This pamphlet contains the text of two reports adopted by the DSP National Committee which provide an outline of some of the results of this process of rethinking.

The first is a report adopted by the DSP National Committee in October 1984, in which Jim Percy, then the national secretary of the party, outlines the DSP leadership’s criticisms of Trotskyism as a distinct ideological and political current in the international working-class movement. The second is a report adopted by the DSP National Committee in August 1985, in which Doug Lorimer motivated the decision to disaffiliate from the Fourth International.

This report has two purposes. The first is to give an assessment of the 12th World Congress of the Fourth International, which was held in the last week of January and the first week of February this year. And the second is to explain the motivation behind the decision taken by the National Executive on June 27 to recommend to this National Committee meeting that our party cease its affiliation to the Fourth International.

“When the ‘Socialist’ leaders entered a bourgeois Cabinet, they invariably proved to be figureheads, puppets, screens for the capitalists, instruments for deceiving the workers,” Lenin wrote in 1917.¹

And when they have outlived their usefulness, it might be added, they are generally tossed aside like so many squeezed lemons.