Majority Rejects Trotsky's Programme

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National Abortion Campaign: bourgeois feminist movement supported by the i Troops Out Movement demonstration - another bogus united front.

McLennan: CP General Secretary the reformist leadership from the labour movement and replace it with one prepared to carry forward the fight against the employers. None of this is called fer by Matthews.

ESCAPE ROUTE Finally the Stalinists give their support to the reactionary diversion of import controls which by assisting the contraction of trade will serve only to worsen the crisis, while directing the working class into an unprincipled bloc with its "own" capitalist class against "foreign" capitalists. Thus at the same time it provides a convenient escape route for the Stalinists and their co-thinkers among the 'lefts' and the right wing from giving any leadership in the real fight to defend jobs against the attack of the main enemy - the employers at home.

"Callaghan tells the international press we have "more handship to look forward to' while Healey at the Lord Mayor's banquet promises us a 'hard and painful winter for millions',"

said Mr. McLennan.

"But not a word from either of them about changing their bankrupt policies. Despite trade union pressure they refuse to impose new impart controus.

"They argue it would not mean more jobs in Britain and would involve massive retaliatory action by other industrial countries." he said.

"Here in Luton we should explode this false theory with facts on the motor car industry presented this week by the Labour Research Fact service.

Between January and September 1975. UK new car registrations of cars made by British firms fell by 93,767. In the same perind, new car registrations of inported cars incrensed by 53,135.

"In January tn September this year, imported cars took 33 per cent of the British mar•ket. The comparable figure in 1970 was 13.3 per cent.

"These figures establish the case for import controls in relation to the motor car industry.

DEMOCRATIC

«But a completely new economic policy encompassing import controls and uther proposais made by the Communist Party, the Tribune group and others needs even as fight consequences of the present disastrous government policies.

Beating the nationalist drum for import controls:

Morning Star, Monday Oct 20th 1975.

The Stalinists' call for import controls exposes their consistent narrow nationalism. The British Communist Party carries forward Stalin's betrayal of the building of an international working class movement.

Nowhere in Matthews pamphlet is there any mention of the fact that the capitalist crisis cannot be solved in one country precisely because it is an international crisis.

The task of building an international leadership to co-ordinate workers' response to the world crisis of capitalism falls on the shoulders of the Trotskyist Fourth International which must be reconstructed in the coming period of strugele.

The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International* is a programme whose power becomes visible only with and through the offensive of the working class and its sharpening struggles with the imperialist system.

Since the French general strike of May-June 1968 the European workers' revolution has been a fact in every nation of the continent - an objective development which the spokesmen of the capitalist class, and their lieutenants in the Social Democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies, wriggle and prevaricate as they may, can no longer bury or deny. The offensive of the working class reverberates in every corner of political life.

It is reflected in the shift to the right by the Tory leadership, the crisis of the Spanish fascist dictatorship (in which Franco's illness and age is purely secondary), the open divisions in the Soviet leadership over how to maintain 'peaceful coexistence' in face of the Portuguese revolution - to give just three obvious examples.

• The development of the European and world revolution is at the same time the material force which and odies it in ole entes of tiplits and crises within the international "Trotskyist' movement - crises in which, whatever the intentions of the participants, the question of the Transitional Programme = its method and scope, its relationship to the task of constructing the revolutionary paity - pushes itself ever more boldly to the fore.

PRINCIPLED The Workers Socialist League itself arose from a principled strug gle taken up against the degenerating leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party to grasp and defend the Programme, and to make it the basis of the day-to-day struggles and initiatives of the party. It • was because the Transitional Programme is the most concentrated antagonist of all centrism, sectarianism and propagandism that the WRP leadership were driven within weeks to bureaucratically expel the opposition in order to preserve their own position.

Any serious discussion of the Transitional Programme necessarily raises - though in many forms - the central questions of revolutionary politics. The internal struggle pres ently under way in the International Marxist Group, British section of the 'Trotskyist' Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is therefore one which - no matter how frivolous and partial the intentions of some of those involved -deals in deadly serious matters.

The political life: of the IMG reflects that of the USFI as a whole - which is to say that it conducts itself less as a party than as a continuously renegotiated coalition of factions.

The major faction (Tendency B), which controls the leading bod ies of the organisation, is one of two which claims to represent the positions of the Mandel (Pabloite) within the USFI as a whole, against the Leninist Trotskyist Faction' led by the Socialist Workers Party, the sympathising organisation of the USFI in the United States (the SWP is prevented from affiliating to the USFI by reactionary US legislation).

The tow major tendencies within the USFI are now publically engaged in political struggle against one another, centring on the question of Portugal.

The key struggle within the IMG has, however, taken up the question of the Transitional Programme in a way which is not directly related to the split within the USFI as a whole. At the beginning of October a minority were excluded from Tendency B after their document Continuing the Struggle for the Transitianal Programme was voted down at a tendency conference.

CONTRADICTION

What drove the leaders of Tendency B. (who are at the same time the political leadership of the IMG) to exclude the minority were two factors - that the minority was raising sharply the contradiction between the policies of the IMG and the methods of the Transitiona Programme, and that their document attempted to connect this contradiction with the historical origins of the USFI itself in the faction, led by Michel Pablo, which split the Fourth International in 1952-3 and led the way towards political liquidation vis-a-vis the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies.

It is not possible in a short article to give a complete analysis of the significance of these splits within the IMG. But it is possible to indicate one essential fact. 'A leading figure within the Tendency B majority has attacked his own minority (and with that the Transitional Programme itself) in the following terms: "It is true that the adoption by the working class of the transitional programme is the only way to guarantee a successful socialist revolution. But it is totally untrue to say that the workers struggle cannot go forward unless the transitional programme is adopted. It is sheer ultra-lett sectarianism to put the transitional programme forward willy nilly as an immediate perspective. Only when the question of pond his bored the eat step (Clynes, for Tendency Committee).

RELEGATE

On this basis the IMG leadership relegate to the indefinite future the building of a cadre based on the programme and the attempt to carry its essential method and central demands into the workers' movement.

Instead they substitute an interminable series of 'united fronts' and intermediate' tactics - an 'action programme, a campaign through the bourgeois-feminist National Abortion Campaign, 'Class Strussie Leit. Wate od on the who put a times sive 1 resisti ment supposed shift to the left of various Labour parliamentarians, a campaign to involve union and Labour Party bureaucrats in the Medical Committee Against Private Practice . . . each tactical turn follows the last in an arbitrary and disconnected string of knots.

What is generally missing in each "intervention' is the conflict within the unity - the struggle to build the political and material forces of a revolutionary leadership against those (left Labour MPs, Stalinists and union functionaries)

are hypocritically driven to "left' foot forward and somenot éven that) by the offenif the working class and its ince to the Labour Governs policies.

CORRECT

The minority opposition within the IMG's tendency B are essentially correct then, when they denounce the leadership's idea that the programme of the revolutionary party "is not in any sense formulated with its starting point as the need to create a differentiation from the the bureacracy"

They are equally correct. to insist that the Transitional Prog ramme is not something to be left on a dignified shelf till "the question of power is posed", but that its method and many of its central demands can and must be fought for in the trade unions - in the struggle for the sliding scale of wages against inflation, and in campaigns to open the books of firms threatening redundancies, and for work sharing with no loss of pay.

DEMANDS

The IMG leadership episodically adopts many such demands - but what it rejects is the fact that they acquire their meaning and can be driven to a head only by creating "a differentiation" in practice with the bureaucrats, and by fighting for each demand as part of an overall revolutionary programme.

To do this is not "ultra-left sectarianism" - on the contrary for revolutionaries to do anything else is to conceal the anarchic and destructive crisis of capitalism under a bushel in the name of political 'realism' , and in doing this to capitulate politically to "left' elements in the bureaucracy.

As the Transitional Programme clearly states in its first lines the central task of the socialist revolution is the resolution of the crisis of working class leadership - and this requires of revolutionaries struggle to mobilise the advanced workers, in their concrete struggles, against the bureaucrats and for support of the Programme.

The idea that the working class will ever 'adopt' the Transitional Programme is itself a ludicrous adaptation to parliamentary bureaucratic prejudices; the modern working class no more 'adopts' revolutionary policies and leadership than a child 'adopts' walking. Both arise from a struggle, both material and conscious, to solve concrete questions. And in both cases it is necessary to reject the fabian, 'realistic' prejudice that the only way to get anywhere in the short term is on one's belly.

Yet in one respect it must be granted that the minority were correctly criticised by the leaders of the IMG: that their positions were 'incompatible' with membership of Tendency B.

To struggle for a consistent creative application of the Transitional Programme within the IMG is similar to campaigning for atheisur within the Vatican. You encounter "polite' sympathy in private; indifference and ostracism on the leading bodies; and as the issue is pressed -excommuniaction!

DISCUSSION

In Britain today only one revot utionary organisation fights to apply and develop the essențial method of the Transitional Programme in carrying them into the day-to-day struggles of the workers movement - the Workers Socialist League. Al the same time only the WL takr up seriously and honestly the hist ory of the world Trotskyist movement, to hammer out the politica and theoretical basis for rebuilding the Fourth International.

The only correct course for members of the IMG who wish to take up these tasks is themselves to join the ranks of the WSL. For our part we pledge ourselves to a serious and thorough discussion on all questions with any such com rades.

*FOOTNOTE The basic programmatic documenl of the Fourth International, adopt ed at its founding conference in 1938. It was drafted by Leon Trotsky, crystallising the gains and perspectives of the Fourth Inter. national movement, especially in ita struggle against the Stalinist ber. eaucracy in the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties of the Third International in other countries

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INGR PRANCE

MANGAL "BORHON