[This is the final part of our analysis…]

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This is the final part of our analysis of the main political issues involved in the struggle a sectarian revisions of Marxism which led to 22 members splitting from the Workers Socialist Leagl Art One centred on the general method of sectarianism and its origins in frustracon di el rayals of the mass leaders of the working class. Part Two showed the specifically nature of the political positions advocated by the WSL opposition, and the contemp: or the established positions and principled record of the i Trotskyist move RECONOTRUCT THE 4TH Part of WSL contingent on a recent demonstration in support of Turkish metal irking class. elf This approach-develing the revolutionary prement, its proemme and its analysis em the standpoint of i active involvement in e daily struggles of the brkers Socialist League ice its foundation as a prement.

Waile giving not an inch to noonist and centrist groups 1 neoretical questions, we i= always seen the task not "winning" an abstract scretical debate with such cre. but in intervening on E Frogramme into workers ragles in such a way as to #se their existing reform1 = d Stalinist trade union * political leaders, and c to the workers in ece the necessity for a • Lutionary leadership.

I fighting for this orient. the Workers Socialist lague has continually had to irat not only the opporram of the International a xist Group and the adapto simple trade anism by the Socialist exers Party, but also I sin petty bourgeois layers ita our own movement. Dur firm stand against áll is ot opportunism made * Workers Socialist League I: i of attraction for those enterts who reject that road IT: ard insistence that our must conduct an ..= and consistent interking the demands .== 13 Iransitional Proto the workers' ApAK. saer :S2 Trotsky tendency, we took up a vigorous fight against anyone who regarded the fight for "principle" as synonymous with abstention from workers struggles.

Proletarian cadre

Only on this basis has it been possible for the WSL to develop its proletarian cadre, and to develop also important layers drawn from the student movement and from a middle class background to the point where they can play an important role in giving practical and political leadership in workers' day-to-day struggles, continuously challenging the reformists and The minority who wished to turn the WSL into no more than a circle of critics of the various left and self-styled "Trotskyist" groups, and the Transitional Programme into a latter day Dead Sea Scroll, knew from the outset that they faced a frontal confronmonth. Par tinued bet bourgeois 1 display tation with the most experienced and tested forces in the movement.

And in undertaking such a fight they enlisted the aid of the most experienced and tested sectarians in the "Trotskyist" movement-the international Spartacist tendency (iSt).

Mouthing wooden formulae of 'orthodox Trotskyism" the Spartacists have, since their formation in 1963, adhered rigidly to the perspective of building no more than a large propaganda group. In this minimal objective they have achieved some success.

Rationalisation

As a consequence the iSt IS a movement whose "record" consists in having issued hardly readable "exemplary" leaflets and statements on almost everything, and having always had an opinion and a comment on struggles carried out by other people.

This grouping has a longstanding and deeply entrenched position of abstention from the class struggle, formulated into a 'theoretical' rationalisation in, for example, Sparaticst No. 23:

"We recognise that a currently embryonic party organisation must necessarily constitute itself in the form of a "fighting propaganda group" in order, by destroying ostensibly revolutionary organisations, to initiate and/or drive forward regroupment process in order thereby to build up one's own organisation"

"One's own organisation"

is of course the iSt itself, which its leaders, with unaccustomed modesty, but WORKER workers strike little apparent logic refrain from actually calling J "the Fourth International'.

In case there is any misunderstanding of the term "fighting" propaganda group, the statement goes on to make it clear that no real fight is involved:

"In doing so the character of this work must always be regarded as exemplary, rejecting out of hand any voluntaristic notion of intervening as a propaganda group into all the daily struggles of the working class, inasmuch as this would lead to dissipating one's own forces and to liquidating the programme" (Our emphasis).

Carrion And in case inyone remains in doubt that what is proposed is a petty bourgeois discussion group whose sole function is to harry, disrupt and destroy other "ostensibly revolutionary" groups and, like carrion crows, to snatch off sectarian elements to build up the iSt, then the concluding point makes the position quite clear:

"Implanting the organisation in the working class through factory and trade union work must be carried out without any restrictions at the programmatic level and, at the present stage of constructing the party, can be carried out only in an exemplary fashion if one is not to succumb to the impressionist nreccure of nossible resulting 100DN13S TOO KORES wishing to lead or initiate struggles in a given plant or trade union without having constructed a leadership there as the instrument of the Here we see the classical combination of ultimatism and adaptation to opportunism that characterises the sectarian.

Unchallenged

While insisting that they will only raise the whole of their programme, the ist go on to make clear that they will not actually fight for this programme until such time as they have "constructed a leadership as the instrument of the party"

Yet this approach not only leaves the reformists and Stalinists in unchallenged leadership of workers' daily struggles, but denies the possibility of ever actually constructing a revolutionary Trotsky was quite clear that workers cannot be won to revolutionary politics through abstention:

"Only gradually, only on the basis of their own experience, through several stages, can the broad layers of the masses become convinced that a new leadership is firmer, more reliable, more loyal than the old"

The Spanish Revolution, There is little likelihood of workers becoming convinced of the leadership qualities of a movement that makes a virtue out of refusing to OLIITIDNR.

of giving in struggles.

Such a standpoint therefore condemns the ist to everlasting impotence within the working class movement. They clearly recognise this fact, as they wrote nine years ago:

"Our strength lies in ideas rather than in our numbers; thus we will recruit in general individuals who feel the need for a comprehensive theory and world-view and therefore respond more to our powerful ideas than our limited ability to put them into practice.

More specifically we can expect to grow largely though not exclusively among students, who are interested in ideas and have a generalised intellectual curiosity about the world, with relatively less success among workers"

Marxist Bulletin IX pp.5-6.

Idealist concept

This is not seen by the Spartacists as a weakness in their work. On the contrary, they manage to rationalise this state of affairs and contort Leninist theory in order to persuade themselves that it is a strength:

'Socialist consciousness is based on a knowledge of history and the class struggle and, therefore, requires the infusion into the class struggle process of socialist conceptions carried by declassed intellectuals organised as part of a vanguard party"

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British troops on streets of Northern Ireland ast ast Inity ey ht.

This idealist concept of revolutionary ideas gradually and peacefully permeating into the existing spontaneous class struggle has nothing to do with Lenin's insistence that the task is in practice to combat spontaneity and divert the working class movement towards revolutionary politics.

In this way of course the Spartacists continue to place their abstentionist petty bourgeois commentators on the same level as revolutionary workers in the leadership of major struggles.

Schoolteacher

Trotsky characterised the iSt position in his article "Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International".

"The sectarian looks upon the life of society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there. In his opinion the working class should put aside its less important matters, and assemble in solid rank around his rostrum: then the task would be solved."

Writings, 1935-6, p.26.

The Spartacists add their own characteristic idealist touch, however by making novel point that:

"Socialist revolution does not occur through the intensification of traditional class struggle, but requires a leap from a vantage point outside bourgeois society altogether".

(ibid)

The Spartacists have failed to enlighten us as to where such a mystical "vantage point" can be tound. But there is ample evidence that their starting point is a million miles from the realities of the class struggle.

Where the complexities of the real world over-stretch the rigid recipies of their "orthodox" theory, the Spartacists either invent Mari disparate elements together inio a single category.

This is most clearly reflected in the Spartacists' complete inability to offer any coherent Marxist analysis of the post-war developments of Special role In the iSt's theoretical work Stalinism is simply equated with social democracy-leaving out precisely the special role played by Stalinism in obstructing and usurping the gains of the October revolution in the Thus we find in Spartacist no. 23:

•The social democratic and Stalinist parties are in their essence simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian. These parties are particularly characterised by the antagonism between the proletarian class and a traditional leadership, between the working class rank and file and the worker |!| bureaucracy. Hence the Stalinist, as well as the social democratic, parties are currents in the workers movement with a twofold character. They are simultaneously bourgeois and workers' parties-or in Lenin's words, "bourgeois workers' parties"

"The additional ties of Stalinist parties to the "worker bureaucracies" of the deformed or degenerated workers states do not in principle alter the quality of this definition, since these bonapartist bureaucracies are channels for bourgeois influence on the workers' movement (the Stalinist parties' severing of ties with these state bureaucracies--as in Spain, France and Italy-is expressed as a process of their transformation into national reformist parties)".

Of course both Stalinist and social democratic parties can be generally described as "bourgeois workers' parties"

But such a loose description does not in any way assist an understanding of the nature of Stalinism as a movement which continues to act as the principle force of counter-revolution within the workers' movement internationally, and which yet remains tied to the workers' state established by the October revolution.

And if the Communist Parties of France, Italy and Spain are now, as the Spartacists admit, being "transformed" into national reformist parties, then what exactly did they represent before?

The Spartacists offer precisely nothing towards understanding this, or any other problem of post-war Yet this theoretical and practical question is the one which has formed the major stumbling block for the various tendencies that have emerged in the post-war Trotskyist movement.

The Spartacists end up sharing the Pabloite notion that the overturning of capitalism in Yugoslavia, China and Cuba was in each case the result of "exceptional"

factors internal to the countries concerned.

This is most awkwardly expressed in the Spartacist account of the formation of a deformed workers' state in Cuba, where these "orthodox" formalists find themselves obliged to invent a completely new form of class rule in order to tape their "analysis" together. 4.

Petit-bourgeois

'In the intervening period between the shattering of the old capitalist Batista state, the compradors of imperialism, and the consolidation of a deformed workers' state, there was a netit-houropois neutral one-with the core of its power being the petit-bourgeois Rebel Army. This regime had temporarily become autonomous of the bourgeois order...

Marxist Bulletin 8 What property relations would a "petty bourgeois" regime that is "not class neutral" defend?

Have the Spartacists discovered such a thing as petty-bourgeois property relations which are "autonomous of the bourgeois order"?

No, they have simply proven themselves unable to understand actual developments.

The fact is that first of all the Castro regime acted as a bourgeois nationalist government, defending capitalist property relations, in coalition with the liberal bourgeoisie.

When this course-which included nationalisation of foreign capitalist holdingswas stopped by the defection of the liberal bourgeoisie and by the US blockade, Castro was driven into a bloc with the Kremlin to defend the newly nationalised property and to contain the mass movement of workers and peasants.

And the Kremlin, driven by their contradictory bureaucratic requirements to preserve an international balance of power with imperialism took the opportunity to consolidate a dependent outpost in the Caribbean.

The final steps towards expropriation of capitalism in Cuba took place under Soviet military protection-as had taken place in the East European "buffer' zone in the post war period.

The Spartacists, however, by viewing Castro as an "autonomous" petty bourgeois, and insisting that as such he was able to bring about the historically progressive step of establishing a workers' state-albeit bureaucratically deformed, trail in practice behind the Pabloite notion that Castro became a "natural Marxist"

And, like the Pabloite view, the Spartacists' analysis fails to say what is to prevent further Cubas, or further petty bourgeois Castros taking the road to social "Orthodoxy"

But the complete inability of these supposed defenders of "orthodoxy" to come to grips with Stalinism iS matched by their inability to understand the importance of the national struggle against imperialism.

This is most clearly exemplified in the Spartacist position on Ireland. This position was parroted by the petty bourgeois faction drawn towards them within the Workers Socialist League.

Refusing to consider the question of Ireland as a whole, the Spartacists confine their remarks and their perspectives to the North East of the island, and take as their starting point the proimnarialict canarineness of In avoid nati trom nARe This brings them to reject any concept of a revolutionary programme designed to put the irish working classon both sides of the present border-at the head of the uncompleted national revolution.

The Spartacists adherents within the Workers Socialist League treated WSL members to classical opportunist formulation in their document on Ireland:

"It is our duty as communists to seek to address the national question in such a way as to neutralise national or communal antagonisms in order to bring to the fore the fundamental class conflicts in society. Thus, developing a revolutionary programme for the Irish revolution we must take account of the Protestants' deeply felt alienation from the Catholic nation..."

The document tactfully avoids mentioning the Protestants' deeply felt sympathy for British imperialism.

But it proposes a concession to this political backwardness by advocating the abandonment of the Marxist call for a united socialist republic in Ireland, and proposing in its place the "more flexible call for:

"a workers' republic as part of a socialist federation of the British Isles, in the framework of the Socialist United States of Europe".

Thus instead of taking up the Leninist position of fighting to combat and divert the spontaneous consciousness of the Protestant working class and raise these workers to the level of revolutionary action, the Spartacists propose to tailor their programme to the prevailing backwardness.

Abject confusion

The results of this retreat are well illustrated by the abject confusion of the frugal sprinkling of political demands that garnish the conclusion to the Spartacist document.

They call for 'a sliding scale of hours' and a programme of public works, but since tact forbids them to call for the unification of Ireland under a workers' government they have to remain silent on who is supposed to implement these demands.

Since the demands are raised only in relation to the North of Ireland, we can only assume they are to be addressed to the ruling British And even while blabbering about the "full Transitional Programme™ , the Spartacists fail to make any call for the expropriation of imperialist holdings in Ireland or 'native' Irish capitalism - since this again raises the issue of the uncompleted national revolution and the necessity for a planned, integrated economy.

Pull back

their determination to being tainted with nalism" they pull back spelling out the itv for the working leadership of the struggle to liberate Ireland from the clutches of British and international imperialism and to carry that struggle through to the establishment of an all-Ireland socialist republic.

Capitulation

This capitulation to extreme right wing currents in the case of Ireland is of course combined by the sectarians with the most absurd ultra-left posturing.

A classic example of this was formulated by the WSL "Trotskyist" Faction in their discussion document on Turkey in which they opposed the WSL's call for the formation of a workers' united front against fascist attacks:

"Trotsky's call for the CP to form a united front with the SPD in Germany cannot be separated from the Left Opposition's self-characterisation of itself as a faction of the Comintern. Therefore we do not call for a united front of the existing workers' organisations as an answer to the fascist threat. Such a strategy amounts to telling the workers to place their faith in a bloc of the Stalinist and social-democratic classcollaborationists."

The utter nonsense of this sectarian position is well illustrated by Trotsky's 1934 pamphlet Whither France?, (written after the Left Opposition had ceased to regard itself as a faction of the Comintern):

'In France there are more than one million organised workers. Generally speaking, this number is small. But it is entirely sufficient to make a beginning in the organisation of a workers' militia. If the parties and unions armed only a tenth of their members, that would already be a force of 100,000 men..

The contributions of the parties and unions, collections and voluntary subscriptions would within a month or two make it possible to assure the arming of 100,000 to 200,000 working class fighters. The fascist rabble would immediately sink its tail between its legs. The whole perspective of development would become incomparably more favourable."

Whither France?, p.33 We continue in the ::== ition of Trotsk! to cal ::: = united front embracing i mE workers parties including m own small torces and ...: trade union movement. ... order to mobilise the ries: powerful force against tre fascist thugs.

The sectarians instead regale us with 'left' sounding excuses for remaining outside this struggle on the masses.

Grovelling

This combination of ultraleft posturing with abject opportunism and rejection of any form of serious agitation for the Trotskyist programme in any country in the world is the real essence of the international Spartacist tendency.

It is reflected in their attitude to immigration laws -where "left" denunciation of restrictions on immigration are combined with grovelling capitulation to the worst kind of nationalism, reminiscent of Tory leader Margaret Thatcher.

... on a sufficient scale immigration flows only exacerbate national antagonisms and in extreme cases could even wipe out the national identity of smaller countries".

Workers Vanguard, 17.3.78 it emerges also in the Spartacists' opposition to the fight throughout the international labour movement to enforce a complete trade boycott against the apartheid state of South Africa.

Reactionary camp

By restricting their call to a boycott of arms, and by arguing that a full boycott should be avoided because "the result would be widespread unemployment among black workers". , (WV 28) an. 1978), the Spartacists succeed in putting themselves substantially to the right of many reformist black leaders.

They end up in the same reactionary camp as the black bourgeois collaborators who appeared in whole page adverts in the British press earlier this month to claim that "sanctions would be crippling to my people"

With nothing to contribute in either theoretical or practical terms to the fight for the reconstruction of the Fourth International, the Spartacists' claims to favour the "rebirth" of the International are so much spurious nonsense.

Their view of an "international" is no more than a multi-national sect, with no relationship to the daily struggles of the workers movement.

Principled orientation We categorically reject this view. We stand for the reconstruction of the Fourth International on the basis of a principled orientation to the working class and the fight in practice for the Transitional Programme.

Petty bourgeois radicalism.

bombastic 'left' rhetoric, and abstention from the living struggles of the workers movement has apparently been enough to preserve the Spartacists as a parasitic international tendency feeding off other left' groups since 1963 Trotsky made the poir.:

that:

"at an opportune moment we - must purge the organis.

ation of people who, in the crucial moment of the are inclined to pro.

foundly contemplate thes navels"

(The Spanish Revo:::

The resignation Second Annual Conferer.

the 22 Spartacist su:::

from the Workers .:

League happily relere: • this task.

CC ICL DED

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SOCIALISI PRESS, Heanesia: is Maritis The witch-hunters: Deakin (top) and Jones (above).

As General Secretary of the TGWU, Arthur Deakin cultivated an atmosphere of hysterical witch-hunting in order to pass a resolution banning communists from holding office in the union.

Deakin was driven on and assisted in this by the widespread Cold Var propaganda and McCarthyite purges being conducted by his capitalist masters internationally.

Today, Deakin's successors in the TG WU bureaucracy do not have such external assistance in carrying through their witch-hunt of nine left-wingers in British Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant.

Identical desire

But in attempting to expel, bar from office and discipline these militants, our latter-day McCarthys are driven like Deakin before them, by an identical desire to assist the government and the employers in their attacks on the working class.

In July 1949 Deakin succeeded in getting his witch-hunting resolution passed by the TG WU Biennial Delegate Conference.

From then until its implementation in March 1950 his main efforts were devoted to suppressing discussion on the question and stamping out opposition.

Opposition there was. One THREE RT Parkin hundred and four TG WU branches submitted motions protesting at the resolutiondespite the fact that Deakin had instructed his supporters to walk out of meetings where the matter was raised.

The issue gave rise to a battle at the Trades Union Congress-but Deakin remained adamant.

The first to suffer from the new ruling were nine full time officials who were sacked from their jobs by Deakin when they refused to sign a declaration supporting ine wiicn-nunting poncy.

Amongst these nine were Sam Henderson, secretary of the Road Passengers Transport section of the union-where the Communist Party had considerable weight.

A Committee for Trade Union Democracy was set up to fight these sackings and a aelegation went to transport 1-1- - 1: wed House.

Stiffest resistance

Police were called in to protect Deakin when these protestors tried to enter the Council chamber.

Deakin commented on sackings :

"It has been said that we have deprived these people of their jobs. They deprived themselves of their jobs by reason of their inability to signify their undivided iance to this union"

But it was in the docks that the stiffest resistance to Deakinism took place.

The 1940s and 1950s were times of bitter struggles in the docks, with battles over wages, decasualisation and other issues.

The post-war Labour government had sent troops into the docks to scab on a strike in April 1949.

In May a further strike in Bristol, London and Liverpool lost 408,000 man-days in an issue of solidarity with Canadian seamen.

The government again sent troops into the London docks.

Expelled

But it was the TG WU bureaucracy (which saw the strike as a threat to its authority) which struck the sharpest blow against the unofficial leadership on London docks, the London 1 1 11. - T l Central Lock-out Committee.

In March three leaders of this Committee-Harry Constable, Ted Dickens and C.H. Saunders-were expelled from the TG WU by the executive, and five others banned from union office for two years.

One of those expelled was a member of the Communist A Portworkers Defence Committee immediately "BRITAIN BEFORE MAN" Exhibition reviewed by our called an overtim e ban in protest, followed ( uickly by a strike, which began on April 21.

By the end of the week, 14,500 dockers were on strike in support of their victimised leaders.

A mass meeting of 2,000 striking dockers in Victoria Park demanded that Deakin come to address them, but he refused to respond to this "unofficial body"

Scab troops

deputation sent from the meeting to Transport House found the doors locked against them.

The Labour government once more called out the troops for scabbing operations-this time uniquely to break a strike in defence of militants victimised by union officials.

By April 27, at the end of the second week of strike action, the Docks Labour Board threatened to sack all those on strike.

At this point the Communist Party pulled back from an all out fight against the TG WU bureaucracy, and the strike was defeated.

Legal attacks

Constable was left without a union card. Yet his mass support on the docks forced the employer to allow him to work on as the only non-union member.

The employers and the Labour government were not slow to cash in on the defeat inflicted on the dockers by their own union officials.

A Commission of Inquiry was set up to investigate unofficial strikes-and a year later legal attacks brought dockers to trial at the Old Bailey.

McCarthyite explusions from the TG WU. and action in support of those victimised are not new, therefore.

New leadership The task for TG WU members in 1978 is to ensure that today's moves against the Cowley 9 by the bureaucracy are decisively reversed, to create conditions for the building of a new leadership the union and the complete destruction of CONCLUDED the materialist basis of Marxism.

In this same work further explains that:

"Materialism is the recognition of 'objects in themselves, or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies or images of those of the land is covered with towns and cities or given over to agriculture, the underlying geology is obscured.

Despite these difficulties earth scientists have pieced together evidence to show that parts of Britain were at various times in geological time are particularly good.

Geological conditions in ancient Britain are well illustrated by reference to parts of the world which are presently in similar geological state.

The geological history of Britain is also integrated with

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orking class and the phi to lead those ruggles-has been the ricular strength of the

ST LEAKDE ALA INTERNATIDNAL

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