The Socialist Labour League, India, which is in solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International, unanimously declares its agreement with the resolutions of the second plenum of the ICFI.
The Socialist Labour League fully endorses the struggle waged by the majority sections of the International Committee against the renegade clique of Healy, Banda and Slaughter who, through their attacks on the political and theoretical foundations of the ICFI, sought to subordinate the vanguard of the international working class to Stalinism, Social Democracy and the national bourgeoisie and thereby to imperialism itself.
In a matter of 12 months since the renegades split from the ICFI, the class basis of all these tendencies has been revealed in such a way that the connection between these renegades and the interests of the Stalinists, the Social Democrats and the national bourgeois agents of imperialism, has been brought into the open in the class struggle. M. Banda, the right-hand man of Healy, has become a full-blown Stalinist and a virulent anti-Trotskyist. S. Michael, the so-called secretary of Healy’s “International Committee,” and his Greek WRP have entered into popular front alliances with Stalinists, radical bourgeois parties and the governing bourgeois PASOK party itself in Greece.
On the other hand, Cliff Slaughter’s and Simon Pirani’s faction’s supporters in Peru, the Liga Comunista, have supported the government of Alan Garcia, characterizing it as the product of the confluence of the proletariat, the peasantry and the native bourgeoisie, just before it carried out the bloody massacre of the Sendero Luminoso prisoners. After this massacre they totally surrendered their banner to the Sendero Luminoso and completed their rejection of the leading role of the proletariat.
Slaughter himself has now initiated an international campaign to unite all the petty bourgeois forces who oppose the class independence of the working class. All these tendencies now grovel before the Soviet and Chinese Stalinist bureaucracies. They have now “admitted” that the decisive factor in the world socialist revolution is the nationalized property relations in the Soviet Union and China. They thereby openly repudiate Trotsky’s historic break from the Stalinist faction in 1923.
The basis of their attack on Security and the Fourth International is their capitulation to Stalinism and its revisionist agencies in order to carry out a regroupment with these forces. They now completely oppose the exposure of imperialist and Stalinist police agents who worked to destroy the cadre of the ICFI.
The split in the ICFI is equally as decisive as the split in the Fourth International in 1953. Without carrying through this split, the Trotskyist movement cannot fight to establish the class independence of the proletariat from the domination of the treacherous counterrevolutionary agencies of imperialism in the working class movement.
It is only by a thorough grounding of the SLL on all the lessons of this split and on the entire history of the ICFI that the SLL would be built as the party of the proletariat of the Indian subcontinent.
The SLL struggles to establish the party of the Indian proletariat. In this struggle it bases itself on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which pointed out that in the backward countries all the unresolved and burning tasks of the democratic revolution can be achieved only through the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. The SLL at all times will fight for the class independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie and also from petty bourgeois populist radicalism. To lead the multimillioned downtrodden peasantry and the many oppressed nationalities in India, the working class must above all establish its own political independence. It is only on this basis that a genuine workers’ and peasants’ alliance can be forged to overthrow the yoke of imperialism and its national bourgeois agents.
After 39 years of rule of the national bourgeoisie, India still remains under the chains of imperialism. It has not achieved national unification. Dozens of oppressed nationalities are still struggling to establish their right of self-determination. Moreover the national bourgeoisie has worked might and main and hand in glove with imperialism to keep the working class and the toiling masses divided through religio-communal diversions.
The completion of the democratic revolution, i.e., the liberation of the multi-millioned peasantry, the right of self-determination for the oppressed nations, achievement of national and language equality, abolition of the caste system, the industrialization of the countryside and the ending of imperialist-instigated partition, is unthinkable without the struggle to overthrow the rule of the national bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The working class in its struggle to overthrow the imperialist yoke and its national bourgeois agencies must advance hand in hand with a socialist policy, a thoroughly worked out democratic program to cut across the various attempts by the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie to keep the working class and the toiling masses tied to the various forms of communalism and radicalism. This also means a ruthless struggle against all varieties of Stalinists in India, which are the main defenders of the 1947 imperialist setup.
The SLL in the coming period will elaborate a perspective for the working class to achieve its historical goal. We intend to submit it to the third plenum of the ICFI. The main task before us is to win the most class conscious sections of the Indian proletariat to the program of Trotskyism and to prepare the launching of the Indian section of the ICFI. Before elaborating various tactics in relation to winning over workers from the Communist Parties and the vanguard elements of the working class to the SLL, we understand that it is necessary for a thoroughgoing assimilation of the lessons of the Trotskyist movement. Thus we will hold a series of basic lectures in the main proletarian centers of India to put forward the perspectives of the ICFI. We also will produce our newspaper regularly on a monthly basis. The character of the paper in these initial stages would be determined by the above tasks and it would contain more theoretical and historical material to clarify and educate the most advanced sections of the workers. We pledge to work in collaboration with the ICFI to establish the Indian section of the ICFI in the coming period.