The following very important essay on the history of the
Trotskyist movement after Trotsky appeared in Spartacist No. 21 (Fall
1972). We have appended an article from 1917 No. 8 (Summer 1990)
entitled Revolutionary Continuity & the Split in the Fourth
International which contains a few criticisms and some supplementary
comments.
The SWP and the Fourth International, 1946-54:
Genesis of Pabloism
The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists
travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge
in uneasy alliance in the early 1960's in an unprincipled "reunification,"
which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from
Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The "United Secretariat" which issued
out of the 1963 "reunification" teeters on the edge of an open split; the
"anti-revisionist" "International Committee" fractured last year. The collapse
of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International
provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist
international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth
International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of
the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response
of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain
while in practice abandoning the world movement.
World War II: U.S. and France
Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth international
had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the
possibility for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions
among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the
revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist
occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the
"democratic" bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe
and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures for
nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended
to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a
sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was
rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the "Proletarian Military
Policy" which called for military training under trade union control,
implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism
without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through "controlling''
U.S. imperialism's army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one
speech referring to British imperialism's armed forces as "our Eighth Army."
The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had
brought about the need for "an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a
democratic revolution." ("Three Theses," 19 October I941)
The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of
the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments
subordinated the mobilisation of the working class to the political appetites
of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced
any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the
point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist
consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories
during the "liberation" of Paris while the working masses were out on the
streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for
a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste
Internationaliste characterized the two groups:
"Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the
defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist
preoccupations, and the 'nationalism' of the masses which is only a reactionary
expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying
imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle
of its own bourgeoisie...."
"the CCI...under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of
Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the
bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses."
I. SWP ISOLATIONISM
European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially
different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The
precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate
collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the
assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American
Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the
disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and
illegalization.
Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during
the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New
York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening
of an "Emergency Conference" of the International, held 19-26 May 1940
"somewhere in the Western Hemisphere," "on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican
and Canadian sections." A rump conference attended by less than half of the
sections, the "Emergency Conference" was called for the purpose of dealing with
the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section,
which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The
meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status
as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also
adopted a "Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the
Proletariat World Revolution" written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky's death,
however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion.
At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth
International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral
country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections,
to centralise and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in
fascist-occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international
activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletins of
letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the
Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international
political organisationsa law which to this day has never been
testedalso gave the SWP a rationalization for downplaying its
international responsibilities.
The SWP's work during the war did evidence an internationalist
perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok
docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky's "Letter to
Russian Workers" in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its
merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely
heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration.
(It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate
the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed
that Cannon's telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of
the SWP's Fourth International magazine, one "Michael Cort," was one of
the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International
was part of the SWP's internationalist responsibility, and should have been a
priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.
The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially
intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal
with the post-war situation.
During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war
period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its
cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian
militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist
Party's policies of social patriotism and class peace.
Optimism and Orthodoxy
The SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant optimism about
the prospects for proletarian revolution. The 1946 SWP Convention and its
resolution, "The Coming American Revolution," projected the indefinite
continuation of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the
Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily international
character of crises and revolutions is recognised, but not the concomitant
international character of the vanguard party. The resolution in effect
makes excuses for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while
praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism: the decisive
battles of the world revolution will be fought in the advanced countries where
the means of production are highly developed and the proletariat powerful --
above all in the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the American
revolution and world capitalism will be overthrown. Profound impressionism led
the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had
emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.
The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the emergence
of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist workers parties in Europe,
the expansion of Stalinism in Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of
the Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the destruction of
capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and
China -- all these developments posed new theoretical problems for the
Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of talented
intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split and shortly thereafter
deprived of Trotsky's guidance, could not handle. The SWP's immediate response
was to retreat into a sterile "orthodoxy"' stripped of real theoretical
content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.
The 1950's brought a new wave of spontaneous working-class
struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they brought the onset of the
Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the
deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life; the relentless purge
of known "reds" and militants from the union movement, severing the SWP's
connection with the working-class movement which had taken years to build up;
the dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the SWP during the
late 1940's. The objective pressure to become a mere cheering section for
European and colonial developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal
orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.
II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE
The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement to
revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the European organizations
combined with the thorough shattering of their continuity to the earlier
period. When Trotsky in 1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth
International, the European working class, confronted with the decisive choice
of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist leadership. The task facing the
Fourth Internationalists was clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of
fascism and war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party which
would stand for proletarian internationalism in the face of the march toward
imperialist war and the social chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third
Internationals. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the conscious
vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing defeat for the class and the
"terrible disproportion between the tasks and the means." ("Fighting Against
the Stream," April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was exemplified
by the French section, which was repeatedly criticized by Trotsky and whose
petty-bourgeois "workerist" deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a
special resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth International in
1938.
The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive
struggle against fascism and war-and lost. During the course of the war and the
Nazi occupations the very rudiments of international, and even national,
coordination were destroyed. The International disintegrated into small groups
of militants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist, some heroic. The
65 French and German comrades who were shot by the Gestapo in July 1943 because
of their revolutionary defeatist fraternization and the building of a
Trotskyist cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the
internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement fighting against
insurmountable odds.
Trotskyist Cadres Decimated
In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the rudiments of
organization in Europe. The European Secretariat set up at this meeting in
Belgium included exactly one surviving member of the pre-war leadership and
largely as a result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo
(Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability as a political
leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of the International. When in June
1945 a European Executive Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World
Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most promising of the young
Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) had been killed at the hands of the
Nazis or the GPU. The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken. This
tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the imprisonment and eventual
execution of Ta Thu-tau and the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction
of the Chinese Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian
Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement and Leon
Sedov). The Europeans were apparently so starved for experienced leading cadres
that Pierre Frank (leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky denounced
as "demoralized centrists" in 1935 and expelled in 1938 for refusing to break
with the French social-democracy after the "French Turn") was enabled to become
a leader of the post-war French section.
At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of a
truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have made a great
difference. But the SWP, which should have assumed leadership in the
International throughout the war years, was sunk in its own national
preoccupations. Cannon noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately
built up Pablo's authority, even going "so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our
differences" (June 1953). The urgent responsibility of the SWP, which whatever
its deficiencies was the strongest and must experienced Trotskyist
organization, was precisely the opposite.
III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED
The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war was to
reorient its cadres and reassess the situation of the vanguard and the class in
light of previous projections. The Trotskyists' expectations of tottering West
European capitalist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle
throughout Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of Nazi state
power left a vacuum, had been confirmed. However the reformists, particularly
the Stalinist parties, reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous
working-class upsurges. Control of the French working class through the CGT
passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had controlled the CGT before the
war to the French Stalinists. Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of
the European working class and the great waves of general strikes, especially
in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy, throughout West Europe, the proletariat
did not take power and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and
solidity.
The Fourth International responded by falling back on sterile
orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these struggles had been
defeated for the immediate period:
"Under these conditions partial defeats... temporary periods of
retreat...do not demoralize the proletariat....The repeated demonstration by
the bourgeoisie of its inability to restabilize an economy and political regime
of the slightest stability offers the workers new opportunities to go over to
even higher stages of struggle.
"The swelling of the ranks of the traditional organisations in
Europe, above all the Stalinist parties...has reached its peak almost
everywhere. The phase of decline is beginning. (European Executive
Committee, April 1946)
Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the German
IKD, the SWP's Goldman-Morrow faction) were correct in noting the over-optimism
of such an analysis and in pointing out that the traditional reformist
leaderships of the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal
of militancy and struggle. Their "solution," however, was to argue for a
limitation of the Trotskyist program to bourgeois-democratic demands, and such
measures as critical support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution.
Their advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist parties was
dismissed out of hand by the majority, which expected the workers to more or
less spontaneously regroup under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared
the way for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit position
of ignoring the reformists' influence could no longer be maintained.
The Fourth International's immediate post-war perspective was
summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an article called "The First Phase of
the European Revolution" (Fourth International, August I946). The title
already implies the outlook: "the revolution" was implicitly redefined as a
metaphysical process enduring continuously and progressing inevitably toward
victory, rather than a sharp and necessarily time-limited confrontation over
the question of state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire
subsequent period.
Stalinophobia
The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared by
impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalinophobia. In November 1947
Pablo's International Secretariat wrote that the Soviet Union had become: "a
workers state degenerated to the point where all progressive manifestations of
the remains of the October conquest are more and more neutralized by the
disastrous effects of the Stalinist dictatorship."
"What remains of the conquests of October is more and more
losing its historic value as a premise for socialist development."
"...from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-Stalinist
governments, which are completely reactionary, we do not demand the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie... "
Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with
the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated
workers state, i.e., a "state capitalist" regime-a position which Natalia
Trotsky shortly embraced.
On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East Europe, the
Fourth International as united in simple-minded orthodoxy. An extensive
document of "The Kremlin in Eastern Europe" (Fourth International,
November 1946) by E. R Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist
tone and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by the Red Army
would be deliberately maintained as capitalist states. A polemic against
Shachtman by Germain dated 15 November 1946 was still more categorical: the
theory of "a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there
has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution: is dismissed, simply, as
"absurd." And Germain rhetorically queries, "Does [Shachtman] really think that
the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of
our continent?" (Fourth International, February 1947).
The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more cynically,
by the "International Committee" in later years over the question of Cuba
(perplexed? then deny reality!) with the difference that the class character of
East Europe, with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held by
the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was far more difficult to
understand. Empiricists and renegades, of course, had no difficulty in
characterizing the East European states:
"Everyone knows that in the countries where the Stalinists have
taken power they have proceeded, at one or another rate of speed, to establish
exactly the same economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia.
Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is rapidly being expropriated,
deprived of all its economic power, and in many cases deprived of mortal
existence.... Everyone knows that what remnants of capitalism remain in those
countries will not even be remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is
to establish a social system identical with that of Stalinist Russia."
(Max Shachtman, "The Congress of the Fourth International," October 1948 New
International)
Excruciating as this ridicule must have been for them, however,
the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their analysis because they could not
construct a theory to explain the East Europe transformation without embracing
non-revolutionary conclusions.
Germain, as was typical for him in those years, at least posed the
theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism
correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort
of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the
Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky's
dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and
counter-revolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a
kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the victorious Russian
proletariat and world imperialism. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism
to static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it became necessary to
answer Germain's question in the affirmative, and the way was prepared for
Pabloist revisionism to leap into the theoretical void.
Fourth Internationa1 Flirts with Tito
Virtually without exception the Fourth International was
disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty years of Stalinist
monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps ill-disposed to scrutinize the
anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as
"comrades" and "left centrists," and Yugoslavia as "a workers state established
by a proletarian revolution." In one of several "Open Letters" to Tito, the SWP
wrote: "The confidence of the masses in it ["your party"] will grow enormously
and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and
desires of the proletariat of its country." The Yugoslav revolution posed a new
problem (later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese experiences):
unlike East Europe, where the social transformations were accomplished by the
army of a foreign degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was
clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the intervention of the
working class or the direction of a Trotskyist party, succeeded in establishing
a (deformed) workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoretical
problem by dubbing the revolution "proletarian" and the Titoists "left
centrists." (The SWP avoided the question of China by refusing to unambiguously
characterize the Maoist regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late
as 1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing China as state
capitalist, were published in the SWP's Fourth International.)
Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content. The
impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent expression, was that
the ability of non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of
social overturn robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence.
The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state and a deformed
workers state demarcated in blood in the need for political
revolution to open the road to socialist development and the extension of
the revolution abroad had been lost.
IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS
The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and
inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for
disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary
upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new
revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating
objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth
International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the
generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering
impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy
of the early post-war Fourth International.
It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep roots
in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and disorientation which were the
precondition for the revisionist degeneration of the Fourth
International not be simply equated with the consolidation and victory of that
revisionism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth International in the
immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The SWP and the
International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a talisman to ward off
non-revolutionary conclusions from world events which they could no longer
comprehend. History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolutionary
Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate theory: Lenin before April
1917 was theoretically unequipped to project a proletarian revolution in a
backward country like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian
Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more than a symmetrical
false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against
orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary
impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a
proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.
In January 1951 Pablo ventured into the realm of theory with a
document called "Where Are We Going?" Despite whole paragraphs of confused
crackpotism and virtually meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure
emerges:
"The relation of forces on the international chess-board is now
evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.
"An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an
epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced....This transformation will
probably take an entire period of several centuries and will in the meantime be
filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and
necessarily deviating from 'pure' forms and norms.
"The objective process is in the final analysis the sole
determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.
"The Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain
circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation."
Pablo's elevation of the "objective process" to "the sole
determining factor" reducing the subjective factor (the consciousness and
organization of the vanguard party) to irrelevance, the discussion of "several
centuries" of "transition" (later characterized by Pablo's opponents as
"centuries of deformed workers states") and the suggestion that revolutionary
leadership might be provided by the Stalinist parties rather than the Fourth
Internationalthe whole analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism
emerged.
In another document, "The Coming War," Pablo put forward his
policy of "entrism sui generis" (entrism of its own kind):
"In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to
work and to remain in the masses' trade unions for example, 'ruses' and
'capitulations' are not only acceptable but necessary."
In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective of
short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split the
working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis as a tactic
for building the Trotskyist party. The new entrist policy flowed directly
from Pablo's analysis. Since the asserted shift in the world relationship of
forces in favor of the advance of the revolution would compel the Stalinist
parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that the Trotskyists
should be a part of such parties pursuing essentially a policy of pressuring
the Stalinist apparatus.
All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the
international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head of the
International Secretariat, the resident political body of the Fourth
International! But there is little evidence of even alarm, let alone the
formation of the international anti-revisionist faction which was
required. One long document by Ernest Germain ("Ten Theses"), and perhaps some
subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an attempt at orthodoxy on
the question of the "transitional period" but no other literary notice was
taken of Pablo's most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.
Germain Resists
In March 1951 Germain produced '"Ten Theses," which was a veiled
attack on "Where Are We Going?" but did not attack Pablo or the document by
name. Germain restated the Marxist use of "transitional period" as the period
between the victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and
the achievement of socialism (the classless society). Without any explicit
reference to Pablo's position, he wrote: "No more than the bourgeoisie will it
[Stalinism] survive a war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the
revolution." Germain insisted on the contradictory Bonapartist character
of Stalinism, based on proletarian property forms while safeguarding the
privileged position of the bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasised the
dual nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by their proletarian
base on the one hand and their subservience to the Stalinist bureaucracies in
power on the other.
Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to the Pabloist
impulse that the destruction of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China and
Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist leadership made the Fourth International
superfluous. Again, he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one
would have thought that the "Ten Theses" simply dropped from the sky as an
interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in response to the emergence of a
revisionist current completely counterposed to Germain's thrust. Insisting that
a new worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalinism but rather
was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:
"It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in embryo the
destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we ought to be much closer
today to the Communist workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental
task: to construct new revolutionary parties...." [our emphasis]
"To be 'closer to the Stalinist workers' then signifies at the
same time to affirm more than ever our own program and our own Trotskyist
policy."
The "Ten Theses" showed that all wings of the Trotskyist movement
were still incapable of grasping the nature of the social transformations which
had occurred in Eastern Europe (although the analysis of the British
Hasten-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP's Los Angeles Vern-Ryan
grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in
recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native
property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was
a foreign occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still considered the
process of "structural assimilation'' uncompleted (!) and predicted the
assimilation of the armies of the East European states into the Soviet
Armyi.e., that Eastern Europe would simply be incorporated into the
Soviet Union.
Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern Europe
destroyed capitalism but contained within it, even in victory, a decisive
bureaucratic obstacle to socialist development; he stressed that the expansion
of the USSR's noncapitalist mode of production "is infinitely less important
than the destruction of the living workers' movement which has preceded it."
No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to China and,
especially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were unable to disassociate the
phenomenon of Stalinism from the person of Stalin; the Titoists' break from the
Kremlin obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily pursue
qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic policies in safeguarding the
interest of its own national bureaucratic regime against the working
class. Uneasy about admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses
could ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in "Ten Theses"
termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events proletarian revolutions and
also argued that "under such conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist
parties in the classical sense of the term."
Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary model
which invalidated "'pure' forms and norms" (i.e., the Russian Revolution)
Germainagain without referring to Pablostressed that they were as a
result of exceptional circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to
advanced industrial countries. He contrasted "the de facto United Front which
today exists between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet
bureaucracy, which has its objective origin in their being both menaced by
imperialism..." with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred in the
prediction of an imminent World III between "the united imperialist front on
the one hand and the USSR, the buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on
the other" but rather than hailing it, termed it a counter-revolutionary
war.
The crux of Germain's argument was:
"What matters above all in the present period is to give the
proletariat an international leadership capable of coordinating its forces and
proceeding to the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy,
forced to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious proletarian
revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!], is socially incapable of
accomplishing any such task. Herein lies the historical mission of our
movement....The historical justification for our movement ... resides in the
incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an incapacity
rooted in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy."
With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the past 20
years the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism reaffirmed most
clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban revolution in which petty-bourgeois
nationalism at the head of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge
with the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the consistently
nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese CP in powerit is easy
to recognize that "Ten Theses" is flawed in its analysis and predictions. What
is much more important, however, is the document's consistent and deliberate
non-factional tone which presaged Germain's refusal to place himself in the
anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced from the determination to fight for a correct line
in the Fourth International, Germain's theoretical defense of the necessity of
Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism merely at one remove, the
denial of the subjective factor in the revolutionary process.
Third World Congress
The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was held in
August-September 1951. The main political report attempted to distinguish
between the Communist Parties and "reformist parties" on the grounds that only
the former were contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a
strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary parties. The opportunist
nature of Pablo's version of an entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the
repudiation of the principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split:
"The possibilities of important splits in the CPs ... are replaced by a
leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and file." There was no
recognition of decisive deformations in the East European and Chinese workers
states; thus implicitly the Congress posed only a quantitative
difference between the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and
deformed workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito might
"head a regroupment of revolutionary forces independent of capitalism and of
the Kremlin ... playing a major role in the formation of a new revolutionary
leadership." There was no mention of the perspective of permanent revolution
for the colonial countries.
The application of Pablo's policy of "entrism sui generis"
was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:
"The activity of our members in the SP will be governed by the
following directives: A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full
program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions...."
No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have any
longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.
The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submitted
Germain's "Ten Theses'' for a vote (after Germain himself had apparently backed
out of doing so) and proposed amendments to the main document. No vote was
taken on the "Ten Theses" or the French amendments. The PCI voted against
adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the only section to do so.
In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was elaborated
along the lines already made clear before and at the Third World Congress:
"We are entering [the Stalinist parties] in order to remain
there for a long time banking on the great possibility of seeing these parties,
placed under new conditions ["a generally irreversible pre-revolutionary
period"], develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the
radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes...."
(Pablo, Report to the 10th Plenum of the International Executive
Committee, February 1952)
"Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial
revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally with the second
against the first....The disintegration of Stalinism within these parties ought
not to be understood ... as an organizational disintegration
or a public
break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal transformation."
("The Rise and Decline of Stalinism," International Secretariat, September
1953)
V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS
With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the preliminary
conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but in whom the French appear to
have placed some degree of confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to
the French PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP. Despite a
considerable body of mythology to the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated
when revisionism manifested itself at the head of the Fourth International,
balking only at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromised
themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case of the PCI with
sporadic resistance) to Pablo's policies until the suicidal organizational
consequences to their sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the
responsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every body and every
section of the Fourth International and both retreated from the struggle by the
foundation of the "International Committee" on the basis of "the principles of
orthodox Trotskyism." The IC from its inception was only a paper international
tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between
pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.
PCI Fights Pablo
The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership by the
International Secretariat (which had installed the Pablo-loyal minority led by
Mestre and Frank as the leadership of the French section), continued to claim
agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing that Pablo and the
IS and IEC were violating its decisions! According to the French, Pabloism
"utilizes the confusions and contradictions of the World Congresswhere it
could not impost itselfin order to assert itself after the World
Congress.'' (undated "Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert Tendency on the
Agreements Concluded at the IEC," March or April 1952)
An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard on behalf
of the PCT minority to Cannon appealed to the SWP. Renard's letter claimed
agreement with the Third World Congress, including its French Commission, and
contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress (citing vague platitudes
to demonstrate its presumably orthodox thrust) with Pablo's subsequent actions
and line in the IEC and IS. Renard asserted that "Pabloism did not win out at
the Third World Congress.'' (He wisely did not attempt to explain why his
organization voted against the main Congress documents!) The main argument of
the letter is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership's
intervention into the French national section.
Cannon's reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of Stalinophobic
opportunism in the union movement (a bloc with progressive anti-communists
against the CP) and denied the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.
The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the
implication of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against minority theoretician
Mestre the majority had written:
"If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic of
entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our new tasks: that
of a more consistent tendency, not even a left opposition
.whose
role is to aid Stalinism to overcome its hesitation and to pose under
the best conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie....If Stalinism has
changed...[it means that] it no longer reflects the particular interests of a
bureaucratic caste whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium
between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that it reflects solely
... the defense of the workers state. That such a transformation should be
produced without the intervention of the Soviet proletariat
.but on the
contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy itself
.would lead us
not merely to revise the Transitional Program [but] all the works of Leon
Trotsky since 1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International."
("First Reflections of Zig Zag," PCI Internal Bulletin No. 2, February I952)
But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWP, demonstrated a failure
of concrete internationalism when faced with the prospect of all alone carrying
through the fight against Pabloism.
On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of two
French sections of the Fourth International, thus permitting the PCI majority
to carry out its own policies in France. This was in clear violation of the
founding statutes of the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the
International as a disciplined world body. What was required was an
international faction fight over the political line of the Fourth
International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to subordinate work in France
to the crucial fight for the legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth
International. Pablo's refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the
split of the PCI majority.
SWP Enters the Struggle
The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a
pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction,
manifested itself within the American party. In his reply to Renard dated 29
May 1952 Cannon had said:
"We do not see ["any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency"] in the
International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom
of it. We do not see any revisionism [in the documents]
we consider these
documents to be completely Trotskyist....It is the unanimous opinion of the
leading people in the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a
great service to the movement."
The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to the Third
World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP representative to the International)
had burned instead of presenting is quite possibly true but not very
significant, in view of Cannon's declaration of political allegiance to Pablo
when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-Pabloist PCI majority.
Against Cochran-Clarke's advocacy of an orientation toward the CP
fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed support to the Pabloist CP entrism
tactic in general but insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism,
contrasting the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP milieu,
lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy third-rate intellectuals.
In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set about forming
a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon
sought to line up the old party cadre around the question of conciliation to
Stalinism and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and Swabeck by
drawing an analogy between the need for factional struggle within the party and
the struggle within the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel
processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told the May 1953
SWP Plenum:
"During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the
ability of the SWP to survive....I thought that our 25 year effort...had ended
in catastrophic failure, and that, once again, a small handful would have to
pick up the pieces and start all over again to build the new cadre of another
party on the old foundations." (Closing speech, 30 May)
But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the necessary
struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen
apparatus over the organizationally liquidationist implications of the
Cochran-Clarke line. In return for their support Cannon promised the routinist,
conservative Dobbs administration total control of the SWP with no further
interference from him ("a new regime in the party").
The SWP's response to finding the dispute in the International
reflecting itself inside the American section was to deepen its isolationism
into virulent anti-internationalism. Cannon's speech to the SWP majority caucus
on 18 May 1953 stated, "We don't consider ourselves an American branch office
of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss" and
extolled discussion in which "we work out, if possible [!], a common line."
Cannon denied the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to "a
few people in Paris." He contrasted the Fourth International with Lenin's
Comintern, which had state power and a leadership whose authority was widely
recognized, and thus denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be
a democratic centralist body.
Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo's conduct against the
French majority, but only over the organizational question in keeping with the
proposition that the International leadership should not intervene in the
affairs of national sections. He wrote:
"...we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the recent
French conflict and split, and at the inconceivable organizational precedent
established there. That is why I delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted
to help the IS politically, but I didn't see how I could sanction the
organizational steps taken against the majority of an elected leadership. I
finally resolved the problem by just ignoring that part of Renard's letter."
("Letter to Tom," 4 June 1953)
The "Letter to Tom" also reiterated the position that the Third
World Congress was not revisionist.
The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI and
SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th IEC Plenum took Cannon to
task for his concept of the International as a "federative union." It noted
that the SWP had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle and
accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China. Seizing on the SWP's
one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen's defense of an SWP majorityite's formulation that
Stalinism is "counterrevolutionary through and through"a characterization
which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to cloak their liquidation of
an independent Trotskyist program with pious reaffirmations of the
contradictions of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the
property forms established by the October Revolution.
IC Formed
Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously broke
publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 The Militant carried "A Letter to
Trotskyists Throughout the World" which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and
belatedly solidarized with the "unjustly expelled" PCI majority. The SWP's
previous characterizations of the Third World Congress as "completely
Trotskyist" necessitated an attempt in this so-called "Open Letter" to locate
the emergency of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed the SWP to present a
somewhat unconvincing case leaning heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist
French minority from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced "Against
Pabloite Revisionism" dated November 1953, which contained a more competent
analysis of Pablo's liquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:
"The conception that a mass Communist Party will take the road
to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It
shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the
mass....
"The working class is transformed [by Pablo's theories] into a
pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it
which pushes a section of the bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way,
the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution
into an auxiliary motor force of it."
In 1954 the "International Committee" was formed. It included the
French PCI majority, the American SWP (fraternal) and the Healy (Burns)
grouping in England. The latter did not play any significant or independent
role in the fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the
disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war, impelled by the
Healy-Lawrence faction's deep entrist perspective toward the British Labour
Party, had been backed by Pablo's International Secretariat, which recognized
two sections in Britain and gave them equal representation on the IEC. Healy
was Cannon's "man" in England and had been consistently supported by the SWP in
disputes within the RCP. When the SWP broke from Pablo, the Healy-Lawrence
faction split, Healy aligning with the SWP and Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence
later went over to Stalinism as did the PCI minority's Mestre). Despite being
part of the new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group continued its
arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no weight in the IC bloc until
its recruitment of an impressive layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists
(most of whom it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made it
considerably more substantial in the British left.
The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (emigre) section,
which had already undergone a split, and the small Swiss section.
The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins in early
1954 but never met as a real international body, nor was a centralized
leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted by the SWP was to boycott the
Fourth World Congress, as merely a meeting of Pablo's faction having no
legitimacy as the Fourth International.
The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To cite
only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a non-factional position on
Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not to split and to attend the Fourth Congress.
A hard fight should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive Ceylonese
doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard cadre in the struggle.
Instead the Ceylonese drifted along with Pablo. Some seven years later, the
revolutionary reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of militants
throughout the world by the LSSP's entry into the bourgeois Ceylonese coalition
government, precipitating a last-minute split by the international Pabloist
leadership. Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the
Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent
claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the
association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the
LSSP.
Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to
the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already
had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own
countries, and the struggle to defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth
International on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.
From Flirtation to Consummation
In 1957 Pablo's international Secretariat and the SWP flirted with
possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe correspondence). The basis at that
time was formal orthodoxythe similarity of line between the IS and SWP in
response to the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively expecting a
repetition of Clarke's 1953 position on the possibility of self-liquidation of
the Stalinist bureaucracies, tended to accept the IS's formally Trotskyist
conclusions over Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures came
to naught because of the opposition of the British and French IC groups, as
well as Cannon's suspicions that Pablo was maneuvering. The issue was posed in
a defective waysimply apparent empirical agreement without an examination
of past differences and present motion.
When the question of reunification, consummated in 1963 with the
formation of the United Secretariat, came up again, the entire political
terrain had shifted. The IS and the SWP found themselves in agreement over
Cuba. But the basis was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but the
SWP's abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist revisionism (which the SWP
in its class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war has now transcended on
the path to outright reformism).
The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled "For
Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist MovementStatement by the
Political Committee of the SWP," 1 March 1963. The key new line was section 13:
"Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic
demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerilla
warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a
leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a
conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the
downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons
to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously
incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in
colonial countries.'' In "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International," 12
June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:
"Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that
peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself
lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The
creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of
imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist
betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working
class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary
significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For
Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the
proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of
Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for
'building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.' Marxists must
resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to
socialism historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on
tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the
socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers."
Ironically, the SWP's further rightist evolution leads it to now
repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other sidethe USec.'s
advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the
legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.
Spartacist and the Fourth International
In his struggle to found the Fourth International Trotsky
repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary organization an
international basis. Prolonged national isolation within one country
must ultimately disorient, deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no
matter how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined
international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to the fierce
pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism generated by the bourgeoisie
and its ideological agents within the working-class movement. As Trotsky
recognized, those who deny the need for a programmatically founded democratic
centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the vanguard party itself.
The destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled
by organizational fracturing into numerous competing international blocs,
necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.
In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced and
resisted powerful objective pressures toward abandonment of an internationalist
perspective. Cut off from the possibility of disciplined international ties as
a result of the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political
degeneration of Gerry Healy's International Committee, the Spartacist League
has refused to passively acquiesce to the national isolation forced upon us. We
have emphatically rejected the ersatz "internationalism" which achieves its
international connections at the price of a federalist non-aggression
pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for disciplined international
organization. We have sought to develop fraternal ties with groupings in other
countries as part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is
the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist international
tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the embryo of a reborn
Fourth International.
The current cracking of the several international "Trotskyist"
blocs now provides heightened opportunity for the Spartacist tendency to
intervene in the world movement. Our history and program can serve as a guide
for currents now in motion towards authentic Trotskyism, because despite
involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld our internationalist
determination and continued to wage a principled fight against revisionism.
The shattering of the revisionists' and centrists' pretensions to
international organizationthe revelation that the United Secretariat, the
International Committee, etc. have been nothing more than federated rotten
blocscombined with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in
a context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified deep-seated
capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objective opportunity for the
crystallization and development of the Spartacist tendency internationally. As
the political corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth
International, world party of socialist revolution, must be reborn.
FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
*********************
"By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it rests
on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not on its historic
tasks. Opportunists find international control intolerable and they reduce
their international ties as much as possible to harmless formalities...on the
proviso that each group does not hinder the others from conducting an
opportunist policy to its own national task.... International unity is not a
decorative facade for us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our
policy. Meanwhile there are not a few ultra-Lefts... [who] carry on a
semi-conscious struggle to split up the Communist Opposition into independent
national groups and to free them from international control." (Leon
Trotsky, "The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition," 7 September
1929)
"We stand not for democracy in general but for centralist
democracy. It is precisely for this reason that we place national leadership
above local leadership and international leadership above national leadership."
(Leon Trotsky, "An Open Letter to All Members of the Leninbund," 6 February
1930)
Revolutionary Continuity & the Split in the
Fourth International
The following letter, which deals with the historic split of
the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s, was addressed to the German Gruppe
IV. Internationale [GIVI]. Like the Bolshevik Tendency, GIVI was founded by
former cadres of the international Spartacist tendency. The letter is a
response to GIVIs equation of the revisionist International Secretariat
of the Fourth International (IS), headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel,
with the forces organized as the International Committee of the Fourth
International (IC), initiated by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The 1963 reunification between the SWP and Pablos
International Secretariat, which produced the United Secretariat (USec), was
sealed by the expulsion of the SWPs Revolutionary Tendency (forerunner of
the Spartacist League----SL). The RT opposed the reunification and defended the
original split with the Pablo current as essential to the
preservation of a principled revolutionary movement.
14 March 1989 Comrades: We have discussed your document,
Continuity or New Program----A False Alternative, and we find ourselves
in sharp disagreement with your conclusion that the 1951- 53 split was
essentially politically inconsequential. In our view this represents a step
away from the tradition from which both of our organizations derive.
Let us say at the outset that our knowledge of the political
activity of the IC sections outside North America in the 1950s is limited. What
we do know about their activity is not impressive, to say the least. We are
somewhat more familiar with the record of the American Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) in this period which shows consistent rightward motion, including the
call on the U.S. imperialist army to act as an instrument of struggle against
racism.
We consider Genesis of Pabloism,
[Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972], the Spartacist Leagues major study
of the crisis of postwar Trotskyism, to be a fine document. As you point out,
it stops at 1954----and while it refers to the activity of the Healy grouping
within the Labour Party as arch-Pabloist...opportunism,
it omits mention of the ICs craven political adaptation to Messali Hadj
in Algeria, or Peron in Argentina. Genesis of Pabloism
also ignores the Bolivian disaster in 1952 and the role of the Cannon
leadership in covering up for the Menshevism of the PORs [Partido Obrero
Revolucionario] critical support to the
bourgeois-nationalist MNR [Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario] government.
This is a particularly significant omission because of the existence of a
tendency within the SWPs Los Angeles branch (the Vern-Ryan grouping)
which explicitly criticized this policy at the time.
The SLs observation that a key to forging an authentic
Trotskyist current internationally is an understanding of the
characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of
the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain
while in practice abandoning the world movement is one with which
we heartily agree. We make no excuses for the national parochialism of the
Cannon leadership, nor its conception of a federated international,
nor its abstention from criticism of the opportunism of its bloc
partners. Nor do we agree with the Proletarian Military Policy, nor the
positions taken on Yugoslavia and China.
At the same time, it is necessary to judge political currents in
their totality, taking into account their history and the social reality which
they confronted. The world after World War II was a very different place than
Trotsky had projected. The SWP was socially isolated with an aging cadre under
tremendous pressure from the domestic witchhunt. It was clearly badly
disoriented by the postwar events and poorly equipped to understand or deal
with them theoretically. The Cannon leadership largely shared, or at least
acquiesced to, the new world reality impressionism of
Pablo which led inexorably to the conclusion that many of the lessons of the
old Trotskyism no longer applied. This is evidenced by
the SWPs support for the decisions of the 1951 Third World Congress.
But, as the fight with Cochran revealed, it would be a mistake to
simply equate Cannon and Pablo. The SWP leadership, while it was
slipping badly, was not definitively hardened around this revisionism.
When confronted with the implications of the liquidationist course of the
Pabloites on their own domestic terrain, the Cannon leadership resisted. In
this fight we take a side, without endorsing the way the fight was conducted or
even many of the arguments used by the majority----for example, Hansens
defense of the proposition that Stalinism is always and everywhere
counterrevolutionary through and through.
While the direction of evolution of the Cochranites was
sufficiently clear at the time of their suspension from the SWP, it became even
more blatant when they set up shop for themselves. Six months after leaving the
SWP they brazenly declared that in the postwar period:
...there has been a clear test of the ability
of Trotskyism to create an independent movement on a program broadly confirmed
by the new revolutionary developments... the old Trotskyist perspective has
become outmoded. As before the war, the vanguard seeks to realize its
revolutionary aspirations within the old parties, leaving no room for a new
revolutionary mass organization. Thus the Trotskyist movement...was doomed to
remain isolated. The test was made for a whole historic era, both in periods of
reaction and revolution, and is therefore a decisive one.
----Our Orientation, reprinted in International
Secretariat Documents 1951-54, Vol. 4
We think that the PCI [Parti Communiste Internationaliste]
leadership was correct in voting against the main document of the IS leadership
at the 1951 Congress. The fact that the SWP did not support them in this, or
that the PCI leadership did not carry out this struggle to the end, does not
negate the fact that there was a significant political differentiation which
clearly had a left/right axis. You admit that, in the document
Where Is Comrade Pablo Going? written by Favre/Bleibtreu in June 1951,
they tried to defend Trotskyism but conclude that because they
capitulated to the bureaucratic maneuvers of the Pabloites within
the PCI and unfortunately retreated from their earlier opposition
to the line adopted by the Third World Congress, they sealed their
fate.
While this maneuver obviously significantly weakened their
political opposition to the new revisionism, the fact is that they did continue
to oppose the Pablo leadership and their French adherents. The next year
Bleibtreu agreed with Healy and a representative of the Swiss section to
undertake together the defense of Trotskyism against Pablist
revisionism and the struggle against the liquidation of the Fourth
International at the upcoming Fourth World Congress
(International Committee Documents 1951-54, Vol. 2). Cannon and the SWP
leadership apparently aborted this with their Open
Letter, issued the next month.
It is quite correct to point to the inconsistencies and
inadequacies of the PCI and SWP, and the passive and inadequate fashion in
which they carried out the fight against the Pabloist leadership.
Genesis of Pabloism is certainly not uncritical on this
count:
Despite a considerable body of mythology to
the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifested
itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only at applying it to
their own sections. Both groups compromised themselves by uneasy acquiescence
(combined in the case of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablos
policies until the suicidal organizational consequences to their sections
necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the responsibility to take the fight
against revisionism into every body and every section of the Fourth
International....The IC from its inception was only a paper international
tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between
pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.
You observe that: The sound political impulse to fight
Pabloism, which had been developed by some IC components, was half-hearted in a
programmatic sense and a disaster concerning its political
practice. True enough, but though the fight against Pabloism was
profoundly flawed, it was not without political substance.
The issues posed in the SWPs Open Letter (the East German
uprising and the French general strike) were not inconsequential. It is
therefore a mistake to equate the positions adopted by the IC sections
on these events with those of the Pabloites. As in the Cochran fight,
despite our criticisms of Cannon et al, we cannot accept the position
that this was a case of two complementary revisionist
positions which were qualitatively similar.
That is why the course toward
reunification with the Pabloists over a shared
capitulation to Castroism was a significant development, which signalled the
irreversible consolidation of the SWP leadership around revisionism, while
simultaneously initiating the Revolutionary Tendency (RT).
* * *
We find your notion of continuity to be
rather one-sided. You suggest that the exponents of
continuity see it as an uninterrupted
development of Trotskyism. This is an easy position to argue
against, but it is a simplification which ignores the crucial distinction
between developing Trotskyism and defending it----even
if partially and inadequately. We do not view
continuity as a kind of metaphysical laying on of hands
which can guarantee the apostolic succession of authentic Trotskyism. Nor does
it consist in simply repeating the answers to yesterdays problems in
response to the new questions which arise today.
The fight against Pabloism in the SWP meant that, unlike the
Cochranite formation, it possessed the capacity for its own political
regeneration. This is borne out by the fact that the political demarcation of
1951-53 was a starting point for the RT within the SWP eight years later, when
the latter finally converged with the IS leadership. In some important ways the
RT/SL represented a positive development of Trotskyism after Trotsky----
something that is not true of any other international current. But it did so on
the basis of the prior struggles upon which it was based, including the fight
against Pabloism in the early 1950s, imperfect as the latter was.
It is at least abstractly possible that a genuinely revolutionary
proletarian current could arise somewhere in the world which would be capable
of developing autonomously the essential programmatic positions of Trotskyism
and applying them to such difficult problems as interpenetrated peoples in
Israel/Palestine, the popular front, special oppression, the genesis of Cuba
and the other deformed workers states, without ever learning of the existence
of the Spartacist tendency or the RT or the IC or even Trotsky.
But the fact is that the RT was not replicated, to our knowledge,
in any other ostensibly Trotskyist grouping internationally. Nor have any of
the myriad currents spawned from the New Left/Maoist movement, in its various
national permutations, spontaneously approximated the program of revolutionary
Marxism defended and developed by the RT/SL.
It is in this sense that the question of continuity has meaning.
It has a great deal to do with answering questions about how revolutionaries
should have responded to various difficult problems posed by the international
class struggle. The fact that the RT developed in the SWP and not, for example,
in Livio Maitans Italian organization in the early 1960s, is not entirely
fortuitous. In its 1962 founding document In Defense of a
Revolutionary Perspective, the RT posed itself as the continuator
of the struggle against Pabloism begun in 1953.
In 1953, our party, in the Open
Letter (Militant, 11/11/53), declared that The lines of
cleavage between Pablos revisionism and Orthodox Trotskyism are so deep
that no compromise is possible either politically or
organizationally. The political evaluation of Pabloism as revisionism
is as correct now as it was then and must be the basis for any Trotskyist
approach to this tendency.
The RTs founding document charged that, the
SWPleadership has accepted the central theoretical position of Pabloite
revisionism. The RT was critical from the outset of the conduct of
the ICs struggle against the Pabloists, as well as the SWPs
temporizing and American exceptionalism. Yet it stood on the SWPs
eventual declaration of intent to carry through a political
struggle against Pabloism on a world scale in order to maintain its domestic
revolutionary perspective.
While standing on the fight against Pabloism in the SWP in 1953,
the RT did not take the position that the IC was the simple lineal continuity
of the Fourth International. Indeed, the Spartacist grouping had to struggle to
successfully reestablish revolutionary political continuity. In its resolution
on the world movement presented at the 1963 SWP Convention in counterposition
to the majoritys document motivating
reunification with the IS, the RT noted,
the disappearance of the Fourth International as a meaningful
structure while correctly arguing that reunification with the
Pabloists was a step away from, not toward, the genuine rebirth of
the Fourth International.
At the London Conference in 1966 the Spartacist group stated
forthrightly that Pabloism has been opposed within the movement by
a bad orthodoxy represented until the last few years by the example
of Cannon. Robertson noted further that:
After 1950, Pabloism dominated the F.I.; only
when the fruits of Pabloism were clear did a section of the F.I. pull back. In
our opinion, the orthodox movement has still to face up to the new
theoretical problems which rendered it susceptible to Pabloism in 1943-50 and
gave rise to a ragged, partial split in 1952-54.
We see our struggle, in the first instance, as one to ensure that
the precious political legacy of the RT and the revolutionary SL is not lost
with the irreversible slide of its leadership into political banditry. Of
course we do not contend that only groupings emerging from the RT/SL can
be revolutionary, but we do think that would-be revolutionaries who study the
history of the Trotskyist movement must come to see that in a vital
programmatic sense the RT/SL tradition, and it alone, represents the authentic
continuity of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International under Trotsky.
And this continuity itself has a history, one which runs through the
ragged and partial split that
produced the paper international tendency that was the
IC.
Your attitude to the tradition of the RT/SL seems, to us,
ambiguous. On the one hand it seems that you find our declaration in the first
issue of the Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt that we
proposed to act as a beacon of orthodox Spartacism
objectionable, and view our position on the 1951-53 split as a
hereditary vice. On the other hand you take
into consideration the revolutionary heritage of...the iSt without
necessarily identifying yourselves too closely with it. Indeed you consider
that the iSt remains revolutionary, and yet even though it is perhaps
fifty times larger than yourselves, you do not propose unification. It seems to
us that this is a peculiar kind of indifferentism on the question of
revolutionary continuity. This impression is reinforced with your assertion
that your assessment of:
the points of break in the development of
Trotskyism in no way expresses neutrality or agnosticism, it only evades the
time-machine-effect: How would we have acted, if...? This method is
inoperational.
We fail to see any merit in evading the
issues posed in the organizational breakup of the Trotskyist movement. What
seems inoperational in this is your claim not to be
agnostic or neutral, at least as regards the IC/IS split. If indeed the two
sides in the 1951-53 fight were complementary forms of revisionism (or
centrist equivalent[s]), you must be neutral in the
falling out; as we are, for instance, in the breakup of the Lambertiste/
Morenoite bloc several years ago.
Fraternally, Bolshevik Tendency |