Healyite guns have political targets in their sights: their bombardment has focussed on a public statement by
WRP theoretician Cliff Slaughter. Speaking for the majority he said that the purged WRP would now open discussions with other currents on the Marxist left as part of a thorough reappraisal of the politics which led to the brutal and appalling degeneration of the WRP leadership bureaucratism and Slaughter conceded that many had been wrongly expelled from the WRP in the past, and now had more to contribute to a discussion on the way forward than some who had stayed in.
The very notion of discussion with other tell wono currents was suficient to send the Healy group Into near apoplexy, denouncing Slaughter and others as "centrists" tionists" for contemplating such a course,
Under this withering fire (from such withered sectarians) sections of the WRP majority appear to quailed and retreated somewhat from the bold stance in favour of discussion outlined by Slaughter in the first public meetings on the split.
In any case a serious, open discussion poses Slaughter and all of the old WRP leadership considerable problems — since few if any can hope to emerge unsullied by association or complicity with Healy's violent methods of bureaucratic dictatorship, and his grotesque caricature politics over the years.
In this context It Is to the credit of those WRP leaders who have stuck to this line that they have been prepared to submit themselves and their actions to a critical investigation — however Inadequate may own political break from the traditional positions of Healyism.
But they have been challenged by an opposition promoted couraged by Dave North, leader of the WRP's American sister party, the Workers League. North, donning the barely convincing quise ol a long standing opponent of Healy, has used the remnants of the WRPs tional" the International Committee a lever against the Slaughter wing of the movement. The WRP is currently "suspended" by the International Committee, at North's urging.
Blements linked with this opposition have called for the expulsion of Slaughter, General Secretary Mike Banda and others who were implicated in Healy's corruption. If taken to its logical conclusion, such a move could drive out members to smash the whole structure of the WRP. For North and his co-thinkers — who hold the sectarian notion that only forces within the IC are the basis of a Marxist leadership any question of numbers or even the survival of the Party secondary to the also taken parties. They refer repeatedly long-standing regard as a "continuity"
tradition.
into ting the same prostrate corruption.
British closely with Healy for so long hands.
have engaged in persona. corrup and liquidation, or carried out acts of violence or political task of movement.
have
-open probing and with tin-pot of Marxist be their between those who today call for an and enapolitical purge and the historical stance of the IC.
weakness from its very inception in
1953 as one side of the solit in the
Fourth International was leaders believed
"Internaspilt from false political positions was the best way to resolve problems and
"fight revisionism major differences within the International over the assessment of the role
Stalinism of and response post-war situation in Europe. The eadersnip
Michael Pablo, presented a fancifu] picture of sufficient struggle and made adaptations to Stalinism in the hopes of linking up moving forces which they expected to emerge within the rank and file and even inside the bureaucratic leaderships of the munist Parties.
itself is organisational
Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985p34 purge of those they define as "guilty"
led and apolitically to the need for the WRP leadership to "recognise the authori ty of the International Committee"
anged as continuity tel
Yet the "authority" of the IC is itself an obvious fiction. The whole IC sup.
ported every twist and turn of Healy's endorsed politics for year after year — adopstance
Bert worship or Hey which let the leaders politically bankrupt. Nobody who worked that can come out of this debacle with clean
While any members of the old leadership who are now proven to acts of conscious betrayal should be subject to disciplinary action, this must not be allowed to obscure the eve of the cleansing the become the IC of the orthodox isolated politically.
Goddali
There certainly is a "continuity"
lurched
The profound
IC that an organisational
The 1953 split centred on real and
World the political of Trotskyists to the new of the Fl, headed by the international class political crass
1970s with the lettward-
Trotskyists!
mass European Com-
Far from
The IC forces, on the other hand, the American Socialist Workers Party, eventually took a belated stand on *orthodox Trotskyism" - but failed to offer an adequate political reponse to Pablo in terms of programme and perspective. Indeed the whole opposition to Pablo only took shape two years after virtually the whole International — SWP leaders and Healy included - had misleading "Pabloite" resolutions on Stalinism at the Third World Congress.
Events of 1953 in France, East Germany and the USSR brought the political differences over Stalinsim to a head - while Pablo attempted to establish secret factions to promote his line in both Britain and the USA. Stung by this manipulation, the SWE leaders hit back with the "Open Letter" of November 1953, which heralded the first and most decisive split in the International.
Yet the split took place on the very
Fourth World Congress: Instead of waging any fight against revisionism within that Congress in front of the world movement, the Open Letter signatories - soon to staged a sudden, Pablo which left his hold unchalleng- organisational break from ed in many sections.
Did the 1953 split kill off revisionsim? Did the organisational break raise the political level of the IC forces? The answer to both questions is clearly "no", The Pablo wing, later to become today's United Secretariat
Fourth International, strengthened its political grip on the other sections, in the absence of any challenge, while the (IC forces stagnated , itself reunified with Pablo and the Pabloites. Then in the 1970s after years of sectarian abstentionism on International issues, Healy himself into an adaptation to a lengthening list of anti-communist bourgeois nationalist leaderships and regimes in the Middle East, a line far worse than any of the positions put forward by Pablo himself!
While Pablo had based his opportunist adaptations to the Stalinist movement upon the false, empirical impression of an impending Thind
War, Healy's opportunist politics rested on his wildlly exaggerated and subjective notions of imminent economic collapse and impending dictatorship (and his ins timidation of all voices of dissent). While Pablo (at first supported by Healy) had dressed up Tifo's Stalinist leadership in Yugoslavia as "centrist" or even "revolutionary", Healy in the abandoned the Trotskyist criticism of the Vietnamese Stalinist leadership - to the extent of endorsing their murder of the Vietnamese killing off Pabloite politics, the 1953 split and subse-
Healy (foreground, with Slaughter to his right) on WRP march quent splits of the IC actually fostered development: like developing resistance to a disease, a certain inevitable exposure to helps to develop the political antibodies to fight against it in a healthy movement.
Healy's sectarian contrary were those of the isolation ward, seeking to develop Marxism by cutting of contact with every form oi political disagreement. proach is as foolhardy as trying to fight for the Trotskyist programme in Britain while making no contact with the social democratic labour movement — or trying to learn swimming without going into the water. As Trotsky warned in 1935:
The sectarian ... generally does not want to go swimming at all. in order not to wet his principles. He sits on the shores and reads lectures on morality to the flood of the class struggle. But sometimes a desperate sectarian headlong into the water. seizes hold of the centrist and helps him drown. So was it: so will it be."
(Sectarianism, Centrism and the
Fourth International)
The call now for an organisational purge, devoid of any development on the key issues, can do nothing but prepare further confusion and splits.
A "Marxism" which depends for its survival on splitting from or kicking ut every dissident tendency. isolation from the actual struggle to develop in a living movement is a skin-deep sectarian Marxism of little value to the working class. does not prevent its advocates from vigorously defending their isolation by putting on the most "theoretical" airs and graces. Trotsky points out in the same article:
"The sectarian sees an enemy in everyone who atempts to explain to him that an active participation in the labour movement demands a constant study of objective conditions. and not haughty bulldozing from the sectarian rostrum.
revisionism necessary politics on the
This apleaps analysis of substitutes intrigue, gossip hysteria."
continuity of the International Committee and the WRP it is impossible to political miss the tred on the movement's obsessive and completely misguided analysis of the economic crisis of Imperialism. Time after time Healy has cried "wolf"
sounding the alarm for an Imminent collapse of the economy.
now need waste time refuting these various discredited predictions
Yet this but nobody should forget that they recurred again and again, and were used as a periodic pretext for further self sacrifice and even more herabsurd
As culean efforts membership. A serious reappraisal of the Healyite economic analysis desperately needed to reorientate the movement.
Alongside this prolonged, broken failure to grasp the actual development of the economic crisis came
Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985p35 the struggle.
ings of any contact nakedness.
sectarianism mass ashes.
movement,
Mike Banda reality the sectarian and
(ibid)
In looking at the actual political small
"haughty bulldozing", cen
Healy's tendencies of sion
Nobody members conference.
by the
WRP/IC every is part of
- un-
Healy's cynical perversion of
North's
Marxist philosophical method. While Trotsky argued for dialectical materialism as a tool for analysis, providing a guide to action in the class
Healy divorced the trapp"Marxist" reality As this from emperor of "theory reality. with strutted around in his new clothes, woven from a warp of the idealist philosopher Hegel and a wett of pure mumbo jumbo, for years not one of his servile courtiers on the WRP Central Committee or the IC dared point out his embarrassing
This "theoretical" charlatanry was nothing but Healy's cynical pretext tor the intimidation of any opponent or critic and an orientation of rabid towards the existing labour movement. His philosophical rantings were not the essence but the superficial form, the icing on the cake of his politics of opportunism and sectarianism.
Trapped In this same distorted framework of political thinking, many of those now arguing for a political break from Healyism keep obsessively raking through the "philosophical"
Some even argue that to expel Healy on charges of rape and corruption requires a philosophical justification: as if the need to drive bestial and corrupt bureaucrats from leading positions is something we can fight for unconditionally elsewhere in the labour but only conditional on finding a "theoretical" pretext for it within a "Trotskyist" organisation!
The fight for a materialist dialectical method within the WRP can only come through an all-round struggle to abandon the policies of sectarian Isolation and root the organisation in the real struggles of the working class. The very core of Healyism and Its survival as a political force has also rested upon the longstanding total lack of internal democracy, both within the WRP itself and within the IC, where Healy removed national leaderships at will. After previously purging numerous individuals and groups in the SLL/WRP. anti-Bolshevik ban" on and factions became theorised as an established position In 1974, with the bureaucratic expulthe minority opposition around Alan Thornett. Two hundred supporters or suspected supporters of Thornett's document (which argued for a correction of the WRP's sectarian line and a return to the method of Trotsky's Transitional Programme) - were bureaucratically expelled on the eve of the WRP
That expulsion, like other abuse of political op ponents of the Healy line, became a the tradition and political culture of the WRP - and part of the training of its new recruits. The same period brought expulsions of leaderships in Greece and the USA. One of predecessors. Workers
League founder Tim Wohlforth, was hounded out at this time as a result of Healy's intervention.
Yet democracy within a party the accountability of the leadership to its mentbers and the defence of the right of members to question and criticise the conduct of their leaderemergence of a bureaucra. lt is the ship is the only safeguard against the
For an entrenched leading clique. It is the only hope for the movement to exclude the possibility of corruption.
Only by opening up serious and democratic objective debate on the political line and orientation of the organisation and the experiences of fighting for that line, can the movement guard against the impres sionism that can arise from a small isolated leadership, a one-sided programme, and revisionist adaptation to alien political forces.
Indeed the necesary developments in the Trotskyist programme, to meet the particular needs and demands of the movement trom sections of the op pressed moving increasingly into struggle - women, lesbians, gays and black people - and to answer the post-war developments in the struggle against Stalinism and natonalist leaderships, requires a constant possibility of free discussion and criticism within the Trotskyist organisation.
Only on the basis of this kind of democracy can the centralised discipline of the organisation be based on political development rather han blind obedience enforced b threats and ignorant faith.
The organisational demand for a simple purge of Slaughter and the old quard is not linked to any such argument for democratic centralism. Nor does it address the crying need to develop the Trotskyist programme in the light of today's class struggle.
North for example attacks Ken Livingstone for taking up the "idealist" question of women's liberation: in doing so he joins Healy in turning his back on the politics of the Comintern, Lenin and Trotsky. As it Healy's monstrous behaviour did not underline the appalling backwardness of the WRP on this issue!
Revulsion against Healy's crimes is not enough. The WRP has yet to catch up with even sections of the Labour left in recognising the special oppression of women as women within capitalist society and the necessity for Marxists to relate to every aspect of their struggle against that oppression.
Even on the issues where we might expect a more developed criticism of the old politics under Healy, there is a great deal of ground to be made up. While North correctly challenges Healy's line of capitulation to the bourgeois politics of Yassir Arafat and the reactionary anti-communist I regimes of Libya. Syria, Iraq and l Iran, he puts forward no class analysis of these governments, nor a programmatic alternative.
North correctly challenges Healy's line of political capitulation to Yasser Arafat and the governments of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran: but he puts forward no programmatic alternative. He even evades the question of the political character of the Castro eadership in Cuba, which again exposes the long-standing theoretical weaknesses of the WRP/iC tradition.
North for example attacks Ken Livingstone for taking up the "idealist" question of women's liberation: in doing so he joins Healy in turning his back on the politics of the Comintern. Lenin and Trotsky. As If Healy's monstrous behaviour did not underline the appalling backward ness of the WRP on this issue! North correctly challenges Healy's line of political capitulation to Yasser Arafat and the governments of Libya, Syria, Irag and Iran: but he puts forward no programmatic alternative. even evades the question of the political character of the Castro leadership In Cuba, which again exposes the long standing theoretical weaknesses of the WRP/IC tradition.
While criticising the Healy line of politically adapting to left social democracy in the form of Ken Liv. ingstone and Ted Knight, the advocates of a further organisational spit do not question the traditional Healy concept, hardened since the mid 1960s of seeking to build a "mass revolutionary party" by Individual recruitment, isolated from and in counterposition to the British Labour Party. Some even atlack the WRP's recent abandonment of the daily newspaper, long alter the base of support for the sale and sustenance of this paper had evaporated! The same people make little criticism of the WRP'g sectarian abstention from serious work in the trade unions, or Its lack of any programme of transltional demands to prepare a class conscious cadre of militants in advance of a possible re-elected Labour government. A real political break rom Healyism demands a root and branch rethink on all these questions, and wholesale change of direction.
Dave North himself has also set very delinite limits beyond which he insists the debate on Healy 's politics must not go. One of the things he stridently defends from the "IC tradition" is the massive slander campaign which Healy waged in the late 1970s against the veteran leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party under the ludicrous title "Security on the WRP are available (E3 including post and 3956. London WCIN 3XX. Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p36 and the Fourth International". Longstanding Marxists Joseph Hansen and George Novack - and by implication a whole additional layer of SWP leaders past and present were publicly accused of being FBI or GPU agents. Yet the real substance of such cynical allegations was shown when in the final stages of degeneration in the WRP/IC prior to Healy's expulsion, North himself was accused by Healy of being a CIA agent!
North's motives in now opposing any repudiation of this scandalous saga of slander and squandered resources are obscure: no doubt the Workers' League's shaky credibility among its US supporters would be torpedoed by an embarrassing climbdown. But North's refusal to abandon this squalid aspect of Healy's politics leaves him tied to a defence of the methods which produced it.
Socialist Viewpoint has carried articles arguing that the WRP must in effect begin afresh and reconstruct its whole political and organisational foundation if it is to break from Healyism and move in a Trotskyist direction. But the key element is this must be a political reappraisal, a programmatic response to the bankruptcy of the past, and a determined move to embrace the democratic traditions of Bolshevism in place of the Healy model, which replicates the monolithism of Stalin's day.
It is only by ditching the complacent North schema of the International Committee as some kind of "thin red line" of Marxism, and turning to a serious analysis of the class struggle in Britain and internationally that WRP members can begin to break the bounds of sectarianism and "philosophical" cant with which Healy has hobbled their development. development.
The turn must be not to the one-sided and often utterly barren documents of the IC but back to the real Marxist tradition of the Bolsheviks, the first four Congresses of the Communist International, the Trotskyist opposition and the Fourth International.
Healvism must be recognised as a grotesque, tragi-comic expression of Pabloism 32 years after the IC claimed to have 'broken with Pablo and Pabloism for ever."
And in moving to construct healthy tradition from the wreckage the WRP must repudiate bureaucratic expuisions and splits such as that of 1974, and open up a serious political discussion with those forces on the Marxist left who were organisationally silenced by Healy. Copies of The Battle for Trotskyism and other literature packing) from Socialist Viewpoint's Bookstall. BCM Box
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