Healy’s Pupils Fail to Break with their Master (Reply to Socialist Fight / LCFI)

The revolutionary tradition of the Fourth International and the centrist tradition of its Epigones Gerry Healy and the ”International Committee” – A Reply from the RCIT to ”Socialist Fight”

By Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), October 2013, www.thecommunists.net

 

 

The British group Socialist Fight, which is part of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (together with the LC in Brazil and the TMB in Argentina) has published a polemic against our analysis of the degeneration of the Fourth International after World War II. (1)

The subject of this document, written by comrade Laurence Humphries, is an important book for our movement called The Death Agony of the Fourth International, which our predecessor organization Workers Power (Britain) published in 1983. (2)

We appreciate comrade Humphries’ contribution for two reasons. First it is a welcome contribution if an organization, which claims to stand in the tradition of Trotsky, deals with the history of the Fourth International. This, in itself, is not a taken-for-granted in times like the present in which the degeneration of pseudo-Trotskyism has reached such low levels that hardly any of these epigones bother to show any interests in the history of our movement. While we do not agree with the positions of Socialist Fight, we appreciate their interest in the subject of the post-WWII development of the Fourth International.

Secondly we welcome comrade Humphries’ contribution because it helps to clarify the programmatic differences between the LCFI and the RCIT which we consider to be differences between centrism and Bolshevism.

Unfortunately, there is nothing positive to add to these comments. The SF/LCFI document is politically and theoretically wrong. Despite some mild criticism, it praises the thoroughly centrist tradition of Gerry Healy and claims that he as well as his partners in the so-called ”International Committee” in the years after 1953 – Pierre Lambert, James P. Cannon, Nahuel Moreno, etc. – represent the revolutionary continuity of the Trotsky’s Fourth International. As such, the SF/LCFI concludes at the end of its document: Workers Power has characterised the split in 1953 as a centrist split and did not break with Pablo’s method. WP are wrong theoretically. In 1953 the opposition to Pablo did fight. (…) The 1953 split was a principled defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism and was therefore a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

In fact, as we will demonstrate below, Healy and the ”International Committee” were rather a centrist current – in rivalry with the other centrist split of the Fourth International (the so-called ”International Secretariat” of Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel) – which did not restore the revolutionary continuity of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The document proves once more that central leaders of Socialist Fight – and thus the LCFI – who have been members of Healy’s organization in the past (most prominently Gerry Downing, the central leader of the SF/LCFI) still adhere to this rotten tradition. Healy’s pupils fail to break with their master.

In addition the SF/LCFI document also distorts the history of the Fourth International and confuses simple facts as well as the arguments of its opponents. It simply lacks any serious dealing with the subject as we will show.

 

I.             Incessant Confusion of Facts and Positions

 

The lack of seriousness on behalf of the SF/LCFI starts already with the fact that nearly 30% of the document is a largely concealed copy-and-paste job. The author has simply incorporated, literally, sentence-for-sentence and paragraph-for-paragraph large chunks of another study to which he refers only once. With the exception of one paragraph, he presents this material as his own. The study, from which the SF/LCFI plagiarizes so extensively, is called “The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy” written by Bob Pitt, a former member of Healy’s WRP, in 1989. (3) Naturally there is nothing wrong in quoting from other publication. Quite the contrary, this assists the reader in studying original sources and in better checking the facts. However, this is, of course, not possible if an author conceals the source of nearly a third of his document which was simply copied and pasted.

In the real world, any scientist or scholar who presents the insights of others as his or her own, is immediately dismissed. In politics, we have no other sanction than contempt for such shameful tricks. Why did the LCFI conceal its extensive copying? Maybe because the original study is not only much better researched, but is a superior political analysis of the rotten tradition of Gerry Healy?!

Unsurprisingly, this vast copy-and-paste job gives the SF/LCFI a certain contradictory character since the paragraphs stolen from Bob Pitt usually contain more critical notes on Healy’s “achievements” than the paragraphs written by the SF/LCFI itself.

The LCFI could have at least minimized the damage if it would have copied more of Bob Pitt’s study and not cut out his insightful and fundamental criticism of the bankrupt tradition of Gerry Healy. But, unfortunately, the LCFI cut out precisely those critical sentences and parts of sentences which denounce the rotten methods of Gerry Healy in the paragraphs it integrated into its own article.

 

The disorganized and disorientated but still revolutionary Fourth International during World War II and its collapse into centrism in 1948-1951

 

However, this is definitely not the only defect of the LCFI document. The first few paragraphs of the document are representative for the whole article. The article starts as follows: “The Fourth International during the war years of 1940-1945 prepared for Trotsky’s prognosis on the future of Imperialism and the tasks of the Fourth International. WP maintains that the struggle inside the Fourth International that wars and revolutions were Imminent was correct. WP have argued that the FI was not a continuity during this period and neither tendency represented a serious left opposition and therefore does not constitute a continuity of Trotskyism.

In fact, our tendency maintains quite the opposite. WP(B)/RCIT reject the opinion that the Fourth International in the war years of 1940-1945 did not represent the continuity of Trotskyism. What we say is that it was severely weakened and disorganized in this period and that it made a number of errors. It stopped following the tradition of authentic Trotskyism when it programmatically adapted to Stalinism, in particularly its Yugoslavian version, Titoism. This did however not take place, as the LCFI wrongly ascribes to us, in 1940-1945 but in 1948-1951. We made this plainly clear in our book and it is astonishing how the LCFI could miss that:

In 1951 the centrist positions of the Third World Congress on Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and general perspectives (the impending "civil war" perspective) proved, beyond doubt, that a programmatic collapse of the Fourth International had taken place. The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav resolution - the cornerstone of all the errors - is a fact of enormous significance.

The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism. From this point on, the task facing Trotskyists was the refoundation of a Leninist-Trotskyist International on the basis of a re-elaborated programme of revolutionary communism. Manoeuvres to replace the leadership of the FI were entirely insufficient. The programmatic basis of the FI had to be changed. The manner by which this could have been done in the early 1950s is a matter of tactical speculation. What is decisive for us is that it was not done. The historical continuity of Trotskyism was shattered – as was evidenced by Pablo's use of the Congress documents at the Tenth Plenum of the International Executive Committee in February 1952, to usher in "entrism sui generis" The opposition in America, Britain and France that did emerge in 1952-3 was subjectively committed to opposing Pablo. However, they have to be judged not by their impulse but by their politics. Their "orthodoxy" was both sterile and based on post-war revisionism, prompted by the Yugoslav events. It was not authentic Trotskyism.

Thus we cannot view either component of the 1953 split as the "continuators" of Trotskyism. Both were centrist.

The IC, itself developing in a rightward direction (e.g. Healy's work in the Labour Party) was distinguished from the IS by the pace of its development. It recoiled from the most blatant expressions of liquidationism issuing from the IS, but not from the right-centrist documents that underpinned that liquidationism. Therefore the IC did not constitute a "left centrist" alternative to the IS. (4)

 

Cowardly SWP(US) Leadership Deviates towards Social-Patriotism

 

Of course Marxists have to make a number of criticisms of the leadership of the Fourth International during the war. This is particularly true for the cowardly adaption to domestic imperialist pressures by the strongest and most important section of the Fourth International, the Socialist Workers Party (USA), which – in addition to this – could also operate under relatively legal conditions. Despite their relatively advantageous conditions, the SWP – which later would become one of the key forces of the ”International Committee” split after 1953 – adapted to social-patriotism. Already before US imperialism entered World War II in December 1941, the SWP leadership stated in an Editorial of its paper “The Militant”: "As horrible as war is, we would not hesitate to urge Roosevelt to enter the war, if it were really to be a war of democracy against fascism. (…) But this is not our war. This is an imperialist war. (…) It is important to make these workers realize that Roosevelt’s war is not a war against fascism. The real solution is to transform the imperialist war into a war against fascism. (i.e. against Germany, Italy and Japan; MP). That can only be done by taking all power out of the hands of the capitalist class. (5) And the central leader of the SWP, James P. Cannon, stated at a trial on 19/11/1941: “We consider Hitler and Hitlerism the greatest enemy of mankind.” (6) What a difference to the classic communist slogans of Lenin and Liebknecht: “The main enemy is at home” and "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war"!

The SWP propaganda disorientated the US-American workers’ vanguard because it told them that their main enemy is not their domestic ruling class but the German fascists. They criticised the Roosevelt government for not seriously fighting Hitler. The SWP leadership called the workers to oppose the US government’s war because it was suspected of not really fighting against fascism. When however it turned out that the US bourgeoisie did fight and indeed smash German fascism – naturally for their own imperialist interests of world domination – the SWP propaganda left the vanguard workers’ politically unarmed, since their main enemy was supposed to be Hitler and not Roosevelt. When faced with its biggest test in history, the future central force of the co-called “orthodox Trotskyist” International Committee turned out to replace the Bolshevik-Leninist attitude to imperialist war with centristic deviations towards social-patriotism.

This cowardly opportunist deviation of the SWP leadership however cannot remove the fact that many Trotskyist leaders and members fought heroically during the imperialist war for a revolutionary program. From 1943 onwards the Fourth International reorganized in Europe under a new leadership (around Pablo and Mandel) and elaborated – despite some weaknesses – a revolutionary programmatic response to the challenges of the beginning revolutionary phase.

In 1944 several of the European sections of the FI regrouped at a conference held inside Nazi-occupied Europe. They adopted the "Theses on the Liquidation of World War 2 and the Revolutionary Upsurge". These testified to the continuing revolutionary potential of the sections of the Fourth International. The theses, written at a time when anti-German chauvinism and pro-allied sentiments were growing rapidly in Europe, espoused a defeatist position in the war. They indicated that the reconstruction of the FI on a revolutionary basis was a real possibility. However, severe disorientation over the crucial question of perspectives obstructed this development from taking final shape.” (7)

We clearly stated our view on the timeline of the Fourth International’s degeneration also in another document, from which the LCFI quotes and hence should be aware of. Thus we wrote in “The Trotskyist Manifesto” in 1989:

As a re-elaborated programme, it has had to confront the fact that the continuity of the revolutionary Marxist movement was broken in 1951 with the degeneration of the Fourth International into centrism. (8)

In 1951 the FI ceased to exist as a revolutionary organisation. In 1953 it ceased to exist as a united organisation when it split into warring centrist factions, none of which represented a political continuity with the revolutionary Fourth International of 1938-48. (9)

And in another article on the history of the Fourth International we wrote:

In March 1946 some 30 delegates from various sections of the Fourth International (FI) assembled in Paris. A police raid and arrests on the third day forced proceedings to move to a jail, but the disruption could not prevent the conference registering its fundamental achievement: the FI had survived the war.

Looking back on the war years, the delegates had reason to be proud of what Trotsky had dubbed "the only revolutionary force on the planet worthy of the name". They had taken many blows. The murderous hostility of the Stalinists had been unremitting. In the Soviet Union itself, several thousand Trotskyists were brutally killed between 1938 and 1941. Defiant to the end, they faced the firing squads with the Internationale on their lips. Internationally, Stalin's GPU had murdered dozens of key FI leaders, including Trotsky himself. (…)

The international leadership under van Heijenhoort managed to remain true to the positions adopted under Trotsky's guidance and even to develop them. This was of central importance to the fate of the FI. As a small, persecuted international of propaganda groups, its foremost strength lay in its programme, and its most important task was to defend it and win small layers of the vanguard to it, thus preparing the nuclei for future mass struggles. (…)

Nonetheless, by the time of the March 1946 World Conference in Paris, the Fl's cadre and sections had weathered the worst of the repression. Sections had certainly made errors in the name of the International but they had also shown the capacity to correct them in the course of collective discussions. The task now was to re-establish the organisation and re-orient the sections in the post-war world. (10)

 

The Objective Difficulties for the Fourth International

 

However, the distortions continue. In the second paragraph of its article the LCFI writes: “What WP fails to appreciate is the objective situation for Trotskyism. It had come through the war very much weakened. Stalinism was much stronger and this period represented a growth of Stalinism particularly the victory in China and the satellite countries of Eastern Europe.

Again, nothing could be more distant from real position of WP(B)/RCIT. We are fully aware of the difficult objective conditions for the Fourth International and stated this unmistakable in our book:

On the one hand, the openly bourgeois parties and social democracy were revivified due to the victory of the "democracies". On the other hand, the Stalinist parties with the weight of Russian victory and their own partisan struggles were likewise strengthened. Far from these forces facing the loss of their material basis, or suffering political demise and organisational disintegration, they emerged from the war much stronger than they were in the late 1930s.

Moreover, the politics of class collaboration - established via the Popular Front before the war, and having behind it the prestige of the Second and Third Internationals, were not disrupted until 1946/7, when the post-war crisis had been overcome. The whole weight of bourgeois democracy and Stalinism was thrown into the scales against proletarian revolution.

Once the immediate potentially revolutionary situations were weathered, the enormous economic power of the USA was brought to bear in the West through Marshall Aid, and the Kremlin bureaucracy sealed off its East European glacis and began the process of transforming them into degenerate workers' states, having expropriated the proletariat politically in advance. In Germany the working class upsurge was very weak and was suppressed immediately by Allied and Russian military means. In Italy and France the Stalinists demobilised the partisan militias. In Central and Eastern Europe a varied combination of Soviet forces and indigenous Stalinists and their popular frontist allies were able to prevent any revolutionary upsurge from occurring.

Thus not only were the Trotskyists weak and disorganised, but the conditions for them to emerge from the situation of marginalised propaganda groups did not materialise. Instead, the counter-revolutionary social democracy and Stalinist parties grew in strength, isolating the Trotskyists yet again. Thus social democracy and Stalinism exerted tremendous pressure on the tiny and disoriented forces of the Fourth International.” (11)

 

Does SF/LCFI Defend Healy’s Notorious ”Security and the Fourth International” Campaign?

 

However, in the third paragraph, the LCFI comrades add to the difficulties for the Fourth International the penetration of the Trotskyist movement by Stalinist Agents. While this certainly was a problem for the Fourth International until the Stalinists assassinated Trotsky in August 1940, one can hardly claim that the political failures of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel, Gerry Healy, Pierre Lambert, Nahuel Moreno and James P. Cannon are related in any way to Stalinist Agents. Or maybe the LCFI believes that there were Stalinist Agents in the Fourth International’s leadership after World War II?! Well, maybe the LCFI indeed believes so, since it positively refers in its article (in the same paragraph) to the Healyite’s “International Committees investigation into the role of the GPU and their agencies inside the movement.” This “investigation” was particularly shameful and notorious, since Gerry Healy and his lackeys accused the SWP(US) veteran leaders George Novack and Joseph Hansen of being agents of the GPU and/or the FBI, i.e. of the US or USSR secret services! (12) George Novack was a long-standing leading theoretician of the SWP and Joseph Hansen was an important leader who worked as a secretary for Trotsky in 1937-40 in Mexico and was central in preventing the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader, who killed Trotsky, from fleeing. Later the Healy/WRP leadership accused the entire SWP leadership of working for the FBI. The Peruvian group of Healy’s ICFI went on to attack Hugo Blanco as a supporter of CIA agents (i.e., the SWP leadership). Hugo Blanco was the famous leader of the Peruvian Mandelite USec section who played a central role in the early 1960s in the Quechua peasant uprising in the Cuzco region of Peru and spent many years in prison and exile.

This slanderous accusations were not only condemned by all other forces who claim to stand in the tradition of Trotskyism – irrespective if they were supporters or opponents of the SWP(US) – but was later also repudiated by the WRP leadership around Cliff Slaughter itself after it got rid of Gerry Healy in 1985. Do the LCFI comrades now really want to praise the insane and extremely slandering “International Committees investigation”?! (13)

Our suspicion that the LCFI comrades share the Healyite criminal idiocy of seeing the cause for political faction struggles in conspiracies of imperialist and/or Stalinist secret services is strengthened by another claim in the next paragraph. Here the comrades charge: “WP accuses the IKD, the German section: “The German section veered in a Menshevik direction”. Of course it would adopt this position Stalinist agents were in control of the organisation and created splits and factional activity. While else would they adopt these positions?” So unbelievable the LCFI explains the political right-wing degeneration of the German Trotskyist leadership by claiming that they were Stalinist agents! What complete nonsense, unsubstantiated by facts!

 

Some Other Nonsense

 

Unfortunately the nonsense continues. In the fourth paragraph the LCFI writes about the split in the SWP(US) in 1940: “The split with Shachtman in the SWP had left 40% of its cadre in the Workers Party which ended up justifying Stalinism.” This is an astonishing statement since the Menshevik opposition of Shachtman, Abern, and Burnham was certainly not “justifying Stalinism” but, quite the opposite, was deeply Stalinophobic and refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attacks! It therefore took a neutral position during the World War II when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. How on earth can the LCFI seriously call this “justifying Stalinism”?! Is this an example of Healy’s famous caricature of “dialectical materialism”?!

A few sentences later, the LCFI author accuses “Germain” (which was the pseudonym of Ernest Mandel) that he “has remained an apologist for Stalinism ever since particularly his role during the 1968 Belgian general strike.” We are not aware that there was a general strike in Belgian in 1968, to speak nothing about a role of Mandel in such a fabrication. Can it be the case that the LCFI confuses this with the famous Belgium General Strike in 1960–1961 where Mandel indeed played a prominent (and right-wing centrist) role?!

Literally the next sentence contains yet more nonsense: “In the British Section there were two groups who were arguing for entry into the Labour party, the RCP and the WIL.” and – shortly after – “The RCP which was led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant initially opposed entry whereas Healy in the WIL received permission from the International Secretariat to enter the Labour Party in 1947.” This is simply impossible since the RCP was the result of a fusion of the WIL and the RSL in 1944. No WIL existed in 1948! Are the comrades completely ignorant of the history of British Trotskyism?! One is tempted to exclaim that it might have been better if the SF/LCFI author had copied much more of Bob Pitt’s study since it is certainly much more informed on the history of British Trotskyism!

The article becomes even stranger in the next sentence, where it credits Trotsky with advocating “entryism sui generis” while every informed historian of the Fourth International knows that the “sui generis” concept was an invention of Pablo and Healy in the later 1940s which called for a long-term entry into reformist parties and for opportunistically hiding the Trotskyist program in order to stay longer in those parties. This was the complete opposite of Trotsky’s concept which argued for an open struggle for revolutionary positions and a short-term entry tactic (more on this below).

So readers can see that already in the first four paragraphs, the SF/LCFI article contains so much nonsense and factual distortions that, were we to continue with a close examination of the rest of the article, we could fill a book. Obviously, this would not be a valuable use of either our or our readers’ time. Instead, let us now focus on the programmatic and theoretical essence of the document which, unfortunately, is consistent with the confused nature of the article as we outlined above.

 

II.           The Supposed “Revolutionary Continuity” of Healy and the International Committee

 

The programmatic essence of the SF/LCFI document is its rejection of the WP/RCIT thesis that the Fourth International degenerated in the late 1940s and early 1950s into centrism, and that neither of the two splits in 1953 represented a break from, but rather a continuity of, centrism. In contrast to our position, the LCFI comrades claim that Healy and the ”International Committee” represented a continuation of the revolutionary tradition of Trotsky’s Fourth International:

Workers Power has characterised the split in 1953 as a centrist split and did not break with Pablo’s method. WP are wrong theoretically. In 1953 the opposition to Pablo did fight. (…) The 1953 split was a principled defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism and was therefore a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

As we have shown in past documents, and will repeat here, Healy and the ”International Committee” shared the centrist capitulation of the Pablo/Mandel leadership towards Stalinism, Social Democracy, and bourgeois nationalism till the split in 1953 and after the split it was no less centrist than its rival. There was no qualitative difference between the adaption and capitulation to petty-bourgeois class forces between the centrist Pablo/Mandel wing and their counterparts Cannon/Healy/Lambert/Moreno. We will demonstrate this for a number of central issues.

 

Healy and Entryism “sui generis”: Pabloism under the Cover of “Anti-Pabloism”

 

As we have explained in numerous documents, both sides of the 1953 split subscribed to the centrist capitulation towards petty-bourgeois and bourgeois class forces under the cover of “entryism sui generis”. “The IC criticised Pablo for putting forward deep entryism into the Stalinist movement. However the sections of the IC would practise a much deeper entryism in the very heart of the social democratic and bourgeois nationalist movements.” (14)

Let us look more closely at Healy’s record. He called for entry into the Labour Party as early as June 1945. (15)He was soon to be supported by Michel Pablo, the new International Secretary of the Fourth International and the whole international leadership pressurized the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) – as the British section of the Fourth International was called at that time – to dissolve its organization and to enter Labour. The RCP majority around Jock Haston and Ted Grant argued for a continuation of the independent RCP work combined with continuing its faction work inside the Labour Party. (The RCP had already a number of members inside Labour and published a faction paper called “Militant”.) (16)

Here, we will not discuss whether an entry tactic into the Labour Party was sensible or not at that time. The LCFI comrades think that Healy was correct to push for entry work in the Labour Party. “As Trotskyists it was the right perspective to enter the Labour Party and carry out sustained deep entry work.”

Of course it as a tactical question and not one of principles when and if to conduct entry work in a reformist party. And it is also only of historical interest to discuss what would have been the best tactic for British Trotskyists in the later 1940s and 1950s. However we remark that we are not convinced of the Healyite/LCFI position that entry work was the correct thing to do in this period. The hard facts are that the Trotskyists lost the majority of its members during their entry period due to demoralization. Of course this was not only because of entrism but also because Healy – supported by his mentor Pablo – expelled many of them. (17)But also Healy’s group – which called itself “The Club” (surely the most apolitical name of any entryist formation in the history of Trotskyism!) – did not grow despite 11 years of entry work! (18) Quite the opposite, in 1954, “The Club” is said to have even shrunk to about 40 members. (19) After 1956/57 the Healy group did grow substantially, but not due to the Labour Party milieu, but because of the crisis in the Stalinist party after the Hungarian Revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution. So the growth of Healy’s group in the later 1950s itself showed that its assumption – that a revolutionary force had to make entrism in the Labour Party because this was the only milieu out which it could grow – was contradicted by its own success.

The alternative position – proposed by the RCP majority around Haston and Grant might not have completely avoided a numerical decline of the British Trotskyists, which was first and foremost a result of the end of the revolutionary post-war period and the beginning of the world-wide democratic counterrevolutionary period in the early 1950s. (20) But an independent organization would have at least improved the chances to keep the revolutionary banner and to consolidate a Trotskyist cadre. Such a cadre could have played a central role in fighting against the centrist degeneration of the Fourth International and preparing for the class struggles ahead.

However the main problem with Healy’s entryism was not a question of whether entry was correct in itself or not. The fundamental question was the programmatic and political nature of his entryism. Unfortunately, the SF/LCFI comrades fully subscribe to Healy’s (and in fact Pablo’s) understanding of “entrism sui generis”. Such they write: “It is true to say that Pablo and Cannon favoured the leadership of Healy who had entered the Labour Party on a principled basis. (…) The Workers Power document accuses Healy and his group of being Bevanite centrists or left reformists. We need to establish facts before accusations are flung around left and right. As Trotskyists it was the right perspective to enter the Labour Party and carry out sustained deep entry work.”

The truth however is that Healy’s entrism was thoroughly opportunist and had nothing to do with Trotsky’s method. It was rather the model for the liquidationist policy of which Healy, Cannon, Moreno, and Lambert would later accuse Pablo. Throughout the 11 years of its “entrism sui generis”, the Healy group never openly raised the banner of Trotskyism which makes them even worse than the arch-opportunists of CWI/Militant in the 1970s and 1980s. They just called themselves “The Club.” They never published a Trotskyist paper. Instead they launched the paper "Socialist Outlook" in an opportunist political bloc with left-reformists supporters of Labour minister Aneurin Bevan (who Minister of Health and later Minister of Labour from August 1945 till April 1951). The editorial board consisted of the two “Club” members, Healy and John Lawrence, as well as the pro-Stalinist trade union bureaucrat Jack Stanley (Secretary of the Constructional Engineering Union) and Tom Braddock (pro-Bevan Labour Party Member of Parliament). It had prominent contributors like Bessie Braddock (Member of Parliament and president of the Liverpool Labour Party, not related to Tom Braddock), Fenner Brockway (Member of Parliament) or Ellis Smith (Member of Parliament). Naturally such a paper never was and never claimed to be Trotskyist. Soon afterwards, this rotten bloc of Healy’s “Club” and the left-Labour wing founded the “Socialist Fellowship” as a left-reformist pressure group in the Labour Party.

Healy’s Socialist Outlook was an unabashed cheerleader for the left-reformist wing in the Labour Party and its ministers. Instead of criticizing left-reformism and explaining its illusionary character, instead of attacking Bevan for being a member of the imperialist government and his followers for supporting this government, it refrained from such criticism and instead fostered illusions in left Labour. Healy usually didn’t call them left-reformist but rather “centrists” and gave the impression that with the push from the rank and file and friendly advice from him, they could become a driving force towards the socialist transformation of the society.

Its first issue in December 1948 ran the headline “Back to Socialism,” subscribing to the left-Labour wing’s illusion that Labour had a socialist past. Such illusions were even more strengthened when beside this title “Member of Parliament” Tom Braddock published a leading article with the headline “It is Time to Change Course”. (21)

In an editorial in May 1949 Healy’s Socialist Outlook would proclaim: "Labour Believes in Socialism." Instead of warning workers against the imperialist Labour government which worked hard to save capitalism through the post-war crisis and to assure that the Empire’s global influence could be saved as much as possible, the paper stated that Labour would bring Britain closer to socialism: "In Britain we have taken a great step forward towards socialism by defeating the Tories and establishing for the first time in our history a majority Labour Government." An astonishing “analysis” of the “orthodox Trotskyist” Healy after four years of an imperialist Labour government! In an Editorial in April 1951, Healy’s Socialist Outlookfantasized that the Labour Government was "itself engaged in freeing Britain from the exactions of the capitalist class..."! (22)

In another editorial in January 1950 Healy’s Socialist Outlook urged the Labour Government "to abolish capitalist exploitation and replace it with planned socialist co-operation." That Labour was a bourgeois workers party inextricably bound to imperialism was something which Healy found not suitable for his rotten alliance with the Labour Members of Parliament. Naturally, Trotskyists apply the tactic of critical electoral support for reformist parties – as our tendency has done many times in the past. But such a critical electoral support must be combined with explaining the petty-bourgeois nature of the labor bureaucracy and its role as an agent of imperialism in the ranks of the workers movement. Instead of spreading illusions that the reformist bureaucracy can lead the working class towards socialism, authentic Trotskyists have to make concrete demands from the party, warn the workers not to trust the leadership, warn them of their inevitable betrayal, and call them to organize independently in action committees to put pressure of the leadership and, if necessary, to act independently.

In contrast to such a principled approach, Healy was determined to pay court to the Labour left. Such in the October 1951 Election supplement he urged workers to vote Labour: "as an expression of your confidence in the workers' ability to govern this country...and to act so that the Labour Government will destroy capitalism." (23) Such centrist propaganda spread the ludicrous illusion that an imperialist government of a bourgeois workers’ party would express the “workers' ability to govern this country” and that the capitalist Labour Government could ever “destroy capitalism”.

Despite his later tirades of hate against Pablo, Healy implemented the same opportunist approach which Pablo himself was advancing. Healy famous election slogan “Labour to Power on a Socialist Program” was completely shared by Pablo.

… this platform can be summarized in the formula: THE SP ALONE TO POWER IN ORDER TO APPLY A SOCIALIST POLICY.” (24)

Healy also continued this right-wing opportunism in his other non-Trotskyist publication of the time which he called “Labour Review” and which was designed to become "Labour's educational and theoretical organ" (Labour Review Vol.1 No. I January/March 1952). This not very educational organ did not try to educate workers to understand the anti-socialist, bourgeois nature of Labour but rather to paint it in pink colors. So when drawing a balance sheet of the Labour Government of 1945-51, he concluded that it offered a vision of future socialism: They (the working class, MP) were given glimpses of what a Labour regime could accomplish and even more, what a socialist future could bring." (Labour Review, Vol. I No. 4) (25)

To show Healy’s unashamed opportunism, we will reprint an excerpt from an excellent analysis which our tendency published in 1986:

While Atlee came in for criticism it was not because of his vicious attacks on striking dockers or other workers. These incidents receive no mention in Labour Review. No, the main fault of the government was in the field of foreign policy: "The outstanding debit on the balance sheet of the Labour Government was undoubtedly its foreign policy." (ibid) For Healy the Atlee government and its "considerable achievements" (ibid) proved the possibility of using the Labour Party for socialist tasks. "We may not have to create a Labour Party, but let's use that Instrument to fulfill its socialist purposes." (ibid)

Of course this couldn't be done under the right-wing leaders. But happily an instrument for their ousting was close at hand. The Bevanites were the vehicle for the party's transformation. In order to encourage this development Healy advocated a road to socialism that was, in essentials, no different to that being advocated by the Communist Party, in their new programme the openly reformist British Road to Socialism: "What should be the right relation between parliamentary- and extra-parliamentary actions? Mr. Bevan criticises those who looked upon parliamentary action 'as an auxiliary of direct action by the industrial organisations of the working class.' But it would be equally one sided, as he does, to make industrial action always auxiliary and subordinated to parliamentary action. Both forms of action are indispensable for conducting the class struggle.’ (Labour Review Vol. I, No.2 May/August 1952).

So for Healy the industrial struggle and the parliamentary struggle are put on equal footing. Whichever predominates at a particular time depends on external circumstance. Moreover the equal importance given to parliament and to industrial action meant a fundamentally parliamentary road to socialism: "It is not excluded that the movement for socialism can be carried far through the gates of Parliament and be “legalized”' to a considerable degree thereby.’ (Ibid)

All that is required is "the active vigilance of the mobilized masses" (ibid) and, more importantly, a Bevanite leadership in the Labour Party: ‘On the other side, which is popularly designated as Bevanite, are all those forces who, regardless of their previous positions and present differ have absorbed certain lessons from the post-war experiences and are seeking to overcome the defeats of the past. They wish to adopt and implement a programme of action that more closely conforms to the needs and aspirations of the socialist and Labour cause at this critical juncture of its evolution in England. (Labour Review, Vol. I, No. 4).

Flowing from this whole analysis Healy abandoned the Transitional Programme of Trotsky. He put in its strategy centering on the election of a Labour government pledged to absolutely vacuous ‘socialist policies’ led by the "left".

Throughout this period there is not one word of warning the potential for treachery inherent in left-reformism, and manifested in 1957 with Bevan's reconciliation with Gaitskell and the right. Instead, all we get is: ‘Mr. Bevan and his associates should be given the chance to lead the Labour Party and its next cabinet so they can carry through as far and as fast as they can his experiment in dynamic parliamentarism." (Labour Review Vol. I, No.2) And the socialist policies demanded of such a government?

1. Complete reliance on the organised power of the working class.

2. No confidence in Britain's capitalists or America's imperialists.

3. Finish without delay the job of nationalising, democratizing and re-organising industry along socialist lines.

4. Put into effect a socialist and democratic foreign policy. This is the only road to workers' power and socialism in Great Britain.’(26)

According to Healy, such a left-reformist programme, which was to be implemented by a future Labour government, was, was ‘the only road to workers’ power and Socialism in Great Britain’.” (27)

These extracts from Healy’s writings demonstrate clearly that the famous opportunist theory of the CWI and IMT (Ted Grant, Peter Taaffee and Alan Woods) – that socialism can be introduced peacefully and via parliament – is not their invention. Healy discovered such “insights already” decades before (of course he himself took them over from the German revisionists Eduard Bernstein).

In addition Gerry Healy explained in the same article – called “The Way to Socialism in Britain” (Labour Review Vol. I, No. 2, May-August 1952) – how imperialist democracy can become more democratic.

Parliament should be re-elected by statute more often than every five years…

This conservatorised section (!) of the government machinery, full of prejudices against Labour (!), will surely have to be renovated (!) from top to bottom and subjected to constant check and control by the working class before it can be considered halfway democratic.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this brief survey of British democracy as it actually exists. First, the democracy retains some (!) extremely antiquated features and undemocratic institutions. Second, even in a purely political sphere it is very remote from perfection. (!) Many more moves will have to be taken to purify its nature (!) and a wide gulf will have to be crossed before this restricted democracy, in which the capitalists and imperialists exercise their dictatorship behind the scenes, cedes before a genuine democracy of the working class. (28)

This is nothing but a repetition of Kautsky’s schema that bourgeois democracy can be democratized and that the capitalist institutions can be “renovated” through pressure from the working class. Healy’s left-reformist propaganda is the complete opposite from the Marxist position on the nature of bourgeois democracy and the need for the working class to smash the whole capitalist state machinery via a – necessarily violent – socialist revolution and replace it with Soviet organs of working class power (workers control, councils, militias, etc.). Healy nowhere explained in his publications that the working class must build its independent organs of struggle in order to overthrow the bourgeois state. Such an open revolutionary propaganda would have endangered his political bloc with the left-reformist camp of Bevan supporters.

Healy’s close and uncritical collaboration with Bevan and his supporters was also an adaption to social-imperialism. Let us not forget that Bevan as Minister of Labour was finally co-responsible for the imprisonment of 10 gas workers for striking in 1950, and charging 7 dockers with organizing an illegal strike in 1951. He was also co-responsible for Britain’s attempts to hold as much as possible of the Empire’s global influence, for the creation of the Zionist state Israel which led to the expulsion of the Palestinian people, for the reactionary partition of India which left about one million dead and turned about 15 million people more into refugees, and the British colonial war against the Malayan Communist guerrillas after 1948. In fact, Healy and his “Club” practised a strategic alliance with supporters of the British imperialist government until Labour lost the elections in 1951.

Bevan and his supporters in the Labour bureaucracy of course were in no way “centrists,” but left-reformist bureaucrats who were determined to save capitalism through some social reforms. This, they sought, would also be the best weapon to defend capitalism against the “communist threat” from the Soviet Union and the working class. As such, Bevan advised his minister “colleagues” in 1950 – when Healy was constantly praising him – the following approach in order to “defend Britain against Russian imperialism”:

Our foreign policy had hitherto been based on the view that the best method of defence against Russian imperialism was to improve the social and economic conditions of the countries now threatened by Communist encroachment. The United States government seemed now to be abandoning this social and political defence in favour of a military defence.(29)

In his opportunism, Healy even went so far to advocate socialism as a tool to regain Britain’s status as a world hegemonic Great Power! In Labour Review, Vol. I, No. 3 (August/September 1952) he wrote: Great Britain can never regain its position of world leadership under capitalist auspices.... Britain, however, can rise to a newer and higher level of world leadership, provided the Labour movement resolutely carries its struggle for Socialism to victory here in the coming period.” (30)

Healy repeatedly capitulated to Bevan and the Labour Left. He praised this imperialist minister constantly in his “Socialist Outlook” – despite that fact that the very same Bevan would denounce Nasser in 1956 for the nationalization of the Suez Canal as Hitler,” “Mussolini,” andAlibaba and his Forty Thieves. (31) And the very same “centrist” (as Healy wrongly characterized him) Bevan who would soon support nuclear armament of Britain with the argument that otherwise a British Foreign Secretary would go “naked into the conference chamber” for the sake of “an emotional spasm” and make it impossible for Britain “to exercise influence on the policies of the superpowers”. (32)

Healy presented the imperialist minister as a “socialist”. After Labour lost the elections in 1951, Healy stated that if Bevan would take over the party’s leadership he could guarantee "the return of a new and more socialist Labour Government" (Socialist Outlook, No.41, 1952). Later that year, the paper ran the headline: "Bevan Gives the Lead that Workers' Want.” The Editorial below stated: "The first two days' proceedings at Morecambe have shown that the LP is turning resolutely to the socialist road the delegates came to Morecambe looking for a clear alternative to the old politics. Aneurin Bevan gave them such a lead in his speech of the first day." (Socialist Outlook, No. 51, 3.10.1952). A few weeks later Healy’s paper proclaimed: "Aneurin Bevan Demands a Real Socialist Policy." (Socialist Outlook, No. 56, 28.11.1952) (33)

In his study, former WRP member Bob Pitt reports about another opportunist propaganda of Healy’s paper: “In September 1953, at the very time that he was flaying the ‘capitulatory’ politics of the Pabloites, Healy was telling Socialist Outlook readers that the forthcoming Labour Party conference presented an opportunity to deliver ‘the knock-out blow’ to the bureaucracy. And how was this to be achieved? ‘It is to be hoped’, Healy wrote, ‘that the Bevanites on the platform will join forces with the rank and file on the floor and thus guide the conference in a real Socialist direction.’ This approach – which has been summarised as ‘hope the Lefts fight’! – offered not the slightest warning as to the real willingness of the leaders of the Labour left to take on and defeat the right wing. (34)

When the paper was banned by the right-wing Labour Party leadership in 1954, Healy deepened his liquidationist policy. He switched his group into the left-reformist milieu around the paper Labour Left paper Tribune and sold their paper until 1957. In short, Healy’s entryism sui generis was built on a permanent bloc with left-reformists. To achieve this he was prepared to drop Trotskyism and to adapt politically to social democracy and – to a certain degree – to Stalinism too which was popular amongst sectors of left-reformist labour.

So to summarize. Healy and his group allied themselves with the left-wing of the Labour bureaucracy for about 11 years. He did so even in the period when the Labour Party and the leaders of this so-called “left wing” served in the imperialist government overseeing the oppression of radical workers on strike as well as the expulsion of the Palestinian people via the creation of the settler state Israel or the repression of the communist guerrillas in Malaysia. This was not a purely practical bloc – i.e., joint practical actions in the class struggle or in defence against the right-wing majority of the Labour bureaucracy which of course can be justified for revolutionaries. No, Healy formed a strategic political bloc which was based on a joint propaganda. He refrained from any serious criticism of the Labour left ministers and trade union bureaucrats. He spread the illusion that socialism can be introduced thorough a Labour majority in parliament. He was worse than the later arch-opportunist CWI of Ted Grant, Peter Taaffee, and Alan Woods since the latter, while also adapting to the Labour Left, at least published an independent paper which openly stated their version of “Trotskyism.”

Healy’s struggle against Pablo was in no way a political struggle against opportunism. It was a result of an apolitical organizational struggle caused by the fact that Pablo started to favor John Lawrence in 1953 instead of Healy, who until then was Pablo’s man in Britain. Similarly, by the way, James P. Cannon only started to oppose Pablo, when the latter organized Cochrane-Clarke faction in the SWP. In opposite to the SF/LCFI claims, the International Committee split in 1953 was neither ”a principled defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism“ nor did it represent “a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

It is a shame that the LCFI comrades uncritically support Healy’s political bloc with the left-reformists: “A paper called the Socialist Outlook was published and printed with support from trade union leaders and Bevanities including Jack Stanley, Frank Allaun, Bessie Braddock and others. These were left reformists and supporters of Aneurin Bevan and an organisation was set up called the Socialist Fellowship. It was necessary at this time to work with these left reformists and centrists by the small band of Trotskyists; it would bring them closer to section of militant workers who were moving leftwards.

This shows that the SF/LCFI still shares the opportunist method of the Healy version of “Trotskyist” centrism. Such a continuity of the non-revolutionary Healy tradition helps us to understand why SF/LCFI takes today the side of the counterrevolution of the Gaddafi dictatorship against the democratic revolution in Libya 2011, and of the Assad regime in Syria since March 2011.

 

Healy and Pablo: The Same Liquidationism

 

As stated above, the Fourth International leadership under Michel Pablo and Gerry Healy developed the opportunist concept of “entryism sui generis.” It called for a long-term entry into reformist parties and demanded from the Trotskyist militants – in order to remain as long as possible inside theses parties – to opportunistically hide the revolutionary Trotskyist program.

Pablo openly admitted that his version of entryism was very different from the Fourth International in Trotsky’s time.

Before the war, more precisely between 1934 and 1938, after Hitler’s victory and the threat which fascism exercised over bourgeois democracy and the workers’ movement, the Social Democracy included, Trotsky conceived the tactic of entry into the Socialist parties which were obliged to struggle. But this tactic had a rather ephemeral character, of short duration, with limited objectives. What was involved was to enter into these parties, to profit from their temporary left turn, to recruit members or to court certain leftist currents which were developing there and to get out. It was not a question of facing the tasks of war and revolution by remaining inside these parties. The entire conception of carrying out the entry work and work inside these parties was determined by this perspective. Today it is not exactly the same kind of entrism which concerns us. We are not entering these parties in order to come out of them soon. We are entering them to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of objective revolutionary processes in their respective countries.” (35)

Trotsky had a very different understanding of the entry tactic. He wrote in 1934 when he tried to convince his comrades to enter the French social democratic party that such a manoeuvre is possible and necessary because the radicalization of the rank and file members of this party permits an entry while keeping raising openly the revolutionary banner.

Its (the Socialist Party’s, MP) internal situation permits the possibility of our entering it with our own banner. The environment suits the aims we have set for ourselves. What is necessary now is to act in such a manner that our declaration will not in any way strengthen the leading bourgeois wing but rather will support the progressive proletarian wing; that its text and distribution will allow us to hold our heads high in case of acceptance as well as in case of dilatory manoeuvres or rejection. There is no question of dissolving ourselves. We enter as the Bolshevik-Leninist faction, our organisational ties remain the same, our press continues to exist just as do “Bataille Socialiste” and others. (36)

But, at the same time, he made clear that entryism must not have a long-term perspective exactly because the conjuncture in which such a manoeuvre is possible cannot last long and finally the bureaucracy will either expel the revolutionaries or force them to drop their open propaganda.

Entry into a reformist centrist party in itself does not include a long term perspective. It is only a stage which, under certain conditions, can be limited to an episode. (…) To recognise in time the bureaucracy’s decisive attack against the left wing and defend ourselves from it, not by making concessions, adapting or playing hide and seek, but by a revolutionary offensive. (37)

As we showed above with numerous quotes, Healycompletely shared Pablo’s “entryism sui generis” concept that Trotskyists should look for a deep and strategic entry into the reformist parties. His Socialist Outlook propagated unconditional loyalty to the Labour Party and urged socialists to be “first and foremost members of the Labour Party.” It criticised, for example, in January 1950 the left-reformist Independent Labour Party (ILP) that it left Labour in 1932: “The ILP made the great mistake of leaving the Labour Party in 1932. If we are to succeed where the ILP failed we must remember we are first and foremost members of the Labour Party, desirous of serving it. (38)

It is not surprising that Pablo praised Healy’s “entryism sui generis” as a model only in the year before the split. “The decision to enter the Labor Party and the conception of the work to be done there was the first experience of the International and by far the most important in the domain of entrist work in general. It has been developing since then in a manner considerably different, I would say, almost qualitatively different, from ‘entrism’ as it was practiced by our movement in the years 1934-38.” (39)

In fact Healy was more liquidationist and opportunist than Pablo. Let us not forget that Pablo and his supporters – even in the years when his Fourth International was entertaining their entryism sui generis” – kept an independent organ (Quatrième Internationale / Fourth International) which openly stated their version of “Trotskyism”. Pablo urged Healy to publish also such an organ but for Healy even this was too much! Bob Pitt correctly remarks:

Indeed, for all Healy’s later fulminations against ‘Pabloite liquidationism’, if he had any difference with Pablo in this period it was that Healy favoured a more thoroughly liquidationist course within the Labour Party. After all, the FI leadership did take the view that, in addition to Socialist Outlook, the British section should publish ‘a theoretical organ, openly defending revolutionary Marxism’ – only to have their repeated requests to this effect ignored by Healy. Indeed, Pablo himself would subsequently criticise Healy’s adaptation to Bevanism as an ‘opportunist application’ of the entry tactic!” (40)

Healy “Pabloite” opportunism is so obvious that – in an internal document years later in 1964 – he could not avoid hinting at this (for which of course he blamed Pablo). During one of his subsequent political zigzags, Healy gave a revealing account of his tendency’s perspectives during this earlier entrist period. ‘Our politics’, he told the Socialist Labour League summer camp in 1964, ‘was determined by a conception that it was our task to encourage a centrist movement who we were to provide with a leadership. This left the question open how we were then to lead it.... And it was from this that the Pabloite orientation took place. Pabloism began in England. We had not understood then the nature of Trotsky’s theories of entry’.” (41)

We finish this chapter by remarking the meanwhile undisputed fact that Healy later continued to develop gross opportunist relationships with leading left-wing bureaucrats of the Labour Party like Ken Livingston and Ted Knight. This is also accepted by Gerry Downing, the central leader of the SF/LCFI. (42) It is however wrong to suggest, as the SF/LCFI does, that there has been a “golden past” of Gerry Healy. As we have shown he was already an arch-opportunist back in the late 1940s and 1950s.

To summarize, Healy applied a liquidationist policy independently of Pablo. He started to do so years before the split and continued for years after the split. His struggle against Pablo was in no way a “defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism“ nor did it represent “a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

 

Healy’s Alleged Struggle against Pablo’s Capitulation to Stalinism

 

As is known, Healy would later sharply denounce Pablo’s capitulation to Stalinism. But in the years of the split, Healy himself capitulated to Stalinism no less than Pablo. First let us recall that Healy, as well as Cannon’s SWP, Lambert’s PCI, and Moreno’s group fully supported Pablo’s capitulation to Tito in 1948. When Pablo published his call to Tito “to form together a Leninist International,” none of these so-called “orthodox Trotskyists” raised a word of criticism. Neither did they later, even after the spilt, raise a word of self-criticism for their capitulation to Tito.

It is remarkable that when Pablo raised some mild criticism on Tito, one of Healy’s closest collaborators, Mike Banda, was the first “who denounced Pablo for criticizing the Yugoslavs as undermining their relationship with their Yugoslav comrades”. (43)

As we have already mentioned above, Healy himself was closely collaborating with pro-Stalinist bureaucrats in the Labour Party. In the following we reprint a splendid summary of Healy’s opportunist adaption towards Stalinism by the former WRP member Bob Pitt:

From then on Healy uttered not a word against Tito, the butcher of the Belgrade Trotskyists, while a letter from Millie Lee criticising the Yugoslav Communist Party was refused publication in Socialist Outlook.

In 1950, Healy organised a youth brigade to visit Yugoslavia which came back spouting eulogies to the YCP’s success in building socialism in one country, dismissing as ‘groundless’ allegations that political repression existed under the Stalinist regime there. Alas for Healy, the brigade’s return coincided with the Yugoslav government’s declaration of support for the United Nations in the Korean War, a development which left Healy and his supporters floundering. Mike Banda described Yugoslav Foreign Minister Kardelj’s speech to the UN as ‘regrettable’ and appealed to this Stalinist bureaucrat to observe ‘the moral principles of Truth and Justice’! Even in the Club’s internal bulletin, Healy could do no more than criticise the Yugoslav decision as ‘opportunist’ – and in any case subordinate to ‘progressive developments’ in a YCP which had ‘broken with Stalinism’ and was ‘returning in many respects to Bolshevik practice’.

As part of his strategy to build the left wing in the Labour Party, Healy had cultivated figures like Jack Stanley of the Constructional Engineering Union, Jim Figgins of the NUR and the MPs Tom Braddock and S.O. Davies. These were essentially Communist Party sympathisers who were drawn to the Socialist Fellowship because they rejected the ‘cold war socialism’ of the Labour left around Tribune, and Healy maintained his relationship with them by making unprincipled concessions to their views in Socialist Outlook. (…) So although Healy correctly defended the North in the Korean War, he remained silent on the Stalinist character of the regime, while the Chinese Communist Party received uncritical acclaim in Socialist Outlook. Even the Soviet bureaucracy was treated tenderly, Stalin’s support for anti-imperialist movements being described editorially as ‘neither as consistent nor as socialist as we would like it to be’! It was only after this scandalous position had opened Healy to attack inside the Trotskyist movement that factional considerations forced him to take a clear stand against Soviet Stalinism. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the opportunist set-up which Healy had stitched together in the Labour Party came apart at the seams, when Smith, Brockway and Bessie Braddock walked out of the Socialist Fellowship in protest at its condemnation of the United Nations.” (44)

Healy’s capitulation to Stalinism did not only take place before the split with Pablo in 1953 but later as well. As Bob Pitt reports: “In early 1967, Mike Banda’s admiration for Maoism was allowed full rein in the ‘Newsletter’, which devoted several articles to enthusiastically supporting the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards. A year later, in an editorial in the theoretical journal Fourth International, Banda delivered a eulogy to the guerrilla warfare strategy of Mao and Ho Chi-Minh. After protests by the Lambert group, a correction was pasted into the next issue of the journal, making the excuse that the article should have appeared under Banda’s byline and was not an editorial at all. But Healy failed to distance himself or his organisation from Banda’s views, or take up a struggle against them.

To summarize, Healy’s struggle against Pablo was in no way a political struggle against the Fourth International’s capitulation towards Stalinism. Healy himself repeatedly capitulated to Stalinism, both before and after the split with Pablo. This is just another example that Healy’s and the International Committee’s struggle against Pablo was neither a “defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism“ nor did it represent “a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

 

Healy and the IC: Adaption to Bourgeois and Petty-Bourgeois Nationalism

 

As we have shown, Healy’s centrist policy involved a systematic opportunistic adaption to social democratic and Stalinist bureaucrats. He – and the whole “International Committee” with Cannon, Lambert, and Moreno – also continued this method with regard to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists in the colonial and semi-colonial world.

 

Algeria

 

In the 1950s and 1960s Pablo and the ”International Secretariat” supported (uncritically) the radical petty-bourgeois nationalists of the Algerian FLN who were waging an armed insurrection for the country’s independence since 1954. Marxists, of course, had to unconditionally support this anti-imperialist struggle without lending any political support to the petty-bourgeois nationalists of the FLN. Pablo and the ”International Secretariat” were involved in various forms of solidarity work which included material support for the nationalist liberation fighters (like counterfeiting money and smuggling guns). Pablo himself was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment for these activities in 1961. After the victory of the Algerian independence struggle, Pablo even became a minister in the FLN government. While Bolshevik-Communists denounce the political opportunism of Pablo and the ”International Secretariat” towards the FLN, we also appreciate their solidarity campaign for the Algerian liberation struggle.

There is no doubt that their practical work was more valuable than the position of the centrist ”International Committee” of Healy, Lambert, and Cannon. These “orthodox Trotskyists” sharply denounced “the Pabloite revisionists” for their support of the FLN. But they didn’t organize any practical solidarity campaign for the Algerian liberation struggle of comparable size like the Pabloites, which is particularly shameful given that one of their three main sections was located in France (the colonial power ruling Algeria) and the other two were located in the two other imperialist great Powers at that time (the USA and Britain).

However, not only did they not support the liberation struggle as it concretely took place, they even made a worse opportunist capitulation than that made by Pablo and Mandel. They uncritically hailed the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA) of Messali Hadj. This petty-bourgeois nationalist formation was much less active in the liberation struggle and soon started collaboration with French imperialism. In 1958, Messali supported the proposals of President Charles de Gaulle which were an attempt of French imperialism to stop the liberation struggle. The MNA became a pawn in the hands of the French government against the FLN and the national struggle and finally ended up in a block with the fascist OAS.

A bourgeois US journalist splendidly characterized at that time the difference between the FLN and the MNA which he compared the Tito partisans to the Chetnik collaborators in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. As he wrote in June 1957: “The F.L.N., which perpetrated the Melouza massacre, is stronger than the rival M.N.A. Furthermore, it is more extremist in its demands vis-a-vis the French. In terms of what became familiar in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1944, the F.L.N. somewhat resembles Tito's Partisans except that it isn't Communist led. The M.N.A. is more similar to Mikhailovitch's Chetniks. Its military organization is weaker than the F.L.N.'s. And its political demands are relatively milder.” (45)

Unimpressed by the nature of the FLN and the MNA, the fake anti-imperialists of the ”International Committee” gave full support to Hadj’s MNA and denounced the much more anti-imperialist FLN. Lambert’s paper La Verite offered to defend "the genuine Algerian revolutionaries against FLN killers." (46)

The ”International Committee,” with Gerry Healy as its secretary, adopted a resolution at a meeting in November 1955 which expressed its unconditional political solidarity with Messali Hadj without a single word of criticism and praised him: “In the person of Messali Hadj, the oppressed and exploited of the world possess a living symbol of this struggle.” (See the footnote below for the full resolution of this meeting.) (47)

The ”International Committee” went even further. In its paper La Vérité in October 1956, the Lambertists called Messali Hadj incredibly “the Algerian Lenin”! Two years later this strange version of “Lenin” would support de Gaulle and his bonapartist coup d’état! (48)

In November 1955, Healy published in the Labour Left paper Tribune an account of his visit to Messali Hadj. In it he paid tribute to “the amazingly confident personality” of Messali Hadj and to his ability to create “an atmosphere which is unique for its calm, impressive feeling.” He also conveyed to him a message of political solidarity for the MNA from the “International Committee,” in line with the resolution mentioned above. (49)

Let us finally mention that the opportunist capitulation of the ”International Committee” to the pro-imperialist traitor Messali Hadj was so obvious that ten years later, one of its leaders had to admit semi-self-critically in its theoretical journal, in a longer article about the Algerian experience: “In other words, we can say that the error made was of a ‘Pabloite’ nature or, to be more precise; that its origins lie in the series of imprecisions and confusions on which the Trotsykist movement lived after the Second World War and which facilitated the development of the revisionist tendency and its first victories.” (50)

Unfortunately the author does not go further and recognize that the fundamental problem of the Fourth International after the World War II was not “Pabloism” as a specific phenomena but centrism, of which Pablo’s politics was one version while Cannon’s, Healy’s, Lambert’s, and Moreno’s were another.

 

Sri Lanka

 

This cross-class collaborationism was not limited to the Algerian liberation struggle. Healy and the ”International Committee” kept friendly relations with the Fourth International’s section in Sri Lanka – the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). They did not raise any criticism of the LSSP’s centrist and finally left-reformist degeneration which was expressed by the cowardly retreat of the party’s leadership during the mass insurrection in August 1953 (the Great Hartal), its “responsive co-operation” with the bourgeois SLFP when it was in power in 1956 or its "critical support" for the SLFP government. As is know, this Menshevism finally resulted in the LSSP joining the popular front government, led by the SLFP’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1964. (51)

Healy and the ”International Committee” would later denounce the Pablo/Mandel-led Fourth International for this reformist capitulation of the LSSP (for which it was expelled, belatedly, by the now fused ”United Secretariat” led by Mandel). But it is a matter of fact that Healy, Cannon, and Lambert didn’t launch any serious opposition to the LSSP’s centrist and finally reformist degeneration – a process which already began in the early 1950s, if not earlier. They did not attack the Menshevik LSSP leadership, because they had no fundamental political differences with their opportunism.

This becomes also obvious from the politics which Healy and his supporters in Sir Lanka applied later. The Sri Lankese Trotskyist veteran Edmund Samarakkody reported in 1973:

Having kept aloof from the politics of the LSSP from the time of the 1953 split of the International, the leader of the so-called International Committee and of the SLL, Gerry Healy, parachuted himself into the Ceylon scene in June 1964. Having arrived in the same plane with Pierre Frank a day before the LSSP conference, Healy, who had a few followers in the LSSP opposition, sought to gate-crash into the conference hall of the LSSP. Of course, he was not permitted to enter.

What Healy’s politics were in relation to the issues at the conference was unknown. Nor did he seek to place his views before the LSSP membership through documentation prior to the conference. Instead, what he sought to do was to take the left opposition into the fold of the International Committee by disruption.

It was this same line of disruption that his followers – Prins Rajasooriya (now with Tampoe), Sydney Wanasinghe (now with the LSSP coalitionists), Wilfred Perera and R.S. Baghavan pursued. It was thus that the Healy group gave full co-operation to the Karlo coalitionists to fight the revolutionary tendency. In fact, a section of the Healy group actively participated in the organisation of the Karlo faction, "the Sakthi group," which in their factional paper publicly called for the support of a coalition government.

Nor were the Healyites strange bed-fellows with the Karlo coalitionists. While denouncing the Mandels and the Franks for the betrayal of the LSSP leaders, and while also denouncing the [Edmund] Samarakkody-Meryl Fernando group for advocating united-front action to include the coalition trade unions against the victimisation by the UNP government, the local Healyite "theoretician" Wilfred Perera was in fact pursuing coalition politics.

Here is a sample of Wilfred Perera’s theory which he put out in 1967 during the UNP regime.

"We should propose to the rank and file of the left parties [referring to LSSP and CP] and of the trade-unions under their control to bring pressure on the Left party leaders to demand

1. a revision of the Joint Program [coalition program] so as to include working-class demands and socialist measures [!], and that the demands should be formulated by a united front of the trade-unions. And we should make our own proposal regarding the demands;

2. a more equitable apportionment of the parliamentary seats for the next election, say on a 50-50 basis as between the SLFP and the left parties.

‘The first demand will show how far Mrs. Bandaranaike is prepared to go towards socialism, and at the same time expose the impotence of the left fakers to push her leftwards. The second will show how sincere Mrs. Bandaranaike is when she says she needs the co-operation of the working-class to defeat the UNP-led coalition.’

Advocating coalition politics could not be more explicit than this!

From the outset however, the policies and practice of this league were at variance and in conflict with the program of Trotskyism. Whilst their reputed leader Healy, of the so-called International Committee, continues to rightly castigate the Mandels and the Pierre Franks for their responsibility for the LSSP debacle, the RSL (the Ceylon Unit of this Healyite IC) called for and supported the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition in the elections of May 1970, the outcome of which was the present SLFP-led coalition government.

The Healyites were thus consistent with their policy within the LSSP(R), when they compacted with the Karalasingham-led coalitionists, who in their factional paper "Sakthi" called for support of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. However, the RSL suddenly somersaulted. About two months after the coalition government was formed (May 1970), when sections of the masses that supported these parties were expressing their disappointment at the policies of the government, the Healy group announced that they had made a mistake when they supported the coalition at the elections.” (52)

It is worth mentioning that Healy’s supporters in Sri Lanka not only crossed the class-line when it supported the popular front coalition of SLFP, LSSP, and CP. It also meant giving electoral support to the same bourgeois government which less than a year later would slaughter several thousands youth involved in the insurrection of the Guevarist Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna (JVP) led by Rohana Wijeweera.

 

Latin America

 

After the split of the International in 1953, both the ”International Secretariat” as well as the ”International Committee” kept supporters in Latin America. While the Pablo-supporters in Latin America were led by Posada, the Cannon/Healy/Lambert supporters were led by Nahueal Moreno. They formed the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism (SLATO) in 1957 to act as the continental bureau of the ”International Committee.”

However both, the pro-IS as well as the pro-IC group, continued the centrist method of the Fourth International. Argentina is another example which proves what we stated already above: “The IC criticised Pablo for putting forward deep entryism into the Stalinist movement. However the sections of the IC would practise a much deeper entryism in the very heart of the social democratic and bourgeois nationalist movements, none more so than the Argentinean IC section under Moreno.” (53)

As is known, General Juan Peron ruled Argentina between 1946 and 1955, when he was overthrown by a military coup. Despite the bourgeois class nature of his party, he was capable via the combination of anti-imperialist rhetoric, social reforms, and the oppression of rival working class organizations to build an organized base in the working class. This was enough reason for the centrist degenerated Fourth International to apply the opportunist method not only on Tito, various other Stalinists, and the British Labour Party, but also to the bourgeois Peronist party in Argentina.

However, while the pro-Pablo group, led by Posadas, at least maintained an independent party, the pro-IC Moreno group (called Revolutionary Workers Party, POR) was much more right-wing than the “Pabloites.” Moreno’s POR liquidated itself into Peronism. In 1954 the POR dissolved itself to join the newly formed Socialist Party of National Revolution (PSRN), which was a pro-Peronist party. Moreno gained control of the PSRN paper La Verdad (The Truth). After the overthrow of Peron in 1955, which drove the Peronist forces underground and Peron himself into exile, Moreno’s group continued to work with the Peronists. They published jointly a paper called Palabra Obrero which declared itself an “organ of revolutionary workers’ Peronism” produced “under the discipline of General Peron and the Peronist Supreme Council.” The paper was linked to a group of “left” Peronist trade union leaders called the “62 organisations” which acted as the transmission belt for maintaining the hold of Peronism over the Argentinian trade unions.

This paper was full of praise for General Peron, but lacked references to Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky. Moreno’s paper called itself Workers’ Peronism of the hard line” and promised that it “carries to its ultimate conclusion the economic programme begun by General Peron (which, of course, was thoroughly pro-capitalist, MP).” It fully subscribed the idea that the working class should rally behind the bourgeois leader General Peron: “Analysis of our progress shows that we do not pick fights with anyone; in order to maintain the unity of Peronism we propose to the best activists (…) that they join Palabra Obrero to give the Peronist movement the direction that the working class deserves, along with General Peron.

The class-collaborationist policy of Morenoism of subordinating working class interests to a faction of the bourgeoisie went even further. In the February 1958 elections, Peron was not permitted to stand. He therefore formed an alliance with other bourgeois, pro-imperialist forces – amongst them the prominent businessman Rogelio Frigerio. After the oldest party of the Argentine bourgeoisie, the liberal Unión Cívica Radical (UCR), had split in 1956, Peron formed with the help of Frigerio an alliance with the candidate of one of the two UCR wings, Arturo Frondizi. Despite the General’s appeal to his supporters to vote for Frondizi, many Peronist workers were disgusted by this alliance and refused to follow his instructions. Hundred of thousands of workers abstained in this presidential election.

Marxists are prepared to form united fronts and practical blocs for actions in order to defend democratic rights, to oppose imperialist attacks, etc. However we consider it as a break of fundamental principles to give electoral support for candidates of the bourgeoisie at elections (as for example the centrist Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt – sister organization of the Cliffite SWP(UK) and ISO(US) – did recently when they called in 2012 to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi).

Not so the Latin American representative of the “orthodox Trotskyist” International Committee: Moreno refused to call for independent workers candidates and thereby to use the election campaign to fight for the independence of the working class from the different factions of the bourgeoisie. The Pabloite section by the way stood candidates in three districts in the province of Buenos Aires under the name of a “Workers’ Party” and got 15,424 votes. Moreno however was much more opportunist than the Pablo group and stressed the importance of discipline and loyalty … with General Peron! Hence he called for a vote for Peron’s choice for the candidate of the bourgeoisie, Frondizi. He justified this with the remarkable explanation:

On deciding to call for a vote for Frondizi, Palabra Obrera, despite considering it extremely dangerous that splits could appear in the masses when everyone is ‘carried away’ with the blank vote, accedes in a disciplined way, not because it considers it better than a blank vote, but in order to safeguard the unity of Peronism and only for that.

The same opportunist and liquidationist line was applied in other countries by the Moreno/IC supporters. In Peru for example the group allied to Moreno participated in 1956 in the creation of the bourgeois party Accíon Popular led by Fernando Belaúnde. It liquidated itself into this party and published, within the party, a periodical. (The Pablo supporters did the same with the stronger bourgeois party APRA which also had more support in the working class.) The peasant uprising led by Hugo Blanco which we mentioned above was crushed under the presidency of this bourgeois figure Belaúnde.

Later Moreno would change the subjects of his centrist opportunism. When this Latin American leader of the “orthodox Trotskyist” International Committee saw the opportunity to form a political alliance with Castro supporters he was prepared to openly refute the theory of permanent revolution. Hence he declared in 1961:

Of course, life has brought out the gaps, omissions and errors of the programme of permanent revolution . . . The dogma that only the working class can accomplish the democratic tasks is false. Sectors of the urban middle class and peasantry are, on occasion, the revolutionary leadership. (…) History has rejected the theory that the proletariat, in the backward countries, is the revolutionary leadership. (…) Mao Tse Tungism, or the theory of guerrilla war, is the particular reflection in the field of theory of the present stage of world revolution.” (54)

Finally we shall remark that neither the ”International Secretariat” of Pablo and Mandel nor the ”International Committee” of Cannon, Healy, Moreno, and Lambert made a serious analysis or drew up any balance sheet of the betrayal of the POR – the Bolivian section of the Fourth International – during the Revolution in 1952. At that time the POR had mass influence, but instead of fighting for the formation of workers and peasant soviets and militias and a government based on them, they called for a government led by the bourgeois-nationalist MNR in which working class representatives should participate. (55)

So when we examine all these cases in Argentina, Peru or Bolivia, we can state that all this makes the right-wing centrist Comintern in the period of the Stalin-Bukharin leadership in the mid-1920s, when it praised the English trade union leaders and China’s Chiang Kai-shek, look like ultra-left sectarians!

In short, we see again how wrong the SF/LCFI comrades are when they claim that Healy’s and the “International Committee’s” struggle against Pablo was a “defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism“ and that did it represents “a definite continuity of Trotskyism.” It was neither of the two.

We can also observe that the political capitulation to bourgeois-nationalist forces in the name of “anti-imperialism” has a long tradition in Healyism. They supported the MNA of Hadj against the more radical petty-bourgeois nationalist FLN which also led the national liberation struggle supported by the popular masses. Later in the 1970s and 1980s they praised Gaddafi and distributed his “Green Book” and also hailed Saddam Hussein and Khomeini for which they are said – according to an internal investigation – to have received over one million Pounds. They failed to attack these reactionary dictators when they brutally oppressed militant workers, Kurdish liberation movements, and left-wing organizations. And, unfortunately, the SF/LCFI today continues such reactionary support for bourgeois regimes against revolutionary-democratic struggles of the workers and peasants. In 2011 they supported the reactionary bourgeois dictatorship of Gaddafi against the democratic popular revolution, and today they side with the equally reactionary Assad regime against the Syrian Revolution. Surely, they add. They don’t support Gaddafi and the Assad regimes only in their military repression but not in their politics. But in the face of an actual counter-revolution, it doesn’t matter how critical you support the counter-revolution! Their erroneous support for the centrist tradition of Gerry Healy in the 1950s and 1960s is an awful legacy which forms the theoretical background for their choice of the wrong side of the barricades in the Libyan and Syrian Revolution.

 

III.          Conclusions and Perspectives

 

So let us summarize the conclusion of our analysis and formulate its consequences. As we will show below, the issue of the revolutionary Fifth Workers International is related to the assessment of the political development of the Fourth International and its splitters since 1948-52.

 

The “revolutionary continuity” of Trotskyism by Healy and the ‘International Committee’ is a myth.

 

The tradition of Healy, Cannon, Lambert, and Moreno is not a revolutionary one. They supported Pablo and Mandel after the World War II in the main issues that marked the collapse of the Fourth International from a revolutionary into a centrist formation. (the decisions of the Second and Third World Congress in 1948 and 1951 concerning Titoism and Stalinism, the capitulation in Bolivia 1952, the liquidationist opportunism towards the British Labour Party, etc.). When they broke with Pablo/Mandel in November 1953 they raised correct partial criticism (concerning their liquidationist opportunism towards the Stalinist parties). But at the same time, as we have shown, they propagated and implemented liquidationist opportunism towards social democracy and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist forces. The IC opportunism was qualitatively not superior to Pablo’s and Mandel’s version. Both represented trends of centrism. Neither reconstituted the revolutionary tradition of the Fourth International in Trotsky’s time and which was kept – with vacillations – by his successors after his death until the first years after the end of World War II.

As we have analyzed in our book, which the SF/LCFI comrades wrongly reject, the leadership of the Fourth International was, by then, disorientated by new and unexpected political developments – in particular the counter-revolutionary defeats which ended the revolutionary phase 1943-47, the strengthening and expansion of Stalinism, the consolidation of capitalism, and the failure of the Fourth International to overcome its isolation from the masses (with a few exceptions like Bolivia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam). They were faced with a new situation and failed to apply the method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program to the new phenomena and to adapt their perspectives to the changed circumstances. As a result, they distorted the revolutionary program in order to adapt to non-revolutionary forces – Stalinism, Social Democracy, and Petty-Bourgeois and Bourgeois Nationalism - which were stronger than the Fourth International.

We are fully aware that the possibilities for revolutionary work were very difficult for the Trotskyists under such circumstances. But their centrist failure was not that they remained numerically weak. Neither was their centrist failure that they made mistakes. Only those who don’t do anything make no mistakes. Their centrist failure was that they became uncritical or even hailed Stalinist, left social democratic, and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist forces. Their centrist failure was that they spread illusions amongst vanguard workers (and their own members) in the revolutionary potential of Tito, Mao-Tsetung, Aneurin Bevan, Messali Hadj,General Peron, etc instead of warning of their inevitable betrayal of the workers. Their centrist failure was that they failed to understand and to teach the workers’ vanguard that only a revolutionary party fighting under the Trotskyist banner can lead the proletariat to victory. Their centrist failure was that, instead, they mis-educated the workers vanguard that an objective revolutionary process would push the Titos, the Maos, the Bevans, and the Perons to provide the workers and oppressed authentic leadership towards the revolutionary toppling of the capitalist system. No Stalinist agent forced them into these centrist failures! These failure were their own volition and responsibility! And it is these failures which marked the centrist degeneration of the Fourth International and all of its leaders in the years 1948-52.

When we say that Healy and the ”International Committee” were centrist from the beginning, does this mean that we consider everything they ever did and said as useless crap? No, certainly not! For example, Healy and the ”International Committee” played an important role in winning-over 200 or so members from the Communist Party to Trotskyism in 1956/57. They also spread Trotskyist ideas amongst many working class youth. Their publication house ”New Park” published numerous books of Marxist classics and about the history of the Bolsheviks. Their theoretical journal Labour Review and Fourth International contained various interesting and thought-provoking articles. They made the works of the materialist dialectician Evald Ilyenkov known in the English-speaking world. And yes, even if Healy’s writings on dialectical materialism had a strong idealist touch, at least he tried to spread the Marxist philosophy. One can hardly give similar compliments to the anglo-empiricists of the CWI or the Cliffite SWP tradition which was and is divided between adapting to reactionary structuralism à la Althusser (Alex Callinicos) and praising the idealist Georg Lukács (John Rees et al).

But, then, the fact is that this is similarly true for various other centrist currents. Mandel was an excellent Marxist economist (even if one does not support his “long wave” theory) and despite his Kautskyian revisionism he often wrote thought-provoking analyses. Or let us take the Marxist economist Andrew Kliman, who might erroneously support the centrist US group of the Marxist-Humanists, but who nevertheless provides highly useful writings on value, the transformation problem, and his analysis of the tendency of the profit rate to fall, which advance Marxist political economy.

We can go even further and state that there have been various Stalinist historians (e.g., Eric Hobsbawn), economists (e.g., Jürgen Kuczynski) or even a philosopher (Evald Ilyenkov) who produced valuable insights. This is even true for one or another bourgeois theoretician (e.g., Carr) or natural scientists.

All of these are insights which don’t make the persons we named above authentic Marxists. But their insights are valuable contributions which will become part of an ever-increasing – but never-ending – process of understanding Marxist truth which revolutionaries are fighting for.

However there is certainly nothing which distinguishes the tradition of Healy and the ‘International Committee’ as superior to other centrist currents coming from the Fourth International. They applied a centrist method which was in no way superior to the centrist method of Pablo and Mandel. They just had different objects of opportunist adaption. The different pressures from different non-proletarian forces pushed the various wings and sections of the already centrist Fourth International into different directions and made their leaders capitulate to different non-revolutionary trends. This is the background against which an organizational struggle developed in 1953 between Healy/Cannon/Lambert/Moreno on one hand and Pablo/Mandel on the other, which led to a split. But, this was not a split in which one side was politically superior to the other. They were two centrist forces which accused each other of revisionism. In other words, it was like two thieves accusing each other of stealing.

So the heart of the differences between the RCIT and the SF/LCFI on the issue of the post-WWII history of the Fourth International is the following: The SF/LCFI believes – as they wrote in their document: “Workers Power has characterised the split in 1953 as a centrist split and did not break with Pablo’s method. WP are wrong theoretically. In 1953 the opposition to Pablo did fight. (…) The 1953 split was a principled defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism and was therefore a definite continuity of Trotskyism.”

We in the RCIT state that the Fourth International degenerated in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it betrayed the method of the Transitional Program of Leon Trotsky by its capitulation to anti-proletarian class forces. Concretely, the leadership of the Fourth International and all its leaders of the future splits – Pablo, Mandel, Cannon, Lambert, Healy, Moreno, etc. – capitulated either to Stalinism (in particular Titoism and Maoism), Social Democracy (e.g., the Labour Party in Britain), or bourgeois nationalism (e.g. MNR in Bolivia 1952, Peron in Argentina or the SLFP in Sri Lanka).

 

“Principled Reunification of the Worldwide Trotskyist Movement” or Revolutionary Fifth Workers International?

 

These differences between the SF/LCFI and us are not only of historical interest. They also form the background for important differences on the revolutionary program today. The Healyite method of opportunist adaption to non-proletarian class forces have constituted the theoretical background for the SF/LCFI’s reactionary support for the bourgeois Gaddafi and the Assad regimes against the revolutionary-democratic struggle of the workers and peasants since the beginning of the Arab Revolution.

Furthermore, these differences of the historical question of revolutionary continuity form the background for our different perspectives. The SF/LCFI comrades orientate themselves towards a regrouping of the so-called “worldwide Trotskyist movement.” They don’t understand that, for many decades already, these forces have been centrist, or rather they consider them as a different, qualitatively superior version of centrism (as the ridiculous theory of the short-lived International Trotskyist Committee differentiated between two versions of centrism).

Therefore it is only logical when the SF/LCFI comrades conclude their document: “The 1953 split was a principled defence of Trotskyism against liquidation and revisionism and was therefore a definite continuity of Trotskyism. The task for Trotskyists is for a principled reunification of the worldwide Trotskyist movement and this is the role that the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International has set itself.”

We at the RCIT reject such an orientation. Naturally, we welcome it when an organization claiming to stand in the Trotskyist tradition develops into a revolutionary direction. In such a situation, we would be most inclined to advance a serious discussion and collaboration towards joining our forces.

But we are not naïve and we are certainly not blinded just because various so-called “Trotskyist organizations” praise Trotsky and the Transitional Program. No sensible person is blinded by an advertising slogan. The proof of authentic Trotskyism is the test of practice. And – as we have shown in our book The Death Agony of the Fourth International as well as numerous other documents – for more than half a century practice has shown that all of the major currents of Trotskyite centrism have failed the test of class struggle. They have failed this test first and foremost programmatically, by adapting to various reformist, petty-bourgeois or bourgeois forces.

This is why we say that the so-called ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” is politically rotten. In fact, it is in a death agony. For more than sixty years, all of these major currents of Trotskyite centrism have proven in practice that they are incapable of self-reform.

This bankruptcy of the centrist forces wrongly claiming the banner of Trotskyism has been proven time and again by the revolutionary events following 1968, by the historic events of 1989-91 and after, and finally by the period of imperialist wars since 2001 and, in particularly, by the new historic period that commenced in 2008. (56) It is in such historic tests that self-proclaimed “revolutionary organizations” are tested programmatically. Such tests – and not abstract proclamations on the ”Transitional Program” or the ”continuity of Trotskyism” – are what show revolutionaries if an organization is healthy or not. And the truth is that all the major organizations of the ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” have failed these tests and proven to be irreparably beyond self-reform. Our call for the Fifth International expresses that we completely reject any orientation towards and illusions about this centrist milieu.

In a recent document on the world situation we  wrote the following assessment, the understanding of which, in our opinion , is vital:

The accelerated crisis and class struggle in the new historic period also exposed the incapability of centrism to understand these developments, to elaborate a revolutionary program and to transmit this into the class struggle. Since centrism adapts itself to the labor bureaucracy, the latter’s decline also massively affects centrism and throws it into crisis. This explains the seemingly contradictory phenomena that the centrist organizations – despite their revolutionary rhetoric – could not grow in the new revolutionary period but rather went into stagnation, crisis and decline. (See for example the recent crisis of the British SWP/IST or of the French NPA).

As a result of all this we have seen in the last years a new shift to the right of centrism and left-reformism. Historically speaking we see the death agony of reformism and centrism. This does however not mean that reformism and centrism will simply dissolve. The bureaucratic apparatus has a certain strength which can keep its position for quite some time if it is not consciously attacked and replaced by the revolutionary workers vanguard. Furthermore new forces of left-reformism or centrism can emerge which appear to sectors of the masses as something new and authentic (like SYRIZA in Greece did in 2012). Only the formation of a revolutionary mass workers party can eliminate the plague of reformism and centrism.” (57)

This is why we say that the Fourth International is programmatically and organizationally dead. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ arrived at this conclusion in 1914 they called for the building of the Third International. So did Trotsky after the failure of the Stalinist centrist Comintern in 1933. And so do we, since history has shown so many times that the so-called ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” has degenerated into ossified centrism and cannot be reformed.

It is time to start organizing revolutionary workers and youth to build the revolutionary Fifth Workers’ International! The issue is not an abstract question of numbering. We in the RCIT don’t mind if the future revolutionary Workers’ International will be called the “Fourth” or the “Fifth,” or maybe unnumbered, like the ”International Workingmen's Association” at the time of Marx and Engels. What is important is first and foremost the program on which it will be based. As Bolshevik-Communists we will fight for a revolutionary program of the new International.

Secondly towards which social strata should the International orientate itself and upon them be built? The RCIT strongly rejects any orientation of building the new International towards the so-called ”worldwide Trotskyist movement.” We maintain that the slogan “rebuilding the Fourth International” either expresses an illusionary belief that any of the centrist fragments claiming to be Trotskyist in fact represents, in any way, a continuum of authentic Trotskyism, or that any of these fragments is somehow capable of self-reform.

Finally, for us, this slogan can also express the political distracting illusion that from out of the so-called ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” the new and healthy militant elements of the working class will emerge. We repeat that we don’t reject the possibility that this or that force from the so-called ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” may move towards an authentic revolutionary direction under the impact of deep class struggles. The central force to orientate to is not this rotten centrist milieu but rather the new, fresh elements of working class fighters who emerge in the wave of class struggles.

In our document on the world situation we have formulated the challenge for all authentic revolutionaries in the following way:

As a consequence the Bolshevik-Communists have no hope in any self-healing power of the milieu of left-reformism or centrism. We therefore reject an orientation towards this milieu which is so strongly affected by the complacent, passive and aristocratic prejudices and modes of thinking. The only possibility for a revolutionizing of the workers movement is the organization of new layers of the massively growing world proletariat. This means first and foremost the proletariat of the semi-colonial world and China as well as the lower strata of the proletariat in the old imperialist metropolises. Only these lower and middle layers of the working class – in other words the ‚mass type‘ and not the ‚aristocratic type’ of the workers – can provide the human material out of which new generations of revolutionary fighters can develop. The militant textile workers in Egypt's Mahalla, the revolutionary militias in Misrata (Libya) and Syria, the Asturias miners, the impoverished public sector workers in Greece, the militant youth in the streets of Athens, Barcelona and on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the migrant and poor workers revolting in Tottenham and Buenos Aires, the super-exploited workers in the Indian and Chinese factories etc. – these are the fighting layers which represent the face of the working class’ future. Therefore the Bolshevik-Communists orientate to those new, militant and growing layers of the working class instead of the old, agonizing sectors of the reformist or centrist left and their basis, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and the labor aristocracy. We are determined to fight for a revolutionary program amongst these layers in order to organize them on such a basis.

It is because of its orientation to the labor bureaucracy and the petty-bourgeoisie intelligentsia that the bulk of the centrist and left-reformist milieu is increasingly poisoned by pessimism, skepticism, moaning about the lack of “left unity”, hysterical renunciation of the “Leninist hyper-centralism” and the “vanguard party” concept as well as praising of liquidationism. Authentic revolutionaries however orientate towards the new, militant layers from the working class and the oppressed who are looking for a program and a strategy to fight against exploitation and oppression. This is where our optimism and firmness stems from. Those who wish to develop in a revolutionary direction must break from an orientation towards the centrist and left-reformist swamp and look for rooting themselves in the healthy, militant proletarian milieu.

This does not mean that revolutionaries should ignore the reformist parties or the centrist groups. The policy of the united front tactic remains in full force as well as the need for a hard struggle to remove these revisionists’ influence in the workers vanguard. But in the first line the RCIT orientates towards new militants and initiatives from the ranks of the workers and the oppressed. From these layers only, new promising forces and a new dynamic will come. And such developments might affect healthier elements from the ranks of left-reformism and centrism and help them to break with the revisionists’ rotten method.

Revolutionaries have to understand in depth that not only has capitalism entered a new historic period of massive instability and sharp turns, but the international workers movement has too. No stone is left unturned. Those forces, who don’t understand the character of the period and its corresponding tasks, are doomed to degenerate more and more and get pushed to the right. For those forces however, who are coming closer to an understanding of the sharply antagonistic nature of the present period, who are willing to join the masses in their struggles – in particular the lower strata of the working class and the oppressed – without arrogantly sneering about their “backward consciousness” and who are at the same time determined to fight intransigently for the revolutionary program and who ruthlessly attack the reformist and centrist traitors – those forces can revolve themselves and play a healthy and utterly positive role in the struggle to build the new World Party of Socialist Revolution. Being aware of the limitations of historic analogies, one has to see that to a certain degree the present period bears similarities to the years after the outbreak of World War One in 1914. In this period the workers movement went through sharp crisis, splits and transformations. In this period the rottenness of the centrist majority of the Second International – which existed already before 1914 but was less obvious – came to full light. The orientation and tactics of Lenin and his supporters are highly instructive for the Bolshevik-Communists today.

The RCIT seeks to discuss and collaborate with all those organizations and activists who share such a general orientation. Indeed we consider it of utmost importance to rally those forces that show in words and deeds that they move into such a direction. Clearly there will be various differences which the RCIT might have with other organizations and activists. Similarly Lenin and the Bolsheviks had various differences inside the Zimmerwald Left and the early Communist International as Trotsky and the ICL did inside the Bloc of Four and indeed even inside the Fourth International. Such differences must be openly acknowledged and debated. They must however not constitute obstacles for serious attempts to move forward and to test in comradely discussion and joint practice the possibilities to fight in a common organization for the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution (which will be the Fifth Workers International in our opinion). The RCIT will launch initiatives in order to accelerate such a process in order to build a stronger, authentic revolutionary international organization.” (58)

This perspective remains fully valid. The RCIT considers the Fourth International and its splitters since 1948-52 as a political corpse. We don’t waste time with the illusionary project to revive a politically dead body. We need a new International which will be built by new forces of the broad mass of the working class and the oppressed and free from the corrupted milieu of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and the labor aristocracy. This is why we call all revolutionary organizations and militants to join us in the struggle for the new International which will be the Fifth Workers International.

By their orientation to the ”worldwide Trotskyist movement” the SF/LCFI comrades become involuntarily intellectual prisoners of this politically rotten milieu. Irrespective of their numerous polemics against this or that centrist current, they retain the hope that the future International will have to be built by sectors of the ”worldwide Trotskyist movement”, nearly-dead carcasses who will somehow miraculously be revived and infused with new life, new revolutionary breathe. But miracles only happen in fairy tales. Unfortunately, for the SF/LCFI comrades, we live in the very real world of class struggle.

The SF/LCFI comrades should break with their loyalty to any version of the Healy tradition and their support for the counter-revolution in Libya and Syria. Otherwise they remain Healy’s pupils who fail to break with their master.

 

Footnotes

(1) Laurence Humphries: The Epigones Destroy Trotsky’s International 1940-1953. A Reply To ‘The Death Agony of the Fourth International’ by Workers Power, Socialist Fight, September 2013, http://socialistfight.com/2013/09/25/the-epigones-destroy-trotskys-international-1940-1953-a-reply-to-workers-power/. All quotes from the LCFI in our document are from this article if not stated otherwise.

(2) Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983

(3) Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html. The paragraphs which the LCFI incorporated covertly are all located in chapter 2 and 3 in Pitt’s study.

(4) Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983, pp. 35-36

(5) The Militant: Fight Against War Goes On (Editorial), 15.3.1941, p. 1, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1941/v5n11-mar-15-1941.pdf (Emphasis in the original)

(6) James P. Cannon: Socialism on Trial (1942), New York 1973, p. 52

(7) Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983, p. 23

(8) LRCI: The Trotskyist Manifesto (1989), p. 4

(9) LRCI: The Trotskyist Manifesto (1989), p. 132

(10) Workers Power (Britain): The Fourth International and the Second World War, in: Workers Power No. 198 (March 1996), p. 11

(11) Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983, p. 25

(12) See on this e.g. the Foreword of Healy’s ICFI in the book George Vereeken: The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, London 1976, published by Healy’s printing house New Park.

(13) We are aware that Gerry Downing, the central leader of the SF/LCFI, has a more critical attitude to the Healy/IC “Security and the Fourth International” campaign. See Gerry Downing: China: deformed workers state or rising world imperialist power? Reply to the International Bolshevik Tendency and the Spart “Family”; in: In Defence of Trotskyism, No. 1, Winter 2009-2010, p. 15

(14) Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International (this was the name of our predecessor organization at that time): Barbaric Trotskyism: a History of Morenoism (Part 1); in: Trotskyist International No. 1 (1988), p. 48

(15) See Martin Richard Upham: The History of British Trotskyism to 1949, Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull, September 1980, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/upham/upmen.htm

(16) See on this Keith Hassel and Dave Stocking: The Collapse of British Trotskyism After the War (Part 1); in: Workers Power No. 39, February 1983, pp. 4-5; See also Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, London 2002, pp. 169-173

(17) Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson write that by 1951 90% of the supporters of the RCP majority in 1947-49 had left the Trotskyist movement either because of demoralization or because had been expelled by Healy. (See Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson: The War and the International. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, London 1986, p. 232)

(18) “Nor had the Club itself registered any numerical gains, despite the large circulation of Socialist Outlook and the Healyites’ energetic pursuit of positions in the Labour Party.” (Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html)

(19) Mark Hoskisson and Dave Stocking: The Rise and Fall of the SLL’ (1986); in: Workers Power No. 80, Theoretical Supplement (February 1986), p. 2

(20) It should not go unmentioned that Pablo as well as Healy/Cannon/Lambert hotly denied such an end of the revolutionary post-war period and the opening of a democratic counter-revolutionary period. Instead they all predicted for many years the imminent economic slump, World War III and revolution. Healy advertised in his paper Socialist Outlook Pablo’s pamphlet “The Coming World Showdown”, in which the later predicted the imminent world war. (See Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson: The War and the International. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, London 1986, p. 211)

Amusingly the Spartacist family still denies that in the 1950s and 1960 a “long boom” and democratic-counter-revolutionary stabilization took place. They call “the ‘long postwar boom’ … a revisionist myth.” (Jan Norden: Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism, New York 1993, p. 35)

Unfortunately the SF/LCFI document, which base its arguments partly on the Spartacists critique against our tendency, quote approvingly Jan Norden’s polemic against our program “The Trotskyist Manifesto” adopted in summer 1989. In it we explained: “Trotsky's Transitional Programme, written in these years, pronounced that the crisis of humanity was reduced to the crisis of leadership. However, today it would be wrong simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are "reduced to a crisis of leadership". The proletariat worldwide does not yet face the stark alternative of either taking power or seeing the destruction of all its past gains. Nevertheless, in many countries and, indeed, whole continents, the crisis of leadership does reach such a level of acuteness.” (LRCI: The Trotskyist Manifesto (1989), p. 19). The Spartacists and the SF/LCFI pose as defenders of “orthodox Trotskyism” when they claim that a statement of Trotsky that was written in 1938 at a specific political conjuncture is actual at all times since then. In his “Transitional Program” wrote: “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” (Leon Trotsky: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. The Transitional Program (1938),in: Documents of the Fourth International. The Formative Years (1933-40), New York 1973, p. 181) So we see that Trotsky related his statement about “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership” to the specific situation close to the World War II. It is telling that all the supporters of the centrist ‘International Committee’ tradition denied the end of the revolutionary period in the late 1940s and fully shared Pablo’s nonsense of the imminent World War III and Revolution-War and War-Revolution. They confused the conjunctural perspective of Trotsky’s program in 1938 with its methodological and programmatic substance. So they didn’t mind to drop the Transitional Program’s method by capitulating to social democracy and bourgeois nationalism because they “orthodoxly” defended that humanity is close to catastrophe and hence everything is “reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership”.

Characteristically these fake “orthodox Trotskyists” are now – when we really live in an actual revolutionary period – either completely demoralized (like the Spartacists) or incapable to recognize a real revolution when it is taking place (like the SF/LCFI denial of the “Arab Revolution” and its support for the counter-revolution in Libya and Syria).

(21) See Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson: The War and the International. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, London 1986, p. 210

(22) For the quotes in this paragraphs see our article by Keith Hassell: The Collapse of British Trotskyism (Part 2). Bevan’s Trotskyist Cheerleaders; in: Workers Power No. 40, March 1983, pp. 6-7

(23) Quoted in Keith Hassell: The Collapse of British Trotskyism (Part 2). Bevan’s Trotskyist Cheerleaders; in: Workers Power No. 40, March 1983, pp. 6-7

(24) Michel Pablo: in: The Building of the Revolutionary Party (1952); in: SWP Education for Socialists, International Secretariat Documents 1951-1954, New York 1974, Vol. 1, p. 36 (Emphasis in the original)

(25) Quotes in this paragraph from Mark Hoskisson and Dave Stocking: The Rise and Fall of the SLL’ (1986); in: Workers Power No. 80, Theoretical Supplement (February 1986), p. 1

(26) Mark Hoskisson and Dave Stocking: The Rise and Fall of the SLL’ (1986); in: Workers Power No. 80, Theoretical Supplement (February 1986), p. 1

(27) Quoted in Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(28) Quoted in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson: The War and the International. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, London 1986, p. 213

(29) Quoted in Mark Phythian: The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945–2006, New York 2007, p. 43

(30) Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(31) Quoted in Don Milligan: Off The Cuff, No. 159, March 31, 2012, www.donmilligan.net

(32) Quoted in John Callaghan: The Labour Party and Foreign Policy A history, London 2007, p. 225

(33) Quotes in this paragraph from in Keith Hassell: The Collapse of British Trotskyism (Part 2). Bevan’s Trotskyist Cheerleaders; in: Workers Power No. 40, March 1983, pp. 6-7

(34) Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(35) Michel Pablo: in: The Building of the Revolutionary Party (1952); in: SWP Education for Socialists, International Secretariat Documents 1951-1954, New York 1974, Vol. 1, p. 35

(36) Leon Trotsky: The State of the League and its Tasks. A Contribution to the Discussion (1934); in: Trotsky Writings, Supplement 1934-40, p. 494

(37) Leon Trotsky: Lessons of the SFIO Entry (1935), in: The Crisis of the French Section, New York 1977,pp. 125-126

(38) Quoted in Mark Hoskisson and Dave Stocking: The Rise and Fall of the SLL’ (1986); in: Workers Power No. 80, Theoretical Supplement (February 1986), p. 1

(39) Michel Pablo: in: The Building of the Revolutionary Party (1952); in: SWP Education for Socialists, International Secretariat Documents 1951-1954, New York 1974, Vol. 1, pp. 31-32

(40) Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(41) Quoted in Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(42) See Gerry Downing: W.R.P. Explosion. The Sabotage to Regenerate Trotskyism 1985-1991, written originally in 1991, republished by Gerry Downing in 2011.

(43) Reported in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson: The War and the International. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, London 1986, p. 212

(44) Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html

(45) Sulzberger: The Test. De Gaulle and Algeria (1962), New York 1962, p.29

(46) Quoted in Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983, p. 58

(47) Resolution of Solidarity with the Algerian Struggle for National Liberation, International Committee of the Fourth International; in: Resolutions adopted at the International Committee meeting in Paris on November 7-8, 1955, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/1955/11/07.htm

Resolution of Solidarity with the Algerian Struggle for National Liberation

Speaking for the Trotskyist militants of the whole world, the International Committee of the Fourth International greets the heroic struggle of the peoples of North Africa. Despite fierce repressions, they have already struck significant blows against French imperialism. The struggle these people are waging is bound to end with their winning complete independence.

The International Committee greets the Algerian revolution, which for the last year has pressed the offensive. The revolution has dealt increasingly severe blows to French imperialism in one of its vital centers, although the government has concentrated in Algeria the greatest part of the repressive forces at its disposal. These are more considerable than the forces employed at any given time in the Indo-Chinese war. The Algerian revolution has also advanced in the face of repressive measures of unprecedented ferocity whose victims-murdered or locked up in concentration camps-number in the tens of thousands.

The International Committee is fully aware of the enormous importance the Algerian revolution holds for the development of the proletarian revolution in France and all Europe.

It hails the Algerian National Movement, which operating under the most stringent conditions of illegality, wages an intransigent fight against imperialism under the leadership of the working masses. In the person of Messali Hadj, the oppressed and exploited of the world possess a living symbol of this struggle.

The International Committee treats with scorn the efforts of petty-bourgeois democrats, Stalinists, and Stalinoid groupings to help French imperialism. They rush to aid imperialism now that the imperialists, forced to retreat by the Algerian revolution, seek to set up a “bargaining agent” that will accept—behind the backs of the Algerian masses—any scheme providing for “independence by stages,” This would safeguard the essential positions of imperialism in the country.

For their part, the Trotskyists give wholehearted support to the central slogan of the Algerian National Movement. This slogan-the only one in keeping with the principles of democracy and socialism-calls for a Constituent Assembly in Algeria enjoying sovereign power in the nation.

The International Committee salutes the Internationalist Communist Party (French Section of the Fourth International) in its campaign to organize the active solidarity of French workers with their Algerian brothers and link them in a fight against their common enemy.

The International Committee calls on the exploited and oppressed of the whole world to demonstrate concretely their solidarity with the Algerian revolution. It calls on the Trotskyist militants to organise this solidarity by every means at their command.

This was unanimously adopted, but Comrade Peng asked that his following statement he included in the report: “We accord our solidarity to all mass movements in North Africa in the struggle against French imperialism even if their political features are still not clear.’

(48) Stéphane Just, in La Vérité No.°426, 12.10.1956, quoted in: Jean-Paul Salles: Les Trotskystes et la Guerre d’Algérie, in : Dissidences, No. 3 (2012), http://revuesshs.u-bourgogne.fr/dissidences/document.php?id=1881#ftn19. See also Vincent Présumey: Obituaries: Pierre Lambert (1920-2008), published by Revolutionary History, http://revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/obituaries/obituaries/lambert94.htm

(49) Quotes take from Bob Pitt: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy (1989), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Contents.html.

(50) David Francis; Algeria. A Discussion Article, in: Fourth International, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1966), Journal of the International Committee  of the Fourth International, pp. 69-70

(51) See on this e.g. Blows Against The Empire. Trotskyism in Ceylon. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party 1935-64, London 1997, pp. 145-218. Edmund Samarakkody: The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon; in: Spartacist No. 22, Winter 1973-74. Leslie Goonewardene: A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (1960), http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/history/Lssp.html

(52) Edmund Samarakkody: The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon; in: Spartacist No. 22, Winter 1973-74, pp. 21-22, http://www.bolshevik.org/history/smk/SMK01.htm

(53) Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International: Barbaric Trotskyism: a History of Morenoism (Part 1); in: Trotskyist International No. 1 (1988), pp. 48-49

(54) Quotes in this chapter on Moreno are taken from the journal of our predecessor organization ‘Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International’: Barbaric Trotskyism: a History of Morenoism (Part 1); in: Trotskyist International No. 1 (1988), pp. 48-49

(55) See on this e.g. the excellent study of our then comrade José Villa: Bolivia: A Revolution Betrayed. The POR and the Fourth International in the Bolivian Revolution; in: Revolutionary History, Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1992, pp. 58-87.Workers Power (Britain) and Irish Workers Group: The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London 1983, pp. 37-39

(56) As a summary of the failures of left-reformism and centrism in the new historic period since 2008 see e.g. the following two documents of the RCIT: ‘Revolutionary Unity in the Struggle for the Fifth Workers International! Open Letter to All Revolutionary Organizations and Activists’, 15.5.2013, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 11 (June 2013), http://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/open-letter-to-revolutionaries; RCIT: The Arab Revolution is a central touchstone for socialists! Open Letter to All Revolutionary Organizations and Activists, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 15 (October 2013), 4.10.2013, http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/open-letter-on-arab-revolution

(57) See RCIT: The World Situation and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Communists. Theses of the International Executive Committee of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, March 2013, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 8, www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-situation-march-2013

(58) See RCIT: The World Situation and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Communists. Theses of the International Executive Committee of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, March 2013, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 8, www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-situation-march-2013