Fraction Leninist-Trotskyist Founded Founding the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

Origins and History

The CWG origins date from 1970 in NZ when a number of students active against the imperialist attack on Vietnam formed the Spartacist League. This group split in 1972 when one group led by Logan and Hannah joined the US Spartacists, while another led by Gager opposed fusion on the basis that the Spartacists had not completed their split from the SWP (US). In an article titled ‘James P Cannonism’ Gager argued that Cannon was a US chauvinist. The Gager group viewed both the International Secretariat and International Committee as having broken from Trotskyism in the early post WW 11 period. They took the position that the 4th International was dead from that time and that a 5th International must be founded. Gager moved to Australia in 1972 and formed the Communist Left of Australia (CLA).

In 1981, a small group of NZ comrades, who had meanwhile established fraternal relations in 1972 with the Revolutionary Communist Group (later Tendency then Party) of Britain, also formed fraternal relations with the CLA and became known as the Communist Left of NZ. We adopted the tradition and program of the CLA. Fundamental to this program was the 5th International position also shared by the RCP (Britain). For us the post-war Trotskyist currents had all abandoned Trotskyism. The cause was ‘empiro-centrism’, the class location of the Trotskyist currents in the imperialist countries were embedded in the labour aristocracy (those privileged layers of workers benefiting from the superprofits of imperialism) which was wedded to the privileges of social imperialism (‘socialism’ at home paid for by imperialism abroad).

Empiro-centrism spawned ‘national Trotskyism’ in the semi-colonies. National Trotskyists joined forces with national bourgeoisies against imperialism instead of going all the way to lead the national revolution to socialist revolution. Thus they were complicit in holding back the complete break from imperialism, thus serving the interests of social imperialism. The Gager group traced this abandonment of Trotskyism back to Cannon’s war-time deviation into US chauvinism (defeat Hitler first) and to Pablo’s view that Tito was an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’ in 1948. If Stalinists could become Trotskyists by some ‘unconscious’ transformation this dispensed with the need of a Trotskyist party and a Trotskyist international. The betrayal of the Bolivian revolution in 1952 by the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) under the leadership of Lora was the direct result of this process of degeneration.

We drew the conclusion that the way back from the historic defeat of 1952 was to rebuild Trotskyism in the semi-colonies and smash the social roots of the evil twins of empiro-centrism and national Trotskyism in the imperialist heartlands.

In the late 1980s CLNZ broke relations with the RCP (Britain) which had degenerated into a British chauvinist current, and fused with Workers Power (Britain) in 1992. In the discussions preceding fusion, we found WP to be a left moving centrist group that was making a strong break not only from Cliffism (i.e. from state capitalism to orthodox Trotskyism on the question of the ‘workers’ states’) but also from empiro-centrism. In our view the formation of the LCRI in 1990 from the MRCI was made possible by the influence of POB and POP the ex-Lora groups in Bolivia and Peru around Jose Villa. In adopting Villa’s analysis of Lora’s betrayal of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, WP showed itself capable of learning the lessons of the post-war degeneration and the evil twins of empiro-centrism and ‘national Trotskyism’. For implicit in this lesson was the role of empiro-centrism in engendering the national Trotskyism of the Lora group that entered the popular front MNR Government. Yet, while the Villa group did not draw the conclusion that the 4th was dead, the majority of WP including the CLNZ did so and called for a 5th International.

WPs left moving centrism under the impact of the Villa groups’ break with Lora came to a halt and went into reverse with the collapse of the Stalinist states. WP began a rapid retreat into British or European social imperialism. It supported Yeltsin’s coup in 1991. The reunification of East with West Germany was welcomed. The NATO bombing of Serbian territory of Bosnia in 1994 was welcomed. It seems that whatever the ‘workers’ states were, they were not as progressive as ‘democratic’, preferably British, imperialism. Yeltsin’s ‘democracy’, West Germany’s ‘social democracy’ and NATO’s smart bombs, were better defenders of the ‘workers states’ than any brand of Stalinism. Just as Cannon said that imperialism was better than fascism, WP said that imperialism was better than Stalinism.

CWG, POP and POB split from WP in 1995 to form the CEMICOR (Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International). In desperation, WP entered discussions with the PTS of Argentina in 1996 which came to nothing. CEMICOR produced analyses (including a critique of the PTS –see below), political commentary and three issues of an International Bulletin, largely through the efforts of Jose Villa and the CWG, but POP and POB became inactive. By 2000 Villa had also become politically isolated and demoralised and CEMICOR was more or less defunct. It seemed that the CWG’s vision of building a 5th International in the Latin American semi-colonies was also at an end. We corresponded with the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) of Argentina and reproduced some political statements with the POR. What we did not yet know was that a split in the PTS in 1998 produced the Workers International League (LOI-CI) in Argentina.

In late 2000 members of the CWG helped set up the Google group, Salta Solidarity which then became Argentina Solidarity in response to the revolutionary uprisings of that period. Among the contacts we made was Vicente Balvanera of the LOI-CI of Argentina who reported on the uprisings of the piqueteros in Salta. Balvanera left LOI in 2001 and was highly critical of it and full of praise for Altimira’s PO which he had rejoined. As a result of some frank exchanges, CWG was kicked off Argentina Solidarity. But more important, CWG made contact with the LOI-CI and began the collaboration that led to the foundation of the Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists in December 2002.

The LOI-CI breaks with national Trotskyism

When the CWG (and POP and POB) split from the LRCI in 1995, almost immediately the LRCI began discussions with the PTS in Argentina. CEMICOR criticised the ‘parity committee’ that resulted as an unprincipled bloc. The PTS was an incomplete break from Morenoism holding still to the view that the IC and in particular Moreno had maintained a ‘continuity’ with the Trotskyist program until 1989 and only then, when the greatest betrayal led to the restoration of capitalism in the workers’ states, declared the 4th International in need of ‘regeneration’. The LRCI on the other hand considered the 4th International to be dead in 1951, although its members were split between ‘refound the 4th’ and ‘found the 5th’ positions.

In reality, however both tendencies shared a similar origin. The LRCI had its origin in Cliffism which in rejecting the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union was the most extreme liquidation of Trotskyism into the labour aristocracy in Britain. It moved left towards orthodox Trotskyism in the late 1980s but reversed direction in the early 1990s. The PTS was a split from Moreno’s national Trotskyism, itself a chauvinist mirror image of European and US imperialism. To what extent then, had the PTS remained trapped in national Trotskyism, and more important, to what extent was a break with national Trotskyism the basis of the split of the LOI-CI from the PTS in 1998?

Under the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc from 1989, the LRCI in imperialist Britain began to degenerate back into social imperialism which it justified in terms of ‘reformist resetting’. In Argentina, the PTS under the same pressure of events took a parallel course, reverting to the patriotic national front. The convergence of these two tendencies was expressed in 1995/6 by the formation of an unprincipled international bloc where political differences were buried for the sake of creating a new international tendency dominated by the LRCI. (see CEMICOR article ‘Another Rotten Bloc' in IB No 1)

The struggle of the LOI-CI (then the Trotskyist Proletarian Faction - TPF) inside the PTS was against the degeneration into national Trotskyism and its subordination to social imperialism. It objected to the PTS rightwing leadership’s adoption of the LRCI’s draft document on the world situation without discussion, and the LRCI’s concept of ‘reformist resetting’ In 1998 the TPF was bureaucratically expelled from the PTS and formed the LOI-CI/Workers’ Democracy to defend the program of the PTS before its post-1989 degeneration.

Both the CWG and the LOI were fighting rightward moving tendencies capitulating to the post-1989 defeats of the world working class. Despite our different origins and experience, we did eventually arrive at a common conception of the cause of this capitulation. The CWG originated in a British semi-colony and early took a 5th position because our first international experience was a fight with the Spartacists over the heritage of the SWP (US). By 1974 we had rejected the dominant imperialist based sections of the 4th as degenerate from 1946. Our analysis was that imperialist based Trotskyism had capitulated to the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Our experience of the UK imperialist based LRCI in the 1990s confirmed this analysis.

The LOI on the other hand developed out of Morenoism as a national Trotskyist tendency. As mentioned above we see national Trotskyism as the reciprocal semi-colonial ‘evil twin’ of imperio-centrism. It expresses the dominant interest of the imperialist ruling class by trapping the permanent revolution within the stageist schema of the national revolution. It forms patriotic popular fronts with petty bourgeois and ‘progressive’ bourgeois classes against imperialism and justifies this as the ‘anti-imperialist united front. As a result the working class remains trapped and incapable of carrying the national revolution forward to the social revolution.

But the PTS did not break from Moreno’s stalinophobia which included the Stalinists and Castroites as part of the counter-revolutionary imperialist front. In the 1990s this put the PTS into popular front alliances with right wing nationalists like Walesa, the Mujahedines and the Bosnian Muslims, against the Stalinist/imperialist front! When after 1989 the Stalinists restored capitalism and turned into the new bourgeois the PTS welcomed the end of Stalinism as the opening of a new revolutionary period! But like the LRCI, this revolutionary period was covering a rightward retreat into broad left social democracy.

The LOI-CI fought inside the PTS against this rightward movement, in particular against the turn towards social democracy. It opposed the anti-imperialist united front as a form of popular front. Since its expulsion it has taken this fight further. It recognized the roots of the PTS degeneration as ‘national Trotskyism’ which enters popular fronts with the national bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois governments like the MNR in Bolivia in 1952. Today is opposes Chavez’ Bonapartist regime in Venezuela, Morales popular front government in Bolivia etc. Against national Trotskyism that provides a left cover for these popular fronts, the LOI fights for an international regroupment of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organisations to refound the 4th International and fight for the permanent revolution.

The Collective and the Liaison Committee

The form that this struggle for regroupment is taking is that of high level united fronts between principled Trotskyists of all currents in which programmatic agreement is the basis of joint action and the development of program, while at the same time programmatic differences are publicly debated. The Collective formed in December 1992 under the immediate impact of the Argentinazo and the US war on terror, began with the collaboration of the LOI-CI, the Group Bolshevik of France, and its sister organisation, Germinal in Spain, and the CWG, Lucha Marxista (Peru), (and a year later) the Poder Obrera Bolivia, all adherents of the defunct CEMICOR. We agreed on a program around the life and death struggles of the Iraq war, the popular front, united front, Leninist party and so on.

The Collective did not go beyond a fraternal federation and despite the high level of programmatic agreement, the BT, LM and POB resented the influence of the LOI in the Collective and accused it of using its funds to create an Argentinean ‘mother’ party and sending its cadres to infiltrate their organisations. These resentments developed into open hostilities and personal attacks on the LOI leadership as Argentinean chauvinist and domineering. In April 2004 these tensions came to a head and a split occurred.

Would a greater degree of democratic centralism have averted the split, or did the split represent an underlying difference over method and program? CWG thinks that the two are necessarily related. LM, BT and Germinal, and POP, read the LOIs drive to regroupment as predatory and sought defence in their national organisations – in the case of BT its residual Franco imperio-centrism, and LM and POB their respective national Trotskyisms. These organisations had failed the test of revolutionary regroupment by means of a dynamic struggle against national chauvinism in both its imperialist and semi-colonial forms. They could not break with the root cause of the degeneration of post-war Trotskyism and formed a propaganda bloc, the Permanent Revolution Collective.

After this split in the Colledive a Liaison Committee arose out of the originators of the Collective, the LOI-CI, the CWG, along with the POR Argentina and its Brazilian fraternal group, the FT, which had begun discussions with the Collective in 2003. It met for the first time in July 2004 when several other Brazilian groups, Marxist Workers Party (POM), Marxist Trench (TM), CCR, and Workers’ Opposition (WO) also took part. Within it, the LOI-CI, CWG and FT soon formed a left pole while the POR Argentina and CRI (Revolutionary Communist International) of France formed a right pole. POM, CCR and WO represented a centre group which since July 2004 has moved left from national Trotskyism around the questions of supporting and defending the Bolivian Revolution inside the Brazilian CONLUTAS. The left pole was prepared to form a fraction in January 2005 but delayed this until December to try to bring the center into agreement with its program. The Founding Documents of the FLT are published separately in the first issue of the Fraction Newspaper,

Long Live the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction and the fight for a new World Party of Socialist Revolution!


From Class Struggle 65 Feb/March 2006

Yugoslavia: Whose side are you on? [June 1999]

We cannot understand the significance of NATO's war against Yugoslavia unless we trace the role of imperialism in the breakup of Yugoslavia as a political campaign to destroy "communism" and consolidate the post-cold war US hegemony. Without this analysis the left strays from a proletarian perspective.

The 'democratic imperialists'

On the issue of the war most of the left are moving right behind Social Democracy which has become the "new right" according to the Le Monde Diplomatique. It is no accident that Blair, Clinton, Schroeder etc are all rightwing Social Democrats. The Greens are also totally compromised by their support of the bombing. Talk of splits in Social Democracy and the Greens may become real if the war continues if the pacifist rank and file rejects their leaderships. This may restore some reformist credibility in the sense of providing a 'left cover' for the Blairite centre.

Already providing a cover for the 'new middle' is the pro-imperialist pacifist 'far left'. This sucks up to imperialism by opposing NATO bombing, yet defends imperialist intervention in some form or other in the name of Kosovo's human rights and bourgeois democracy. These include the Usec (International Viewpoint) and Rouge in Europe, and Green Left in Australia

Fundamentally these criticisms of the bombing are not unconditional opposition to imperialism, but criticism of war as a tactic in advancing human rights! Some say Serbian 'fascism' is equal to or worse than NATO imperialism (Australian Green Left Weekly, Michael Karadjis, "Chossudovsky's frame-up of the KLA").

Underlying this capitulation to 'democratic imperialism' is a Eurocentric racism which brands and demonises Slavs as backward, uncivilised etc needing to be taught a lesson by the West's moral campaign for human rights. It is no surprise that these groups tend to hate Stalinism as totally reactionary. That is, they have always backed anti-Stalinist bourgeois democratic social movements as being more progressive than the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Degenerated Workers States.

The Socialist Workers: some history

The most obvious case is the International Socialist current, often called the 'Cliffites' after their main historic leader Tony Cliff (SWO in NZ). Their hostility to Stalinism is legendary originating in a split between Shachtman and Trotsky in 1939 over the defence of the Soviet Union. Trotsky distinguished between a healthy workers' state and a degenerated workers state ruled by a Stalinist bureaucracy. This bureaucracy would have to be overthrown by a political revolution to create a healthy workers state.

Yet Trotsky subordinated the overthrow of the Stalinists to the defence of workers property against imperialism. He said that this might mean blocking with the Stalinists to defend the Soviet Union. But the Cliffites were hostile to Stalinism, and they rejected Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. They put forward instead their theory of 'state capitalism' which had no progressive features worth defending. They took the infamous double defeatist position -"neither Washington nor Moscow."

The first test of this position came in 1950 with the Korean war when the Cliffites refused to take sides in the UN/US attack on the Democratic Republic of Korea. Today in the case of Yugoslavia where capitalism has been restored the Cliffites hostility to Stalinism is still evident in the opposition to the former Stalinist Milosovic.

To call for the defeat of NATO and Milosovic in Kosovo at the same time is to take a dual defeatist position on the war, equating the two sides as equally bad.

The social base of this dual defeatist position is the petty bourgeois labour aristocracy in the imperialist states. Trotsky's original critique of Shachtman still holds. The "petty bourgeois opposition", as he called it, was adapting to the onset of the cold war which hyped-up US workers against the SU as a Stalinist dictatorship equal to Hitler's fascism. The opposition caved in to this media blitz and adopted the state capitalist position. This adaptation to anti-Stalinist public opinion is still evident today. It accounts for the Cliffites inability to withstand NATO's media campaign to demonise Serbia and Milosovic, and their call for Milosovic to get out of Kosovo when the effect of that call is to weaken Yugoslavia's defence against NATO!

Solving the National Question

On the other hand, the so-called 'ultraleft' says the national question is now wholly subordinated to the defence of Yugoslavia. For example, the ICL (Spartacists) and the Marxist Workers Group (MWG) "subordinates" the national question to the united front against imperialism as if they were separate questions. While it is correct to unconditionally oppose NATO (i.e not making the defeat of Milosovic and the defence of the KLA conditions of that stand) we cannot eliminate the national question from our programme by making it merely an effect of a future working class revolution. We have to do more than proclaim the end of the Kosovo question; we have to actively turn the national question into the class question (as we explain below).

Former Stalinists, and Trotskyist currents like the Spartacists and the MWG, take a view of the national question, which reduces it to its leadership. This misses the point of the Leninist fight to champion the national rights oppressed workers in order to win them away from their reactionary chauvinist leaderships to the struggle for socialism.

Therefore, for these tendencies, the fact that Kosovo liberation is led by the KLA which is covertly armed and trained by the US, and which now acts as the "ground troops" for NATO, disqualifies the Kosovo struggle as reactionary.

But why should the reactionary leadership disqualify the national rights of the majority? All national struggles against oppression are led by reactionary, or potentially reactionary, leaders whose interests are much closer to imperialism than those of workers and peasants. InYugoslavia, the anti-imperialist UF against NATO is led by Milosovic, who is no democrat. Yet he is no fascist. But even if he were a fascist that would still be no reason to abandon the defence of Yugoslavia.

Trotskyists defend oppressed countries from imperialism despite their reactionary leaderships. This is because imperialism is the main enemy. It creates the conditions for reactionary leaders. A victory for imperialism is always an outright defeat for workers because it allows imperialism a free hand to impose worse economic and political conditions on workers. This is why the defence of on an oppressed country in a war with imperialism is unconditional.

However, while our military bloc against imperialism is unconditional workers must maintain a political and military independence from the bourgeois leadership. This is because in the national struggle an independent working class leadership can emerge capable of replacing the bourgeois leadership and winning against imperialism by turning imperialist war into class war.

So just as we bloc militarily with Milosovic while he is fighting against NATO, the fact that the Kosovo struggle is currently misled by the KLA in league with NATO is no reason for abandoning the national rights of the majority of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Inside the UF against imperialism we fight to build workers multi-ethnic militia which can prevent ethnic violence from dividing and destroying workers unity.

It is because this 'ultraleft' current is pro-Stalinist, and tends to put its faith in Stalinist (or ex-Stalinist) bureaucrats, that it rejects national struggles led by non-Stalinist elements, and turns the struggle to build an independent revolutionary leadership into a lifeless abstraction. It fails to see that the while the Kosovo national question has to be subordinated to the Yugoslav national defence against NATO, nevertheless inside the anti-imperialist UF, Kosovo has to be raised in order to create the conditions for workers internationalism. Without that internationalism there can be no socialist revolution capable of resolving all national questions by a free choice of peoples to form Socialist Republics within wider Federations.

Revolutionary dialectics

Our position is neither of these flipflops. The clearest way to understand revolutionary politics is to follow the class line of dialectics. It is no accident that Trotsky saw dialectics as the key to socialist revolution and the abandonment of dialectics as the sure evidence of capitulation to bourgeois ideology and abstaining from the leadership of the proletariat. Once again, imperialist war becomes the crucial test of the ability of Trotskyists to understand the class line.

As Trotsky taught us, imperialism represents the main capitalist enemy with the power to set-up and destroy whole nations by economic, political and military means. Therefore we must subordinate our struggle against any given national bourgeoisie to a united front against imperialism. But since the national bourgeoisie are ultimately serving the interests of imperialism, only a working class opposition to imperialism can ensure the defeat of both.

Thus, in the case of the current war, while we subordinate the Kosovo question to the defence of Yugoslavia, we subordinate both to the building of an international working class opposition that can win a victory over imperialism and allow the free development of national rights within the framework of a Federation of Socialist Republics.

We can see that imperialism has successfully divided and ruled the former Yugoslav Federation of degenerated workers states. It has restored capitalism and imposed -IMF austerity programmes. And it has promoted former Stalinists or fascists as ultranationalist bourgeois leaders all bent on grabbing territory and ethnically cleansing any opposition. Any imperialist intervention, military or 'humanitarian', as we have seen in many places as well as Yugoslavia, cannot defend national or human rights, and only strengthens the hand of reaction. It is designed to set up compliant client mini-states of imperialism as "Mafia republics", or military bases as part of the strategy to partition and exploit the resources of Central , South and East Asia.

Because of imperialism's divide and rule tactic we are on the side of oppressed nations. We are for the unconditional right to self-determination of any oppressed people which democratically expresses this right. However, we do not support the reactionary leaderships of independence movements, or its imperialist backers, since this the opposite of self-determination.

So while we unconditionally defend Yugoslavia against NATO and the KLA, we also call for the right of Kosovars to self-defence against Yugoslav repression. This right has to be raised along with the demand for multi-ethnic militias capable of uniting workers against repression on all sides.

We do not call for Independence for Kosovo now because that would mean a victory for the KLA. Not because it has got its arms and supplies from imperialism, but because it has accepted the imperialist strings attached to these- that is, support of NATO bombing Yugoslavia to make Kosovo free!

Against US domination of the whole Balkan region, Serbian, Kosovar Albanian, Albanian, Croatian etc., self-determination can only result from the united Yugoslav workers overcoming the imperialist divide and rule strategy of fomenting ethnic chauvinism and removing their ultranationalist leaders to create a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Balkans.

But this will only happen during the unconditional defence of Yugoslavia where the bourgeois misleaders will be shown to be on the side of imperialism not the workers of Yugoslavia. Milosovic cannot defend Yugoslavia and will do a deal, probably brokered by Russia, another US semi-colonial dependency desperate for IMF funds, for the partition of Kosovo under UN "peacekeeping troops". The KLA and the Albanian bourgeoisie in the pay of the US have already done their deal - and the price for ordinary ethnic Albanians is bombing, displacement and chaos.

Such deals are a major defeat for Yugoslav, Kosovar, and all Balkan workers, as well as workers everywhere, as they legitimise a NATO/UN "hardcop-softcop" routine to intervene at will in any oppressed country on the pretext of defending 'human rights'.

Therefore, it is necessary to actively call for workers to unite across ethnic lines as the only way that Yugoslavia can be truly defended. This internationalism must be taken up by workers in the NATO countries following the example of Italian and Greek workers.

The main enemies are at home!

Turn Imperialist war into civil war!

From Class Struggle No 27 May-June 1999

Declaration of the Proletarian Faction of the LRCI: 1995

This statement contains the main arguments fo the Proletarian Faction formed within Workers Power NZ, a section of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), in July 1995. It documents the development an a factional struggle over the reversion to right-centrism of the LRCI on the question of capitalist restoration, Bosnia etc. Fundamentally the struggle revealed a divergence in method between our conception of dialectics and the League's impressionism. Some of the documents referred to are also in the CWG or LCMRCI archives on this site. Those which are not can be obtained by emailing CWG.

This statement is an updated and extended version of the earlier statement "For a Proletarian Faction" dated the 18 June 1995. Despite the clear differences between the method, theory and programme of the faction and that of the LRCI, a common response was to ridicule the faction statement as "a joke", "not serious", not having a "sufficiently different programme" to justify a faction. Faction members therefore undertook to produce a much more detailed statement to make it clear to those who have difficulty understanding where the Faction differs from the LRCI, precisely what our differences are, and why they exist.

Introduction.

Like the rest of the post-war Trotskyist left, the LRCI has failed to break decisively from centrism. "Centrism is the name applied to that policy which is opportunist in substance and which seeks to appear as revolutionary in form. Opportunism consists of a passive adaptation to the ruling class and its regime, to that which already exists, including, or course, the state boundaries. Centrism shares completely this fundamental trait of opportunism, but in adapting itself to the dissatisfied workers, centrism veils it by means of radical commentaries". ["Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads" Trotsky, Writings, 39-40. p.54.]It moved left from centrism in the 1970's to produce an apparently Trotskyist analysis of the degeneration of the Fourth International [FI] and the Degenerate(d) Workers' States [dws] in the early 1980's.Specifically The Death Agony of the FI and The Degenerated Revolution published in 1981 and the Trotskyist Manifesto published in 1989. However, by the late 1980's, as a small international tendency of around 100, it along with the rest of the left was subjected to the massive reactionary pressures of imperialist crisis and the collapse of the DWS's. The LRCI's Trotskyist "orthodoxy" was shown to be hollow.Its method is devoid of dialectics. Its failure to learn the lessons of the collapse of the FI meant that its break from the Cliffites was incomplete and that rather than developing a revolutionary response to the crisis of Stalinism, the LRCI collapsed back into centrism.

Succumbing to its isolation from the class struggle, and the pressure of democratic counter-revolution, a growing gap between theory and practice has arisen. While the LRCI pronounces orthodox Trotskyist positions on method, political economy and the restoration of capitalism in the DWS's, in reality it has a one-sided abstracted Trotskyism which argues for a "revolutionary period" since 1989 and still-existing "moribund workers states". These upbeat historical abstractions coexist with and cover a passive propaganda role in the class struggle which is evidenced by the League's capitulation to the "progressive" nature of democratic imperialism.

The events of this period are every bit as momentous as those after WW2, if not more so. According to the LRCI the collapse of the workers'states would be every bit at catastrophic as the events of the 1930's. As such the end of the workers' states would constitute the supreme test of Marx's dialectical method. But the LRCI has failed to survive the test. Like the centrist FI after the Second World War, the League's inability to recognise the end of the Workers's states and the nature of the period as counter-revolutionary, demonstrates that it has become disoriented by events and liquidated its role as a revolutionary vanguard. That this should have happened comes as no surprise to us, given the history of our relations with the LRCI.

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