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SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT PRESENTI "International For an International Conference in 1987 for the of the Fourth International "bureaucracy and ihe Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p15
Nigg CHAM02 TREENIE political "по" the collapse Committee" Milli any their own. * WIF UKES Having Healy's the pale, and grouping
10p By JOHN LISTER IS there any easy answer to the
crisis and organisational fragmentation which have so weakened the post-war Trotskyist movement since the major split of 1953?
Is there any single initiative which can make up the political and theoretical ground that has been lost?
The answer to both questions is
But they are questions whch have arisen in a new way for members of
Workers Revolutionary Party following the expulsion a year ago of former leader Gerry Healy and the
Cof the "International which they had regarded as the sole continuity of Trotskyist politics.
Though WRP comrades come fresh to the problem, still few of them have
detailed knowledge of international currents other than
Ffor decades accepted line that the United Secretariat (USFI) could be simply dismissed as "Pabloite" and beyond
that every other was "revisionist WRP members have found it hard to catch up on the background and present-
day politics of other organisations. They have found it equally hard to conditioned break from the to the of hostility reponse though they have taken a rather more towards charitable line organisations about which they know as little or less. One of these is the International (LIT), based on Workers League Nahuel Moreno's Argentine Socialist Workers Party (PST), and sections in Latin America, and which modestly proclaims itself as World Trotskyist Movement". Moreno's Bolshevik faction broke from the USFI in 1979, and joined for a period with another oppositional current from the USFI and Conference" for "Open an Trotskyists to "revisionism" Nicaragua, the However Parity Committee the only; name politically which the access, full or open on the political issues top-level movement, took which this appeared dodged comprehensive, work lacked any democracy Equally Committee)" been proclaimed. resolve the crisis of Trotskyism. The outcome was a calling for resolution, conference to be held this year. This has alrady been published Morenist journals, and has just been adopted and published by the WRP (Workers Press, January 31) as we go to press. Far from seeking to open up a genuine discussion among the varied
of currents the movement, resolution appears to present a series gut of conclusions from a discussion that USFI, has never actually taken other preconditions the support to Conference". How else political traditions to resolution's curious insistence that by other an convening "The continuing the process by the begun Committee in 1953"? with of and the new "Open in programmatic was Still no analysis of but Gaddafi, down exclusion clauses central the world 1953 Trotskyist Fourth and discussion! without "process" which seeks to place significantly voluminously criticism any began then and of either ignominious debauchery. social serious democratic the fusion Internati and theoretical political denunciation and use phraseology noisily political struggle. Unfortunately which the United Secretariat today. lengthy statements, such a in certainly not prior to a discussion. Ironically, applied
today's Trotskyist few WRP / Morenist being conference! place, as attendance OI "International are readers from other interpret the for International Who resolution's Conference in 1987, the sponsors are which was International "revolutionary but WRP lays the was a year in which International split Is this the the Conterence in which glib continue? The resolution makes no political of the IC tradition which came to such an conclusion in Healy's The reality was that the IC made no reconstruct which had precipitated the 1953 split. Its attitude to the other wing of the FI, the International Secertariat, was to as a substitute for are many there indications that this is the attitude WRP/ Morenists are seeking to continue in relation to the The whole text, while littered with political questionable points and formulations sufficiently detailed to include specific items with which the USFI could not agree - many of these points have yet to be discussed in any detail by the WRP itself - and it they retrospectively, Moreno's current (or the WRP) only a Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p16
years ago, the same preconditions would result in them
excluded from their own
They say there is none so zealous as a repentant sinner: but the hypocrisy of the WRP struggling to keep out other tendencies by laying down such detailed political preconditions
participation in the political debate is breathtaking.
Scan be impressed by the sweeping three-word dismissals of what the WRP believe to be positions of the USFI and Lambert
These sideswipes — with many
upon the need to build Yet who is making this demand? The Witself which only 18 Vietnamese Stalinism and Gaddafi's Libyan regime, and still has
Ton the character of the Cuban state or its leadership!
The entire problem of the post-war "liquidationist revisionism" not a word on the chronic problem of movement and the development of the Marxist programme. calling for a "return to fundamentals, to the continuity of the struggle of
" sums up the conservatism and sectarian narrow-mindedness of the WRP / Morenist Conference call. It is an invitation to a conference in which on this basis there will be no real attempt to learn or to convince,
"orthodox" formulae would stand in place of serious development of programme. supporters, and others who these views or have other criticisms of the Confernece call, be allowed to argue this in the debate up to and
Othe Conference would we be excluded? Will the WRP deny that the objective is to exclude currents of world Trotskyism USFI and the Lambertists - without any discussion at all?
It is on these quesions that the seriousness of the Conference call, and its implications healthy development of the WRP in breaking from its Healyite past, must be jud peditical reconstruction of the Fourth International is a qualitative
task, involving the reworking of the 1938 Transitional
Programme and the fight an objective
appraisal by all Trotskyist currents of the lessons of the last 50 years of class
struggle. To prejudge the results of
this process is to kill it.
The calling of a World Conferene
is no short-cut: instead it may yet
become a damaging diversion.
After years of crisis and confusion: Political