Less Gang

Scan page 5

Area.

When it comes up for discussion it will be necessary to strengthen it with a clear perspective for strike action and occupations now to defend our gains and confront the Tories, together with an explicit commitment to take up the fight for socialism now!

Huckfield The decision by the Royal Family to call an all-out strike if the government does not increase its 19.4% wage offer is an act of gross irresponsibility.

For too long the taxpayers of this country have been pouring money into the vast and ever open coffers of this institution.

The demand that the Royal Family should have their standard of living protected is a symptom of the all too familiar syndrome of something for nothing.

It must be made clear to 'Red' Liz and her Trotskyite pals that they cannot go on forever consuming more than they earn.

In particular the decision to increase the wages of Ann Phillips by 30% to mend her roof, is a clear breach of the government's cash limits and cannot be justified.

The call from Tribune MPs to featherbed the Royals by import controls against 'dumping' deposed monarchs in Britain familiar as it is dreary.

More efficient The plain fact is that foreign royals are more efficient and better finished than the British models, who are ageing, inefficient and in any case rely heavily on German components.

That is why Michael Edwardes says that 30% of the Royals must lose their jobs through natural wastage and assassination.

The absurd restrictive practice which says that only the Queen can open Parliament, and the crippling stand she has taken against new technology -preferring to ride around in a horse-drawn coach-has helped make her and her cronies unviable.

Not only are those highly paid drones to be found nodding off at official functions but the quality of the product is now reviled across the world.

Appeals for restraint have fallen on deaf ears.

The Royal Family have made one arrogant demand after another acting on the assumption that they could not be closed down because they are a British institution' The ordinary tax payer has had enough. Either the Royal Family accept their offer or they should be allowed to go the wall.

Scan page 6

On 3rd September 1938, the Transitional Programme was adopted by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International. This Conference was attended by 30 delegates from organisations in 11 countries and represented the culmination of Trotsky's struggles to construct a new international against the stream of Stalinist betrayals and the forward march of fascism in Europe.

Central to the experience which informed the programme of the new international was:

"The definite passing over of the Comintern to the bourgeois order, its cynically counterrevolutionary role throughout the world" (Transitional Programme, p.3).

The tragedy of Germany, where Stalinism was the actual handmaiden of Nazi power, was scorched into the programme and perspectives of the Fourth For Trotsky, after the experiences of China, Germany and Spain, there was no question but that:

"the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to world revolution" (In Defence of Marxism, It was this understanding of the impossibility of reforming the Comintern and the Stalinist parties which compelled Trotsky, in the teeth of constant harrassment and intimidation-not to mention outright murder of his supporters-to struggle for the construction of a new international to keep aloft the banner of Bolshevism.

Furthermore, for Trotsky, this struggle to keep the flame of revolutionary socialism burning was his most significant contribution to revolutionary As he wrote in his journal for March 1933:

"I think the work in which I am now engaged is the most important of my life-more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other."

His reasoning for this was simple:

"The collapse of the two internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of those internationals is at all equipped to solve.

«The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experiences in dealing with t.

"There is now no-one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals" (Diary in Exile).

That was the political legacy which Trotsky bequeathed to the Fourth International, before his death in 1940 at the hands of Stalin's assassin.

In the post-war years, however, these very political foundations of the Fourth International came once more under assault. Nor was this fresh PHOTO: Mark Rusher, IFL assault on the Trotskyist movement restricted to the forces of Stalinism, Social Democracy and Bourgeois Liberalism who had hated the young international from its inception.

Instead, the most deadly challenge to the fundamental principles and perspectives of the Fourth International came from its very heart: the International Secretariat.

In the wake of the social overturns in tastern Europe, the F.I., under the secretaryship of Michel Pablo, began a process of revising its analysis of the world situation.

This was to lead inexorably to the liquidation of that "fixed capital of ideas" which Trotsky had laid at the very centre of the F.I.

Above all, the Trotskyist analysis of the counter-revolutionary role of the F.I. itselfnow regarded as "the old Trotskyism"-was rejected in favour of "new" perspectives.

"Pabloism', , as it became knowh, assumed predominance within the world Trotskyist Movement.

The effects of Pabloism in the Fourth International have been dealt with in much greater detail in the two WSL documents The Poisoned Well' and The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle' and it is not the intention of this article to recount once more this But it is necessary to understand this background in order to grasp the real nature of developments currently taking place an organisations claiming to continue the work of Trotsky and claiming to represent the Fourth International.

The purpose of this article is to examiné the current orientation of the International Marxist Group as British representatives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and continuators of Pabloism.

In a feature article printed in Socilaist Challenge no. 138 entitled 'Our Common Cause' the main arguments are presented which explain the ÎMG's drive towards 'revolutionary regroupment'.

The perspective for regroupment was originally adopted at their 1978 conference. What is new from this year's conference is that this now centres almost exclusively on seeking unity with the Socialist Workers Party (GB)-a centrist group that declares the Soviet Union and deformed workers' states to be capitalist regimes.

Of course, as Trotskyists, the Workers Socialist League itself absolutely committed to the reconstruction of the Fourth International. We see this process. taking place through a series of splits and principled fusions.

Such fusions must, however, be on the basis of programmatic agreement and open discussion of the practical and theoretical lessons of the last 30 years.

It was on this basis that in the period up to last year's XIth World Congress of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the WSL argued consistently for a discussion of the differences which had emerged in the world Trotskyist movement since the war.

As we stated at the time, in our efforts to open up a discussion on these questions and "Despite the substantial Masses oJ amerences mal exist-m paru- nuint in narti. cular the fact (hat the WSL does not recognise the USFI as The Fourth International' ses it as Pabloite and fights for ses it as Pabloite and tights I0l the reconstruction of the F.I.there remains the objective possibility of the WL fusing with the USFI. It is our duty to examine to what extent this is a concrete possibility through the opening of a discussion between our two organisations."

Crucial to this was a discussion of the document "The Poisoned Well' and of the problems of the post war F.I.' Our recognition that as Trotskyists we were obliged to defend the revolutionary programme against Pabloite liquidationism did not prevent us from seeking to open up and widen out the discussion of the problems of the F.I. to others who claimed to be Trotskyist, including those, like the USFI and sections, who we characterise as Pabloite.

In the event, the IMG and the USFI rejected such a discussion-on the grounds that the WSL refused to recognise he USFI as being The Fourti But within weeks of this decision, the unresolved questions they refused to discuss had brought the USFI to a major split-with the effective expulsion of the LTT and Bolshevik Faction over the question of Nicaragua and the intervention of the Simon Bolivar Brigade.

The WSL for its part has continued to work for the principled reconstruction of the Fourth International-and in January the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee was launched on the basis of general youin rauy on alL carnivar lines lines nf nraorammatir aoreement on basic issues facing Trotskyists.

The IMG, however, having rejected open discussions with the WSL, has now set out on a desperate courtship of the SWP in which it would appear that none of the 'scruples' and 'principles' which were erected as a barrier to the discussion with the WSL are likely to get a look in.

The SWP very probably does recognise the USFI as being "the fourth international'. We shoula, however, be very clear what they mean by that.

"The only realistic assessment of the Fourth International is that it is a current of opinion and its conferences etc. are a debating society. This is not something to be ashamed of, since it is a fairly large society and has the potential of becoming bigger" (International Socialism, Winter Clearly, that is not what Trotskyists mean when they refer to the F.I. For the IMG, howevel, this assessment apparently raises no problems.

This is explicable largely by the fact that in many respects it falls in line with the views of the IMG's European mentor, Ernest Mandel.

In his book "From Stalinism to EuroCommunism" Mandel, amongst all the concessions to EuroCommunism, manages to reduce the F.I. to no more than a senior cousin to the left as a whole:

«The Fourth International has worked longer on this question and has reached much more serious Marxist conclusions than any other current of the international workers' movement"

Clearly then, in this context the approach to the SWP is no more than a continuation of past positions. That these positions are not those of the founders of the F.I. apparently matters not a jot. Thus the IMG state:

"We think that the SWP should draw the conclusions of the last 30 years. In the debate with the SWP in International Socialism before the XIth World Congress of the F.I. we suggested holding discussions on the issues which prevent the SWP from affiliating to the F.I. We still want this discussion. We cannot comprehend the reasons which prevent the SWP from affiliating to the F.I.

• "However, the IMG does not make atiliation to the fo. a precondition for fusion with the SWP. Other alternatives. are open, such as becoming a sympathising organisation allowing individuals to become members of the F.I."

Ignoring here the fact that even for Trotskyists the "conclusions of the past 30 years" have yet to be drawn up-due in large part to the refusal of the USFI to countenance any dis cussion of the events behind the splits in 1951-3 and the 1953 fusion with the American SWPit will suffice to note here that in one fell swoop the IMG has reduced the Fourth International to an optional extra.

Thus, the struggle by Trotsky and his supporters in the 1930s against Stalin's assassins, the ravages of fascism and the betrayals of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, to construct a new international is stripped of all historical signifícance.

And Trotsky's own assessment that "outside these cadres (of the F.I.) there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name" becomes no more than bluster.

Of course, Trotsky had a somewhat different attitude to the question of revolutionary regroupment. In the Open Letter for the Fourth International" in 1935 he spelt out the need for revolutionary intransigence.

the condition for success is irreconcilable criticism of the centrist leadership, exposure of the attempts to create a Two-and-a-half International, and •ceaseless explanation of the fact that the revolutionary tasks of our epoch doom beforehand to ignominious bankruptcy those unifications which are hybrid and amorphous" (Writings 1935/36).

For Trotsky what mattered was not that some centrist might be with us today; but rather that we educate real revolutionary Marxist cadres through systematic development and the application of the fixed capital of ideas, which Marxism represents, to events.

For the IMG, however, rejection of the historical struggle for the F.I. goes hand in hand with a rejection of that fixed capital of ideas.

Not content with minimising the role and tasks of the F.L, they proceed to strike at the central experience of the

Scan page 7

COLIN MORROW looks at the political estions that arise from the latest 'unity' drive by e British International Marxist Group. MORROW lat arise fro nternation DELE COMIN = ta Natior. Rankand ge