Letter to the National Committee SWP from National Secretary SLL 12/6/63

[p040] The National Committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party Dear Comrades, It was with deep regret that the delegates and visitors to the Fifth National Conference of the Socialist Labour League took note of the failure of your committee to send fraternal greetings to our conference. This is the first time since the founding unification conference of the English Trotskyist move- ment in March 1944 that you have taken such action, even though you had major political disagreements for a number of years with the old leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. In the past we have always regarded your greetings as a recognition of the revolutionary ties which existed between our organisations. It is well known that several members of the leadership of the Socialist Labour League, including myself, grew up and deve- loped with knowledge gained from the books and writings of the leaders of your party. We feel, there- fore, that your decision not to send greetings is in line with your political hostility towards us. It is a con- tinuation of the shabby accusations contained in recent letters from you. (See IC Bulletin No. 16). We can only conclude that you wish to sever relations between the SLL and the majority leadership of the SWP. By the time you read this letter you will have joined forces with the Pabloites and the existing split will have become more serious. This rather sad state of affairs is not of our making. Early in 1961 we started a discussion with you in order to see if it was possible within the framework of the International Committee to learn and to teach one another in a way that would strengthen the inter- national Trotskyist movement. We were unable to convince you on such an approach, because, as you know from copies of letters which we have and you have, comrade Cannon advised against a discussion. It is the same Cannon who is now busy in the background whooping up the petty organisational scandals which he requires to make the split complete. He knows as well as we do that the letter to your Political Committee over the Cuba crisis reveals that despite his long and heroic defence of Trotskyism, he has at last capitulated to the Pabloite disease. Indeed, your Political Committee could not support this letter. But instead of seriously discussing your differences before the membership you have deliberately kept them in the background in your conference preparations. You have deliberately avoided a serious discussion, yet you are engaging in a constant offensive against us behind the scenes, within your leadership. You are getting ready to expel the Wohlforth minority, although it has loyally carried out every decision of your party. Such is the political degeneration of the SWP. You have now come to the conclusion that the ‘sectarian SLL’ is not worth the writing of a letter of 35 DOCUMENT No. 4 greetings to its conference. You have found new allies. You publish an attack on the SLL from comrade Peng which you say is an act of ‘fraternal courtesy to the Chinese section of the International Committee’, but who has heard of the Chinese section since the split with Pablo in 1953? Peng refused the IC the corresponding address of this section. During the ten years of the functioning of the committee he never once gave a report of the life and work of that section. Until this recent bulletin from him you yourself have not produced a single report from the Chinese comrades. In other words, this section is resurrected only at times when it suits the leadership of the SWP in factional alliance with Peng. We who know this man are fully aware that he has no understanding whatsoever of the daily life and political work of our sections. We have never heard him make a single contribution on the national prob- lems of any section over the past ten years. To hide behind the ‘authority’ of such a man in struggle against the SLL can only be described as an act of political bankruptcy on your part. We note that one of the criticisms which he laid against the SLL was that it did not really wage a struggle against Pabloism in Britain. Here we would like to publish for all to see a section of the corres- pondence between yourselves and us on this matter. (See appendix) Peng talks about our ‘internal regime’ and ‘Healy’s organisational methods’. ‘The list of expulsions in the past few years makes depressing reading,’ he says. ‘In one instance expulsions occurred on the eve of a national convention.’ You know very well that these are misrepresentations and lies from beginning to end. You publicly defended the steps we were forced to take in relation to Peter Fryer. You are aware that Pablo came to England especially to organise these refugees from the class struggle and that he spent considerable sums of money trying to encourage them to go into(public opposition to us. He published their most slanderous documents against us. He joined hands with the most reactionary forces, including the right wing of the Labour Party, to ‘expose’ the SLL. You know all this and, in fact, you opposed it, but you now publish Peng’s lies without the slightest comment. We expelled Brian Behan before the second congress of the SLL because he outrageously in public attacked. Behan is now one the organisation and its leadershi of the anarchist propagandist He is a regular contributor to the extresfe ’ Tory magazine The Spectator. He writes in the house organ of the Astor family 20th Century alongside such well-known fascists as Andrew Fountaine and such representatives of the ‘democratic’ press as Cecil King of the Daily Mirror empire.