Response to Healy criticism:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/28/heal-s28.html

1. This article ignores the burning question in everyone’s mind: what would happen if the Marxist method was not applied to the movement? We need to develop and study Marxist theory in order to maintain the discipline and morality of the revolutionary leadership. Without the rigorous work required to develop theory, a petty-bourgeois leadership could develop using money alone, i.e. the commodification of the revolution. The development of theory is impossible through practice alone but indispensable when in practice all progress is blocked. Progress continues in theory if not in practice.
2. A successful development of the Marxist method requires a democratic process. The leadership should bring the theory to the people not unlike Moses delivering the Ten Commandments. Those ideas should give the advanced workers around the party and the working class in general the procedural tools they need to overcome their oppression at the hands of the bourgeois ideologist who would control the socialist party with money alone. To paraphrase Bismarck, the revolution can only succeed through blood and iron in service of the democratic process.
3. “Rejection of dialectics” presupposes the existence of a dialectic. An unbiased observer familiar with the dialectic would see no evidence of the existence of a dialectic in the practice of the party. The absence of the dialectic is an effect of a conscious process by the ruling class to eliminate the democratic process from the revolutionary movement. When no dialectic exists, we have not a rejection but an absence.
4. Materialist philosophy tells us the absence of a dialectic results from the absence of material processes such as financial oversight, a rotating leadership subject to recall, and protections for the rights of factions and the membership in general from arbitrary, or undialectical, decision-making.
5. Vandreier quotes North: “In this objective exposition of the real historical development, Trotsky demonstrated the bankruptcy of the metaphysical mode of thinking, which, proceeding from formal logic, rigidly counter-posed the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution…”
   • In denying the existence of a Nanobureaucracy, the Nanobureaucracy follows the exact method of the bourgeoisie who deny the existence of class differentiation under capitalism. In their formal logic, denying the reality excludes it from objective processes. We simply assume every bourgeois assumption and ignore every proletarian refutation however clear they be.
6. As Trotsky argued, the opposite is also true: the socialist revolution cannot be accomplished without democratic forms of rule, at the very least within the party and the Fourth International itself. In confirming our belief in the presently nonexistent dialectic, we resurrect it, we give it its real, bodily form as the Democratic Power Faction of the Fourth International. Thanks to the Democratic Power Faction, the dialectic can be seen for what it is: one single law that controls the entire physical world. The total absence of a dialectic is the organizational reflection of an atrocity against the human rights of the revolutionary leadership for the benefit of the Nanobureaucratic ownership.
7. We can trace back this state of affairs to the inherent bias in Trotsky’s own theory based on Lenin’s false assumption that Left Communism had been vanquished by Bolshevism. This false assumption comes from the economic conflict of interest of state (not only party) leaders creating revolutionary theory. A head of state who creates revolutionary theory cannot help but ignore even his own theory that the state oppresses and interferes in the development of a revolutionary class orientation. Lenin acknowledged that a real revolutionary Marxist party would put in place a state that withered away by design, and yet the Bolshevik state acted in quite the opposite manner, removing elected leaders for party appointments, using the secret police against workers’ leaders, and defending Stalin’s right-wing positions on the state over the objections of Marxists like Shliapnikov and Kollontai. This Trotskyist defense of Stalin (Trotsky rejected Stalin’s multiple resignations, at least one by his own admission.) ruined the Workers’ Opposition (and the Democratic Centralism faction) politically using police state tactics while forcing them into terrorist assaults on the state, killing Lenin in the process.
8. Trotsky’s own long-term wife, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova who was present during his assassination, later turned to the beliefs of the state capitalists. She could not ignore Trotsky’s own history of state-capitalist-hating prejudice, something she alone without him would later have to reject. Pankhurst’s ideas had clearly outweighed Trotsky’s in her mind. He had clearly lost all territory and very many arguments as well.