struggles of the labour movement: on this issue the connection between a healthy regime and healthy political line is made clear in the need to reject sterile activist propagandism.
On the political level, a host of
=WRP crisis questions must be confronted
• Any real change on the Middle East calls for a serious analysis of the nature and historical development of the vicious regimes in Libya, Iraq. Iran, and Syria, each of which the WRP has from time to time defended. and a solid reappraisal of the politics of the Aralat wing of the PLO. The starting point must be the interests of the oppressed masses of the Middle East, and the fight for a strategy of permanent revolution, conveient alliances with wealth and power-
• This reappraisal must also include a rejection of the positions of adaptation to the Stalinist leadership in Vietnam, the scandalous justification of the murders of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and a reaffirmation of the need for political revolution against each of the Stalinist leadership internationally.
• The Healy experience underlined the appalling backwardness of the WRP on the question of women's oppression, where not even the lessons of Lenin, Trotsky and the First Four Congresses of the Communist International have been incorporated into the theory or practice of the party: in lact the development of the women's liberation movements in the post-war period demand rotskyists go much further in outlin ing a perspective for that fight.
• The Tennings. letter another side of WRP backwardness
on the question of gay rights and gay liberation, with the party taking a more backward position than many reformist councils! *The Workers Revolutionary Party has openly declared its political alliance with the revolutionary movements in the Arab world, Africa, Ireland and Latin America.
*These represent the continuation of Trotsky's struggle to resolve the crisis of leadership in the working class and build the world party of socialist revolution"*.
not Healy's rejection of situation in 1985. has any programme tervention. gross opportunist adaptations. ternational, WRP recognise that the "orthodox". Pabloite" International has on Vietnam and the Middle East that adopted far worse political positions than even Pablo himself. The only real comparison with WRP adapta reveals tions to Khomeini and Arafat is the Castroite line of the American SWP jected Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, LIBYA GADDAFI SPEAKS Socialist Viewpoint No.
repudiated Trotsky • The central issue of the relation- built. ship of Marxists to the British Labour Party must be faced in the light of the cock-eyed Healy's analysis of the period and the actual • The WRP's trade union work, which has been in a state of collapse since the 1974 expulsions, and which could only languish in the absence of transitional of also suffered from the • On the question of the Fourth In- comrades expulsions, must "anti- calumny. Committee the struggle and policies. -who have gone the whole hog, re- effectively and 'Our Libyan Arab people on this date, the date of the eighth anniversary of the upsurge of the Great Revolution, stand with power in their hands, with wealth in their hands and with weapons icember 1985 p36
Othe call for political revolution. Far from lecturing the rest of the crisis-ridden Trotskyist movement, or denouncing them lock, stock and barrel as "revisionists" WRP members (and IC sections) must now confront the actual situation and political degeneration of the move: ment as a whole, of which the WRP is a part! The unresolved political problems of the 1953 split in the Fourth International, the Cuban revolution. and the whole post-war crisis of the FI cannot be wished away or ignored: they must be politically confronted if a revolutionary International is to be
We cannot offer ready answers to all these questions. But we have ad dressed many of them to some extent since our expulsions in 1974. We have carried out a continuing strug gle in the labour movement for principle and programme. And we offer now to discuss all or any of these issues with WRP members who wish to carry forward the fight for Marxism despite,the betrayals of Healy.
We are among the supporters of
magazine Socialist Viewpoint. We have survived intimidation, mass
Tand eleven years of provocations and abuse from Healy to continue the battle for Trotskyism. You can survive it, too, and still make a real contribution to
Ffor socialism, if you make a real break from past methods
Our views are summed up in Battle for Trostskyism, and other publications. Why not find out more? EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER REVOLUTION
The downhill path
= WRP crisis : since 1974 Extract from 1979 Introduction to Battle for Trotskyism "The Battle for Trotskyism" was the chronicle of the 1974 expulsions. It was published in 1976 by what was then the Workers Socialist League. This extract is from the second (1979) edition. The WSL published a paper. "Socialist Press", from 1975-1981. For further details, contact Socialist Viewpoint. WHEN the group of comrades who formed JTION the Workers Socialist League were expelled from the WRP in December 1974 we predicted that the speed at which the WRP was degenerating would bring about its collapse disintegration relatively quickly.
Indeed it seems certain that this would have been the case if the Healy leadership's subsequent opportunist turn to support for petty bourgeols and bourgeois Araba nationalist leaders had not provided an artiticial and temporary stay of execution.
The reality is that even now, live years after OUT expulsion, the political degeneration is still working its way through into organisational crisis and disintegration. The last six months alone have seen at least two waves of expulsions from the WRP, which is only a tiny fraction of the size it was in 1974. The sales of its daily paper, Newsline, are clearly negligibie: bundles of copies lie uncollected at main railway stations and the paper is unobtainable many former WRP strongholds.
The scale of the crisis is such that even the WRP Political Committee has had to admit it publicly and take steps to cut back on the Party's extensive apparatus and the size of the paper. But these stepe cannot stablise a movement that has abandoned every shred of past principles and that retains the allegiance of its members only by the most fantastic and monstrous slander campaigns against its political opponents.
Mike Banda
Ours was not an opposition that simply reacted to this or that aspect of Healyism such as the total denial of democratic centalism within the WRP; the sectarian, the absence of international perspective; or the cavalier attitude towards the history of the Trotskyist movement. We set out from the outset to confront Healy's method and to contrast it to that spelled out in the ap proach of the Transitional Programme. We tocussed on the necessity for a programme capable of mobilising workers in struggle in such a way as to lead them to grasp the bankruptcy of their reformist and Stalinist leaders and the need for the revolutionary seizure of power.
The introduction to the first (February 1976) edition of Battle for Trotskyism points to the obvious weaknesses that were contained in our early documents weaknesses that flowed from the conditions in which they were written, the in¡tailly limited purposes they were intended to serve, and the newness of the problems they confront. Yet they represent the most developed opposition yet to emerge from the ranks of the SLL/WRP Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p37
Healy is acutely aware of this. Today the pages of Newsline are regularly being filled once more with foul slanders against the Workers Socialist League and our members. We see this as a sign of desperate weakness. Healy recognises us as a threat to which he has no political answer. So he sets out at all costs to wall off members and ex-members of the IC from any objective assessment of our positions and our record in practice.
As the Third Document - a detailed account of our expulsions - shows, it was our ready acceptance of a challenge by Healy to develop a second document taking up the questions he posed, that decided him to prepare our expulsions before the WRP conference that was supposedly to debate our positions.
In a bid to prevent us winning a broader base of support we were framed up on organisational charges, expelled a week before the conference, and vilified in our absence by the leadership from the conterence platform. Even the notional democratic rights laid down by the WRP constitution were violated.
Today's crisis in the WRP however finds Healy more desperate than ever — and the slanders more vitriolic.
The most disgusting slanders to date have been aimed at Socialist Press editor John Lister. A former full-timer area organiser for the WRP. Lister Is now cynically branded by Newsline as an FBI agent!
A Newsline weekend supplement, dated May 5 1979, and entitled "Security and the Fourth International", carried three articles. The introduction stated:
"The Newsline weekend supplement today publishes three articles on the FBI-CIA spy network of the late Joseph Hansen. double agent and long-time leader of the United States revisionist Socialist Workers Party...
Today we publish vital new chapters in the investigation showing the world. wide tentacles of Hansen's network: in Latin America, Australia and Britain."
The third of these articles, on Britain, is entitled "John Lister: the FBI Oxford Attorney"
Naturally the article offered not a shred of proof to connect Lister in any way whatever with the FBI: but, more abysmally still, it could not even fabricate anything to connect Lister with Hansen either! Far from being one of the "world-wide tentacles of Hansen's network". Lister had never so much as met, spoken with or received communication from Hansen in any shape or form. Indeed the nearest thing to a link between the two is the fact that as a national organiser for the WSL Lister last year sent Hansen a copy of a letter (since published) pressing the case for the circulation of the WSL document The Poisoned Well". Hansen did not reply!
The WRP case therefore had to be flimsy. But in fact it hung on an outright and conscious lie. Newsline claims that Lister wrote in Socialist Press an article that sup-
-WRP crisis ported the SWP's proposal for a financial settlement to their five year 540 million lawsuit against the FBI. The anonymous. WRP hack speculates that the reason for this is:
"perhaps, because the FBI leaders of the SWP have promised Lister himself a cut of the proceeds if and blood money is received."
But of course Lister's article did not support but positively denounced - the SWP's proposal for a financial settlemet! It went on to affock the way in which the SWP had talled to take the lessons of its cout action against the trade union and labour movement!
Thus one: deliberate Newsline lie becomes for Healy the basis for accusing the editor of Socialist Press of being an FBI agent! What value, we to place on the "investigation" that supposedly backs the WRP's travagant and voluminous reams of accusations against Joseph Hansen George Novack? The WRP leaders have adopted the time-honoured method of using slander to wall off their members from discussion with political opponents, In case anyone should doubt this. Newsline Itself has admitted its intentions by ending an article entitled Clique" (May 16) with the words:
"Workers and youth must be on guard against this group and have whatsoever to do with it. You don't know who you will be talking where he will turn up next." (emphasis added)
This same article significantly refers to some extent to the 1974 expulsions. In doing so it reveals that Healy has continued to embroider on the WRPs original lying account of events.
The Third Document goes into the original fabrication of a "quote" from Alan Thornett which supposedly "real" position on the Labour Goernment. The statement was allegedly made at a WRP Central Committee meeting September 14, 1974, before the Document was produced. Cliff Slaughter claimed that Thornett had said that the working class would come into conflict with capitalism "through the Labour Government*
As the Third Document points out:
"It is never mentioned, of course. that Thornett Immediately challenged the accuracy of it. or that no such position appeared in either of the two political - documents he submitted, of such statement has ever appeared in Socialist Press or in any statements or literature put out by the WSL."
But, relying as ever on the receding Healy has now developed the lie. Tro of remaining WRP reads:
"With Wilson back In Downing Street. the Thornett clique [!) put forward the utterly reactionary and anti-Marxist view that the strength of the mass movement will force the Wilson government to carry out measures.
The WRP Central Committee overwhelmingly rejected Thornett's position as a complete capitulation to democracy and the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.
History has vindicated the WRPI
History normally does "Vindicate you" I you make it up to justity your actions as you go along. The whole account here Is based on a lie, and designed to persuade
readers Invite to themselves in Battle for Trotskyism. 1974, states on page 3: when the Labour Government will open the door to reaction. And on page 21: FBI into the US and ludicrous class.* then, are Events since 1974 mote ex- and opposite contained within it Stalinist quotes the 1974 examples Thornett's perialism's "thieves kitchen" nothing Imperialism. position from criticiam of Arafat to un- to critical support for him. action and manoeuvre carried out by these anti-communist famous Iraqi Ba'athist regime's execution and torture of Communist Party members. students and trade unionists has been publicly endorsed by Newsline. atlacks on the oppresssed Kurdish minori- ty are defended let slip our dish people as "CIA agents". The WRP's previous correct support for the historic Kurdish from obliterated First Ba'athist speakers are feted at WRP con- terences. and Newsline "socialist transformation" of Irag. whose people are tree to do anything but Independently organise political parties or genuine workers and peasants* councils Newsline. his speeches critically, and his brazen anti-communism ignored. that no now extended to include Ayatollah Kho- whose meini, 1 reconstitution of the Shah's shattered ar- my, endorsement of the wholesale murder members, of gays, attacks on the rights of Iranian and women, liberation struggles by national minoritles are all detended by the WRP. They accuse anyone opposing Khomeini's reactionary policies of being CIA inspired. was even given to dead Aigerian dictator Boumedienne, whose right wing positions anti-capitalist were notorious. on Khomeini has been the principled one social of critically supporting him in his calls for the downlall of the Shah, while warning that Khomeini offers no political solution to the problems of the Iranian masses, which be resolved only through can revolution. But when meini/Bazargan government's repression Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p38
the reader that our oppostion in the WRP was based on this fabricated position. We
see the truth for
On Social Democracy, the First Doeument, for Instance, produced in November
*It is indisputable of course that this
will betray and
This Labour Government will seek revolution by every means available to it to betray those workers who voted it into office. Our task is to warn continuously of this. Social Democracy is the principle agency of the ruling class within the working
History, we think, has vindicated us.
Chinese Shek's
The Second Document makes the important point that sectarianism always has its
Cof Kuomintang! slides into opportunism" (pages 68-9). It failure to call for the building of Trotskyist parties for political revolution in North Vietnam or China. And it examines the praise in Workers Press for Yassir Arafat's appearance at the United Nations _ Imdescribed as a "serious blow to US-Israeli
" It shows the WRP's switch of Stalinism
The WRP has slavishly defended every
despots: Even the InLemphasis the Ba'athist by branding the Kur- workers programme." liberation struggle has been the record, Instead talks of the
Libyan bonapartist dictator Gaddafi —
Tin unions, revolution. - it promoted In countries reprinted UnT Newsline's bootlicking subservience has
mover to organise the attempt militarily to crush against tion And posthumous WRP seal of approval
revolution, The Workers' Socialist League's position:
social we attacked the Kho- masses.
of women's righta, Newsline replied:
"And now to compound the confusion
- and complete the monstrous cam-
paign of slander and misrepresentation
- the man who symbolised the revolu-
tionary aspirations of the Iranian peo-
ple and their struggle against the
Shah's despotism. Ayatollah Khomelni.
is condemned as a religious bigot
(Newsline, 10.4.79).
For the WRP, therfore, the Iranian
15 completed with the
emergence of the present bourgecis na-
tonalist government! This stand, echoing
Healy's defence of the murder of CP
members by the Iraqui Ba'athists would, 1f
applied in 1926-7 in China have placed
the WRP leaders to the right of Stalin, for-
cing them to defend the mass murder of
members by Chiang Kai
tionalist forces, Even Stalin felt obliged to "anti-imperialist" bourgeois na-
seek out "left" elements within Chiang's
Indeed the WRP's abandonment of the Trotskyist theory of Permanent Revolution Is so brazen that it just has to be deliberate and conscious. It flies in the face of a formally correct article on the Iranian revolution in the WRP's own "theoretical" Journal Labour Review published as late as December 1978. That states:
"Ranged against world imperialism.
Tand the Shah's dictatorial military-police state. stand the revolutionary masses of Iran. All they lack is conscious leadership. The "democratic"
Cof the bourgeois National Front and the Mosiem religious leaders
Padded] is no answer to the social and economic problems facing
masses of Iran. The Tudeh (Stalinist) Party of Iran meanwhile strives might and main to limit the
Tand peasants to that
The Tudeh Stalinists will no doubt be relleved to hear they now have the unsolicited assistance of the WRP in this line of class betrayal. But the Labour Review article suggested a very different line:
"What is required in Iran, however. is the construction of a party based on the theories of Marx. Engels. Lenin and Trotsky. In his theory of the permanent
Trotsky insisted that in with a belated bourgeois development. especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, democarcy and national emancipation could be achieved only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the working class leading the peasant masses...
... this alliance (between the working class and peasantry] could be forged only through an irreconcilable struggle
Othe national-liberal bourgeoisie ... the democratic revolu-
grows over directly into the socialist revolution." (p408)
By April 1979, a mere four months after this formally correct defence of permanent
Khomeini's support for the PLO heralded a fresh about-face by the WRP to complete support for the Islamic leader and a refusal to criticise his moves to suppress democratic rights. Indeed history has vindicated the formal orthodoxy of the WRP last December and refuted the opportunist line of the WRP in April 1979, as Khomeini has proved that his Isalmic capitalist regime is incapable of oflering democratic rights to the Iranian
Small wonder that the IC, for all its press
WRP crisis E WRP helped fuel TGWU witch-hunt against Trotskyists. coverage of the area, has no sections in the Middle East. The dropping of the theory of permanent revolution Indicates that they do not believe Trotskyist parties to be necessary for the struggles of the masses; and such parties would only be an embarassment to the WRP's cross-class, popular frontist strategy of "alliances with the national liberation movements"
Such alliances mean in practice throwIng the columns of Newsline open for the demagogic "anti-imperialist" statements of Arab bourgeois governments and governing parties, coupled with periodic official visits by Healy or Vanessa Redgrave to reactionary Sheikhdoms to collect donatons to the Newsline's libel fund or to sell feudal rulers exclusive government rights on the WRP film "The Palestinian"
But such opportunism in relation to Middle East regimes is reflected also in the WRP's adaptation to Vietnamese Stalinism. Shortly after the expulsion of the 1974 opposition, the WRP disgraced itself by etfectively defending the murder of the Viet namese Trotskyists by Ho Chi Minh's Stalinist forces in the post-war period, and awarding the Stalinists the credentials of having carried out a consistent revolutionary line. This has now extended into WRP endorsement for the Vietnamese bureaucracy's invasion of Cambodia.
The Workers' Socialist League, in contrast, has put forward a consistent line of exposing the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism and advocating demands on which workers can move into struggle for their independent interests and challenge the bureaucracy. The WRP in Britain
Healy's opportunism has not been restricted to the international level. It has coloured every aspect of the WRP's prac-
T& tice in the British labour movement.
In the Introduction to the 1976 first edition lof Battle for Trotskyism] we referred to the role of WRP Central Committee member Tom White in entering a class collaborationist "workers' participation" committee at British Leyland's Cowley plant.
White's hell-for-leather degeneration has since led him to resign from his position on the Committee of the TGWU 5/293 Branch In the plant at the height of a right wing anti-Trotskyist witch-hunt by the TGWU bureaucracy. In his resignation letter, handed to the bureaucracy. White declared that the WL members and supporters who laced recommended punishment including expulsion from the union - were gullty of the trumped up charges levelled at them by local union officials.
The Cowley Plant is (with the exception of Equity!) the one section of the trade union movement where the WRP still hold a leading position.
White's opportunism theretore provides a good means of comparing the practical record of the WRP to that of the WSL.
Leyland has been the test-bed for the specific method and form of attack adopted by successive Labour governments.
"Participation" committees - joint union/management bodies — were formed as part of this strategic attack. Their aim was to suck convenors and stewards into arguing that there was a joint interest between workers and management. and pressing for sacrifices on the shop floor to
'save the company"
While Tom White willingly cooperated in this new set-up and went into participation, the Workers Socialist League and its supporters tought tooth and nail against it at every stage. Under our leadership the Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p39
TGWU Branch fought all the way for the independent class interests of the workers, and stuggled to expose those that col laborated with management. For this, and the fact that our members and supporters fought against workers being sacked, and for wage demands that would defend livIng standards, we have been continuously under attack from the TGWU bureaucracy-
We challenge Henly to give an account of anything White has done to fight the TGWU witch-hunters or to mobilise workers against attacks by Leyland management during the last five years.
It is easy to avoid attacks from the bureaucracy — If you follow White's example and keep your head down while the management moves into attack conditions and union rights. But while the WRP snipes at us from the right, the workers of Cowley have shown their confidence in the policies we have tought for in the trade unions. And skilled workers and toolmakers in British Leyland have witnessed the bureaucratic repression that is heaped by union leaders on any section that attempts to stand up for its independent interests.
For the WRP, the class struggle has been reduced to an occasion for superficial or uncritical comment in Newsline and occasional expeditions to picket lines with exhortations to "join the revolutionary party". The maximum slogans of its journalistic coverage in fact cover an abandonment of workers to the minimum programme of the trade union bureaucracy and spontaneous trade union militancy.
In other words every aspect of the WRP's practical record in the struggle vindicates the warnings and analysis presented in 1974 in Alan Thornett's First Document. The WRP for all its talk of "brInging down" the Labour Government has played no role in the real struggle against it.
The WRP continues to ignore the necessity for such work. Healy's blend of sectarianism and opportunism could be clearly seen in the General Election. Despite the dwindling size of the WRP, the Party made the grandiose gesture of standing six times as many candidates as in 1974 — thus getting five minutes on television. Few of the 60 candidates were backed by any local organisation, or carried out any real campaign in the election. The television broadcast was Healy's attempt to jump over the lack of numbers, while posing as "the party of the left.
But what did the broadcast actually say? It Included no attacks on the union bureaucracy. It offered no analysis of Stalinism. It failed to mention Trotskyism or the Fourth International.
And while correctly defending national liberation movements, the perspective was totally national in character and abstact in content. In this way the maximumminimum election programme attacked in Alan Thornett's First Document lives on today in an even more degenerate WRP.
After five years of slanders, lies and evasions, we do not expect any answer from Healy and the WRP leadership to the points we raise.
But we do hope that members and ex-members of the WRP who are appalled by the politics and the actions of the Healy leadership study the material put forward, take the decision to break from Healyism, and join us in the battle for Trotskyism.
June 1979
Working to co-ordinate
Othe hard left By JENNY FISHER IT's not all gloom and doom. While the casual reader of the bourgeois press might think that all the left is doing is splitting apart and clogging up the bookstalls with yet more new magazines, one initiative aimed at uniting the left - at least in action - has quietly been plugging away at what could seem an impossible task for the last few months.
After an initial meeting earlier this year, Labour Lelt Co-ordination was ormed to bring together the sup porters of various newspapers, magazines, campaigns and pressure groups on the leff of the labour move ment. Our first "outing" was at Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth; and was the fruit of weeks oft the careful planning necessary to mount such a joint initiative.
In Bournemouth,