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The Battle for Trotskyism

Documents of the opposition expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974.

Written: 1974.
First Published: February 1976.
Source: Published by Folrose Ltd. for the Workers Socialist League.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Sean Robertson for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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Second Document on Party Policy and Perspectives

This document arises from Comrade Healy’s challenge to me, in front of the Western Area Aggregate, to answer the following questions. He agreed that my reply could be contained in a further document to be circulated to the Party prior to the Conference.

1. If you say that the leadership of the Party is sectarian, then this Party is a bankrupt party. Will you explain, therefore, the historical, philosophical and class content of the degeneration?

2. If the Party, as you say, contains within it the core of Trotskyism, how can it be a degenerate party? At what point does the degeneration start?

3. If you say that the leadership of the party is sectarian, how does this reflect itself into the international perspectives of the I.C.?

In addition to replying to these points, I shall present material in answer to Comrade Healy’s statement that, “there will be no factions in this Party before or after the Conference. I will expel anyone who tries to form a faction in this party”.

I have also included further material on workers’ control, in reply to the second document of the leadership.

The fact that I have been expelled before the Conference, and that this document has been suppressed, makes no difference. I submit it as a conference document, asking comrades to read it objectively, on the basis of the politics it contains, and not to be influenced by the efforts t denigrate me.

To tackle the theoretical and political degeneration of this party necessarily involves a historical study of the movement from the start. Much of the material necessary to do this is not available to me, and much has, no doubt, been lost. I can only draw out what seem to be important points in the development of British Trotskyism, and pose questions to which definite answers cannot always yet be given.

It might seem that a history of the party is a history revolving around the political development of one man – Comrade Gerry Healy. This is because he is the only leading party comrade who has been through much of the rich experiences which have made the party. Very much because of this, his position and political method is the dominant one inside the party, and any analysis of the party’s position must start out from this.

Comrade Healy may object that he is being made the object of a campaign of “character assassination”. My only reply can be that we must analyse objectively what has produced the present party bureaucracy, and this means examining people’s history.

I would remind Comrade Healy of his political attack on James P. Cannon in his pamphlet, “Problems of the Fourth International”:

“Trotsky’s theoretical genius flowed from the entire revolutionary experience of the Soviet Union, both in its triumph and degeneration. Cannon’s politics, on the other hand, were mainly derived during the period of Soviet degeneration and defeat for the international working class outside the U.S.S.R.

“His early years in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. provided him with a meagre grasp of Marxist theory. Like the rest of the party leaders, he was imbued with pragmatism (if it works, It is all right), and his relation to Trotsky was based on this method.

“He correctly saw Trotsky as the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian revolution, and when the break with Stalin took place after Lenin’s death, he concluded that Trotsky had the correct political position.

“Cannon was strengthened in his conclusion by the immediate conflict of factions within the American Communist Party . . . It was a pragmatic decision dictated by the factional situation within the C.P. of U.S.A., which produced important results, especially during Trotsky’s life-time.”
(Problems of the Fourth International, pp. 10-11)

This technique might be described as denigration, but the irony of it is that all of this description applied equally, if not more so, to the original author. Comrade Healy, like Cannon, spent time in a degenerate Communist Party. Plainly, from the newly-published documents on the fight against Pablo, he can be seen to have leaned almost exclusively on the theoretical strengths of the S.W.P. (such as they were), and their defence of “orthodox Trotskyism”. (See later in this document) in fact, the British Trotskyist movement seems to have been distinguished by having produced scarcely a single theoretical document during the entire period of the struggle against Pablo, leading to the split in 1953, and, indeed, throughout the whole period 1950-1956. This is certainly suggestive of a “meagre grasp of Marxist theory” in the British leadership. I will return to these points in more detail.

A brief examination of what Cannon, in one of his letters (Vol. 1, pp. 261-2), calls the “pre-history” of British Trotskyism, is important first, however, if we are to understand the evolution and degeneration that has taken place.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920, as a direct result of the intervention of Lenin, to secure the unification of the various Marxist groups. From the start the new party tended towards sectarianism, but was able to capitalise on the impetus to the working class movement of the Russian Revolution, and to carry out important and valuable work in the early 1920’s.

This was much as the direct result of the initiatives of the Comintern, which followed the Party’s development, through to 1923. The reorganisation of the party’s work, which began in 1923, however, while providing immediately some important gains, in the long term turned out to be a double-edged sword.

Brian Pearce, in the SLL publication, Early History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, makes this clear in his explanation of why, by 1926, the CPGB:

“had acquired the reputation, despite its small size, of being a model section of the (Stalinised) Comintern. The resolution of the enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, held in February, praised the ‘absence of factional struggles in the British Party’”.
(p. 60)

Brian Pearce then refers back, for an explanation, to the reorganisation:

“The factors determining this docility were doubtless many, and at present one can only speculate on the basis of insufficient material. Of some importance, probably, was the circumstance that the reorganisation of 1923 equipped a small party with a top-heavy hierarchy of full-time officials. In the atmosphere of international bureaucratic centralism, as it developed from 1923 onwards, these officials evolved a close-knit freemasonry, based on unquestioning loyalty to the Comintern leadership. As it grew more and more apparent that, if only because of the Comintern policy, the CPGB was not going to lead a revolution in Britain, the importance of conformity to the current Moscow line, as against respect for Marxist principle or the facts of the situation in Britain, would acquire increasing weight.”

In this instructive passage, Pearce traces bureaucratic degeneration, from its material base (the top-heavy hierarchy imposed by directive from the Comintern after 1925) through to its political and theoretical degeneration, taking the form of the slavish adherence to the Comintern line, the absence of factions, and so on. Conspicuously, this political subservience, once established, continued on to the left zig-zag of Stalin’s “Third Period”:

“ . . . The CPGB . . . was to retain and consolidate this characteristic of exceptional readiness to follow the latest Moscow line. Even in 1929, Campbell, Rothstein and the others, who at first resisted the ‘Third Period’ swing to the left, came to heel, as soon as they saw that the Comintern meant business. The Murphy and ‘Balham Group’ affairs were tea-cup storms by Continental or American standards. (It complements this relative docility of the British Communist Party that in this country ‘Trotskyism’ developed in the 1930’s mainly outside the ranks of Communists and ex-Communists, through the ILP.)”
(Pearce, p. 60)

It was this Communist Party, with its apparatus conceptions of party-building, its “freemasonry” of national leadership, and (from 1928 until late 1934) its ultra-left sectarian politics, which Comrade Healy joined, and where he spent his early years of political life.

It could hardly have been otherwise, given the period and the objective forces at work in the Labour and Trade Union Movement, together with the continuing degeneration of the Communist Party. Yet an examination of party methods prevalent now within the Workers Revolutionary Party must now force us back to re-examine the history of its leadership.

We have been told by Healy that he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1936, on the question of social-fascism, and that he then immediately joined the Trotskyist movement. It is not quite clear how this could be the case. By late 1934 already every Communist Party internationally was putting forward the Moscow-inspired policy of seeking alliances, not only with social democrats, liberals and churchmen, but with “progressive sections of the bourgeoisie”.

It is from that time that the Communist Party has stood, almost uniformly, to the right of the Trotskyist movement, and has viewed Trotskyism as an ultra-left tendency. Consequently, any member of the Communist Party who was holding on to a “social-fascist” position would have been expelled in 1936, but certainly not anyone criticising “social-fascism”. Perhaps Comrade Healy can clarify this problem in his reply?

Regardless of the weaknesses or strengths of individuals, the Trotskyist movement in the 1930’s and 1940’s embodied some very real weak points, which have been widely acknowledged. Peter Fryer (then a leading SLL journalist) wrote in his book, The Battle for Socialism (checked by G. Healy, M. Banda and others):

“The great achievement of these (Marxist) organisations was that, in a period of reaction, under exceptionally difficult circumstances, they brought the Marxist critique of Stalinist theory and practice and the Marxist alternative to Stalinism to the attention of enough working class militants to ensure the movement’s continuity. Without doubt these Marxist groups had great weaknesses. The Communist opposition, from which they emerged and in which they were cradled, inherited some of the less happy features of Comintern line and language during the so-called “Third Period” of left sectarianism. The Marxist groups could not but bear the stamp of the Communist Party from which they sprang; could not but share its virtual isolation from the mass movement, its tendency to adventurism and the harshness of its language towards political opponents, particularly those who were close to its own point of view. To these sectarian features, the Marxist groups added an often fierce internecine war, in which the clash of personalities seems to have caused almost as much rancour as differences over principle”.
(pp. 144-5)

Fryer qualifies this criticism, of course, by adding:

“It is less important to criticise their defects than to pay tribute to the fortitude of their members, who carried the torch of Marxism through more than a decade of darkness. It often flickered, but it never went out. We shall always be in their debt.”

Both sides of this account have validity when we come to assess the historical roots of the present degeneration of the party leadership, Without these comrades, whatever their subjective weaknesses, there would be no British Trotskyist movement today. Yet we would be blind to ignore the obvious ancestry of the personal denigration, sectarian positions and internal cliquism, which today are such a manifest scar on the practice of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and which now endanger the theoretical foundation of the movement at its very root. It is one thing for such methods to predominate in a tiny organisation, a propaganda sect, isolated as a result of objective historical forces from the mass movement of the working class. It is the opposite thing for these methods to carry over into a broadly based party with the task of preparing the revolutionary leadership with the capability of actually leading sections of workers in the struggle for power. It comes out clearly as a method when we contrast the rapid quantitative expansion of national membership of the SLL which took place in the campaigns leading to the launching of the Workers Revolutionary Party and immediately afterwards, with the narrow-based, tightly-knit central leadership of the party, which was and is unable to train and bring forward into a position of national leadership a single new comrade. Thus all decisions and policy rest exclusively with a narrow circle, and this, in my opinion, means that there has been no qualitative development in the ‘transformation’ of the Socialist Labour League into the Workers Revolutionary Party. I would like the party leadership to give their explanation of their inability to train new cadres.

Certainly the domination of the Trotskyist movement by a clique has a definite precedent, in the period of Haston in the 1940’s. Cannon, in the letter already referred to, is quite clear on the regime that existed then (though we must not have any illusions on Cannon’s position either):

“I know, and have even tried to explain to others more than once, that organisational procedures and questions are subordinate to political considerations, and in the long run can only serve them.”

“But it is no less true that, in certain situations, and to a certain extent, organisational conceptions, methods and practices have an independent character, and must be dealt with as such.”

“A shining example of this exception . . . was the notorious Haston Group itself. Its organisational methods were so false, so incompatible with the functioning of a democratic organisation of revolutionary workers, that agreement on this or that political policy at one time or another made no real difference. The whole Haston system had to be blown up before a genuine Trotskyist organisation could get started in England”.
(Volume 1, pp. 261-2)

Note that here Cannon writes off the entire history of British Trotskyism in the 1930’s and early 1940’s – I do not go along with that position. But the general characterisation of the Haston regime seems fairly accurate, and to tally with other accounts. Comrade Healy spent around seven years in this kind of organisation, and learned some points of manoeuvre and organisation which we can see today in the practice of the party. Haston and Healy both followed the international line of Pablo and went along with giving the tiny British Trotskyist sect the grandiose name of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Eventually Haston was correctly removed from the leadership, and his clique with him. The opportunity existed for a complete change of regime within the British section of the International. What prevented this was Comrade Healy’s close working relationship with Pablo in this period, through which he not only acquired bad politics, but also a talent at the organisational methods that accompanied and protected Pablo’s politics.

It is important to read the Party’s four-volume Trotskyism versus Revisionism in order to fully appreciate how belated was Comrade Healy’s swing from Pabloism, and how slender was his understanding of the issues involved in the final split. The problem he faced was that he saw the whole fight as one of subjective questions – with Pablo’s mentality and problems, Pablo’s likeability, etc. – rather than a vital political and theoretical struggle (as it was later portrayed). Take for instance this letter from G. Healy, written in May 1953:

“The problem of Pablo has for some time been a great source of anxiety for me. For the past few years I have been extremely close to him and have grown to like him considerably. On the present issue I thought and still think that it would be possible to prevent him from making serious errors, by endeavouring to hold him back until the issues in the SWP become sufficiently clear. Pablo suffers badly from isolation in Paris. That French movement is a ‘Killer’”.
(Volume 1, p. 112)

Small wonder Pablo felt “isolated” in Paris in 1953! He had (with Comrade Healy’s support) expelled the majority faction of the PCI, the French section, in 1952! The question by now was rather whether it was “that French movement”, or Pablo, who was the “Killer”!

In this completely non-political letter, Comrade Healy reveals that he had not grasped any of the theoretical revisions which are central to Pabloism, and still sees Pablo as an acceptable but misled secretary. Yet this letter comes two years after the publication in France of a full-length theoretical analysis of Pablo’s document, Where Are We Going? This was written by a French comrade, Bleibtreu-Favre, and goes through some of the major revisions of Marxism contained there – to which I shall return later on.

Healy’s letter of May 1953 comes a whole year after the letters between Renard and Cannon, in which Renard complains of Pablo’s liquidationist moves against the French section. In reply, Cannon stated that he, as the most experienced “Orthodox Marxist” could see no weakening in Pablo’s position on Stalinism (and, for this, is attacked by Cliff Slaughter in the introduction as an “opportunist” and a “pragmatist”).

If that is true, what then is Healy’s position? He had still not written a word against Pablo. He had voted for the expulsion of the French majority. The appeals from the French fell on deaf ears. A year later, Comrade Healy was blaming the French for Pablo’s problems!

This calls for explanations on two counts:

Firstly: why is there no honest account given of the enormous theoretical weaknesses of the British section at that time, where Pablo could write such statements as:

“ . . . this transformation (from Capitalism to Socialism) will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries, and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism, and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms”.
(Quoted by Bleibtreu, Volume 1, p. 65)

Why could only the French answer on a theoretical level and take up these revisions?

Secondly: why does the whole of Cliff Slaughter’s commentary distort and invert the fight against revisionism to make it look as if the British section played a leading role, when in fact it produced not a political word? I shall return to these points, but the key question here is that a strong political link is established between Comrade Healy and Pablo.

This is important, because Pablo, as I have said, represented not merely a theoretical attack on the foundations of Trotskyism, but by his organisational methods also represented a degeneration, which threatened the whole existence of the Trotskyist movement, as organised on the basis of democratic centralism.

Renard wrote in 1952:

“All this (Pablo’s manipulations and manoeuvres) tends to demonstrate that a bad cause has need for bad methods in order to defend itself. And this likewise explains why, for us, the struggle against Pabloism is not a struggle of secondary importance”.
(Volume 1, p. 87)

Pablo’s conception of the international as a monolithic structure dominated by himself as secretary, was itself a blatant attack on the historical struggle of the Trotskyist movement for democratic centralism in opposition to the bureaucratic centralism of the Stalinist Parties. Yet Comrade Healy, along with others, voted for the expulsion of the French majority, and could write of Pablo, in May 1953:

“The trouble with Pablo, Jim, is that he is a little disappointed with our terrible struggle to build an International. It must be said, however, that he has been at the forefront of the fight. Great progress has been made over the post-war period in organising a proper functioning international organisation . . . The disease of impatience and isolationism has gripped him to the point where he unwittingly (at this stage) provides a little cover for Cochrane and Clarke”.
(Volume 1, p. 114)

Here we have a defence of Pablo right up to the beginning of the struggle in the American section against the Cochrane-Clarke Pabloite faction in the USA. Only after Cannon turns against Pablo does Comrade Healy make any break. In July 1953, Comrade Healy was excusing Pablo’s politics on the subjective grounds that:

“The trouble with Pablo is impatience and haughtiness . . . ”
(Volume 1, p. 148)

At the same time, he is attempting to ante-date some differences with Pablo, stating that he had kept quiet about them in Pablo’s interests:

“For quite a time here, whilst I was at one with you” (Cannon is now opposing Pablo) “I did my best to prevent Pablo from making serious errors by avoiding an open clash with him, but I was not too successful”.

Yet, a mere two months later, we read in a further letter from Comrade Healy that Pablo is not now a “powerful thinker” with weaknesses of haughtiness and impatience, but:

“This man proceeds with all the old cominternist vices. His methods sickened me to the point that it almost made me physically unwell . . . They want an international of spineless creatures who will accept revisionism to the point where they become the left cover for Stalinism”.
(Volume 1, p. 268)

What then caused this complete reappraisal of Pablo, within two months? The answer is contained within these documents also. Comrade Healy writes to Cannon in August 1953 stating that the fight with Pablo’s agent in the British section, John Lawrence, is now out in the open. So much for Slaughter’s attack on Cannon’s pragmatism and “nationalism”, because Cannon began to swing into the fight only after Pablo began serious disruption of the American section, as he would have us believe!

Comrade Healy’s letter of August 1953 is quite explicit:

“Last night the struggle broke out here in earnest. Our EC was confronted with an organised faction of four . . . The combination represents more the character of a clique than anything else, especially to those who know the people concerned and their past records”.
(August 31st, 1953. Volume 1, p. 246)

Even in this letter it emerges that Comrade Healy was planning only to propose amendments to “strengthen” Pablo’s revisionist document, The Rise and Fall of Stalinism. He asks for the SWP’s line on this.

Every single one of Comrade Healy’s extremely short, non-political letters in Volume 1 of the Documents shows that Cliff Slaughter is writing absolute nonsense, bearing no relation whatsoever to what is actually in the text, when he claims that:

“The letters of G. Healy show how the British leadership entered the fight in an endeavour to carry forward the building of sections of the international, and to educate its cadre in the struggle against liquidationism”.

Comrade Healy’s fight against Pabloism was certainly not the decisive theoretical contribution, and was certainly not on his own initiative. He came down on the right side, but very much as a result of organisational moves obviously designed to protect his own political base in the British section. If Comrade Healy can say legitimately of Cannon that his break with Stalin was pragmatic, and based on factional splits in the USA, then certainly I have no hesitation about applying the same argument to Comrade Healy’s break with Pablo.

Theoretically the British relied almost exclusively on the work done by the SWP, and it was on the initiative of the SWP that the issues were first brought out into the light of discussion internationally by the publication of the Open Letter of the Socialist Workers Party, in November 1953.

Farrell Dobbs outlined the case for issuing the Open Letter thus:

“We think the best service we can render the international movement is to cut through the whole web of Pabloite intrigue with an open challenge to their revisionist-liquidationist line. We think the time has come for an open appeal to the orthodox Trotskyists of the world to rally to save the Fourth International and throw out this usurping, revisionist clique. The movement must be put on its guard against the Pablo tactic of splits and expulsions, against his abuse of administrative control”.
(Volume 1, p. 282)

Comrade Healy was, of course, not at all clear that the line was “liquidationist-revisionist”. He had not declared his views on the SWP memorandum about the Rise and Fall of Stalinism. He had not produced a single analysis of Pabloism not drawn from snippets of American material. The split was carried through, therefore, in 1953, under conditions where the British section had a completely inadequate theoretical grasp of the issues, and where Comrade Healy had associated closely with Pablo politically and organisation ally until the middle of 1953.

Taken as a whole, Comrade Healy’s history to this point is hardly one that would equip him as defender of democratic rights and objective political discussion inside the movement, or as a defender of Trotskyist and Marxist theory against sectarianism and propagandism.

From 1953 to the formation of the Socialist Labour League in 1959, the party’s history consisted of the struggle inside the Labour Party, and the recruitment after 1956 of a cadre of intellectuals from the ranks of the Communist Party in reaction against the Hungarian events and to Kruschev’s speech. It is from around that time that the discussion and struggle for “dialectical materialism” begins, and this to emerge as a field of knowledge in itself. This always tends to develop into a schoolroom exercise completely separate from the struggle in the mass movement for policy, programme and perspective. Certainly the philosophical analysis of the roots of opportunism and idealism in their various forms is extremely valuable, but if it is then cut off from the elaboration of the party’s own strategy and tactics and an examination of its own practice, then it becomes an elaborate cover – so that the movement can end up merely attacking everybody else, while itself merely contemplating events.

The history of the SLL – WRP since 1957 has been very much one of a conflict between the theoretical work on the one hand, largely dominated by the party intellectuals, and, on the other hand energetic, activist, organisational drives, centring in Comrade Healy’s undoubted organising ability, and developing powerful propaganda campaigns, leading up to the establishment of the daily paper and the turn outwards of the SLL to form the broader base on which the WRP was founded.

The authoritarian regime which has existed within the party during this period, and in an even more obvious form now, seems a combined product of Healy’s training in the various movements I have outlined, his failure to break with the politics and methods of Pablo in 1953, and also his subjective requirements, as secretary, to keep a rein on those comrades who, in fact, have always carried out the main theoretical work of the party. The relationship with the intellectuals seems to have been “I do the practice, I am the secretary, you do the theory”. The struggles, often valuable, against “idealism” on the Central Committee, continuously start from Comrade Healy’s drive to assert a position of dominance in the party from a limited theoretical base.

As I have said, under conditions of a propaganda group of tightly-knit comrades, in very hard conditions, this can operate (though it is doubtful whether it is in line with the best in the Trotskyist tradition). However, once the movement begins to attract workers into its ranks, and to need therefore to develop workers into leadership positions, once the class struggle has taken a step forward, as took place with the election of the Labour Government, the contradiction between sectarian, clique methods and the requirements of a broad-based party becomes too great. The party undergoes a massive theoretical and organisational crisis, and to prevent discussion on these problems, the leader of the party bureaucracy resorts to the “personal rule” methods of Pablo, Haston and Stalinism, with expulsions, suspensions, splits, intimidation and liquidation of vital sections of party work in the desperate attempt to stop any opposition.

Trotsky, in his 1931-1932 writings, is clear that the domination, cliques and individuals within the Trotskyist sections is incompatible with the expansion from propaganda groups into workers’ organisations:

“The sections of the Left Opposition, originating out of small propaganda groups, gradually are being transformed into worker organisations. This transition puts the tasks of party democracy in first place. Regular organisational relations must finally replace the kind of regime in which a few comrades . . . make all their decisions in a casual manner.

“Discipline can only be built up on a conscious assimilation of the policies of the organisation by all its members, and on confidence in the leadership . . . The iron discipline which is needed cannot be achieved by naked command”.
(p 57)

Clearly this change has not taken place in the Workers Revolutionary Party in the transformation from the Socialist Labour League – the structure is monolithic and totalitarian. The “Constitution” is in shreds, as a result of the leadership’s bureaucratic and frenzied drive to suppress discussion of my first document. What Comrade Healy himself describes in Pablo as “cominternist methods” come now into the party in the form of forced and forged “confessions”, show-case denunciations, smears of “police agent”, etc. This is because, like Pablo, Comrade Healy and the party leadership have no political answer to their brazen abandonment of the method of the Transitional Programme. The movement is entitled to discuss these points I have raised, and to call for a full answer from the General Secretary.

Before moving off these historical questions, it is worth a moment to examine what the party four-volume set called The Struggle in the British Section – the British fight against Pabloism. All comrades should study this boldly-titled section. It is easily the most insignificant section of its kind in the whole series, since it occupies a total of twelve pages only in volume 2, and contains not a single political word from start to finish. There are some items of interest, however. (One, which does not fit into my main argument, is that back in 1953 there was a Mersey Docks Group, and branches in Edinburgh and Birmingham, where today there is hardly trace left in these areas).

The most interesting aspect of the chapter is that Comrade Healy only really challenges the organisational moves by Pablo against discussion within the International. This is certainly not in itself wrong, but it appear ironic from today’s standpoint to read:

“If there was one single act which condemns the unprincipled basis of the Pablo clique, it is this. Pablo breaks the statutes of the Fourth International in a manner only comparable to the practices of the Stalinist movement. And these people talk in the name of the F.I.”

With the constitution of the WRP in ruins, it is useful to know how relative for Comrade Healy was the principle of democratic centralism and democratic rights. He goes on to complain, correctly, that:

“In the name of the F.I., Pablo and his clique expel leading comrades without explanation, violate the statutes, and then, in company with the Centrists, support a public attack on comrades defending the line of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Congresses.”

“Such unprincipled conduct is, therefore, incorporated in the history of our movement as part of the basic education of basic cadres.”

Obviously such conduct has formed part of Comrade Healy’s education, since we have history repeating itself. Only today, the role played by Pablo as secretary of the Fourth International is played by Comrade G. Healy, General Secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

I can only echo the correct sentiment expressed in 1953 by Comrade Healy himself:

“We say in all sincerity that these actions will never build a movement and will never defeat the loyal Trotskyists in this country”.

I am sure that all those expelled in the latest round of WRP purges will agree with this.

The main connecting thread which I draw out of the wrong positions of the party on workers’ control, nationalisation, corporatism, and its abandonment of the Transitional Programme, is that of sectarianism. The ultimatistic and catastrophic approach to the organised working class, based on a method which draws a direct (mechanical) connection between developments in the economic crisis and the class questions involved (in what is in fact a dialectical interaction between economics and politics) cuts the party off from the class and again leads to a sectarian method which severely restricts the training of cadres, our fight in the unions, and the building of the party itself (as I show in detail in the first document). What does this sectarian method mean philosophically in terms of method? As the party correctly says in In Defence of Trotskyism:

“On political questions, revolutionists have to struggle constantly against sectarianism. The sectarian tends to declare his ‘revolutionary’ policy, but to find no way of relating this to the real developments of the living movement. He will endlessly state correct principles, but he cannot make them live”.

Trotsky goes further than this on sectarianism, in his assessment of the Bordigists, an extreme sectarian group in Italy, who had to be excluded from the work of the International Left Opposition because of their inability to break from an ultra-left position on such basic conceptions as the United Front against Fascism. He wrote:

“In their chemically pure form, these conceptions are expressed in their most complete manner by the dead sect of Bordigists, who hope that the proletarian vanguard will convince itself, by means of a hardly readable literature, of their position, and sooner or later correctly gather around their sect”.

“ . . . Often these sectarians add that revolutionary events inevitably push the working class towards us. This passive expectancy, under cover of idealist Messianism, has nothing to do with Marxism”.

“ . . . The best prepared propagandist circles must inevitably disintegrate if they do not find contact with the daily struggle of the masses”.

Sectarianism is, therefore, shown to be a method which lifelessly (mechanically) counterposes programmes or principles to the movement of the working class, but cannot grasp the necessity of a link (a bridge) between the strategic aims put forward and the spontaneous movement itself. This link is not an abstract “leap” as posed by the party perspectives document:

“This bridge is the transition from spontaneity to political consciousness”. (This is wrong – this is where the bridge is required – AT)

“The whole of Leninist teaching revolves around an understanding that this transition is a dialectical one, a revolutionary leap, achieved through the practice of the revolutionary party, in struggle against opportunism and sectarianism, fighting at each stage on the tactical requirements – including the necessary programme of Transitional Demands – flowing from the objective course of the struggle”. (My emphasis A.T.)

The party leadership, in the above quotation, has revised the Transitional Programme. The development of consciousness is not one cataclysmic “leap”, but is the outcome of the process of struggle in the workers’ movement. Within this the revolutionary party fights day by day against the spontaneous trade union consciousness of the working class for its programme of Transitional Demands.

The working class makes leaps in the development of their consciousness at each stage, not one mechanical leap forced on by the objective forces alone, but a process of transition, each point representing a leap: a process containing two opposites – the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the working class, and containing at its centre the active role of the party, fighting for its programme in the mass movement.

I am accused of turning away from the fight for leadership – it is only in this way that the fight for leadership means anything at all.

The philosophical basis of sectarianism is the counter-position of a maximum programme to the material reality of the mass movement – in effect, the separation of theory and practice. The body of knowledge of Trotskyism is seen as separate from the day to day struggle in the class. In general terms the party document, In Defence of Trotskyism, states a correct position:

“Only by grasping the role of our own practice in the objective class struggle of which we are part can we transform the oppression of the working class into the taking of power by that working class. This is why Lenin insisted: without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.

This is correct, but the question is not what is said in documents, but what takes place in the Workers Revolutionary Party. Marxist theory, Lenin wrote, “is not a dogma but a guide to action”. Yet, when an attempt is made to analyse the practice of the party, to check and enrich the theoretical positions, as in my first document, all manner of red herrings, denigration and organisational measures are brought forward to muzzle the discussion.

For example: The party engages in two election campaigns, expending massive funds and energy, and yet no examination of that practice takes place, and any attempt to get an examination is suppressed. The election manifesto was not discussed in the party, before or after the campaign (only where I have raised it). Similarly, the policies for the trade union work are handed down from the leadership, with no discussion in the party at any level, and with no party members or branches involved in the struggle themselves, and no examination made afterwards. At the same time, members are fed on abstract philosophical concepts, which in themselves are correct, but find no reflection whatsoever in the practice of the party.

The first of these concepts is the “gap” between the revolutionary party and the spontaneous consciousness of the working class. It is obviously true (and fought for in What is To Be Done? by Lenin) that Marxism and spontaneous consciousness are opposites, and that only a party which struggles for the scientific method of Marxism can equip itself to lead the working class to power. It is true, of course, that the programme of the revolutionary party, including at its centre the preparation of the class for the taking of power, is the opposite to the reformist illusions held by workers. Yet it is still not sufficient, in order to establish the credentials of a party, as “revolutionary”, merely to proclaim the need to take power, the need to fight bourgeois ideology, the need for a full socialist programme. Trotsky, in struggling for the method and development of the Transitional Programme, stressed this time and time again in the writings of 1938-1939, by emphasising that the Transitional Programme was not a soft line but a necessary link, a bridge, to the mass movement:

“The political backwardness of the American working class is very great. This signifies that a danger of fascist catastrophe is very great. This is the point of danger for our activity. The programme must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as it is, and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness”.

“ . . . Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers”.

“ . . . All the arguments that we cannot present such a programme because the programme does not correspond to the mentality of the workers are false. They express only fear before the situation. Naturally, if I close my eyes, I can write a good rosy programme that everyone will accept, but it will not correspond to the situation, and the programme must correspond to the situation”.

“ . . . We must combine politics with mass psychology and pedagogy, build the bridge to their minds. Only experience can show us how to advance in this or that part of the country”.

“ . . . I think in the beginning this slogan (sliding scale of wages and hours) will be adopted. ,em>What is this slogan? In reality it is the system of work in a socialist society. The total number of workers divided into the total number of hours. But if we present the whole socialist system, it will appear to the average American as utopian, as something from Europe.”

“. . . It is the programme of socialism, but in a very popular and simple form”.
(Writings: 1938-1939, pp. 43-44)

Such lengthy quotations from this discussion are important, because Trotsky here shows the falseness of the mechanical position taken by the party – that since objectively the crisis now poses nationalisation and the planned economy, the only answer is boldly and loudly to proclaim this abstract truth. The real question is to find a way in which the truth can become a living force mobilising the organised strength of the working class in the struggle for power. Trotsky in the same article stresses that the “popular” slogan of the “sliding scale of wages and hours” does pose power.

“It is easier to overthrow capitalism than to realise this demand under capitalism. Not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism. That is why we are calling them transitional demands. It creates a bridge to the mentality of the workers and then a material bridge to the socialist revolution. The whole question is how to mobilise the masses for struggle”.

Thus the slogans and demands of the transitional programme, as shown in my first document, do not soften the opposition between the party and the class in the struggle for revolutionary consciousness, but rather provide a common ground on which the struggle can develop – the common ground being the experiences drawn in the material, daily struggles of the class. If these gains in Marxist theory are not taken into the daily work of the party, then all that is left is the lifeless counter-position of the maximum programme of socialist revolution to the mass struggles of the working class, which establishes only the most superficial and propagandist links and roots in the class, and certainly does not develop a “new leadership” in any more than an abstract sense.

The wooden and sectarian politics at that point makes it impossible for the working class to make the transition to power.

The second damaging generalisation put forward particularly inside the party is that the successful carrying through of the party’s programme centres on the work of the individual member, and that if targets are not met, or campaigns not successful, then it is the individual comrade’s theoretical weakness which is to blame. Again as a thing in itself, there is truth in this; the party cannot develop without a struggle to develop all comrades in conflict with all forms of idealist thinking which they bring into the party. Yet the concentration on the practice of individuals can also leave out the general line within which the particular struggles of individuals for the party are carried through. The general line is the overall political perspective and programme of the party. If that is wrong and sectarian, then no amount of pressure on individuals can compensate for it. If there is no programme and no critical examination of practice, then all that is left is an activist notion of party-building, which separates completely theory from practice. A good example of pure activism is given in the new internal publication (aimed at the political denigration of myself), A Menshevik Unmasked, page 5:

“Wherever there is determined leadership, consistent struggle and persistent advocacy of policy, the forces of Trotskyism will grow and solve the crisis of leadership”.

In other words – the crisis of leadership can be resolved without a programme, provided you are active enough and persistent enough! It is in this way, in the practice of the party, that the conflict between theory and practice is not developed. The party becomes just a propaganda machine, which, since it is progressively less able to communicate with workers, is less able to hold any relationship with those advanced layers who come forward to fight bureaucracy and fight to overthrow capitalism. The trade union work then becomes liquidated into a series of ultimata addressed to the bureaucracy and the rank and file from the pages of Workers Press.

I take up these points because only in this way can we begin to explain the disintegration of the trade union work of our party, which is weaker now than at the Founding Conference, despite a year’s work in favourable objective conditions.

To take another side of this separation of theory from practice, which is the philosophical foundation of sectarianism, I will quote Slaughter’s introduction to Volume 2 of Trotskyism versus Revisionism.

“The SWP separated theory from practice and refused to bring their practice into conflict with their theory. As a result, theory became a ritualistic dogma, and their practice became a method of adaptation to backward and trade union consciousness of sections its workers, drawn into struggle for the formation of the CIO”.
(page XII)

This criticism of the SWP correctly identifies the theoretical source of opportunism in the SWP. This implies that such deviation from Marxism takes place only in the direction of the opportunist right, never to the sectarian left. In my view the philosophical degeneration of the party has its roots in the historical problems of the early Trotskyist movement which lived on after the war in the form of Pablo’s ultra-leftism of 1944 to 1950, from which Comrade Healy has never really broken.

Thus, though able to take a correct stand against Pablo’s liquidationist move to the right, following 1950, Healy carried this through on the strength of the experience of the SWP. When it came to a struggle against the SWP opportunism, therefore, there was no real struggle carried through for the Transitional Programme, but instead just a substitution of the maximum programme in a propagandist way for the softening of the Transitional Programme by the SWP into protest politics and minimum demands.

The development of this position has accelerated in the last year since the Founding Conference of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

As a left counterpart to the Pabloite capitulation to the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracy, our party has adopted sectarian positions, for example: they have called trade union and Labour Party leaders “corporatists”; they have published theoretical articles on the election which failed to call for a Labour vote against the Tories; they continuously repeated as a “programme” the maximum demands of the nationalisation of all industry, the land and the banks, without compensation and under workers’ control.

This has led to a distortion of the history of the Trotskyist movement. No longer does Workers Press or any other party publication give any hint that Trotsky called for the Fourth International not only as a response to the opportunist right wing zig-zags of the Soviet bureaucracy, but most immediately because of the criminal ultra-left sectarian policy of the “Third Period” which led to the defeat of the German working class in 1933.

I have been at pains to differentiate the sectarianism of the leaders of our party from Third Period Stalinism. However I will pose some questions to the party leadership directly:

1. Why is there no treatment in either the play “1931” or the articles in the Workers Press on 1931 of the ultra-left sectarian policy of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which prevented it from establishing itself as a strong alternative to the betrayals of MacDonald?

2. Why is Stalinism almost continuously now portrayed historically as merely an opportunist right wing tendency?

3. Is it true, as the party leadership implies, that the separation of theory from practice necessarily means a move to the right? Is there no such any more as left sectarianism?

The other aspect of the quotation which I have used from Cliff Slaughter is that he says that theory, once separated from practice, is transformed into “ritualistic dogma”. Here too, he is correct, and here too we have to examine, not only what is said by the party leadership (this is, of course, very important) but equally what is done in practice. Is it true, for example, that holding schools and training comrades to recite correctly concepts from Volume 38 and Comrade Healy’s lectures is the same thing as training a cadre in dialectical materialism? I maintain that it is not. This can only be done by a struggle to take Lenin’s philosophical work into understanding of movements of the class and the development of the party and its programme as a leadership of real forces, to become a weapon in the class struggle. If this does not happen we end up with a counter-position of theory to programme, as in the party’s book, In Defence of Trotskyism:

“Will revolutionary parties, able to lead the working class to power, and to the building of socialism, be built simply by bringing the programme of Trotskyism on to the scene of political developments caused by the crisis? Or will it not be necessary to conduct a conscious struggle for theory for the negation of all the past experiences and theory of the movement into the transformed reality of the class struggle?”
(Page 59)

Here we have wooden opposites: programme brought into the crisis by the Trotskyist movement on the one hand, or the struggle for Marxist theory on the other hand. At this point, of course, anyone who criticises the party for this separation is accused of “escaping the defence and development of the all-round Marxist world outlook of which (the) dialectical method is the essence.” (page 59)

It is said that:

“This very task of defending and developing Marxism does have a much more comprehensive basis than the defence of programme itself. The materialist and dialectical foundations of Marxism are under attacks, not only at the level of programme”.
(page 57)

Here the International Committee is polemicising against the OCI, making many correct points, but at no stage is the concrete brought into the discussion. At no point does the IC discuss programme. Philosophy is transformed into its own field of debate, divorced from the class struggle itself and divorced from practice.

All knowledge begins from the struggle of man against nature, now in the form of the class struggle – the conflict of revolutionary theory in the form of the party with spontaneity in the form of the class. That must be the starting point and central reference point in our polemic. That is not the starting point in theoretical education in our party. The consequence of this is that cadres are not trained in Marxism. They are trained to repeat formulae of dialectical materialism and given some grounding in principled struggles which are the history of the WRP as a section of the International Committee. But, in living terms, no education takes place, because there is no real discussion or analysis within the party of the party’s practice in the class struggle.

This lays the party open to a further danger. Let me again quote In Defence of Trotskyism on the degeneration of the SWP:

“What has happened to the SWP and the whole Pabloite, revisionist movement, is this: having abandoned this training of cadres, this fight for dialectical materialism, hoping simply that the ‘programme’ would some day ‘merge’ or ‘fuse’ them with the forces coming forward in the class struggle, they met up with the middle class forces, thrown on to the campuses and on to the streets by the first stage of the capitalist crisis. These forces now stifle them, begin consciously to import idealist philosophy into the movement, easily transform Novack, Mandel and others into their instrument”.
(page 45)

Not only does this quotation again show the separation of “programme” from theory, but also opens up a little on the class nature of the degeneration of our party and the SLL before it. If the policies programme of the party are, as I maintain, sectarian, and divorced from the real struggle of the working class, it follows in the main that forces which come forward to the party, and carry out the main activity of the party will be forces from outside the organised working class, as is shown by this statement in A Menshevik Unmasked, the party’s “reply” to my document:

“A small party of the kind envisaged by T, based on well-paid union militants, and lacking a broad appeal to new and politically unsophisticated layers, would collapse ignominiously before the huge wave of spontaneous struggles now beginning”.
(Page 56)

Here the reactionary turn of the party away from the fight in unions and to the recruitment of the “politically unsophisticated”, unorganised and weak sections of the class as a substitute for this is clearly expressed, leaving the main cadre as radicalised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, middle class, etc. Whereas the Pabloites capitulate to these forces by adopting radical policies, etc., the Workers Revolutionary Party, by and large, has capitulated by refusing to fight the sectarianism and activism many of the comrades bring with them, by remaining rooted in propagandism and isolated from the unions.

Here I have taken up some basic philosophical questions. On the problems of philosophical discussion in the party, it must be said that, despite the concentration of the leadership on philosophy, almost nothing is written about it. I therefore call on this leadership to engage in a full philosophical discussion by exchange of documents.

The first two sections of this document, together with my first document, give a fairly comprehensive picture of the sense in which I use the word “sectarianism”, to describe the position of the party leadership. It has nothing in common with the revisionists’ use of the term as one of abuse, in order to cover up their own abandonment of principles. It is used in a strictly scientific sense, and to clarify this still further, I will quote a fairly lengthy passage from Trotsky’s Writings: 1935-1936, which sums up most of the aspects of sectarianism which apply to the party leadership. In the article, Trotsky sets out to define sectarianism, so there is no question of this quotation being in any way “torn out of context”:

“It would be absurd to deny the presence of sectarian tendencies in our midst. They have been laid bare by an entire series of discussions and splits. Indeed, how could an element of sectarianism have failed to manifest itself in an ideological movement which stands irreconcilably opposed to all the dominant organisations in the working class, and which is subjected to monstrous, absolutely unprecedented persecutions all over the world? Reformists and Centrists seize upon every occasion to point a finger at our ‘sectarianism’; and most of the time they have in mind, not our weak but our strong sides: our serious attitude towards theory; our efforts to plumb every political situation to the bottom, and advance clear-cut slogans; our hostility to ‘easy’ and ‘comfortable’ decisions which deliver from cares today, but prepare a catastrophe on the morrow. Coming from opportunists, the accusation of sectarianism is most often a compliment”.

“Curiously enough, however, we are often accused of sectarianism, not only by reformists and Centrists, but by opponents from the ‘left’, the notorious sectarians who might well be placed as exhibits in any museum. The basis for their dissatisfaction with us lies in our irreconcilability to themselves, in our striving to purge ourselves of the infantile sectarian diseases and rise to a higher level”.

“To a superficial mind, it may seem that such words as sectarian, centrists, etc., are merely polemical expressions exchanged for lack of other and more appropriate epithets. Yet the concept of sectarianism as well as the concept of centrism has a precise meaning in a Marxist dictionary. Marxism has built a scientific programme upon the laws that govern the movement of capitalist society and which were discovered by it. This is a colossal conquest! However, it is not enough to create a correct programme. It is necessary that the working class accept it. (My emphasis, AT) But the sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a stop upon the first half of the task. Active intervention into the actual struggle of the worker masses is supplanted for him by an abstract propaganda of a Marxist programme”. (My emphasis, AT)

“Every working class party, every faction, passes during its initial stages, through a period of pure propaganda, i.e. the training of its cadres. The period of existence as a Marxist circle ingrafts invariably habits of an abstract approach to the problems of the workers’ movement. He who is unable to step in time over the confines of this circumscribed existence becomes transformed into a conservative sectarian. The sectarian looks upon the life of society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there. In his opinion, the working class should put aside its less important matters and assemble in solid rank around his rostrum. Then the task would be solved”.

“Though he swear by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian is the direct negation of dialectical materialism, which takes experience as its point of departure and always returns to it. (My emphasis, AT). A sectarian does not understand the dialectic action and reaction between a finished programme and a living, that is to say, imperfect and unfinished mass struggle . . . Sectarianism is hostile to dialectics (not in words but in action) in the sense that it turns its back upon the actual development of the working class”.

“The sectarian lives in a sphere of ready-made formulae (My emphasis, AT). As a rule, life passes him by without noticing him; but now and then he receives such a fillip in passing as makes him turn 180 degrees round on his axis, and often makes him continue, on his straight path, only . . . in the opposite direction. Discord with reality engenders in the sectarian the need to constantly make his formulae more precise. This goes under the name of discussion. (My emphasis, AT). To a Marxist discussion is an important but a functional instrument of the class struggle. To the sectarian discussion is a goal in itself . . . The sectarian sees an enemy in everyone who attempts to explain to him that an active participation in the workers’ movement demands a constant study of objective conditions and not haughty bull-dozing from the sectarian rostrum. For an analysis of reality, the sectarian substitutes intrigue, gossip and hysteria.” (My emphasis, AT)
(Trotsky, Writings, 1935-36, p. 26)

It is in this scientific sense that I use the term “sectarianism” in relation to the party.

It is now clear that the use of the slogan of workers’ control epitomises the revision of the Transitional Programme by the present party leaders. The purpose of the section dealing with workers’ control in my original document was to show that the party has revised the method of Lenin and Trotsky which lies behind this slogan. As I have stated, the demand is wrongly tacked on to the end of Workers Press articles in ritualistic fashion, together with the slogan of “Nationalisation without Compensation”. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky used the slogan in this way, although it has now become the stock-in-trade of the revisionists, especially IS and the “Militant” Group, for whom it becomes an avoidance of the struggle to mobilise the class.

I tried to show that workers’ control is the road of approach in the factory to nationalisation, and I backed this up with a series of quotations from the Transitional Programme and Lenin, to demonstrate that this has always has been the method of the Communist movement. Let me repeat: workers’ control is to be established prior to nationalisation. In its developed form, it becomes economic dual power in the factory. Some quotations from Trotsky will establish this as being the case:

“Control lies in the hands of the workers. This means ownership and right of disposal remain in the hands of the capitalists”.
(L. Trotsky: Workers’ Control of Production)

This should be clear enough. The employer has not been nationalised. He is still the owner. But the workers in his plant have been able to establish effective control over the capitalist management. By its very nature, this state of affairs is transitional. It comprises dual power at plant level, and can lead on, either to the re-establishment of the complete power of the employer, or the revolutionary expropriation of the employers as a class. The second issue demands that the movement for control becomes nationwide, and is accompanied by the emergence of dual power in the State – i.e. the rise of workers’ councils. All this is made very clear in the same article:

“What regime corresponds to workers’ control of production? It is obvious that power is not yet in the hands of the workers. Otherwise we would have, not workers’ control of production, but the control of production by the workers’ state, as an introduction to the regime of state production on the foundation of nationalisation. What we are talking about is workers’ control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie. However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. Workers’ control, consequently, can be carried out only under the conditions of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavourable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also the ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional, transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state. The proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.”
(Ibid. Emphasis added. A.T.)

We can see at once how far the party is from the conception of workers’ control outlined here. For the party, it is something established only after nationalisation, and is therefore something synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky shows this to be wrong on both counts. Firstly, workers’ control is fought for and established while the plant remains under private capitalist ownership. In fact, it can only emerge in that form, for the slogan, as developed by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, and by Trotsky in Germany in the slump, was precisely intended to indicate to workers the first steps in the struggle to combat capitalist chaos, and poverty, and reveal to the proletariat the “hidden springs” of capitalist economy. Hence the slogans for inspection and control. Thus Trotsky says: “the regime of workers’ control is provisional, transitional”. Transitional to what? To the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, to the dictatorship of the proletariat, to workers’ state control over the bourgeoisie and its plants, and then to direct workers’ management of the economy. Workers’ control opens up the road to nationalisation, it does not follow it, and it cannot. For without dual power, there can be no total power, no dictatorship of the proletariat.

By repudiating the correct use of the workers’ control slogan, as outlined by Trotsky in these quotations, the party is, in fact, blocking the road to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is not established by a single “leap” from reformism to revolutionary consciousness, but by the working class, through its own struggles, and the conscious intervention of the revolutionary party, passing through stages in development, each of which is a qualitative development. To quote again from Trotsky, arguing against those who refused to struggle for the establishment of factory committees, saying that soviets were not necessary immediately:

“You have not only no soviets, you have not even a bridge to them, not even a road to the bridge, nor a footpath to the road.”
(Workers’ Control of Production)

Here is a clear conception of stages in the development of politic consciousness in the working class. Even clearer, perhaps, is this passage, again from the same pamphlet (published by the Socialist Labour League):

“They failed to foresee and understand just one thing, to whit, what a potent factor in the socialist revolution a concrete plan of collaboration could become, if it be made the subject of discussion in trade unions, at factory meetings, among the workers not only of operating but of shut-down enterprises; and if it be linked with the slogan of workers’ control over production, and subsequently with the slogan of seizing power.”

If the party telescopes these essential stages (or leaves them out) by using the single catch-all slogan “Nationalise industry, banks and land, without compensation, under workers’ control”, we open up no road to the working class for the eventual seizure of power and the establishment of its dictatorship. This is, after all, the precise reason why Trotsky developed the Transitional Programme, and why the Fourth International adopted it as its founding document.

In the period of transition, we have the task of indicating and clearing the road towards power for the working class, and in the process establishing a leadership position in the unions for the revolutionary party. Workers’ control serves precisely that function as the transitional programme makes clear:

“The abolition of business secrets is the first step towards actual control of industry”.

And:

“The immediate task of workers’ control should be to explain the debits and credits of society . . . ”

And:

“Workers’ control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality strikes”.

So then we have not workers’ control after nationalisation (as the party insists) but, as Trotsky says, workers’ management:

“Workers’ control in such cases (i.e. public works, nationalisations) would be replaced by direct workers’ management”.

When Brandler, the leader of the Right Opposition in the German Communist Party, identified control with management, this is what Trotsky has to say:

“To them (the Brandlerites) ‘control over production signifies the management of the industries by the workers’. But why then call management control? In the language of all mankind, by control is understood the surveillance and checking by one institution of the work of another. Control may be active, dominant and all-embracing. But it remains control. The very idea of this slogan was the outgrowth of the transitional regime in industry when the capitalist and his administrators could no longer take a step without the consent of the workers; but on the other hand, when the workers had not as yet mastered the technique of management, not yet created the organs essential for this, let us not forget that what is broached here concerns not only taking charge of workshop also the sale of products and supplying of factories with raw materials and new equipment, as well as credit operations, etc.”

In a footnote to the New Park Publications edition, added by editor, it says:

“In English ‘control’ often, indeed usually, has a much stronger meaning than similar-looking words in French, German, etc. What is conventionally translated as ‘workers’ control’ means merely ‘workers’ supervision’ and is not a synonym for ‘workers’ management’.”
(Both quotations from Trotsky: Germany 1931-2, p. 192)

In passing we should note that Trotsky in this period touches on the concept of the ‘bridge’ developed more fully in the Transitional Programme:

“Control is a transitional measure, under the conditions of the highest tension of the class war, and conceivable only as a bridge to the revolutionary nationalisation of industry”.
(Ibid. p. 191)

From which I must stress again – no “bridge” in the form of workers’ control, no “revolutionary nationalisation”. And this was precisely point I was making in my first document.

If we envisage workers’ control and not management, as the form of administration after the revolution, who and what will workers be supervising? Why will they not, as Trotsky writes in the Transitional Programme, manage industry themselves? Or, if we are simply being sloppy (and mean management when we say control, even though there is no excuse for this blunder) that still leaves unanswered my original criticism: the party does not raise, as it should, the demand for workers’ control under capitalist ownership, and consequently has no perspective for a struggle for dual power in the factory. Without this struggle, a vital element in the development of consciousness of the working class and the mobilisation of the class on the question of nationalisation is missed out of the party programme.

Contrast Trotsky’s approach to the fight for workers’ control with the method in the ATUA pamphlet The Measured Day Work and Productivity Deal Swindle:

“When Socialists use the slogan ‘workers’ control’, they are always very careful to explain that it must be workers’ control of an industry that has been taken completely out of the hands of the capitalist owners and that nothing is owing in the way of compensation.”(p 87)

But how is it to be taken out of their hands, and by whom? The Transitional Programme and Trotsky’s writings on Germany give us the answer. Only workers’ control, struggled for and established from below against the capitalist owner creates the organised power of the workers to carry through the expropriation of the owners and the understanding that this only arises out of dual power. The party’s position is to start with state power ready-made, instead of seeing the necessary stages through which the working class must pass to arrive at this goal.

Because the party is wrong on this question, the leadership is seeking a diversion away from their false positions, by accusing me of separating the call for workers’ control from the dictatorship of the proletariat. The “truth” of this is established by the method of ringing sections of texts where I have omitted passages from my quotations, the imputation being that I have falsified quotations from Lenin to back up a reformist case.

My original contention has not been answered, that the demand for workers’ control is a transitional demand fought for under capitalism, and that the party wrongly turns it into a maximum slogan linked with the expropriation of the whole economy. Trotsky is clear that the latter is a maximum demand:

“Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day”

Yet the same old maximum slogans are turned out day after day, as if there existed now, in Britain, a “general revolutionary upsurge”, that rendered the Transitional Programme out of date and its demands obsolete. As Comrade Healy said in Oxford, in an area aggregate:

“We are in a period of dual power”. (He then, correctly, said: dual power is a state of flux. There is only one way out. Either the working class crushes the bourgeoisie or vice versa.)

This is a sectarian position, because it means the problems of fighting within the class struggle for workers’ control, for soviets (“Councils of Action”) as organs of dual power, all are unnecessary, because you are anyway in a period of dual power. Therefore the question becomes just one of “Build the Party” to take power (no need of a programme), and this becomes separated from the struggle for leadership within the working class.

Lenin, in his April Theses, is clear on the nature of dual power:

“This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands the organs of power; the other is a supplementary, and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers”.

Trotsky is also very clear in Germany, 1931-1932:

“The fascist petty bourgeoisie and the proletarian organisations seem to counter-balance one another. Were the workers united by Soviets; were factory committees fighting for the control of production, then one could speak of dual power. Because of the split within the proletariat, because of the tactical helplessness its vanguard, dual power does not exist as yet.”
(p. 171)

And again, in the Transitional Programme:

“If the factory committee creates a dual power in the factory, then the Soviets institute a period of dual power in the country”.
(p. 41)

What is involved in Comrade Healy’s statement is a passive, empirical method, taking only the surface of events and refusing to draw on the lessons embodied in the Transitional Programme, which stops the party developing its leadership of any significant section of the working class.

Of course, we could all sound very revolutionary if we talked of nothing but the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and answered every critic of the party line and its policies by showing that they were not doing so. I do not think this is a serious way of answering criticisms where the party has been palpably wrong, as it has been over workers’ control. The task of a revolutionary party is not just to talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat, but to develop a strategy and tactics, policy and programme, that open up the road to its establishment. Telescoping the demands of the Transitional Programme into a single maximum demand for socialism does not do this. On the contrary, it walls off the party from the class, and actively aids the opportunists.

Trotsky, of course, very consciously refrains from including even a passing reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat in the “workers’ control” section of the Transitional Programme. This is not a concession to reformism on his part, as he explains:

“The end of the programme is not complete because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into the dictatorship (of the proletariat), the dictatorship into the socialist society. This brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is programme for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution”.
(Writings: 1938 – 1939, p. 49)

It is a programme through which the party can root itself in the working class and win the leadership of whole sections of workers in the transition from pre-revolutionary to a revolutionary situation. Certainly the working class is capable of arriving at a situation of dual power, without a revolutionary party, but it cannot convert its soviets into organs of its rule without the leadership of a revolutionary party, deeply rooted in the class, with a majority of the class behind it, and armed with a correct strategy, tactics and programme, together with a history of having fought for these in the class.

I drew in my first document, on the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and on our movement’s founding programme. The party is also based on the First Four Congresses of the Communist International, and here again is a wealth of quotation which could back up my case. I will just give one clear example.

At the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in July and August 1920, the “Theses on the Trade Union Movement, Factory Councils, and the Communist International”, Section 11, reads:

“3. The struggle of the factory committees against capitalism has as its immediate general object, workers’ control over production . . . The committees in the different factories will soon be faced with the question of workers’ control over entire branches of industry and industry as a whole. But since any attempt by the workers to supervise the supply of raw materials and the financial operations of the factory owners will be met by the bourgeoisie and the capitalist government with the most vigorous measures against the working class, the fight for workers’ control of production leads to the fight for seizure of power by the working class.”

“4. Propaganda in favour of industrial councils must be carried out in such a way as to convince the broad working masses, even those not belonging directly to the industrial proletariat, that responsibility for the disorganisation of the economy belongs with the bourgeoisie, and that the proletariat, in demanding workers’ control, is struggling for the organisation of industry, for the suppression of speculation, and against the high cost of living. It is the task of the Communist Parties to fight for workers control of industry by taking advantage of all the circumstances that become issues of the day – from lack of fuel to breakdowns in the transport system – by welding together the most isolated elements of the proletariat around the same objective, and by drawing in the broadest layers of the petty bourgeoisie, who are suffering cruelly from the disorganisation of the economy and continually becoming more and more proletarianised.”
(Quoted in Hansen’s Introduction to the Transitional Programme Page 20.)

Clearly here too the Communist tradition and method is completely at variance with present party theory and practice.

In this context, it is completely irrelevant for the leadership to produce expensive copies showing that I left out certain passages when I chose my quotations, Clearly, the leadership cannot, or will not, understand these basic lessons from Lenin and Trotsky. For instance, on page 21 of the party photo-document, they comment that my quotation from Lenin was written on January 11th, 1918, “after the dictatorship of the proletariat”. The point I was making is that workers’ control was established before nationalisations were carried out, even after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat. As I pointed out in my first document the first major nationalisations were carried out only in June 1918, and that prior to that date workers’ control had been exercised over a capitalist management.

With nationalisation, workers’ control passed over into workers’ management, both through the Soviets, and directly by factory committees. Workers’ control is a necessary transition and training period for the working class to equip the workers with the knowledge necessary to take over the management of the factories which are theirs. The party, therefore, both abandons the lessons of the Russian revolution, and spreads confusion with talk of what I have ‘left out’, or ‘deleted’, none of which is incompatible with my case.

Let us, then, return to the original discussion on these questions. In relation to the party’s wrong positions on the slogan of workers’ control, and their failure to apply and develop this slogan in the party’s activity in the class struggle.

The immediate question flowing from Comrade Healy’s challenge to me to take up and analyse the wrong positions of the International Committee of the Fourth International is: how can you have correct International Perspectives without at their basis an understanding and defence of the Transitional Programme, its founding document?

The British Section of the International Committee has emerged as the leading section after a long series of splits and desertions since the war. We are told now that there are sections of the IC in the USA, Germany, Greece, Ceylon, Australia, Peru, Portugal and Ireland. All of them are tiny groups completely dominated, politically and organisationally, by the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party. I will go on presently to examine some of the policies and statements of the IC, dating back to the first issue of Fourth International magazine.

What emerges as a pattern, however, is that since the reconstitution of the Fourth International and its Secretariat towards the end of the war in 1944, the Transitional Programme has been generally set aside by the leadership of the International. In the period leading up to the split with Pablo in 1953, there predominated initially an ultra-left position of “impending revolution” in every country, which swung rapidly in the years from 1950-1953 towards the “Third World War” position, particularly under the influence of the “cold war” situation and also the Korean War in the early 1950’s. This was the position of the leadership of the International. It is expressed very clearly in this letter from Comrade Healy – then working closely with Pablo – to the SWP leadership in February 1953:

“Firstly, the war seems to be getting very near. Since the end of the last (war), our sections in Western Europe have had a rough time, splits and sharp internal fights have taken a severe toll, both in England and in France. In other countries, lack of cadres has held us back considerably. Over the past year it is my distinct impression that the picture on an overall scale has distinctly improved (despite the PCI split). Some very serious work in the mass movement is being done now and in France in particular. Everyone wants to get on with the job, and the nearness of the war adds to their determination . . . Our movement must not go into the war smashed up and divided.” (my emphasis. SWP International Secretariat Documents, Vol. 2, p. 82.)

Bill Hunter in his document Under a Stolen Flag (1957) was eventually able to analyse this kind of perspective with some objectivity:

“Then, in 1947-53 came the period of the Cold War. The question was constantly posed: could we build revolutionary parties in time, before the war was upon us? During this period, certain prominent individuals in the Trotskyist movement, headed by a man named Pablo – under combined pressures of European Stalinism and world imperialism – began to revise and reject the fundamental principles, criteria and method of analysis of the Trotskyist movement. The result of all this was a profoundly pessimistic world perspective and a false orientation based on a sceptical rationalisation: the imminence and inevitability of the Third World War. This prognosis presumed not only the organic incapacity of the American and Western European working class to prevent such a war (and thereby dismissed its revolutionary potentialities), but conversely it also attributed to the imperialist bourgeoisie a power, homogeneity and stability which it did not possess.”
(Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Vol. 3, p. 3.)

This analysis was not the first of its kind. It did not come until some years after the split with Pablo had taken place. It fails to take objective account of the complicity of the British Section in this revision by Pablo, but it expresses cogently the theoretical weakness of the post-war Fourth International. Other sections, notably the French and later the Americans, answered Pablo’s revisionism earlier than 1957. Otherwise we would very likely be in the “United Secretariat” today! Today, when we are continually being confronted by the Workers Press predictions of an American war on the Middle East, leading inevitably to a world (nuclear) war situation, it is useful to remember this 1953 letter of Comrade Healy’s.

The weight of opinion up to 1953 within the International as a whole was generally that there would be such a war and it was in this atmosphere that Pablo’s revisionist document, Where are We Going?, and later, The Rise and Fall of Stalinism made their appearance. It is important to see this clearly, because it was not purely as a result of Pablo’s individual theoretical weaknesses that the perspective he put forward in these documents was so false. The whole international movement suffered from a poverty of theoreticians who could start from the basic premises of the Transitional Programme and its dialectical method and analyse the particular situation and balance of class forces existing after the war. Originally, only the French comrade, Bleibtreu, came forward to polemicise against Pablo’s singular revisions. These revisions of the programme of Trotskyism called for the Trotskyist movement in each country to enter into the national Communist Parties, while abandoning their own independent organisations – in other words, liquidation.

Bleibtreu called, almost alone, in 1951 for:

“. . . a return to the Trotskyist analysis of the degeneration of the USSR and of the character of the bureaucracy, return to Trotsky’s fundamental statement that the crisis of humanity is and remains the crisis of revolutionary leadership, return to . . . the construction . . . of the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution”.
(Volume 1, p. 79)

These loud warnings went unheard, as did the principled struggle of French majority against Pabloite liquidationism, and it was not until the SWP came on the scene, in conflict with Pablo, that there was any further theoretical struggle taken up. Morris Stein, in August 1953, for example, strikes a productive note, challenging Pablo’s distortion of the Transitional Programme:

“In reading The Rise and Fall of Stalinism, I came upon the following endorsement of the Trotskyist programme for the Soviet Union: “The programme of action put forward in this connection by the Transitional Programme and which the Second World Congress reaffirmed and concretised now acquires burning actuality”. This statement of support would seem to apply to the programme in its entirety. The document, however, does not leave it at this. It proceeds to cite the Transitional Programme as a footnote. But in citing it, it stops short of the last two sentences . . . Why are these two sentences omitted? They contain the two central political conclusions of our programme. Without such a clear-cut statement as to how and by whom the programme will be carried out, it remains suspended in mid-air”.
(My emphasis, Volume 1, p. 170)

The attack on Pablo is very instructive, because it shows an attention to the Transitional Programme, which is absent from most of the documents of the post-war International, and also because it looks to the programme to provide a concrete perspective for mobilising the masses, not merely correct speculative statements. The first British attempt at theoretical polemic against Pablo, Bill Hunter’s article, also looks for a programme for action, from the Transitional Programme:

“A programme for the political revolution must begin from the necessity of organising the masses independently of the bureaucracy. Compare the Pabloite ‘programme’ with that for the political revolution in the Transitional Programme. Here are no abstractions, but a programme for struggle. Its sentences are sharp and clear, ringing with a revolutionary hatred of the bureaucracy”.
(My emphasis, Volume 3, p. 15)

These are strong and correct points to make of the Transitional Pogramme, but what seems, unfortunately, to have happened, and outweighed this approach is that the Transitional Programme is reduced to just the abstract posing of the first sentence of the document:

“The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”.

This again is valid and correct – but it is only a general point, which, for Trotsky, is just the start of the programme which orientates towards solving this leadership crisis through the mobilisation of the class and the fight of sections of the Fourth International to lead struggles for transitional demands, which pose ever more sharply before the class the need to take power and enable the Trotskyists to give revolutionary leadership to decisive sections of the class when the hour for open insurrection strikes. The first stage in this process is, therefore, the struggle of the sections for the transitional demands to the point that:

“The old ‘minimal programme’ is superceded by the Transitional Programme, the task of which lies in the systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”

More and more the essence of what is contained in this quotation falls into the background in the International, and concentration is brought to bear simply on the first, which merely poses the problem and not the answer. Alternatively, as with the later capitulation of the S.W.P. to a revisionist, Pabloite position, the section on “transitional demands” is softened to make way for the radical protest politics of the ‘boom’ and the most craven reformism. Their argument again took the form, as did Pablo’s, of a revision, a re-writing of the Transitional Programme. For them, as Comrade Slaughter shows in his “Reply to Hansen”:

“In this article we are told (by Hansen) that while the Transitional Programme was based on valid principles, the conditions under which it was written have been left behind by the post-war expansion of capitalism, and particularly by full employment and the increased spending power of the workers . . . ”
(Vol. 3, p. 304)

In other words Hansen had to attack the definition of the period as “pre-revolutionary”, in order to smuggle in his move to the right politically. Peng, in “Pabloism Reviewed”, takes up this point in relation to Pablo:

“Pablo declared that when discussing our policy towards the Stalinists, we have to ‘leave aside the Transitional Programme, written in an entirely different epoch’, that is to say our Transitional Programme has become out of date and can no longer be applied to the ‘new conditions’.”

The deviation from Trotskyist policy and orientation in the working class is reflected then in the way the Transitional Programme is used. I have shown in my section on philosophy and in my first document the leadership’s distortion of this programme, where it leaves out the vital question of the actual struggle in the class, the material process in which revolutionary consciousness is actually developed in the class, and so on. What emerges here, as a trend in the International, with few exceptions, is a tendency to eliminate from the Transitional Programme all except the polemics and the generalisations about the need for a new revolutionary leadership – in other words, it ceases to be a programme as a guide to action, and becomes, rather, a commentary, which is applied to certain events and to produce propaganda statements which can never be the basis for action, since they contain, in any event, no real demands. As the SLL wrote of an SWP resolution:

“The final ends posed may be impeccable, but they remain purely abstract if they are not related to the means of achieving them.”
(Vol. 3, p. 110)

Or again, from the same article, quoting Lenin:

“ . . . Instead of indicating precisely how the proletariat at the given moment should push revolutionary developments . . . Instead of advising definite preparations for a struggle against the bourgeoisie when the latter turns against the gains of the revolution . . . we are offered a general description of the process which does not say a word about the concrete tasks of our activity . . . The new Iskra-ists also can describe and explain the process of struggle which is taking place before their eyes tolerably well, but they are altogether incapable of giving a correct slogan for their struggle.”
(Lenin, Vol. 3, p. 68)

It is not necessary to go as far as Lenin in condemning all of the slogans of the International Committee, but a large number of the statements on new developments suffer from just the defect he is attacking. This seems to flow from the long, historical isolation of the Trotskyist movement from the masses, away from the positions where Trotskyists could in any way alter the developments taking place. This seems to have been the origin of the drive to make correct statements about what is taking place, while attacking all and sundry involved In the struggle (many times correctly), yet developing no cadre to carry through a meaningful struggle on behalf of the International Committee. This is the international background to Comrade Healy’s theoretical weaknesses, and those of party leadership dominated by him.

I will analyse a few examples of these formally correct statements in order to show how both the sectarian positions I have been discussing and the abandonment of the Transitional Programme and its method, results in such a tiny and isolated International movement.

The report of the International Conference of Trotskyists, held in September 1963, was reprinted in the first edition of “Fourth International” magazine. Entitled the “Future of the Fourth International”, it begins with a ritualistic reference to the Transitional Programme:

“Our unity is based on the fight for the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky twenty-five years ago. This fight has drawn us together to struggle against those revisionists who take the name of ‘Trotskyism’ but have abandoned the programme.”

Then the Report moves on to the quotation on the “crisis of leadership”, and states (not incorrectly):

“Many say that they agree with that formulation, but in the real struggle they capitulate to the bureaucracy, so that their repetition of the Transitional Programme loses any content and becomes a deception”.

The next reference to the Transitional Programme, however, turns around the question of “leadership” in isolation from programme, in order to stress it as the only important aspect:

“This is a clear abandonment of the Transitional Programme, with its stress on the decisive question of resolving the subjective question of the world revolution.”

This is, then, the lead into a whole passage which idealistically turns the question of leadership on its head by stating:

“It is in this sense that the fight for dialectics is the fight to build the world party in every country”.

Unfortunately this omits the key question of the vehicle for the vital dialectical understanding the party develops for it to act on its ideas, and make them a material force in the workers’ movement. This must be through the programme of the party, fought for by its cadre, tested, enriched and developed. It is completely possible to recite the formulae on dialectics, without ever seeing this philosophy as part of a living struggle in the class. The only way to prevent this is through the fight to turn the party always back to the mobilisation of the class on the party’s programme. This does not in any way belittle theory. It is the very essence of the importance of theory in the course of the struggle to build, not abstract “leadership” merely in the propaganda sense, but a materially powerful political leadership of a real section of the working class in a struggle. The International Committee in 1964 as in 1974 had a propaganda conception of leadership. This comes out again clearly in the Report I have been discussing. On Cuba, the Report says:

“It is true that Castroism has found much support among peasant layers and radical intellectuals in backward countries, but this is precisely because of the failure of the working-class to resolve its crisis of leadership.”

This is not just an unfortunate turn of phrase. It is true that the working class cannot spontaneously build revolutionary leadership. But to put the problem in this way eliminates the key role of the I.C. It is not so much the working class as a class that has to resolve the crisis of leadership, but rather the development of the Fourth International, impossible without the Transitional Programme and its demands. The formulation evades the harsh reality. So does this later passage:

“The decisive test of a Marxist party’s orientation towards the mass movement is the degree of success in building a revolutionary cadre, whose links with the working class are forged in struggle against the opportunists and bureaucrats.” (Note! No reference to sectarians! A.T.)

Yet the task is not just to train cadres “linked” with the working class, but cadres of workers, trained to lead sections of the class, with roots in the unions, and bringing the problems of the class into the party. This is left out – and so is a real analysis of the programmatic recruitment of these cadres. Internationally, therefore, the same problem predominates as in Britain: The struggle to train workers as Marxists cannot have meaning without the Transitional Programme and a fight for Transitional Demands.

It is impossible to hold indefinitely a working relationship based on principle if this programme is set aside. The first wave of development of the class struggle, under such conditions, throws the relationship into mortal crisis. Is the section concerned to stand aside and be a mere spectator of the mass struggle? Or is it not more likely to act, but to act on ill-prepared programmatic lines, and to capitulate through the pressure of the moment to opportunism? The defections to Pabloism and to opportunism that have taken place since the war cannot be separated from the sectarianism of the IC leadership and its abandonment of the Transitional Programme. All of the “philosophical” rationalisations in the book cannot exonerate the present leadership of the IC completely for the departure of so many former sections of the post-war International from the rostrum of the International Committee. It is ironic to read that, in 1964, there were sections of the IC “in Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, in Japan, and in the deformed workers’ states of E. Europe”. Where are they all now? Does the leadership of the IC bear no responsibility for the liquidation of the International?

I now want to move on to consider some aspects of the work of the IC, in relation to the policies and orientation it puts forward for the various national sections.

Nobody doubts that there are enormous problems posed in building a revolutionary Marxist party in Ireland, in struggle against not only reformism and Stalinism, but also the religious prejudices and the religious sectarian divisions among the workers in the North. The IC has, however, considerable advantages which should have secured it by now a sizeable cadre of Trotskyists, or, at the very least, a concrete perspective and policy on which a section could be built: the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party and several party members have contacts in the Irish workers’ parties; the country is close enough for regular contact between new contacts and the WRP – indeed, Comrade Healy himself has in the past done series of lectures in Dublin, when it looked as if some movement might emerge; and, most important, the principled position and the public declarations of the WRP and the International Committee, in opposition to the intervention of British troops, the attacks on democratic rights, internment, torture of political prisoners, the provocations connected with the Littlejohns etc., all ought to be capital in the struggle to build a principled cadre in Ireland.

What of course, the International Committee does not have, which makes the building of such a cadre impossible, is a programme which can in any way unite the Irish workers and farmers in the struggle for national liberation, and from this position, it is also impossible for the IC to put forward a programme of transitional demands to pose to the workers the question of the socialist revolution. To such an extent, indeed, has the IC abandoned the Transitional Programme, that it cannot put forward a single demand which can be fought for by Irish workers as part of their daily struggles, except as a pious hope for the future. Let us examine a few of the demands they do put forward.

In 1971, as unemployment in Britain and Ireland soared, and the Socialist Labour League launched the famous “Right to Work” marches, (which, as I realise now, never at any point called for a sliding scale of hours, ending of business secrets, or any transitional demands whatsoever), this was included in an IC statement:

“The International Committee . . . calls on all Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, to join the ‘Right to Work’ campaign . . . ”
(December 1971)

This campaign was run almost exclusively in England, and was completely separated from any points of programme, certainly in relation to the struggles of Irish workers. Their only course of action, it seems, must be to help the English working class bring down the Tory government. This may seem all right when we are talking about the North of Ireland (though even here it is inadequate, and, put in the tones of an ultimatum), but how can it conceivably relate to the workers in the South? Even more explicitly, talking in terms of an acceptance (albeit a tacit acceptance) of partition, is the following demand:

“It calls upon the workers of N. Ireland to unite in their trade unions in defence of their living standards and basic rights”.

This clearly not only accepts partition, but refuses to raise the question of the leadership within these unions, which, in many of the best organised sections of workers in the North, is dominated by the Orange Lodge, and dedicated to the defence of the status quo. Thus, not only are many thousands of Catholic workers and unemployed left with no perspective by this demand (which does not even talk about a fight against reformism in the unions!) but Protestant workers are left under their reactionary leaders also – in most cases in different unions anyway! This demand is a minimum demand of the worst variety – merely telling workers to join a union and giving no unity to the class or perspective to those in unions.

Let us examine another demand put forward in the same statement:

“Unity of all Irish and British workers for the overthrow of the Tory Government and the Cosgrave coalition in Dublin!”

This is followed by the demand for the re-election of a Labour Government, pledged to withdraw the troops. No mention of what can replace Cosgrave and the Labour Party in the Republic, which the IC, by the same sweep of the pen, has dismissed. The IC fails to make the point that what is necessary in the South to split the Coalition, drive out the bourgeois representatives, and put demands on the Labour leaders. Cosgrave is thus treated as exactly the same as Heath; the Irish Labour Party the same as the Tories in Britain. Conspicuously there is a silence on what could replace the Irish Labour Party in office. The IC does not seem concerned. Certainly, there is no prospect of the diminutive “Irish section” being forced into the breach.

This adventurist and sectarianism position on the Irish Labour Party is exactly in line with the discussion in my first document where I examined the party’s wrong positions on “corporatism” and its sectarian presentation of maximum demands. Let us examine a document produced by the Irish section. As a tiny group in a sharp situation, with the urgency of developing a cadre in a struggle in the workers’ movement for Marxism, one avenue to be at least explored is the possibility of work in the Labour Party, North and South, where a struggle for a programme and correct policies and principles could begin to win around some forces on which to establish an independent movement. Also the struggle should obviously include advancing a programme and perspective which could draw forward some of the best militants from the Republican movement. Both are, howewer, precluded by the sectarian position of the IC. Most glaring is the position with regard to the N. Irish Labour Party. The Irish section is forced to follow blindfold the pattern of work laid down in Britain. In Britain, the expulsion of the Young Socialists has meant that no work has been done for a long period inside the Labour Party. Therefore, it seems, the entire International must mechanically take this lesson (as in Germany, where a small group of Trotskyist youth fight for “leadership” in total isolation from the massive youth movement of the Social Democrats, and obviously in other countries also). Certainly an exploratory document, such as that by the Workers’ League (Irish Section) should contain a serious examination of the options for entry work, faction work, and so on, without merely taking it for granted that the reader is going to be in favour of an “independent” “revolutionary party” comprising a handful of people with no influence on any of the big working class organisations. Yet instead of any such thoughtful approach, the Irish section writes this of the Northern Ireland Labour Party:

“In fact, like the labour leaders in Germany before Hitler came to power, the NILP (Note: the party, not its leaders, AT) long ago made up its mind that right wing loyalism and the Orange Order were going to conquer, and have since proceeded to adapt and reach some agreement with Fascism. More than any other, this party has betrayed the working class in the North. The Workers League must fight to build its own organisation in total opposition to all these reformist movements.” (Workers League pamphlet: Defend the Trade Unions, August 1974)

There are some grotesque echoes of “Third Period” Stalinism here, and no ambiguity about them. Like the labour “leaders” in Germany, the NILP is portrayed as having reached “some agreement with fascism”. In other words, the whole party, from leaders to members, are social-fascists, not to be worked with.

Surely, if this is the case in Northern Ireland, then the same must be even more true of the German Social Democracy? Presumably there can be no notion of supporting such a pro-fascist party? Yet the German section calls boldly, in Fourth International, “vote SPD! Prevent a Strauss Government!” In Germany the class nature of the SPD is clear – it is a workers’ reformist party with a bourgeois leadership, acting in defence of capitalism, and guilty of countless and continuing betrayals of their members. The task is to expose these leaders. Yet, in Northern Ireland, with no class analysis at all, the reformist is described in terms equivalent to “social-fascist”. How can the Workers League establish itself on this kind of perspective?

To compound the confusion, there is not a mention in this pamphlet, either of the Transitional Programme, or of any demands or policies for the living struggle of the class. All the Workers League offers is to train cadres:

“In the theory of Marxism, in particular in a study of the period when Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union”.

and, it refers to:

“the determined struggle by Trotsky to form a new International in 1938 and the conquests of the International Committee of the Fourth International in defending Trotskyism since”.

Yet, the “Trotskyism” which it has defended excludes the Permanent Revolution and the concrete sections on demands from the Transitional Programme. All that is left, if we believe the Irish section’s document, is abstract talk of “Marxist theory”, correctly stated hostility to Stalinism and revisionism, sectarian hatred of social democracy, and – complete bankruptcy of programme.

It is worthwhile to have dwelt on these questions in relation to Ireland, since they really reflect the crisis of the International work as a whole. I will deal more briefly with some other points that arise.

Recent events have shown the enormous resilience and revolutionary will of the Greek working class in deposing the Greek military junta and establishing the government of Karamanlis elected, though clearly reactionary and bourgeois. The Workers Press immediately followed this election by posing the issues in the following way:

“Karamanlis elected – now for a General Strike!”

This call correctly poses the need to mobilise the working class in the struggle for its political independence and its taking of state power. However, it also poses great dangers, if it were adopted, separated as it is from any real mass movement in such a direction (as reflected by the small vote for the Communist party and the left-wing parties) and from any programme for the preparation for the strike.

Under the sharp conditions of the class struggle in Greece it is irresponsible to pose the call for a General Strike without putting forward the call for the setting up of factory committees, workers’councils and an armed workers’ militia to protect the strike. Without these measures, a strike, if it took place, would come immediately under the guns and tanks of the state, with no political leadership steeled in the struggle of the classes, and with no arms defend itself.

Yet, of course, strikes do not just descend from the heavens. They arise from the movement forward of the class, for certain demands, certain gains which they are seeking, or are out to defend. For the workers’ movement in Greece, the problem is not to talk about this mass movement, There were no concrete demands discussed in this article, merely the call to join the Greek section of the I.C. Clearly, for Workers Press it was sufficient for the I.C. to issue the call for a General Strike and to hope that this call coincides with the spontaneous movement.

Just in comparing this statement with an I.C. statement in November 1973, we can see that it is a consistent position of putting ultimatistic and general demands, which leave out the vital stages in the mobilisation of the class. The demands in this statement are:

“In every country, industrial action to black all supplies to the Greek regime!”

This is obviously correct. It remains to be followed through in practice, by a serious campaign in the unions, which is made all the more difficult because the sections of the I.C. are isolated from the trade union movement.

“Demand the release of all political prisoners . . . and the end of martial law immediately!”

It is not clear whether this demand is addressed to the Greek or to the international working class: it is correct, but it lacks the concrete form necessary to form the basis of action.

“The special courts must be dissolved!”

Again – the question is by whom? By the junta? Or by the workers?

“Mass demonstrations against the repressions!”

Are we calling for mass demonstrations in Greece, or internationally or both? Is this a call to action, to be followed through, or merely a correct formulation? How many sections in fact mobilised demonstrations on this issue?

“Down with the Junta!”

This correct call, coming in this context, presumably means that mass demonstrations will bring down the junta (as a matter of fact, under very different circumstances they did do so a year later). But is it not irresponsible, under conditions of open military dictatorship, to propose these mass forms of action, without also proposing the defence of the masses involved. As it is, the junta has been brought down, Karamanlis elected, and still there are no demands from the I.C. for the mobilisation of the workers in their own self-defence. Clearly, all concept of transitional demands leading to a situation of dual power have been abandoned by the leadership. Now, the class struggle is streamlined into a call from the IC for a General Strike, followed by the seizure of power and the establishment of socialism. This emerges also from the next slogan:

“For a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in Greece!”

Trotsky is clear on this question in the Transitional Programme, which the I.C. has almost discarded:

“Of all parties and organisations, which base themselves on the workers and peasants, and speak in their name, we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie, and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers’ and farmers’ government. On this road, we promise full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around these transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the workers’ and farmers’ government”.
(Transitional Programme, pp. 38-9).

The clearest thing that emerges here is that the Stalinists and reformists, who would be called upon to form the workers’ and peasants’ government, in Greece, can be exposed and replaced only through a struggle for transitional demands, which at every point pose the question of power, and which neither party can carry out. Such demands are entirely absent from the I.C. statement and its concluding demands. The last three are basically a call for building the sections of the I.C., still abstaining from any real programme on which sections can be built.

This state of affairs is particularly tragic, since the Greek section of the Fourth International has a history of Trotskyism reaching right back to 1928 – and yet is cut off from an understanding of the founding document of the International by the leadership of the I.C.

The I.C. talks continuously about the economic crisis (although this is a fairly recent development – the Trotskyism v. Revisionism documents contain hardly a reference to the economic crisis, or to economics) and its effects on the class struggle – for instance, the editorial in Fourth International, Spring 1973:

“There is not a single country in the capitalist world whose everyday political life is not now shaped directly by the breakneck development of the economic crisis” (p. 51)

Yet, while putting forward this fundamentally correct, if mechanically conceived view, the remarkable aspect of I.C. policy in the different sections is that no statements are issued putting forward transitional demands centring on the defence of jobs and living standards. Where demands go out at all (and some statements, like the abysmal one on Ethiopia contain not a single demand or point of programme) they all centre on just issues of democratic rights or international solidarity; or betrayals by revisionist or Stalinist leaderships. Ceylon fits this pattern. The Summer 1972 statements on Ceylon centre purely on the correct call to defend democratic rights:

“The International Committee of the Fourth International calls on all dissident workers and youth in the left-wing coalition parties to support the campaign of the R.C.L. for democratic rights, and to demand of their leaders that they break from the S.L.F.F. immediately.

Release the poIitical prisoners now!
Lift the ban of left-wing papers!
Halt the repression!”

But this is surely not adequate to bring out the reason for the repressions; the reason for them is to destroy the independent strength of the working class, in order to foist on the class the burden of the economic crisis. Alongside these democratic demands should go Transitional Demands for the defence of wages and jobs, as a programme for the workers’ and peasants’ government, shorn of the bourgeoisie. On this, there is silence, Again, in a second statement, the same position:

“We demand the C.P. and L.S.S.P leaders break away from the coalition to fight for these basic democratic rights. It is only in this way that a workers’ and peasants’ government can be fought for in Ceylon.”

But that government must have a programme. The I.C. Section in Ceylon, however, has no programme to offer. This is true also of another statement in October 1972, which refers to the big wages movement in the Ceylonese working class, yet advances not a single slogan on this, resulting in a peculiar juxtaposition:

“The bank employees have shown their determination not to bow down in front of the government’s threats or strike-breaking attempts, by carrying forward their fight for a wage demand now over a period of more than ten weeks.”

“The I.C. of the F.I. demands that all political prisoners in Ceylon be released immediately, and all the democratic rights of the workers and peasants be restored.”

Here there is no expressed support for the wages movement, and no demands to develop this movement politically or establish links between these workers in struggle and the peasantry: just the relentless following through of the correct democratic demands, to which the actual movement of the class becomes a side issue. Thus the I.C. section in Ceylon is compelled to become a spectator of the class struggle, not involved in the daily fight to establish leadership over sections of workers and build a real force to help shape the class struggle.

The enormous upsurge and revolutionary struggle of the workers and peasants of Bangladesh brought many Bengali workers into a relationship with the Socialist Labour League, which took a clear and principled line in support of national independence. The possibilities from this of developing a section of the F.I. in Bangladesh should have resulted at least in the training of some decisive cadres and the winning of a circle of contacts in the new state itself. Yet the programmatic basis for the party’s intervention, it is now clear, was inadequate to develop more than a passing relationship with these workers, and this is why nothing was built out of these struggles. The I.C. statement (F.I., Spring 1972) makes this weakness clear. The demands at the end are:

“Long Live the Bangladesh Revolution!
No Compromise with the Hindu Capitalists!
Forward to the revolutionary and socialist unification of India!”

Again the abstractly correct formulae which characterise the work of the I.C.! All of the statements it issues could have been written (and many are) in London. Yet note that in this statement there is not even the call for a Bangladesh Section of the Fourth International. This is because the I.C. is based on Comrade Healy’s peculiar conception of an International based on England:

“The Socialist Labour League now shoulders an enormous responsibility – that of constructing the mass revolutionary party, which will lead the working class to power. By doing so it will inspire revolutionists in all countries to build similar parties to do the same”.
(G. Healy, Problems of the FI, p. 4)

Alongside this nationalist conception – “all other countries can follow us” is a devaluation of the colonial revolution. Pablo dismissed the working class in the metropolitan countries; Comrade Healy dismisses the struggle of the colonial workers and peasants for national liberation, and seeks only to lay down ultimata, where the IC says anything at all. All that the statement on Bangladesh can call for is that the revolutionary workers and peasants (particularly round Mukti Bahini):

“. . . must organise themselves separately and maintain their political independence of the Awami League bourgeoisie and the Stalinists”.

and that they:

“ . . . must combine the national struggle with the fight for an uncompromising redivision of the land in the interests of the poor peasants, the nationalisation of industry, and the setting up of a workers’ and peasants’ government”.

Among these abstractions is nowhere Trotsky’s call in the Transitional Programme:

“As a primary step, the workers must be armed with this democratic programme. Only they will be able to summon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary democratic programme, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the ‘national’ bourgeoisie. Then, at a certain stage in the mobilisation of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, Soviets can and should arise . . . Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois democracy. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion, and, likewise, opening up an era of socialist revolution. The relative weight of the individual democratic and transitional demands in the proletariat’s struggle . . . is determined by the peculiarities and specific conditions of each backward country . . . ” (p. 42)

Unwilling really to examine the concrete conditions of the situation and problems of the masses in Bangladesh, the IC ends up with abstract ultimata which miss out the key question in Trotsky’s analysis: the organs of dual power of the workers and peasants. On this basis the socialist demands of the IC cannot build a movement.

I have examined in some detail the IC’s departure from the Transitional Programme and put this in something of a historical context. What underlies the whole weakness of approach is the sectarianism and propagandism of the leadership of the International – the British leadership. Yet this has also its opposite contained within it – that of slides into opportunism. For instance there has been no call for a number of years for sections of the FI to be built in North Vietnam, or in China, to carry through the political revolution. Indeed, the whole question of the political revolution in Eastern Europe, over which the International split in 1953, has been dropped in favour of superficial and academic articles in Workers Press which all avoid the questions of the preparation of revolutionary leadership in the form of FI sections in E. Europe. Least of all is there any hint of a section of the FI being developed in the Soviet Union. This aspect of the Transitional Programme, like so many others, is now set aside by the party leadership.

Perhaps the worst opportunism is exemplified by the recent revision of the Leninist position on the United Nations in relation to the appearance there of Yassir Arafat (who in turn was uncritically boosted by Workers Press as some kind of principled leader of the struggle for Arab liberation). Only shortly beforehand (September 28th, 1974) Workers Press reported the PLFP leader, in publicly breaking from Arafat, denouncing him saying:

“The PLO have become satellites of reactionary and capitulationist regimes.”

The article at that time made clear the PLFP view that Arafat’s bourgeois nationalist policy was a betrayal of Palestinian workers and peasants. Yet on October 16th, 1974 we read these astonishing lines:

“The UN vote to let the PLO speak there was a serious blow to US – Israeli imperialism. It also shows that the power of the Arab revolution is greater than any wish feudal-bourgeois Arab rulers might have of quietly ditching the PLO and doing a ‘reasonable’ oil price deal with the West”.

So much for Lenin denouncing the; League of Nations as a “thieves’ kitchen”! So much for the IC statement on Cyprus 1972 calling the UN “imperialism’s Trojan Horse”! So much for the correct SLL statement to the SWP:

“All of these opportunist groupings lend their support to the UN and its subsidiary organisations, tools of imperialism in stabilising the conditions of future imperialist expansion”.
(Trotskyism v. Revisionism, Volume 3, p. 122)

So much for Peng’s attack on the UN:

“According to the tradition of Trotskyism, we should exploit every opportunity to expose its character as an instrument of imperialist robbery and counter-revolution”.
(Volume 2, p. 193)

Instead of this the British section of the IC in its daily paper portrays Arafat’s appearance at the UN as a blow against imperialism! This error has not been acknowledged in the paper, although a slight shift of position has taken place since this issue was raised by Comrade Richardson.

The one-sided interpretation of the Transitional Programme, and the abandonment of a real international perspective is accompanied by the lack of any programme or policy for any country in the continent of Africa – least of all Rhodesia or South Africa, despite the revolutionary developments in Angola and Mozambique, and despite Workers Press reports of the talks on Rhodesia. Thus whatever contacts are won towards a fight for Trotskyism from these countries are immediately confronted with merely generalised statements about “independent revolutionary parties” and “sections of the IC”.

Thus, the IC degenerates hand in hand with the Workers Revolutionary Party, becoming an international sect as the class struggle develops internationally and ruthlessly exposes the leadership’s bankruptcy of programme.

I think I have made enough points to establish that the sectarianism of the party leadership is inseparable from the sectarian and wrong positions of the IC. Both must be corrected by a return to the Transitional Programme.

As I explained in my first document, I resigned (wrongly) from the Party on September 15th, because of serious political differences. On Thursday, September 19th, I corrected this error, and returned to full membership, by decision of the PC, in order to present my differences, first to the CC and then, in document form, throughout the party prior to Conference.

The first introduction of my differences was at the CC meeting of October 12th. The essence of the position I put to the CC was that the party return to the Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International. Since that time, the leadership has gone through a series of unprincipled adaptations to my position, both in the Conference documents and in Workers Press. A startling contrast is immediately clear, when we compare the Ferranti crisis of September 17th with that of British Leyland on December 9th.

The Ferranti crisis came to a head when the National Westminster Bank told the Labour Government that, unless new securities were put up to back the existing £18,000,000 overdraft, they would put in a receiver. Workers Press said: “There is an unmistakeable case for nationalising Ferranti, without compensation and under workers’ control”, and put forward the following policies:

1. “The working class must end, once and for all, the capitalist property relations, which are the source of the crisis”. (in other words social revolution – AT)
2. “The Labour Government must be forced to stop propping up bankrupt capitalism, or its leadership must be removed”.
3. “The situation demands, more urgently than ever, a re-doubling of the fight inside the trade union movement against the Labour Party manifesto and its “social contract” aim of propping up capitalism, and for the nationalisation of the entire economy without compensation and under workers’ control”. (My emphasis, AT).

This was the only policy put forward for Ferranti workers to fight for, a full, maximum programme of socialism.

On Friday, December 6th, a £100 million security to British Leyland was announced as the company faced collapse. Workers Press for Monday, December 9th, had the headline, “Leyland Crisis: A Policy for Action”. The editorial board statement went on to say:

“The solution rests: in the hands of Leyland workers, organised in their unions in demanding the nationalisation of the combine by the Labour Government”.

The statement went on to make the following demands:

1. “Where attempts at redundancies are made, set up factory committees representing all sections of workers”.
2. “These committees to demand the abolition of business secrets. This demand is the first step towards workers’ control”.
3. “To defend the jobs, working conditions and living standards, the following demands must be made in the unions:
(a) No wage cuts: Full basic increase and Sliding Scale of Wages
(b) No sackings: Meet the threat of redundancies with the sliding scale of Hours.
(c) No Business Secrets: Open Leyland Books.”

This represents a substantial adaptation to my position. Workers’ control, for example, is presented, correctly, as preceding nationalisation, in sharp contrast to the much-defended wrong formulation normally carried in Workers Press. (The statement, nevertheless, still contained major omissions, such as the key demand for public works and workers’ management).

The transitional demands of December 9th were supposed to be directed at Leyland workers, but where was the fight in the Cowley trade union movement for these positions? The 5 / 293 branch of the T&GWU met on the day of the statement, but none of the two remaining members of the party even attended it. It was left to me, and other expelled members, to fight for a programme for the crisis. The leadership was only concerned with the statement as a tactical manoeuvre against me, not with the fight in Leyland itself.

Since the Leyland statement, Workers Press has gone right back to its maximum programme. A major article of Tuesday, December 10th, on the Swindon occupation, carried not a single transitional demand.

Let me deal in more detail with this adaptation, which began in the week following the CC meeting of October 12th in a very confused way, with an article by Alex Mitchell on rising inflation (Workers Press, October 18) which said:

“In these conditions workers must demand substantial increases, plus a sliding scale of wages and hours, tied to the real increases in the cost of living, as decided by T.U. consumer committees”.

There is no explanation as to how a Sliding Scale of Hours can be tied to increases in the cost of living, or how it would help to fight inflation! At the C.C. meeting on October 19th, the leadership put forward, as a reply to my position at the previous meeting, its first pre-conference document. The only section of this document which took up programme was section five, “Our Programme”, which said:

“The Workers’ Revolutionary Party’s work cannot be confined to advocating a socialist programme of demands in a propaganda way. What distinguishes the transitional epoch is that it is possible and necessary to take up every minimum demand of the worker, even the most elementary, within the framework of the correct, actual, that is, revolutionary perspectives. Our Party and our daily press take up every minimum demand on wages, working conditions and democratic rights, but advance a programme and perspective of power and the building of the revolutionary party, which is necessary to realise these demands in our epoch.”

Here not a mention of transitional demands! The Transitional Programme is falsely presented to justify the leadership’s maximum programme.

By the C.C. meeting on November 2nd, the document had been revised, and a major adaptation to my position included, entitled “Programme for Action”. This was a “Programme” of Transitional Demands, tacked on to the document, as Conference tactics against me.

Yet another manoeuvre was carried out on the day before I was to speak at the 5th Anniversary meeting of Workers Press (Sunday October 27th). Workers Press on the Saturday carried a statement containing a series of transitional demands, but again it was not connected with the struggles of the working class. The same edition saw praise for the straight pay claims of the Glasgow bus-men, the Hull drivers, the Glasgow refuse-men and the Scottish haulage drivers, with not a transitional demand in sight, not even a Sliding Scale of Wages, the “key” demand!

Such obvious adaptations and manoeuvres are a testimony to the bankruptcy of the politics of the leadership. They are knocked off course and forced to zig-zag at the first sign of criticism. This method has now given way to denigration and expulsion, but it all amounts to the same thing. The leadership have no answers to the questions I am posing. The Transitional Programme is a method of revolutionary leadership, which must be consistently fought for – not written in, on convenient occasions as part of a factional fight.

At the last Central Committee meeting I attended, prior to my expulsion, I attempted my minority rights under section 8 of the constitution. This was categorically refused by Comrade Healy, in the following words:

“I will not have factions in this party – I will expel anyone who forms a faction in this party.”

The following extracts from Trotsky’s Writings 1938-39 (p. 131) shows this statement to be an abrogation of Bolshevism:

“The entire history of Bolshevism was one of the free struggle of tendencies and factions. In different periods, Bolshevism passed through the struggle of pro- and anti-boycottists, “otzovists”, ultimatists, conciliationists, partisans of “proletarian culture”, partisans and opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, left-communists, partisans and opponents of the official military policy, etc. etc. The Bolshevik Central Committee never dreamed of demanding that an opponent “abandon factional methods”, if the opponent held that the policy of the Central Committee was false. Patience and loyalty toward the opposition were among the most important traits of Lenin’s leadership.”

“It is true that the Bolshevik Party forbade factions at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, a time of mortal danger. One can argue whether or not this was correct. The subsequent course of development has in any case proved that this prohibition served as one of the starting points of the party’s degeneration. The bureaucracy presently made a bogie of the concept of “faction”, so as not to permit the party either to think or breathe. Thus was formed the totalitarian regime which killed Bolshevism.”

“ . . . The Fourth International has never prohibited factions and has no intention of doing so. Factions have existed and do exist among us. Controversy occurs always over the content of the ideas of each faction, but never over its right to existence. From the standpoint of Bolshevik ideas on party democracy I would consider it an outright scandal to accuse an opponent, who happened to be in the minority, of employing “factional” methods, instead of engaging in discussion with him over the gist of the question. If the differences are serious ones then factional methods are justified. If the differences are not serious, then the adversary will find himself discredited. The factional struggle can result only in a more profound principled fusion or a split. No one yet has invented another alternative, if we leave aside the totalitarian regimes”.

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