Editorial

[p006] EDITORIAL THERE IS NOT a single country in the capitalist world whose everyday political life is not now - shaped directly by the breakneck development of the international economic crisis. Not the slightest prospect exists of any solution being agreed to replace the Bretton Woods agreements overthrown by Nixon on August 15, 1971. Now the anarchic nature of the capitalist system asserts itself at every turn. Fixed parities have virtually dis- appeared, and as credit, collapses, the desperate search for value accelerates. We are in a period of the collapse of currencies, the failure of great businesses and banks, the cancellation of invest- ment programmes, and the assumption of direct preparations for Fascism by the most powerful centres of finance capital and heavy industry. Everything which revisionists saw as a sign of the stabilisation of the capitalist system has in fact become a source of greater revolutionary contradictions. Only those who denied the char- acter of our epoch as one of wars and revolu- tions, of the decay of capitalism, could have characterised post-war capitalism as ‘neo- capitalism’ and preached, like Mandel, that the revolutionary role of the working class under imperialism had been historically left behind. In fact, the need of world capitalism to regulate international payments: through state intervention (Bretton Woods) could only -bring to a head once again the fundamental contradiction between socialised production, increasingly international, on the one hand, and the continued existence of private property in the means of production and the nation state on the other. The very dependence of capitalism on the Bret- ton Woods agreements, which seemed for 25 years to give the appearance of stability, now turns into its opposite. The collapse of Bretton Woods’ brutally exposes the insoluble problems of every ‘national’ capitalism. Marx and Engels concluded after the revolutions of 1848 that it was not pos- sible to trace the developments in the political struggle immediately and directly to their econo- mic basis. Today there is a great transformation. EDITORIAL The division of the world between a few great powers, dominated by a handful of banks and monopolies, and the capitalists’ own efforts to respond, within the decadent capitalist framework, to the international character of the system, together with the necessity of greater state inter- vention in the economy of each capitalist country, have created an entirely different relationship, with politics and economics interpenetrating at every turn. Above all, this interpenetration takes place in conditions of the decay of the capitalist order, not at a time when it still had scope for its greatest expansion, as in the middle of the 19th century. In Britain, even the inflationary boom and Keynesian policies of the 50s and 60s could not conceal the accumulated and insoluble problems at the base of the economy. And now the class struggle in Britain becomes’ the arena in which these contradictions demand a solution, demand it so imperiously that there can be no delay or compromise. This is why the ruling class has been compelled to challenge every single basic right of the working class and to run the risk of dis- pensing with the well-beloved methods of com- promise through the trade union bureaucra¢y. A revolutionary situation is created by these changes. All the legislative preparations are’ finished for a complete change in methods of. rule which have been built up over three centuries. The relations between bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and pro'e- tariat are bound to be rapidly transformed. At the same time, the conditions of life of the work- ing class ferce them te demand action ‘from . their traditional organisations which go beyond any- thing in the past. Hence the inyuffetable: pressure on the trade union bureaucracy. On-the che side, the relations they have built upg-w:th the capitalist state over nearly a century make them easy prey to the. corporatist plans of the. Tory. Government and the monopolies. With the -langaage cf ‘parti- cipation’ they prepare the ground in one industry after another. They intend to collaborate on the . state ‘pay boards’. But on. the qther hand they 2

[p007] feel the pressure from their own base in the unions. This latter pressure, far from impelling them in a left direction, will only heighten their crisis, provoke from them confused and danger- ous lines of action, and hasten their complete defection to the counter-revolution. As in the past, there are trade union bureaucrats who will “even raise the question of general strike in orger to head it off and at all costs prevent the develop- ment of mass action under revolut‘onary leader- ship. Others, such as Jackson in the Union of Post Office Workers, try to instil a fear of Fascism as a cover for their own corporatism. The same Stalinist parties who defend this trade union bureacracy continue to peddle the lie of peaceful, parliamentary roads to socialism. They know full well that any period of ‘peace’ (i.e. of the working class being politically lulled to sleep) is used by the class enemy to prepare for uvil war. But to grant the capitalists this precicus time is precisely in the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy is mortally threatened by the development of the inter- national capitalist crisis, and is the principal force for destroying revolutionary developments in any country. Every section of the Fourth Inter- national must be politically steeled to answer and defeat the Stalinists. Without this there can be no building of revolutionary parties. It is not at all an accident that this basic position of Trotskyism on the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism has been a fundamental division between the International Committee and all revis‘onism. The recent revelations concerning the _Inter- national Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and its activities in Chile provide a clear warning of the implications of the ‘peaceful road’ every- where. The CIA was in constant contact and under the direct influence of this Corporation, and was pressed to carry out political subversion in its interests. Great resources were expended to prevent the election of Allende, for fear of future nationalisation. When these attempts proved unsuccessful. ITT, on its own admission, worked with other US companies to create a collapse of one of the main banks or savings societies, thus destroying investment plans, creat- ing mass unemployment, and bringing about con- ditions of chaos in which the government could be brought down. Piecing this together with the actual developments last year in Chile, it is clear that military preparations were also made. In the end Allende actually took military representatives into his Cabinet. _ The parliamentary road was equally shown bankrupt in France. While opinion polls predicted a victory in the National Assembly elections _ (March 1973) for the Socialist-Communist-Radical front, Pompidou and Messmer, the direct repre- » sentatives of finance capital, arrogantly proclaimed that even if the left won the majority they would not be asked to form a Cabinet. There could be no question of accepting an electoral verdict if it opened the door to working-class actions against the capitalist system itself. Undoubtedly the crawling promises of the Stalinists and Social Democrats to accept the Constitution convinced the middle class that there was no possibility of a real fight against the banks and the monopolies, and they responded yet again to the traditional cry of the French ruling class for ‘order’. All those who conceal from the working class the real preparations of the capitalist class in this period, the Stalinists principally, are acting as executioners of the working class. Literally every- thing depends now on the ability of the forces of Trotskyism to win from the masses now thrown into struggle the cadres who will be able to defeat Stalinism and win leadership of the masses in the struggle for working-class power. The fight for this independent course, and against every variety of subordination to the bureaucracy, has been the key to the s‘ruggle of the International Committee against Pabloite revisionism. The theoretical divisions of the past, now sharper than ever before, are shown clearly in the sphere of politics. The revisionists now provide the theoretical cover for centrism. Bowing to spontaneity, they provide the most sophisti- cated arguments for the bureaucracy’s aim of keeping the workers. out of politics, restricting the working class to trade union struggles. In this ‘way the trade union and Labour leaders are left free to pursue their class collaboration and pre- pare against their own rank and file. When the revisionists of every stripe come forward with demands limited to ‘participation of the rank and - file in the unions’, and ‘solidarity’, they are guilty of the grossest deception of all. What is really at stake is the fight for alternative leadership, the fight: to train:from ‘the ‘rank and file’ those: new leaders who will become Marxists and remove -;.the. opportunist and Stalinist leaders. It will be done only under the banner of the Fourth Inter- national. LL SL SSS SSS Serr Ss a sis a SHUR ce Sa, Fourth International Spring 1973

[p008] By a Ceylon Correspondent TODAY the imperialist system throughout the world has reached the highest point in the death agony which was postponed after World War II with the deliberate inflation of the dollar and with the aid of the Stalinist and social-democratic leadership in the working class. The movement of the working class in the metropolitan countries and Eastern Europe as well as the workers and poor peasants in the colonial and semi-colonial countries is thrust forward by the objective development of the economic crisis at its sharpest point. The break-up of the old reformist and Stalinist leadership in the situation is unavoidable. Either they are being destroyed by the ruling class, once . they have completed their betrayal of the working class, or they are being constantly challenged by the growing militancy among the oppressed masses. Under these circumstances the Trotskyist move- ment throughout the world is given enormous possibilities of building the revolutionary leader-. ship as the alternative to reformism and capitalism. But the rapidity with which the old order breaks up will provide the opportunity for centrist ten- dencies to develop in the working-class movement. Trotsky wrote in his open letter for the Fourth International: “Under conditions where the traditional mass orga- nisations are in process of collapse and decom- Position <centrism represents in many cases an inevitable transitional stage even. for progressive working-class groupings. Marxists must be able to find access to all such tendencies in order by example and propaganda to speed their passage to the revolutionary road. In this the condition for success is irreconcilable criticism of the centrist leadership, exposure of the attempts to create the 24 international and ceaseless explanation of the fact that the revolutionary tasks of our epoch doom beforehand to ignominious bankruptcy those unifi- cations which are hybrid and amorphous.’ Here we try to expose the centrist leadership of tHe section of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat in Ceylon, which has now degenerated to the extent where it practises open collaboration not only with CEYLON: The Centrism of Bale Tamoo. GEYLON: THE CENTRISM OF BALA TAMPO the repressive coalition government of the country but also with the main pillars of imperialism itself. Gerry Healy after his visit to Ceylon at the time of the 1964 Emergency Conference of the LSSP wrote: ‘The LSSP revolutionary wing has now the historic task of recorstructing the revolutionary party in Ceylon. They will do this all the better when they understand its relationship to the past and break completely from the Unified Secretariat in Paris.’ The perspective laid down here is clear; with- out understanding their own relationship to past events and breaking completely from Pabloism the LSSP(R) could not and will not develop asa revolutionary party. Anyone can see that this was not just simple support for the LSSP(R). The supporters of Robertson, the ‘Spartacist’ group philistines who reject the role of the revo- lutionary party and Marxism in the working-class movement, cannot understand the significance of the intervention made by the International Com- mittee at the time of the great betrayal of the Unified Secretariat. Although these petty-bourgeois radicals are stunned today by the nature of the betrayals pre- pared by the Pabloite Unified Secretariat, what they seek to avoid like the plague is the continuous fight of the IC against Pabloism since 1953. The authors of the ‘Solidarity’ pamphlet Ceylon: ]VP Uprising of April 1971 state: ‘it should be pointed out that their (SLL’s) pre-1964 criticisms of the LSSP and of the United Secretariat centred on the espousal by these bodies of the ‘international perspectives of ‘Pabloism’’ (centuries of degenerated workers’ states, possibility of Communist Parties moving to the left as a result ‘of mass pressure etc.) and not on the social com- position of the LSSP, its dedication to parliamen- tary politics or its crass opportunism . . . All the centrists throughout the world want to forget or distort the struggle launched by the IC against Pabloism, which developed within the Fourth International and has dominated the Unified Secretariat and its predecessor since 1953.

[p009] The Robertson group as well as the Socialist Workers’ Party, who were actual participants in the earlier stages of the fight against Pabloism, today want to write off the history of the struggle of the IC. When the SWP unification with the Pabloite revisionists was accomplished in 1963 they wrote: ‘We can attract the best layers of this new gene- ration of rebels by our bold programme, our fighting spirit and militant activity; we can only repel them by refusing to close ranks because of differences over the past disputes of little interest to young “evolutionists of action who are primarily concerned about the great political issues and burn- ing problems of the day.’ The fight of the IC against this method is on record for all to see. What the SLL and the IC always insisted upon was to go back to the 1953 split and from there to draw up a balance-sheet of the activities of the Pabloite sections as well as the IC. It is through grasping the nature of these struggles of the IC against Pabloism that new revolutionary cadres can be built in different parts of the world. We clearly say. that the par- liamentarianism and opportunism or even the social composition of the LSSP cannot be separated from their political position in 1953 within the Fourth International and their con- tinued allegiance to Pabloism. Formal criticism of Pabloism or observations made only after the event, in the style of Robert- son, will not help to build an alternative to Pabloism in Ceylon or anywhere else. E. Samarak- kody, the leader of the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party which broke away from the Pabloites in Ceylon in 1968, himself has tried to make a formal criticism of the Unified Secretariat in an internal bulletin written to his group recently. But he has carefully avoided the question of the struggle of the IC against the US. This centrist position is a deadly cancer in the working-class movement, which cannot be tolerated. Nobody who is seriously taking up the tasks of building a revolu- tionary party can avoid the struggle of the IC in the past two decades. We do not believe in natural Marxists as Pabloite revisionists do. We also do not believe in revolutionary movements devoid of the valuable and indispensable experiences of the revolutionary movements in the past! No revolu- tionary movement can stand indifferent to its own ‘past. Only the middle-class philistines who attempt to make a living out of Marxism will try to do so. It is true that the LSSP (R) did not join the ranks of the IC. We are going to examine here the role of that group who later joined the US. But the intervention made by the IC laying down the perspectives (as in the 1964 quotation above) did not go unnoticed. . The statement made by the IC on July 5, 1964 said: ‘The LSSP Revolutionary seetion has taken the first necessary step.’ On that basis the IC continuously made inter- ventions during that ‘period to win a cadre for the Marxist party in Ceylon. The IC can proudly announce today that not only was it proven right in its entire perspective with regard to Ceylon, 6 but also that the IC was able to build a solid section in Ceylon which is prepared to undertake the struggle for the Fourth International. It is a fact that the initial cadres for building the revolutionary section came from the LSSP Revolutionary wing. These cadres were won through the active intervention of the IC. It was not just observing the events when the crisis blew up in the ranks of the revisionist US. The IC was confident that a Marxist cadre could be won from . the LSSP (R). In reply to an attack by Pierre Frank on the attitude of the SLL to the Ceylon betrayal the Political Comm-‘ttee of the SLL stated: ‘The Marxists in the Revc‘uitionary section of the LSSP are iinding a road t:: the masses and we are confident that along this road they will reject the Unified Secretariat with its replacement of Marxist principles by policies of adaptation to bureaucracy, the consequence of which has been class treason in Ceylon.” Cadres won and trained through this interven- tion have today been able to function as the only Marxist revolutionary movement among the work- ers and peasants of Ceylon. No left organization, outside the coalition partners the CP and the LSSP, have built any developed means‘to pene- trate the working class in this decisive period. Only the Revolutionary Communist League, the section of the IC, possesses a regular publication to intervene in the developing class struggle. This regular publication takes place under conditions where the official organs of the RCL and the Revolutionary Communist Youth are still banned under the emergency laws. The publications of the Pabloite revisionist LSSP (R) or Samarakkody’s RSP did not come under the attack of the govern- ment and are not banned at all. But they are un- able to publish any regular news sheet due to their own political and organizational problems. The RCL recently published its own theoretical jcurnal called Fourth International and Kamkeru Mavatha, a weekly. Started as a four-page paper six months ago, it is now a six-page paper. The plans are published in that paper to develop it to an eight-page paper immediately and to make it a twice-weekly in the coming months. The funds to maintain this paper come entirely from the sales of the paper and the contributions made by its readers among the working class. All the other left tendencies in Ceylon are com- pletely paralysed in the face of the growing polari- zation of class forces resulting from the new stage of crisis in the world capitalist system since August 15 1971. The complete liquidation of the LSSP (R) has come about as a result of the very conscious role played by its leadership headed by Bala Tampoe. The Unified Secretariat, following in the footsteps of their record in relation to the LSSP, try their best to cover up for the treacherous leadership in the LSSP (R) today. The article published in Intercontinental Press on the SLL position in ex- posing Bala Tampoe reveals this cowardly attempt of the henchmen of the US more than ever. The Workers Press (in the series of articles written by Jack Gale) exposed the position in the US in relation to some blatantly counter-revolu- Fourth International Spring 1973

[p010] tionary. activities of Bala Tampoe. Here we intend to examine his political positions in the recent period, especially around and after the April 1971 - uprising. Since its origin as a separate section (after breaking away from the LSSP when the LSSP took the decision to join the capitalist coalition with the SLFP of Mrs Bandaranaike) the LSSP (R) has moved rapidly to the right. The theoretical preparations and cover-up for this rightward move ~ of the party were done once again by the US. _ Here we have to remember that before. 1964 the Unified Secretariat opposed with all their might any form of split in the LSSP. Their sole advice to the left wing of the LSSP in 1964 was con- -tained in their official statement, which said: ‘The end result could be highly injurious to the Fourth International and to the LSSP including its left wing which has absolutely no interest to put in question the unity of the party through the creation of undue internal friction and tension from any source.’ But the split was forced on the left wing by the force of the working-class radicalization against the coalition government at the time. The US itself was forced to break relations after the event with its so beloved section in Ceylon, the LSSP. But such empirical adaptation: itself could not of course produce any changes in the policies of the US. They did not learn anything from the bitter experiences in Ceylon since there was a conscious decision in the US not to discuss the past events which could jeopardize their newly formed reunification which was unprincipled to the core. Therefore although there was a demand from a considerable section in the LSSP (R) to discuss the history of their own movement, as was sug- gested by the IC, this was deliberately blocked by the leadership composed of both Bala Tampoe and Samarakkody at the time. Instead the Unified Secretariat was tightening its grip on the LSSP (R) to lead it along the same old road of class betrayal. The coalition which was formed in July 1964 did not last more than a few months. Instead of consolidating its forces through a complete dis- cussion over the experiences of the treachery of the LSSP, the LSSP (R) plunged into the parlia- mentary election held in March 1965. The youth section which came out from the LSSP confer- ence along with the LSSP (R) were further dis- oriented by the manner in which the election campaign was mounted. The same old parliamen- tarian demagogy predominated in the campaign. No programme was developed through a struggle against the capitulation of the working-class leaders. _ As the result of the election a more right-wing UNP government came to power, defeating the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. In its short period of governmental power, the coalition proved to be a complete failure in the eyes of the masses as well as the bourgeoisie. Therefore the bourgeoisie stood firm and brought a more reactionary regime to deal with rising militancy in the working class. In the statement she made about forming the gov-