Wrp Opts for Popular

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recent "Local Government in Crisis" Conference held in Lambeth where members of that organisation rushed to the defence of the Labour-dominated Lambeth Council when it faced criticism for selling council houses and putting up rates.

In case anyone thinks that this was a temporary aberration on the part of the WRP, the fruits of an effort to create an opportunist alliance with Ted Knight, they will be further enlightened by reading the material produced for their Fifth Annual Conference at the end of January.

"Manifesto '81-Tory Counter-revolution: the WRP Reply" spells out a popular front strategy which will lead Healy and Banda to stretch out the hand of support to forces far to the right of Knight and the Lambeth Council.

The WRP panacea for the crisis is the formation of «Community Councils" which:

"must embrace all sections of the community involved in production, commerce and the maintenance of local services."

Just to make it clear that this is what is meant there is a reference further down the same page to "the whole community" being involved.

What is this if it is not a cross-class alliance, an appeal to sections of the bourgeoisie to adopt a "progressive' stance in face of the Tory attack?

Implications

The reactionary political implications of this position, which "has antecedents in the popular front strategy of the Stalinist parties since the 1930s, are becoming increasingly evident.

Faced with massive Tory imposed cuts in public spending in general and in the rate support grant in particular, Labour councillors find themselves confronted with the decision-either carry out the orders of the Tories or rally the working class in defence of their services.

It is the duty of all socialists to demand that they stand and fight. When they refuse to do so, as is happening, with a few honourable exceptions, throughout the country, they must be exposed for their subservience.

Not so, says the WRP:

"The fight is not with the Labour councils but against the Tories because it is the Tories who are to blame for the cuts." (p.10 of the Manifesto, emphasis in original).

What must trade unionists do when they see Labour councils cutting jobs and services?

"They must avoid at all cost fighting. Labour councils on sectional issues."

Capitulation

This advice is nothing short of a disgraceful capitulation and covering up for the treachery of social democracy. For all the talk about dangers of military dictatorship being around the corner, there is not a word in the Manifesto on the break-up of social democracy, the crisis within the Labour Party, which presents revolutionary socialists with unprecedented opportunities. But how could there be, when the WRP is itself rushing towards reformism?

Unfortunately for the HealyBanda-Redgrave clique, this flight towards the right wing can do nothing to solve their internal problems.

Lack of cadres in the labour month on the paper and Healy warned (letter of September 19 to CC members) that this would rise to '£12,000 per calendar month" by the end of the year.

Yet, despite a loss on the paper which must have topped £100,000 in 1980 alone, money was still being spent as if it was going out of fashion.

Healy reported, "we spent over £1,000 on the Olympics" and an equal sum on the events in Poland (both no doubt being regarded as of equal political significance). Honda cycles were supplied to branches for making deliveries of Newsline (see Pledges of Special Congress, June 29 1980), youth centres are being set up, prime site book shops established.

Whatever the financial losses on the paper, the organisation is awash with masses of money. For a group with so few active cadres to be found anywhere in the labour movement, this is certainly a mystery.

Comrade Healy has a penchant for demanding committees of inquiry into the activities of other organisations within the labour movement. Surely it would not be unreasonable to call for the establishment of such a committee of trade unionists and sympathetic financial experts to delve into the mysterious sources of wealth of the WRP?

Four-person WRP contingent Nor can the rightward rush stifle the political rifts within the declining organisation. So deep were these, stretching into the editorlal board itsell, that on August 28 the Political Committee released a statement on "Party Unity" which drew attention to a resolution on "party security, discipline and tasks". passed a a previous Central Committee meeting.

The statement reads in part:

"Regardless of political differences and organisational difficulties, which were present right up to the adoption of the resolution, it means the entire membership of the party accept that we can preserve party unity •. (emphasis in original):

Just in case any members might entertain illusions about democratic rights, Healy sets them right on that issue:

"We warn that those who have accepted the resolution in words but who violate it in practice automatically place themselves outside the WRP."

Undoubtedly one of the factors causing divisions in the ranks at that point was the gathering conflict between Iraq and Iran. Having heaped fulsome praise upon both regimes, describing the former, socialist oint as evolutionary , the WRP leadership could now only wring their hands in anguish that their Central Committee statements, reminiscent of UN resolutions, counselled: "peace'to no avail. Never did it cross their minds to adopt a Leninist position of revolutionary defeatism. But some members could see there was something amiss here and they had to be sat upon hard.

Just to make sure no one makes a squeal of protest at the Conference, another statement produced for debate was a document on "security" which was simply an attack upon the WSL, reiterating the usual string of half-truths and lies, with the clear implication that the split from the WRP in 1974, which led to the formation of the WSL, was the work of the CIA, the Special Branch (and, no doubt, the KGB into the bargain!)

The document is a blatant device to stifle any political disagreement, using the usual Healyite methods of insinuating that any critic must be a spokesperson for the interests of the state security forces.

One valuable lesson needs to be distilled from the degeneracy of the WRP. The extreme lurch to the right we are now witnessing is not at all incompatible with the previous swing in an ultra left direction.

The WSL has tried to emphaThe WRP leadership has never been widely acclaimed for the strength of its polemics against its opponents on the left.

Their line of argument almost invariably depends upon the invention of unacceptable political positions which • are then falsely attributed to the unfortunate victim, before being demolished by a tidal wave of insults and abuse.

But the WRP has now sunk so low that it is apparently incapable of arguing a public defence of its position against a public attack, and is now employing lawyers to draft their polemics, and seeking to use the High Court to vindicate their A recent issue of Socialist Organiser (January 24) carried an article by Sean Matgamna under the headline "Gaddafi's Foreign Legion : to Knight's Rescue'-attacking the WRP's craven support for Ted Knight's policy of rate increases, and its opportunist links to Gaddafi's Libyan dictatorship and other Arab bourgeois regimes.

Matgamna likened the WRP 'eek -with its crazed pseudo Marxist mumbo-jumbo-to • religious sects such as the Moonies, the Scientologists and the Jones Cult which committed mass suicide in the Guyana jungle three years ago.

He pointed to its history of using psychological and physical violence against its own members-as documented in the WSL book The Battle For Trotsky ism.

And he also raised once again the fact that the WRP is widely believed to be in receipt of subsidies from Gaddafi and possibly other Arab governments.

Apparently the WRP do not wish to contest this last factwhether because it is undeniably true or because in denying it too strenuously they might antagonise Gaddafi, the Iraqi Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party and other oil-rich "allies", But they responded at once to Matgamna's other points. Not by an article in their press-but through a letter from the solicitors of Vanessa Redgrave, a WRP Central Committee member, to Socialist Organiser.

Redgrave claims that as a publicly known member of the WRP she has been damaged by the article, and calls for an apology.

She has had the effrontery to commission lawyers to write declaring that the factual account of the expulsions of the founding members of the WSL from the WRP contained in The Battle for Trotskyism has been "refuted" in Newsline articles.

The mind boggles at the prospect oi the High Court being asked to decide which account "refuted" the other!

Most intriguing of all is Redgrave's insistence that the WRP bears no similarity whatsoever to the Moonies and the Jones cult.

Healy's fanatical, idealist "philosophy" certainly has more in common with such cranky sects than it does with revolutionary Marxism.

What would the High Court make of a group so paranoid that it announced on November 12 that: \ "The threat of state repression directed against the party is not part of an ongoing perspective but immediate in its dangers. The countdown can be set from the Fire Brigades Union national delegate conference ... The Tory plan will be to use bloody provocations in order to introduce special emergency laws and take violent reprisals against the party, its press and organisation."

What would a court think of a leadership that set out to foster a cult of personality like this:

"Light-minded middle class disrespect for leadership must be ruthlessly fought against [!] Backwardness and arrogance will be resolutely combatted. Centralised leadership: means that great political devotion to the role of leadership must be consciously developed."

(August 24 1980)

And lawyers would no doubt laugh uncontrollably at the even more bizarre 'cult of the agenda' —a fetish unique to the WRP:

"A rather simple way to understand how we dialectically function in the objective world is as follows:

SUBJECT (man) enters the Objective world through PRAC. TICE-PRACTICE is here the middle (Transition) between SUBJECT and OBJECT. It is dialectically manifesting theory as the subjective side of practice and the physical changing of the world which is the objective side of practice.

SUBJECT-PRACTICE

(Theory as subjective practice in transition into Objective Practice)

OBJECTIVE WORLD A close examination of the Agenda will reveal that this is the dialectical process which enables us to train our minds to respond dialectically to the development of a constant source of knowledge to guide our practice.

We hope to supply plastic cases to maintain this material clean and easy to handle at branch meetings."

Has Redgrave a material leg to stand on? We await her next dialectical leap with interest.