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al to discuss programme, and dodges the other major points contained in the section one mitsonot which deal with the method Trotsky's Transitional Programme. in misquoting Thornett in this way Healy reveals an important aspect of his own revisions of Marxism.

Healy also willfully obscutes the fact that the document is not intended as a full exposition of Marxist but is specifically replying to his own challenge to explain the "historical, philosophical, and class content of the degeneration" of the WRP.

The truth is always concrete, as the man who fell out of the skyscraper said. But to get to it one must often pass through a certain number of abstractions and - some times - of losophical hot air. The aim Healy's document "Some Notes Towards 2 Study of Thornett's Philosophy": 9th Feb. 1975. is to justify philosophically (i.e.after the event) the suppression of the discussion opened by Alan Thornett in tih WRP last year At the same time Healy's document revises the fundamentals of dialectical materialism and is a qualitative "leap' in the degeneration of the WRP under the pressuse of the middle class.

In the struggle to develop a political consciousness in the working class going beyond the reformist trade union consciousness (which arises spontaneously from workers' daily experiences), the philosonhical method of Marxism is indispensable. It must therefore be defunded and developed in opposition to all attempts to revise it. As Lenin wrote in What is to be Done?:

As we shall show, the opposite is thu case. Any reformist of empiricis will tell you that there are two side to every question, but unless these two sides express the essence of the matter, and the conflict between them is grasped, thought will remain superficial, undialectical, unable to grasp the source of movement. Science evaporates and the question becomes merely which side the emphasis is placed on. This is exactly how Healy proceeds. He quotes a number of passages from Marx and Engels which minimise the conflict between man and nature, stressing instead 'unity". For instance: "Being, that is living man's unity and dependence upon naturally is emil is added. determines consciousSuch quotations are interspersed with Healy's own comments, which attempt to lead awayfrom conflict by generalisations on the "Universa) Movement of Matter" (capitals in original! Healy p. 8).

Thus he states *Man is part of Nature as an integral part of the universal movement of matter"(emphasis added p. 3). Yet as it stands such a statement is the equivalent of saying, for instance, that the working class is an "integral part" of capitalism. On a certain level of abstraction this is true - capitalism needs the working class, and the working class is an oppressed class only because of capitalism - but for revolutionaries it diverts from the essential relationship, which is not one of unity but the harsh antagonism of opposites. Under the guise of philosophy Healy smuggles