Behind the Smokescreen

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For those who thought the bottom of the ditch had again revealed undreamed of depths of distortion and sländer against the Workers Socialist League. Although most of the present members of the WRP have probably never known any other political anethod from their leadership, it has not always adopted such positions.

Until 1974, members of the Workers Revolutionary Party and its predecessor the Socialist Labour League had for many years been able to subject to the most merciless criticism the various tendencies inside the labour movement prodaiming themselves to be Marxist. To carry out this: task, the WRP in the main had no need to misrepresent the political positions put forward by these groups. The speeches and publications of representatives of these organisations provided the WRP with all the immunition they needed.

It is an indication both of the political strength and integrity of the Workers Socialist League and the continuing political degeneratior of the WRP that, in order to attack Dur group, the WRP is forced to distort and misrepresent our programme and analysis to a degree anheard of in the workers movement since Stalin first set about trying to discredit Trotsky by slandering him and falsifying his politcal positions.

DISHONEST

The latest example of thsi misrepresentation can be found in an article in the August 27th issue of Workers Press. The article is written hipping boy' of WRP General, Secretary, Gerry Healy, who saw Gale as representing centrist tendencies inside the WRP. Gale now eims to be worming his way back nto favour by his scurillous attacks or the Workers Socialist League •hich appear from time to time in tbe pages of Workers Press. His latest offering must qualify him For the title 'Most Dishonest Political Writer in British Journal". No mean feat when one ponsiders the many (un)worthy pontenders for that particular title.

Perhaps the most glaring disfortion to any objective reader of Faie's article is the way in which he eprints our statement of critical ppport for the LCDTU lobby of TUC Conference (published ays before the WRP announced e: were holding a lobby). The tatement exposes the Stalinist olitics of the LCDTU and states #SL will fight to expose these brough its own slogans. Gale erints the statement and then We call on all our members and supporters to support the lobby of the TUC called on September 2nd, ! and organised by the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions The lobby is demanding a rejection of wage restraint and a fight against •employment.

We support this lobby even though the record of the LCDTU has always been to come to the defence of the trade union bureaucracy.

We consider it necessary to pose our alternative demands to the TUC and expose those of the Communist Party, for which the LCDTU is a front organisation. blandly asserts that it says the opposite of the words on the page! He writes: "His call to support the Stalinist lobby does not include a single demand which could separate his tendency from Ramelson's stunt" and goes on: "Thornett has no difficulty in placing his group in total subservience to both the Stalinists and the reformists"

Such statements by Gale tell us nothing about Thornett's policies but speak volumes on his inability to read even a simple passage written by the WSL.

TROTSKY

But the main aim of Gale's article is to demonstrate that on the question of the Labour Governemnt Trotsky stands on the side of the WRP and not on the side of the Workers Socialist League.

The present policy of the WRP is to call on the working class to "force the Labour government to resign" on the grounds that it is an anti-working class government that is a coalition with the Tories inaall but name. The WRP propose that the Labour Party conference must adopt the WRP's socialist programme on which the Labour Party must fight the election that would be brought about by the resignation of the government.

The Workers Socialist League believes that this policy is incorrect. Of course, we do not disagree about the totally reactionary nature of the Labour government. The Wilson government is leading a massive attack on the jobs and living standards of the working class. They do this because they start, not from the need to overthrow this bankrupt capitalist system and introduce socialist policies, but from the need to prop up capitalism at the expense of the working class who voted them into power.

The so-called 'left-wing' of the Labour Party, while they object in words to the policies that Wilson is carrying out, in practice do nothing that would seriously challenge his right to attack the working class on behalf of the bosses.

What, then, is to be done about this Labour government? The Workers Socialist League believes that most members of the government have nothing in common with the labour movement at all. They really belong with the Tories. We believe that these ministers. like Wilson, Callaghan, Healey and Jenkins, should be removed from power.

But then the question is, how is that to be achieved? We demand that those members of Parliament and Cabinet ministers who claim to be lefts should stop simply talking about their opposition to the Labour right-wing. Instead, they should immediately start a campaign inside the Parliamentary Labour Party to force the right-wing to resign.

We propose this because it is our firm conviction that these 'lefts' like Benn, Heffer and Foot have no intention of fighting the right wing and we want to demonstrate this in practice to all those class conscious sections of the working class who still believe that the Labour government would be all right if the 'lefts' were not obstructed from carrying out the Labour Party manifesto. Only by exposing their support for the right wing can the 'lefts' be exposed and destroyed as a political force. SPONTANEOUS The call te "force the Labour government to resign" on the other hand, assumes that the working class has already spontaneously broken from positions which it is quite clear that they still hold, including extensive grass roots support for the so-called lefts.

Moreover the WRP do not propose how the Labour government should be forced to resign, or what government should replace it. government to resign. Today, the WRP refuse to propose such action and at the same time offer no. alternative as to how Wilson can be forced to call another election. Their apparently 'revolutionary' demand this becomes a form of words to cover their complete lack of serious intervention in the working class.

In his article, Jack Gale sets out to distort our policy on the Labour government. He accuses Alan Thornett, a leading member of the WSL, of arguing, at the time of his expulsion from the WRP; that the Labour government would be forced to the left by the pressure of the working class, and would therefore come into conflict with capitalism. In this way Gale seeks by barefaced lies and distortion to show that the WSL has a tradition of 'wrong positions on the Labour But then another question must arise. Since this was supposedly such a basic difference with the WRP, surely such a position would have emerged as a part of the WL's position, and not be confined to an alleged verbal statement at one WRP central committee meeting? Thornett has consistently denied ever making such a statement, and Gale, after more than 6 months publication of the WS socialist Press is unable to find a single quote in any of the documents of the split or any issue of our paper to support his accusation. If Thornett and leading WSL members did hold this incorrect position it would inevitably be reflected in the pages of Socialist Press. We challenge anyone to produce a single quote from our publications that supports Gale's accusation. NOT SERIOUS In fact Gale's accusation on this question is not even serious. Its main role is to conceal at all costs the real political differences which Comrade Thornett raised first on the WRP Central Committee and in one opposition document (given a restricted circulation by that CC) together with another one authoriser by Healy but suppressed. As Gale well knows and seeks to: conceal, the discussion within the WRP on these differences was blocked at each point by the leadership and then abruptly ended altogether by the bureaucratic expulsion of over 200 WRP members immediately prior to the party's First Annual Conference last December.

Cde Thornett's differences were not on the reactionary role of the Labour government, but on the sectarian wiong positions of the WRP leadership and its consequent abandonment of the method of Trotsky's Transitional Programme, the Founding Document of the Fourth International. As his first document clearly stated:

"At the same time the party in its practice abandons the characterisation of this period in the Transitional Programme as:

"A pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organisation. and therefore abandons what is the strategic task in such a period -again from the Transitional "Overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard.' This has in my view led the party into propagandising the maxımum programme on the basis that the revolutionary situation has grown so sharp that any other programme does not apply. It leads to the conclusion (rationalisation) that the working class has broken from reformism and Stalinism. The mechanical link between economics and politics, which has become central to the party's theoretical position over the recent period is in essence the abandonment of the Transitional Programme in which Trotsky says:

"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of their ably push the workers towards us. This passive expectancy, under a cover of idealistic messianism, has nothing in common with Marxism"

What today is the WRP's ultimatistic demand "make the Labour government resign" if not a refusal to help the masses of workers who still support the fake 'lefts' find bridge between their present demands and the socialist revolution? Workers test their leaders in struggle, and it is in struggle to make their 'left' leaders fight that they will learn the need of new leadership and new policies. We support and seek to politically direct their demands on the 'lefts' because we see this as the only way of discrediting the lefts' But the "lefts' both in the Labour Party and in the unions must also be confronted with a prog ramme of demands which starts from the present problems confronted by workers, and goes beyond simple trade union demands containing within them the necessity for the working class to take the power.

ADAPTATIONS

It is difficult for new WRP members and those who simply see each day's Workers Press in itself, and have not seen objectively its many changes, reversals, and subtle adaptations over the last year, to understand that, prior to the election of the Labour government has dogged the WRP and created its continuing political crisis It emerges in the "force Labour to resign" slogan and in the inability of the WRP to penetrate the unions (so thatnat one WRP policy went on the agenda at the T&GWU conterence, and not a single trade union other than Equity has seen any serious WRP intervention). It emerges in their pat maximum slogan, attached to everything and addressed to no-one, "nationalise industry, banks and land under workers control without compensation" - calling presumably on a Labour government of 'corporatists' legislate what amounts to the social Because the WSL does not follow these sectarian lines and directs instead a continuous struggle for programme and revolutionary leadership right into the labour movement,, particularly in areas where the WRP has never been able to hold an organisation, Gale emerges to accuse us of reformism. He claims that because the Workers Socialist League does not support the policy of forcing the Labour government to resign, they therefore support keeping the Labour government in power.

Trotsky, says Gale, has demonstrated how every Labour government is a capitalist government that given the choice between defending capitalism and taking the road to revolution, always chooses to defend capitalism. Therefore the Thornett group are agreeing to keep

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been struck, 'Workers Press' daily paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, has yet

-UC LOBBY

WICAN GUILDIN ACTION COM