SOCLALIST PRESS, Mednesday December 1s, 1978. Pose T

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November 1973: Trolley buses with burned out tyres line the street afte: national School and Healy's visit to Athens on the 14th January, 1976, the London leadership made every possible effort to gag the secretary of the Greek organisation and to strangle any critique coming from the ranks.

Within the leadership of the Greek movement, the London clique had found valuable colleagues, since, at the 7th Conference which was held in the summer, the criterion for the election of the members of the Central Committee in Greece was the degree of servility displayed for the English leadership. Sklavos ceased to be the editor or the newspaper, being allowed to "relax" from this duty, and to devote himself "uninterrupted" to his leading tasks!

In the local branches of the WIL people servile to the English clique were openly acting as a faction, calling on the members to fight for the expulsion at all costs of Sklavos from the party.

The secretary of the organisation had been banned not only from lighting for his views in front of the membership as a whole but also from discussing the differences which appeared in the International School even within the Central Committee to whom, as the leader of the Greek delegation, he was bbliged to give a descriptive and informative account of what had happened there.

The last conference of the organisation, after rejecting completely the perspectives put Forward by the Central Committee had decided explicitly in favour of the continuation of the discussion, the circulation of internal bulletins ind a new conference in December 1975. puppets in the Greek time leadership During this time, Healy's fissolved dictatorially one aggregate of the organisation (the only one that took place) and one branch meeting.

They then asked the Control Commission to interview all the dissidents on questions of "moral order"

They halted the transtormation into full members of all the candidates who were under Control Commission investigation and, despite a decision for an intensive recruitment campaign, they refused accept new members, being afraid that an even more unfavourable correlation of forces for their clique would be formed.

MURDER

After the intervention of the English leadership, the recalled conference of the WIL was postponed many times - even though it had been fixed by the 7th Conference.

Healy stated clearly that he was opposed to the holding of a conference before the international discussion on the philosophical question, because Sklavos wanted, by gaining the majority within the Greek section, to fight within the IC from a stronger position.

The "international" discussion finally fixed for the 3rd-4th January 1976 was then posponed to the 15th on the pretext of "security reasons" arising out of the murder of the American agent Welch in Athens. In reality this postponement was necessary for Healy's factional activities.

Finally, Healy arrived, but did not appear at the tirst meeting, at which the international discussion was supposed to open up.

He did not once meet the General Secretary of the WIL, using the cheap pretext that he had not come as an "official" representative of the IC.

Instead, Healy remained at his hotel where he held meetings with members of his faction inside the out the split. A rather member of the faction said later that Healy did not appear because he had been accused of going to the US and expelling Wolforth!

RESIGN

of the WRP his views base isation.

The majority of the CC, which irbitrarily broke the clear decision of the 7th Conference of the organisation for the continuation of the discussion and for a new congress by December 1975, considered that the resignation of the secretary was ...unconstitutional and decided to expel him!

At the same time the CC distributed forms within the organisation carrying a declaration of loyalty and condemning the secretary on the model of the declarations which, during reactionary periods, the police used to force communists to sign, in an attempt to smash their morale.

Each member was called up individually and was heavily pressured to sign. All the members were considered expelled and the signing of the declaration was a condition for their re-admission into the Now, after the mass expulsions, the organisation has been reconstructed as the Workers Internationalist League (Majority) [now renamed the Communist Internationalist League, Ed.J. But the majority by provocatively informing the owners of the various halls that "there will be incidents" and urging them to cancel the bookings.

They even call in the police Trotsky against their comrades of yesterday and, having lost all sense of propriety, they publicly admit this in the columns of their paper.

Without doubt this practice, of calling on the police to intervene in the differences among Trotskyists, unprecedented in Greek records, does not start from themselves, but is done on the advice of cowardly leaders of the WRP, and particularly from Healy.

This clique has completely corrupted people who perhaps might have something to contribute to the Trotskyist movement and the working class.

VIGOROUS

The fact that this middle class sect of the WRP and the servile and careerist elements which surround it tries to present Sklavos and the other members of the organisation as responsible for the split, reminds us of the old proverb of the "thief who yells to frighten the householder"

In any case, we do not feel sad at this split. The incidental events could only influence the form of the outcome but could not prevent it.

We have to understand its necessity. To draw the political lessons from it. A split can become a new starting line for a new vigorous development of the movement only if it is a break with a wrong method and policy which did not simply belong to a cèrtain group in the organisation but which was also our method.

Ütherwise there is not a split bet dissolution. The construction of the present is possible only by the dialectical negation of the past.

Throughout the whole post-mar period the Trotskyist morement in Greece and internationally was Bot able to base itself on the method established by the Fourth International, the method of the Trans itional Programme.

This has to be done pos. The split reflects precisely this histori demand which is posed sharply Joe to the sharp • economic crisis.

All the preconditions nare deco completed for a reorientation of the movement and its return to the road laid down by Lenin. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

Without doubt this *ll zor take of small circles and propagandis place without toil. Whole decades havt left a clear mark on our nort ment.

Even more important an obstacle in the struggle for a dialectical approach to the probiems of the workers movement is the fact that the leading militants, who are sick of the treacherous compromises of the Stalinists and reformists have a tendency to be pulled to the other extreme and not be able to distinguish, as Lenin says, between compromises and compromises.

"We must" - he writes in Left Wing Communism - "learn to distinguish between the man who has given up money and firearms to the bandits so as to lessen the evil they can do and to facilitate their capture and execution later, and a man who gives his money and firearms to bandits so as to share in the loot." (pp21-2).

Undoubtedly in politics things are more complex than in this simple example. However, if we do not grasp its essence, if we do not learn not to lose the content behind the form, to distinguish the wood from the trees, it is not possible to build a revolutionary party or indeed to assist the workers in the overthrow of the capitalist yoke.

Our duty is not to train people to propagandise unbending schemas, but revolutionary leaders, armed with the dialectic method, able to open up, within the masses, the road to revolutionary perspectives.

This means that we must consciously base our activity Transitional Programme.

On the other side there are undoubtedly several comrades who should be in our ranks.

It is not necessary to be hasty with them. It is better that they delay and they break by rejecting critically the sectarian and opportunist policies of the clique rather than come with us in a hurry bringing with them their erroneous positions. Fruit cannot be gathered before it is ripe.

We must open up the Trotskyist road among the masses: This is our basic: task. Every new member recruited from the undeveloped mass is worth ten people who have crossed over from the other side to us in a hurry.

It is in any case these fresh forces that will assist the best elements who remain in th› old WIL to come over to us.

NUCLEUS

We remain, more than ever, loyal to the principles and programme of the Fourth International. This is enough to consider ourselves uncompromising Fourth Internationalists.

The crisis in the Internationai Committee which is provoked by the action of historical . forces independent of our subjective will, unavoidably, in all the sections will provoke splits and realignments.

From that will come the nucleus for the building of the world revolutionary party.

We have to intervene consciously in this developing process, to see it as a process of reconstruction of the forces of the International Committee on the basis of the Transitional Programme and the dialectic method which permeates it.

The petit-bourgeois Heaiy sect will be destroyed. We will assıst in this. Trotskyism can now triumph.

February 1976.

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factionalists of Healy intervene to prevent public meetings of the