Conference" - or a dialogue of the deaf?
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Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p15
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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 of 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 for 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
Who resolution's
Conference in 1987, the sponsors are which was
"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.
can 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 on 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 the 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.