[The London-based Gulf Committee last month published a…]

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The London-based Gulf Committee last month published a special report that makes clear the complete denial of democratic and trade union rights throughout the area.

The report, entitled Political Prisoners in the Oil States: Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran, gives a number of harrowing accounts of tortures, executions and extended detentions without trial in all the countries named. In Iran alon there are well over 30,000 people working for SAVAK, the notoriou secret police whose activities have been noticed as far afield as here in Britain, and there are perhaps the same number of political prisoners.

On 6th June 1974 the Guardian reported that 52 Omani workers involved in political and trade union activities in the nearby oil state of Abu Dhabi were arrested, tortured and deported back to Oman, whererthere are no trade union or democratic rights of any Kind.

TORTURE

When rumours are constantiv spread about that the Shah of Iran is just going to 'save British Leyland or some other aline comer of capitalist Britain it should not be orgotten that this regime rests on range of torture all but unknown anywhere else in the world. The Sunday Times of 19th January described a number of cases of appalling injuries done to political prisoners during interrogation, particularly by applying heated electric frames to their bodies.

One such prisoner called Massoud Ahmadzadeh, an engineer from Teheran, managed to reveal his terrible wounds to foreign legal observers who were attending one of the tew open trials held in the country, before he was led off to be shot. What the Sunday Times report made clear was that such injuries were by no means unique, but indeed typical of the methods of the Iranian regime in suppressing its political opponents.

One wonders what British trade minister Peter Shore had to say about these matters during his recent visit to fix up a trade deal with the government of these butchers and torturers. Perhaps he swopped stories about the method employed by British soldiers against republican prisoners in Ireland.

One wonders also whether the Stalinist rulers of China ever mention the torture and death done to many hundreds of Maoists in Iran during the junketing and frequent visits to Peking of the Shah and his representatives.

In recent weeks it has become clear that the war being waged against the liberation struggles of the Southern Prince of Dhotar in

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ge 4 G. Healy, National Secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party has written an 8-page attack on Alan Thornett's "Second Document on Party Policy and Perspectives" (written while Thornett was still in the WRP and which was suppressed by the national leadership who expelled him and all those in agreement with his politics just before the first Annual Conference of the WRP), Healy is only able to take up one aspect of the document - and only quotes one passage from it. This is torn out of its context and shor of its content in the document, then distorted and finally made into a plank of Healy's argument. We begin by showing the passage in its context - Healy's quote is italicised:

....the International Committee IS polemicising against the OCI "...to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. " Collected Works, Volume 5, page 384] One thing the ruling class fears above all, therefore, is the development of Marxist philosophy, a guide to action, within the workers movement. The essence of this philosophy is the method of dialectical materialism, which studies the world as matter in motion, whic develops through the unity and conflict of opposites within it.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophy of revolution - it sees nothing as eternally fixed, but every thing as in motion, in a continuing process of conflict. As a world-view, seeking in material reality and the struggle of classes the basis of all the ideas, moods and theories thrown up by social development, it forms the sinews' of the body of theory with which the revolutionary party struggles to win the conscious leadership of the working class, through the development of and fight for a programme which can establish the bridge between the as yet only trade union conscious masses of the organised working class and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Only by grasping all of the opposed forces at work, not just within the workers movement, but amongst all classes of society, can the revolutionary movement correctly defend principles and programme and put forward tactics which can assist the strategic aim of preparing the class for power. more openly the working class and the capitalist ciass enter into conflict with one another, the louder do the apologists of capitalism preach class collaboration in order to head off, and ultimately to crush the struggle of the working class to. overthrow capitalism.

ASTMS leader Clive Jenkins mounts a platform with Enoch Powell to campaign for "national unity against the Common Market. JenKins himself becomes a puppet in the rearmament of the Tory Party to enforce political and moral unity on society, preparing to use the scared middle-class as shock-troops against the trade unions. Wedge wood-Benn adds his efforts in the drive to 'unite trade unions and employers in board-room class-collaboration under the Industry Bill linking with the 'unity' of the social contract.

It is precisely this pressure to which Healy succumbs when he writes on apparently abstract quesions of philosophy. The philosohical core of his document centres on the unity and conflict of wo essential opposites: man and ature: thought and being. It is this question we are concerned with here...in discussing this most Kanırn птаная sado to arlinns na sites he is of necessity expressing is approach to development in all spheres: in nature, in society, and within the WRP itself. And on the key question he is devastatingly clear. attacks Thornett (and with him, Lenin) precisely for in sisting that the conflict of oppo sites is absolute, and that their unity exists only relatively to this conflict.

Let us look more closely at the in exactly such a reactionary conception. CONTE Worse - by blindly amalgamating together the development of the class struggle and the "universal moment of matter", precisely the element of consciousness which differentiates man's actions from those of animals and the unconscious movement of the objective world he confronts is eliminated. Healy thus reduces the class struggle to a mere 'natural process and contemplation "universal Vore Tony, H Healy sets out his pos- matter. ition as follows:

"Man is part of nature and in conflict with it. That is the starting point of all knowledge and not Thornett's one-sided assertion that knowledge begins 'from the struggle of man against nature. "Thornett subjectively separates the struggle between man and nat(emphasis added) one man with nature, thus destroying the dialectical relationship between the subjective (mens" thoughts) and the objective material world."

Healy then goes on: "He (Thor nett) then transfers the source of consciousness to the brain as some RESS Thursday, 20th March 1975 for precisely the opposite conception - that unity is relative and conflict absolute.

There is, as Lenin said "an absolute (i.e. the struggle of opposites) within the relative (i.e.their unity)" [Collected Works, Volume38.p360] Revolutionaries Beer into a (ratie unity wie, enter into a (relative) unity syndicalist workers, reformist bureaucrats, (and even centrists like Healy!), on a basic question of workers rights such as the release the Shrewsbury Two. But within this unity there must be a struggle for the revolutionary leadership of the class. This is the 'absolute question. The conflict of opposites itself conflicts with their unity. Only thus does the world change.

As Lenin puts it (crystallising exposition of the world-view Marxism in On the Question Dialectics, Collected Works, Vol "The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute." (The passage in which Lenin repeats this fundamental point - in several ways - is on a page facing one of Healy's own main quotations.)

This passage is well known to Healy and the whole WRP leader