Pierre Frank « » »« joined hands with the coalition renegades and urged -that Healy's application be rejected." The rejection of Healy's requost was made by the entire Presidium, which included left-wing represen-— tation, On this point, all the tendencies, for once, were unanimous and my opinion was not asked. , ~ —
A second point: Healy does not reveal ‘that he demanded that the revolutionary tendency, after leaving the conference, should break not only with Perera, de Silva, etc., but also. . . with the Fourth International. This happened. to be the real aim of Healy's trip to Colombo, where he hoped to fish in troubled waters, He does not mention this, because he met with a rebuff.
We now come to another lie, which has all the appearance of being calculated, According to him, the representative of the Fourth International, who took the Floor at the conference of the. LSSP to voice the opinion of the world Trotskyist. movement, supported the De Silva-Gunawardene resolution advocating a coalition. of the whole United Left Front with the SLFP, It happens-to be a matter ofpublic record that the Fourth International opposed any coalition © — whatsoover with the SLFP and supported the left-wing tendency which is now functioning as the Coylonese section of the Fourth Internation~ al,
The reasons for Healy's departure from the standards of truthful reporting are clear enough, This is not an instance of The Nowsletter's habitual carelessness with facts, In Colombo Healy announced his support for the left wing of the LSSP, But the left wing has been conducting its struggle for the past year in consultation, with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International where it has had direct representation. Healy has been denouncing the United Secretariat as guilty of all kinds of "betrayals." Thus if he were
logical, he would have to admit either that he had decided to participate in a "betrayal" perpetrated by the United Secretariat, or admit that he had been mistaken about its politics, at least in the case of Ceylon, In fact of this dilemma proletarian morality lost out to political expediency. Healy chose to amalgamate the position of the United Secretariat with the very proposals which in faot it. was battling against! Thus he was free to display himself before the readers of The Newsletter as the champion of the left wing of the LSSP against. . . the United Secretariat!
However deliberate the lie may be, it happens to cast a most revealing light on the nature of Healy's politics. The Fourth International ~~ both before and during the conference -- in. opposition to the proposal for a coalition with a bourgeois party, advocated the positive slogan of a workers and peasants government, and did this in the concrete instance by suggesting that as against a coali-. tion with the SLFP, the Trotskyists should advance the formula of a government of the United Left Front,
For Healy such a slogan is identical to a coalition with the’ bourgeoisie, hence constitutes betrayal. This is not one of Healy's passing aberrations; it is part of his general concept, a manifestation of his failure to understand the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and his failure to properly appreciate the colonial revolution, He thus excludes governmental transitional slogans and any possibility of a transitional government coming into existence, , a
Even without a detailed examination of his policies in England, it is easy to gather, simply from reading his newspaper, that to him the Tories and the Labour party amount to one and the same, He never comes out in favor of going through the experience of a Labour government,
In the field of the colonial revolution, basing himself on the premise that in the absence of a revolutionary Marxist party, there can be no successful revolution, he denies the triumphs registered by the theory of the Permanent Revolution, in Algeria and Cuba, He likens Castro to. . . Batista, Chiang Kai-shek and Ataturk. In Zanzibar, he reduces the revolution to a comic opera, and so on,
Healy's politics is very simple. You cannot open any issue of his newspaper without finding the very latest on how someone has betrayed something somewhere. The Newsletter deals in "sell outs" the way some papers deal in sex, It appears to keep standing headlines in which it is necessary only to replace the names of those who have sold out each week, Castro, we are told, has betrayed the Cuban masses; it is necessary to construct a revolutionary leader~ ship, Ben Bella has betrayed the Algerian masses; it is necessary | to construct a revolutionary leadership, The Socialist Workers party has betrayed the American masses; it is necessary to construct a revolutionary leadership, .The United Secretariat has betrayed Trot
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skyism; it is necessary to "reorganize" the Fourth International, On this political level, where ~~ outside of Healy -- the. whole world is conmitting petrayals, there is no need for profound analysis, no need even for cerebral effort. Each side in the two camps -~- Healy and the rest of the world -- follows its predestined course, In any case, for such politics, there is no need to belong to an international organization, to take part in its congresses; it is sufficient to turn on the phonograph and place the needle,in the groove,
Healy has really invented nothing novel. He simply represents today's version of the insular British sectarianism which Engels and Marx! s daughter fought in the nineties and which Lenin: scored in the twenties in The Infantile Diseage, ;
A final word, In Colombo Healy sought to debate me on numorous questions, including Marxist "philosophy." The Ceylonese workers movenent, obviously, ought not to be denied the opportunity to witness the capacities of such a genius in action,
FOURTH