On 1 July the leadership of the League for the Fifth International (LFI) summarily expelled 33 members, mostly from the organisation's British section, Workers Power, but also comrades based in Australia and Ireland.
Those expelled included the majority of Workers Power's trade union activists, and a substantial proportion of its leading members and regular contributors to its paper.
The supposed pretext for the expulsions consisted of "leaked" emails that discussed the possibility of leaving the organisation either prior to or during the LFl's congress later this month.
The LFI leadership issued a very lengthy public statement branding the expelled members as "petit-bourgeois dilettantes", who had succumbed to the "torpor of the labour aristocracy in Britain" and were seduced by "Chinamania".
Along with the ritualised abuse, the statement contains a number of inaccuracies and falsehoods that cannot be addressed here, but have already been answered in a statement from the expelled members (go to www.permanentrevolution.net).
The real reason for the expulsions stems from substantial political differences which had developed over two years and resulted in minority and majority factions being formed.
The expulsions marked the culmination of a long-running battle within Workers Power and the LFI, which first saw the emergence of an organised tendency in Workers Power (Britain) early last year. In March 2006, came the formation of an international faction for the first time in the history of the LF and its forerunners.
An increasingly bitter dispute had developed over perspectives since the LFI's last congress in 2003. That congress adopted what those of us now expelled had characterised as a "catastrophist" outlook on the world economy.
This view provided a justification of sorts for the notion of a global "pre-revolutionary period" characterized by capitalist stagnation and crisis. It was accompanied by a "new turn" towards mass agitation that seemed designed to feed younger members recruited through the youth group, Revolution, a diet of hyper-activism.
Under pressure from the tendency/faction the leadership retreated from some of the language of 2003, but did not discard the substance.
Increasingly, schemas replaced concrete assessments of the balance of class forces in particular countries and regions. The need for a serious analysis of imperialist globalization, the impact on the world economy of the collapse of the Stalinist states and the opening up of these regions to capitalist exploitation, the rise of China as an economic and political power, was dismissed.
In the mindset of the LFI leadership the World Social Forum/European Social Forum became the vehicle for the imminent creation of a 5th International to be formed "in months or years". Every fightback, large or small, was evidence of the new pre revolutionary period internationally.
The call for a "new workers party" became a mantra in Britain and a slogan applicable throughout Europe. Using the critical support tactic towards the Labour Party in Britain was abandoned - electoral abstention became the of indiscipline. fusions. 2006.