No Principled Basis for

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For some time within the ranks of the International Marxist Group there has been a grouping of members who profess political agreement with a number of the positions of the Workers Socialist League.

Yet rather than put these views into practice in the logical way by leaving the IMG and joining the WSL they have remained within the IMG ranks, declaring themselves the "Trotskyist Opposition Faction"

last November.

The result of this has been a curious partial critique by these comrades of the practice and perspective of the IMG - a critique which has failed to go to the historical and political roots of the wrong positions put by the IMG leadership and leaders of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International of which the IMG is the British section.

This has emerged clearly with the publication in the IMG's paper Red Weekly of a pre-conference statement by "Tendency 1" , which concludes by advocating:

"Conference should resolve to unite the forces of the IMG with the WSL as a vital part of our perspectives for the year ahead".

Red Weekly, June 3rd.

MISLEADING

Couched in these terms, and coming at the end of a political statement which pulls back from a full-scale critique of the practice of the IMG, this statement is completely misleading. It gives the impression that the very real political and theoretical differences on principled issues which divide the IMG from the Workers Socialist League could in some way be skipped over if the IMG Conference passed formal vote for a "merger"

This is most certainly not the case. Political questions. must be treated more seriously than this if a principled way forward is to be found for the reconstruction. of the Fourth International.

Why is the WSL an organisation independent of the IMG? Not because we wish to preserve an artificial division, or to remain a small group of people, but because we are in fundamental disagreement with the IMG's view of the working class and the crisis of leadership; with their consequent practice of only paying lip-service to the demands of Trotsky's Transitional Programme; and with their political support for the United Secretariat, whose history and practice must be critically reexamined (along with the other international groupings claiming to be Trotskyist) if firm grounds are to be established for a principled reconstruction of the Fourth International.

None of these disagreements can be swept aside by an organisational "fusion" of IMG and WSL - indeed such a step would only impede discussion to clarity these questions by relegating them to secondary importance.

NOT OVERNIGHT The cadres of the IMG and the USFI leaders did not in our opinion simply arrive at wrong political positions overnight. They derive their wrong political conclusions from a history of empirical opportunist and centrist politics within the USFi itself - a history which stretches back to before the 1953 split in the world Trotskyist movement.

of the USFI. It states for instance that:

...the nolitical rncitions of tha USFI concerning the nature of the petty bourgeois leaderships of the Chinese and Cuban workers' states and the need to build Trotskyist parties in these grave weaknesses »Countries reflect But in the same statement, Tendency 1 itself even talks wrongly of the "state power of the bourgeoisie" apparently being overthrown in Angola (succumbing to the same type of empirical conceptions as the USFI leadership). And they plainly fail to grasp the political roots of these wrong positions.

Those roots, as the WSL has repeatedly analysed and documented, are in the USFI's continuity of political method with that of Michel Pablo whose • lethal combination of liquidationist politics and bureaucratic regime forced a split in the Fourth International in 1953.

IMPRESSIONS

Working on the basis of surface impressions Pablo saw Tito's split with Stalin as evidence that under certain conditions Stalinist parties could become centrist and even revolutionary parties. He therefore advocated scrapping • the careful work of cadre building being carried out by sections of the Fourth International, and instead began to instruct them to secretly of Trotskyism.

Any resistance to this line drew a bureaucratic response from Pablo and his supporters - who included the present USFI leader Ernest Mandel, In fact until 1953 only the French sectio'. resisted Pablo's line, while the British section (led by Gerry Healy) and the American SWP (led by James P. Cannon)

backed Pablo.

Only when moves were made to apply the same line to the British and US sections " did the fight against it really begin, giving rise to the famous Open Letter of 1953 which formed the basis of the split in the International.

DISTORTED

And since 1953 both sides in the split have pulled back from an analysis of its lessons, and have presented a factionally distorted history of the International. Until these questions can be confronted there is no way to reconstruct the International and no way of grasping today's wrong method and positions advocated by Mandel, Healy, Hansen and Lambert : political leaders of the main international groupings calling themselves Trotskyist.

Indeed the very instances Tendency 1 quote - abandonment of the call for Trotskyist parties in Cuba and China (as well as Vietnam), and talk of a "class struggle tendency" emerging in the labour movement bringing sections of the bureaucracy - are clearly today's evidence that Pablo's perspectives live on in the USFI.

And if the "class struggle tendency" has already since the IMG Conference been swamped in the pages of Red Weekly by an empirical adaptation. to the emergence of black self-defence groups and an idealisation of the forces they represent, then this, too, Is Pabloism - opportunist and superficial to the core.

INITIATIVE The WSL document Fourth International: Problems and Tasks was an initiative towards an international discussion on these allantinan balance sheet of the post war developments in the Fourth International.

It has not been seriously replied to by the IMG or the USFI. Yet the Tendency 1 statement does not press for such' a full discussion but instead simply criticises what it calls the WL's "failure to grasp adequately the history and development of the USFI."

What Tendency 1 clearly has not grasped is the importance of these questions to the international movement.

For Tendency 1 - the "Trotskyist Opposition" - in the IMG the big question therefore remains: do they agree with the WSL analysis or not?

If they do agree then we recommend them to draw the logical conclusion and apply to jon our movement, help us build a principled leadership based on a firm working class cadre and the fight for the Transitional Programme.

It they do not agree, or it they nave reservations, then how can it be principled to fuse the two organisations together?

It is rather their task to find a means to locate and clarify those disagreements which they feel are central, so that the public polemic between the WSL and the IMG can From Liu Po-ching, Chu Mandel develop to a higher level.

Only in this way can Tendency I's practice bear out its statement that:

"The emergence of the Workers Socialist League out of a struggle for Trotskyism in the degenerated International Committee represents an important development for the political reconstruction of the Fourth International."

The need in our view is now to attempt to take up the struggle for Trotskyism against the other degenerated body, the United Secretariat, of which the IMG is a part. We wait to see which side members of the Trotskyist Opposition take in that struggle.

on the rostrum

----- pull-quotes -----

This is why the Tendency l statement fal's short on its critique

enter the national Stalinist parties, dropping all external appearances