English
ICFI
The ICFI Defends Trotskyism

Resolution of the Workers Revolutionary Party Central Committee

The resolution of the IC is a continuation of the coverup of the false methods that existed in the IC and the WRP before the split with the Healy clique. It is a dishonest and hypocritical document. The Pharisees of the IC declare that they are opposed to the principal architect of betrayal, G. Healy, and his assistants A. Mitchell and V. Redgrave. Strange opposition this, which disciplines the very membership and leaders of the WRP who threw Healy out. In order to carry out its coverup, the IC is now assisting the Healyite clique to complete the job they began, the smashing of the WRP. The IC’s unprecedented action was taken in the middle of the WRP’s battle against the vicious court actions of the clique.

Your resolution lies, comrades of the IC. The ICFI has for many years abandoned the Permanent Revolution in theory and practice. You want the membership of the sections in the IC to believe you were the Sir Galahads. If you really want to build the world movement now, based on the Permanent Revolution and the principles of Trotskyism, then you would honestly face the past, when the IC was based on Pabloite conceptions of the irreversible objective movement and the abandonment of independent leadership. Where were you comrades? If you tell us now you did not know, then what sort of leaders are you, when the Permanent Revolution could be stolen away from under your noses, and you were not aware of it. In fact you knew, as much as the leadership of the WRP. There was a degeneration, politically and theoretically, in the IC as much as in the WRP. And, if it is the entire leadership which is responsible in Britain for Healyism, so also is the IC. The entire leadership is responsible. Should we then suspend the whole ICFI and its sections? Nonsense! Face up to your duty. Rout out Healyism everywhere and build a principled movement which will thus help you and other leaders to correct the methods learned in the last ten years or more.

Your simon purity is frankly nauseating. You not only participated in the IC when it revised Trotskyism, there are a number of members of the WRP who are witnesses to the occasions when you carried out Healy’s methods in relation to comrades, carried them out unquestionably and even with enthusiasm. If there are these occasions with our comrades, what happened in your own sections? Now will you answer to the charge comrades, that members of the IC ordered humiliating physical punishment on a comrade when Healy had declared that he had found water on his toilet seat? In what tradition was this, Trotskyism, the Marine Corps or the glass house? Comrades of the IC, after a near-accident, caused by Healy’s striking his driver, you, on behalf of Healy, threatened the driver, a leading member of the British section, and also threatened a leading member of the American section, that if anything happened to the great leader Healy, “we will kill you.” And this comrade is now suspended, without trial, under your arbitrary and collective punishment. There is the German comrade, now correctly reinstated by us. He was arbitrarily sent back to Germany by Healy. How did it happen, Comrade Peter, that you promptly followed Healy’s action by expelling this comrade from the German section without proper inquiry and disciplined his girlfriend for talking to him.

You wave clean hands over financial matters. But it has been revealed that payments by you were made directly to Healy and not to our financial department. Did you not feel even a little uneasy about this? The overwhelming majority of our leaders and members did not know about this money until the expulsion of Healy. And shall we remind you that this overwhelming majority, when they moved against the Healy clique, went right to the end. Your compromise resolution on the Healy minority was simply brushed aside.

However, let us comment about this past of the degeneration of the WRP and the IC. It is not we who are looking for scapegoats in order to avoid taking the struggle to the end now. Your resolution suspending the British section and the timing of your attack squarely pins this indictment on you. It fills us with great anger that you claim to be defending the principles and integrity of world Trotskyism. You play with phrases like children playing with Christmas toys. The first test of leaders is to face reality and the consequences of their own mistakes. You are running in the face of what happened to the IC over the past decade and you will pay for that.

Defending the principles and integrity of world Trotskyism, by suspending a whole section without written and concrete charges for it to answer, and without a thorough written and verbal discussion. Nowhere in the history of the Trotskyist movement, not even in Pabloite treatment of the French section, can you find such an arbitrary bureaucratic act. You would have to return to the history of the Comintern to find a parallel, or to the British Labour Party bureaucracy, of which many, many comrades in our party have long had memories.

The Workers Revolutionary Party has ejected a most rotten clique from its leadership. The members are proud of that achievement. We have a duty to build an international carrying forward the principles of Trotsky, firmly based on the Permanent Revolution, with perspectives for building a world party with roots in the masses. That means tearing down all that is false in the last ten years and more. If you cannot face that, then we will fight you, and we are confident that we will have the support of all those throughout the world who earnestly desire to rout revisionism out of our international movement. The membership of the WRP has already shown by its deeds that it will not stop at anything or anybody in its search for historical truth and the source of corruption. We will not be held back by anyone seeking to conceal their own role in the past. Those who want to fight for principles today will honestly assess the past. And those who fight honestly now to remedy the consequences of the past degeneration have nothing to fear and we welcome them into the struggle. But as for those who cover up, we will bring them to book before the world revolutionary movement and the international working class.