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