The International Left Opposition argued for the Communist League to enter the ILP. The majority would not. So the minority split and entered themselves.
The majority protested to the international ( about the breach of democratic centralism. The international backed the minority. In fact its attitude to democratic centralism and what a group represented, dealt with on pages 150-51 of the book, is very interesting
Nevertheless the speed with which the split occured was a very bad sign for the future of Trotskyism. In fact by the end of the book there are 3 Trotskyist groups in Britain. A long tradition was started in these very early daThe main battle n and with the ILP was over their attitude to Stalinism. But one of the other major battles at this time, with most of the other groups was over the issue of League of Nations Sanctions against Italy for its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopla). The IL.P had a generally correct position of opposition to these imperialist
- but this relapsed into a form of pacifism. The book deals extensively with both these questions.
Eventually the International came to the conclusion the period of entry work in the small ILP should come to an end and Trotskyists should be in the Labour Party
Trotsky argued this not as a principle but as a tactic flowing from the opportunities offered in that particular period
A good deal of this book is spent on detailina the different attitudes to this entry work. Bornstein and Richardson themselves argue complete entry very strongly and present it as though this is an overriding principle.
copies of the documents and propaganda produced by Trotskyists at that time would have been useful. In fact a documentary history alongside this work is badly needed.
The split into three groups was over attitudes to the Labour Party. One of the groups thought it was necessary completely building the independent revolutionary party. The international argued for the fusion of all three groups. In fact two did fuse for a while into the RSL. But it was an unrepared tusion which quite quickly ell apart
Not surprisingly many of the Trotskyists of this period became worn out with the factional struggles and just dropped out.
It was a very difficult period to work in, The chapter of this book on the Moscow Trials is very interesting. As we look at that episode of Stalinist history today it is very easy for people to see the truth. But in this period the Stalinists were able in alliance with social democrats and liberals in the Popular Front, to almost completely isolate the Trotskyists from the rest of the left.
Much of the work by Trotskyists in those days was experimental. It was the attempt to break from an essentially propaganda opposition, as the Left Opposition in the CP, to building their own groups and parties with roots and practical work in the masses. The pressures of the period are one reason why some of the central characters involved can be seen abrupty changing position, and suddenly switching rom one group to another.
All of this was also, to a lesser degree, of the International movement some of whose leaders misdirected the small weak British group:
But his means we must study this history all the more. As we look at the groups today we see that in their recent history they have been making the same mistakes as those made in the earliest of days of the movement.
Some of today's leaders have purposely covered over or distorted this history, It is obvious that some of them had a reason. That history would show the incorrectness of their £2.00. (62 pages). SICKLE cell disease is a term for a group of blood diseases resulting inheritance of sickle haemoglobin. Heamoglobin is the component in the red blood cells. Sickle haemoglobin can cause the red blood cells to distort into a rigid shape up the small blood vessels and cause sickle crisis.
The severity of the disease varies person is affected from childhood and may have crises and become dangerously ill with severe pain, fever and jaundice. There are many acute and chronic complications involving virtually every part of the body, e.g. strokes, loss of sight, hip and shoulder problems.
Sickle cell disease occurs in Black and Asian populations recently was considered to be a rare tropical illness of little signiticance in Britain. But sickle cell disease occurs with a frequency of at least in 200 babies the Afro-Caribbean community.
Screening at birth is possible and clearly needed. However, there has been no attempt to mobilise resources and provide a service comparable to that for phenylketonurea which occurs in in 10,000 babies but for which every new born baby is screened.
Other services, such as antenatal counselling and diagnosis in pregnancy (prenatal diagnosis) are also inadequate. Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p28 present actions. The renegade Jock Haston (once a Trotskyist, now an EETPU official) says that he recruited Gerry Healy. Healy was then a Stalinist who physically attacked him at Hyde Park Corner! Clearly old habits die hard, and false methods of the past have helped shape the present crisis of the Trotskyist movement.
Following their recent expulsion of Gerry Healy, and a start of the debate on the degeneration of the SLL/WRP in Britain, some of the current WRP majority around Cliff Slaughter are now revealing a bit about the history of that tradition. They have gone back to material from the 1940g. Few WRP members would have dreamed such material existed. Why has it been deliberately hidden for so
Let us hope that one thing to come out of the present crisis of Britsh Trotskyism will be a new attitude to the history of our movement. This volume by Bornstein and Richardson could play a very important role in developing the necessary discussion.
eagerly await its companion volume. Sickle Cell Anaemia — Who Cares?: Ă survey of screening and counselling facilities in England, Usha Prashar, Elizabeth Anionwu, Milica Brozovic. Runnymede Trust.
In April 1984 the Runnymede Trust carried out a postal survey in order to Identify accurately what services are provided for sickle cell disease within the NFS, with particular relerence to screening facilities, counselling practices and provision of in-service training, Questionaires were received back from 98 District Health
Authorities.
Services wre generally poor, even
In those Districts with high ethnic minorities. Ot those districts with over 10% ethnic minorities, all screen pregnant women for sickle hormold counseling tor pre gomt form of counselling pregnant women, educational material sickle cell disease and some form of screening of new born bables.
But only a minority offer prenatal diagnosis, have regular in-service training, specialist cinics, trained counsellors and keep statistics; and there are only six sickle cell centres.
The booklet argues the case for sickle cell centres to be set up along the lines that haemophillac centres have been set up nationally. The setting up of centres results in more expertise. education, screening and counselling. It has been very successful in treating haemophiliacs so surely the same applies in the case of sickle cell disease.
The authors point out that the black and ethnic minority communities are discriminated against, and that this is one symptom of racism in the NHS.
Fight to break from sectarian method!
WRP after Healy
WORKERS' Press, the weekly paper of the purged Workers Revolutionary Party, devoted two pages of a special issue on February 7 to a reply to an article in the last issue of Socialist Viewpoint.
Now, as we are going to the open tate to Be and u the Open Letter to the WRP from members expelled in 1974, which we carried in our December issue.
Clearly the WRP has moved to a much more open attitude to discussion with other tendencies: with this in view, JOHN LISTER looks at some of the more recent developments since last year's expulsion of WRP founder and leader Gerry Healy. WITHIN days of our last issue going to press. the further split we had forecast in the ranks of the purged WRP majority took place.
A group of 50-60, raising the tatty banner of "political continuity" with Healy's International Committee, set out to form a new "British section", apparently taking with them funds from the WRP Young Socialists as a nest-egg.
Masterminding this ultra-sectarian breakaway, and showing that he for one had neither learned nor forgotten anything during the "break" with Healy was the leader of the IC's tiny American section, Dave North.
In Britain, the new breakaway grouping's main strengths were among inexperienced youth members and in the Yorkshire base of Central Committee member Dave Hyland.
If this small-scale split appears sadly bizarre, the latest split in the Healy rump takes the biscuit: having split from the majority of the WRP because they refused to condemn Healy's systematic rape of women members and slavishly endorsed his every Still with Healy: Corin Redgrave political notion, the minority groupSocialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p29 ing - heavily overpopulated with corrupt elements from the full-time apparatus - ousted Healy himself from their leadership (apparently on the grounds that he has completely lost his marbles)! In the true Healyite tradition, this change of leadership had again to result in an organisational split - leaving a new, ultraHealyite group consisting of Healy himself, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave and two dozen accolytes to carry forward the continuity of the "fight for the right to rape"
But the dangers of disintegration are far from over in the main WRP itself, which lacks either an authoritative leadership OI a developed perspective and orientation towards the workers movement in Britain.
One of the chief dangers has emerged in the form of the profoundly pessimistic line argued in a lengthy • -document from General Secretary Mike Banda, still in self-imposed exile in his native Sri Lanka.
Apparently churned out in a fit of extreme subjective depression, and without obvious reference to documentary sources, Banda's text "Twenty-seven Reasons (why the International Committee should be buried forthwith and the Fourth International Built)" (Workers' Press, Feb effectively dismisses the entire history of the Trotskyist movement from its foundation in 1938 to the present day — as an utter waste of time.
While this might appear to offer a useful counterblast to the traditional Healy/IC sectarian nonsense of the triumphant all-conquering "thin red line" of Bolshevik continuity flowing exclusively through limited forces of the British SLL/WRP and its international hangers-on, it offers no balanced assessment of the factional strug gles waged by Trotskyists in the harsh conditions since 1938.
Banda's negative line of criticism concentrates excusively upon the evil motivations he attributes to the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement, particularly in the postwar period. Even if all he says were true (and there is little reason to accept it all), it would be the equivalent of writing a history of the trade union movement which looked only at the
manoeuvres, intrigues and corrup tion of the top bureaucrats - and ignored the ciass struggle and courageous actions of rank and file workers.
The Trotskyist movement as a whole certainly has to come to terms with major historical weaknesses — most significantly its inability grasp and confront the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, and its tendency under massive ideological and material, class pressure to adapt politically to existing nationalist and reformist leaderships.
Banda, as one of the key theoretical defenders over decades of Healy's crude political assertions, has until now been very much part of this problem. His document however points no way towards solving it.
Instead of recognising that the key strengths which underlay the continued existence and attractive power to Trotskyism - despite its rotten and sectarian leaderships -revolutionary aspirations of the youth and workers drawn into its ranks, their attempts to fight reformism and bourgeois tionalism, and their willingness to struggle in practice, against all the odds, for what they belived to be a correct line, Banda dismisses every struggle, every intervention, every slogan as the outcome of some sick, manoeuvre.
Instead of drawing a balance sheet of post-war Trotskyism with a view to reconstructing a principled programmatic basis on which the most determined forces could be re-organised and united, Banda's approach is that of a single-minded accountant, seeking bankrupt and bring in the liquidator. In demoralisation Helay's aloof sectarian dismissal of every other tendency as worthless except he now brands his own tendency as the worst of all!
This kind of demoralisation is by no means surprising as following the de-throning of Healy, whose personal prestige and authority acted as the keystone to the WRP's self-satisfied conception of representing the sole "continuity of Trotskyism" against an evil "revisionists" and imagined or real police/FBI/GPU spies.
But by one-sidedly and subjectively opening up a discussion on the history of the movement without fixing the terms of the debate or insisting upon an orientation toward today's living workers' Banda's line is exposing the WRP majority to the danger of predatory raids by lanatical sectarians such as the Spartacists the Workers Power, who feed off the casualties of demoralisation.
Such groupings have points to score on the bankruptcy of the
•- PARTI COMMUNISTE to post-war
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Stalinism, naeffectively the history of the WRP cynical
But they have a line for the presentmost extravagent lunacies.
blunders of the past: few sectarians anything useful on offer for the actual problems facing the WRP today. And when it comes to making criticisms of the history of particular people like the should hesitate botoze rowing despicable Spartacist a backlash
Poland and supporting immigration controls in the imperialist countries
(to name but two obvious points) or a regime should be an eye-opener for horde of wavering WRP members.
their Healy-style open letter listing their ready denunciations of every other
WRPI) as "centrist", apparently open-minded suggestion of imediate fusion movement, might seem to be a more attractive the Spartacists, nor is their history home-grown one of any exemplary practical work in the British
"potted history" served up for wouldendless be WRP "comrades" carefully skirts around their own relatively
Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p30
PROLETAIRES DE TOUR LES PATA, UNISSEE-VOUR I
NUMERO SPICIAL
LA VÉRITÉ
Hitler ne doil me exploltears cap
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Tutte de canissesen Jain 36
French Trotskyists and others in occupied Europe risked everything to campaign underground in World War 2: the movement is much more than the weakness of its every other tendency bar their own.
day class struggle which is easily as sterile and self-isolating as Healy's
Any fool with the benefit of hind point the finger at the anything deeper to say
Spartacists who quick look at megalomaniac degenerate internal struggle,
At first sight Workers Power, with orthodoxy.
current (save for now and with their with the WRP.
But they are no more honest than class struggle. Their small,
Le journal des trotskysies qui funteur depuls 5 ana doms
Calligalile coatre in guerre imperinliste et At dervour fascist.
Affondre la situation et passer & action et la réaction, contre ates. Suives le mot d'ordre sont entrés en lutte
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Fastenrite abandonment of the state capitalist analysis on the Stalinist states, claiming that "...on Stalinism and many other questions we have maintained consistently revolutionary positions in contradistinction to the waverings of the centrists."
Banda-like, tively write off the whole post war history of the Fourth International fosill But in place of the stig com placency of the "thin red line' cept of Trotskyist continuity so long cherished by Healy and the WRP
Workers Power (who have never led struggles substitute the arrogance of
"minute red blob" theory of a grouping magically discovering the elixir of centrists.
from nowhere and with no record of themsleves authorities on Trotskyist
Hastening to score cheap points on the numerical decline of other groupings on the left, Workers Power swagboast and inflate the picture of eir own size, with wiltully deceptive claims for the size of their support amongst miners, and their ludicrous slogan of launching a new rank and file "minority movement" in the NUM consisting of themselves and a few close supporters.
Behind the bravado and bluster is the harsh fact that Workers Power is a ossified, sectarian current which has never succeeded in work-
Will WRP break from its sectarian abstention from the functioning Miners" Support Committees and other broad campaigns?
mAlr ing constructively with any number of unaffiliated workers or with any other forces on the hard left in any flurry of activity around the miners significant campaign. strike, Workers Power's main focus for political intervention - like that of the Spartacists 1s meetings of other currents on the left. Broad campaigns and initiatives they see purely and simply as an occasion for polemics and a platform for their own sectarian politics splitting and ultimatums. Their conception of a 'united front' is one in which all forces involved agree to unite behind the Workers Power programme!
Curiously, the Workers "planks for a fusion platform" skirt around the fundamental democratic centralism.
Could this be becasue the whole "fusion" ploy is not so open and fraternal after all, but a deliberate manoeuvre to lure around some unsuspecting WRP militants, recognising that it is not a viable possibility with the group as a whole? Why else would Workers Power as a minority in any fusion with the WRP not even mention the question of in-
2DAШ nolga
NO VICTIMISATIEN ternal regime and the rights to form minority tendencies especially in the aftermath of the ex-
Despite posure of the Healy regime?
Whatever the propaganda parasitic members
WRP politics of Workers Power would be to still the leave the sectarianism of Healy and Banda - intact, and duck the central problem of relating seriously to the actual struggles of the British labour movement.
hairrecognise and seek
Power issue of any section of that movement while
"Marxists" versus "revisionists".
Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p31 by guaranteed factions, and real plans of this organisations for group, embrace the to tionary
The priority at present for the WRP is not to reject out of hand the whole history of struggle - imperfect, inadequate, against the stream — of the post war Trotskyist movement, but to politically to tackle the common political problems which have remained unresolved by movement,
In other words, the lesson of the break from Helay and rejection of
Healy 's political methods, the lesson of the break from North and the nonsense about "IC continuity" must forward.
be a