March 28, 1986

The CC of the Revolutionary Communist League is in receipt of the resolution passed by the CC of the Peruvian section of the ICFI at its meeting of March 9, 10 and 11, on the crisis of the IC. The RCL disagrees totally with the analysis as well as the conclusions of the CC of the LC regarding the crisis in the IC.

1. The CC of the LC does not recognize that the objective source of the crisis in the IC is the pressure of imperialism on the Trotskyist movement and that this pressure was definitively expressed by the attempt of the former leadership of the WRP, the Healy-Banda-Slaughter clique, to politically and organizationally liquidate the ICFI. It is not even mentioned in the LC resolution that the ICFI is faced with a liquidationist attack of the most fundamental kind. This dangerous indifference to the objective and political source of the crisis in the IC leads to the same liquidationist conclusions that the crisis was contained in the very formation of the IC. As the CC resolution nowhere defends the IC we fear that they themselves have entered upon this liquidationist path.

2. When the Peruvian comrades characterize the degeneration of the WRP as a “Healyite degeneration” they are indulging in politically hollow terminology in order to cover up the conscious liquidationist policy carried out by the old WRP leadership.

As it is now amply clear from M. Banda’s “27 reasons to bury the IC,” at least from 1975 onwards the Healy-Banda-Slaughter clique had been opposed to the very existence of the IC and its sections. The right-centrist line they followed in Britain compelled them to take the path of liquidating the IC. We would like to remind the Peruvian comrades that the attitude of the Healy-Banda-Slaughter clique towards every section of the IC that stood for the political independence of the working class was nothing short of perpetrating political provocations. If there had been a section of the IC in Iraq, the Healy-Banda-Slaughter clique would have supported Saddam Hussein to destroy it.

Once they realized that it was impossible for them to use the IC as a tool for their petty-bourgeois opportunist politics, the Healy clique broke away from the IC in October 1985 to be followed by the Banda-Slaughter clique three months later. Having broken from the IC, the Banda-Slaughter clique issued a public declaration that the “IC should be buried forthwith.” Since then, renegade Banda has reconciled with the LSSP leaders in his search for gravediggers to bury the IC and the RCL. They at the same time have lined up with the agent-run SWP for the same purpose.

To suggest, as the Peruvian comrades do, that we accept their documents as legitimate discussion material in the IC is to ask us to commit political suicide.

3. The assertion of the Peruvian comrades that “Healyism implies fundamental problems of strategy and methods of building the party and the international and therefore does not deal with simple tactical errors” is truly amazing. We do not consider Healy-Banda-Slaughter cliques to be leaderships directing the party on the wrong path. They are liquidators who work consciously on the basis that the existence of the International and its sections is an impediment and should be buried as they stand in the way of their petty-bourgeois course. Discussions regarding strategy and tactic are possible only with those who accept the IC and its sections. As Lenin pointed out:

“Of course, liquidationism is ideologically connected with renegacy, with the renunciation of the program and tactics, with opportunism. ... But liquidationism is not only opportunism. The opportunists are leading the party on to a wrong bourgeois path, the path of a liberal labour policy, but they do not renouce the party itself. They do not liquidate it. Liquidationism is that brand of opportunism which goes to the length of renouncing the party. It is self-evident that the party cannot exist if the members include those who do not recognize its existence.” {Collected Works, Vol. 19, Progress Publishers, p. 151)

There is neither logic nor political justification in the demand of the Peruvian comrades that the legitimacy of the founding of the FI and the IC should be reexamined because the Healy-Banda-Slaughter clique reneged. This demand is a formula to avoid the struggle against the liquidationists.

4. To state that, “The task of the IC is to organize and direct the international discussion in the struggle for the political clarification of all the sections, and not to force a rapid international regrouping on the basis of a verbal agreement with the Transitional Program or the ‘Open Letter’ of 1953” is, to say the least, thoroughly confusing. In the first place, the IC has not called for any “regrouping” with any one.

If the Peruvian comrades consider that the united offensive by the legitimate sections of the ICFI against the renegades bent on liquidating the IC and its sections, is a “regrouping” then the implication is that they themselves reject the IC.

As far as the sections of the IC are concerned, the Transitional Program of 1938, the “Open Letter” of 1953 and the political capital of the struggle against the “reunification” of the Pabloites and their great betrayal of 1964 are not some optional “aspects” of program but are the very foundations of their existence. Those who do not accept these foundations are not members of the IC.

If the Peruvian comrades demand that the IC should set aside the principles and history on which it is based in order to “direct international discussion in the struggle for the political clarification of all the sections” it is more than just an absurdity for it to demand of the IC that it should voluntarily come to a position bereft of any principle or history to be defended. That is exactly the position of the Banda-Slaughter liquidators.

5. The demand of the Peruvian comrades that Banda and Slaughter who campaign for “the burial” of the IC should be invited to the 11th congress of the IC contradicts the very existence of the IC. As Lenin said, “A party that wants to exist cannot allow the slightest wavering on the question of its existence or any agreement with those who may bury it.” (Ibid., p. 414)

On the above grounds, the CC of the RCL rejects in toto the arguments and conclusions of the Liga Comunista CC resolution.