Going Nowhere

Scan page 5

Review of WORKERS' POWER' - forerunner to 'WORKERS' ACTION' UNEMPLOYMENT-S A Worker's, Answe This exceedingly shabby publication is the product of a group of people who, posing as a Left Alternative to the leadership of the International Socialists, were recently expelled from that organisation. For IS it was their fifth national purging in as many years and that they felt threatened by the innocuous criticism of such members as these can only testify to the desperate and degenerate state that the organisation is in.

Any attempt to understand the present practice of IS and from that understanding to advance a principled and coherent alternative to it, cannot avoid , as Workers Power persistently do avoid, an examination of the politics of that organisation and the historical conditions that produced those Within IS this left centrist left alternative always ducked such principled considerations. Diplomacy required silence on the IS theory of the Permanent Arms Economy and State Capitalism, the cultivating of the membership proceeded by duplicity and equivocation leading to the remarkable fact that an opposition which they say 'commenced in 1972' leaves IS more than three -years later without having expressed an opinion on a single one of IS's basic revisions of Marxism!

Whatever may be thought of this tactic from within Is, when we idiscover that Workers Power from outside and supposedly ¡independent of IS continues the evasiveness we can only endorse policy of theoretical ¡Trotsky's view that while "for the (masses centrism is only a transition from one stage to another, for individual politicians centrism can become second nature"

The IS group was formed in the Iperiod of the Cold War (October 1950 was the date of the founding conference) and reflected the pressure of the Cold War ideology upon socialists. Its political positions were based upon the 'impression' of post-war capitalist strength in the West and Stalinist strength and stability in the East.

For the group that was to become the International Socialists the failure of socialism to emerge fout of the 2nd World War produced not a deepening oi their Marxist understanding to enable them to grapple with the new world reality but a rejection of Marxism altogether.

The gains of October they thought had been lost in Russia to a new state capitalist class that had extended its "empire" across Europe and as the second of the world's two "imperialist" super powers nad parcelled the world out or capitalist exploitation with the United States at Yalta. Capitalist ¡tablility in the West had been tecured by investment in arms, which being wasteful, they claimed, not raise the. organic pomposition of • capital and ponsequently did not create the tendency for the rate of profit to "THEORY"

For the IS theoreticians saw in heir "theory" of the Permanent LIms Economy capitalism's pacity to overcome its own inatradictions. Thus imperialism is not (as Lenin and Trotsky clicred) the highest stage of apitalism but in Kidron's telling brene it was the highest stage but it is from this belief that we were not in the imperialist epoch • instead at the beginning of a En epoch of capitalist and state britalist expansion that the IS conclude premature Mensheviks obsession with rank fileism derives.

As IS theoretician Duncan Hallas put it, today's conditions demand putting aside grandiose ideas of international leadership, world congresses and the like in favour of the humdrum tasks of propaganda and agitation in one's own country •.. In the existing situation the analogy of Marx and the First International is in some ways more relevant than that of Lenin and the Third".

FOT a. materialist, one consequence . of this view that capitalism had overcome the contradictions of the imperialist epoch and now had a new epoch of expansion in front of it would be to collaba working class is much more than the three of four shopping lists that are scattered about the pages of Workers Power!

How hostile Workers Power are to the Transitional Programme of Trotsky is made very clear in their article on Portugal where we are told that "left centrist groupings are more healthy in the short run" (p12) and on the National Abortion Campaign "we must work in the NAC to improve it not to take it over". '. (p14)

A recent struggle in Wolverhampton, grossly misreported on the first page of this magazine gave Workers Power the opportunity to continue the IS tradition of "doing serious and "SIT implications of shop steward collaboration with management were clearly posed in leaflets distributed at the factory an inquiry was also forced through at regional level that instructed the shop stewards to fight for re-instatement.

When the convenor and his stewards called a mass meeting and tried to do exactly the opposite, he was shouted off the platform, new elections of stewards were called and a strike resolution passed if the two were not reinstated. In the face of this display of real workers' power, what do our. friends from Workers Power have to say?

PRAISE

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Instead they find space to praise a bureaucrat. "The full time official tried to argue with the stewards but got nowhere." (p. 1) This full time official (who incidentally sold out the Yarnolds strike in the same town) refused to initiate any action on behalf of the two militants beyond advising them to go to the Industrial Relations Tribunal!

Having seen how Workers Power measure up in a real fight against the reformist leaders we are not surprised to discover that this tendency believe that the positions of the WSL towards the reformist leaders - such as 'Make the Left MPs fight' and 'Kick out Wilson' -"sow criminal illusions in the left fakers, Tribunites and Benn type mavericks ...' Of course it is necessary to challenge the Labour Party to expose it and to put demands on it. But these demands must be put by real forces capable of doing the job themselves." (p. 15)

Unhappily if real forces already capable of doing the job themselves actually existed then what would be the purpose of exposing the reformist leaders? Only gratuitous malice to discomfort parliamentarians could explain such superfluous exposure. Indeed the purpose of the "united front" which these innocents imagine they expelled from IS in 1971 whose economistic practice bears many similar features to the object of Workers Power's disappointed suit.

While having a similar method of work to IS, Workers Fight shared the same political outlook as the USFI, the Pabloite International led by Ernest Mandel. Once they declared their sondarity with the USPI, the USFI not unreasonably suggested that Workers Fight should join the IMG which is the British section of the International they claimed to be in solidarity with.

Notwithstanding their commitment to build a "democratic centralist" international Workers Fight found it impossible to join their national section whose main offence in the eyes of Workers rignt was a propagandistic passivity that refused to issue calls to action. This approach was enshrined in the perspectives, accepted at the IMG's 1972 Conference.

Shortly afterwards when the IMG did begin issuing calls to action - no less than organise a general strike - one of their leaders and co-author of the 1972 perspectives, Tony Whelan, resigned in disgust and took his supporters with him to continue the strategy of passive propagandism.

It might have appeared that with Tony Whelan out of the way the main obstacle on the road to uniting with the International with which one was in fundamental solidarity' had been removed.

Far from it! Instead of linking and his passive propagandists! The contradiction which this unprincipled manoeuvre led to with Mandel's International was easily resolved. It was declared to be "dead"

BELATED

This belated discovery that what they thought were declarations of solidarity were in fact no more than essays in necrophilia flowed not from a principled reassessment of

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and dis pait linked up with ... Tony Whelan up with the IMG, Workers Fight