tactic of the united front Winning the majority of the working class
By HARRY SLOAN TO WIN the working class away from its traditional. reformist leaderships and organisations, and build a truly mass, Marxist party capable of leading the socialist revolution needs much more than banner-waving. propaganda and proclamations.
A new party must prove its relevance to the working class -involve itself in the many day-to-day struggles against exploitative employers, anti-union laws, police violence, racist attacks and the many facets of sexual oppression
It must establish its credentials as front line fighters, unite those in conflict, sharing their struggles but not their illusions; it must play a conscious role of deepening and drawing the political lessons from these struggles, uncovering the inadequacy and betrayals of the trade union bureaucrats, reformist and "Communist Party" politicians, and putting forward consistent class struggle tactics and demands.
This might seem so elementary that it hardly merits explanation: but the small, divided and politically confused segments that represent the present-day British Marxist movement bear witness to the fact that these lessons have yet to be fully learned or applied to the British labour movement.
Even as Neil Kinnock - aided and abetted by elements from both sides of the splintered British "Communist Party" — wages a growing witch-hunt against the hard left, using the sterile propagandists of Militant as a convenieht pretext, an objective appraisal of the size and strength of British revolutionary Marxism suggest that there is a long, long way to go before the social democratic leaders are really faced with any serious Marxist threat.
Time and again in the history of British Marxism, the urge simply to raise the red banner, substituting denunciations and propaganda against the Labour Party and union bureaucrats for serious work designed to win a real base of support in the
and ultra-leftism abopings berge and small
Even at its highest and healthiest point, the British Communist Party never attained a scale that really merited the label "mass party" in the eyes of the early leaders of the Communist International.
All of the political weaknesses and problems of the British CP were compounded by the rise of Stalin and the bureaucratic caste he represented to the leadership of the Russian Party and the Comintern,
Yet despite the strengthening in the post-war period of a hard left in the British labour movement politically well to the left of the Stalinised CP few of these currents have assimilated the early warnings of the Comintern against sectarianism and abstract propagandism.
The proionged decade of deluded self-proclamation of the WRP as "the mass revolutionary party" (with at the very high point in 1973 only 3,000 members and virtually no organised work within the trade unions or broader labour movement) has partially broken with the expulsion of founding leader Gerry Healy. Meanwhile the equally wrong-headed and sectarian SW has for years been urging militant workers simply to leave the Labour Party to Neil Kinnock, and directed their energies towards grouping trade unionists in such a way as to divert from any real political fight against the union bureaucracy. Militant preaches "socialism" via a Labour government passing an "Enabling Act" for nationalisation, while refusing to involve its supporters in day-to-day struggles in the unions or most of the active campaigns in the Labour Party.
The question is not simply one of size. Large numbers can as the WRP, SWP and Militant have shown - be led in just as sectarian a fashion as a small grouping.
The history of the Comintern shows that even when in the massive upsurge following World War I revoluSocialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p28
Fighting sectarianism
Lenin in Red Square tionaries stood at the head of new mass parties formed as a result of splits in the old reformist parties and trade unions, the task of winning a majority of the working class to revolutionary action was one which preoccupied the leaders of the Communist International.
In today's situation, where the revolutionary movement is much smaller as a component of the workers' movement as a whole, and itself politically split and disorientated - lacking even the unitying authority provided by the Russian Revolution and the early Comintern - the problems of winning support for the Marxist programme are even more pressing.
But even at the high point of the Comintern the political solutions put foward by Lenin, Trotsky and others
"A parliamentary socialist organisation or a propaganda sect can remain for decades within one and the same framework which assures it a few parliamentary posts or a cer- tain outlet for pamphlets. But the party of socialist revolution is obliged to learn in ac- tion how to fuse together the majority of the working class, utilising to this end every The outlived groupings and factions are interested in preserving intact and im- mutable all the barriers dividing the working class into segments. We, on the other hand, have a vital stake in pulling down these barriers of conservatism and in teaching the working class to follow our example. Herein lies the whole meaning of the united front policy, a meaning which derives directly from the social revolutionary essence of (Leon Trotsky: "From the ECCI to the Paris Convention of the French Comunist Par- ty, 1922", in The First Five Years of the Communist International [New Park ed] Vol 2
were panacea. blueprints could would automatically raw leadership, War I and the ships be steeled and tested wage a political struggle of revolutionary zeal -ков from left over syndicalism. of the Comintern, Lenin produced the stinging polemic Left Wing Com- munism, an ing from the prestige and experience of the successful Russian Revolution, Lenin took up need to root the Communist Parties in all the daily struggles of the working class. He was particularly firm on the need for a sober appraisal of the mood and militancy of the working class, rejecting reliance on narrow layers of the most active and committed minority. the need for Marxists to utilise every possible avenue to reach the masses - rejecting ultra left abstentionism from Parliamentary from work in unions, and condemning those "Left Communists" who hand manoeuvre with other political par- opportunity for mass action that opens up. our party." p168): Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p29
No simple be offered which resolve the political weaknesses of the new and
thrown forward by the struggles of the mass movements of workers followed the end of World
example of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917. Only through a combination of developing theory and practical experience could the necessary leader-
Immediately after the formation of the new International in 1919, Lenin began to recognise the necessity to
against ultra-left and sectarian politics which led away from practical interventions and towards abstract propagandism - whether this arose from an excess
among raw worker militants (such as Gallacher and others around the shop stewards movement in Britain), or from fundamentally flawed political theories
anarchism and
In advance of the Second Congress
Infantile Disorder, distributed to every delegate. Argu-
Othe cudgels for the any superficial
Left Wing Communism insists upon
Selections and reactionary trade rejected out of any kind of compromise
ties. Lenin continually draws the line between on the one hand obligatory tactical, organisational manoeuvies to create the best Marxist agitation, and on the other hand impermissable political conces-
principle or revolutionary leadership was its ability to distinguish between these different types of "compromise" build a party on that basis.
A further section on the situation in Britain argued the case for a new British Communist Party to seek affiliation to the Labour Party and rejected sectarian and ultra left tendencies among the founders of the new CP. Lenin stressed above all the imthrough propaganda alone:
"Victory cannot be won with a vanguard alone. To throw only the vanguard into the decisive battle. before the entire class the broad masses, have taken up a position either of direct support for the vanguard, or pathetic neutrality towards it and of precluded support for the enemy. would be not merely foolish but criminal. Propaganda and agitation alone are not enough for an entire class, the broad masses of the working people, those oppressed by capital, to take up such a stand. For that, the masses must have their own political experience. (...)
The immediate objective of the class conscious vanguard of the international working class movement, i.e., the Communist parties, groups and trends. is to be able to ead the broad masses (who are still, for the most part, apathetic. ridden) to their new position."
"cannot be reached without the liquidation of Left doctrinairism and without a full elimination of its errors."
So evenwhile the Second Congress tightened up the political basis of the new International, (adopting Lenin's rigorous "21 Theses" on Conditions of Admission to the Communist International, designed to purge the new Parties of reformist elements) Lenin and Trotsky serious perspective towards winning and mobilising sections of workers then unorganised or still under reformist leaderships.
By the Third Congress, the Comintern acknowledged the new, slower tempo of revolutionary struggle following the post-war upheavals, in a situation where the capitalist class continued to exploit each and every oportunity to inflict defeats and setbacks on the labour movement.
In this new phase of the struggle, Lenin and Trotsky continued to urge the Communist Parties to take the fight into the mass organisations of the working class, in particular the
trade unions:
fundamental task of the Communist Party in the current crisis is to lead the present defensive struggles of the proletariat. to extend their scope, to deepen them. to unify them, and in harmony with the march of events. to transform them into decisive political strug gles for the ultimate goal.
"Whether the revolutionary movement develops in the next period at a swift or slow tempo, the Communist party must in either case remain the party of action. It stands at the head of the struggling masses; it tirmly and clearly tormulates its fighting slogans, exposing and sweeping aside all the equivocal slogans of the Social Democracy. which are always based on compromise and concilia-
(Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International, (Ink Links) pp202-3).
This same Third Congress adopted the lengthy Theses on Tactics whích began to elaborate a detailed series of demands centred on workers' con-
Teach designed to link up with and develop defensive trade union political content:
"The Communist Parties do not put forward minimum programmes which could serve to strengthen and improve the tottering founda-
Cof capitalism. munists' main aim is to destroy the capitalist system. But in order to achieve their aim the Communist Parties must put forward demands expressing the immediate needs of
The Communists must organize mass campaigns to fight for these demands regardless of whether they are compatible with the continuation of the capitalist system. The Communist Parties should be concerned not with the viability
competitive capitalist industry or the stability of the capitalist economy, but with proleterian poverty, which cannot
must not be endured any
If the demands put forward by the Communists correspond to the Immediate needs of the broad proletarian masses, and if the masses are convinced that they cannot go on living unless their demands are met. then the struggle around these issues becomes the starting point of the struggle for in place of the minimum programme of the centrists and reformists, the Communist International offers a struggle for the concrete demands of the proletariat which.
their totality challenge power of the bourgeoisie, organize the proletariat and mark out the Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985p30
different stages of the struggle for its dictatorship. Even before the broad masses consciously understand the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they can respond to each of the indidividual demands.
As more and more people are drawn into the struggle around these demands and as the needs of the masses come into conflict with the needs of capitalist society, the working class will come to realize that if it wants to live, capitalism will have to die. This realization will be the main motivation in their struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The task of the Communist Parties is to extend, deepen and unity the struggle around these concrete demands."
Within these Theses are set out what were later to be taken up by Trotsky and developed as "transitional demands" in the founding programmatic documents of the Fourth International in the 1930s. And the Third Congress also adopted extensive theses on methods and forms of work among women.
Between the Third and Fourth Con-
"The most proletariat — the Paris Commune — was nothing else but a bloc of all the organizations and shadings within the French working class, united against the bourgeoisie. If, despite the establishment of the united front, the Commune was quickly crushed, then the explanation for this is above all to be found in the fact that the united front did not have at its left flank a genuine revolutionary, disciplined and resolute organization, capable of quickly gaining leadership in the fire of events." gresses, the Comintern leaders press- ed home the logic of these earlier positions and emphasised the impor- tance for Communist Parties ticularly the French party and those faced with a major political split within the labour movement - taking the initiative in the fight for united action and a united working class front on basic issues facing the work- ing class.
glorious page in the history of the French
Trotsky in particular argued at
length in explaining the basis for the
united front:
"The problem of the united front
- despite the fact that a split is in-
evitable in this epoch between the
various political organisations bas-
ing themselves on the working
class grows out of the urgent
need to secure for the working class
the possibility of a united front in Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p3l
the struggle against capitalism."
(On the United Front, in First Five
Years, Vol 2p92)
The tactic of the united front is seen here primarily as a means of advancing the class struggle, of enabling workers to make political development in the course of their struggles which would of course benefit the Communists, for whom the class struggle at its sharpest was home territory, while it is anathema to the reformist bureaucrats and politicians - as Neil Kinnock so ably confirms even today.
"The greater is the mass drawn into the movement, the higher its self-confidence rises. all the more self-confident will that mass movement be and all the more resolutely will it be capable of marching forward, however modest may be the initial slogans of struggle. And this means that the growth of the mass aspects of the movement tends to radicalize it, and creates much more favorable conditions for the slogans, methods of struggle, and. In general, the leading role of the Communist Party.
The reformists dread the revolutionary potential of the mass movement; their beloved arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade union bureaus. the arbitration boards. the ministerial antechambers.
On the contrary, we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums [places of refuge - H.S.] and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses. With a correct tactic we stand only to gain from this. A Communist who doubts or fears this resembles a swimmer who has approved the theses on the best method of swimming but dares not plunge into the water.
(On the United Front pp 94-95)
Only as an incidental feature of this whole approach was the united front tactic seen as a device simply to "expose" and denounce the reformist leaders who refused to engage in joint action.
Trotsky was at pains to explain that, even though the united front tactic was ruled out only in those countries where the Communist Party was of insignificant size or where it already dominated the whole labour movement, it was not by any means simply a craving to reverse the historic split which had separated Communists from social democracy.
Marx and Engels in the early days of the working class movement had expected that the revolutionaries could operate as a distinct tendency within a single broad workers' party.
"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which
pushes forward all others; on the other hand. theoretically. they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march. the conditions. and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."
(Communist Manifesto, Section II)
In similar fashion to the early Comintern leaders, Marx and Engels saw the leading role of Communists being established through concrete experiences of the advanced workers in the course of actual struggle rather
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims. for the enforcement of the momentary interest of the working class: but in the movement of the present they also represent and take care of the future of the movement."
(Communist Manifesto, Section IV)
But the scale and impact of the bureaucratisation democratic parties, and the extent to which their leaders became sucked in to the reformist politics of parliamentary democracy surpassed the worst expectations of Marx and Engels. The mass workers' parties of the Second International degenerated from class struggle origins to a miserable class collaborationist nadir with the vote of a majority of each one of the national perialist ruling class on the eve of World War I.
Prior to this Lenin had taken the lead in transforming the hard political theories and class struggle conceptions of Marxism into a hard organisational form with the development of what became the Bolshevik party structure, based on the discipline of democratic centralism and the principled opposition to class collaboration. At the watershed 1903 Congress of the Russian party of the Second International, the RSDLP, the break between the "Bolsheviks" (literally "majority") and "Mensheviks i (minority) took place over the apparently organisational detail of party rules and statutes. The Mensheviks then, like today's Labour Party right wing opportunists, made a principle out of their individual 'rights" to follow whatever they liked, irrespective of party decisions. Lenin insisted upon a party that would have a rigid discipline in carrying out the policies of the majority and the decisions of the elected leadership, while allowing full freedom of democratic discussion within its ranks. It was Lenin's party, based on its fight for proletarian discipline, which proved itself in October 1917 as the only Marxist leadership capable of taking and holding state power and overthrowing capitalism - which the Mensheviks for the most part displayed themselves on the other side of the
Karl Marx barricades, seeking to preserve the capitalist "Provisional Government"
The political split between reformism and Marxism was therefore no accident, and the issues involved centre on the political independence of the working class. But plainly while the majority of workers, for
Treason, remain loyal to reformist leaders, there will be no socialist revolution. The united front policy derives from that central question. As Trotsky put it:
"If the Communist Party did not seek for organizational avenues to the end that at every given moment joint, coordinated action between the Communist and the nonCommunist (including the Social Democratic) working masses were
possible, it would have thereby laid bare its own incapaci-
Othe majority of the working class. It would degenerate
Communist society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power."
(On the United Front, p 93
In answer to those who ask if the united front policy extends only to the workers, and should exclude the reformist leaders, Trotsky points out:
"If we were able simply to unite
working masses around our own banner or around our practical slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party trade union. that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united
would not exist in its present form."
(ibid)
But if the Communist Parties make appeals for joint action with the reformist parties and reformist leaders
does this not imply a "softer" line towards reformism. Is this a political compromise? Trotsky's answer was a firm "no": Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p32
"It is possible to see in this policy a rapproachement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle.
(p96)
The only way it would represent a political compromise would be if the Communist Party in any way renounced its own independent line or its right to criticise the other elements in the united front. This would be impermissable: it would in ellect abandon the gains made in the original break from the reformist parties.
"We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment."
(p96)
Indeed it is clear from the Comintern position on the united front that it is seen as a means through which the Communist Parties will grow in membership and influence, not by any means as an opportunist "sinking of differences" or peaceful coexistence with social democracy.
In the event, of course, the political degeneration of the Soviet leadership under Stalin's bureaucratic domination after 1924, and the failure of key Communist Parties - especially the German party - to assimilate the method and content of the united front tactic, meant that it was never really tested in the way argued for by Trotsky.
Though the German Communists (KPD) in 1922 successfully drew Socialist Party militants to a major Berlin conference of factory delegates, and attempted to build from this a network of Control Committees" to supervise production, distribution and prices, a strong sectarian left wing in the KPD continued to resist the united front tactic. Events moved faster than the development of an adequate ledership of the KPD producing a major defeat for the working class in the "failed October" of 1923
By 1925 onwards, Stalin's influence began to make itself felt in the abandonment of the political independence of the British Communist Party to the fake "left" bureaucrats of the TUC's Anglo-Russian Committee - turning the united front from a road to the masses into a link up with the traitors of the 1926 General Strike.
In China, the abandonment of any class analysis of the bourgeois nationalist leadership of Chiang Kai Shek led to the Communist Party be-
Only political fight
ing ordered to dissolve into the bourgeois Kuomintang quently butchered by Chiang. The proletarian "united front" had been turned by Stalin into a parody alliance with the hangmen of the revolution.
The abrupt turn in foreign policy following 1927, with the proclamation that a period of relative stability had been succeeded by a "Third Period" of class" heralded a further series of grotesque Stalinist attacks united front tactic. Social democrats were branded "social fascists". Germany. where unreconstructed sectarianism was again: head, KPD militants themselves thrown into fronts" with fascists against social democrats! This scandalous period of political treachery divided powerful German workers' movement in the face of Hitler's offensive.
The changing requirements Stalin's foreign policy after 1935 brought yet another caricature of the united front tactic: this time the strategy of the "popular front" - a supposed alliance between the workers and the fascist" "democratic" bourgeoisie, quite obviously on a programme acceptable to the capitalists. bankruptcy of this new was confirmed by the crushing defeat of the Spanish working class in 1939.
The Trotskyist movement was built on the basis of the political method WRP crisis Expelled: Gerry Healy
and subse- - an capitalist "class against the on In given its found "united the fight developed in the first four Con- of gresses of the Comintern, and in a bitter struggle against Stalinism. absurd embraced from the outset the need for transitional demands to advance and deepen the daily struggles of the working class, the importance of the fight for workers control, and the "anti- vital role of the united front. The the Trotskyist movement since its for- mal launch in 1938 has not been able orientation to build parties of sufficient size and weight in the workers movement to apply the tactic of the united front as enviseaged in By JOHN LISTER Far from settling any political issues. the autumn of former leader Gerry Healy from the Workers Revolu- tionary Party, along with his closest supporters, has opened up a fierce but politically con- fused factional warfare within the WRP involving sections of the old leadership. Socialist Viewpoint No. 10 February 1985 p33
bankruptcy initiatives. worker remains Trotsky: develop programme in practical union But with few localised exceptions ing class, the Comintern can break hold of Healyism! expulsions, flurry last expulsion much bitter Healy Line.
documents. For a mere handful of
Marxists to make grand proposals tor "joint action" with mass reformist or Stalinist parties is seen by the workers as a quixotic gesture: reformist leaders by no means expose their
Aby ignoring such
The method however of seeking to root the Marxist movement in the trade unions and every one of the daily struggles of the working class, to win leadership positions and win
recruits by proving our credentials in the fight, is one which
Nvalid for much smaller organisations. The programme of transitional demands, and the constant struggle to maximise the chances of workers learning political lessons in actual struggle are equally crucial to us today. The ability to work cooperatively yet on an independent political basis with other tendencies, and with sections of the left trade
Tand Labour leadership is crucial if the tiny forces of Marxism are to become mass forces.
Serious work along these lines, in a situation shaped by the crisis of social democracy, the political polarisation of the trade unions and the desperate plight of whole sections of the work-
Scan create the kind of political developments which will build the basis of a mass party — and then perhaps British Marxist can try, over 60 years on, to carry out the Comintern tactic of the united front.
Internally, there have been further
Ta succession of Inconclusive special conferences, and
Cof internal discussion documents. Publicly, there has been
polemic and exchanges of insults between the WRP majority and the expelled Healyite forces. A broadside of writs fired by Vanessa Redgrave as flagship of the
fleet has inflicted major damage on the top-heavy apparatus of the WRP, sinking the daily News
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 liquida- tion, 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 en- apolitical 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 "Interna- spilt from false political positions was the best way to resolve problems and "fight revisionism major differences within the Interna- tional 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 leader- ships 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 — adop- stance 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,
Othe 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
Tinto 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 ap- leaps analysis of substitutes intrigue, gossip hysteria." continuity of the International Com- mittee 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 her- absurd 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
Abut 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 expul-
Othe 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
Othe 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
Tor 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
Ton 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
Want to know more? CUBA Radical face of Stalinism Copies available (15.00 including postage) Box 3956, London WCIN 3XX The politics MINERS' STRIKE of the aBy BILL PETERS K Perhaps the first attempt at an objective and coherent political analysis of the miners' strike and its lessons for the workers' movement. 44 pages, 80p. including postage. from Socialist Viewpoint, BCM Box 3956. London WCIN 3XX.
in touch with your nearest contact. Name Address Trade Union Labour Party Telephone SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Who INSIDE: deluge of sell- • NHS under ti Please send me I enclose £ Name Address
Socialist Viewpoint has supporters and sellers in many towns in England and Scotland. If you wish to find out more about our politics and our work in the labour movement in your area, contact Socialist Viewpoint at BCM Box 3956, London WCIN 3XX, and we will put you Please send me details of Socialist Viewpoint. WELFARE will be Subscribe to the STATE monthly The me SOCIALIST Keep up with events - from a Socialist Viewpoint! Our monthly magazine carries analysis and background coverage coupled with reviews, historical articles and comment. Make sure of your copy each month - take out a subscription at the bargain rate of 12 issues for f10 including postage (or £12 overseas). Or take several copies to sell: contact us for bulk rates. plus a donation of £
----- pull-quotes on this page ----- SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT issues of Socialist Viewpoint.
SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 70p