Anatomy of Sectarianism Force Resign

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CP isolated itself from any united front work with the ANC, and the latter remained under the leadership of the miniscule African middle class of lawyers and reachers.

The CP was obsessed with the idea that revolutionary initiative would come from the most reactionary section of the working class - the white labour aristocracy now hand in glove with the Afrikaner nationalists.

The Labour/Nationalist. cooperation, begun in 1922 found its pottient of 1924-29 in which Herzog, the. Nationalist Prime Minister, took several Labour members into his cabinet, having ousted the government of Smut's pro-British, pro-capitalist South Africa Party..

The pact government laid the foundations of the present system of apartheid under the name of a "civilised labour policy"

This strengthened the industrial colour bar, reserving whole categories of jobs lor whites only.

In this way, thousands of erstwhile рост white Afrikaners were 'raised up' to better paid jobs in the railways and the police.

The government also passed the Industrial Conciliation Act which made it virtually impossible for African trade unions to operate. The Nationalist Party proved such good defenders of the privileges of the labour aristocracy that the Labour Party went into sharp decline having outlived its purpose!

Similar processes were underway to the north, in Rhodesia. After a similar phase of trade union struggle between white workers and capitalists in the 1920's the Reform Party was returned to power in the colonial parliament under the premiership of Godfrey Huggins, a surgeon from Bexleyheath., and similar, in some cases identical, legislation was pushed through to defend the white bloc.

The Reform Party remained in power until 1962 when it was ousted by, the even more reactionary Rhodesia Front party led by Ian Smith.

These coalitions of farmers and labour aristocracies were to a certain extent opposed by the mineowners and international capital in general.

The entrenchment of the colour bar for example prevented the capitalist from employing the cheapest labour in all circumstances. • -However,. all qualms were forgotten for the time being since, as the mineowners soon realised, concessions to skilled whites and Afrikaners were: amply repaid in profits by a solid stable white regime, armed to the teeth, and dedicated to the exploitation of the African workers and peasants.

The wages of African miners, in real terms, a South African government commission discovered 1948, had remained unchanged since 1911!

The EDITION AVAILABLE NOW Price 30p plus 10p p&p from:

WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR Healy and Banda Sectarianism is one of the most misunderstood terms in left-wing politics. This booklet seeking to analyse the sectarin politics of the Workers Revolutionary Party, sets out to give some guidelines towards an understanding of what sectarianism is, where it derives from, and the degeneration it can lead to.

The most widespread misconception, fostered by revisionist groups such as the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, is that somehow sectarianism Is to do with not joining common blocs with other left groups on specific questions.

But when Trotsky wrote the section Against Sectarianism in the Transitional Programme, this was not even considered worthy of mention.

What Trotsky wanted to attack was ultra-left isolation from the mass organisations of the working class - in particular the mass trade unions.

"At their base lies a refusal to struggle for partial and transitional demands, ie, for the elementary interests and needs of the working mering for the terolution means to the sectarians convincing themseives of the superiority of socialism.

They propose turning their backs on the "old" trade unions, ie, to tens of millions of organised workers - as if the masses could somehow live outside of the conditions of the actual class struggle! They remain indifferent to the inner struggle within reformist organisations - as if one could win the masses without intervening in their daily strife!"

But the ultra-leftism of the sectarian is just one side of his political profile. The other is always the interlinked vice of opportunIsm. The programme goes on:

"The shadownise serve to coratient, opportunism, revealing no revolutonary vistas. In practical politics, sectarians unite with opportunists; particularly with centrists, every time in the struggle against Marxism".

When the articles in this booklet attempt to probe beneath the airy rhetoric of the WRP's aeclared object of building "a mass revolutionary party" , to the real practice concealed by their flurry of words we begin from this standpoint.

Sectarianism is destructive to the revolutionary movement because it first isolates the revolutionary cadre from the main bodies of the working class, then rationalises this isolation, and finally institutionalises the isolation, building it into the very structure and functioning of the party itself.

The WRP exemplifies all these positions to an extremely high degree, and the fight to penetrate to the roots of the Healy leadership's method is closely linked to the fight against sectarianism in othér movements and tendencies towards it within the WL itself.

Perhaps the ciearest facet of sectarianism within the WRP is its institutionalised nature - taking the form within the party of a tightknit leading clique surrounded by myths and illusions in infallibility of the leadership.

The WRP's rigorous suppression of free discussion and criticism becomes necessary to uphold these ideas.

The first article in the booklet, The WRP School of Falsification takes this question head on - questioning the role of then WRP General Secretary, Gerry Healy in the major split in world Trotskyism of 1953.

The WRP had just published its four volumes of documents and letters on the history of the International, with an introduction by Cliff Slaughter which simpły lied about the events and about the content of the documents in order to fabricate a leading role for Healy in 1953.

To support this they had also suppressed a key letter written by Healy only a few months before the split in 1953 which completely backed the revisionist views of the secretary of the International, Michel Pablo.

In reprinting this suppressed letter, and exposing the obvious distortions based on the WRP's four volumes, the WSt launched the public fight I01 an objective reassessment both of the history of the WRP leadership itself and of the Trotskyist Fourth International as a whole.

None of the points made against Healy and the WRP leadership in this first article have ever been answered.

Aside from supposed historical infallibility, another central plank in the plattorm of authority erected by the Healy leadership was the abuse of the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism. It is used by thes but as a theory of knowledge as sophisticateti means of giving Healy the fake prestige of a "theoretician".

As soon as a political challenge to the sectarian positions of the WRP began within the movement therefore, (based around Alan Thornett and the forces later to be expelled and to found the Workers Socialist League), it was clear that șuch a political fight had to be argued through not simply in political terms, but in head-on conflict with Healy's "philosophy"

Two articles in this booklet therefore tackle this aspect of the fight against the WRP leadership. Their importance is that they do not as do sceptics and revisionists deny the crucial role of dialectical materialism as the necessary theory of knowledge of a revolutionary article dealing with philosophical questions - Marxism on the Rack. It quotes a passage by Mike Banda (now the new WRP General Secretгу) who had written defending Healy's "philosophy":

"Dialectical thought concepts are now enterig matter through us via the self impulse of the universal movement of matter. As this takes place we arrive at the moment of actuality which is causality. Lenin explains that "The unfolding of the sum total of the moments of Actuality NB equals the moments of dialectical cognition (Lenin CW Vol 38 p158).

At this dialectical moment of causality, the cause (essence) cancels itself into the effect (abstract thought already posited in us as a part of a previous dialectical process). Likewise the effect cancels itself into the cause. This is the only way to grasp the dialectical relationship between man and nature". (emphasis added).

The article (first published in May 1975) challenged Banda or Healy to explain in intelligible language what this passage meant. There has of course been no reply.

Marxism on the Rack goes on to show the link between these revisions of Marxist philosophy by the Healy leadership and the WRP's sectarian abstention from the fight for-transitional demands in the organised working class.

It stresses the importance in Trotsky's Transitional Programme of the concept of the "bridge" between the daily trade union struggles of the working class and the social revolution - a "bridge" constructed out of the fight for transitional demands to politically mobilise the working class.

-The WRP's abandonment of this method and approach and their rationalisation of their isolation from the working class is taken up again in two later articles Behind the Smokescreen - challenging the WRP's * "Make Labour Resign": slogan - and Lessons of Our History which attempts a serious balance sheet of the record of the old Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the WRP).

This is valuable in showing the real process of degeneration which has taken place in the movement to reach today's sectarian positions.

The opportunist side of this sectarian degeneration is taken up sharply in the article Vietnam: WRP on the Road Back to Pabloism.

Thisshows how a four part series of articles on Vietnam in the WRP's Workers Press systematically AN SNALYSIS OF THE SECTARIAN POLITICS OF THE WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY Pabloism brings out clearly the connection between distorting the history of the Trotskyist movement (and the 1953 split in particulat) and turning one's back today on the most elementary principles of Trotskyism.

"The present leadership of the WRP correctly opposed Pablo (after having supported his bureaucratic expulsions of those who disagreed with him) in 1953. But they never fought on the basis of a political opposition to him. Now, disorientated by the world-wide offensive ot the working class, they jump, as impression (p25 impression to News Line journalist Jack Gale -defender of their line on the Labour government This article, written nine months ago, preserves all its importance today, linking completeły with News Line - The Rot Goes On -an up-to-date assessment of the new WRP paper.

While the WRP's rhetoric becomes more and more hysterically ultra-left, its real politics drift further to the opportunist right.

And under the strict bureaucratic control of the central leadership no dissent, challenge or change is permitted.

This booklet, then, in charting the process of the WRP's degeneration, compiles the most ruthless and thoroughgoing critique of sectarianism, its methods and its effects.

It does so from a standpoint impossible for other groupings calling themselves Trotskyist - from the Workers Socialist League's continuous record of struggle in the workers' movement for the demands and principles of Trotsky's Transitional Programme, and struggle for an objective grasp of the history and problems of the Fourth International.

• For this reason every reader who has not followed these articles in Socialist Press or who wants to return to them in a convenient collected form would gain by a study of Behind the Smokescreen.

PUBLISHED "BEHIND THE SMOKESCREEN"

analysis of the sectar politics of the WRP 40p plus 10p p&p Available from WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park London NW5 1HR

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesday 30th June 1976

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BEHIND THE MOKESCREEN

FORCE LABOU RESIGN