[Don Flint's article in SP 178, cited by…]

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Don Flint's article in SP 178, cited by the comrade of the Bolshevik Faction. did indeed include a number of excessively brief and unexplained statements on the past political record of Nahuel Moreno-all of which occured in one paragraph, which read as follows:

"In his adherence to the method of Pabloism, Moreno has adopted the guise of a Castroite (his support for the Fidelista "Organisation of Latin American Solidarity in the 1960s), a Maoist (he eulogised the Red Guards), and a Peronist (his paper Palabra Obrera at one point described itself as • an "organ of revolutionary workers' Peronism' and issued 'under the discipline of General Peron.)"

It was in any event the intention of Socialist Press to withdraw this paragraph, which takes a prematurely definitivethough unargued-position on a number of questions which are yet to be fully discussed by the Workers Socialist League:

But, curiously, comrade Monica does not challenge this paragraph, focussing attention instead on other questions.

In doing so she lists in a few words a series of Bolshevik Faction positions on which our article is accused of making "extremely inaccurate and irresponsibie" statements.

Unfortunately the comrade offers us no hint as to what she believes we have got wrong, and makes no attempt to correct the position.

Instead she goes on to make a number of rather strange allegations against what she regards as positions of the Workers Socialist League, which appear to have little to do with either the article concerned or the actual policies of our movement.

Extraordinarily, for instance, we are accused of saying "that in Nicaragua the FSLN was not the one who led the masses, arms in hand, to defeat Somoza". This is neither our position, nor is it, to our knowledge, the position of any serious revolutionary organisation in the world. It certainly does not . appear in comrade Flint's articte.

We are similarly accused of not basing our analysis "on the class struggle and its effect on the different organisations existing within the working class' Yet the entire article, headed 'Nicaragua bad the Crisis in the United Secretariat' began with the unmistakeable statement that:

"The dramatic events in Nicaragua which brought the downfall of the reactionary Somoza dictatorship and put the patty bourgeois Sandinista National Liberation Front in control of the country has not only had an impact in weaken. ing imperialism's grip on Central America.

"It has also produced a major upheaval in the world Trotskyist movement."

Comrade Monica upbraids us for a "careless" interpretation of the theory of Permanent RevoluTIon Revol on more trototys position on the seizure of power by petty bourgeois nationalist movements or other , nonTrotskyist forces".

Yet Don Flint's article devoted no less than seven paragraphs to an examination of the instability of the petty bourgeois : FSLN regime in It compared and contrasted the situation to that in Cuba after Castro's defeat of the Batista dictatorship: It looked at the circumstances in which Castro's petty bourgeois nationalist forces developed an alliance with the Kremlin bureaucracy, which created conditions for the overturn of capitalism and creation of a deformed workers state in Cuba.

Surprisingly comrade Monica does not include Cuba in her list of deformed workers' statesinstead citing Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, which since all were liberated by Stalinist forcas offer few paraileis and are of little direct relevance to the situation today in Nicaragua.

We are also accused of BF, the OCRFI and the LTT.

Yet this is not the position we have taken either in comrade Flint's article or in other articles in Socialist Press.

From the start we welcomed the convening of the conference insofar as it opens up the possibilities of a long overdue discussion on the fundamental crisis of the post-war Trotskyist movement.

From the same position we have also criticised moves which seem to us to suggest that the conference might not be so open as first indicated by the convening organisations-and might not even be held at all.

But we have consistentiy warned against the positionalso argued in comrade Monica's letter-that a conference restricted to the single issue of Nicaragua, on which a number of organisations appear at present to be in agreement, could in itself provide a sound basis for "regroupment or reconstruction" of the Fourth •Comrade Monica declares that it is "very easy, backward and sectarian to seize on every detail and deepen existing differencos on questions which have passed into history.". . But it is even easier in the most opportunist way simply to brush aside past differences

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Wednesday 1980

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arguing for the rejection of the Open Conference, called by the