No to Stalinism and the Popular Front!

Build the Fourth

International!
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the
“Reorganization Conference” of the Workers Revolutionary Party

David North, Keerthi Balasuriya

•

• The International Committee of the Fourth International denounces the call issued by
the British Workers Revolutionary Party for a conference “for the reorganization of
the Fourth International.” It is a reactionary political maneuver orchestrated by a
section of the WRP leadership to carry out a unification with the right-wing centrist
Morenoite tendency in Argentina. Lacking the slightest principled content, the
unstated and hidden purpose of this merger is to provide a political cover for the
liquidation of Trotskyism into Stalinist popular frontism and in this way create the
conditions for the betrayal of the working class in Europe and Latin America.
For the Workers Revolutionary Party, the unification with the most right-wing of the Pabloite
tendencies—that of the late Nahuel Moreno in Argentina and his so-called Movimiento Al
Socialismo (MAS) and its bogus international front, the International Workers League-Fourth
International (its Spanish acronym being LIT-CI) will represent the culmination of the
calculated anti-Trotskyist course which it has pursued under the direction of Cliff Slaughter
since the split with the International Committee in February 1986.
For the last 18 months, Slaughter has exploited the disorientation and demoralization among
WRP members in the wake of the political crisis which exploded inside the organization in
October 1985 to orchestrate, step by step, the WRP’s repudiation of the founding principles
of Trotskyism and turn it into a treacherous instrument of popular front betrayals.
The International Committee has repeatedly warned that the political trajectory of the
Workers Revolutionary Party would inevitably land it in the camp of the class enemy.
Moreover, we have warned that Slaughter has been working with a political perspective
which he refused to discuss with the ICFI prior to the split and which he has kept concealed
from the WRP membership itself. Without having ever divulged his long-term plans, he has
now brought the Workers Revolutionary Party within inches of a unification with a political
party whose leaders are working inside a popular front formation with the Argentine
Stalinists.
From the standpoint of the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party, its dissolution into the
centrist swamp of Morenoism will signify an irrevocable break with Trotskyism and the rapid
transformation of this organization into an agency of imperialism.
The objective significance of such a betrayal of Marxism for the workers’ movement was
explained many years ago by none other than Cliff Slaughter:
As imperialism (not “neo-capitalism”!) moves rapidly into its worst-ever economic
and political crisis, it must desperately suck away these middle-class elements to
some centrist political force to deal with that phase of the crisis when new
masses are thrown into political struggle.

Such centrist forces cannot be sucked out of nothing as it were. Mandel is

hatching out the kind of politics to fit the bill. Of course, imperialism uses the
centrists in this way only as a short step on the road to the eventual fascist and
dictatorial repression. (Fourth International, Summer 1972, p. 215, emphasis in
the original)