; why should we have confidence in the IC?'" This question, on which Comrade Slaughter, to his shame as a Marxist, places such a high value, actually reflects the anti-internationalism cultivated by Healy.

Comrade Slaughter's criticism of Comrade North's speech to the Special Conference is bound up with an attempt to discredit the International Committee Resolution of October 25, 1985 which sought to end the reactionary nationalist autonomy of the WRP, made membership in the WRP conditional upon acceptance of the authority of the ICFI, and established internationalism as the fundamental basis for the regeneration of the British section. The Resolution thus defined the fundamental historical principles at stake in the struggle within the Party.

Attacking North's speech, Slaughter writes: "I suggest to you that your long speech at the first session of the WRP Special Congress on October 26th requires a very thorough criticism and self-criticism, and that it contains dangers, because it is very one-sided and misleading. It is indeed onesided and misleading to such an extent that it tends to guide comrades into a much too easy and simple understanding of what is involved in the degeneration of Healy and Healyism and their effects on the WRP and the IC. It gives a picture of a WRP and WRP leadership corrupted to such an extent by Healy that no one in the WRP could or would raise a criticism of Healy's anti-Marxist writings and practices,

while D. North, on the other hand, had, since 1982, taken up arms or correct positions against Healy. If such a false picture is allowed to go unquestioned, we shall never understand and overcome the real process of degeneration of which Healy was the arch-representative. I propose therefore to take up your speech point by point."

We regret that it is necessary, in reply, to expose Comrade Slaughter's criticisms point by point. But as Trotsky once explained, honest information is the precondition for political discussion. The history of the communist movement has demonstrated again and again the political damage that can be done by misinformation and half-truths. The use of such unworthy methods can do real damage inside the WRP where there are many comrades who, despite their devotion to Trotskyism, have been denied the possibility of acquiring any knowledge of the political life of the World Party. He is seeking to exploit this lack of knowledge to foment hostility toward the IC. Toward this end he twists facts and employs disorienting half-truths to confuse the cadre and make them suspicious of their international comrades.

Before proceeding to the most serious distortions of the historical record, let us first deal with a few minor points in the order which they appear in Comrade Slaughter's letter. First, Comrade North has never suggested that he was the only one who opposed Healy on political questions. There certainly were comrades within the WRP, including members of its Central Committee, who were prepared to take a principled stand. We have recently learned that Comrade Brendan Martin raised many of the same political criticisms which Comrade North had raised and at about the same time, in the fall of 1982. Between the time Comrade North first raised these differences in October 1982 and then was compelled to withdraw them in December 1982, Comrade Martin was expelled from the WRP. It now appears that Comrade Martin's expulsion was part of Healy's preparation for the fight against the opposition within the International Committee. We do not believe that Comrade Slaughter opposed this organizational suppression of Comrade Martin's criticisms. Unfortunately, the expelled comrade did not bring his case to the attention of the International Committee. Perhaps he was not able to do so.

We have also recently learned of the case of Comrade Stuart Carter, who was physically assaulted and expelled for opposing Healy this past June. Fortunately, this comrade's membership has been reinstated. We suspect that there are many other comrades who were dealt with in a similar fashion. Therefore, the criticisms which North made at the Special Congress were by no means directed against the WRP cadre in general. When he spoke of an unprincipled clique within the Political Committee, he was referring only to those who subordinated questions of Trotskyist principles to the pragmatic needs of the practical work within the British section. Comrade Slaughter was an important part of that clique leadership.

There is another small point that must be answered: Comrade Slaughter suggests that the discussion bulletin published by the Workers League containing documents relating to the differences raised by Comrade North between 1982 and 1984 is an incomplete record. He writes that "I hope that any future publication of your letters will include Banda's and my own, since our mistakes can then be used for the movement's education."

Allow us to point out that North's letter of January 23, 1984 to Comrade Banda was not a reply to any letter written by the latter. We had received none. As for the letter of December 27, 1983 to Comrade Slaughter, this was a reply to a letter from him which Dave North had received earlier that month. Since his letter quoted Comrade Slaughter's letter so extensively, we thought that the reproduction of the latter in the discussion bulletin would be superfluous. Comrade Slaughter visited our print shop in Detroit just prior to publication and North showed him the printed galleys and the table of contents. He indicated complete satisfaction with the arrangement of the material.

At any rate, if Comrade Slaughter believes that the documents which we included in the Workers League discussion bulletin comprise an incomplete record, he need only to publish Dave North's notes and the whole correspondence, which he has had in his possession since 1984, in the News Line. However, we have noticed that the News Line editorial board has chosen to publish all the documents relating to the struggle against Healy — including one written by Sheila Torrance — except those which are contained in the Workers League discussion bulletin. Thus, the only substantial critique of Healy's policies and anti-Marxist method has not been made available to the readers of the party's press. The leadership of the WRP prefers that the role of the International Committee in the struggle against Healy not be known.

Now let us concentrate on that portion of the letter that constitutes Comrade Slaughter's principal and most consciously dishonest attack on Comrade North and the International Committee: that they were reluctant to carry through the struggle against Healy, that they failed to understand the real issues at stake in the fight within the British section, and that behind the formal slogan of internationalism they obscured the class lines being drawn by Comrades Banda and Slaughter against the minority.

Comrade Slaughter writes: "We must correct the impression that by October 19th or thereabouts you and other IC comrades were for a resolute break with the Healy anti-party group and that the WRP majority leadership was somehow resisting a truly internationalist understanding and treatment of the problem. As you know, as late as October 25th, the very eve of the Healyite rump's calling of a split conference, supported by leaders of the Greek and Spanish sections of the IC, you, together with comrades from Sri Lanka and Australia called for an approach which started from the perspective of uniting the Party."

He then goes on to stress that while Vanessa Redgrave had already resorted to legal actions, the resolution put forward by the International Committee (with the agreement of, the Peruvian and West German delegates, whom Slaughter fails to mention) stated that "All actions involving the use of bourgeois state agencies by members of the WRP against other members must be withdrawn immediately. All disputes are internal to the WRP and the ICFI and must remain so."

Comrade Slaughter then writes the following: "As you know, WRP delegates on the IC (C. Slaughter, P. Jones, M. Banda) spoke out strongly against this clause. Our opinion (developed below) was that resort to the bourgeois state put an unbridgeable gulf between Redgrave & Co. and the WRP. That is a class line, and it is fundamentally wrong to ask that such actions be 'withdrawn' and 'discussion' for 'unity' resumed.... My position, as I clearly stated it, was that the IC should declare that such actions, together with those of Healy which brought his expulsion, and also crimes carried out through collaboration with the Iraqi regime and what lay behind them politically, should be split questions, and that the IC should issue an immediate statement to the WRP Special Conference to that effect, accepting as members of the IC section in Britain only those who accepted our line on this question. We voted for the IC Resolution because that was all we could get agreement on. I consider the resolution inadequate.... Because IC comrades were still toying with the possibility of 'the standpoint of the unity of the party' they restricted the conception of internationalism to the formula of subordination to the IC."

To answer this thoroughly dishonest account, it is necessary to reconstruct the events leading up to the Special Conference and split of October 26th.

On July 1, 1985, the WRP Political Committee was confronted with the Aileen Jennings letter which accused Healy of sexual relations with at least 26 female members of the WRP and international sections. With the support of Comrade Banda, the Political Committee began a cover-up that was to last for another three months. Though he claims not to have seen the letter, Comrade Slaughter was informed of the allegations upon his return to London from the United States on July 2nd. A meeting of the International Committee had been scheduled for the second weekend in July, immediately prior to Comrade Slaughter's scheduled departure to Greece for his summer holidays. This meeting was cancelled in order to conceal the scandal within the WRP leadership from the International Committee. However, the eruption of the financial crisis led Healy to summon the IC delegates to London in order to milk the sections for money. At a meeting chaired by Comrade Banda, false reports were given to the IC by Comrade Dot Gibson, Corin Redgrave and Healy. Pledges of 82,000 pounds sterling were obtained — nearly the entire financial reserves of all the IC sections. Not a word was said about the sexual scandal.

As it covered up the scandal from both the WRP membership and the International Committee, the internal relations within the Political Committee began to resemble that of an Italian court in the days of the Borgias. For Comrade Slaughter to suggest that the split took place under conditions where the political issues had been fought out within the WRP ("You should," he writes to North, "actually analyze and learn from the clarification already going on in the WRP before October 25.") is a grotesque mockery of Marxism. When Comrade North traveled to London during the weekend of September 14-15, there was no talk whatsoever of a split within the WRP leadership. In fact, Healy had been permitted to prepare "lectures" for an international school despite his supposed retirement. He made use of the opportunity to organize a split within the International Committee. Moreover, when Comrade North arrived in London and learned for the first time of the Jennings allegations, Comrade Banda was still opposed to a control commission. Moreover, he was then in an alliance with Sheila Torrance.

Even as late as the weekend of October 5-6th, when Comrade Slaughter came to the United States to meet with the Central Committee of the Workers League, it was still not clear that the WRP leadership intended to move for the expulsion of Healy. Precisely because there was no indication that further organizational measures were contemplated within the WRP, the Workers League did not press for an immediate meeting of the International Committee at that point. We believed that it would be possible to wait until early November, and agreed with Comrade Slaughter's suggestion that Comrade North should undertake to contact different sections and report to them on the crisis within the WRP. The purpose of such reports was not to line up support for any faction within the WRP; but to help prepare a meeting of the International Committee in which all sections could send delegations that would be prepared for the most exhaustive discussion. Indeed, there was still no official division between a majority and minority within the leadership of the British section and Comrade Slaughter specifically stated that he was visiting the Workers League not as a representative of the Workers Revolutionary Party but as the secretary of the International Committee. He even stated that he did not believe that a majority of the Central Committee would have endorsed his trip to the United States, so strong were the anti-internationalist tendencies within the party. In fact, the Workers League paid for his trans-Atlantic fare.

It was only during the days that followed Comrade Slaughter's return from the United States that the factional struggle within the WRP exploded. The now famous "walkout" — which gave Healy's supporters on the Political Committee the full run of the center and enabled Vanessa Redgrave to steal the documents that she then used to launch her court suit — occurred on October 10th. It was on that afternoon that Comrades North and Rippert, who had just arrived in London, learned that Mike Banda intended to move a motion at the upcoming Central Committee for the expulsion of Healy. They were also told by Comrade Banda that he intended to move the expulsion of all those who opposed this resolution.

Both Comrade North and Comrade Rippert were totally opposed to such an organizational settlement with supporters of Healy on the Central Committee and immediately contacted Comrade Slaughter to protest this course of action. As Comrade Slaughter hopefully will recall, he expressed agreement with their opposition and accepted their proposal for an immediate discussion in Leeds. In the course of their discussions with Comrade Slaughter, which began at 4:30 AM on the morning of October 11th and lasted throughout the day, an agreement was arrived at: Comrade Slaughter would oppose any resolution for the expulsion of Torrance and other supporters of Healy on the Central Committee and would demand that they be given minority rights. The basis of this agreement was the recognition that involved in Healy's abuse of cadre, which fully justified a motion for his expulsion, was an enormous political degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the greatest crisis in the International Committee since the split with the SWP in 1963.

In the course of the day, the discussions between Comrades North, Rippert and Slaughter were joined by Comrades Dave Hyland and Dave Temple. At every point the international implications of the struggle within the WRP were stressed. Comrade Slaughter emphatically agreed with the comrades from the IC. Indeed, Comrade Slaughter opposed Comrade Banda's plans for mass expulsions and prevailed upon him to accept the establishment of minority rights. On the morning of October 12th, prior to the scheduled meeting of the Central Committee, Comrade North — at the request of Comrade Slaughter and Comrade Banda — spoke to rank and file WRP members to explain why the struggle for political clarification required that the conditions be created for the fullest discussion within the party and that organizational measures be avoided. This was understood and accepted by virtually all the Party cadre who attended the two meetings at which these issues were discussed. Thus, at the Central Committee that was held that afternoon and into the following day, Healy was correctly charged and his supporters were guaranteed minority rights.

At no time during that weekend did Comrade Slaughter suggest that the international comrades were evincing political weakness toward Healy and his supporters. He gave the appearance of agreeing with the proposition that by granting the minority the rights specified by the constitution, the conditions would be created for the rapid exposure of Healy's supporters and a real clarification of the political issues. This approach was vindicated in subsequent developments. Unwilling and unable to discuss their real politics in front of the membership, the minority escalated its provocative actions against the WRP. It boycotted the Central Committee meeting of October 19, 1985 at which Healy refused to attend to answer the charges against him and was rightly expelled.

As Comrade Slaughter claimed to understand, the struggle within the WRP had international ramifications. So rapidly had the inner-party crisis developed in mid-October that the motion for the expulsion of Healy had been voted prior to any formal meeting of the IC. Let us state for the record that the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee had the right to move and carry through the expulsion without the explicit authorization of the International Committee. But it must be bluntly said that these conditions were the direct product of the squalid behavior within the WRP Political Committee during the previous three months: the cover-up of Healy's abuses, the intimidation of members who demanded a control commission investigation, the lies to the International Committee, etc. However justified Healy's expulsion — on this score we don't need to be lectured by Comrade Slaughter — it took place under conditions in which there had been no discussion whatsoever of the underlying political issues within the Party leadership, let alone within the WRP branches.

Moreover, the expulsion created a serious crisis within the International Committee. The fact that the WRP leadership was blind to the political consequences of the expulsion beyond the English Channel and the Irish Sea was itself a demonstration of its nationalist myopia. Without any information or political explanation, IC sections were suddenly confronted with the expulsion of the most well-known international leader.

This is why preparations were immediately begun, following the vote on October 12th, to summon a meeting of the International Committee on the crisis in the British section as quickly as possible. Comrade Beams of the Australian section and Comrade Balasuriya of the Sri Lankan section traveled to London during that week. The leaders of the Peruvian, Spanish and Greek sections were contacted and urged to come to London. Complicating the situation, however, was the fact that Savas Michael, the secretary of the Workers Internationalist League in Greece, was by now collaborating secretly with Healy to split the International Committee and working to block a meeting of IC leaders. Both the Spanish and Peruvian leaders were contacted by the WIL secretary, given false information, and urged not to attend any meeting of the International Committee not called by Gerry Healy.

On Sunday, October 20th, in the midst of these efforts to organize an IC meeting, Comrade North, who was then in Detroit, was informed by Comrade Banda over the telephone that the News Line — which had not been published for more than one week — would reappear the next day carrying a statement on the expulsion of Gerry Healy. This course of action was opposed by the Workers League Political Committee and by the IC delegates from Sri Lanka and Australia who were already in London. With an IC meeting only a few days away, it was felt that the WRP majority was obligated to consult with its international comrades prior to making the expulsion public. This opinion was communicated to Comrade Banda by Comrades Balasuriya and Beams. Comrade Banda then informed North that the statement would not be published until the IC met. That evening Comrade North flew to London.

On Monday afternoon, the 21st of October, the international delegates who were present in London were invited to attend a meeting at which a report would be made on the situation at the print shop in Runcorn. The delegates agreed, of course, to hear the report. In the discussion that followed the report, WRP comrades began to discuss the preparations for a split with the minority. It was at that point that Comrade North, with the agreement of all the international leaders, requested permission to withdraw from the meeting. He explained that the upcoming meeting of the IC had been called to hear a report from the British section, not to provide a stamp of approval for any faction; and that the IC was determined to have an objective discussion of the political crisis within the WRP. It was on this principled basis that Comrade North stated that the International Committee stood for the unity of the British section.

This marked a turning point in the relations between the WRP majority and the International Committee. It now became clear to Comrade Banda and others in the WRP majority that the IC was not going to be a rubber stamp for the decisions of any faction within the British section, and the domination of the IC by the WRP was being ended for once and for all. Moreover, the standpoint of the IC delegates — to maintain, if at all possible, the unity of the WRP and avoid a split — was totally correct. It has always been the tradition of the Marxist movement to oppose premature splits, i.e., those which precede clarification of the underlying differences on matters of political principle. Such a clarification had certainly not taken place within the WRP, regardless of the most recent alignment of forces on the Political Committee.

Above all, it was not at all clear that on the most decisive question of all — its attitude toward the International Committee — the position of the majority was different from that of the minority. When Slaughter speaks of "the Healy anti-party group," his standpoint is simply that of a national leader. Our starting point, however, is that of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. Those who refuse to uphold its authority, who place the immediate practical needs of a national section above those of the international working class and the world revolution, whose conscious leadership is embodied in the Fourth International, are anti-party. For the International Committee, the problem it confronted was not whether it was prepared for a resolute break with Healy and his supporters. Rather, it was whether such a break would enable the IC to maintain fraternal relations with any section of the Workers Revolutionary Party. That was our "64,000 dollar question."

Let us speak directly about the experience of the Workers League. Our party emerged directly out of the struggle against the abandonment of proletarian internationalism by the Socialist Workers Party. A small minority waged the struggle for the perspectives of the International Committee inside the SWP for nearly four years. In the interest of the international clarification of the Trotskyist movement, it resisted enormous pressures to either adapt to the Hansen leadership or split prematurely in response to bureaucratic persecutions. The IC faction led by Tim Wohlforth remained inside the SWP even after the 1963 reunification with the Pabloites, in order to continue the fight for internationalism. When the supporters of the IC were finally expelled, in June 1964, the break came not over a domestic issue but over the refusal of the SWP to tolerate discussion on the entry of the Ceylonese Pabloites into the Bandaranaike coalition government — a world historical betrayal of Trotskyism. Later, prior to the formation of the Workers League, the American Committee for the Fourth International broke with Robertson's Spartacist tendency over the refusal of the latter to accept the authority of the International Committee. Robertson saw the Fourth International merely as an adjunct to his national activity. We continue to believe — though we are not sure that Comrade Slaughter does — that the break with the Spartacist League over this issue was absolutely principled and made it possible for the Workers League to break politically with the bankrupt milieu of petty-bourgeois American radicalism and to begin to develop as a revolutionary proletarian party.

In 1974 every single member of the Workers League stood with the International Committee against Wohlforth's rejection of Trotskyist principles. Permit us to remind our British comrades that Wohlforth's resignation on September 29th of that year was made in opposition to the intervention of the International Committee in the affairs of the Workers League. In answering Wohlforth's statement that the suspension of Nancy Fields was carried on the Workers League's Central Committee "only because of the intervention of the IC," Comrade Slaughter replied (in a later dated October 6, 1974):

"As a comrade who has had to fight against the anti-internationalism of Cannon and Hansen, then Robertson, you must surely pull up sharp when you re-read these words. With this phrase you lower yourself to the level of that narrow American pragmatism, which sees the International only as an appendage to your own immediate purposes. With such an appeal, you deny your own past struggles and appeal to the worst elements around the movement, and particularly to hostile groups waiting to attack and destroy it. Every rotten petty-bourgeois revisionist concentrates his attack on the alleged authoritarianism of the IC and defends his national independence." [Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Vol. 7, p. 262]

How well Comrade Slaughter wrote 11 years ago! But, unfortunately, it is easier to condemn the nationalism of another section than it is to fight such a tendency within one's own.

We will now return to our narrative. The immediate response of the WRP majority leadership to the refusal of the International Committee to rubber stamp its decisions was one of unconcealed hostility. Delegates representing four sections of the International Committee were thrown out of Comrade Banda's house on the evening of the 21st, and they had to obtain hotel accommodations in London at considerable expense. The WRP majority then decided to go ahead with the publication of its statement on the expulsion of Healy prior to any meeting of the International Committee. On Tuesday, October 22nd, IC delegates representing these four sections wrote the following letter to Comrades Slaughter and Banda:

"A meeting of the International Committee of the Fourth International is scheduled to meet tomorrow morning in London. It has been summoned by the Secretary of the International Committee on an emergency basis to hear a report from the British section on the expulsion of Healy by the Central Committee of the WRP last Saturday, October 19, 1985.

"All the sections of the International Committee have been duly and properly informed of the scheduled meeting and adequate time has been given to permit all section delegates to attend the meeting. The North American section has made available to the Peruvian delegate a pre-paid air ticket.

"Delegates representing an absolute majority of the sections (those of Sri Lanka, Germany, North America, Australia and Britain) are already assembled in London. The International Committee meeting must go forward as scheduled, at 10:00 a.m., October 23, 1985, in London.

"As this emergency meeting of the IC is now less than 24 hours away, the undersigned delegates request that the Workers Revolutionary Party postpone a public announcement of the expulsion of Healy for one additional day, until the IC hears the report from the British section."

This request, which was read over the telephone to the WRP at 11 in the morning and presented in writing two hours later (giving the News Line staff plenty of time to prepare another lead story), was simply ignored. The delegates did not even receive a formal reply. When this letter was read over the phone to Comrade Slaughter in Leeds, he claimed that it might not be possible to stop publication because the Runcorn Occupation Committee would not tolerate any delay. In fact, members of the Committee later told IC delegates that they would have certainly responded favorably to an appeal from the International Committee.

The statement actually published by the Workers Revolutionary Party was devoid of any serious political content. Aside from announcing the expulsion, it provided no clarification of the issues underlying the crisis in the WRP. Its statement on the political questions was confined to the declaration that "The Central Committee will continue to investigate the circumstances and a fuller explanation will be given." The statement then added that: "We have a duty to the International Committee of the Fourth International, to the Trotskyist movement and the working class to expose and explain this situation, and give them the full benefit of this investigation." This last declaration would have carried greater weight if the publication of the expulsion statement had been held until after the International Committee met with the British section.

Without the participation of the British section, the remaining IC delegations (including the Peruvian delegate, who had arrived early on Wednesday morning, October 23rd) drafted a statement on the expulsion of Healy from the WRP. In contrast to the statement of the British section, it provided, however limited, an analysis of the political and social roots of Healy's degeneration. It explained:

"In expelling Healy the ICFI has no intention of denying the political contributions which he made in the past, particularly in the struggle against Pabloite revisionism in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, this expulsion is the end product of his rejection of the Trotskyist principles upon which these past struggles were based and his descent into the most vulgar forms of opportunism.

"The political and personal degeneration of Healy can be clearly traced to his ever more explicit separation of the practical and organizational gains of the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the historically and internationally grounded struggles against Stalinism and revisionism from which these achievements arose.

"The increasing subordination of questions of principle to immediate practical needs centered on securing the growth of the Party apparatus degenerated into political opportunism which steadily eroded his own political and moral defenses against the pressures of imperialism in the oldest capitalist country in the world.

"Under these conditions, his serious subjective weaknesses played an increasingly dangerous political role."

In another passage the statement warned: "Those like Healy who abandon the principles on which they once fought and who refuse to subordinate themselves to the ICFI in the building of its national sections must inevitably degenerate under the pressure of the class enemy.

"There can be no exception to this historical law."

The contrast between the two statements simply underscores the importance of the intervention by the International Committee. Despite Comrade Slaughter's insinuations, the International Committee understood the significance of Healy's actions and recognized that the overwhelming majority of healthy forces within the WRP, especially its vital proletarian core, supported the expulsion. Nor was it indifferent to what Comrade Slaughter refers to as "The position inside our own ranks. The exposure of Healy had exploded so violently in the membership that a real rebellion had erupted, including the occupation and shutdown of our print shops."

What Comrade Slaughter fails to mention is that this situation was the product of the unprincipled cover-up in which Comrade Banda and other leaders of the WRP majority had participated throughout the summer. The form of the explosion within the WRP was determined by the absence of any struggle for a Marxist program by any section of the leadership over many years. This is why the IC felt that its fundamental responsibility was to fight for political clarity within the WRP. This could not be achieved by simply sanctioning a split.

The IC finally met on Friday, October 25th, in Bradford. There were six sections present. (Of course, the Workers League is a "section" only in the sense that it is in political solidarity with the IC and functions within the world movement within the legal limits established by the reactionary Voorhis Act.) The Greek and the Spanish leaderships refused to attend despite direct appeals from all the other delegations. In his report to the International Committee, Comrade Slaughter offered no political analysis of how this degeneration had developed within the WRP. His position was that the split was simply over the question of Healy's sexual abuses. When Comrade Banda was asked to offer an explanation, he refused with the words: "Don't preempt me; I'm still thinking." With the Special Conference little more than 24 hours away, the WRP leaders had nothing to say on the political questions underlying the explosion in the WRP and did not even have a single programmatic statement to present to the International Committee.

The delegates from the five other sections insisted that the crisis within the WRP had exposed the degeneration of its entire leadership, and that the survival of this organization as a section of the International Committee was now at stake. The International Committee rejected the claim by three of the four WRP representatives that the immediate factional line-up within the British section could be accepted at face-value as a decisive demonstration of principled differences. (It should be noted that Comrade Slaughter refers only to himself, Comrades Jones and Banda as the delegates from the British section. He neglects to mention Comrade D. Hyland, the fourth WRP delegate, who spoke strongly against the report given by Slaughter.) To claim, as Banda and Slaughter did, that the issue before the IC was "for or against rape" was to insult the whole world Trotskyist movement, including the membership of the WRP. The international delegates insisted that the crisis within the WRP was the outcome of a nationalist opportunism which rejected the struggle for the World Party of Socialist Revolution and used the Fourth International as a means of satisfying the needs of the British section. The IC pointed out that the behavior of the WRP majority during the previous week — its refusal to consult with the IC and its unconcealed hostility toward its delegates — indicated that the majority shared the same anti-internationalism of those supporting Healy.

As for Comrade Slaughter's claim that the IC refused to recognize that "collaboration with the Iraqi regime" should be the basis of a split, the delegates replied that it would be politically dishonest to single out members of the minority for a policy that had been carried out by the entire leadership. After all, when the Workers League had raised the issue of the execution of Iraqi communists on the International Committee in February 1984, Comrade North was opposed by Comrade Slaughter. If the policies of the WRP in relation to Iraq were to be made issues upon which a split was to be immediately carried out, the IC would have been obliged to break not only with Mitchell but with Slaughter and Banda as well. Moreover, the execution of Iraqi communists was not the only instance of a gross betrayal of Trotskyist principles. At the IC meeting of February 1984, the Workers League was specifically denounced for having published a lengthy statement condemning the persecution of Tudeh party members in Iran. We believe as well that the line laid down by the WRP on the Iran-Iraq War has implicated the entire IC in a terrible betrayal of the Iranian and Iraqi working class. We might also speak about the uncritical coverage of the Lancaster House talks, which led to the betrayal of the Zimbabwean masses. The IC insisted that the correction of these errors required a serious and objective analysis, not organizational scapegoating by those anxious to cover up their own tracks.

The IC delegates made it absolutely clear that they were not going to provide unprincipled backing for Comrades Slaughter and Banda; and that the precondition for further collaboration between the Fourth International and the WRP would be the explicit acceptance of the authority of the International Committee. The IC was prepared to collaborate loyally with all those within the WRP who accepted this internationalist standpoint — both majority and minority — and work for the unity of the British section on the basis of a principled discussion of all political differences. The IC emphasized that acceptance of this proposal would itself be a crucial test of the political character of both factions and their leaders. The international delegates then produced the two resolutions which had been prepared prior to the meeting. The first announced the endorsement of Healy's expulsion from the WRP. The second resolution analyzed the crisis in the British section and put forward concrete proposals for overcoming it and avoiding, if possible, a split.

Let us quote several passages:

"At the root of the present crisis which erupted with the exposure of the corrupt practices of G. Healy and the attempt of the WRP Political Committee to cover them up, is the prolonged drift of the WRP leadership away from the strategical task of the building of the world party of socialist revolution towards an increasingly nationalist perspective and practice...

"In the past the WRP has correctly urged its international comrades to always begin from the needs of the world party and not from narrow national considerations.

"Now the ICFI calls on all leaders and members of the WRP, whatever their legitimate differences on perspective and program, to subordinate themselves to the discipline of our international movement and uphold its authority.

"If this is not done, there is the imminent danger of a split without clarity on issues of principle and programme. Such a split would severely weaken the Party and create the conditions for provocations against the WRP and other sections of the ICFI.

"Certainly the section which has played the leading role in exposing the activities of the agencies of imperialism and Stalinism in the Trotskyist movement cannot be unmindful of the dangers inherent in the present situation.

"Political differences should be neither suppressed nor concealed. They exist and must be openly and fully discussed in a Party united under the leadership of the ICFI and the Central Committee of the WRP. In this way the cadre of the WRP and the entire international movement can be educated and the present crisis overcome in a way which will bring gains for the ICFI as a whole."

One month later, Comrade Slaughter demagogically attacks this resolution, thus exposing the fact that his participation in the IC meeting and his support for the Resolution was simply an unprincipled maneuver. His claim that "We (i.e., himself, Banda, and Jones) voted for the IC Resolution because that was all we could get agreement on" is a political non-sequitur, because the Resolution made no concessions whatsoever to the position put forward by Slaughter, Banda and Jones at the start of the meeting: that the IC should rubber stamp a split with the minority. The IC Resolution instructed the WRP majority to prepare for the 8th Congress "starting with the circulation of documents by both the Majority and Minority tendencies."

As for Slaughter's argument that the Resolution was "fundamentally wrong" because Redgrave had already initiated a lawsuit against the WRP, this has no political weight whatsoever. First, as Slaughter must certainly recall, he began to shift his position in the course of the discussion of point 3 of the IC proposal: that "All actions involving the use of bourgeois state agencies by members of the WRP against other members must be withdrawn immediately. All disputes are internal to the WRP and the ICFI and must remain so." Though he now specifically attacks this proposal, claiming that it is impermissible "to ask that such actions be 'withdrawn' and 'discussion' for 'unity' resumed," — a position which we consider absurd — it was Slaughter himself who agreed, and then urged Banda to recognize, that an attempt should be made to see whether it would be possible to prevail on Redgrave, through the intervention of the leaders of the minority faction, to call off her legal action against the WRP. After the British delegates accepted the IC proposal, Slaughter and Banda contacted the News Line editorial office and instructed them to remove from the front page an article that had been prepared on the legal suit filed by Redgrave. With a substantial portion of the party's assets threatened, only a fool or worse would accept Slaughter's claim that, as a matter of principle, the IC should not have demanded the withdrawal of a legal action against the WRP.

At any rate, the issue is a cynical diversion. Anyone who reads the Resolution will understand that had the minority accepted its provisions, it would have been compelled to demand that Redgrave call off her attack on the Party. If she had refused, the minority would have had to support her expulsion from the WRP and then collaborate loyally with the majority to repulse her attack. Who in his right mind can claim that the IC Resolution, and specifically provision 3, failed to recognize class lines?

All this aside, the question of Redgrave was entirely secondary. The attempt of the IC to establish the conditions for a principled discussion within the WRP and to avoid a split if possible was absolutely correct. If Trotsky was correct to oppose a split with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union even after Stalin was driving his secretaries to suicide and arresting and shooting his supporters, and if he was correct to oppose a precipitous split with Burnham, Abern and Shachtman even after they rejected the defense of the USSR, the IC was correct to strive to establish a principled line of struggle within its British section without being unduly distracted by the actions of Redgrave. The International Committee was not, as Comrade Slaughter suggests, "toying" with unity. It was fighting for the political clarification of the British section and the entire world movement.

The llth-hour decision of the British section to accept the terms of the Resolution was warmly welcomed by the International Committee. It was seen as an important first step toward breaking with the anti-internationalism of Healy and toward genuine collaboration with the Fourth International. It was agreed that Comrade North should contact a representative of the minority faction the following morning, October 26th, and put the agreement before them. If they were prepared to discuss the proposal, a further meeting was to be held between representatives of both factions under the auspices of the International Committee.

As arranged, Comrade North contacted Ben Rudder of the minority faction at 7:45 AM. He informed Rudder that the majority had agreed to an IC proposal that would guarantee the constitutional rights of the minority and allow the discussion to proceed within the Party. He stated that the International Committee would be on the premises of the London center from 10 AM on, prepared to meet with representatives of the minority to discuss the Resolution in detail. In conclusion, Comrade North said to Rudder: "We are assuming that you still consider yourselves members and accept the authority of the International Committee of the Fourth International." Rudder's reply was: "You shouldn't assume anything." That remark, and the events of the next few hours, demonstrated that the International Committee had correctly identified the fundamental issue within the WRP: For or against the Fourth International! The minority refused to meet with representatives of the International Committee. Here they exposed Healy's real line: rejection of the Fourth International. He and his coterie of petty-bourgeois nationalists will not accept the authority of an international proletarian party which they cannot control. Like all revisionists, they see in the program and principles of the Fourth International an obstacle to their centrist orientation to one or another section of the existing trade union, social-democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies.

The pro-Healy rump split from the WRP on the basis of a break with the Fourth International. Alex Mitchell showed up outside the London center not to meet with the International Committee, but rather to circulate the "communique" of the Greek and Spanish organizations which had refused to attend the IC meeting and fight for their positions within the Fourth International.

It is significant that Comrade Slaughter has comparatively little to say about this important part of the struggle within the International Committee. This is because a careful analysis of the issues raised with the Greeks and Spanish cuts completely across his attempts to belittle the issue of internationalism, a word and concept that Slaughter misses no opportunity to denigrate. It is too "formal" and "abstract." For example, Comrade Slaughter writes: "I do not accept that the relations between IC members in London on the one hand and the WRP CC members in London on the other are more decisive historically, more important, than the actual issues on which Healy was expelled." But raised in the question of relations between the IC and the WRP is the historical necessity of the Fourth International. Slaughter counterposes so-called "actual issues" to the principles upon which the Trotskyist movement is based. In doing so, he ignores the real political content of these "actual issues" and thus defends the anti-internationalism that characterized the degeneration of the WRP and ultimately produced the abominable organizational regime. The challenge confronting Marxists at every point in the class struggle — which finds its most complex though concealed reflection within the inner-party struggle — is to disclose the historical questions of principle that lie at the core of the so-called "actual issues."

While Comrade Slaughter is not prepared to accept that relations between the WRP Central Committee and the International Committee are not "more important" than the "actual issues" of rape and physical abuse, he holds a different position on relations between the International Committee and the WIL Central Committee in Athens.

Informing the Greek section of its suspension from the International Committee, Comrade Slaughter makes clear that the sole reason for this action was the refusal of the WIL to accept the authority of the International Committee, and not its opposition to the expulsion of Healy. Writing to the Greek section on November 11, 1985, Comrade Slaughter stressed that the WIL may "of course disagree" with the decision to expel G. Healy "and fight for your position within the ICFI." In other words, in relation to the Greek section, Slaughter places the central emphasis not on the "actual issues" of sexual abuse but on the fundamental issue of internationalism.

"The anti-internationalism which led to the refusal to attend the October 25 IC meeting must be rejected," wrote Comrade Slaughter. "If not, the WIL faces destruction as a Trotskyist party. The WIL is on the brink of announcing the 'transformation of the League into the revolutionary party.' Comrade Savas and the CC know that there are gigantic destructive dangers in founding a party on the unprincipled foundation of a break with internationalism. The very best interpretation which can be placed on Comrade Savas and the Greek CC's break with the IC is that they fear disruption of their work for the transformation into a party. Such a position, politically, means that internationalism, the foundation of our movement in every country, is rejected in favor of immediate national concerns as perceived by the WIL leadership. (Emphasis added)

"A party formed on this basis could never be a section of the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International. It would attract all those petty bourgeois elements who reject our internationalist foundations. We urge you with all the force at our command to turn back from the path upon which you have embarked, to return immediately to the IC, and to conduct the work of founding the revolutionary party in Greece on this, the only principled basis."

This is the advice that Comrade Slaughter gives to the Greek section, whose leaders find common ground with Healy on the basis of opposition to internationalism. S. Michael is cynically exploiting the crisis within the British section to free the WIL from any international control and meet the demands of imperialism for a new "Hellenic" centrist party, tailored to the needs of the Greek petty-bourgeoisie, to bolster the crisis-ridden PASOK of Papan-dreou and block the development of Trotskyist leadership in the working class. For S. Michael, "subordination" to the International Committee means submitting the program of his organization to the scrutiny of Trotskyists. Slaughter correctly condemns this rejection of the Fourth International. As he has for many years, Comrade Slaughter is prepared to defend internationalism with all the strength he can summon ... outside of Britain and as long as it does not run counter to the immediate practical needs of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Permit us to quote still one more passage from Comrade Slaughter's letter on the question of the events leading up to the split. He tells Comrade North: "I have said that I think your 'standpoint of the unity of the Party' in the week between Healy's expulsion and our Special Congress profoundly mistaken, because we had gone through intensive experiences in exposing the then minority. Because you did not share or study the implications of those struggles you draw the false conclusion that your search for an 'objective' demonstration of the correctness of the majority's position was finally successful in the October 25th resolution agreeing subordination of the WRP to the IC. This is not true. The WRP delegates would of course have agreed to such a formulation at any time, just as any other section would. Such a declaration does not and cannot 'objectively' decide anything whatsoever. I believe that you persisted in a dangerously over-formal line of 'let the differences come out and be clearly seen' long after the minority had actually gone to the State and had split. This formalism led you to give little importance to the really basic class questions of the split, so that you could seriously propose, as late as 25th October, that Redgrave withdraw from the court action and resume her minority rights! Only afterwards, when the discussion had exposed this argument, did you assure us that you meant it only to have a tactical role (defense of assets etc.)."

Far from this position being "exposed," it was supported by every IC delegate except Comrades Slaughter, Banda and Jones. Nor was the Resolution merely a "tactical" measure, though it is now clear that Comrade Slaughter's belated acceptance of the Resolution was simply a tactical maneuver in relation to the IC. But since the Special Conference opened on October 26th, he has been trying to undermine and discredit the Resolution. Why? Because he does not agree with the principled relation between the WRP and the International Committee defined by that Resolution.

Comrade Slaughter makes the claim that the International Committee and Comrade North "dangerously underestimated the real issues involved in the expulsion of Healy" and therefore present internationalism "in a formal way that obscures these issues." This is nothing but a demagogic attack on the refusal of the IC delegates to accept the claim that Healy's sexual practices are the fundamental issue involved in the split or the characterization of the Torrance-Mitchell-Redgrave faction as "near-fascist" or "neo-fascist."

It was not the International Committee that suppressed the investigation into the sexual abuse of cadre by Healy but the leadership of the WRP. The fact that an overwhelming majority of the Political Committee endorsed the suppression of the Jennings letter and that it was concealed for months from both the WRP Central Committee and International Committee demonstrates that neither the political nor moral implications of these practices were understood, and it tarnishes later claims that the split occurred over moral corruption. If the split was simply over rape, then how is it possible that it took such a long time to move against Healy on this issue? Why was Healy permitted to close the rally last August 18th which commemorated the 45th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination — six weeks after the Jennings letter came into the possession of the Political Committee? Why was he permitted to lecture at the International school, with IC delegates present, in late September — 10 weeks after the Jennings letter? Shortly before the school was to begin, just a few days after Comrade North had been informed by Comrade Banda of Healy's forced retirement (without the actual reason being given), the WRP general secretary called the States to find out how many Americans would be attending! The Political Committee refused to send anyone.

The Workers League maintains that the sexual abuse of cadre was a manifestation of the political degeneration of Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party. The former was a derivative of the latter. No one is denying that the sexual practices are of political significance and that such abuses cannot be tolerated. As a matter of fact, Comrade Slaughter may recall that it was during his conversations with Comrade North in the United States in early October that the latter first defined these practices politically as an attack on the historically-assembled cadre of the Trotskyist movement. But to place all the emphasis on the "sex" question serves only to distract attention from the more essential issues of program, principles and method. The danger of such an approach is revealed in the December 3rd issue of News Line, which carries an article entitled "The deadly price of CORRUPTION." A series of disconnected incidents are pasted together, connecting such diverse figures as Maurice Thorez, Georges Marchais, Ernest Thaelmann, Walter Dauge and Raymond Molinier. In reference to Thaelmann, the article mentions a 1928 scandal involving the theft of party funds which was covered up by the leader of the German CP. In turn, Thaelmann's cover-up of his brother-in-law was sanctioned by Stalin. No doubt these unprincipled maneuvers were a reflection of the political degeneration of the Communist International. But what conclusions are drawn by the "special correspondent" who wrote the article? The victory of Hitler, he writes, "was the price that the German working class paid for the cover-up of Thaelmann in 1928. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from a little corruption arose a massive defeat." As far as we are concerned, this conclusion is a grotesque exaggeration. The defeat of the German working class did not arise from "a little corruption" but from the growth of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, based on the post-World War I defeats of the European working class which isolated economically backward Russia, the subsequent degeneration of the CPSU and the Comintern, and the disastrous policies imposed upon the German working class by Stalin. It appears that a new conception of history is being unveiled.

On the same page, immediately below this article on corruption, the News Line carries an interview with Tyrone Sullivan, a Labour Party member in South Wales. The article informs us that "Sullivan's feelings are that sexual abuse is the most fascinating and important topic in the working class movement and presents a greater danger of corruption — even more so than drug abuse — which is something which is affecting the whole movement." This interview is entitled "Morality and the Miners." Given the fact that Sullivan, a member of the Labour Party, is not asked about the present conditions facing the miners in the aftermath of the strike nor about his views on the policies of Kinnock, we find the title ironic. (By this we imply no criticism of Tyrone Sullivan, who is not responsible for the questions he was asked.)

As for Comrade Slaughter's continuing efforts to justify his characterization of Healy's supporters as representatives of a "neo-fascist tendency," we find this a truly deplorable departure from the Marxist method and the teachings of Trotsky. The method that describes Mitchell as a "near-fascist" is by no means superior to that which characterizes Thatcher as a "Bonapartist dictator." If, indeed, the Workers Revolutionary Party turns out to have been the breeding ground for a sizeable number of fascists — including one-third of its Central Committee up until mid-October — the International Committee could have nothing to do with such an organization. Moreover, if Comrade Slaughter states, for once correctly, that "Healy and the WRP were a long way down a political path which has been well-trodden before: the path of Pabloite revisionism," how is this to be reconciled with the claims that the supporters of Healy adhere to "the very ideology which inspired Mussolini"?

The danger of replacing concrete analysis with factional hyperbole is revealed when he states: "They are close to every fascist position on the rights of human individuals, rights which for them are reduced to nothing by the requirements of the party." If Comrade Slaughter re-reads this passage carefully, he will notice its strong similarities with the anti-communist rhetoric of bourgeois liberals. What does he mean by the "rights of human individuals"? The confused non-class terminology demonstrates — and here we are being generous — that he has not thought his analysis through to the end and is working on the level of superficial comparisons and analogies. Moreover, the political logic of labelling Healy and his supporters fascists is to end all analysis of this tendency and the roots of its development within both the party and the working class. On this false basis, the real nature of Healy's political betrayal cannot be understood.

Comrade Slaughter's attempt to portray the IC as befuddled and indecisive, incapable of recognizing the essential issues, is directly contradicted by the statement made by Mike Banda to the Central Committee, in the presence of Comrade Slaughter, when he presented the IC Resolution to the WRP leadership and urged its unanimous ratification. Standing before the majority members of the CC on October 26th, Comrade Banda stated:

"I just want to make a few remarks. Comrade Dave North tried to contact all of the sections. The Greeks refused to come. The Spanish comrades took their phone off the hook. After discussing throughout yesterday we had a lot of disagreements, which were really misunderstandings which can be understood in dealing with the enormity of the crisis that we face. The IC sent a letter to me asking for a delay in publishing the statement on Healy's expulsion. We refused to consider it. But this did not prejudice the IC. The meeting yesterday discussed these questions. There, we concluded, after much discussion, that essentially due to the previous practice, the WRP looked upon the IC as an advisory body to rubber stamp decisions of the WRP. We had to reevaluate and reexamine the whole position of the WRP to the IC. We were holding the position of Healy which led to his destruction.

"For the first time we had to break free from these concepts which were bureaucratic, nationalist, and centrist, to subordinate ourselves to the decisions of the IC. From now on we intend to make it the construction of the IC and not just the WRP. If you look at the statement of the (pro-Healy) minority, it says nothing about the IC. It is a nationalist conception.

"I must pay a special tribute to comrades in the IC, we nearly came to blows at one point. This was the old conception when Healy said he was the IC and replaced the IC with himself. This was the reason for the expulsion of Mulgrew (from the Australian section) and the accusation that North is a CIA agent. The practice of the Greek and Spanish sections is a product of this degeneration.

"The exposure of this began in 1982. The critique of Healy's philosophy and the WRP's politics by the Workers League became the basis of the regeneration and rearming of the International. There was an objective logic to this process. Despite the suppression nothing could stop it. This includes the differences that arose over the Middle East, the Malvinas and Grenada. It was an international phenomenon. This is what led me to call Dave North and say 'Renew the Alliance.' It was not, in fact, an alliance. It involves the whole struggle of the world party. The development of dialectical materialism cannot be fought out on a nationalist basis.

"Before the IC meeting, we originally conceived of the conference today as being simply against the minority and its morals. But now I see that the decisive question is the International and how it functions. The International is not the summation of its parts. It is a body in itself. This is the fight of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We embody that. The rump group, however, does not recognize the foundations of the Fourth International.

"I want to commend Comrade Dave North and the American section. We could not have done this without their fight."

The resolution was carried unanimously by the Central Committee and then presented, in a slightly amended form which acknowledged the split which had occurred on Saturday, October 26th, to the Special Conference which passed it by an overwhelming vote.

Comrade Slaughter's Attack on the Workers League

In attempting to discredit the International Committee in the eyes of the WRP cadre, it is necessary for Comrade Slaughter to argue that an undifferentiated process of degeneration took place within each of the sections of the World Party. The claim that the degeneration of the IC sections paralleled and duplicated the processes within the WRP enables him to advise WRP members that it is "appropriate to ask, as one comrade did, is not mistrust in the IC equally justified?" As part of his dishonest efforts to undermine the internationalism of the WRP cadre, he singles out the Workers League for criticism and claims that Comrade North has failed to give a true account of his own degeneration and that of the American section.

We consider Comrade Slaughter's insinuations to be nothing less than a slander against the Workers League and the International Committee. Let us state as bluntly as possible that the practices and methods of work which have existed for years inside the WRP are unknown and unheard of inside the Workers League. When the Workers League removed Tim Wohlforth as national secretary in 1974, it put an end to the domination of arbitrary and subjective methods within its leadership. Neither Comrade North nor anyone else in the leadership of the Workers League is looked upon as infallible or omniscient. There is not a single leader who has not made his share of mistakes, and these are openly discussed within the appropriate committees of the Party, and, when necessary, in front of the entire membership. The constitutional rights of all members are respected. Since Wohlforth's resignation from the party, not a single member of the Workers League has been expelled or driven out of the movement because he or she expressed political differences with the Party leadership. Until recently, we believed that in upholding democratic centralism within the Workers League, we were simply following in the footsteps of the Workers Revolutionary Party. We had no way of knowing — and this was a major point made by Comrade North in his speech to the WRP Special Conference — that a nationalist clique leadership within the British section was systematically covering up for Healy's organizational abuses. We had no way of knowing that Comrade Slaughter and others worked might and main for many years to present a false picture of what was actually taking place within the WRP. So for Comrade Slaughter to claim that North has been an "executor" of Healy's "policies and methods" is an abominable libel against the political integrity of the Workers League.

Comrade Slaughter refers to the decision of the Workers League to withdraw its differences in February 1984 under conditions in which, as Comrade Slaughter now admits, North was "presented with threats and ultimatums and the immediate danger of split. You said yourself that you then withdrew (February 1984) 'influenced' by these threats and by the fact that you still were influenced by the fact that you had always seen the US section as loyal to the WRP and the IC. You added that Mike Banda pointed out that if these criticisms were true then you would have to conclude that the WRP had degenerated into a full-blown revisionism, and so you pulled back."

As Comrade North explained at the Special Conference, Banda's remarks had an impact upon him precisely because the Workers League did not know what was taking place within the WRP and did not suspect that Banda and Slaughter were consciously misleading the International Committee. There should be no doubt about it: had either Comrades Slaughter, Banda or Geoff Pilling (who was part of the WRP delegation to the IC meeting of February 1984 and especially vitriolic in his attack on the Workers League) indicated the actual state of affairs within the WRP to Comrade North — not to mention stating that they agreed with his political report — the withdrawal of criticisms would never have been contemplated.

Comrade Slaughter continues: "My only point here — a major one, I think — is that this process that you went through has been true of many of us who have worked in the WRP and IC leadership. Opposition on any question brought bitter and ruthless attacks, and if comrades did not at a certain point agree to be wrong, or to put aside their criticisms, they faced only the prospect of isolation, expulsion, as you did. I do not believe that you were any less the victim of this than I, for example, was, and if I had persisted, on earlier occasions, with my criticism on perspectives or on philosophy you could until 1982 have joined in the attack mobilized by Healy."

We entirely reject the arguments presented above as both dishonest and cowardly. Let us point out to Comrade Slaughter that North did not withdraw his criticisms in 1984 to avoid "bitter and ruthless attacks" or out of fear of personal "isolation" or "expulsion." A "leader" who conceals his differences because of fear is not a communist. In terms of his personal position within the IC and his relations with Healy, North crossed the Rubicon when he put down his criticisms in writing and confronted Healy and the Political Committee of the WRP in October 1982. In February 1984, when the decision to withdraw the criticisms were made, North was acting in his capacity as the leader of the movement in the United States, responsible for the political future of the Workers League as well as the International Committee. The threat was not simply against North.

Comrades Banda, Slaughter and Pilling made it clear that fraternal relations between the International Committee and the Workers League were about to be broken. A meeting of the Central Committee of the WRP had been called on Monday, February 13th, to authorize such an action.

The decision made by the American delegation to withdraw its criticisms may be legitimately criticized. But, in reply, let us note that there was not a single delegate from the other IC sections (the Australians, Sri Lankans and Peruvians were not present) who voiced agreement with even a single point made by North and the other comrades from the Workers League. The American delegates discussed at length amongst themselves the implications of a split, with the Workers League in a minority of one. Under these conditions, they decided against it. There have been other important occasions in the history of the communist movement when similar retreats were made to avoid a premature split. To those who argued categorically against the admissibility of such a retreat, Trotsky was wont to quote the Latin aphorism, "Long live justice, let the world perish!" But if the Workers League had known about the real situation within the WRP, there would have been no question of withdrawing any criticisms. Nor, we should add, would the Workers League have been a minority of one on the International Committee.

We must stress, however, that there is a fundamental difference between those who, on the basis of principled considerations, withdrew criticisms which had been put down in writing and forthrightly presented, and leaders such as Comrade Slaughter for whom concealing their own differences and denouncing criticisms made by others became a way of life. Comrade Slaughter claims that he faced the same situation which Comrade North confronted. We ask Comrade Slaughter to provide us with the record, if there is one, of his struggle against Healy within the WRP Central Committee during the last 15 years? We are not asking for private correspondence of which no one was told. Within the International Committee, for at least the last decade, there is absolutely no record of even the slightest disagreement between Slaughter and Healy. He suggests that Comrade North, prior to 1982, would "have joined in the attack mobilized by Healy" had you raised differences. Come, come, Comrade Slaughter. You have been viewed by every member of the International Committee for more than 20 years as the most erudite Marxist theoretician in the world movement. Had you simply gotten up at any meeting of the International Committee and said that you had serious disagreements with Healy's conception of dialectics, the floodgates would have been opened up. At the very least, comrades in every section — not to mention your own — would have been alerted and encouraged to examine Healy's method with a critical eye.

At the last meeting of the IC on November 5th, Comrade Slaughter indicated that his own role between 1982 and 1984 was not raised by Comrade North in his speech to the Special Conference. That oversight should now be corrected, for the role played by Comrade Slaughter in defending Healy and suppressing the criticisms raised by the Workers League was absolutely decisive.

In October 1982, when Comrade North informed Slaughter of his differences with Healy's Studies in Dialectical Materialism and asked him for his opinion, Slaughter replied, "I'm very suspicious of things I don't understand."

North outlined the content of his differences and asked Slaughter if he thought they were correct and whether they should be pursued. He replied that they were entirely legitimate differences, that he had long been concerned with the separation of the question of dialectical method from the development of historical materialism, and that these issues must be discussed within the International Committee. Slaughter did warn that he was not prepared to indicate the precise form that his intervention in the discussion would take. This last remark caused Comrade North to ask whether he would have Slaughter's support in raising these issues on the International Committee. Comrade Slaughter's reply was unequivocal. "Dave," he said, "I'm 55 years old and I've never pulled away from a fight."

But the next time Comrade North visited England, he encountered a very different Cliff Slaughter. Healy did not have the courage to personally defend his Studies. That task was assigned to the rest of the WRP Political Committee, whose members were joined by Slaughter and Pilling. Healy did not attend a single session of the two-day discussion. Slaughter intervened on the second day. He declared that he had been misled by North and that now, having had the opportunity to study the written notes, he wanted to correct the impression that he had any agreement with his criticisms. He warned Comrade North that the theoretical positions which were advanced in his critique of the Studies resembled those of Sidney Hook, the American pragmatist and leading Cold War anti-communist. Thus, it was Comrade Slaughter who took the lead in mounting the defense of Healy against North's criticisms.

Slaughter's collaboration with Healy against the Workers League did not end with that meeting. Throughout the next year, Comrade Slaughter intervened repeatedly to build up a case that the Workers League was abandoning the struggle for dialectical materialism. The central theme of his attack was that the Workers League was underestimating the importance of Hegel in the development of Marxism. This criticism was intended to reply to North's correct statement that Healy was "Hegelianizing" Marxism, i.e., that he was mystifying the dialectical method and reverting to subjective idealism.

In April 1983, for the first time in several years, Slaughter wrote a letter to Comrade North criticizing an editorial which had appeared in the Bulletin on the occasion of the centenary of Marx's death. This editorial, in praising Marx's contribution, had failed to mention the role of German idealism in the development of dialectical materialism. The Political Committee was surprised by the tone of the letter as it seemed that the slight mistake did not warrant such a major response. At any rate, with Slaughter's criticisms in mind, Comrade North spoke at length on the origins of Marxism at the May Day rally held in Detroit the next month. No written reply was sent to Comrade Slaughter as North expected to see him soon in Britain and intended to discuss the matter there. For various reasons, the scheduled meeting with Slaughter did not take place. But in meetings with Healy during the next few months, the subject of Slaughter's criticism never came up.

It was, therefore, with some astonishment that Comrade North reported to the Political Committee that he had received another letter from Slaughter, dated July 13, 1983, which stated:

"You will recall that I sent you a short letter, drawing your attention to certain sentences in a Bulletin editorial. This editorial wrote about Marx's theoretical contribution without the essential content of the dialectical method achieved by the 'negation' of Hegel's philosophy. Do I take it that you received this letter and that a reply can be expected?"

Comrade North responded to Comrade Slaughter, in a letter dated July 21, 1983, acknowledging the omission of reference to Hegel's role in the March editorial and thanking him for calling this to our attention. There was no further letter on this matter from Comrade Slaughter.

The next intervention by Comrade Slaughter was made at the IC meeting held in late October 1983. After Comrade North had spoken at length on the political situation in the United States, and explained in detail the reasons for the Party's decision to intervene for the first time in the US Presidential election with its own candidate, Slaughter attacked the report for failing to concentrate on the issue of cadre training on the basis of the dialectical method. This was followed by a denunciation by Comrade Banda of the position which the Workers League had taken on the US invasion of Grenada. On the basis of a casual glance at the headline of a single issue of the Bulletin, Banda claimed that the Workers League had failed to take a revolutionary defeatist position. Following the meeting, after taking the time to review the entire issue of the Bulletin, page by page, Comrade Banda retracted his criticism and offered to apologize to North in front of the International Committee.

Several weeks later, a letter from Comrade Slaughter arrived in the United States, reviving the false claim that the Workers League had abandoned the position of revolutionary defeatism. However, the most important aspect of this letter (to which Comrade North replied at length on December 27, 1983), was Slaughter's escalation of the factionally-motivated attack on the Workers League's supposed abandonment of the fight for dialectical materialism.

Once again recalling the editorial in the Bulletin, he claimed that the Workers League "had Marxist philosophy presented in a manner doctored to meet the requirements of American pragmatism." He accused North of concentrating "on matters of program to the exclusion of an explicit treatment of the struggle for the dialectical method in the day-to-day fight with the party cadre, and that this can only bring dangerous letting up in the conscious struggle against propagandism."

Slaughter asserted that North's "heavy emphasis of the 'political independence of the working class,' backed by a quotation from In Defense of Marxism, will become a weapon in the hands of all those who retain the mark of pragmatism, because it will be treasured by them as something more 'concrete' than the explicit struggle to develop and comprehend the categories of dialectics as a method for that life-and-death matter of grasping the rapid and all-sided developments thrown up by the world crisis." From there Slaughter proceeded to attack the position taken by the Workers League on Grenada and claim that it flowed from the rejection of dialectical materialism. Slaughter's arguments, as North explained in his reply of December 27, 1983, were right-wing and Pabloite in character.

Upon studying Slaughter's letter, it became clear that the differences between the Workers League and the Workers Revolutionary Party were of a fundamental character. What was involved was not merely a different appreciation of Hegel's contribution to the development of Marxism — the position of the Workers League on this question had been, at any rate, shamelessly distorted by Healy and Comrade Slaughter — but a clash on the most fundamental issue of revolutionary strategy: the leading role of the proletariat in the socialist revolution. As North wrote to Slaughter: "I must admit that I am disturbed by the very suggestion that an emphasis on the 'political independence of the working class' could be characterized as 'very heavy' within the International Committee — especially in relation to the report from a sympathizing section in a country in which the working class has not yet broken politically from the liberals. All the organizational, political and theoretical tasks of a Marxist party — above all, in the United States — are directed precisely toward the achievement of this political independence."North pointed out that "the concept of the political independence of the working class... is under relentless attack by Stalinists and revisionists all over the world today."

Following a discussion on the Central Committee, at which Slaughter's criticisms were rejected, it was agreed that there had to be a discussion in the International Committee on the political line of the WRP and the world movement as a whole. That is why Comrade North drafted a letter to Comrade Banda calling for a discussion on the perspectives of the International Committee. This letter, dated January 23, 1984, stated:

"We feel that the basic problem is that the International Committee has not yet drawn up a real balance sheet on its work over the last eight years. Surely we cannot simply go from alliance to alliance without making an analysis of each concrete experience through which the International Committee has passed. Without such an analysis we will face greater and greater confusion which inevitably, if not corrected, will produce political disasters in the sections."

Two weeks later, Comrade North presented a comprehensive report, which had been prepared with the collaboration of the entire Workers League Political Committee, to the International Committee. This report, which at least some WRP members have now read thanks to the efforts of the comrades who participated in the Runcorn occupation, was rejected. By the time Comrade North formally presented his differences to the International Committee on February 11, 1984, a great deal of factional spade work had already been done by Comrade Slaughter. Further discussion on the IC and within the national sections was suppressed.

On February 14, 1984, just one day after the conclusion of this International Committee meeting, at which the Workers League was threatened with an immediate split unless it withdrew its criticisms of the political line and theoretical method of the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership, Gerry Healy wrote a letter to Cliff Slaughter, in which he congratulated the IC Secretary for the "good political job" that "was done last weekend ..." Though Healy had not attended the meeting, he boasted that "we are strong enough to ideologically rout our most important and powerful imperialist opponents."

Having identified the Workers League with US imperialism, Healy concluded his page-long letter with the following analysis: "We have avoided the split which was posed by the metaphysical pragmatists and established instead this new unity and identity of opposites, of which they are still part. We look forward to this state of affairs continuing, also if necessary, with no holds barred."

It is a measure of Healy's degeneration that he could speak of the "ideological rout" of an opponent whose criticisms could neither be objectively discussed nor answered in writing.

Two days later, on February 16, 1984, Comrade Slaughter replied [We quote the text in full]:

Dear Gerry

Thank you for your letter of February 14. I believe that what you say does penetrate more deeply to the essential content of what took place at the IC of Feb 11/12. The attack from the US Section has as its content the need of the imperialists to destroy the IC. To defeat this attack means that the dialectical materialist training of the cadre in the last period has indeed been in line with the needs created by the most fundamental processes of revolutionary change in the objective world. The objective necessity at the heart of this interconnection could not have been grasped so clearly and made consciously, the content of our response without the systematic work on Vol 14 and well as Vol 38.

Not only that: we have to understand as your letter says in conclusion, that the newly established unity and conflict of opposites is not a completed and self-contained process but develops always anew in interconnection with the world revolution of which it is a part. Hence we go forward 'also if necessary with no holds barred.'

Fraternally, Cliff

Exposed in Healy's letter to Slaughter and the IC Secretary's sycophantic reply is the political cynicism and total disregard for principles which characterized the WRP leadership's attitude toward the International Committee. When Healy crudely identified the Workers League with "our most powerful imperialist opponents," Slaughter neither protested against this slander nor did he point out the absurdity of maintaining a "unity and identity of opposites" with an organization so defined. He did not even suggest that the disputed issues expressed a legitimate difference within the Trotskyist movement. Instead, he fortified Healy's slander — which finally blossomed 16 months later into the allegation that Comrade North is a CIA agent — with the observation that "The attack from the US Section has as its content the need of the imperialists to destroy the IC." No one forced Comrade Slaughter to write those words, which he knew even then to be grossly untrue. But in the struggle against the International Committee, the operative principle was, as both Comrade Slaughter and Healy agreed, "No holds barred."

Knowing his own role in fighting against the development of Marxism in the Workers League and the International Committee, one would have expected that Comrade Slaughter would be reluctant to return so quickly to the factional war path against the ICFI. It is distressing to see how quickly Comrade Slaughter has reverted to the old methods of baiting the International. As if nothing at all had happened within the IC, he writes to Comrade North:

"Now, I maintain that the one-sidedness and partial, selective nature of the account you gave to our Congress was disturbing and dangerous, and conflicts with the urgent necessity of facing up to and analyzing our responsibilities. You omitted several important political questions which have emerged in the last four years. To analyze these is essential to any clarification of the split. For example, you will recall that the Workers League leadership came to the point of abandoning the long-time perspective of the Fourth International towards a Labour party in the United States. Discussion on the International Committee corrected that. We all know that differences on basic perspective do appear in sections and in the IC itself, and the IC and its sections fight to correct those. But in giving an account of how you challenged Healy's and the WRP's positions and failed to get support in the WRP, it is entirely wrong to ignore this question, in which I think you will agree the IC and WRP comrades were right against you and whoever supported your position (which you corrected) in the Workers League."

We must confess that every member of the Political Committee rubbed their eyes in amazement upon reading these lines. Has Comrade Slaughter already forgotten that it was he who explicitly attacked the Workers League's central emphasis on the Labor Party? In his above-quoted letter to the Workers League in November 1983, Slaughter wrote:

"It is correct in general to insist, as your resolution's concluding section does, that 'The central issue facing the American working class is the necessity to establish its political independence through the formation of a Labor Party, and the struggle for a workers' government committed to abolishing the capitalist system and establishing socialism.'

"Yes, but the road right now, to 'establishing the political independence of the American working class' is by recognizing that the 'central issue' is to fight for the defeat of the US imperialist invasion of Grenada and its coming attack in Nicaragua."

In reply, Comrade North warned that Slaughter's approach, "which explicitly separates the fight for the defeat of the US invasion of Grenada from the struggle to establish the political independence of the working class, is identical to that of every revisionist and Stalinist group in the United States.

"Wasn't it against this invidious distinction that the Workers League and the IC based their struggle against the opportunist Pabloite conception of the 'anti-war' movement? Do they not always claim that our 'sectarianism' consists of our principled approach to all political developments, and our refusal to abandon a strategical line worked out over many years to suit what is happening 'right now'? ...

"I do not want to write more sharply than is necessary, but the approach you suggest would lead, if accepted by the Workers League, straight toward outright opportunism ...

"Had the Bulletin of October 28, 1983 repeated 100 times the call for the defeat of US imperialism but left out the issue of the Labor Party as the central task facing the working class, the Political Committee statement would have represented a centrist evasion of the real concrete tasks."

Comrade Slaughter never replied to this letter in writing. But the attack on the Workers League's perspective on the Labor Party was stepped up. The Workers League was accused in February 1984 of elevating the Labor Party from a tactic to a strategy, that is, that it was liquidating the struggle for the building of the revolutionary movement in the United States in favor of exclusive concentration on the building of a labor party. The allegation was factionally motivated and false.

The Workers League made no "correction" on the campaign for a Labor Party because there was nothing to correct. Following the IC meeting of February 1984, the Party simply continued to develop the presidential campaign that it had launched one month earlier. The Election Manifesto which had been produced prior to the IC meeting was used throughout the year with great effect. The matter was never raised again on the IC. (As for our presidential election campaign, the first waged by the Workers League since its founding in 1966, it was virtually ignored by the Workers Revolutionary Party. In the course of 11 months, the News Line ran less than a half dozen news articles on it. So much for Healy's interest in what he liked to refer to, on holiday occasions, as "the great North American proletariat.")

It was not the Workers League which abandoned the Labor Party orientation. We defended it against the criticism of Comrade Slaughter and the WRP leadership. Our record on this question is of immense pride to our entire membership.

Comrade Slaughter is not finished with his criticisms of North and the Workers League. He continues: "Later, in 1985, you followed with a lapse into an analysis of the trade union bureaucracy in the US which we challenged as being completely non-Marxist in its method and conclusions, and you eventually agreed. Nobody made you write that analysis, and you have presumably made some critical analysis of how you came to proceed in a thoroughly undialectical, completely empiricist and 'objectivist' way, in the manner of bourgeois sociology, concluding that the 'material base' of the American trade union bureaucracy was its vast empire of wealth, privilege and bureaucratic organization. But you did not incorporate any such invaluable self-criticism in your account of the developments in the IC since 1982. Yet surely there are social forces behind such a prostration before the accomplished fact, just as there are social forces behind Healyism (see the 'Political Letter No. 1' issued to Workers League members by yourself on behalf of the Political Committee on July 8 this year).

"Finally I must refer to the Workers League Conference of June 30/July 1 this year, which is the subject of your Political Letter to which I have referred. You presented to the Workers League 12th Congress a perspectives document which was nothing short of total disorientation. When I began to discuss this document with you (you will recall that I had arrived in Detroit on the eve of your Congress, and until then, like the delegates, had not seen the document), I came very soon to the conclusion that the various formulations I found to be wrong or confused were in fact part of a perspective which could only be called Pabloite. You had reacted to the US government and presidential statements and preparations threatening war, and your conclusion was that the perspective for the Workers League was one of preparing a revolutionary defeatist struggle against the US imperialists when they went to war. This is the old Pabloite 'war-revolution' thesis of over 30 years ago. You corrected this position even before the Congress began, and you did the right thing in announcing to the delegates that the perspectives were revisionist through and through, representing an abandonment of Trotskyist program and Marxist method."

First, let us make a minor correction. Comrade Slaughter refers to the error on the trade union bureaucracy and the 12th Congress as if there were two different episodes in 1985. In fact, the incorrect formulation on the bureaucracy was part of the same resolution that was discussed at the 12th Congress. As for the substance of his criticism, we have no difficulty acknowledging that the Workers League, like every other revolutionary party, makes mistakes.

But Comrade Slaughter should feel somewhat ashamed of the way he raises this in his letter to Comrade North. Given the conditions which existed within the International Committee in the aftermath of February 1984, it was inescapable that serious political problems would arise within the Workers League and every other section of the International Committee. Our party has never operated with the delusion that a correct national orientation can be sustained without a scientific international perspective developed by the Fourth International. The Workers League, like every other section, paid a price for the impressionist international perspective that was written by Comrade Slaughter, in collaboration with Healy, and then imposed on the Internationa] Committee. The mistakes within the Workers League perspective flowed directly from the 10th International Congress Resolution.

The fundamental thesis of this international perspective was "the struggle for power is on the a

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The ICFI Defends Trotskyism

1982 -1986

Documents of the Struggle against the WRP Renegades

Fourth International: A Journal of International Marxism. Volume 13. Number 2. Autumn 1986

1. Editorial

2. A Contribution to a Critique of G. Healy's "Studies in Dialectical Materialism"

October 7—November 7, 1982

by David North

3. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North

December 1983

4. Letter from David North to Cliff Slaughter

December 27, 1983

5. Letter from David North to Mike Banda

January 23, 1984

6. Political Report by David North to the International Committee of the Fourth International

February 11, 1984

7. Letter from Aileen Jennings to the Workers Revolutionary Party Political Committee

June 30, 1985

8. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to Sections of the ICFI

October 5, 1985

9. Joint Communique from the Greek and Spanish Sections of the ICFI

October 21, 1985

10. Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Crisis of the British Section

October 25, 1985

11. Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the Expulsion of G. Healy

October 25, 1985

12. Special Congress Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite)

October 26, 1985

13. "Split Exposes Right-Wing Conspiracy Against Party"

Statement of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite)

October 30, 1985

14. "Morality and the Revolutionary Party"

News Line Article by Mike Banda November 2, 1985

15. Letter from the International Committee to the Central Committee of the Workers Internationalist League, Greek Section of the ICFI

November 9, 1985

16. Letter from the Workers League Central Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee

November 21, 1985

17. Letter from Cliff Slaughter to David North

November 26, 1985

18. "Revolutionary Morality and the Split in the WRP"

News Line Report November 29, 1985

19. Letter from Peter Schwarz to the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party

December 2, 1985

20. "Nothing to hide...or fear"

News Line Comment by Geoff Pilling

December 6, 1985

21. Letter from the Workers League Political Committee to the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee

December 11, 1985