No answer to police interference

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After a year in which Labour Ministers have supervised brutal attacks on Grunwick pickets, bans on Labour movement demonstrations, the 'ABC" prosecution and the establishment of a new police issue state ference in the Labour movement has become a major question.

But while TUC delegates rehearsed their endorsements for the expected imminent Labour election campaign they were careful not to spell out the full extent of Labour complicity in the attacks, or offer any real answer.

Tobacco Workers Union General Secretary Doug Grieve moved a resolution calling for the Government to launch an inquiry" into and activities Branch and Patrol Group.

Such a call useless. • It creates that gr "independent the functions of the Special the Special is worse than the illusion vernment-run committee could actually carry out an independent role.

And it suggests that Labour leaders-who have time and again revealed their dedication to the strengthening of the capitalist state apparatus-could be prepared to assist in such an inquiry.

Sapper At the same time in singling out two specialist sections of the police, the resolution steers well clear of any attempt to expose the role of the police as a whole, in their defence of fascists, their attacks on pickets, their harassment of black workers and youth.

Len Murray, supporting the motion, expressly stated that it should not be seen as an attack on the whole force, "nor on the men and women who work for it"!

Speaking on the main resolution, Grieve pointed to the compiling of files on militants and union officials by the Special Branch; to phone tapping and the interception of mail; and to attempts to lure students into working as agents. ACTT leader Alan Sapper, who moved an amendment, referred to the brutality of the Special Patrol Group against pickets at Grunwick:

Protection "We want protecting, not brutalising" he said. The police force, he added "must protect us, not beat us up"

But those expressions of anguish and horror are also expressions of complete confusion.

The police are part of the armed. repressive force maintained by the capitalist state to preserve capitalist exploitation. They will never act in response to the "democratic" wishes of the majority of the population, who are exploited by capitalism, and whose interests demand the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

The only way a police force responsive to the workers movement can be established is through revolutionary struggle for a socialist planned economy, the dissolution of the police and the standing army, and the establishment in their place of workers' militia organised through the trade unions.

But such a course means a fight not simply against the police and their Labour Cabinet allies, but also against Grieve, Sapper and the TUC bureaucracy.

The mobilisation of a lobby of some 400 'Right to Work' marchers and supporters of the 'Campaign Against. Youth Unemployment outside the TUC on Tuesday offered TGWU General Secretary Moss Evans and a string of other bureaucrats a chance to shine as spokesmen of the 'left'.

Boldly -in the knowledge that he was committing himself to nothing and diverting from a confrontation with the 5% Phase 4 limit-Evans strode to the platform to move a resolution that echoed the central slogan of the lobbyers, calling for a 35 hour week to cut unemployment.

Out came all the threadEvans bare old cliches about unemployment in the 1930s. Out came the usual spurious estimates of how week.

Left out

But of course, as did the 'Anger on the Road' march and the various categories of campaigns against youth unemployment, Evans left out one vital point: unemployment is rising because TUC leaders are collaborating with employers in speedingup production and cutting manning levels.

As long as this continues a cut in working hourseven if achieved-would bring no new jobs at all!

Dole queues are growing because of brazen betrayals such as the sell out at British Leyland's Speke plant, where 3,000 workers lost their jobs through a refusal of union officials, stewards or even "right to work" campaigners to fight for a policy of plant occupation, opening Leyland's books, and the fight for a nationalised motor and components industry.

Connivance

And unemployment will not be ended until TUC leaders are forced to break from their connivance at Healey's public spending cuts and to fight for a crash programme of public works paid at union rates under workers' control.

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The perspective outlined from 1950 onwards by Fl leader Michel Pablo -parties were moving towards centrism and even a "revolutionary orientation" under from their membership - was rudely shattered by events in the class struggle.

East German workers rose in political revolt against the Stalinist bureaucracy, only to be crushed by Soviet tanks. Stalin's death in the USSR found Pablo and his co-thinkers without any programme for political revolution, casting around for left' sections of the Kremlin bureaucracy: And in France a General Strike was brazenly sold out by the supposedly leftward-moving mass Communist Party, while the Pabloites refused to criticise the Stalinists.

Pablo, under James caught in indee us cition orkers ures within other parties of the l 'Open Letter' of 1953 declaring a public faction with Pablo and seeking to defend 'orthodox Trotskyism'. The signatories of this letter formed the International Committee. Pablo's followers remInternational. Under cannon ained in the International Secretariat.

1.: Daily confirmation that this is the epoch of imperialist decay is to be found in the profound political and economic crises convulsing the capitalist states, unIu vA- statee the calnnial and ex-colonial regimes, and the degenerate workers' states of Europe and Asia. in this period the betrayals of both Stalinist and Social Democratic parties internationally-each finding new depths of class collaboration in the face of the growing movement of workers and peasants against imperialism-highlights the vital necessity for the reconstruction of the Fourth International as the organising centre of the world party of the socialist 2. Founded forty years ago. in 1938 on the inseparable principles of proletarian internationalism and the defence of the political independence of the workIne Portuguese AFM rEgimE ing class from the bourgeoisie and all its agencies within the workers' movement, the task of the Fourth International was and remains that of preparing the human, material and political resources necessary to resolve the crisis of proletarian leadership in the international struggle for socialism.

But the International was from the beginning faced by huge objective and internal difficulties. The Trotskyist movement today confronts a crisis in which its whole post-war history must be re-examined in order to probe the political reasons behind its prolonged disorientation. Only from such a basis can a principled way forward be found for its reconstruction.

3. Trotskyism, the present day continuity of revolutionary Marxism, stands alone in seeing the need for the working class to take the lead in the struggle for social revoluBerlin workers defy Stal that pressure tion. For this reason it. is only Trotskyists who reject on principle political blocs or partnerships with other classes in which the revolutionary strength of the working class is subordinated to the interests of the juntas, or sections of the bureaucracy parasitic upon the workers' movement itself.

Because of the fundamental importance of this principle we are convinced it is necessary to re-examine those episodes in the postwar history of Trotskyism in which that position was abandoned in practice, and the method on which it rests was thrown into question.

In particular it is necessary to analyse anew and break from the method involved in the orientation of the movement towards Stalinism under the leadership of Michel Pablo-both prior to and after the 1953 split. It is essential to link this to an examination of the orientation of Trotskyist tendencies towards the Castroite leadership in Cuba and to petty bourgeois nationalist forces in Latin America and Algeria in the years following 1959, and to an analysis of present attitudes to the latest changes in post-war Stalinism-so-called 'Eurocommunism' in the capitalist states, and the nature of the Vietnamese Communist And such an analysis must also involve a searching examination of the attitude of the various tendencies of the world Trotskyist movement to 'progressive' military juntas such as the post-1974 AFM Can yesterday's bl nderer and miracle-man b come tomorrow's Marxist?

The answer is in some instances 'yes' Can this be done without examining the harsh lessons of the past, without breaking from the false positions of the past, without a struggle to change and to grasp the essence of Marxism?

The answer must be 'no"

So how can the blunderer or his followers be forced to make such a break?

This is the problem, confronting those forces internationally who see the need to fight on an international basis for the programme and the method of Trotskyism, but find themselves up against three main groupings land a number of smaller ones) each laying claim to represent the continuity of the Fourth International.

The largest of these groupings, the 'United' Secretariat, (USFI) remains wracked by a regime in Portugal and progressive' bonapartist regimes such as that of Gaddafi's in Libya. • Above all we must establish the basis to positively re-affirm both in our current programme and in the practice of each section, as well as by drawing the lessons of the past, the basic starting point of revolutionary Marxism: that the proletariat, the propertyless class, exploited by the bourgeoisie as the living instrument of capitalist production and the source of value, is the only consistently revolutionary class in society.

4. Yet in capitalist or colonial countries where peasants and small farmers represent a sizeable section of the population-even its majority-it is necessary for the workers to be equipped with a programme around which an alliance can be made with those oppressed small property-holders against the bourgeoisie and the big landowners.

Such a programme, basing itself on the theoretical • gains • embodied in Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, must contain a system of transitional demands, in combination where appropriate with democrațic demands, capable of mobilising the broadest layers of mass support in struggle against feudal relations, national oppression, Bonapartist or fascist dictatorship and leading over to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

Such a programme is the indispensible basis for common struggle, and the bridge between the democratic and the socialist revolution, ensuring that the reactionary separation of these Wednesday profound internal crisis, and is composed of the most heterogeneous forces drawn together on an opportunist basis over the last 25 years since the 1953 split.

The rival "International Committee" • led by Gerry Healy, is based around the British Workers Revolutionary Party. Its policies are a bizarre Trotskyist " voodax... formal, , uitraleftism, propagandist abstention from the day-to-day class struggle, and gross opportunist adaptation to the petty bourgeois nationalist forces in the Middle East and Africa.

And the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International OCRFI), headed by French OCI leader Pierre Lambert, combines an opportunist approach to the fight for the demands of the Trotskyist Transitional Programme with thorough going liquidation of its forces into social democratic parties in a number of countries.

Looked at in themselves, none of these groupings can OCI leader Lambert Disagreements between t SLL and the French OCI - co the French General Strike of an 'international' which never : Finally, in 1971, on the cover of specious arguments i the OCI. The OCl went on to f struggles, advocated by the Mensheviks and now adopted by all sections of Stalinists, is opposed and defeated in practice.

5. In the struggle to mobilise the working class itself, the key is likewise a programme of transitional demands which can form a bridge between the daily spontaneous and trade union struggle carried on by the working class, and the necessary conscious struggle for the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The fight in practice for such a programme to form the basis of the actions of the working class is the material way in which Marxists must today undertake the task described by Lenin in What Is To Be Done?:

1978 claim either in their practical record or in their theoretical positions, to represent the continuity of Trotskyism.

Nor would anything be improved by simply fusing these three inadequate groupings together.

The very history of the postwar Fourth International. is sufficient to prove that neither ill-prepared and hasty splits, nor opportunist "reúnifications" can in themselves resoive political problems.

The reconstruction of the Fourth International as the organising centre of the world party of socialist revolution requires not the formulation of a suitably diplomatic verbal declaration • agreeable to l all parties. not a mutual hiding of sins.

It requires a return to examine the programme, the principles and the method on which the Fourth International was founded 40 years ago, to see in what way those principles have been challenged in the post-war International, and to demonstrate the importance of SLL leader. the remaining parties of the Inter intinued unresolved. Opposed asse: 1968 and of the Middle East War attempted to achieve democratic c pretext of criticism of the OCI's on philosophy and the Transition form the OCRFI.

.. to combat spontaneity, to divert the working class movement from this spontaneous, trade unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy • all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the 'conscious element', of the role of Social Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers" . For this reason, also, therefore, any abstention from this fight for leadership within the working class movement is a retreat from the task of Marxists today. It is a . matter of principle therefore for Trotskyists to undertake

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Despite the Hungarian events of 1956, the SWP leadership began to move closer to the Pabloite view that the Kremlin bureaucracy was being pressured into self-reform, and increasingly accepted the Pabloite emphasis on petty-bourgeois-led colonial liberation struggles in place of the fight to train a vanguard party in the proletariat and in the advanced capitalist countries.

The high point of this emerged in the wake of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Castro, under com, bined military threat and economic blockade from US imperialism, turned towards the Kremlin for support. Under Soviet military protection; and in an increasingly close relationship with the Cuban : Stalinist party, Castro pressed ahead with nationalisations and the replacement of the old bourgeois state apparatus with the apparatus of a deformed workers state.

The SWP joined the Pabloites in regarding Castro as a 'natural Marxist' , seeing the Cuban revolution as the 'model' for future revolutions in the colonial countries, and seeking to 'fuse' the Fought by the British Socialist Labour League (who wrongly insisted that Cuba remained a capitalist state, but defended it against imperialist attack) the SWP broke its political sympathy for the International Committee and declared in favour of a 'reunification' with the International Secretariat. This took place, on a Pabloite programme and without prior discussion on the split of 1953. The result was the present 'United' Secretariat. reaffirming the correctness of those principles in today's struggles.

And above all it demands a rigorous scrutiny of the past and present practical work of those parties that lay claim to be Trotskyist parties, to ensure that a reconstructed Fourth International can operate firmly on the basis of democratic centralism.

The Workers Socialist League, which is not a part of any of these three main group ings, has since its foundation, consistently argued for such a perspective.

We have pointed out that while moves to reconstruct the Fourth International must almost inevitably begin with discussion on the roots of the present divisions and crisis within the "world Trotskyist must be to lay a principle crisis movement" of programmatic and methodological agreement on which a fighting International can be built, capable of giving leadership to today's struggles of the international proletariat. ional Committee - the British nts of the history of the Fl, of 1967 were scarcely discussed in alism. in events in Bolivia, and under rogramme, the SLL split from systematic and serious work, propagandising and agitating for the demands of the transitional programme, within the labour movement and the mass organisations of the working class as a whole. Without taking the fight into this arena, the programme becomes simply words.

6. In the ideological arming of the working class and the intervention of Marxists into the labour movement is enshrined also the need for parties and a reconstructed Literational constructed - the Bolshevik pattern, ise: on the political and mamazional principle of Or.92..= centralism=c=: lemocracy within * - ect in arriving at ambined with ..= == by all mem- ed discipline But this objective is casually brushed aside by the leaders of the USFI, IC and OCRFI.

They would sooner see continuation of the present confusion than any attempt to cut through the tissue of lies, evasions and half truths. with which they have attempted to conceal the history of the movement.

The WSL has been repeatedly attacked for its determination to fight for an understanding of the political issues underlying the post-war splits in the Trotskyist movement in 1953 and 1963.

But our position is based not on academic interest in history' for its own sake.

On the contrary, the political problems central to those splits-the problem of understanding the contradictory post-war role of Stalinism, and the difficulty of orientating towards petty bourgeois nationalist forces in colonial liberation struggles-live on as problems in carrying out the decisions of the majority.

The fight for this internal regime brings to a high point the fight against the petty bourgeois tendencies to individualism, propagandism, opportunism and careerism which beset the bankrupt ranks and leading echelons of the reformist, Stalinist and centrist movements. At the same time it challenges syndicalist positions brought into the movement by trade union comrades.

And by bringing the practice of the movement into open discussion enabling the theoretically established perspectives and the daily developing practice of the party to be brought into sharp conflict, democratic centralism plays a crucial role in the fight against schematism and dogmatism, together with all forms of idealist retreat facing today's working class.

The abject confusion of the USFI leadership on "Eurocommunism" (which they regard as a "progressive' phenomenon reflecting anti-bureaucratic feeling in the working class) and the grovelling of the International Committee leadership to petty bourgeois nation. alists in the Middle East, amply demonstrate that these "historical" questions are in fact questions about today.

We remain convinced that there is no shortcut to the reconstruction of the Fourth International. It is not possible simply to piece together the existing splintered fragments of the post-war Trotskyist movement.

It is necessary to reaffirm both in theory and in practice the principles on which the Fourth International was founded.

We see practical and theoretical agreement on the nine points listed below as a principled basis for the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

Trotsky from the Marxist method of dialectical materialism.

Similarly on an international level democratic centralism must be upheld as the essential organisational principle of the reconstructed Fourth International. The Workers Socialist League will not be a party to any repetition of the "moratoria" and unspoken "non-aggression pacts" that have characterised the opportunist organisational relationships within the IS, the USFI, the IC and the OCRFI.

We are fundamentally opposed to the concept of an "International" in which the discipline is so loose and the programmatic agreement so weak that public warfare can take place between its factions in different countries around the world. We insist on the Trotskyist movement with Castroite forces.

fullest internal discussion and examination of the practice of the sections, combined with a strict adherence by all sections to the line of the majority.

7. The Trotskyist Fourth International traces its independent origins and its reason for existence from the pronouncement by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1933 that the Comintern, totally dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy, was dead for the purposes of revolution and a thoroughly counter-revolutionary force within the international workers' movement. At the same time Stalinism was seen as a fundamentally unstable Bonapartist form of rule, balancing between the nationalised property relations established in the October revolution and the international pressures of imperialism. Trotsky established a clear position of unconditional defence of the Soviet Union as a workers' state against imperialism, coupled to the fight to prepare political revolution for the conscious overthrow of the bureaucracy and restoration of soviet power.

This analysis still has to be defended both against tendencies that have attempted to see the Stalinist bureaucracy as a permanent and progressive force in the , workers' movement (pre-war centrists, and Pablo in the post-war period) or as a permanent, reactionary force-a new ruling class in the Soviet Union (Schachtmanites and state capitalists today).

In defending the Trotskyist perspective, the most important starting point is the question of the political independence of the working class from the Stalinist bureaucracy in the struggle for state power. It is this, along with an analysis of the counterrevolutionary world strategy of Stalinism in the postwar period which most clearly refutes the Pabloite notion of a 'left centrist' evolution of Stalinism in the Eastern European buffer zone or in Asia, and which shows most clearly the reactionary nature of 'Eurocommunist' criticism of the regimes in Eastern Europe. It is this position also that confirms the need for the building of Trotskyist parties for political revolution in Cuba, Vietnam, China and Yugoslavia as well as the USSR and Eastern Europe.

It is necessary for the world Trotskyist movement to re-examine these issues bearing on the post war role of Stalinism in order to clarify and correct the wrong positions that have been adopted. For this purpose the USFl, IC and OCRF leadership and sections-for all their false positions-cannot be regarded in advance as having placed themselves outside the world Trotskyist movement.

8. It is impossible to reconstruct the Fourth International without a conscious break from the method of impressionism and empiricism taking up a struggle for the dialectical method as fought for by Trotsky in In Defence of Marxism. Such a break means also a break from attempts to substitute petty bourgeois propaganda groupings for serious Marxist cadres developed in the mass organisations of the working class. Only when such a change is made cán the fight for the transitional programme on an international scale take on real meaning and life at the centre of the reconstruction of the Fourth International:

9. Should agreement be reached on these general political principles, the way would be opened up for steps to organisationally reconstruct the Fourth International.

The WSL is flexible in regard to the organisational aspects of discussions towards this reconstruction. We insist only that these must involve parity arrangements acceptable to all parties, and that both the history of the movement as a whole and the present practice of each part of it must be open to examination.

USFI leader Mandel

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Keith White and Martin Folan review British Soldiers Speak Out on Ireland.

British Speak Soldiers Out Ireland On has been produced by ex-British soldiers who are opposed to the ng OCIAL IST 'RESS. reines.

----- pull-quotes -----

crimputer with files on isolitical speets in the

many "extra" jobs would be "created" by the 35-hour

peasantry, petty bourgeois- ie, 'progressive military

Vitin 1963: