'Liquidate' — say revisionists

'THE GREATEST future for Trotskyism is to liquidate itself into a mass revolutionary movement,' leading revisionist Robert Pennington told the 60 assorted members and supporters of the International Marxist Group who mustered at the small Conway Hall last Friday evening.

'We don't particularly want to be Trotskyists. The contribution of Trotskyism is to be part of building a mass communist movement.'

The meeting, called allegedly to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination, mounted a concentrated attack on everything Trotsky fought for.

'If we were to apply certain parts of the transitional programme today,' Pennington said, 'we'd be out of our minds. The programme was drawn up in period of chronic unemployment. It would be absurd for example to call today for a sliding scale of wages.

'When he wrote the Transitional Programme, Trotsky made a mistake in saying that there would be an economic crisis after the war.

'The SLL has never stopped looking for it. Every time someone sneezes on Wall Street, they say "My God, there's a slump"!'

Pennington, cynically introduced by chairman Robert Purdy as 'an old Trotskyist—that means he's been around longer than I have', spoke from the same platform as 'New Left Review' and 'Red Mole' editor Robin Blackburn and leading Pabloite P. Jordan.

It is no accident that Blackburn was invited to speak at the meeting just two days after his return from the Soviet Union, or that his speech tried to justify Stalinism by praising its 'dual role'.

Blackburn claimed that this 'dual role' was 'an essential precondition for the form taken by anti-imperialist revolutions in China, Cuba and Vietnam'.

If the IMG's leading spokesmen are now forced to come out openly with a liquidationist programme, this is because the movement of the working class and the deepening crisis of the Stalinist and Social-Democratic bureaucracies demands that they intensify their efforts to destroy Bolshevism.

In the course of so doing, they whitewash the Stalinist bureaucracy, which, far from being responsible for anti-imperialist revolutions, has worked consistently as their gravedigger and as a threat to every gain of the October Revolution.

Pennington attacks the Transitional Programme and the Socialist Labour League because he has capitulated to the middle-class conception that capitalism can right itself, and that it is no longer a system of crises, wars and revolutions.

His conception of a 'mass communist movement', led by nobody in particular and certainly not by Trotskyists, is the antithesis of Marxism and involves a concentrated attack on the fight for working-class leadership.

This is how the revisionists 'commemorate' Trotsky, who fought continuously against the idea that there was anything in the remotest degree progressive about the bureaucratic degeneration of the world communist movement under Stalin.

Pennington now uses the anniversary of Trotsky's murder by a Stalinist agent to make the most brazen overtures to the Stalinists.

Blackburn is cast in the role of middle-man—a political go-between for the revisionists and King Street.

And this is also the cause of Pennington's venomous hatred of the Socialist Labour League.

The successes of the League—based on a continuous fight against revisionism—stand like a rock between Pennington and his avowed aim of winding up Trotskyism.

Thirty years after Trotsky's murder the Stalinists can be seen to have failed in their efforts to liquidate revolutionary Marxism.

Pennington's and the IMG's attempts will not succeed either.