MG leader poses as Marxist A SHEEP N WOLF'S CLOTHING

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USFI interpreted the 'facts' of the Cuban revolution to at the conclusion that Trotskyists need only fuse with Castroite groups to carry out revolution.

Readers of the Pabloite weekly journal Intercontinental Press will have witnessed an incongruous spectacle in the August 28 issue.

Notorious reviser of Marxism Alan Jones-a leading member of the International Marxist Groupdonned a ludicrous disguise and posed as a defender of Marxist philosophy, in a ten page attack on the positions of Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).

Unfortunately for Jones, the disguise turns out to be a poor fit, and the spirit gum on his Karl Marx beard works loose in the course of his tortured and repetitive argument.

Political Jones' objective-to present a political answer to the sustained, hysterical slander campaign aimed by the WRP against Joseph Hansen and George Novack, leading members of the Pabloite US Socialist Workers Party-is a worthy one.

But Jones is unqualified to undertake the task he has set himself-elaborating a defence of the Marxist method of dialectical materialism against Healy's perversion and abandonment of that method.

Jones himself fails to comprehend the essence of dialectical materialism, or its application to political analysis. Hiw own track record on this is appalling.

Only last year Jones produced a two-part article in the same Intercontinental Press (February 28, March 7, 1977) arguing on the basis of the changes in strike statistics that there was a "downturn" in the class Role of officials This account left out any serious analysis of the role of the trade union bureaucracy in restricting the number of disputes..

But more conspicuously, it was actually published at the very point where, after a New Year's wave of strikes against the 42% pay limit, management and union attempts to end the Leyland toolmakers' strike by a threat to sack all 3,000 strikers led spontaneously to a virtual national strike movement within the AUEW!

simply on the basis of the "facts" of the decline in si rike figures left ex-.

Jones completely unable to grasp the political basis of those facts, or the contradictions beneath the surface that contained the possibility of such a sudden, explosive development.

Pessimism

But it was not only Jones who took this view. Rather he lent the pretence of a "theoretical" content to the prevailing mood of pessimism within the ranks of the IMG, who had to all intents and purposes abandoned a perspective of struggles against wage controls and against the union bureaucracy, and drifted into focussing their attention on protest action against the social service cuts.

The "theory" in this instance, as is customary in the IMG and the whole of the Pabloite "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International of which the IMG is the British section, flowed from the most superficial impressions of the "facts" of the situation, and not from an analysis of the forces at work beneath the surface events of the class 'Realistic' In this way the IMG leaders are able to persuade their largely inexperienced membership that theirs is a the working class at a particular moment.

But in fact the policy is always a one-sided response to events, trailing along Lenin-fought for vanguard party behind developments in the class struggle, and continuously attempting to jump onto bandwagons only after they have gathered pace.

Such an approach is not one to construct a Leninist vanguard party, to give leadership to the working class, but one to piece together a constantly confused support group.

Jones however gamely takes up the struggle to defend his viewpoint and at the same time attack Healy's revisionist positions, (which for factional reasons which we will not examine in this article, he traces back to 1963).

Justification

His whole argument hinges ón a justification of starting analysis from the "facts" of the class struggle against Healy's vieW expressed in the Socialist Labour League document Opportunism and Empiricism:

A series of SLL quotes are torn from that document to make Healy's rejection of empiricism appear to be a rejection of all forms of practical experience in the class struggle.

"As we shall see"

tion of the position that Marxism: proceeds from facts leads them to reject the foundation of dialectical materialism."

Jones then proceeds to parade a sequence of unsurprising but equally partial quotations from Trotsky, from Lenin, Marx and Engels, showing that none of these revolutionary leaders disregarded facts.

Therefore, we are supposed to concil ide, Healy's position was sim iply insane, rejecting any connection with the real world.

Lily gilded

Jones even attempts to gild the lily by declaring that the difference between empiricism and Marxism is that empiricism latches on to a few facts in isolation and in a fixed way, while Marxism:

"demands a study of all the facts, and proves its positions and theories on the basis of them."

66 .. In short, empiricism bases itself not on the real facts but on impressions and mere resemblances to facts and aspects of reality."

Jones should know. This last quote is little more than a summary of the method of the USFI leadership when it launched a turn towards guerrilla warfare in Latin America in 1969.

100% empiricism To judge from the later, self-critical words of the USFI leaders themselves, their approach at that time was 100% that of empiricism:

«We ... lacked a complete and correct view" "we overestimated" "we thought" "our hopes were very much exagerated"

"led to an evolution opposite to the one we hoped for"... "our estimation was false" "errors of appreciation of reality" (Self-Criticism UrE Latin America)

These "errors of appreciation of reality" did not flow from USFI leaders ignoring the "facts" as they saw them.

They flowed from a failure to analyse the processes within the class struggle that gave rise to those "facts"

Product

The USFI did not start by seeing the facts as the contradictory product of a conflict of opposed class forces, in which the key issue was not to adapt to the existing state of affairs but to prepare to mobilise the mass movement of the working class in the revolutionary struggle for socialism.

The method of dialectical materialism mate ialism consists no in simpl compiling hug lists of facts" and being aware that such facts change in the course of the struggle, but in probing the essence of the struggle itself, Lenin points out that:

'The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics... The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their "self-movement" in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the "struggle" of opposites."

(CW Vol. 38 p.359-60)

Development for the USFI leaders and for Jones is not so much the struggle of opposites as a succession of varying "facts". • For them history is reduced to Henry Ford's "one damn thing after another"

Healy in 1963 attempted to challenge this approach, quoting Trotsky's attack on those opportunists who "worship the accomplished fact" • Centring on SWP leader Cannon's letter which justified the Kremlin climbdown in the Cuban missiles crisis, the SLL pointed out that:

"it is nonsense to pose the Cuban problem as Cannon poses it- What else could he have done under the circumstances?' Taken to its logical conclusion, this type of argument can be used to justify anything."

It stresses that "the given circumstances" are themselves the product of a process of class struggle in which the treachery of Stalinism and reformism has played a key role.

And it makes the point that:

"All this argument that "the facts". are the objective reality must 'start preparation policies • of non-working ships"

In taking in 1963 Hea defending N opportunist Castro.

and that we from here' is a to justify adaptation to class leaderup such a fight ly was correctly larxism against adaptation to Method not applied But in himself refusing to come to grips with the actual processes and struggle of opposite forces that had given rise to a deformed workers' state in Cuba, Healy failed to apply the Marxist method to. understand this crucial development in the real world.

And, in proceeding from the late 1960s onwards to further distort and then to pervert the application of Marxist philosophy, utilising it as a factional bludgeon against inner-party opposition, Healy turned dialectical materialism from. a revolutionary weapon into a means of mystifying the WRP and its membership.

The only movement to have analysed this theoretical degeneration and fought Healy's revisionism from the standpoint of dialectical materialism is the Workers Socialist League.

For Jones to cite past polemics in Socialist Press as authority for his lame and partial attack on Healy is no more than the false pretences that come naturally to such a practised Pabloite impressionist.

Marxism is no patent medicine, but we warn our readers: beware imitations, accept only the real thing!

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INDUSTRSAL MEWS tage 1 DULIALID y 4U septemder, 17 10

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"realistic" policy, based on the 'actual' requirements of