Open Letter to the British Section of the Fourth International¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Ted Grant delivers a polemical obituary for the British section of the Fourth International, arguing that the organisation under Gerry Healy’s leadership has collapsed as a revolutionary tendency. The diagnosis rests on three interrelated failures: theoretical capitulation to Tito-Stalinism, a liquidationist policy inside the Labour Party, and the imposition of a bureaucratic regime that destroyed internal democracy.
Grant’s central theoretical claim is that the post-war expansion of Stalinism—into Eastern Europe, China, and Yugoslavia—constituted an unforeseen historical development that the Fourth International’s pre-war prognosis had failed to anticipate. Stalinism, he argues, emerged not merely as a Russian bureaucratic deformity but as a mass Bonapartist tendency capable of establishing deformed workers’ states with genuine mass support. The International Secretariat and the Healy leadership, rather than grappling with this new reality theoretically, performed a 180-degree volte-face: having previously denounced Eastern Europe and China as capitalist, they now embraced Tito’s Yugoslavia as a healthy workers’ state. Grant attacks this as a crude syllogism—Stalinism could not make revolution, Stalinism made revolution, therefore it is not Stalinism—which he dismisses as theoretically bankrupt. He insists that Tito’s regime remains fundamentally Stalinist: totalitarian, based on “socialism in one country,” manoeuvring between imperialism and the Moscow bloc, and reproducing the same conditions that produced the Russian degeneration. The break with Moscow, Grant argues, was forced on the Yugoslav bureaucracy and produced no fundamental change in principles; the Fourth International must support Yugoslav national self-determination against Great Russian chauvinism without underwriting Tito’s political regime.
The second charge concerns the group’s work inside the Labour Party. Grant documents a pattern of accommodation to reformist and Stalinist fellow-travellers through the Socialist Fellowship and the paper Socialist Outlook. The Trotskyists, he claims, provided the organisational backbone for a left-wing formation that was largely fictitious, propping up a “shadow” left wing rather than building a revolutionary nucleus. The paper’s editorial line whitewashed Stalinist foreign policy, suppressing revolutionary criticism while publishing reformist and Stalinist material. Grant contrasts this with a proper entrist approach: patient, sober criticism of all tendencies, relentless exposure of Stalinism alongside imperialism, and the preparation of cadres rather than the pursuit of organisational control for its own sake.
The third indictment is organisational. Grant details a regime of bureaucratic manipulation: conferences held in secret, documents suppressed or rewritten without acknowledgement, branches dissolved arbitrarily, expulsions on flimsy pretexts, and the imposition of monolithic discipline that demanded unanimity on pain of expulsion. He names specific victims—Percy Downey, Jimmy Deane, Sam Levy—and describes the technique of using procedural resolutions to force the minority to vote against their convictions. This, he argues, is Stalinist monolithism, not Bolshevism.
The appeal is for a break to preserve the theoretical heritage of Trotskyism through patient, democratic work inside the Labour movement, rejecting the neo-Stalinist path and the organisational methods that have reduced the group to a “shambles.”