treasures! SIX months after the trauma of expelling their former General Secretary for a horrendous record of violence, rape and corruption, the members of the Workers Revolutionary Party have yet to adopt a fresh perspective on the British and international class struggle - though debate flourishes on a range of issues.
This is one of a series of discussion articles submitted by Socialist Viewpoint supporters who were expelled from the WRP by Healy in 1974, seeking to draw out lessons of the latest split, and suggesting a political agenda for the way ahead. "TREASURES coated in dust." That was how WRP Central Committee member Richard Goldstein referred to the history of the Irotskyist movement as he introduced a Conway Hall meeting entitled "Tasks of the Fourth International.
Many militants in the WRP and elsewhere would query whether the coating is not in fact rather thicker, stickier, and more foul-smelling than "dust". But there is no doubt that one of the key tasks of the WRP - and othet forces seeking a way forward in the fight for Trotskyist politics - is to take a serious and constructive attitude to the experiences of the past.
Until recently most WRP thinking on the history of the Trotskyist movement had been reduced to the arrogant presumption that they alone (and particularly their now expelled and disgraced leader Gerry Healy) represented the "continuity" of the
By JOHN LISTER fight for Trotskyist orthodoxy against "Pabloism"
Under the code word "Pabloism" were summed up the politics of tail-ending "left" Stalinist currents, oportunist dissolution of Trotskyist forces into mass Communist Parties, and, later, political adaptation to petty bourgeois nationalist leaderships most significantly in Cuba and Algeria.
Now, of course, WRP members have to face up to the bureaucratic political degeneration of their own eadership which led them ever further and faster down the road of political capitulation to anticommunist bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaderships in the Middle East, the Stalinist bureaucrac in /ietnam, and even sections of the labour bureaucracy in Britain. The political record of the WRP under Healy exhibits all of the opportunism of Pablo who in the early 1950s openTrotskyism" boasted of "Junking the old
The struggle of WRP members now to find their bearings alter the expulsion of Healy has been complicated by the divided nature of the world Trotskyist movement. Since the major split of 1951-53 left a string of unanswered questions on the anlaysis of post-war Stalinism and set a new, deplorable "norm" of premature splits as a substitute for political struggle in a democratic centralist framework, each major world event has simply added to the prevailing political contusion fragmentation.
There are no shortages of pretenders to the title of "sole continuity" of Trotskyist orthodoxy. Best known of these is Pierre Lambert's Parti Communiste Internationale in France and its international hangers-on. The PCI offers the most striking echo of Healy's represssive internal regime, swaggering selfwar struggles Socialist Viewpoint No. 12 May 1986 p28
proclamation, theoretical bankruptcy and opportunist adaptation (in Lambert's case to social democracy and the reactionary Force Ouvrière union bureaucracy).
Other, smaller groups have emerged as a result of a succession of splits in the larger organisations: some, like the Spartacists, have evolved in their own curious fashion into bureaucratic cult groupings around their founder gurus.
Others, from outside the Trotskyist tradition altogether, have from time to time emerged and stridently proclaimed themselves to be the sole world arbiters of Trotskyist *OTthodoxy" power in Britait, One such grouping is Workers which breezily writes off the entire history of struggle of the Trotskyist movement since the war, and - from all the authority of a propaganda group with no record of practical work, and
which itself broke from state capitalism only six years ago, now presumes to brand every current but themselves as "centrist"
To fall into this school of politics would be a disaster for the WRP: it would do nothing to discard the sectarian method of Healy in relating to the British workers' movement or to the international forces which look to the Trotskyist programme.
Unfortunately it is not only Workers Power which has been peddling a wholly negative view on the post-war history of the Trotskyist movement. A similar point of view is contained in the lengthy document by Mike Banda "Twenty Seven Reasons (why the International Committee should be buried forthwith and the Fourth International built)". It is echoed by other WRP members. It is an understandable reaction to the skeletons that have tumbled out of the WRP's cupboards since Healy's expulsion - but it is one which leads nowhere.
Unless we seek to analyse and explore the lessons of history from the standpoint of actively developing a movement in the working class today, it has no value. And while any fool Soviet troops raise the Red Flag over the Reichstag at the end of World War 2: the post-war period demands a development of the Trotskyist programme of 1938.
for 1917. with the benefit of hindsight can compile a catalogue of past errors and urge they not be repeated, the task is to develop a leadership and a programme capable of taking foward the struggles of today's labour movement.
From this starting point, the unsuccessful, defeated or betrayed struggles, the false starts and mistaken analysis of various groupings are not simply scrap material for the dustbin of history but part of the living experience which must be the basis to strengtben and develop the programme and analysis of Marxists today.
The question which sectarian sceptics such as Workers Power must confront is: given the obvious weakness of failures of the Trotskyist movement, would the workers' movement now be better off if the various curring hemotives as rookiests had. ding themselves as Trotskyists not made the sacrifices, taken the risks, tried to shape history, fought for influence in the mass movement
- and made their mistakes? Would Marxists be wiser now — or more ignorant? Would there be more Marxists — or fewer? Would we be better placed to give leadership in the unions, the labour movement generally. or the struggles of the oppressed?
To ask the qustion is to answer it. Obviously the struggles waged by Trotskyists have been the only way Trotskyism could have stayed alive except in armchair circles of abstract academics and sectarian wranglers.
Nor is it the case that the existence of Trotskyism can be said to have stunted the growth of any more healthy, spontaneous revolutionary currents in the workers' movement. Trotskyist activity may have missed opportunities, tail-ended existing leaderships, adapted to mass moods, or (all too often) stood aside from necessary struggles, but its weaknesses are not by any means all self imposed: they have reflected the Socialist Viewpoint No. 12 May 1986 p29
Lessons of the defeat of failed Russian 1905 revolution helped Lenin and Trofsky prepare real material problems of developing a mass revolutionary break from existing leaderships under the pressures of imperialist ideology, reformism, Stalinism and nationalism.
We are not the first generation to encounter this kind of problem. Marx and Engels battled much of their political lives as a tiny minority of conscious revolutionaries in the very infancy of any independent labour movement. They were forced to draw their lessons not from unbroken victories but from the mixed and changing fortunes of the Chartist movement, the early British unions, the Fenian struggle, early struggles for bourgeois democracy and national liberation in Europe, and the Paris Commune.
They were forced to polemicise at length with now forgotten political opponents whose unfamiliar names today send readers skipping to the glossary: but from these actual strug iles for a grasp of the class struggle, rom their limited interventions into the events of the day, and from the experiences of the struggles that failed they developed the basic elements of the politics we fight for today - including the outlines of the theory of permanent revolution; the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the understanding of the bourgeois state; the principle of internationalism.
Lenin, too, developed much of the political strength which enabled the Solsheviks to take power trom a serious appraisal of the experience, and practice of the existing Marxist movement in its various forms - not least the defeats and betrayals it suffered. Lenin's insistence upon the need to smash the capitalist state machinery and replace it with a workers' state — a dictatorship of the proletariat — arose from his renewed study of the defeated Paris: Commune. The study of the failed Revolution of 1905 brought forward the importance of the soviet as the independent organ of workers power in challenging the state. It also trig-
gered which Com- world programme and The 1938 Pro- gramme" reformist by and their political and organisational situation. By understanding strengths and the movement. lines of There problems. and adapted to opted to adventures. On the other, dogmatism objective asses
in the since and
Wto all on existing the IC
exrole in and ved the
bankers. government, im-
Funder farmers, and Even the tist in actional divisions of the world
Bother important offer the oppor develop th make it mor explicit, more adequate as a guide to action.
Similarly a serious evaluation of the role played by the various Troskyist currents during the Cuban and Algerian revolutions should offer the the movement's understanding of the necessary principled orientation to mass-based anti-imperialist struggles and their leaderships.
The unique evolution of the Castro leadership from petty bourgeois nationalism to Stalinism, and the more commonplace processes of consolidation of the nationalist leadership in Algeria (the "model" for many susbequent
Tin Africa) presented serious problems of analysis for the Trotskyists of the day.
12 May 1986 p30
Re-examining after the a consistent dependent The dismal centrist OT from the sketch tary near-soviet the most ruling "mass pressure" ability of democratic) overturn leaderships dent exclusion of letariat struggles
the Nicaraguan tail- leadership Libyan leaderships in the (unlike social take to but recognises parasitic as of the working counter- global counter-
1956 Hungarian Revolution brought new concrete life to programme of political revolution.
of the mass movements of the day; with all its particular features, it is the raw material from which a new, more developed, more adequate gramme must be developed.
But the history of the movement also has lessons for Marxists in Britain. In particular the failure of the post-war Trotskyist movement develop a consistent orientation towards the Labour Party and to work in the mass organisations labour movement must be examined In the immediate post-war there were attempts to build the RCP as a small mass party outside the Labour Party at a time of truly massive illusions in the new Labour government. But the split, and the Healy group's turn to an opportunist deep-entry Bevanite current in the Labour Party, expecting it to evolve in a centrist or revolutionary direction, resolve the problem.
In the late 1950s, become the SLL/WRP, having won important forces from the Communist Party after Hungary, turned correctly to building a trade union base and to the youth as a force for change in the Labour Party. But after the successful fight for the leadership of the YS, the mass youth expulsions of 1964 led despite an initial period of serious campaigning - to the launching of a one-sided "party-building" abandoning any involvement in life of the Labour Party
This switch from mobilisation to a propaganda orientation became increasingly the norm for work in the unions, sketchy handful of substituted for any serious gramme of action or leadership in struggles.
By the 1974 general election, which returned a Labour government, the WRP lacked
virulently opposed, and expelled some of us for advocating) any pro- gramme of transitional which could relate to the new oppor- pro- tunities opened up as the workers' movement embarked on a series of militant struggles. Nor had any sec- tion serious work to to ional demands or link up the fight ir the unions with the fight inside the Labour Party against the predictable of the wage-cutting Period tionist government. case throughout the 1974-79 period subsequent revolt welled up trom the tank and file of the unions and the Labour Par- the ty after 1979, most Marxists were left into flat-footed, along, tail-ending events. did not political what was to recognise the need to prepare now for the shape after the next general election whenever that might be. from the break paigns anti-racist campaigns, exercise, the "new realist" agitation and port of workers in struggle. too, with a the Richard Goldstein analogy, slogans pro- (indeed Socialist Viewpoint No. 12 May 1986 p31
nearest bin. It is demands Marxist left done any not been opularise transi current. collabora- policies of the Wilson For the most part this remained the while others panted reassessment of the these lessons, struggles which will take deepening and This means a WRP's sectarian abstention from broad based cam- - print and