Centrist bankruptcy again

A meeting of the Walloon Popular Movement in Liège last year.

and "all Walloons united"

whatever their social status. 9 Mandel and 'La Gauche' try to make the best of a bad job by criticising Perin at this late stage, and they go in for the most frantic whistling in the dark when they conclude:

6 Don't let anybody smile too soon; he who laughs last laughs longest. The confusion born of the effort by the Perin tendency to prevent a class orientation, a left socialist orientation, to the new groups which came from the split in the PSB, is now dissolved by Perin himself. The way exposed is now clear for a federal congress of the Walloon Workers' Party, which will decide to group together with other left socialist forces, beginning with the Union of the Socialist Left.

The new left socialist formation, awaited with mounting impatience by many militants, will finally be born, without any doubt by September. 9 This is great stuff. First you amalgamate with the demagogue Perin, allowing him to use socialist colouring to ensure his parliamentary seat, giving him a platform to influence all the Walloon workers who are breaking from the opportunists, eventually to lead a substantial part of them into open class collaboration. Then you condemn his statements against socialism, and comfort yourself with the ingenious theory that his very betrayal exposes him and his group.

Those who are really exposed by these events and by all the casuistry of 'Lá Gauche' are the so-called revolutionary socialists around Mandel and the "Trotskyists" rat the Pab'United Secretariat'.

Their addiction to centrism, and their abandonment of the central perspective of building the revolutionary party, actually permitted the bureaucratic leaders of Belgian Social Democracy to consolidate their strength against the rank and file, and then handed over this rank and file to right-wing demagogues whom they now themselver denounce, even comparing them with the neo-fascist Poujade in France.

Leadership has been abdicated by these people and so they play their own very definite part in the betrayal of the working class, just as they did in Ceylon, Algeria and the USA.

Once again it becomes very clear that the fight against revisionism waged in the columns of The Newsletter and in the sections of the Fourth International is no abstract debate.

We drew attention months ago to precisely these dangers, and we are confident that this theoretical struggle has helped to create the forces in Belgium which will defeat this revisionist and centrist course, setting in motion the reconstruction of the Trotskyist movement in Belgium.