[3F3: 141--H shring and Liebknecht The Zimmerwald Conference…]

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141--H shring and Liebknecht The Zimmerwald Conference held in Switzerland in September 1915 was the first clear sign of the revitalisation of working class internationalism. Though only 38 delegates attended, Zimmerwald became the rallying point of the forces who rejected social-chauvinism.

The main questions facing the conference were - how to re-establish the international unity of the working class and what policy to adopt on the struggle against the war.

• From the first days of the war, the position taken by Lenin and the leading Bolsheviks had been uncompromising. The Second International had entirely deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie. There could be no unity of any sort with the social chauvinists. A Third International had to be created unsullied by the betrayals of the Second.

(a 11 The basis for reconstituting the international unity of the working class had to be a principled position Kautsky - defencist. on the. struggle against the war. The war had been an inevitable product ot imperialism. There could be no hope of a lasting peace established by any of the imperalist powers, such a peace could only be an interlude between one war and the next. Only the revolutionary mass action of the working class to overthrow imperialism could bring a democratic peace.

The genuine internationalists unila ho thros miha stilicad tha difficulties of their own imperialist governments to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.

Lenin did not flinch from the consequences of this policy. It might well mean the military defeat of that country:

"from the point of view of the working class and of the toiling masses of all the people in Russia, the defeat of the Tsarist monarchy and its armies would be the least evil"

DEFEATISM'

On this policy of revolutionary defeatism' and on the need for a complete break from the Second International, the Bolsheviks at this point were in a minonty. The centrists, wavering between reform and revolution, who had been forced by the pressure of the ... m:eseneMn •Lapaesal ole - . g 210:101 1лe/102 ....... A-ENE BAGN masses to voice opposition to the war, did so only in a pacifist way and hoped for reconciliation with the social chauvinists.

They tried to brand Lenin's principled position as an 'anarchist" one, unsuitable for the mass organisations of the working class. But behind their pacificist illusions in the possibility of a democratic peace without the overthrow of imperialism lay a refusal to mobilise the working class independent of the bourgeoisie and independent of the social-chauvinists.

Though the Left remained a minority within the Zimmerwald movement, the October revolution in Russia was to prove the correctness of Lenin's policies and lay the basis for the re establishment of the unity of the working class through the Third Only the uncompromising struggle by the Bolsheviks for a complete break from social chauvinism and centrism was to make this possible.

The announcement that perspective for a publication in future is the latest in a series of savage blows struck at the struggle for a Trotskyist party in Britain.

The leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in a completely non-political 'explanation', blame the problems of Workers Press on failing circulation and rising costs. But neither of these are "technical' problems - they go right to the heart of the political relationship between the party and the organised working class.

The production and distribution of a revolutionary paper cannot be based on gimmicks - they require a cadre politically prepared to root them in the lite of the working class.

When the daily Workers Press was launched in September 1969, it brought together all the political and material strengths built by the movement over years of previous work. For the five years before 1969 the main energies of the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party) were directed to laying the foundations for the daily paper.

The day it started with four pages, five editions a week, was for us a proud-victory. As the chief instrument of our party work, Workers Press immediately became a vital weapon in the struggles of the workers movement, giving leadership in the trade unions, defending workers in struggle, replying every day to the lies of the capitalist press, challenging and answering the Stalinists and the right-wing, showing the centrists and revisionists that it is possible to build parties of the Fourth International to lead the struggle for power.

YEARS OF WORK

Out of years of work came a qualitative leap, prepared and integrated into the development of the party cadre. For the first time since the Third International was politically destroyed by Stalinism -almost half a century ago - the international workers movement possessed a voice which spoke every day for the politics of revolutionary Marxism.

This achievement is now in chaos. It is said that 'those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad'. In the language of revolutionary politics this means -that the physical liquidation of revolutionary parties begins when they turn away from the continuous study of the real development of the workers movement, when they abandon the struggle continuously to defend the body of knowledge of Marxism and its programme, and to carry these into the day-to-day battle for leadership within the class struggle itself.

In the WRP a turning point was passed in November 1974 when the leadership of Gerry Healy bureatcratically expelled Comrade Alan Thornett and over 200 members on the eve of the First Annual Conference.

The two documents which Comrade Thornett put forward fot internal discussion both sought to correct the positions of the party, to convince the party that tne method and demands of the Iransitional Programme had to be fought for, day-to-day in the spontaneous struggles of the working class.

They showed how the Healy teadershin was linuidating the partv cadre by recruitment' which involved no agreement with the party's programme or even knowledge of it.

The true history of the Trotskyist movement, of the struggle against Pablo's drive to liquidate the small cadres into the Stalinist apparatus, falsified and submerged in the WRP leadership's fraudulent 'history' Trotskyism v. Revisionism. The WRP cadres in the unions and in the factories were hamstrung by the maximum, allpurpose formula "nationalise the means of production without compensation under workers' control"

The leadership held them back from fighting on the central demands of the Transitional Programme - for a sliding scale of wages; to open the books of the employers to elected committees of workers; for work sharing on full pay administered by elected committees and for nationalisation under workers management of bankrupt firms.

The WRP opposition raised these questions out of living experience, out of the need for a programme on which the working class can fight which will be a bridge from today's consciousness to the tasks of social Healy bureaucratically and unconstitutionally gagged and expelled them.

Whilst the leading working class cadres were driven out of the party as "reformists", ", less than a year later a WRP Central Committee member - Tom White - was sitting on a Ryder committee in British Leyland Cowley, whose sole purpose is class collaboration, speed-up and sacking!

With his expulsions, Healy cut off the roots that had been with such difficulty sunk in the workers movement, roots that promised, with the aid of a regular daily press and a testea party cadre, to give leadership as the working class pressed forward on the oftensive, driven by the economic crisis and the craven class-collaboration of their leaders.

In cutting these off, Healy placed the daily press and the party in danger and dealt a hammer blow at the working class itself. As we warned, the obverse of sectarianism was opportunism and liquidation.

All parties face set-backs and defeats. They can be overcome -provided the lessons are learned. But the WRP leadership treat the closing of Workers Press without a word of politics! They blame cost and circulation problems, and simply cease publishing, giving not an atom of perspective for the future of the party press, not even a weekly DaDer!

For the WRP members who have fought to build the party and raise the huge sums needed for a daily paper - this is betrayal, a step in the liquidation of the party itself. This is what allows the capitalist press to gloat.

The struggle for Workers Press is part of our history. The WRP expulsions and the loss of Workers Press is a blow to the workers movement internationally. But defeat in a battle is not the end of the war.

We do not intend to capitulate. The Workers Socialist League takes up the struggle for a revolutionary party to lead the British working class to power, and to rebuild the Fourth International principled basis. We shall build Socialist Press, with the perspective of establishing a firmly based daily revolutionary paper.

We appeal to members and supporters of the WRP to read Socialist Press and to study and discuss the positions of the WRP opposition and the WSL - not the falsified and slanderous accounts put out by the WRP leadership. The record of the WSL is there for all to see. It is the continuity of the struggle for Trotskyism in Britain.

Liquidating WRP - Healy (top)

and accomplice Banda.

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9a221 The ITY documentary Death of an Informer' which appeared on February 17th, Branch agent provocateurs were infiltrating party branches and offering young members a supply

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publication of "Workers Press' is to cease, with no political