29.08.1996

Not in our journal

According to the article from the Communist Workers Group (New Zealand) in Weekly Worker (July 25), the discussions between the League for a Revolutionary Communist International and the Argentine-based Trotskyist Faction (TF) were undertaken on the rebound after the expulsion of Poder Obrero (Bolivia) last year from the LRCI and in order to provide a “smokescreen to cover its internal crisis”. Moreover, your readers are told that the discussion with the PTS (Argentina) and the Trotskyist Faction are the first “serious fusion discussions with another international current”.

In truth the discussions with the PTS were opened in August in London last year; the split/expulsion of José Villa and Poder Obrero did not take place until October, when the former returned unannounced from a long holiday, secretly organising a split in Latin America, and denounced the LRCI as “pro-imperialist”.

So the discussions with potential fusion partners were not prompted by any “crisis”. Any comrade who participated at the open and lively ‘World to Win’ event held by Workers Power in July could realise this for themselves. Indeed, parting company with the PO and José Villa did not in any sense whatsoever represent the start of a crisis for the LRCI. It represented the end of a protracted democratic internal debate inside the LRCI on all the issues (Bosnia, Stalinism, anti-imperialism, etc), that went back to 1991.

It is laughable to claim that the LRCI “does not tolerate international tendencies”.  LRCI documents and letters (no doubt in the possession of the CWG) prove that on many occasions the LRCI encouraged and prompted dissident comrades in New Zealand and Latin America to form a tendency (or two) and even a faction during 1993-95 and allow minorities to access the extra rights accorded to such organised oppositions under our constitution.

In fact they refused to do so, only grouping themselves together after they left the LRCI. Indeed, the CWG resigned without a fight months away from a congress.

As victims of the political disorientation that has befallen many in the new world order, Villa and the CWG systematically took imperialist hypocritical support for the oppressed group (Bosnian muslims, Tutsis in Rwanda) as reason to abandon revolutionary democratic defence of the legitimate grievances of the oppressed.

Further, far from being a knee-jerk response to a crisis ridden tendency, the opening of discussions with the PTS is part of a long tradition of the LRCI to pursue revolutionary regroupment through a process of splits and fusions, a process that goes back to the early 1980s and has involved in-depth discussions and written exchanges with groups such as Spartaksbund in Germany and Austria, Voce Operaia in Italy and the Revolutionary Trotskyist League in the US, Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency in Britain and South Africa. We even sought discussions with the precursors of the Weekly Worker - The Leninist - in the mid-1980s!

As for the shopping list of differences between the TF and the LRCI, it is impossible in the space of this letter to correct the many misrepresentations of the positions of both the LRCI and the PTS. That differences exist is clear and well known to both discussion partners without the aid of the CWG; the discussion is intended to overcome them or, where this is not possible, to decide whether they are of such a principled character they would prevent regroupment.

Both the PTS members and leaders already know enough from the discussion, from the translation and circulation of hundreds of pages of documents, and from the active participation of PTS members inside Workers Power that they have no reason to “suspect” that the LRCI has “bureaucratic and sectarian tendencies”.

The CWG end their polemic with a call on the PTS and LRCI to push for a principled approach to dealing with differences. Frustrating as it must be for the comrades not to have access to the rich discussion already underway in the “hundreds of pages” presently circulating, the comrades can rest assured that the differences are being explored in such a fashion. Comrades can see some results of the agreements (Chechnya) and disagreements (black question in the USA) in the PTS latest journal EI no6 and in the latest Trotskyist International. Others will have seen the PTS’s approval for the programme of our French section towards the strike movement of last December. The LRCI has registered the principled character of the youth programme of the PTS youth organisation and of the electoral programme presented in the elections of last year on a common list with the MAS.

As to the CWG’s request that they be allowed to circulate their criticism in our internal bulletins, to write and read these bulletins is the right of members bound by common discipline, something the CWG voluntarily abandoned when they walked out of the LRCI. We suggest they content themselves with circulating the ones they already possess and meanwhile carry on helping to fill the pages of the Weekly Worker

Mark Abram
for the LRCI