Workers Party: yel to break from Healyism

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winter: militancy was not lacking but leadership cratic repression.

positions.

Although the Workers Party Group like the WSL has come out of the WRP, and echoes some of our criticisms of its leaders, it has not been formed in the same way; nor has it broken from the basic political conceptions of the Healy movement on questions of programme and practice.

A serious discussion with these comrades however. This is because they stil represent, however much they themselves deny, some of the strengths as well as many of the weaknesses of the Healyite movement.

Aiso, the issues they raise involve a discussion which was never possible before within the WRP.

Unlike the. Workers Party founders, the forces that tormed the WS struggled initially within the WRP to raise our differences and fight for the maxımum possible internal discussion to correct the wrong positions of the Party. -Understanding We produced two major discussion documents-only one of which was eventually selectively circulated by Healy. We argued for our rights as a minority both under the then WRP constitution and in line with the traditions of the Trotskyist and Bolshevik movement.

After the Healy leadership cracked down and expelled us, we lobbied WRP aggregate meetings and the WRP Conference from which we were excluded.

We even fought right through the rigged WRP 'appeals' machinery against our expulsions.

In the process of this struggle we were able to further deepen our understanding of how profound was our split with the Healy movement and to develop our critique of the WRP's false method in the practice of party-building. • The three leading members of the Workers Party, on the other hand, carried out no such fight against Healy.

They were expelled from the WRP only after they had themselves i resigned. They had produced no written critique of the WRP's programme and practice, and only conducted a brief fight within its ranks.

Limited basis As a result their break with Healy has taken place only on the most limited basis, and no real analysis has been developed of Healy's attitude to practice and programme.

Furthermore, unlike the founders of the WSL, the Workers Party leaders emerged with no roots in the organised working class.

It had been precisely the necessity for : our leading members to fight on a clear programme day in and day out in the workers' movement that had at first focussed our attention clearly, on the false method of the WRP and its abandonment of the demands of the Transitional Programme.

Yet the Workers Party, though it has subsequently recruited workers, emerged from simply an abstract critique of Healy's most obvious false positions in the most general terms. It has yet to grasp the meaning of the fight for programme in general and the significance of the Transitional Programme in particular, in the struggle to construct a revolutionary party. OUR HISTORY Indeed although the Workers Party leaders were prominent in the WRP during our expulsions from the WRP in December 1974, they show little grasp of the events that led up to the expulsions or the real issues involved.

In common with this attitude to most historical questions, the Workers Party take little interest in examining details-which in fact prove to be of considerable importance.

The first criticisms we raised against the line of the WRP focussed on Healy's notion in 1974 that the collapse of capitalism in Britain and on a world scale, was imminent, and that it was therefore simply a question of a "countdown to dictatorship".

Abandonment

This alarmist and totally one-sided analysis •of the mounting economic crisis of capitalism was not even carried through consistently: there was no WRP call, for instance, for the formation of workers' militias or any other preparation against the predicted "police/ military dictatorship"

Instead it led simply to the total abandonment of any serious day to day trade union work conducted by the WRPand of any demands on which such work could be based.

After all, if the whole system stands on the verge of collapse, then socialist revolution must be the only solution. Any demand short of the immediate expropriation of capitalism is therefore inadequate, and the sole task of revolutionaries is to build an organisation to carry this out.

Mass recruitment

The WRP on this basis embarked on the most frenzied and ill conceived 'mass' recruitment campaigns.

Hundreds of workers, youth and passers-by were signed up on the spot, in the streets, in lifts, in traffic jams, and enroiled on the most minimal basis "members" of the "mass revolutionary party" This reached its peak of absurdity in the two election campaigns run by the WRP in 1974.

Why were we the first to detect what was wrong with all this? Because unlike the petty bourgeois elements of the WRP the Cowley members recognised that in recruiting members that are then required to carry out a fight for Party PHOTO: Carlos Augusto. IFL policy in the class struggle, a considerable measure of political agreement is essential.

And in also coming into contact with large sections of workers outside the narrow circles of the WRP, the Cowley members were forced to attempt to. argue for the WRP's policies-and recognise how distant these were from the reality of the class struggle.

Isolated

Far from developing workers and mobilising action against the attacks of the bourgeoisie, the WRP's predictions of "military coups" and abstract calls for the "nationalisation of the basic industries" simply isolated the Party from the working class.

And when we turned to compare this approach with that in Trotsky's Transitional Programme, we found that Trotsky's method was indeed entirely different.

We stressed the necessity for revolutionaries to find "a bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the We emphasised the need for patient work in the trade unions, in which Marxists stand "in the front line trenches" even in the course of struggles for the 'modest material interests' of the workers. Trotsky "Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy" {Transitional For Trotsky, then, governBy To Ri mental demands were completely related to demands on jobs, wages and democratic rights. Each had to be presented in the form of a "bridge" over which the working class could advance, in struggle, beyond its daily, trade union consciousness, to a grasp of the need for socialist revolution.

Healy, however, had abandoned this living conception of struggle for leadership. Instead the term 'leadership' was, reduced by the WRP to an abstraction divorced from the day to day class struggle.

This was highlighted after our expulsions when Tom White, the one remaining WRP member in Cowley, was allowed by the WRP to enter the class collaborationist "workers' participation" committees in the plant. He was further encouraged by Healy to stab in the back the struggle by the 'Cowley 9 Defence Campaign' against victimisation by the TGWU bureaucracy of leading militants in the plant-including himself!

Facts wrong

Have the Workers Party grasped the way in which Healy's method departs from that of Trotsky and the Transitional Programme?

Apparently not. They attack us for example, fo not ceaselessly employing Healy's abstract slogan of "Bring down the Labour government" , which they uncritically support.

Even in this they get their tacts wrong:

"When former WRP central committee member Alan Thornett and his supporters adopted clearly wrong positions by arguing against a struggle to bring down • the WilsonCallaghan administration, an open debate within the party was suppressed". . (WP document The Revolutionary Party P5).

We did not argue against the slogan in 1974-for the good reason that it had not then been adopted by the WRP! It was not adopted as a position until 1975 -when the expulsion of the Cowley cadre and loss of many more workers had further widened the WRP's isolation from the real struggles and political level of the working class.

On the other hand . from the very outset Socialist Press has attacked those bureaucrats in the trade union and labour movement. who argued that workers should hold back on their struggles in order to "save the Labour Government"

was In taking up the struggle to expose 'left' social democracy through the tactic of placing demands on the'lefts' we have always spelled out the demand that Labour. MPs should be called upon to vote and campaign against WilsonCallaghan's attacks on the working class-even if this meant bringing down the Labour government.

The Workers Party leaders however have no real experience of the struggle for programme in the working class.

They fail to grasp that in the fight revolutionaries inevitably confront not simply the open right wing but the treachery of those 'left' bureaucrats who pose as militant defenders of the working class but pull back in practice from any struggle against the TUC or Labour leadership.

It is crucial to expose these forces in action to those layers of workers that look to them for leadership.

The Workers Party accuse us of separating "the economic from the political"

Yet they do not see that it is only in reality through the struggle for transitional demands and not simply through the shouting of abstract governmental slogans, that the link between day to day struggies on jobs and wages and the strategic necessity to overthrow capitalism can be brought home to the working class.

Practical struggle

Because a slogan calls for "bringing down" a government does not make it necessarily more "political" than a slogan Thornett that seeks to mobilise the kind of mass action that actually can bring down governments.

The answer lies not in the ritualistic use of a form of words, but in the practical struggle by revolutionaries against the bureaucratic leaders of the workers' movement.

Arrogance

It is ironic that the Workers Party, who have yet to lead any struggles anywhere in the working class, have the arrogance to attack the WSL (who throughout last winters' pay batties struggled for the building of councils of action and the generalisation of strike action) for what they call our:

"unwillingness to understand and intervene in that movement as the struggle for power in embryo."

Yet embodied in this abstract concept of the "struggle for power" is the basis of the Workers Party's effective abandonment of the transitional demands and the method of the Transitional Programme-a facet of their politics that so clearly echoes Healy.

The Workers Party actually claim that today's class struggle poses different political tasks from those confronted in the Transitional Programme, which, they say:

"was in fact written to meet a completely different world situation, where the working class had suffered defeat after defeat."

Now they declare, things are all changed because:

"The revolutionary tide now flowing so strongly favour of the working class."

Yet Trotsky in 1938 was at pains to stress the revolutionary movements of the working class: his focus, however, contrary to that of the Workers Party, was on its crisis .of 'The multi-millioned masses again and again enter the road of revolution. But each time they are blocked by their own conservative bureaucratic machines.

"The Spanish proletariat has made a series of heroic attempts since April 1931 to take power in its hands and guide the fate of society. However its own parties (Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists, POUM, etc)-each in its own way acted as a brake and thus prepared Franco's triumphs.

"In France the great wave of sit-down strikes, particularly during June 1936, revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system."

Far from simply revelling in this militancy of the proletariat, Trotsky stresses the dangers posed by its treacherous leadership.

This central question remains unchanged today!

The post-war Trotskyist movement has been unable in any country to place itself at the head of the masses or to carry through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Must be broken

The workers' movement remains therefore politically dominated by counter-revolutionary Stalinism, reformism and even petty-bourgeois nationalism. This hold can and must be broken.

It is not and has never been true, as Royston Bull fondly believes, that:

'the working class is surging forwards towards an embryonic revolutionary consciousness, thirsting for a revolutionary party to lead it and brushing aside contemptuously the old sectarian and opportunist crap which would see it tied down to

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defeat after defeat or unprincipled sell out after sell out."

A guest reviewer looks at "Support the Leicester 875 to be published the by Leicester 21 April Defence tee Commi later this onth.

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