[Marxist method and starting point point where the…]

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Marxist method and starting point point where the full programme of Marxist method abandoned.

Thus there is no reckoning in Banda's articles with the central charge made in the Philosophy section of the Second Document -that the WRP leadership separates theory from practice and thereby lifelessly counterposes its abstract schema of maximum demands (nationalisation without compensation under workers control of all industry, banks and land) to the mass movement of the working class in such a way that workers are cut off from the political means of struggling for these demands.

NO DISCUSSION Because the WRP permits no discussion on the practice of the party, as was shown by the suppression of discussion on Cde Thornett' s original document (not one aggregate or meeting was held for Cde Thornett to put his positior outside Oxford and the Western Region) this separation continues.

The maximum programme is clearly taken up and exposed by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme - a document which comes in for sustained attack by Banda in four parts of the fourteen part series. This begins most significantly (Part 7) with an attack on the method of the Programme, in particular the concept of the "bridge"

For Banda and the WRP the "bridge' between the present consciousness of the working class and revolution is to be the sudden realisation one day by the mass of workers that the whole economy must be nationalised without compensation under workers control, and that therefore they must in their millions join the WRP.

Banda This idea is termed by Healy and Banda a "leap" and is supposedly brought about not by any principled and continuous intervention in workers' daily struggles, but by paper sales, recruitment drives and more paper sales. Meanwhile workers supposedly wait for the WRP to knock on their door.

Trotskyists, however take their starting point from the Transitional "It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably lead ing to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat"

This seems pretty clear to most readers. It is the founding document of the Fourth International. While the details of some of the demands might well have changed since 1938 the task and the method expressed here remain, and it is this task which is rejected by the WRP.

Reformists and Stalinists reject the need for a 'bridge' because they do not intend to overthrow capitalism. But Trotskyists do need to bring workers, in struggle, to the point where the luu programme oI revolution can win mass support.

This is the Marxist method;

but contemptuously thrown aside by Banda. Why do workers need to struggle in order to learn these lessons when they can read all the right slogans in Workers Press? Why bother with programme if you have "philosophy"? He ridicules the concept of fighting for a programme including transitional demands in the mass movement, stating:

"Thus the party becomes transformed from an opposite to an adjunct of the spontaneous movement. The crisis of leadership becomes reduced through the method of Thornett into a crisis of self-mobilisation of the working class - and Marxism is flung unceremoniously out of the window" • [Part 8] But, on the contrary, the question taken up by the WSL is the mobilisation of the working class (ignored by the WRP) through the struggle for demands which go beyond reforms, posing the questions of power and leadership:

"It is easier to overthrow capitalism than to realise this demand [sliding scale of hours] 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". [Trotsky's Writings 1938.

1939 pp 43-4] Thus Banda directs all the time away from the practice of the WRP which refuses to take this starting point, and so tinds itsell a dwindling force even in those unions where it did once have strong positions.

WORKERS

Banda rhetorically asks "Where [in WSL's analysis of the WRP] do rank and file workers fit into this scheme, or are they of no account?" [part 6] The answer is painfully obvious - rank and file workers, insofar as they are attracted by the oratory and journalism of the WRP, are offered no Marxist training and no programme on which to struggle. They do not "fit in" to the WRP, ana usually remain only for short periods, seldom reaching leading positions.

Workers are not turned by the WRP to the fight for leadership in the unions and so learn little of the power of the Marxist method and programme. Meanwhile the WRP continues to degenerate into a sect of middle class radicals mouthing phrases of revolution, but further each day from carrying it out.

Trotsky wrote of sectarianism (and this is not answered by Banda though quoted at length by Cde Thornett): "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 nat ine workins • class accept it. emphasis added 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 is supplanted for him by an abstract propaganda for a Marxist programme" . (Writings The reactionary side of such sectarianism, which entirely epitomises the WRP leadership, emerges when Banda (Part 13) attempts to answer Cde Thornett's exposure of the inadequate programmatic demands put forward by the International Committee to recruit the basis of a section in Bangladesh must not be separated from the abstract, ultimatist demands, divorced from any concrete perspective for Bengali workers, put forward in the other hand that the IC was not wrong - it was the Bengalis' fault • they were too backward and rel¡gious to repond to the IC!! He writes: "But if we did not recruit a sizeable group it was not for want of trying.. Nationalist feeling was and is extremely intense and the support for Bhashani and Rahman was very intense. There were no:developed trade union groups in Britain and