https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/20/germ-s20.html

Quotes from Speech:

…leader Gerry Healy personally attended the founding conference of the BSA.

Of the two-dozen founding members who gathered in Hanover at that time—I was one of them—hardly anyone was older than 25. What attracted us to the International Committee of the Fourth International were three great issues.

In Germany, the SPD, which had formally broken with Marxism in 1959 in the Godesberg Programme

And while all other political tendencies were adapting to the national milieu, we insisted that the building of the International had priority and was a precondition for the building of the national section.

In the mid-1970s, the bourgeoisie managed to block the wave of militant labour struggles with the help of the social-democratic and Stalinist apparatuses. It launched a counteroffensive that continues to this day.

[Does not address internal conflict of the ICFI- OCI/SLL as a causative factor in the success of the counteroffensive]

Its French section, the OCI, had already broken with the International Committee in 1971.

[Other sections along with OCI.]

The Internationale Arbeiterkorrespondenz group that the OCI had built in Germany in the 1960s broke apart.

[That the OCI “built”, organizational connection only. Should say: “That represented the same political positions.”]

In all these struggles, the question of political leadership arises with great urgency. Building the ICFI and the Socialist Equality Party are the most important tasks. The future depends on the working class overthrowing capitalism.

Democratic Power Responds:

If building the SEP is unquestionably the most important task, it does not stand to reason that we must build it unquestioningly. The failure of the WRP in the 80s should prove that the reversal against the revolution of the 1970s did not happen without the help of bourgeois ideology within the ICFI itself. This means that the OCI should not bear the blame itself but the entire SLL/OCI leadership. The SLL introduced a bureaucratic organizational approach to political organization, meaning control took precedence over clarification. The OCI, having turned politically only sought to wrest control away from the SLL. This meant that as the Social Democrats and Stalinists exposed themselves as pillars of the capitalist state, the ICFI could not offer itself as the leadership of a movement for a new state.

If the party does not hold higher principles above the simple defense of party bosses, they will give up on inspiring the masses and shining a light on their struggle. The working class does not have the same privilege as the intellectual leadership to ignore its own problems or silence its own arguments. For that reason, it requires the patience and the active participation of the leadership in its problems. The methods of repression and character assassination will not bring workers forward to build mass parties but rather drive them away. The methods of defending party bosses in their exploits will not win them power but notoriety, a gas which disperses rather unites the working class as it naturally gathers in the name of humanity and the cause of justice.

Through the course of their struggle they must consciously connect their demands with the cause of socialism in order to overcome the class oppression that keeps their movements out of power. For this reason, the bureaucracy must succeed in criticizing and overcoming its own tendency towards self-limitation in order to serve as a bridge for the working class from spontaneous consciousness towards socialist participatory activity. A socialist leader takes the responsibility for the success or failure of the revolution upon himself while a bureaucrat attempts to shift the blame on to other organizations, such as “the social-democratic and Stalinist apparatuses” or such mass movements as BLM and #MeToo.