Workers Party- vet to break from Healyism

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objective tasks.

In this article we propose to show how their attitude on questions of party organisation and the struggle for an international closely parallels this.

Again they refuse to confront the real problems involved in 'party building; and again they in practice bow to spontaneous developments in the working class.

• We see the same contemptuous wave of the hand to dismiss the difficult problems of confronting and dealing with the numerous fragments which like themselves claim adherence to revolutionary: Marxism:

The Workers Party have reacted to the complete lack of democracy in Healy's WRP by abandoning altogether the necessary struggle to maintain the balance between democracy and centralism.

We in the WSL also faced the same lack of democracy within the WRP, but have fought since to allow demo. cratic internal discussions, real: differences to be expressed at conferences etc..

Spontaneity

We have not, however, bowed so far to expressions of spontaneity as to allow branches or individuals to express different. opinions publiclylet alone to carry them out.

By suggesting that branches should be able to act in this way, the Workers Party comrades show that they have not yet developed the historical and theoretical understanding to deal with problems of action in the working class.

Nor have they recognised the real problem of fighting sectarianism among petty bourgeois elements within the ranks of revolutionary organisations who will be drive bs their isolation from the class struggle to futile hairsplítting and endless discussions.

The problems of developing from a tiny group into a party are not the same as those of fighting to develop a mass organisation.

It is not, as Trotsky put it, "as if the proletariat were in a wellistocked shoe store, selecting a new pair of boots'.

"As regards new leadership, the choice is very limited. Only gradually on the basis of new experience through several stages, can the broad layers of the masses become convinced that a new leadership is firmer, more reliable, more loyal than the old."

(The Class, the Party, and the leadership' in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) Path finder p 362)

Development Thus, in the early stages, workers are only won in ones and twos, and are developed as cadres through the fight within the party against spon.

taneity.

Democratic centralism is the organisational means of ensuring the necessary polit:

ical development. However, as Trotsky himself explained:

" da not think I can give a formula on democratic centralism that 'once and for all' would eliminate misunder standings and false interpretations' (Writings 1937-8 pp89-90) He went on to explain that organisational arrangements vary according to the relative development of a party and its line, and the particular cirumstances of time and place:

"Democracy and centralism do not find themselves in an invariable ratio to one another ...Before a conference, when the problem is one of formulating a political line for the next period, democracy triumphs. over centralism. When the problem is political action, centralism subordinates democracy to itself.' The problem for the comrades of the Workers Party is that they have chosen to emphasise only the side of this balance which they themselves prefer. Through this they have given in to spontaneity.

Thus in their document dealing with the WRP, they quote from Trotsky's Writings 1930-31 (p155) as follows:

Whoever is acquainted with the history of the Bolshevik Party knows what a broad autonomy the local organisations always enjoyed; they issued their own papers, in which they openly and sharply, whenever they found it necessary, criticised the actions of: the Centra Committee Apparently in line with this view, the constitution of the Workers Plarty has adopted this clause:

Party members and local party organisations may voice Eve.

Bolshevik workers in a their disagreements with party policy or with decisions of the party bodies at any level of the party and circulate their differences to other members in any form. Members and local organisations may also raise their differences with party policy or decisions of party bodies with full factional rights in the party press and other party publications.' They go on to say that 'all party organisations have the right to publish their own propaganda.

Such an attitude can only lead to accepting and glorifying the • spontaneous consciousness of the Workers Party workers and petty bourgeois layers. If will do nothing to develop a party consciousness or authoratitive leadership.

Consciousness

Rather than struggling to ensure that their leadership advocates the correct policy, branches can merely substitute their own point of view.

But party consciousness can only be achieved by means of democratic internal debate on policy questions in dispute and by agreement that until changed, the line of the majority will prevail in propaganda and in practice. factory committee meeting This was the position of Trotsky also, and the one he adopted after 1933 when the proven total degeneration of the Stalinist Comintern led him to decide to fight to build a new International.

This necessarily began with development of small cadre groups.

The quotation used by the WP comrades from before that time refers to very different circumstances, when the Left Opposition was still a faction within the Communist International, an organisation of mass parties. Clearly the later period is more relevant to us.

Trotsky himself was well aware of this change, as he showed during his joint struggle with James P. Cannon against the petty bourgeois opposition in the American SWP in 1939-40.

He dealt with very similar examples from the history of Bolshevism which were used by the petty bourgeois opposition:

'Schachtman finds, or better to say invents, histor¡cal precedents': In the Bolshevik Party the opposition had its own public papers etc. He forgets only that the party at that time had hundreds of thousands of members, that the discussion had as its task to reach these hundreds of thousands and to convince them. Under such circumstances it was not easy to confine the discussion to intemal circles. On the other hand the danger of co-existence of the Party and the opposition papers was mitigated by the fact that the final decision depended upon hundreds of thousands of workers and not. upon two small groups. The American Party has only a comparatively small number of members Ic. 2,500 at this time) the discussion was and. is more than abundant.

(In Defence of Marxism, Pathfinder p. 161)

Trotsky went on to argue against the opposition having 'their own public paper or magazine', since this would provide la means not to convince the party, but to appeal to the external world against the Party' He had taken this position ever since 1933, and in the articles in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-6) "strongly attacked the idea of the opposition having its own press and presenting different positions.

The argument on such organisational questions is very much at the centre of the political differences in that particular struggle.

These positions were argued more fully by James P. Cannon in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, which was strongly praised by Trotsky (see especially p122f).

He argued against the opposition who were:

'pressing all the time to establish as the normal procedure the right of a minority to contradict the party line in the public press.' He: went on to explain shevik methods of organising discussion, making these points amongst others:

We are on the eve of the convention which will conclude the discussion with a decision. From that we shali proceed to discipline in action on the basis of the decision. That is the real tradition of Bolshevism. The "tradition' which the opposition wishes to invoke are those of Men'Equally fraudulent is the. reference to 'many similar instances' in the history of the Fourth International. There are no such instances. The Fourth International and its predecessor, the International Left Opposition, never sanctioned different publications advocating antagonistic programmes on fundamental questions, just the contrary. The International Left Opposition took shape on a worid scale in the course of an irre concilable struggle for a single struggle and against groupings (with their publications! which, while pretending agreement 'in general' advocated antagonistic programmes.

Cannon goes on to quote the one exception when a separate paper was issued for a limited period.

This was when the two French sections had the same programme but differences over the tactic of entry and so were "talking to different audiences."

So it can be seen that an organisation which condemns others for "subjective idealişm' to a short-term view of their views which seem most unlikely to give them a longterm future.

Problems Problems . But a similar methodology as well as a propensity to brush aside problems with a wave of the hand informs the Workers Party's attitude to the building of an International, James P.. Cannon wrote in Struggle for a Proletarian Party (p144) that:

The 'first question for every revolutionist is the question of international affiliation. Without a close union of co-thinkers on an international scale a revolutionary movement in our epoch is unthinkable.' For Royston Bull on the other hand (WP Bulletin No.5 whatever nimble feats of nomenclature are performed on the deathbed of the Fourth International to make it United Or International, Defend It or Reconstruct, a successful revolutionary party must first be built in Britain before British Trotskyists can help much towards transforming the world revolutio. nary struggle.

'Lenin's dominating influence on the world wide striving for a Marxist understanding was the result of his practical leadership of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky's international authority was similarly based.' Before dealing with Comrade Bull's patriotic conclusions, let us consider his somewhat inadequate grasp of history.

When Lenin was in the Second International, there was certainly little in the way of a centralised line and discipline.

Nevertheless, he spent a great deal of effort taking up : supposedly revolutionary organisations within it.

From the start he saw the struggle against reformism as an international question. After 1914, Lenin, together with Trotsky, Luxembourg and other fighters against imperialist war' and centrist betrayal, took up the struggle to bui-d a new. Third International.

Lenin took up this struggle initially through the effort to build the Zimmerwald Left as a force in the international workers movement.

In his "April Theses" or "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", he placed as one of the central preoccupations of the Russian working class "The Need for a Third Thus, although it is clear that Lenin derived great authority from the success of the Russian Revolution, this Revolution itself was only made on the basis of a consistent international struggle against reformist and centrist betrayal. The building of a Third International was directly linked to that.

In dealing with the history of the Fourth International, the comrades of the WP give the same simplistic answers, often compounded by a sheer lack of knowledge of the facts of the matter.

All that is necessary, they say, is a "proper understanding of the way the revolutionary tide is now flowing so strongly in favour of the working class in the struggle with imperialism."

The world is analysed simply in terms of the forward movement of the working class and the existence of the Workers Party.

Nothingness

Beside these two facts, every other force evaporates into nothingness.

Thus Comrade Bull again:

(Bulletin No. 5 p. 3):

Without a single exception all the hundreds of parties and groups affiliated to these various "Fourth International' factions refuse to break from the conservatism, sectarianism and opportunism of the postwar-era. The total collapse in practice of the FI's Marxist credentials around 1950 was

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The Three Mile Island plant at Harrisburg the and of it as a serious revolutionary force.' One can only assume tha The phrase 'around 195( used because of Comrade Bull's with serious study of the actual process he so summarily dismisses.

Nor does he find it necessary any serious arguments for these most far-reaching conclusions:

The proven political bank upcy of the leadership of al the requires no further demonstra.

It is not good enough just to throw together a few i histdepenis alone can bergnore l orica and then declare that process Bull and Johns.

Perhaps they are not yet 'worshipping' so many 'accomplished facts' as their mentor. But they could learn.

Thus we are told by Comrade Bull (in the same Bulletin) that:

'The workers and peasants of Vietnam were organisad and inspired to an outstanding level of revolutionary achievement by a leadership which played a fully conscious and historical role in - inflicting one of the greatest defeats imperialism has ever suffered.

Comrade Bull describes this as an adaptation by the counter-revolutionary Stalinists to the "pressure of the masses", , he does not consider it necessary to call for political The film does not tackie the thorny questions which nuclear power poses for the socialist movement.

It stops short at liberal and individual protests against a society that daily risks all our lives in the search for profit.

But where is the energy to come from which a future socialist society will need. The "no growth syndrome'" is as much of a danger to mankind as the China Syndrome.

It forgets that most of the world lives at starvation level! primarily because of the inability to apply energy resources to transforming the world economy.

Fossil fuels are physically limited (which is not to deny that the present shortage is

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shevism, of pre-war social democracy of the "all inclusive