The public meeting which is being held this afternoon by the so-called Marxist Party, ostensibly to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, is a calculated provocation against the Trotskyist movement. Its political purpose is to create a bogus “Fourth International” cover for the politics of counterrevolutionary Stalinism inside the British workers’ movement.

Neither the “Marxist Party” nor its leaders Gerry Healy and Vanessa Redgrave have anything to do with the International Committee of the Fourth International, from which they were expelled two years ago for crimes against the working class.

Moreover, the International Committee was founded in 1953 to uphold the program of political revolution by the armed Soviet working class against the Kremlin bureaucracy. It has opposed all revisionist tendencies which have claimed that the Stalinists could reform themselves with their own “political revolution” and that their overthrow was not necessary.

This fundamental political principle, which is written into the founding program of the Fourth International and its International Committee, is openly attacked by Healy, Redgrave and their “Marxist Party.” However, they persist in using the label of the International Committee to provide a cover for political activities that they have worked out in consultation with the Soviet bureaucracy.

Last week, both Healy and Redgrave participated in the official Moscow celebrations of the October Revolution as special guests of the Stalinist regime.

This trip is the payoff for the open transformation of Healy and Redgrave during the past year into frenzied supporters of the present Stalinist boss, Mikhail Gorbachev.

To those who know anything at all about the history of the Soviet Union and the bloody record of Stalinist persecution of Trotskyists, the political implications of this visit are staggering.

As a man who for many years led the Trotskyist movement, Healy’s admission to Moscow could only have been arranged with the approval of the KGB, which concluded that his visit was in the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

At a time when Trotskyist activity remains illegal in the USSR, and just as Gorbachev was preparing to deliver his anniversary speech denouncing Leon Trotsky, the KGB was issuing an entry visa to Gerry Healy!

Healy did not announce his plans to visit Moscow prior to his departure. He did not explain the political purpose of his visit. He did not reveal how his trip was arranged. He did not identify with whom he met in order to obtain a visa. He did not disclose who was to pay his airfare or the cost of his Moscow accommodations.

Rather, he traveled to Moscow behind the back of the international working class as a cheerleader for the political heirs of Joseph Stalin, who to this day function as the principal accomplices of imperialism against the workers’ and national liberation movements.

Healy did not go to Moscow to denounce the Kremlin’s occupation of Afghanistan, its betrayal of the Sandinistas, its behind-the-scenes talks with the South African government, and its shameless offer to serve as a gendarme for imperialism as part of a permanent United Nation’s counterrevolutionary “peace-keeping” force.

Nor did Healy and Redgrave use the occasion to condemn the Stalinist regime’s cynical abandonment of the Palestine Liberation Organization for the sake of a deal with Israel. Their silence in the face of Moscow’s preparations for diplomatic recognition of the Zionist state is especially nauseating. For years Healy and Redgrave posed as defenders of the Palestinian people in order to obtain the unwitting assistance of the PLO for their corrupt money-making schemes in the Middle East.

The Soviet bureaucracy has welcomed Healy to Moscow because he has placed his knowledge of the inner workings of the Fourth International at the disposal of the KGB and has offered to serve as its official “Trotskyite” representative in Britain. Upon returning to Britain, his role will be to denounce genuine Trotskyists who continue to fight the criminal policies of Stalinism as “counterrevolutionaries.”

This is already indicated in the founding statement of the “Marxist Party,” dated July 18-19, 1987, which declares: “Revisionists today, for whom the world revolution and the political revolution are empty abstractions, not only fail to recognize the political revolution in the USSR, but are its bitter opponents. And in this they manifest the needs of world imperialism. In a word—anticommunism.”

That is not all: in an interview published in the September issue of the Soviet magazine Ogonyok, Redgrave made the following slanderous attack on Trotskyists:

“Sometimes I’m asked if there are enemies of perestroika in England. I consider that every upright, thinking, honest person, whoever they are, would wish perestroika success irrespective of what they know or don’t know about the Soviet Union and the way things happen in the USSR. All the same, I’d like to point out that socialists, or those who call themselves such, misrepresent the essence of perestroika and falsify it. They say ‘It’s a move to the right, it’s not socialism, it’s a trick.’

“The capitalist press prints assertions of a similar nature, but it’s easy to establish the source of these lies. Not one honest person, whether they be an actor, a scientist, a white-collar worker or a manual worker, would be biased against perestroika. The majority of people don’t believe the bourgeois definition of perestroika as a trick. The danger lies not so much in the outspoken enemies of perestroika as in the, so to speak, ‘insiders,’ those who say, ‘it’s not socialism.’ Moreover, these forces have a certain influence over the unions in England. They are guided by dogma and the habit of formalized thinking....”

Who is Redgrave kidding? Since when has the capitalist press been expressing any concern that perestroika and glasnost are undermining the interests of world socialism? Every politically literate worker and socialist intellectual knows that there is not a bourgeois government in the world that is not hailing Gorbachev’s policies and wishing him success.

Functioning as a political prostitute for the Kremlin bureaucracy, this degenerate representative of the British ruling class—who in 1985 was advancing perverted arguments in support of Healy’s “right” to sexually abuse underage female members of the party he once led—deliberately lies to the Soviet working class and blackguards the Marxist opponents of the Stalinists.

Healy and Redgrave are providing the Kremlin with a “Trotskyite” platform from which the old and infamous Stalinist lies can be hurled against the political enemies of the Kremlin bureaucracy. While applauding Gorbachev’s deals with Reagan, each of which were made at the expense of the struggles of the oppressed masses all over the world, Healy and Redgrave denounce the Trotskyists, who alone uphold the banner of world revolution against the Kremlin’s reactionary program of peaceful coexistence.

The International Committee of the Fourth International warns the working class that Healy, Redgrave and their “Marxist Party” are, in the full political sense of the words, political agents of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The entire workers’ movement in Britain and internationally should consider this organization as a semiconcealed organ of Kremlin-KGB policies. Thus, we advise the workers’ and national liberation movements to subject its activities, members and finances to the most careful scrutiny.