Letter to the OCRFI and the OCI
from Spartacist No. 22, Winter 1973-74 15 January
1973
Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth
International; and Organisation Communiste Internationaliste
Dear Comrades,
At the Third National Conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. we
held a major discussion on the Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of
the Fourth International (OCRFI), based on our translations from the October
1972 issue of La Correspondance Internationale containing the basic
documents and discussion from your international conference of July 1972. We
were also guided by the reports of our comrades Sharpe and Foster of their
discussions last summer with comrade DeM. of the OCI.
We give serious attention to the OCRFI because we note that some
of the steps that it has undertaken go in the direction of resolving the
impasse which has existed between the SL/U.S. and the International Committee
(IC) since November 1962, and the acute hostility between us after the April
1966 IC Conference in London. We are in agreement with the stated goal of the
OCRFI to fight on the program of the Fourth International to reconstruct a
democratic-centralist world party, and to pursue this aim at present through a
regulated political discussion in an international discussion bulletin
culminating in an international conference. We note that toward this end your
July conference did indeed represent a break with the federated bloc practice
of the former IC and was indeed marked by a real and vigorous discussion such
as was absent from the Third Conference of the IC in London in 1966. Thus it
appears to us that on the face of it the OCRFI does possess one of the
essential qualities necessary for the struggle to verify the authentic
Trotskyist program and to measure by that program the political practice, in
its development, of national groups participating in the discussion. Therefore
the SL/U.S. have come to the conclusion that it is part of our duty as
internationalists to seek to participate in this discussion.
We note that we fully meet the formal requirement for admission to
participation in your discussion process as stated in the resolution, "On the
Tasks of the Reconstruction of the Fourth International," i.e., we
"state [our] will to fight on the program of the Fourth International to
reconstruct the leading center, which [we] agree does not yet exist." (see our
1963 resolution, "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth
International," and later documents). We are unable to request more than
simple admission to the discussion, rather than admission to the Organizing
Committee of the discussion, because of our programmatic differences,
unclarities about or simple unfamiliarity with views held by members of the
Organizing Committee. Since the Organizing Committee also intends to work
toward the construction of national sections of the Fourth International, we
can hardly participate in such activities given this programmatic
ambiguity.
In our view, the preliminary purpose of a discussion such as that
envisaged by the OCRFI must be to crystallize a series of decisive specific
programmatic demands analogous to the concrete points defining revolutionary
Marxist principle set forth by Trotsky in the 1929-33 period as the basis for
rallying forces from the scattered and politically diverse milieu of
oppositional communists.
Therefore we should like to list some of the issues which appear
to us to pose differences or central ambiguities between our views and those
expressed by the OCRFI or which have been advanced by the OCI. The importance
that we attach to these points is that if unresolved they threaten the
crystallization of a bona fide and disciplined Trotskyist world movement and
center. Therefore from our present understanding these are topics which merit
particular discussion.
(1) United Front: We differ with the conception of
the "strategic united front" as practiced by the OCI and as set forth in "For
the Reconstruction of the Fourth International" (especially Section IX, "Fight
for Power, Class United Front, Revolutionary Parties") in La Verité
No. 545, October 1969 and in the general political resolution of the OCRFI.
In terms of the OCIs work in France, our position has been elaborated in
Workers Vanguard No. 11, September 1972. We believe that we share with
the first four Congresses of the Communist International the view that the
united front is essentially a tactic used by revolutionists "to set the base
against the top" under those exceptional conditions and decisive opportunities
in which the course of proletarian political life has flowed outside its normal
channels. Comrade Trotsky heavily elaborated on this conception over the German
crisis of 1929-33 and also in his discussions with SWP leaders in 1940
regarding an approach by the SWP to the Communist Party U.S.A.
The united front is nothing more than a means, a tactic, by
which the revolutionary party, i.e. its program and authority, can in times of
crisis mobilize and then win over masses (at that time supporters of other
parties) by means of concrete demands for common action made to the reformist
organizations. Any other interpretation must base itself on a supposed latent
revolutionary vanguard capacity within the reformist or Stalinist parties
themselves--a central proposition of Pabloism.
The aim of the united front must be to embed the revolutionary
program in the masses. In the same way, in the highest expression of the united
front, the soviets, the condition for their conquest of power is the ascendancy
of the revolutionary program. Any form of fetishism toward the mere form of
united fronts or soviets (or for that matter toward trade unions or factory
committees) means abdicating as revolutionists, because at bottom it is the
dissolution of the vanguard party into the class through the substitution of
such forms (and other politics!) for the role of the revolutionary party. This
is not Leninism but at best a variant of Luxemburgism. One of Lenins
greatest achievements in counterposing the revolutionary vanguard to the
reformists was to transcend the Kautskyian conception of "the party of the
whole class." To place emphasis upon some mass form at the expense of the
vanguard party would be to smuggle back in the Kautskyian conception.
When erstwhile revolutionary forces are qualitatively weak in
comparison to mass reformist or Stalinist parties it is, in ordinary
circumstances, equally illusory either to make direct "united front" appeals to
the large formations or to advocate combinations among such large forces (when
Trotsky called for the united front between the SPD and KPD he believed that
the latter still had a revolutionary potential).
Certainly the tactics appropriate to a full-fledged revolutionary
party cannot be mechanically assigned to a grouping qualitatively lacking the
capacity to struggle to take the leadership of the class. However, the
differences in functioning are in the opposite direction from those projected
by the OCI. To the extent that the revolutionary tendency must function as a
propaganda league, the more it must stress the presentation of its full
program. As Trotsky noted, in the first instance Bolshevism is built upon
granite foundations, and maneuvers can only be carried out in a principled
fashion upon that foundation. The united front of the working class, of course,
is the maneuver on the grand scale.
(2) Bolivian POR: We do not believe that the
PORs participation in the émigré Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialist Front (FRA) fell from the skies. We agree with the OCI and the
OCRFI resolution that the FRA--created following the coup of the rightist
general Banzer, incorporating elements of the "national bourgeoisie" including
General Torres--is a popular front and not the continuation of the Popular
Assembly, which may have possessed the essential formal prerequisites to be a
proletarian soviet pole in opposition to the earlier regime of the leftist
general Torres. It appears to us that in the period of the Torres regime the
best that can be said of the POR is that it subordinated the development of the
vanguard party to that of the Popular Assembly, i.e. subordinated the
revolutionary program to an ill-defined and vacillating collection of left
nationalist and Stalinist political prejudices. Given the default of
revolutionists, the Popular Assembly necessarily concretely possessed a core of
Menshevist acquiescence to the "national bourgeoisie." For further elaboration,
see Workers Vanguard No. 3. In our estimation the PORs earlier
policy, which the OCRFI resolution emphatically supports, is an embodiment of
the erroneous conception of a "strategic united front" and demonstrates
the resulting subordination of the vanguard organization to the mass
organization, in this case to the Popular Assembly.
Prolonged periods of repression there have severely limited our
knowledge of or contact with the Bolivian POR, but it appears to us on the
basis of available evidence that the organization has played a
characteristically centrist role at least as far back as the revolutionary
upheaval in 1952.
(3) Stalinism: We note that in the past the OCI has
tended to equate the struggle against imperialism with the struggle against
Stalinism, e.g. the slogans advanced at the 1971 Essen Conference. The general
Political Resolution submitted by the OCI and adopted by the OCRFI takes this
equation one step further when it denies the "double nature" of the Stalinist
bureaucracy, writing of it simply as "the organism of the bourgeoisie within
the working-class movement." Perhaps the OCI has been led to this false
formulation through a simplistic linear extension of the true and valuable
insight that the class struggles of the workers cut across the "Iron
Curtain."
To us, and we believe to Trotsky, the Stalinist bureaucracy has a
contradictory character. Thus in 1939 it conciliated Hitler and
undermined the defense of the Soviet Union. But beginning in 1941 it fought
(badly!) against the Hitlerite invasion. Thus our wartime policy was one of
revolutionary defensism toward the Soviet Union, i.e., to fight against the
imperialist invader and to overthrow the bureaucracy through political
revolution, with by no means the least aim being to remove the terrible
bureaucratic impediment in that fight. In the Indochinese war the role of the
Hanoi bureaucracy, and our attitude toward it and the tasks of the Vietnamese
proletariat, are essentially the same.
In the SWPs 1953 factional struggle, the Cannon-Dobbs
majority sought to defend itself against the Cochran-Clarke Pabloist minority
by putting forth a position (similar to that of the OCRFI), that the Stalinist
bureaucracy is "counter-revolutionary through and through and to the core."
Since this was a possibility truly applicable only to capitalist restorationist
elements, in their most extreme form either fascist or CIA agents, the SWP
majority was compelled to commit a host of political blunders in attempting to
defend its formulation; and in fact this position, along with Cannons
advocacy of federated internationalism, represented departures from Trotskyism
which helped undermine the revolutionary fiber of the SWP.
Also in this connection we note the OCIs analysis of Cuba In
La Verité No. 557, July 1972. The OCIs refusal to draw the
conclusion from its analysis--which until that point parallels our own--that
Cuba, qualitatively, is a deformed workers state indicates the potential
departure from the Leninist theory of the state in favor of a linear, bourgeois
conception as of a thermometer which simply and gradually passes from
"bourgeois state" to "workers state" by small increments without a qualitative
change. Such a methodology is a cornerstone of Pabloism. According to this
conception, presumably the reverse process from "workers" to "bourgeois" state
by small incremental shifts could be comparably possible. Trotsky correctly
denounced this latter idea as "unwinding the film of reformism in reverse." We
note however that the OCI appears inconsistent on the characterization of the
Cuban state; "The Tasks of Rebuilding the Fourth International" (in La
Correspondance Internationale, June 1972, page 20) calls for the
"unconditional defense of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, of workers
conquests in Eastern Europe, of the revolutionary war in Vietnam...."
(4) On the Youth: We note that the relation of the
OCI to the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme is unprecedented in the
history of Leninist practice and, in fact, represents a catering to
petty-bourgeois dual vanguardist sentiment in the student milieu. We also
oppose the subsidiary concept of a non-Trotskyist "Revolutionary Youth
International" put forward at the Essen Conference in July 1971. The
revolutionary youth movement must be programmatically subordinate and formally
organizationally linked to the vanguard party, which encompasses the historic
experience of the proletariat. Unless this is the case, student and youth
militants can never transcend petty-bourgeois radicalism which at crucial times
the proletarian vanguard will find counterposed to itself.
(5) Violence and the Class Line: We strongly oppose
the OCIs stated willingness to use the bourgeois state apparatus--the
courts--to mediate disputes in the working-class movement. In addition, the
SL/U.S. is unalterably opposed to the use of physical force to suppress the
views of other working-class tendencies where that is the central issue, such
as the OCIs forcible prevention of the distribution of leaflets by the
IKD at the July 1971 Essen Conference. We are not pacifists, and fully
recognize the right of self-defense by ourselves or anyone else in the
socialist and labor movements to protect meetings and demonstrations from
physical assault and to protect individual militants from terroristic attack.
Taken all together, our view flows from the proposition that the greatest free
play of ideas within the workers movement strengthens the position of
revolutionists and enhances the possibility for united class action.
Conversely, it is the reformists and Stalinists--the labor lieutenants of
capital--who most characteristically employ violence and victimization within
the movement.
(6) International Committee: The OCRFI resolution,
"On the Tasks of the Reconstruction of the Fourth International," states that,
starting in 1966, the SLL "started down the same path which the SWP had
previously taken." But further on, the resolution deplores the "explosion of
the IC caused by the SLL," on the grounds that this latest split "aggravates
the dispersion" which began in 1952. We consider that organizational forms
should correspond to political realities. We strongly opposed the break by the
SLL ("IC") with us in 1962 because of its apparently mainly organizational
character. Only after the very sharp rupture at the 1966 London Conference, and
especially in the several years following when the SLL piled up a series of
major political differences with us, were we able to appreciate that the
SLLs desire in 1962 to make a rapprochement to the SWP then (to which we
were willing to acquiesce but not agree with) was an expression of a
fundamental political difference.
The SLLs break with us in 1962 was, however, part of a real
struggle within the American group. The 1971 SLL-OCI break seems to have been
but a separation of bloc partners without visible repercussions within either
group--hence without struggle however unclear.
At bottom, differing estimations of the split in the IC may
reflect the linguistically slight but nonetheless real differences between the
OCIs "For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International" and the
SLs "For the Rebirth of the Fourth International." Our slogan implies
that a very fundamental process must be gone through; that it is not possible
simply to fit together existing bits and pieces, perhaps with a little chipping
here or there, in order to put the edifice together again.
Since the SL/U.S. has itself already had a ten-year history with
the IC, we cannot simply approach the OCRFI discussions as if the previous
experience between main elements in the OCRFI who had been part of the former
IC and ourselves did not exist. Therefore we must review that past experience
since it conditions our approach to the OCRFI.
Our views on the development of the IC since 1966 are set forth
initially in Spartacist No. 6 (June-July 1966) on the London 1966
Conference and our expulsion; in the article on the Healy-Wohlforth current in
Spartacist No. 17-18 (August-September 1970); in Spartacist No.
20 (April-May 1971) which is a summary of political and organizational
developments since 1966; and in Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)
on the SLL-OCI split. As you will note from these materials, from the time we
first became aware of it at the London Conference, we protested the absence of
democratic centralism in the IC.
We believe that one of the necessary tests of genuine
revolutionists is the demonstrated capacity to even ruthlessly undertake
self-criticism. The "International Committee" dominated by the SWP from 1954 to
1963 and by the SLL from 1963 to 1971 was always partly fictitious and partly a
formalization of blocs of convenience by essentially national organizations.
This demands explanation by those who would not simply repeat their previous
experience. It is not enough to pass over the last eighteen years with the
promise that from now on things will be done differently.
We were definitively expelled from the Healyite international
conglomeration in 1966 at the very time the OCRFI pinpoints as the beginning of
the SLLs downhill slide. We believe there is a relationship. Evidently as
part of the OCIs attempt to remain in a common bloc with the SLL, and
perhaps in part through ignorance of our real positions, the OCI has over the
years projected upon the SL/U.S. a series of positions. Not only do we not
hold, nor have we ever held, these views, but most of them are the exact
opposite of our views. For example, the OCI asserted that we believe in the
"family of Trotskyism" even though at the 1966 London Conference our delegation
was struck by the aptness of an OCI speakers statement "there is no
family of Trotskyism" and our speaker specifically quoted that observation
approvingly, as was reported in Spartacist No. 6 and many times since.
In the "Statement by the OCI" of 1967 on the IC, reference is repeatedly made
to a "VO-Robertson bloc" and the general conclusion drawn that "the struggle
against Robertson is fully identified with the struggle against Pabloism. His
positions join those of the SWP and the United Secretariat where they are not
those of Pablo." The OCI in similar terms apologized to the SLL for the
invitiation of an SL/U.S. observer to the Essen Conference.
The SL/U.S. was aware from 1962 on that the OCI tendency was not
to be equated with the SLL, and after our expulsion from the London Conference
we continued to note the difference (for example in Spartacist No.
17-18, in discussing Healys attempted rapprochement with the United
Secretariat, we wrote of the Healy-Banda group "and their politically far
superior but internationally quiescent French allies, the Lambert group." We
also knew through private sources that at least since 1967 the Wohlforth group
internally had been conducting a vigorous campaign to discredit the OCI.
Our characterization of the OCI as politically superior to the SLL
was based on a series of political positions which the OCI held in common with
us in counterposition to the views of the SLL. Recent OCI polemics against the
SLL (e.g. La Verité No. 556) note the OCIs objection to
several key SLL positions which we had also opposed: the SLLs willful use
of "dialectics" as a mystification to hide political questions; the SLLs
chronic tailending of Stalinism in Vietnam; the SLLs enthusing over the
Chinese "Red Guards"; the SLLs notion of a classless "Arab Revolution";
the SLLs unprincipled approach to the United Secretariat-SWP in 1970. We
also considered of importance the OCIs objection to the SLL position that
Pabloist revisionism had not organizationally destroyed the Fourth
International. The OCIs position on this question appears to correspond
to the view we have consistently held and upon which we spoke insistently at
the 1966 London Conference.
Moreover, we have always taken a very serious attitude toward the
OCI, not because of its numbers but because of its experienced senior cadres
and its continuity in the world movement. We have centered in this letter on
the presumed differences between us and the OCI, but the strengths of the OCI
have reflected themselves as well, in specific political positions, some of
which we have learned from, such as the OCIs insistence on the basic
class unity across the whole of Europe, the "Iron Curtain" notwithstanding.
Other positions as noted above we have developed in an independent but parallel
fashion. Above all, we respect the OCI for its adamant attempt to give life to
its internationalism.
That is why we patiently waited when no other option was open to
us vis-à-vis the OCI, and when we had the opportunity we have
persistently sought discussion. It was especially with the OCI in mind that in
the concluding portion of our final statement upon being expelled from the
London Conference in 1966 we stated, "If the comrades go ahead to exclude us
from this conference, we ask only what we have asked before--study our
documents, including our present draft on U.S. work before you now, and our
work over the next months and years. We will do the same, and a unification of
the proper Trotskyist forces will be achieved, despite this tragic
setback."
Recently, in the document "The Tasks of Rebuilding the Fourth
International" (which the introduction to the English edition states is
"central to [the] international discussion"), the OCI characterized the SL from
the 1966 Conference as "centrist" or "centrist-sectarian." Thus, rather than
following our documents and our ongoing work as we asked in 1966, the OCI has
simply continued to echo the SLLs avalanche of falsehood aimed at our
political obliteration. In the light of the above points, this would seem an
appropriate time for the OCI and with it the OCRFI to undertake a thorough
examination of the SLs politics.
We do not expect, and would have no confidence in, a simple
reversal of appraisal of the SL/U.S. by the OCI. Estimations of the SL/U.S. by
the groups comprising the OCRFI should be guided by two considerations. One is
the questions of general political and programmatic character such as we have
gone into above. We naturally believe that we are correct about these; but
because our views have taken shape within the American Trotskyist framework
(and during a period of enforced national isolation) we must allow that they
may be partial, and in ways which we cannot presently know. As the main
Political Report to our recent National Conference stated: "The SL/U.S.
urgently requires disciplined subordination to an international leadership not
subject to the deforming pressures of our particular national situation." (see
Workers Vanguard No. 15, January 1973) It was in this spirit that we
published our article "Genesis of Pabloism"
(Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972) which contained substantially the sum
total of our present understanding of Pabloism.
The other question, subordinate but within the framework of
essential programmatic agreement very important and perhaps contributory to
that programmatic agreement is the question of comrades internationally
understanding the concrete reality of the socialist movement in the U.S. in the
context of the evolved American labor movement and the specific configuration
of class relations in this country. There is a striking lack of correspondence
between the existing divisions within the ostensibly Marxist movements in
Europe and America so that any effort to superimpose groups in Europe on
"similar" groups in the U.S. is inappropriate. The six-months stay by
Comrade Sharpe in France was extremely helpful in bringing this point home to
us. It would be extremely clarifying for example if a representative of the OCI
could come to this country for an extended stay to examine, for example, not
only the SL/U.S. in its concrete work, but also currents such as the "Vanguard
Newsletter" of Turner-Fender, which has stood apparently closest formally to
the OCI; the International Socialists, who mainly look to Lutte
Ouvrière as their closest friends in France, but who contain
sympathizers of the OCI among them; and the other tendencies within the
American radical movement. Moreover, the trade unions as they have evolved here
should be examined in the union offices and on picket lines. More broadly,
characteristic college campuses and the reality of the National Student
Association should be investigated.
We take our commitment as internationalists seriously as a
condition for our very survival as Marxian revolutionists, and by this we mean
neither diplomatic non-aggression pacts with groups in other countries nor the
Healyite fashion of exporting subservient mini-SLLs. As one of the results of
what is for us precipitous growth domestically, we are acquiring the
resources--human and material--to undertake for the first time on a sustained
basis our international obligations.
It is in the context of our need for a disciplined International
and our firm commitment to fight to bring about the programmatic agreement
which forms the only basis for such an International, that we wish to
participate in the discussion opened by the OCRFI.
We are enclosing copies of all our documents referred to in this
letter. Should we be accepted into the discussion organized by the OCRFI, in
order to familiarize comrades internationally with our views, we would like to
submit three documents initially to the discussion: (1) this letter, (2)
our delegations remarks to the 1966 London
Conference, (3) our Statement of Principles.
Fraternally, Political Bureau Spartacist League/U.S. cc.
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