Geneza pabloizmu

SPR a Czwarta Międzynarodówka 1946-54:
Geneza pabloizmu


Niniejszy artykuł jest przetłumaczony ze Spartacista (wydanie angielskie) nr 21, jesień 1972 r. Pierwsze tłumaczenie ukazało się w Spartaciście (wydanie francuskie) nr 4 w 1974 r. Skopiowano z:

http://socjalegalitaryzm.byethost18.com/arch/fdsizmlkwp/viewtopica4bd.html?f=36&t=150&i=1

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Amerykańska Socjalistyczna Partia Robotnicza (SPR) i europejscy pabloiści w różnym tempie i różnymi drogami stoczyli się w rewizjonizm, aby we wczesnych latach sześćdziesiątych XX w. połączyć się w niełatwym przymierzu pozbawionego zasad „zjednoczenia”, które teraz załamało się, gdy amerykańska SPR dopełniła przejścia od pablowskiego centryzmu do otwartego reformizmu. Zjednoczony Sekretariat, który wyłonił się ze „zjednoczenia” z 1963 r., balansuje na krawędzi otwartego rozłamu; „antyrewizjonistyczny” Komitet Międzynarodowy rozpadł się w zeszłym roku. Zapaść różnych konkurujących pretendentów do płaszcza Czwartej Międzynarodówki daje decydującą okazję do odbudowy autentycznej trockistowskiej tendencji międzynarodowej. Kluczem do celu odbudowy Czwartej Międzynarodówki poprzez proces rozłamów i fuzji jest zrozumienie charakterystyki i przyczyn pablowskiego rewizjonizmu i wadliwej reakcji antypablowców, którzy walczyli, za mało i za późno, na terenie narodowym, równocześnie w praktyce porzucając ruch światowy.

II wojna światowa, Stany Zjednoczone i Francja

Przed wybuchem wojny Trocki i Czwarta Międzynarodówka sądzili byli, że upadający kapitalizm i wzrost faszyzmu usunęły możliwość reformizmu, a więc burżuazjno-demokratycznych złudzeń wśród mas. Jednak musieli oni stawać się coraz bardziej świadomi, że obrzydzenie klasy robotniczej faszyzmem i groźbą faszystowskiej okupacji dały początek socjalszowinizmowi i odnowie zaufania do „demokratycznej” burżuazji, przepajającego masy proletariackie w całej Europie i Stanach Zjednoczonych. W obliczu takich sprzeczności potężne naciski nacjonalistycznego zacofania i demokratycznych złudzeń w klasie robotniczej prowadziły do rozłamu między sekcjami Czwartej Międzynarodówki, niektóre zajmowały stanowisko sekciarskie, inne kapitulowały przed socjalpatriotyzmem, który szalał wśród mas. SPR na krótko przyjęła „proletariacką politykę wojskową”, która wzywała do szkolenia wojskowego pod kontrolą związków zawodowych, implicite stawiając utopijną ideę, że robotnicy amerykańscy mogliby zwalczać niemiecki faszyzm bez istnienia w Stanach Zjednoczonych państwa robotniczego, przez „kontrolowanie” armii amerykańskiego imperializmu. Brytyjski trockista Ted Grant poszedł jeszcze dalej, w pewnym przemówieniu nazywając siły zbrojne brytyjskiego imperializmu „naszą Ósmą Armią”. Niemieccy IKD ze swoją teorią, że faszyzm stworzył potrzebę „pośredniego stadium zasadniczo równoważnego rewolucji demokratycznej” („Trzy tezy”, 19 października 1941 r.), zwrócili się ku otwartemu mieńszewizmowi.

Francuski ruch trockistowski, podzielony w toku wojny, był najlepszym przykładem tej sprzeczności. Jedna z jego frakcji podporządkowywała mobilizację klasy robotniczej apetytom politycznym gaullistowskiego skrzydła imperialistycznej burżuazji; inne ugrupowanie odrzucało wszelką walkę w ruchu oporu na korzyść roboty wyłącznie w miejscach pracy i, nie rozpoznając istniejącego poziomu świadomości reformistycznej wśród robotników, awanturniczo usiłowało podczas „wyzwalania” Paryża zająć fabryki, kiedy masy pracujące były na ulicach. Dokument konferencji europejskiej z lutego 1944 r., który był podstawą do fuzji między dwoma francuskimi ugrupowaniami i sformowania Komunistycznej Partii Internacjonalistycznej (PCI), tak charakteryzował te dwie grupy:

„Zamiast rozróżniać między nacjonalizmem pokonanej burżuazji, który pozostaje wyrazem jej imperialistycznych dążeń, a «nacjonalizmem» mas, który jest jedynie reakcyjnym wyrazem ich oporu przeciwko wyzyskowi przez imperializm okupantów, kierownictwo POI uważało walkę własnej burżuazji za postępową. (…) CCI (…) pod pretekstem strzeżenia nienaruszalności dziedzictwa marksizmu-leninizmu uparcie odmawiało rozróżniania nacjonalizmu burżuazji od ruchu oporu mas”.

I. IZOLACJONIZM SPR

Po wybuchu II wojny światowej początkowo trockizm europejski i amerykański w odmienny sposób reagowały na różne zadania i problemy. Niepewny internacjonalizm amerykańskiej SPR, utrzymywany przez bliską współpracę z Trockizm podczas jego wygnania w Meksyku, nie przetrwał zamordowania go w 1940 r. i wybuchu wojny światowej. Amerykańscy trockiści wycofali się w izolację, jedynie częściowo narzuconą im przez dezintegrację sekcji europejskich w warunkach faszystowskiego triumfu i delegalizacji.

W przewidywaniu trudności koordynacji międzynarodowej podczas wojny został ustanowiony stały Międzynarodowy Komitet Wykonawczy (MKW) w Nowym Jorku. Jednakże jego jedynym zauważalnym osiągnięciem wydaje się zwołanie „Konferencji Nadzwyczajnej” Międzynarodówki, przeprowadzonej 19-26 maja 1940 r. „gdzieś na półkuli zachodniej z inicjatywy jej sekcji amerykańskiej, meksykańskiej i kanadyjskiej”. Kadłubowa „Konferencja Nadzwyczajna”, w której uczestniczyła mniej niż połowa sekcji, została zwołana w celu zajęcia się międzynarodowymi odgałęzieniami Shachtmanowskiego rozłamu w sekcji amerykańskiej, którego rezultatem stało się odejście większości stałego MKW. Konferencja wyraziła solidarność z SPR w walce frakcyjnej i potwierdziła jej status jako jedynej amerykańskiej sekcji Czwartej Międzynarodówki. Konferencja przyjęła również „Manifest Czwartej Międzynarodówki o wojnie imperialistycznej i proletariackiej rewolucji światowej” napisany przez Trockiego. Jednakże po jego śmierci stały MKW popadł w zapomnienie.

Przynajmniej z perspektywy czasu widać, że amerykańska sekcja Czwartej Międzynarodówki powinna zainicjować tajny sekretariat w jakimś neutralnym kraju Europy, złożony z wykwalifikowanych członków SPR i emigrantów z innych sekcji, aby centralizował i bezpośrednio nadzorował robotę trockistów w krajach okupowanych przez faszystów. Jednak SPR zadowalała się ograniczeniem swej aktywności międzynarodowej podczas wojny do publikowania w swym biuletynie wewnętrznym listów i dokumentów frakcyjnych od europejskich trockistów. Przyjęcie w 1941 r. ustawy Voorhisa, zakazującej grupom amerykańskim afiliacji z międzynarodowymi organizacjami politycznymi – ustawy, która po dziś dzień nie została poddana próbie – również dało SPR usprawiedliwienie dla umniejszania swej odpowiedzialności międzynarodowej.

Robota SPR podczas wojny świadczyła o jej internacjonalistycznym programie. Dokerzy z SPR wykorzystywali okazję, jaką dawało przybijanie statków z Władywostoku do zachodniego wybrzeża USA, aby potajemnie rozprowadzać wśród radzieckich marynarzy list Trockiego do robotników radzieckich. Towarzysze z SPR służący w marynarce handlowej koncentrowali swe wysiłki na dostawach do Murmańska, dopóki ekstremalnie ciężkie straty nie zmusiły partii do ich przerwania. (Była to reakcja na działalność, jaką GPU nakierowało na uruchomienie antytrockistowskiej siatki szpiegowskiej Soblena. W wiele lat później zeznania ujawniły, że telefon Cannona był podsłuchiwany przez GPU i że niejaki „Michael Cort”, agent biznesowy magazynu SPR „Fourth International”, był jednym z agentów GPU). Jednak utrzymywanie Czwartej Międzynarodówki i kierowanie nią były częścią międzynarodowej odpowiedzialności SPR i powinny być równie pilnym priorytetem, jak robota, którą SPR podejmowała we własnym imieniu.

Kierownictwo SPR przetrwało okres wojny w istocie nietknięte, ale umocnione w swej izolacji i źle wyposażone teoretycznie, aby sobie poradzić z powojenną sytuacją.

Podczas ostatnich lat wojny i w okresie bezpośrednio powojennym SPR odnotowała pewne robiące wrażenie sukcesy w zaszczepianiu swoich kadr w przemyśle podczas boomu oraz w werbowaniu nowej warstwy proletariackich bojowników przyciąganych do trockizmu z powodu sprzeciwu wobec polityki socjalpatriotyzmu i pokoju klasowego partii komunistycznej.

Optymizm i ortodoksja

SPR wchodziła w okres powojenny z prężnym optymizmem co do perspektyw dla rewolucji proletariackiej. Konwencja SPR z 1946 r. i jej rezolucja pt. „Nadchodząca rewolucja amerykańska” przewidywały dla SPR nieskończone trwanie sukcesów. Izolacjonistyczna perspektywa partii była na konwencji oczywista. Konieczny międzynarodowy charakter kryzysów i rewolucji był uznawany, ale nie jednoczesny międzynarodowy charakter partii awangardowej. W efekcie rezolucja usprawiedliwia polityczne zacofanie klasy robotniczej Stanów Zjednoczonych, równocześnie chwaląc jej bojowość, i przedstawia następujący sylogizm: decydujące bitwy rewolucji światowej zostaną stoczone w krajach zaawansowanych, gdzie środki produkcji są wysoko rozwinięte, a proletariat potężny – przede wszystkim w Stanach Zjednoczonych; dlatego wszystkim, co jest niezbędne, jest organizowanie rewolucji amerykańskiej, a światowy kapitalizm zostanie obalony. Głęboki impresjonizm doprowadził do postrzegania świata oczami amerykańskiego kapitalizmu, który wyszedł z wojny jako niekwestionowana górująca kapitalistyczna potęga światowa.

Powojenna stabilizacja europejskiego kapitalizmu, powstanie partii stalinowskich jako dominujących reformistycznych partii robotniczych w Europie, ekspansja stalinizmu w Europie Wschodniej (jawnie zadająca policzek trockistowskiej analizie, że stalinizm mógł tylko zdradzać), zniszczenie kapitalizmu przez oparte na chłopstwie formacje nacjonalistyczno – stalinowskie w Jugosławii i Chinach – cały ten rozwój stawiał nowe problemy teoretyczne dla ruchu trockistowskiego, z którymi SPR, pozbawiona przez drobnomieszczański rozłam Shachtmanowski warstwy utalentowanych intelektualistów, a niedługo później pozbawiona przewodnictwa Trockiego, nie mogła sobie poradzić. Bezpośrednią reakcją SPR było wycofanie się do bezpłodnej „ortodoksji”, pozbawionej rzeczywistej treści teoretycznej i w ten sposób pogłębiającej jej izolację.

Lata pięćdziesiąte XX w. przyniosły nową falę żywiołowych walk klasy robotniczej w Europie zachodniej i Wschodniej, ale SPR przyniosły one początek zimnowojennego polowania na czarownice: prześladowania obecnych i byłych członków partii komunistycznej na mocy ustawy Smitha; osłabienie wszelkich aspektów życia społecznego i intelektualnego; „nieustanna czystkę znanych «czerwonych» i bojowników” z ruchu związkowego, pozbawiającą SPR łączności z ruchem klasy robotniczej, której zbudowanie zajęło lata; odejście całej warstwy robotników zwerbowanych do SPR w późnych latach czterdziestych XX w. Obiektywna presja, by stać się sekcją jedynie oklaskującą rozwój sytuacji w Europie i koloniach, była silna, ale SPR trzymała się swego werbalnego ortodoksyjnego oddania robieniu rewolucji amerykańskiej.

II. ZERWANIE CIĄGŁOŚCI W EUROPIE

Podatność europejskiego ruchu trockistowskiego na rewizjonizm zależała od historycznej słabości europejskich organizacji połączonej z dogłębnym zniszczeniem ich ciągłości z wcześniejszym okresem. Kiedy w 1934 r. Trocki rozpoczynał walkę o założenie Czwartej Międzynarodówki, europejskiej klasie robotniczej, stojącej w obliczu decydującego wyboru: socjalizm albo barbarzyństwo, brakowało komunistycznego kierownictwa. Zadanie, w obliczu którego stała Czwarta Międzynarodówka, było jasne: mobilizować tę klasę przeciwko groźbie faszyzmu i wojny, gromadzić kadry dla światowej partii rewolucyjnej, która w obliczu marszu ku wojnie imperialistycznej i socjalszowinistycznej kapitulacji Międzynarodówek Drugiej i Trzeciej występowałaby za proletariackim internacjonalizmem.. Jednak Trocki zauważał był niezmierną trudność dla świadomej awangardy, by iść naprzód w okresie miażdżącej porażki dla klasy i „straszliwej dysproporcji między zadaniami a środkami”. („Pod prąd”, kwiecień 1939 r.) Przykładem słabości ruchu europejskiego była sekcja francuska, która była niejednokrotnie krytykowana przez Trockiego i której drobnomieszczańska „workerystowska” dewiacja i dyletantyzm w 1938 r. były tematem specjalnej rezolucji na konferencji założycielskiej Czwartej Międzynarodówki.

Czwarta Międzynarodówka przygotowywała się do decydującej walki przeciwko faszyzmowi i wojnie – i przegrała. W toku wojny i nazistowskiej okupacji same podstawy międzynarodowej i nawet narodowej koordynacji zostały zniszczone. Międzynarodówka zdezintegrowała się na małe grupy bojowników prowadzących improwizowaną politykę: niektóre oportunistyczne, niektóre bohaterskie. 65 towarzyszy francuskich i niemieckich, którzy w lipcu 1943 r. zostali rozstrzelani przez gestapo za swoje rewolucyjno-defetystyczne bratanie się i budowanie trockistowskiej komórki w niemieckich siłach zbrojnych, jest pomnikiem internacjonalistycznej odwagi słabego ruchu rewolucyjnego walczącego przeciwko przygniatającej przewadze wroga.

Trockistowskie kadry zdziesiątkowane

W sierpniu 1943 r. usiłowano przywrócić podstawy organizacji w Europie. Sekretariat Europejski ustanowiony na spotkaniu w Belgii obejmował dosłownie jedynego żyjącego członka przedwojennego kierownictwa i – głównie w rezultacie nieistnienia wypróbowanych kadr – Michel Pablo (Raptis), wykwalifikowany tajny organizator nie mający zdolności politycznego przywódcy ani teoretyka, wyłonił się jako szef Międzynarodówki. Kiedy w czerwcu 1945 r. Europejski Komitet Wykonawczy spotkał się, by przygotować przeprowadzenie kongresu światowego, doświadczone kadry przywódcze i najbardziej obiecujący z młodych trockistów (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) byli już zabici z rąk nazistów albo GPU. Ciągłość trockizmu w Europie została zerwana. Ten tragiczny proces został zdwojony wraz z uwięzieniem, a w końcu egzekucją Ta Thu-taua i trockistów wietnamskich, prawie całkowitym wyginięciem trockistów chińskich i likwidacją pozostałych trockistów rosyjskich (obejmujących poza Trockim Ignacego Reissa, Rudolfa Klementa i Lwa Siedowa). Europejczycy byli wyraźnie tak głodni doświadczonych kadr przywódczych, że Pierre Frank (czołowy członek grupy Moliniera, którą Trocki w 1935 r. potępiał jako „zdemoralizowanych centrystów”, a w 1938 r. wyrzucił za odmowę zerwania po „francuskim zwrocie” z socjaldemokracją) mógł zostać przywódcą powojennej sekcji francuskiej.

W tym decydującym punkcie zwrotnym interwencja prawdziwie internacjonalistycznej amerykańskiej partii trockistowskiej mogłaby spowodować wielką zmianę. Jednak SPR, która w latach wojny musiała przejąć przywództwo Międzynarodówki, utonęła we własnych narodowych dążeniach. Później Cannon zauważył, że kierownictwo SPR świadomie budowało było autorytet Pabla, nawet posuwając się „tak daleko, by zamazywać mnóstwo różnic między nami” (czerwiec 1953 r.) A odpowiedzialność ciążąca na SPR, która przy wszystkich swoich brakach była najsilniejszą i najbardziej doświadczoną organizacją trockistowską, nakazywała pilnie czynić coś właśnie przeciwnego.

III. ORTODOKSJA POTWIERDZONA

Bezpośrednim zdaniem, w obliczu którego stali trockiści po wojnie, była reorientacja ich kadr i ponowna ocena sytuacji awangardy i klasy w świetle poprzednich przewidywań. Oczekiwania trockistów, chwiania się zachodnioeuropejskich reżimów kapitalistycznych i odnowienia w całej Europie pełnej przemocy walki klasowej, szczególnie w Niemczech, gdzie upadek nazistowskiej władzy państwowej pozostawił próżnię, potwierdziły się. Jednakże reformiści, szczególnie partie stalinowskie, potwierdzili że powstrzymują żywiołowe powstania klasy robotniczej. Kontrolowanie francuskiej klasy robotniczej za pośrednictwem CGT przeszło z rąk socjaldemokracji (SFIO), która kontrolowała była CGT przed wojną, w ręce francuskich stalinistów. W ten sposób pomimo wyraźnego rewolucyjnego ducha europejskiej klasy robotniczej i wielkich fal strajków generalnych, szczególnie we Francji, Belgii, Grecji i Włoszech, proletariat w Europie Zachodniej nie wziął władzy, a aparat stalinowski wyszedł z tego z nową siłą i twardością.

Czwarta Międzynarodówka zareagowała popadnięciem znów w bezpłodną ortodoksję i upartą odmowę uwierzenia, że te walki zostały pokonane na najbliższy okres:

„W tych warunkach częściowe porażki, (…) czasowe okresy odwrotu (…) nie demoralizują proletariatu. (…) Niejednokrotne wykazywanie przez burżuazję jej niezdolności do ustabilizowania gospodarki i reżim polityczny o bardzo małej stabilności oferują robotnikom nowe okazje do przechodzenia do coraz wyższych etapów walki. (…) Rozdymanie szeregów tradycyjnych organizacji w Europie, przede wszystkim partii stalinowskich (…) prawie wszędzie osiągnęło szczyt. Zaczyna się faza spadku”. (Europejski Komitet Wykonawczy, kwiecień 1946 r.)

Prawicowo-oportunistyczni krytycy ruchu trockistowskiego (niemieccy IKD, frakcja Goldmana-Morrowa w SPR) mieli rację zauważając zbytni optymizm takiej analizy i wskazując, że tradycyjne reformistyczne kierownictwo klasy robotniczej zawsze pierwsze korzysta z odnowienia bojowości i walki. Ich „rozwiązaniem” jednakże było argumentowanie za ograniczeniem programu trockistowskiego do żądań burżuazyjno-demokratycznych i takich posunięć jak krytyczne poparcie dla powojennej burżuazyjnej francuskiej konstytucji. Ich obrona polityki entrystowskiej wobec europejskich partii reformistycznych była odrzucana bez dyskusji przez większość, która oczekiwała, że robotnicy mniej lub bardziej żywiołowo przegrupują się pod sztandarem trockistowskim. Ta postawa przygotowała drogę do ostrego zwrotu w kwestii entryzmu, kiedy dorozumiana postawa ignorowania wpływu reformistów nie mogła być dłużej utrzymywana.

Bezpośrednio powojenna perspektywa Czwartej Międzynarodówki została ujęta przez Ernesta Germaina (Mandela) w artykule zatytułowanym „Pierwsza faza rewolucji europejskiej”. („ Fourth International”, sierpień 1946 r.) Tytuł już implikuje perspektywę: „rewolucja” byla implicite redefiniowana jako metafizyczny proces trwający ciągle i postępujący nieuchronnie ku zwycięstwu, a nie ostra i w sposób konieczny ograniczona w czasie konfrontacja w kwestii władzy państwowej, której wynik określi cały następny okres.

Stalinofobia

Późniejsza, pablowska, kapitulacja przed stalinizmem została przygotowana przez impresjonistyczne przesadzanie w jej przeciwieństwie: stalinofobii. W listopadzie 1947 r. Sekretariat Międzynarodowy Pabla pisał, że Związek Radziecki stał się

„państwem robotniczym zdegenerowanym do tego stopnia, że wszelkie postępowe przejawy pozostałości zdobyczy Października są coraz bardziej neutralizowane przez katastrofalne skutki stalinowskiej dyktatury. (…) To, co pozostaje ze zdobyczy Października, coraz bardziej traci swoją wartość jako przesłanka dla rozwoju socjalistycznego. (…) Od rosyjskich sił okupacyjnych ani od prostalinowskich rządów, które są kompletnie reakcyjne, nie domagamy się wywłaszczenia burżuazji”.

W SPR chodziły słuchy, że Cannon skłaniał się do charakteryzowania Związku Radzieckiego jako państwa robotniczego, które uległo całkowitej degeneracji, to jest reżimu „państwowokapitalistycznego” – do stanowiska, które przez krótki czas popierała Natalia Trocka.

W kwestii stalinowskiej ekspansji na Europę Wschodnią Czwarta Międzynarodówka była zjednoczona w prymitywnej ortodoksji. Obszerny artykuł dyskusyjny o „Kremlu w Europie Wschodniej” („Fourth International”, listopad 1946 r.) pióra E.R. Franka (Berta Cochrana) był pisany przeraźliwie antystalinowskim tonem i skłaniał się ku poglądowi, że kraje okupowane przez Armię Czerwoną będą umyślnie utrzymywane jako państwa kapitalistyczne. Polemika Germaina przeciwko Shachtmanowi datowana 15 listopada 1946 r. była jeszcze bardziej kategoryczna: teoria „zainstalowania zdegenerowanego państwa robotniczego w kraju, gdzie nie było uprzednio rewolucji proletariackiej”, jest po prostu odrzucana jako „absurd”. I Germain retorycznie pyta: „Czy [Shachtman] naprawdę uważa, że stalinowskiej biurokracji udało się obalić kapitalizm w połowie naszego kontynentu?” („Fourth International”, luty 1947 r.)

Metodologia tutaj jest ta sama, co zastosowana bardziej cynicznie przez Komitet Międzynarodowy w wiele lat później w kwestii Kuby (jesteśmy zakłopotani? To zaprzeczajmy rzeczywistości!), z tą różnicą, że klasowy charakter Europy Wschodniej, z kapitalistycznymi instytucjami ekonomicznymi, ale władzą państwową trzymaną przez armię okupacyjną zdegenerowanego państwa robotniczego, był daleko trudniejszy do zrozumienia. Empirycy i degeneraci, oczywiście, nie mieli trudności z charakteryzowaniem państw wschodnioeuropejskich:

„Każdy wie, że w krajach, gdzie staliniści przejęli władzę, szli w tym czy innym tempie do ustanowienia dokładnie tego samego reżimy ekonomicznego, politycznego, społecznego, jak istnieje w Rosji. Każdy wie, że burżuazja została wywłaszczona albo szybko jest wywłaszczana, pozbawiana całej swojej władzy ekonomicznej, a w wielu wypadkach pozbawiana życia. (…) Każdy wie, że jakiekolwiek pozostałości kapitalizmu pozostają w tych krajach, jutro nie będą nawet pozostałościami, że cała tendencja zmierza do ustanowienia systemu społecznego identycznego z tym w stalinowskiej Rosji”. (Max Shachtman, “Kongres Czwartej Międzynarodówki”, w: „New International”, październik 1948 r.)

Pomimo śmieszności tej sytuacji, upokarzającej dla nich, ortodoksyjni trockiści w swojej analizie znaleźli się w pułapce, ponieważ nie mogli skonstruować jakiejkolwiek teorii, by wyjaśnić przekształcenie Europy Wschodniej, nie dochodząc do nierewolucyjnych konkluzji.

Germain, jak w tych latach było dla niego typowe, przynajmniej stawiał jasno dylemat teoretyczny: czy trockistowskie rozumienie stalinizmu jest poprawne, jeśli stalinizm w pewnych wypadkach okazuje się chętny do przeprowadzenia pewnego rodzaju antykapitalistycznych przekształceń społecznych? Uczepiwszy się ortodoksji, trockiści utracili byli rzeczywiste pojmowanie teorii i zdławili część dialektycznego rozumienia stalinizmu przez Trockiego jako pasożytniczej i kontr-rewolucyjnej kasty siedzącej na szczycie zdobyczy rewolucji październikowej, swego rodzaju zdradzieckich pośredników, balansujących między zwycięskim rosyjskim proletariatem a światowym imperializmem. Po sprowadzeniu w ten sposób materializmu dialektycznego do statycznego dogmatu ich dezorientacja była pełna, kiedy stało się konieczne na pytanie Germaina odpowiedzieć twierdząco, i została przygotowana droga do skoku pablowskiego rewizjonizmu w teoretyczną pustkę.

Czwarta Międzynarodówka flirtuje z Titą

Prawie bez wyjątku Czwarta Międzynarodówka została zdezorientowana przez rewolucję jugosłowiańską. Po jakichś dwudziestu latach stalinowskiej monolityczności trockiści może nie byli zbyt predysponowani do dokładnego zbadania antystalinowskiej jugosłowiańskiej partii komunistycznej. Jugosłowiańscy titoiści byli określani jako „towarzysze” i „lewicowi centryści”, a Jugosławia jako „państwo robotnicze ustanowione przez rewolucję proletariacką”. W jednym z kilku listów otwartych do Tity SPR pisała: „Zaufanie mas do niej [Waszej partii] będzie ogromnie wzrastało i stanie się ona skutecznym kolektywnym wyrazem interesów i pragnień proletariatu swojego kraju”. Rewolucja jugosłowiańska stawiała nowy problem (później powtórzony przez doświadczenia chińskie, kubańskie i wietnamskie): inaczej niż wschodnioeuropejska, gdzie przekształcenia społeczne zostały dokonane przez armię obcego zdegenerowanego państwa robotniczego, rewolucja jugosłowiańska była wyraźnie tubylczą rewolucją społeczną, której bez interwencji klasy robotniczej ani kierownictwa partii trockistowskiej udało się ustanowić (zdeformowane) państwo robotnicze. Czwarta Międzynarodówka unikała teoretycznego problemu przez nazywanie tej rewolucji „proletariacką”, a titoistów „lewicowymi centrystami”. (SPR unikała kwestii Chin przez odmawianie aż do 1955 r. niedwuznacznego scharakteryzowania reżimu maoistowskiego jako zdeformowanego państwa robotniczego. Jeszcze w 1954 r. w czasopiśmie SPR „Fourth International” opublikowane zostały dwa artykuły frakcji Phillipsa, charakteryzujące Chiny jako państwowokapitalistyczne).

Znów utrzymywana jest ortodoksja, ale obrabowana ze swojej treści. Impulsem, któremu opierano się, dopóki Pablo nie dał mu spójnego wyrazu, było to, że zdolność sił nieproletariackich i nietrockistowskich do dokonania jakiejkolwiek formy przewrotu społecznego odbierała Czwartej Międzynarodówce rację bytu. Sedno jakościowego rozróżnienia między państwem robotniczym a zdeformowanym państwem robotniczym – krwią znaczona potrzeba rewolucji politycznej, by otworzyć drogę do rozwoju socjalistycznego i rozszerzenia rewolucji za granicę – zostało utracone.

IV. PABLOIZM ZWYCIĘŻA

Słabe liczebnie, izolowane społecznie, bezbronne teoretycznie i niedoświadczone kadry powojennej Czwartej Międzynarodówki w sytuacji powtarzających się przypływów przedrewolucyjnych, na których bieg nie mogły wpływać, padały łatwo łupem dezorientacji i niecierpliwości. Zaczynając od początku 1951 r. nowy rewizjonizm, pabloizm, zaczął się utwierdzać jako reakcja na frustrującą obiektywną sytuację przez przedstawianie zastępczej drogi wyjścia z izolacji Czwartej Międzynarodówki od głównego ruchu klasy robotniczej. Pabloizm był uogólnieniem tego impulsu w rewizjonistycznym ciele teorii, oferującej impresjonistyczne reakcje, które były bardziej spójne niż jednostronna ortodoksja wczesnej powojennej Czwartej Międzynarodówki.

Sednem sprawy jest to, że słabości organizacyjnej, braku głębokiego zakorzenienia w proletariacie oraz niezdolności teoretycznej i dezorientacji, które były przesłankami rewizjonistycznej degeneracji Czwartej Międzynarodówki, nie można po prostu zrównywać z konsolidacją i zwycięstwem tego rewizjonizmu. Pomimo ciężkich błędów politycznych w okresie bezpośrednio powojennym Czwarta Międzynarodówka była wciąż rewolucyjna. SPR i Międzynarodówka uczepiły się bezpłodnej ortodoksji jako talizmanu, by odrzucać nierewolucyjne konkluzje z wydarzeń światowych, których nie mogły już zrozumieć. Historia udowadniała była, że w decydujących punktach zwrotnych marksiści byli zdolni do przezwyciężenia nieodpowiedniej teorii: Lenin przed kwietniem 1917 r. był nieprzygotowany teoretycznie, by projektować rewolucję proletariacką w kraju zacofanym, jak Rosja; Trocki do 1933 r. zrównywał rosyjski termidor z wracaniem do kapitalizmu. Pabloizm był więcej niż symetryczną fałszywą teorią, więcej niż po prostu impresjonistyczną przesadną reakcją na ortodoksję; był on teoretycznym usprawiedliwieniem dla nierewolucyjnego impulsu opartego na wyrzeczeniu się perspektywy zbudowania awangardy proletariackiej w krajach zaawansowanych czy kolonialnych.

W styczniu 1951 r. Pablo wkroczył w dziedzinę teorii z dokumentem zatytułowanym „Dokąd idziemy?” Pomimo całych akapitów zagmatwanych głupstw i prawie pozbawionej znaczenia bombastyki wyłania się cała rewizjonistyczna struktura:

„Stosunek sił na międzynarodowej szachownicy ewoluuje teraz na niekorzyść imperializmu. (…) Epoka przejścia między kapitalizmem a socjalizmem już się zaczęła i dość daleko zaszła. (…) To przekształcenie zajmie prawdopodobnie cały okres paru stuleci i będzie w międzyczasie wypełnione formami i reżimami przejściowymi między kapitalizmem a socjalizmem i w sposób konieczny odbiegającymi od «czystych» form i norm. (…) Obiektywny proces jest w ostatecznym rachunku jedynym determinującym czynnikiem, pokonującym wszystkie przeszkody natury subiektywnej. (…) Partie komunistyczne zachowują możliwość nakreślenia w pewnych warunkach z grubsza rewolucyjnej orientacji”.

Podnoszenie przez Pabla „obiektywnego procesu” do roli „jedynego determinującego czynnika”, sprowadzanie czynnika subiektywnego (świadomości i organizacji partii awangardowej) do nieznaczącego, rozważanie „paru stuleci” okresu przejściowego (później charakteryzowane przez oponentów Pabla jako „stulecia zdeformowanych państw robotniczych”) i sugestia, że rewolucyjne kierownictwo mogłoby zostać zapewnione raczej przez partie stalinowskie niż Czwartą Międzynarodówkę – wyłoniła się cała rewizjonistyczna struktura pablowskiego rewizjonizmu.

W innym dokumencie pt. „Nadchodząca wojna” Pablo wysuwał swoją politykę „entryzmu sui generis” (swego rodzaju):

„W celu zintegrowania się z rzeczywistym ruchem masowym, roboty i pozostania w masowych związkach zawodowych na przykład, «podstępy» i «kapitulacje» są nie tylko możliwe do zaakceptowania, ale i konieczne”.

W istocie trockiści mieli porzucić perspektywę krótkoterminowego entryzmu jako taktyki budowania partii trockistowskiej, którego celem zawsze było dokonanie rozłamu w organizacjach klasy robotniczej na twardej podstawie programowej. Nowa polityka entrystowska wypływała bezpośrednio z analizy Pabla. Ponieważ domniemana zmiana w światowym stosunku sił na korzyść postępu rewolucji zmuszałaby partie stalinowskie do odgrywania roli rewolucyjnej, jedynym logicznym wnioskiem było, że trockiści powinni być częścią takich partii, prowadząc w istocie politykę wywierania nacisków na stalinowski aparat.

Wszystko to powinno zdetonować bombę w głowach międzynarodowych kadr trockistowskich. Pablo był przecież szefem Sekretariatu Międzynarodowego, stałego organu politycznego Czwartej Międzynarodówki! Jednak mało jest dowodów nawet na alarm, a tym mniej na formowanie międzynarodowej frakcji antyrewizjonistycznej, jaka była potrzebna. Pewien długi dokument Ernesta Germaina („Dziesięć tez”) i może pewne podziemne pomruki, zmusiły Pabla do wytworzenia próby ortodoksji w kwestii „okresu przejściowego”, ale nie ma żadnych innych uwag na piśmie o najbardziej otwartej napaści Pabla na program trockizmu.

Germain stawia opór

W marcu 1951 r. Germain wyprodukował „Dziesięć tez”, które były zawoalowanym atakiem na „Dokąd idziemy?”, ale nie atakował Pabla ani jego dokumentu po imieniu. Germain przywracał marksistowskie użycie terminu „okres przejściowy” oznaczającego okres między zwycięstwem rewolucji (dyktatury proletariatu) a osiągnięciem socjalizmu (społeczeństwa bezklasowego). Bez żadnej wyraźnej aluzji do stanowiska Pabla pisał: „Tak samo jak burżuazja, nie przetrwa on [stalinizm] wojny, która zostanie przekształcona w światowy przypływ rewolucji”. Germain kładł nacisk na sprzeczny bonapartystyczny charakter stalinizmu, oparty na proletariackich formach własności przy strzeżeniu przed robotnikami uprzywilejowanej pozycji biurokracji. Podkreślał dwoistą naturę masowych partii komunistycznych poza ZSRR jako determinowanych przez ich proletariacką bazę z jednej strony i podporządkowanie rządzącym stalinowskim biurokracjom z drugiej.

Germain usiłował zaprezentować ortodoksyjną reakcję na pablowski impuls, że zniszczenie kapitalizmu w Europie Wschodniej, Chinach i Jugosławii bez trockistowskiego kierownictwa czyniło Czwartą Międzynarodówkę zbędną. Znowu nie odnosił się do stanowiska, które atakował; można by pomyśleć, że „Dziesięć tez” po prostu spadło z nieba raczej jako interesujące ćwiczenie teoretyczne niż w odpowiedzi na powstanie nurtu rewizjonistycznego zupełnie przeciwstawnego impulsowi Germaina. Podkreślając z naciskiem, że nowy rewolucyjny przypływ o światowym zasięgu nie ustabilizowałby stalinizmu, lecz raczej byłby dla niego śmiertelnym niebezpieczeństwem, pisał on:

„To dlatego, że nowa fala rewolucyjna zawiera w zarodku zniszczenie partii stalinowskich jako takich, powinniśmy być dziś o wiele bliżej komunistycznych robotników. To tylko jedna faza naszego fundamentalnego zadania: budowy nowych partii rewolucyjnych (…). Bycie «bliżej komunistycznych robotników» oznacza zatem również potwierdzanie bardziej niż kiedykolwiek naszego własnego programu i naszej własnej trockistowskiej polityki” (podkreślenie nasze).

„Dziesięć tez” ukazało, że wszystkie skrzydła ruchu trockistowskiego były wciąż niezdolne do uchwycenia natury przekształceń społecznych, które pojawiły się były w Europie Wschodniej [chociaż analiza większości Hastona-Granta w brytyjskiej RCP, zapożyczona przez grupę Verna-Ryana w organizacji SPR w Los Angeles, osiągnęła początek (jednak jedynie początek) mądrości uznając, że w okresie bezpośrednio powojennym zbadanie rodzimych form własności raczek nie wystarczy, skoro władzą państwową w Europie Wschodniej była obca armia okupacyjna, Armia Czerwona]. W 1951 r. Germain wciąż uważał proces „asymilacji strukturalnej” za niedokończony (!) i przewidywał asymilację armii Europy Wschodniej do Armii Radzieckiej – to jest, że Europa Wschodnia zostanie po prostu inkorporowana do Związku Radzieckiego. Germain uznawał, że przekształcenie w Europie Wschodniej zniszczyło kapitalizm, ale zawierało w sobie, nawet w zwycięstwie, decydującą biurokratyczną przeszkodę dla rozwoju socjalistycznego; podkreślał, że rozszerzenie niekapitalistycznego sposobu produkcji ZSRR „jest nieskończenie mniej ważne, niż zniszczenie żywego ruchu robotników, które je poprzedzało”.

Żadna taka wbudowana przeszkoda nie była uznawana w odniesieniu do Chin, a szczególnie Jugosławii. Trockiści byli niezdolni przestać kojarzyć stalinizm z osobą Stalina; zerwanie titowców z Kremlem zaciemniało wszelkie uznanie, że Jugosławia będzie w sposób konieczny prowadziła jakościowo identyczną politykę wewnętrzna i dyplomatyczną, strzegąc przed klasą robotniczą interesów własnego narodowego reżimu biurokratycznego. Germain, któremu niełatwo przychodziło przyznać, że siły stalinowskie na czele mas chłopskich mogłyby kiedykolwiek dokonać rewolucji antykapitalistycznej, w „Dziesięciu tezach” określał i jugosłowiańskie, i chińskie wydarzenia jako rewolucje proletariackie i argumentował również, że „w takich warunkach te partie przestają być partiami stalinowskimi w klasycznym sensie tego określenia”.

Tam, gdzie Pablo przyjmował te wydarzenia jako nowy model rewolucyjny, który unieważniał „«czyste» formy i normy” (to jest rewolucję rosyjską), Germain – znów bez odnoszenia się do Pabla – podkreślał, że były one rezultatem wyjątkowych okoliczności, które w każdym razie nie byłyby istotne dla zaawansowanych krajów przemysłowych. Przeciwstawiał możliwościom Europy „faktyczny jednolity front, który dziś istnieje między rewolucjami antykolonialnymi w Azji a radziecką biurokracją, a bierze obiektywny początek we wspólnym zagrożeniu przez imperializm”. Zgadzał się z przewidywaniem nieuchronnej III wojny światowej między „jednolitym frontem imperialistycznym z jednej strony a ZSRR, krajami buforowymi i rewolucjami antykolonialnymi z drugiej”, ale zamiast cieszyć się z niej, raczej określał ją jako wojnę kontr-rewolucyjną.

Sedno argumentacji Germaina było takie:

„Tym, co się liczy przede wszystkim w obecnym okresie, jest dać proletariatowi międzynarodowe kierownictwo zdolne do koordynowania jego sił i prowadzenia do światowego zwycięstwa komunizmu. Stalinowska biurokracja, zmuszona zwrócić się ze ślepą furią przeciwko pierwszej zwycięskiej rewolucji proletariackiej poza ZSRR [Jugosławia!], jest społecznie niezdolna do wykonania takiego zadania. Na tym polega historyczna misja naszego ruchu. (…) Historyczne uzasadnienie dla naszego ruchu (…) polega na niezdolności stalinizmu do obalenia światowego kapitalizmu, niezdolności zakorzenionej w społecznej naturze radzieckiej biurokracji”.

Mając przywilej spoglądania z perspektywy czasu i doświadczeń minionych 20 lat – najwyraźniejszego potwierdzenia w 1956 r. na Węgrzech kontr-rewolucyjnej natury stalinizmu, rewolucji kubańskiej z 1960 r., w której drobnoburżuazyjny nacjonalizm na czele chłopskich partyzantów wyrwał z korzeniami kapitalizm tylko po to, aby złączyć się z aparatem stalinowskim wewnątrz i w skali międzynarodowej, konsekwentnie nacjonalistycznej i stalinowskiej polityki rządzącej w Chinach partii komunistycznej – łatwo jest uznać, że „Dziesięć tez” w swojej analizie i prognozach było błędnych. Jednakże tym, co jest o wiele ważniejsze, jest konsekwentny i świadomy niefrakcyjny ton tego dokumentu, który zapowiadał odmowę Germaina przystąpienia do obozu antypablowskiego. Oderwana od determinacji, by walczyć o właściwą linię w Czwartej Międzynarodówce, teoretyczna obrona przez Germaina konieczności trockizmu znaczyła bardzo niewiele. Był to pabloizm pozbawiony tylko zaprzeczania roli czynnika subiektywnego w procesie rewolucyjnym.

Trzeci Kongres Światowy

Trzeci Kongres Światowy Czwartej Międzynarodówki został przeprowadzony w sierpniu-wrześniu 1951 r. Główne sprawozdanie polityczne próbowało rozróżniać między partiami komunistycznymi a partiami reformistycznymi na tej podstawie, że jedynie te pierwsze miały być pełne sprzeczności, i przewidywało, że pod naciskiem silnego masowego przypływu mogłyby stać się partiami rewolucyjnymi. Oportunistyczna natura Pablowskiej wersji taktyki entryzmu została ostro odsłonięta w odrzuceniu zasadniczego entrystowskiego celu, ostrej polaryzacji i rozłamu: „Możliwości ważnych rozłamów w partiach komunistycznych (…) są zastępowane ruchem ku lewicy w ich szeregach”. Tam nie było żadnego uznania decydujących deformacji w państwach robotniczych: wschodnioeuropejskich i chińskim; w ten sposób kongres implicite uznawał jedynie ilościową różnicę między Związkiem Radzieckim za Lenina a zdegenerowanymi i zdeformowanymi państwami robotniczymi. Sprawozdanie przewidywało możliwość, że Tito mógłby „stanąć na czele przegrupowania sił rewolucyjnych niezależnych od kapitalizmu i od Kremla (…) odgrywającego główną rolę w formowaniu nowego rewolucyjnego kierownictwa”. O perspektywie rewolucji permanentnej dla krajów kolonialnych nie było tam żadnej wzmianki.

Zastosowanie Pablowskiej polityki „swego rodzaju entryzmu” zostało wypracowane w komisji austriackiej:

„Działalność naszych członków w partiach socjalistycznych będzie kierować się następującymi wytycznymi: A. Nie występować jako trockiści z naszym pełnym programem. B. Nie naciskać na kwestie programu i zasad”.

Żadna ilość werbalnej ortodoksji w rezolucjach nie mogła dłużej zaciemniać widzenia tych, którzy chcieli widzieć.

Komunistyczna Partia Internacjonalistyczna Francji poddała „Dziesięć tez” Germaina pod głosowanie (po tym, gdy sam Germain jawnie zrezygnował z uczynienia tego) i zaproponowała poprawki do głównego dokumentu. Ani jeden głos nie padł za „Dziesięcioma tezami” ani francuskimi poprawkami. PCI jako jedyna sekcja głosowała przeciwko przyjęciu treści głównego dokumentu.

W następnych miesiącach została wypracowana pablowska linia w zgodzie z liniami, które już przed Trzecim Kongresem Światowym były wyraźne:

„Wchodzimy [do partii stalinowskich] w celu utrzymania się tam na długi czas, mając nadzieję na wielką możliwość na ujrzenie tych partii, postawionych w obliczu nowych warunków [„ogólnie nieodwracalnego okresu przedrewolucyjnego”], rozwijającymi tendencje centrystowskie, które będą przewodziły całemu stadium radykalizacji mas i obiektywnych procesów rewolucyjnych”. (Pablo, sprawozdanie na X plenum Międzynarodowego Komitetu Wykonawczego, luty 1952 r.)

„Schwytana między imperialistycznym zagrożeniem a rewolucją antykolonialną biurokracja radziecka poczuła się zmuszona sprzymierzyć się z tą drugą przeciwko temu pierwszemu. (…) Dezintegracja stalinizmu w tych partiach nie powinna być rozumiana (…) jako dezintegracja organizacyjna (…) ani publiczne zerwanie z Kremlem, lecz jako postępowe przekształcenie wewnętrzne”. („Wzrost i upadek stalinizmu”, Sekretariat Międzynarodowy, wrzesień 1953 r.)

V. ANTIYPABLOWCY

Wraz z kapitulacją Germaina, w którym Francuzi wydawali się pokładać pewien stopień zaufania, chociaż jego rola we wstępnych konfliktach wokół polityki pablowskiej była dwuznaczna, zadanie zwalczania pabloizmu spadło na większość francuskiej PCI Bleibtreu-Lamberta i amerykańską SPR. Pomimo znacznej ilości przeciwnych mitów i PCI, i SPR wahały się, kiedy rewizjonizm przejawił się na czele Czwartej Międzynarodówki, uchylając się tylko od zastosowania go w swoich własnych sekcjach. Obie grupy kompromitowały się przez niedobre ustępstwa (w przypadku PCI połączone ze sporadycznym oporem) wobec polityki Pabla, dopóki zabójcze dla nich konsekwencje organizacyjne nie zmusiły ich do ostrej walki. Obie nie sprostały odpowiedzialności podjęcia walki przeciwko rewizjonizmowi w każdym organie i każdej sekcji Czwartej Międzynarodówki i obie wycofały się z walki przez założenie Komitetu Międzynarodowego na bazie „zasad ortodoksyjnego trockizmu”. KM od początku był jedynie papierową międzynarodową tendencją składającą się z tych grup, w których już nastąpiły rozłamy między skrzydłami propablowskimi a ortodoksyjnymi.

PCI zwalcza Pabla

Większość PCI, zawieszona przez Sekretariat Międzynarodowy (który umieścił w kierownictwie sekcji francuskiej mniejszość kierowaną przez Mestre’a i Franka), nadal twierdziła, że zgadza się z linią Trzeciego Kongresu Światowego, argumentując że Pablo, SM i MKW naruszają jego decyzje. Według Francuzów pabloizm „wykorzystuje gmatwaninę i sprzeczności Kongresu Światowego – gdzie nie może sam się narzucić – w celu utwierdzenia się po Kongresie Światowym”. (Niedatowana „Deklaracja tendencji Bleibtreu-Lambert o porozumieniach zawartych w MKW”, marzec lub kwiecień 1952 r.)

Ważny list od Renarda w imieniu większości PCI do Cannona, datowany 16 lutego 1952 r., zwracał się z apelem do SPR. List Renarda pretendował do zgodności z Trzecim Kongresem Światowym, włącznie z jego komisją francuską, i przeciwstawiał ten rzekomo niepablowski Kongres (przywołując nieokreślone banały, aby wykazać jego rzekomo ortodoksyjną treść) następnym działaniom Pabla i jego linii w MKW i SM. Renard twierdził, że „pabloizm nie zwyciężył na Trzecim Kongresie Światowym”. (On mądrze nie usiłował wyjaśniać, dlaczego jego organizacja głosowała przeciwko głównym dokumentom Kongresu). Głównym argumentem listu jest apel przeciwko interwencji pablowskiego międzynarodowego kierownictwa we francuskiej sekcji narodowej.

Odpowiedź Cannona z 29 maja oskarżała większość PCI o stalinofobiczny oportunizm w ruchu związkowym (koalicję z „postępowymi” antykomunistami przeciwko partii komunistycznej) i zaprzeczała istnieniu takiej rzeczy jak pabloizm.

Większość PCI dawała świadectwo jasnego rozumienia implikacji pablowskiego entryzmu. W polemice przeciwko teoretykowi mniejszości Mestre’owi większość napisała była:

„Jeśli te idee są słuszne, przestańmy pleść o taktyce entryzmu, nawet entryzmu swego rodzaju, i stawiajmy jasno nasze nowe zadania: bardziej spójnej tendencji, nawet nie lewicowej opozycji (…) której rolą jest pomaganie stalinizmowi przezwyciężać jego wahanie i ustawianie decydującego starcia z burżuazją w najlepszych warunkach. (…) Jeśli stalinizm się zmienił, (…) [znaczy to, że] nie odzwierciedla już partykularnych interesów kasty biurokratycznej, której samo istnienie zależy od niestabilnej równowagi między klasami, że nie jest już dłużej bonapartystyczny, lecz odzwierciedla wyłącznie (…) obronę państwa robotniczego. Takie przekształcenie, które miałoby zostać wytworzone bez interwencji radzieckiego proletariatu (…), lecz przeciwnie, przez ewolucję samej biurokracji, (…) prowadziłoby nas do rewizji nie tylko «Programu przejściowego», [ale] wszystkich prac Lwa Trockiego od 1923 r. oraz założenia Czwartej Międzynarodówki”. („Pierwsze odzwierciedlenie zygzaka” Biuletyn wewnętrzny PCI nr 2, luty 1952 r.)

Jednak większość PCI, podobnie jak SPR, wykazała brak konkretnego internacjonalizmu, kiedy stanęła w obliczu perspektywy zupełnie samotnego prowadzenia walki przeciwko pabloizmowi.

3 czerwca 1952 r. większość PCI poprosiła o uznanie dwóch francuskich sekcji Czwartej Międzynarodówki i umożliwienie jej w ten sposób prowadzenia własnej polityki we Francji. Było to jasnym naruszeniem założycielskich statutów Czwartej Międzynarodówki i oznaczało jej likwidację jako zdyscyplinowanego organu międzynarodowego. Tym, co było potrzebne, była międzynarodowa frakcja walcząca o linię polityczną Czwartej Międzynarodówki. Jednak większość PCI nie chciała podporządkować roboty we Francji sednu walki o legitymizację i ciągłość Czwartej Międzynarodówki. Odmowa przez Pabla zgody na to żądanie doprowadziła bezpośrednio do oderwania się większości PCI.

SPR wkracza do walki

SPR przyłączyła się do walki przeciwko rewizjonizmowi dopiero, gdy ujawniła się wewnątrz amerykańskiej partii tendencja propablowska, skrzydło Clarke’a frakcji Cochrana-Clarke’a. W swej odpowiedzi do Renarda datowanej 29 maja 1952 r. Cannon napisał był:

„Nie widzimy [żadnego rodzaju tendencji prostalinowskiej] w międzynarodowym kierownictwie Czwartej Międzynarodówki ani żadnego jej znaku ani objawu. Nie widzimy żadnego rewizjonizmu [w tych dokumentach], (…) uważamy te dokumenty za całkowicie trockistowskie. (…) To jest jednomyślna opinia czołowych ludzi w SPR, że autorzy tych dokumentów oddali wielką usługę ruchowi”.

Historia o tym, że SPR przygotowała była pewne poprawki do dokumentów Trzeciego Kongresu Światowego, które Clarke (przedstawiciel SPR w Międzynarodówce) spalił zamiast przedstawić je, jest całkiem możliwa, ale nie bardzo znacząca, biorąc pod uwagę deklarację Cannona politycznej zgody z Pablem, kiedy to się liczyło, i odmowę solidaryzowania się z antypablowską większością PCI.

Wbrew obronie przez Cochrana i Clarke’a orientacji na poputczików partii komunistycznej, większość SPR potwierdziła poparcie dla pablowskiej taktyki entryzmu w niej, ale upierała się przy pewnego rodzaju amerykańskiej wyjątkowości, przeciwstawiając masowe partie europejskie żałosnemu środowisku amerykańskiej partii komunistycznej, któremu brakowało bazy w klasie robotniczej i które było zaludnione lichymi trzeciorzędnymi intelektualistami.

Cannon odpowiedzi na zagrożenie ze strony Cochrana i Clarke’a przystąpił do formowania frakcji w SPR, wspomaganej przez kierownictwo Weissa w Los Angeles. Cannon dążył do zgromadzenia starej kadry partyjnej wokół kwestii pojednania ze stalinizmem i apelował do partyjnych związkowców, takich jak Dunne i Swabeck, przez nakreślanie analogii między potrzebą walki frakcyjnej wewnątrz partii a walką wewnątrz klasy przeciwko reformistom i sprzedawczykom, jako równoległymi procesami walki frakcyjnej przeciwko obcej ideologii. Na plenum majowym SPR w 1953 r. powiedział:

„W zeszłym roku miałem poważne wątpliwości co do zdolności SPR do przetrwania. (…) Myślałem, że nasze 25 lat wysiłku (…) skończyło się katastrofalną klęską, i że jeszcze raz mała garstka będzie musiała pozbierać te kawałki i zacząć wszystko od nowa, by zbudować nową kadrę innej partii na starych fundamentach” (przemówienie końcowe, 30 maja).

Jednak Cannon wybrał inną drogę. Zamiast prowadzić niezbędną walkę wszędzie, gdzie mógłby jej przewodzić, zawarł koalicję z aparatem Dobbsa-Kerry’ego-Hansena w sprawie organizacyjnie likwidacjonistycznych implikacji linii Cochrana-Clarke’a. W zamian za ich poparcie Cannon obiecał rutyniarskiej, konserwatywnej administracji Dobbsa całkowitą kontrolę nad SPR („nowy reżim w partii”), do której on się nie będzie wtrącał.

Reakcją SPR na stwierdzenie, że dyskusja w Międzynarodówce odzwierciedla się w sekcji amerykańskiej, było pogłębienie jej izolacjonizmu w jadowity antyinternacjonalizm. Przemówienie Cannona 18 maja 1953 r. na zebraniu partyjnym większości SPR oświadczało: „Nie uważamy się za biuro amerykańskiego oddziału międzynarodowej firmy, które otrzymuje rozkazy od szefa” i wychwalało dyskusję, w której „wypracowujemy, jeśli to możliwe [!], wspólną linię”. Cannon podważał legitymizację międzynarodowego kierownictwa, które nazywał „kilkoma ludźmi w Paryżu”. Przeciwstawiał Czwartą Międzynarodówkę Kominternowi Lenina, który miał władzę państwową, i kierownictwu, którego autorytet był szeroko uznawany, i stąd zaprzeczał, żeby współczesna Czwarta Międzynarodówka mogła być ciałem demokratycznocentralistycznym.

Cannon z opóźnieniem zrobił wyjątek dla postępowania Pabla przeciwko francuskiej większości, ale tylko w kwestii organizacyjnej, podtrzymując propozycję, że międzynarodowe kierownictwo nie powinno się wtrącać w sprawy sekcji narodowych. Pisał:

„Byliśmy zdumieni taktyką wykorzystywaną w ostatnim francuskim konflikcie i rozłamie oraz niewyobrażalnym organizacyjnym precedensem ustalonym w nim. Oto dlaczego zwlekałem tak długo z odpowiedzią Renardowi. Chciałem pomóc SM politycznie, ale nie widziałem, jak mógłbym sankcjonować kroki organizacyjne podjęte przeciwko większości wybranego kierownictwa. W końcu rozwiązałem ten problem po prostu przez zignorowanie tej części listu Renarda”. („List do Toma”, 4 czerwca 1953 r.)

„List do Toma” powtarzał również stanowisko, że Trzeci Kongres Światowy nie był rewizjonistyczny.

Sedno błędów w antypablowskiej walce walce PCI i SPR zostało należycie wykorzystane przez pablowców. XIV plenum MKW przywołało do porządku Cannona za jego koncepcję Międzynarodówki jako „związku federacyjnego”. Zauważyło ono, że SPR nigdy nie sprzeciwiała się była pablowskiej polityce entryzmu co do zasady i oskarżyło SPR i PCI o pozbawioną zasad koalicję w kwestii Chin. Czepiając się jednostronnej ortodoksji SPR (obrony przez Hansena sformułowania większości SPR, że stalinizm jest „kontr-rewolucyjny dogłębnie i na wskroś – charakterystyki, której odpowiada jedynie CIA!), pablowcy zdołali osłonić swoją likwidację niezależnego programu trockistowskiego pobożnymi potwierdzeniami sprzeczności stalinizmu jako kontr-rewolucyjnej kasty spoczywającej na szczycie form własności ustanowionych przez rewolucję październikową.

KM sformowany

Po rozłamie Cochrana-Clarke’a SPR pospiesznie zerwała publicznie z Pablem. 16 listopada 1953 r. „The Militant” zamieścił „List do trockistów na całym świecie”, który potępiał Cochrana, Clarke’a i Pabla i z opóźnieniem solidaryzował się z „niesprawiedliwie wyrzuconą” większością PCI. Uprzednie charakteryzowanie Trzeciego Kongresu Światowego przez SPR jako „całkowicie trockistowskiego” wymuszało próbę umiejscawiania w tym tak zwanym „Liście otwartym” powstania pabloizmu po kongresie, która skazała SPR na przedstawianie trochę nieprzekonującego przypadku, opierającego się w dużej części na ulotce (czy dwóch ulotkach) pablowskiej francuskiej mniejszości z 1952 r. Mniej więcej w tym samym czasie SPR wyprodukowała dokument pt. „Przeciwko pablowskiemu rewizjonizmowi”, który zawierał bardziej kompetentną analizę likwidacjonistycznego przystosowania się Pabla do stalinizmu:

„Koncepcja, że masowa partia komunistyczna wejdzie na drogę do władzy, jeśli tylko zostanie rzucona na szalę wystarczająca masowa presja, jest fałszywa. Przerzuca ona odpowiedzialność za regres rewolucji z kierownictwa na masy. (…) Klasa robotnicza jest przekształcana [przez teorie Pabla] w grupę nacisku, a trockiści w grupkę nacisku obok niej, która popycha część biurokracji ku rewolucji. W ten sposób biurokracja jest przekształcana z blokady i zdrajcy rewolucji w jej pomocniczą siłę napędową”.

W 1954 r. został sformowany Komitet Międzynarodowy. Obejmował on większość francuskiej PCI, grupę Healy’ego (Burnsa) z Anglii i amerykańską SPR jako obserwatora. Grupa angielska nie odgrywała żadnej znaczącej roli w walce przeciwko rewizjonizmowi. Odejście Healy’ego i Lawrence’a z dezintegrującej się po wojnie Rewolucyjnej Partii Komunistycznej, wymuszone przez głęboko entrystowską perspektywę ich frakcji wobec brytyjskiej Partii Pracy, zostało poparte przez Sekretariat Międzynarodowy Pabla, który uznał dwie sekcje w W. Brytanii i dał im równą reprezentację w MKW. Healy był „człowiekiem Cannona” w Anglii i był konsekwentnie wspierany przez SPR w sporach w RCP. Kiedy SPR zerwała z Pablem, frakcja Healy’ego i Lawrence’a rozpadła się, Healy został z SPR, a Lawrence przystał do Pabla (później przeszedł na stalinizm, tak jak Mestre z mniejszości PCI). Grupa Healy’ego, chociaż byla częścią nowej antypablowskiej międzynarodowej koalicji, kontynuowała swój arcypablowski oportunizm w Partii Pracy. Niewiele znaczyła w koalicji KM, dopóki zwerbowanie po rewolucji węgierskiej z 1956 r. robiącej wrażenie warstwy intelektualistów z partii komunistycznej i związkowców (z których większość później utraciła) nie uczyniło jej znacznie bardziej istotną na brytyjskiej lewicy.

KM twierdził, że popiera go również (emigrancka) sekcja chińska (która już uległa rozłamowi) oraz mała sekcja szwajcarska.

Na początku 1954 r. KM udało się wyprodukować parę biuletynów wewnętrznych, ale nigdy nie spotkał się on jako rzeczywisty organ międzynarodowy, ani nigdy nie zostało wybrane scentralizowane kierownictwo. Taktyką przyjętą przez SPR było bojkotowanie Czwartego Kongresu Światowego jako po prostu spotkania frakcji Pabla nie mającej legitymizacji jako Czwarta Międzynarodówka.

Ruch światowy zapłacił wysoką cenę za ten unik. Żeby przytoczyć tylko jeden przykład: Cejlon. Cejlońska LSSP zajęła niefrakcyjne stanowisko wobec pabloizmu, apelując do SPR, aby nie robiła rozłamu i przybyła na Czwarty Kongres. Trzeba było wobec biernych cejlońskich wątpiących forsować twardą walkę, wymuszającą polaryzację i wykucie twardej kadry w walce. Zamiast tego Cejlończycy dryfowali wraz z Pablem. Jakieś siedem lat później rewolucyjna reputacja trockizmu została splamiona w oczach bojowników na całym świecie przez wejście LSSP do cejlońskiego burżuazyjnego rządu koalicyjnego, przyspieszające rozłam w ostatniej chwili dokonany przez pablowskie międzynarodowe kierownictwo. Gdyby w 1953 r. w sekcji cejlońskiej była prowadzona pryncypialna antyrewizjonistyczna walka, mogłaby tam zostać stworzona twarda organizacja rewolucyjna z niezależnym roszczeniem do trockistowskiej ciągłości, zapobiegając kojarzeniu nazwy trockizmu z fundamentalną zdradą LSSP.

W ten sposób antyrewizjonistyczna walka świadomie nie była prowadzona w ruchu światowym, KM składał się głównie z tych grup, które już przeszły rozłamy w kwestii zastosowania polityki pablowskiej w ich własnych krajach, a walka o pokonanie rewizjonizmu i odbudowę Czwartej Międzynarodówki na bazie autentycznego trockizmu została przerwana.

Od flirtu do skonsumowania

W 1957 r. Sekretariat Międzynarodowy Pabla i SPR flirtowały w sprawie możliwego zjednoczenia (korespondencja Handen-Kolpe). Podstawą w tym czasie była formalna ortodoksja – podobieństwo linii między SM a SPR w reakcji na rewolucję węgierską z 1956 r. SPR, może naiwnie oczekując powtórzenia stanowiska Clarke’a z 1953 r. w sprawie możliwości samolikwidacji stalinowskich biurokracji, skłaniała się do przyjmowania formalnie trockistowskich konkluzji SM w sprawie Węgier za dobrą monetę. Ta wczesna uwertura zjednoczeniowa nie udała się z powodu sprzeciwu brytyjskiej i francuskiej grupy KM, jak również podejrzeń Cannona, że Pablo manewruje. Sprawa zostala postawiona w błędny sposób – po prostu empiryczne porozumienie bez zbadania uprzednich różnic i obecnego ruchu.

Kiedy znów pojawiła się kwestia zjednoczenia, skonsumowanego w 1963 r. wraz ze sformowaniem Zjednoczonego Sekretariatu, cały teren polityczny się zmienił. SM i SPR porozumiały się w sprawi Kuby. Jednak podstawą nie była już rzekoma zbieżność w ortodoksji, lecz porzucenie przez SPR trockizmu, by poprzeć pablowski rewizjonizm (który SPR w swej linii kolaboracji klasowej w kwestii wojny wietnamskiej teraz przekroczyła na drodze do otwartego reformizmu).

Podstawą dla zjednoczenia z 1963 r. był dokument zatytułowany „O szybkie zjednoczenie światowego ruchu trockistowskiego – oświadczenie Komitetu Politycznego SPR” z 1 marca 1963 r. Kluczową nową linią była część 13:

„Na drodze rewolucji, zaczynającej się od prostych żądań demokratycznych, a kończącej się złamaniem kapitalistycznych stosunków własności, wojna partyzancka prowadzona przez bezrolnych chłopów i siły półproletariackie, pod kierownictwem, które staje się oddane doprowadzeniu rewolucji do konkluzji, może odgrywać decydującą rolę w podkopywaniu i przyspieszaniu upadku władzy kolonialnej i półkolonialnej. To jest jedna z głównych nauk, jakie trzeba wyciągnąć z doświadczeń od czasu drugiej wojny światowej. Musi ona zostać świadomie włączona do strategii budowy rewolucyjnych partii marksistowskich w krajach kolonialnych”.

W dokumencie pt. „Ku odrodzeniu Czwartej Międzynarodówki” (12 czerwca 1963 r.) tendencja spartakusowska sprzeciwiała się:

„Doświadczenie od czasu drugiej wojny światowej wykazało, że wojna partyzancka oparta na chłopstwie pod drobnoburżuazyjnym kierownictwem nie może sama z siebie prowadzić do niczego więcej niż antyrobotniczego reżimu biurokratycznego. Do stworzenia takich reżimów doszło w warunkach upadku imperializmu, demoralizacji i dezorientacji wywołanej przez stalinowskie zdrady i brak rewolucyjnego marksistowskiego kierownictwa klasy robotniczej. Rewolucja antykolonialna może mieć niedwuznacznie postępowe, rewolucyjne znaczenie jedynie pod takim kierownictwem rewolucyjnego proletariatu. Dla trockistów włączanie do ich strategii rewizjonizmu w kwestii proletariackiego kierownictwa w rewolucji jest głęboką negacją marksizmu-leninizmu, nieważne jak pobożne może być równocześnie wyrażane życzenie «budowy rewolucyjnych partii marksistowskich w krajach kolonialnych». Marksiści muszą stanowczo występować przeciwko wszelkiej awanturniczej akceptacji drogi partyzantki chłopskiej do socjalizmu – historycznie podobnej do programu eserowskiego w kwestii taktyki, który zwalczał Lenin. Ta alternatywa byłaby kursem samobójczym dla socjalistycznych celów ruchu, i może fizycznie dla awanturników”.

Ironia losu sprawiła, że dalsza prawicowa ewolucja SPR prowadzi ją do odrzucania teraz podstawowej linii części 13 z drugiej strony – obrona przez ZS drobnoburżuazyjnej walki zbrojnej jest daleko zbyt awanturnicza dla legalistycznej SPR, która ma na celu zostanie masową partią amerykańskiego reformizmu.

Spartakusowcy a Czwarta Międzynarodówka

Trocki w swej walce o założenie Czwartej Międzynarodówki niejednokrotnie podkreślał imperatyw rewolucyjnej organizacji na podstawie międzynarodowej. Przedłużająca się izolacja narodowa w jednym kraju musi ostatecznie zdezorientować, zdeformować i zniszczyć wszelkie ugrupowanie rewolucyjne, nieważne jak subiektywnie wytrwałe. Jedynie pryncypialna i zdyscyplinowana współpraca międzynarodowa może zapewnić przeciwwagę dla okrutnej presji w kierunku izolacji i szowinizmu, generowanej przez burżuazję i jej ideologicznych agentów w ruchu klasy robotniczej. Jak zdawał sobie sprawę Trocki, ci którzy zaprzeczają potrzebie programowo ufundowanej demokratycznej centralistycznej partii światowej, zaprzeczają samej leninowskiej koncepcji partii awangardowej. Zniszczenie Czwartej Międzynarodówki przez pablowski rewizjonizm, któremu towarzyszył rozpad organizacyjny na liczne konkurujące koalicje międzynarodowe, wymaga uporczywej walki o jej odrodzenie.

W swojej dziesięcioletniej historii tendencja spartakusowska stanęła w obliczu potężnej obiektywnej presji ku porzuceniu perspektywy internacjonalistycznej, i oparła się jej. Liga Spartakusowska, w rezultacie organizacyjnego sekciarstwa, a nstępnie degeneracji politycznej Komitetu Międzynarodowego Gerry’ego Healyego odcięta od możliwości zdyscyplinowanych więzi międzynarodowych, odmówiła biernej zgody na narzuconą nam izolację narodową. Z naciskiem odrzuciliśmy namiastkę „internacjonalizmu”, która zdobywa powiązania międzynarodowe za cenę federalistycznego paktu o nieagresji, w ten sposób z góry rezygnując z walki o zdyscyplinowaną organizację międzynarodową. Dążyliśmy do rozwinięcia braterskich więzi z ugrupowaniami w innych krajach w ramach procesu wyjaśniania i polaryzacji. Naszym celem jest krystalizacja spójnej demokratycznej centralistycznej tendencji międzynarodowej opartej na pryncypialnej jedności programowej, zarodka odrodzone Czwartej Międzynarodówki.

Obecny rozłam w paru międzynarodowych koalicjach „trockistowskich” teraz zapewnia szczytową okazję dla tendencji spartakusowskiej do interweniowania w ruchu światowym. Nasza historia i program mogą służyć jako przewodnik dla nurtów zmierzających teraz ku autentycznemu trockizmowi, ponieważ pomimo wymuszonej narodowej izolacji przez pewien czas utrzymaliśmy swoją internacjonalistyczną determinację i kontynuowaliśmy prowadzenie pryncypialnej walki przeciwko rewizjonizmowi.

Rozbicie pretensji rewizjonistów i centrystów na międzynarodową organizację – zdemaskowanie, że Zjednoczony Sekretariat, Komitet Międzynarodowy itd. nie były niczym więcej, niż sfederowanymi zgniłymi koalicjami – połączone z odnową proletariackiej bojowości o światowym zasięgu w kontekście zaostrzonej rywalizacji międzyimperialistycznej i nasilonego głęboko zakorzenionego kapitalistycznego kryzysu stwarzają bezprecedensową obiektywną okazję dla krystalizacji i rozwoju tendencji spartakusowskiej w skali międzynarodowej. Gdy wciąż trwa rozkład politycznych trupów koalicji rewizjonistycznych, musi zostać odrodzona Czwarta Międzynarodówka, światowa partia rewolucji socjalistycznej.

O ODRODZENIE CZWARTEJ MIĘDZYNARODÓWKI!

WAR and the WORKERS LEAGUE

The “Trotskyism” of the Second International

WAR and the WORKERS LEAGUE

[Reprinted from Workers Vanguard #7, April, 1972. Originally posted online at http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/05/1972-april-war-and-workers-league.html ]  

In the current period of heightened inter-imperialist rivalry, the pressures of war will be reflected in increasing measure in the opportunism of sections of the workers movement which abandon their proclaimed struggle for international revolutionary solidarity of the workers in favor bf support to one section or another of the imperialists struggling for a greater share of plunder. Our task becomes more urgent, therefore, to conduct a relentless exposure of workers’ and radical organizations which now support, openly or backhandedly, bourgeois forces in war.

We analyze here one recent case of egregious betrayal of the working class by an ostensibly revolutionary, even “Trotskyist” organization. That the Workers League, the American section of the “International Committee for the Fourth International” of Tim Wohlforth and Gerry Healy, took its public stand in favor of the military moves of the Indian bourgeois government in the India-Pakistan war, responding to pressure no greater than the current relative popularity of the Indian action, indicates the certainty and depth of their future betrayals in wars of wider proportions and greater consequent pressure to betray to a section of the bourgeoisie. If the unbridled opportunism characteristic of the Worker League/Socialist Labour League combination is not politically expunged from the workers movement in time, revolutionists will write of them in future major wars as Lenin in 1915 characterized the policy of the social chauvinists of the Second International:

“Forty-four years after the Paris Commune, after half a century of the mustering and preparing of mass forces, the revolutionary class of Europe must, at the present moment, when Europe is passing through a catastrophic period, think of how to quickly become the lackey of its national bourgeoisie, how to help it plunder, violate, ruin and conquer other peoples, and how to refrain from launching, on a mass scale, direct revolutionary propaganda and preparation for revolutionary action.”

– Lenin, “Imperialism and Socialism in Italy,” Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 366.

Such was Lenin’s paraphrasing of the Second International’s position. We shall see why his fight for an independent working-class revolutionary policy in bourgeois wars retains burning importance today.

In the article “War, Revolution and Self-Determination” in the January 1972 number of Workers Vanguard, the Spartacist League analyzed the India-Pakistan war and the duty of revolutionists to seek the defeat of both governments and their armies in that war. The SL position flew in the face, as usual, of most of what was being said on the left; its opponents, either directly supported the Indian army (Workers League/ Socialist Labour League) or claimed that behind that army, despite it, with its help or because of it, somehow, was a national liberation struggle instead of its opposite; somehow the invading Indian army with its tanks and planes was being “used” by the Bengali workers and peasants. What remains of the “International Committee” of Tim Wohlforth and Gerry Healy explicitly stated: “We critically support the decision of the Indian bourgeois government to give military and economic aid to Bangla Desh”[Bulletin, 20 December 1971], We distinguished between aid from a bourgeois government and control by that government and noted that the Indian bourgeoisie had obviously taken control of the just Bengali self-determination struggle, and that a “self-determination struggle” under the total military and political control of another nation’s bourgeoisie is something other than it claims to be.

Wohlforth “replied” to our characterization of the IC as “waterboy for the Indian army” in an article “Spartacist Rediscovers Shachtman” in the 17 January 1972 issue of his Bulletin. The title refers to WV’s view that in 1942 the stance of the Workers Party of Max Shachtman on the question of the Chinese “self-determination struggle” was more Leninist than that taken by the Socialist Workers Party led by James P. Cannon.

Spartacist’s “Shachtmanism”

The central thrust of the WL’s “reply” is to smear the SL as “Shachtmanites,” i.e, as anti-Marxist renegades, and thereby cancel out the impact our arguments (on Bangladesh, the WL position on the working-class character of the police, their role in the National Peace Action Coalition [NPAC] as left face of SWP class-collaboration documented inWorkers Action #10, etc.) are having on Wohlforth’s own ranks. He shelves any defense of his indefensible support to the Indian bourgeoisie in favor of slander and label-pasting, hoping thereby to escape the impossible task of answering what we said about his stand. After all, we may be right, but he has the method; and even when correct we are still abstentionist petty-bourgeois empiricist swine.

Wohlforth accuses the SL, together with the SWP, Red Mole, the OCI, etc., of sharing “…the same methodological and class position as the Shachtman group in 1940” [emphasis added], The SWP majority in 1940 characterized the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern grouping as a petty-bourgeois current in flight from the working class and the imperative defense of the Soviet Union, and presumably that is now what the Wohlforthites tell each other the lot of us are.

According to Wohlforth “the direct connection between the present day abstentionists and their Shachtmanite ancestors is Spartacist.” Whatever this may mean metaphysically to Wohlforth, it is the direct reverse of the facts, as anybody outside the Workers League should have the political knowledge to recognize. None of the groups attacked for “abstentionism” (SWP, Red Mole, the OCI, and the SL) trace their political or organizational ancestry to Shachtman’s Workers Party/Independent Socialist League/Young Socialist League; all of them to this day stand formally on the position of the Trotsky-Cannon Majority in the 1939-1940 SWP faction fight; they all maintain formal continuity on the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union and the necessity to defend it against imperialism; all regard the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern break a consequence of petty-bourgeois capitulation to anti-Soviet “democratic” imperialism, All of them How the Pabloists (SWP, Red Mole) and the inverted Pabloists of Healy-Wohlforth’s IC became revisionists had nothing to do with the issues of the 1939-1940 SWP fight, except in the elementary sense of the kinship of all varieties of revisionism and centrism. There is an organization which traces its ancestry to Shachtman – the International Socialists – and they are not mentioned in Wohlforth’s essay on Shachtmanism ! (The IS’ “two wars” position on Bangladesh was criticized in the WV article.)

Wohlforth quotes a section from our above-mentioned article in the January WV (leaving the source unidentified so as to make it tougher to look up) which raised the similarity between the slogan of self-determination for China in the circumstances of World War II and. support for Bengali “self-determination” under conditions of total Indian control of that movement. We referred to Shachtman’s conclusion “that such support was merely backhanded assistance to U.S. imperialism which not only merely assisted, but controlled the Chinese forces,”

Wohlforth’s “answer” avoids the China-India analogy, the question of the U.S. in China in World War II, and the question of Bangladesh independence – which is what our article was about. The section of the article he does quote was aimed not at Wohlforth, but at the more circumspect SWP, whose objective support to India was backhanded. In the section dealing with Wohlforth, titled “Healyite ‘Principles’ Oil the Tanks,” we wrote:

“The SWP ‘merely’ justifies the capitulation of the Bangla Desh leaders to the Indian army; the Healyites openly support the Indian bourgeoisie’s army.”

This characterization was not surmise on our part. We quoted the Bulletin text:

“We [the ‘International Committee’] critically support the decision of the Indian bourgeois government to give military and economic aid to Bangla Desh.”

Since the WV’s view that the IC “has proclaimed itself waterboy for the Indian bourgeoisie’s army,” was based on a literal reading of the very words they wrote in their press, no one should be surprised that Wohlforth does not deal with them. No chance. Why attempt to defend a grotesque betrayal? Wohlforth quotes our reference to Shachtman’s position on China in World War II, and lets fly. WV had said:

“In a polemic with the SWP in 1942 it fell to Max Shachtman’s lot to place the general principle of support to self-determination struggles within a context of Leninist regard for concrete reality. The issue was China. Should socialists support China’s war against Japanese imperialism on the grounds of self-determination for China, or had such support become merely, as Shachtman charged, backhanded assistance to U.S. imperialism which not merely assisted, but controlled the Chinese forces?”

  

He replies:

“Every word of the SL passage is like a textbook example of the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie. First Max Shachtman is abstracted from… Max Shachtman, [Bulletin’s dots]. It just happened to ‘fall’ to Shachtman, who had just committed a criminal split with Trotsky deserting the defense of the Soviet Union under the class pressure of imperialism, to defend Leninist principle! Shachtman himself is broken up into a series of episodes and positions some of which are correct and some incorrect. This in itself represents a complete abandonment of theoretical thought.”

The generous, open-minded reader might be inclined to think that while the argument is admittedly murky and inept, where the Bulletin creates so much smoke there must be fire. The smoke turns out to be but dust as Wohlforth thrashes his straw man.

What Is Shachtmanism?

The character of Shachtmanism and the experience of the Workers Party is indeed fit material for discussion among Marxists. Wohlforth raises it to pose as “defender of Trotsky.” For Wohlforth – in order to lend horror to his label – must assert that the break with the SWP in 1940 over the question of Soviet defensism was an immediate repudiation of all Marxist principles – hereafter the SWP majority would be right on all disputed questions, and the “Shachtmanites” wrong on all of them. To assert anything else would be breaking Shachtman up “into a series of episodes and positions some of which are correct and some incorrect” and a “complete abandonment of theoretical thought.” That this nonsense can be passed off in public without flinching as the embodiment of “Marxist method” is an indictment not of Shachtmanism but the abysmal political miseducation carried on inside the WL. It runs counter to the experience and practice of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; it is a cultist argument attractive to a Stalin-Wohlforth-Catholic mentality but death to Marxists. It effectively denies the Leninist conception of both democratic centralism and the united front; it turns regroupment like that between the Bolsheviks and Trotsky’s Mezhrayontsi in 1917 into capitulation not fusion. It flies in the face of reality in that during the war years there was substantial agreement between the SWP and the WP on the issues they faced, much to the confusion of militant workers and the radical public generally. This led to the two organizations holding unity negotiations in 1946 to consider whether sufficient agreement existed between them to establish a fused party. Further, during the years 1940-46 the Workers Party considered itself, and was considered by European Fourth International sections, as co-thinkers of the Fourth International.

  

Wohlforthian Method: Cultist Cretinism

Wohlforth’s reasoning on what he fancies is “petty bourgeois empiricism” is childish, stupid, and anti-Marxist to the core. On one level, of course we must break Shachtmanism up “into a series of episodes some of which are correct and some incorrect.” Wohlforth claims to be both a Leninist and a Trotskyist. To do so he must either employ the method he labels “empiricism” or simply ignore the intense polemics Lenin and Trotsky waged against each other for years. Obviously in those episodes one or the other, but not both and maybe neither, was correct. Trotsky was won over to Lenin’s conception of the organizational question and Lenin came to accept Trotsky’s stand on the Permanent Revolution and the tasks of the proletariat in the democratic revolution. No intelligent study of the years before the October Revolution can fail to show that Lenin was wrong as against Trotsky on an aspect of their task, and vice versa. We do not claim that either Max Shachtman or J. P. Cannon were ever Marxists of the stature of Lenin or Trotsky. But only a political imbecile, a cultist pseudo-Marxist can ignore the fact that generally healthy Marxist organizations and leaders have been wrong, or took inadequate positions on particular issues for periods of time; and that even groups standing generally to their right occasionally took superior positions on particular issues at a given time. Wohlforth’s denunciations of the SL for noting that Shachtman espoused what we consider a correct position on the Chinese issue shortly after his “criminal split with Trotsky” only shows his dread of critical analysis. What Wohlforth calls “the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie” – i.e. careful investigation into all the issues in a political dispute such as that between the SWP and WP-Lenin considered essential in politics, and remarked that anyone who did not study the issues for himself “can be dismissed with a simple gesture of the hand.”

Was it not Stalin who argued that to separate Trotsky’s critique of bureaucratic degeneration in a workers state afterthe revolution from Trotsky’s centrist-Menshevik position on organizational questions before the revolution constituted an abandonment of Marxism-that Trotsky, wrong earlier on the one question, had to be wrong on the other? Or conversely, was it not Stalin again who argued that to separate Lenin of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” from Lenin the builder of the democratic centralist Bolshevik party constituted the grossest heresy? In point of fact, it “just happened to fall” to Lenin to first abstract Lenin from… Lenin, to refute his “old self” in the April Theses. He had been an “Old Guard” within the Party and the main proponent of a now outmoded theory. Lenin’s new position approximated Trotsky’s correct theory that the dictatorship of the proletariat (in alliance with the peasantry) could be established in Russia without a prior European socialist revolution or a period of workers and peasants democratic dictatorship.

Has Wohlforth utterly forgotten that Trotskyism itself became a system only as a theoretical response to Stalin’s progressive abandonment of the hard conclusions of the October Revolution, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s shedding of his earlier, “episodic” position on the party on the other?

Stalin, like Wohlforth, began with the proposition: The masters of Marxism are infallible and the renegades are wholly bankrupt. The cult Stalin built around Lenin was only preparatory to the one-he built around himself. Stalin accomplished this not solely through the building of statues and the recitation of incantations, but through a theory of the direct coincidence of truth with a single individual’s thought until that individual and not his positions become the ultimate authority. The application of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development to the realm of cognition provides a useful antidote to this Stalinist-Wohlforthite theory.

There is another aspect of Wohlforthian methodology we need to take up for a moment. Wohlforth’s celestial dialectic refuses to descend to the worldly plane. When we acknowledged Shachtman’s role on the Chinese question of 1942, we did so on the basis of his placing “the general principle of support to self-determination struggles within a context of Leninist regard for concrete reality” against Wright of the SWP. It is not because we consider China of 1942 exactly analogous to Bangladesh in 1972 but rather because Shachtman’s methodology was consistently Leninist in those articles.

When we consider the concrete, if you please, criteria of support to Chiang over which Wright and Shachtman argued, it resolves to whether military aid and strategic military subordination through imperialist control of the general staff (General Stillwell’s command) was a sufficient basis to decisively transform Chiang’s anti-Japanese struggle into an appendage of U.S. imperialism. Shachtman thought so; Wright did not.

What Wohlforth has overlooked is that both Shachtman and Wright, the WP and the SWP, agreed that a U.S. army invasion would make the question moot and of course subordination to imperialist arms would be unmistakable.

The physical presence of the Indian army backing up the military command of General Aurora places Wohlforth against Shachtman, Lenin and the SWP! If there were a Dantean Inferno to which Wohlforth were consigned, it would consist of him endlessly fleeing all the figures, revolutionary and centrist alike, who were after this political bandit’s hide.

Shortly after the WP’s repudiation of Soviet defensism and its split from the SWP, James Burnham split with the WP majority to find his place in ultra-right politics thereby lessening the internal pressure for a consistent anti-Marxist generalization. Shachtman and Abern continued to consider themselves Trotskyists until after the end of World War II, and in a few cases – and the question of support to Chiang Kai-Shek’s China during the Pacific War was one of them – the Workers Party was correct as against the SWP. Anyone who reads it will discover that Shachtman’s argument was essentially an “orthodox” gloss on Lenin’s position on Serbia and Poland during World War I, applying the criteria Lenin developed to the new imperialist war.

That the SWP could be wrong on an issue should hardly surprise Wohlforth. In his own pamphlet “The Struggle for Marxism in the United States,” Wohlforth characterizes the period of World War II as one in which “American Radicalism Reasserts Itself,” arguing that the SWP was then slipping into narrow “orthodoxy,” able to “reassert” past positions but not creatively apply Marxist principles to new situations – a polite way of saying that their positions were wrong or inadequate on a number of things. Is it then Wohlforth’s position that no one could be right on those questions?

In the long run, under the enormous pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Shachtmanites, left to their own devices, had to find themselves in the camp of that same imperialism. That happened, but not according to the Workers League’s latest timetable – it took seventeen years from the split in 1940 before the reconciliation of the WP with American social democracy took place. It is not inconceivable that the whole process of the WP’s disintegration could have been reversed had reunification with the SWP taken place before the full pressure of the cold war atmosphere bore down on both organizations. Certainly between the years 1940-46 the WP was no literary exponent of world imperialism, as one would infer from the Bulletin, but rather a left centrist party whose members seriously desired a communist revolution. The disintegration and decay of the WP must be analyzed in the same way as the demise of the revolutionary SWP, as a process by which the SWP moved to a severe deformation as a revolutionary party by 1953, when the principle of internationalism was undercut, to rightward moving centrism as the SWP totally embraced Fidel Castro in 1961, to 1965, when they joined hands as reformists with the liberal imperialists in the anti-war popular front.

To leave the question here would merely invite more WL sneers about “evolutionary method.” The “Shachtmanite” slander is too valuable for Wohlforth to give up voluntarily; it is a time-worn anathema which has allowed him and the SWP to evade answering our charges of betrayal to their ranks. But it is easily exploded.

Wohlforth vs. Wohlforth – Again

In 1962 the forerunners of the Spartacist League and the present Wohlforth grouping were members of an oppositional minority tendency in the SWP. At the behest of Gerry Healy of the English SLL Wohlforth sought control of the tendency, and failing to win a majority, consummated an unprincipled split within its ranks. We have published the documents of this rupture in Marxist Bulletin #3: The Split in the Revolutionary Tendency. The first document in the collection is a letter from James Robertson to Geoffrey White, written a month before the break was carried out, detailing the machinations of Wohlforth in preparing the split. It reads:

“Tim Wohlforth gives every evidence of ardently desiring the Robertson-Ireland wing of the tendency out of the Minority and out of the party, and the sooner the better – as witness his concluding remarks at the last NYC tendency meeting: ‘Robertson’s covertly for a split within a few months. If Jim goes, good riddance!’ And of course there is the ‘break all ties, deepen the breach’ tone and language of his document. Cannon wrote more mildly of Shachtman in 1940, though Tim obviously believes he and I are the exact reincarnations of those two then. So driven is he to create a panic mood of hate to consummate a split of the tendency that to add to the compound picture of a petty bourgeois grouping of the upper West Side’s middle-class 103 St. fleeing the proletarian factory quarters at101 St. that poor old Tim snarls and foams at any decent comrade daring to call the Shachtmanites of 1941 -46 a left-centrist grouping. To cite Tim Wohlforth against Tim Wohlforth, however:

‘We can now get an accurate picture of the political development of the Shachtman tendency. It was born in 1940 as a petty bourgeois opposition with in the Trotskyist movement. It went through a “second split” with the mass exodus of those who rode the opposition bloc out of the movement altogether. It then launched a party and attempted to compete with the SWP to be the Trotskyist party in this country. It contained at this time divergent tendencies which pushed it in different directions. It had within it tendencies which wished a reconciliation with the SWP by building a united Trotskyist party. It had other tendencies which forced it to the right-to a definitive break with Trotskyism in 1946. We can characterize the WP of this period as a left centrist grouping of unstable composition which couldn’t quite decide exactly where it was going. Then following the 1946 WP-SWP unity affair and with the opening of the cold-war witch hunt, it began to move to the right at an accelerated pace, transforming itself from a competing tendency within the Trotskyist movement into a centrist “third camp” tendency which felt itself antagonistic to Trotskyism as well as to reformism. It stayed only for a relatively short time in this centrist limbo as it soon struck out in an open reformist direction, seeking today to become theloyal left wing of the social democracy.’ ” (page 22, What Makes Shachtman Run?, Tim Wohlforth, August, 1957.) 

In 1964 Wohlforth stated the following on the SWP which he now holds up against Shachtman as absolutely right on the China issue:

” … The theoretical sterility of the SWP goes much farther back than that [1940] having its roots in Cannon’s empirical bloc with Trotsky covering the whole period from 1928 to 1940. Cannon and the SWP’s leading cadres never attempted to master the Marxist method. It was Trotsky’s job to develop theory and Cannon’s job to build an organization around his theories. This division of labor broke down with the Shachtman fight in 1940 when a good half of the party was lost to petty bourgeois revisionism and the rest saved largely by Trotsky supplanting the SWP leadership in-the struggle.”

-Tim Wohlforth, letter to Robertson, 12 August 1964 in ACFI “Information Bulletin No. 1” (undated) referring to the SL-ACFI unity negotiations. [our emphasis]

Thus Wohlforth in 1964 considered the American Trotskyists from the time of their founding to be totally lacking in revolutionary capacity and nothing more than organizational hacks in a bloc with Trotsky. The implicit conclusion, of course, is that Wohlforth is this country’s first Marxist! But more important than Wohlforth’s pathetic self-glorification is the logic of his argument, for given his characterization of the SWP surely it is axiomatic that without Trotsky the SWP, if it took any correct positions at all, must have arrived at them by dumb luck or sterile reflexive orthodoxy!

Wohlforth’s twisting of history for petty factional gain is the same now as in 1962. The purpose, like the method, is analogous. A number of leaders of the SWP oppositional grouping which became the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in 1961 had come aver to Trotskyism from Shachtman’s dissolving ISL/YSL, among them Mage, Robertson and Wohlforth. The SWP leadership carried out a slander barrage against all these leaders, who had broken from Shachtmanism, as “unreconstructed Shachtmanites.” The individuals who were to go on to found the SL insisted on a serious evaluation of degeneration and decay of the Shachtmanite organizations, as they were to do with the partly parallel breakdown of the SWP. Wohlforth was then looking for an opening to make common cause with the Dobbs leadership to smash the Robertson-Mage-White grouping. The fraudulent issue of “Shachtmanism” arose, and Wohlforth jumped at the chance to use it, despite the fact that he was one of the central targets of the SWP’s slander! As then, so now: to get the SL, he establishes another bloc with the SWP, reaching across ten years in time, to underwrite his contention that the SWP was right to expel these people, since all the time they were only concealed Shachtmanites! Now as then he continues to offer aid and credence to the SWP Pabloists as their loyal opposition, asking only one thing – get the Spartacist League!

Parenthetically, one can trace a political origin to many of the present and past SL cadres and leaders that is different from that typical of the WL-SWP: namely origins in the CPUSA! Thus Geoff White was a state chairman of the CP and Smith Act indictee; Ed L., a long-time CP trade union cadre; Jim Robertson, a CP youth activist; and then Harry Turner, buried for years in a CP underground cell. These were later joined by Dave Cunningham of the Iowa CP and Marv Treiger from the Los Angeles CP. All these comrades were led to Trotskyism out of the clash between their subjective revolutionary impulses and the realities of Stalinism, i.e. a recapitulation of the road of the original Left Opposition itself.

In 1957 when Wohlforth was struggling to be a Marxist and not a political bandit he characterized rather well the pressures and dynamics which made the WP “a left centrist grouping of unstable composition which couldn’t quite decide where it was going” in the period before its definitive break with Trotskyism in 1946. According to Wohlforth today, his own analysis in 1957 can only be breaking Shachtman up “into a series of episodes, some of which are correct and some incorrect,” which is “a textbook example of the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie.” Wohlforth says that in such an approach “Max Shachtman is abstracted from… Max Shachtman”; we can only observe that the above counterpositioning indicates that, by Wohlforth methodology, Wohlforth is dissolved into… Wohlforth. Hegel observed about the reflective nature of philosophy that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”; Wohlforth’s owl flies deaf, drunk and night-blind.

Now, nearly ten years after the split in the RT, Wohlforth brings up the same charges, in the same manner, for an even baser purpose. This time Wohlforth uses the “Shachtmanism” slander to cover his bloc with a section of the Indian bourgeoisie and the Indian army, a bloc which the logic of Marxism and class struggle dictates can only be ultimately directed against the workers and peasants of India and Bangladesh and the revolutionary movement.

Those Little Dots

Wohlforth begins his piece with a quote from Trotsky:

“Throughout all the vacillations and convulsions of the opposition, contradictory though they may be, two general features run like a guiding thread from the pinnacles of theory down to the most trifling political episodes. The first general feature is the absence of a unified conception…. History becomes transformed into a series of improvisations. We have here in the full sense of the term the disintegration of Marxism, the disintegration of theoretical thought, the disintegration of politics into its constituent elements. Empiricism and its foster brother, impressionism, dominate from top to bottom…. Throughout the vacillations and convulsions of the opposition, there is a second general feature intimately bound up with the first, namely, a tendency to refrain from active participation, a tendency to self elimination, to abstentionism, naturally under cover of ultra-radical phrases…. Hot on the trail of ‘concrete’ political tasks in words, the opposition actually places itself outside the historical process.”

One wouldn’t know it from the Bulletin text, but the quote from Trotsky which Wohlforth has adduced against the SL is taken from Trotsky’s “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” included in In Defense of Marxism. More than the source is omitted. By omitting Trotsky’s reference to what positions he was criticizing, Wohlforth’s quote amounts to no better than a forgery of Trotsky’s words. What politics of Burnham’s is Trotsky characterizing? Omitted from Wohlforth’s selection are Trotsky’s references to “Hitler and Stalin in Poland; Stalin and Mannerheim in Finland.” Trotsky is referring to Burnham’s refusal to defend the Soviet state and his hostile attitude toward the dialectic and to the question of the class difference between that state and its bourgeois-imperialist enemies. That is the first point: it was not for refusing military support to a bourgeois state (in any kind of war) that Trotsky and the SWP majority denounced the Burnham-Shachtman-Abern minority. It was for their responsiveness to bourgeois public opinion running against such support to the Soviet Union. See any difference there, Cde. Wohlforth? Or is that hair-splitting over “concrete reality” again?

Wohlforth: Revolutionary Defeatism Equals Abstentionism

Next point: Wohlforth hopes that a smokescreen of quotations from Trotsky written against positions entirely different from the SL’s will convince the reader that a position, clearly stated, against both of two warring bourgeois armies is abstentionism! A really abstentionist organization would have evaded an analysis of the war, or claimed simply that wars are tragic events for the workers. The SL took the position of revolutionary defeatism against both Indian and Pakistani bourgeois governments and their armies. That Wohlforth calls abstentionism. He gets involved, he takes sides – no abstentionist he, no indeed! – he pitched right into the fray on the side of one of the bourgeois robbers! The policy of revolutionary defeatism in a bourgeois war meant something rather different, for Trotsky, than standing “outside the historical process.” Wohlforth doesn’t say so of course, but he has condemned Lenin’s entire policy during World War I as “abstentionist,” and “empiricist” besides, since Lenin was manifestly concerned with “concrete conditions.” Wohlforth’s “anti-abstentionism” is that of the betraying Second International which also took sides – lots of them – bourgeois sides.

Wohlforth: Britain Equals Pakistan

Third point: in case any one of his readers is quick to notice the class distinction between the Soviet state – which was what the 1939-40 debate was about – and the bourgeois Indian state, Wohlforth immediately dishes up another non-sequitur to cloud the issue doubly. At least in this instance his quote does refer to India. Thus the following from Trotsky, again offered without source:

“India is participating in the imperialist war on the side of Great Britain. Does this mean that our attitude toward India – not the Indian Bolsheviks but INDIA – is the same as toward Great Britain? If there exists in this world, in addition to Shachtman and Burnham, only two imperialist camps, then where, permit me to ask, shall we put India? A Marxist will say that despite India’s being an integral part of the British Empire and India’s participating in the imperialist war; despite the perfidious policy of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, our attitude toward India is altogether different from our attitude toward England. We defend India against England.”

That is a good statement of the SL position: it too defends India against England, against the U. S., and the rest. Now where, Cde. Wohlforth, did Trotsky defend an Indian war against Pakistan, or before that state’s existence,against Afghanistan, Burma, Iran or China? You raise the question of wars and the colonial world. Name one instance in Tim Wohlforth which Lenin or Trotsky urged or supported a war by any colony, client state, or imperialist-dominated backward nation against another. By Bolivia against Peru? By Iran against Turkey? Does Wohlforth presume to bend reality (or his despised “concrete conditions”) to fit Trotsky’s position on a fundamentally different issue so far as to assert that Pakistan is imperialist like the U. S. or Britain while India is Pakistan’s colony in rebellion? A war between Britain and India is of course a different matter for Marxists than a war between Britain and Germany, But a war between one tin-pot semi-colonial bourgeoisie and another such bourgeoisie is not different in this respectfrom a war between two great imperialist powers. Neither India nor Pakistan is a colony of the other. To the assertion that East Bengal had a semi-colonial relationship to West Pakistan, against which the Indian army made war, a Marxist would have to reply that Tanganyika was a colony of Hohenzollern Germany; Britain warred against Germany in World War I – did Lenin support Britain against Germany? Or advise the Tanganyikans to invite British control to aid the war against Germany? He supported the right of the Irish to accept German arms – that did not amount to German control of the republican movement. (Because of “concrete reality,” again, Wohlforth.) But Lenin certainly did not urge the Kaiser to send armies to Ireland, which would have meant trading the British yoke for the German, and one cannot conceive of a statement from him, “We Bolsheviks critically support the decision of the Hohenzollern government to send arms to the Irish rebels.” He did not support no matter how critically the unsupportable motives of the German government; he supported the independent and entirely different motives of the Irish rebels, who were so situated that the German “help” was not occupation or control – their struggle remained independent.

In fact Trotsky’s quote above comes down on the opposite side of Wohlforth’s position. Does Trotsky favor the assistance from the subject Indian nation to Britain in its war? He condemns the Indian nationalist leaders for that policy – and he would have condemned the Bengali nationalists’ support to the adventure of conquest by the Indian bourgeoisie.

Fourth point: in the “Conclusions” section of Trotsky’s “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” from which Wohlforth tore a quote, stands a paragraph his supporters would do well to ponder. Wohlforth lumps the SL with Shachtman in alleged disregard for principle, for theory, for veering about according to petty-bourgeois impressionism. Trotsky said:

“The politics of a party has a class character. Without a class analysis of the state, the parties and ideological tendencies, it is impossible to arrive at a correct political orientation. The party must condemn as vulgar opportunism the attempt to determine policies in relation to the USSR from incident to incident and independently of the class nature of the Soviet state.”

The WL owes an explanation of why it is necessary to proceed from the class nature of the Soviet state in determining our attitude toward its military moves, yet we stand condemned as reactionary empiricists when we proceed from the class nature of the Indian state!

Wohlforth as Merlin

The obscurantist, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t character of the “dialectic” developed by Stalin and Mao and adopted by Healy and Wohlforth could not possibly be illustrated more clearly than by the following syllogism, all parts of which are taken directly from his “Spartacist Rediscovers Shachtman.” 1) The IC openly offered “critical support” to the military move of the Indian bourgeois government. 2) The SL urged revolutionary defeatism on both asides. 3) The SL policy is abstentionism, i.e., the SL not take a stand. 4)”Not taking a stand means standing with the bourgeoisie.” 5) Therefore the SL stood with the bourgeoisie.

And so support of the bourgeoisie becomes support of the working class; the call to workers to practice revolutionary defeatism becomes support of the bourgeoisie. Even Kautsky, who had to mislead a more sophisticated audience, never sank to an argument so stupid and patently illogical.

All the lies, all the twisted logic and the distortion of Trotskyist history, theory and tradition, all the slanders about “Shachtmanism” peddled to his supporters, will not be enough to wash the bloody disgrace from Wohlforth’s and Healy’s hands. They deliberately turned a section of the workers movement, raw uneducated would-be communists, into recruiting agents for a bourgeois army. The degenerated Second and Third Internationals sold out for far higher stakes; Healy/Wohlforth’s betrayal will not win them janitors’ jobs, much less cabinet posts.

Third Period Healyism: Learn to read, Learn to think

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971). Copied from: http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/05/1971-dec-third-period-healyism.html

The SLL-WL, seeking to make factional capital of the disastrous policy of the Bolivian POR, adopted a sectarian posture which only mud-the waters and sows confusion before serious is seeking to understand the crucial lesof the Bolivian defeat. Prominent among the Healyite charges of class treason heaped upon Guillermo Lora of the Bolivian POR was this from Wohlorth in his 30 August Bulletin:

“Together with the Stalinists the POR supported the position of threatening a general strike and military action in defense of Torres!” [emphasis in original]

Such is Wohlforth’s conception of treachery against the working class. The most charitable interpretation is that Cde. Wohiforth was sorely pressed for time in grinding out turgid copy for the weekly Bulletin. More likely, Wohlforth didn’t know that he had scrapped a basic Leninist tactic for defeating counterrevolution and making proletarian revolution. In his self-proclaimed fight for the continuity of the Fourth International, Wohlforth would do well to re-establish continuity with the views of Trotsky:

The party came to the October uprising…. through a series of stages. At the time of the April 1917 demonstration, a section of the Bolsheviks brought out the slogan: ‘Down with the provisional government!’ The Central Committee immediately straightened out the ultraleftists. Of course we should popularize the necessity of overthrowing the provisional government; but to call the workers into the streets under that slogan-this we cannot do, for we ourselves are a minority in the working class. If we overthrow the provisional government under these conditions, we will not be able to take its place, and consequently we will help the counterrevolution. We must patiently explain to the masses the antipopular character of this government, before the hour for its overthrow has struck, Such was the position of the party….

“Two months later, Kornilov rose against the provisional government. In the struggle against Kornilov, the Bolsheviks occupied the frontline positions. Lenin was then in hiding. Thousands of Bolsheviks were in the jails. The workers, soldiers, and sailors demanded the liberation of their leaders and of the Bolsheviks in general. The provisional government refused. Should not the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks have addressed an ultimatum to the government of Kerensky?-free the Bolsheviks immediately and withdraw the disgraceful accusation of service to the Hohenzollerns – and, in the event of Kerensky’s refusal, have refused to fight against Kornilov? This is probably how the Central Committee of Thaelmann-Remmele-Neumann would have acted. But this is not how the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks acted. Lenin wrote at the time: ‘It would have been the most profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat is capable, so to speak, out of “revenge” upon the SRs and Mensheviks for their support of the crushing of the Bolsheviks, the assassinations on the front, and the disarming of the workers, of “refusing” to support them against the counterrevolution, Such a way of putting the question would have meant, first of all, the carrying over of petty-bourgeois conceptions of morality into the proletariat (because for the good of the cause the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but also the big bourgeoisie); in the second place, it would have been-and this is most important-a petty-bourgeois attempt to cast a shadow, by “moralizing,” over the political essence of the matter….

“It is precisely this ‘petty-bourgeois moralizing’ which Thaelmann & Co. engage in when, in justification of their own turn, they begin to enumerate the countless infamies committed by the leaders of the Social Democracy.”
(“Against National Communism,” reprinted in The Struggle Against Fascism in
Germany
)

Wohlforth is counting – not for the first time – on the ignorance of his supporters. He hopes that his own “petty-bourgeois moralizing,” cataloguing the horrors of bourgeois regimes and the crimes of the reformists who participate in them, will cover his inability to handle them. Trotsky’s devastating critique of the policies of the Stalinists and ultra-lefts in pre-Hitler Germany, “conducting politics with blown-out lanterns,” applies with equal precision to the “Trotskyist” Wohlforth. More from The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany:

“One might have said, ‘For Bolsheviks, Kornilovism begins only with Kornilov. But isn’t Kerensky a Kornilovite? Isn’t he crushing the peasants by means of punitive expeditions? Doesn’t he organize lockouts? Doesn’t Lenin have to hide underground? And all this we must put up with?’

“… I can’t think of a single Bolshevik rash enough to have advanced such arguments. But were he to be 
found, he would have been answered something after this fashion. We accuse Kerensky of preparing for and facilitating the coming of Kornilov to power. But does this relieve us of the duty of rushing to repeal Kornilov’s attack? We accuse the gatekeeper of leaving the gates ajar for the bandit. But must we therefore shrug our shoulders and let the gates go hang?’ Since, thanks to the toleration of the Social Democracy, Bruening’s government has been able to push the proletariat up to its knees in capitulation to fascism, you arrive at the conclusion that up to the knees, up to the waist, or over the head-isn’t it all one thing? No, there is some difference, Whoever is up to his knees in a quagmire can still drag himself out. Whoever is in over his head, for him there is no returning.”

For the Smarter Ones

On “critical support” advocated by Lenin “as a rope supports a hanged man,” Wohlforth says:

“Is it necessary to point out that Lenin was referring to support to social democratic parties and not to bourgeois governments and certainly not to military dictators?”

Correct, But Lenin was referring to political support, not military defense against counterrevolution – which is at issue in the “military action in defense of Torres” for which Wohlforth condemns Lora. Leninists defend the policy of fighting militarily alongside Stalinist, social-democratic, and even bourgeois forces against fascist or rightest military uprising, while maintaining the complete independence of the working-class movement. That is the whole lesson of the Kornilov affair, and of the policy Trotsky urged to save the German workers from Nazism. But Wohlforth apparently cannot understand the difference between a policy of unified military defense with political independence and military defense with political capitulation to alien classes and class collaborators.

Further, Wohlforth’s acknowledgement of Lenin’s policy of critical political support to reformist working-class parties-which is not the issue in the case of military defense of the bourgeois Torres regime against the right – is peculiar in its own way, since Wohlforth (in sharp contrast to his past positions) is recently on record as refusing to engage in united front political action with Stalinists, particularly Maoists. Are the Stalinists worse than the social democrats, Cde. Wohlforth? If you claim they are, you are in your haste to score cynical factional points embracing a “method” which Trotsky ceaselessly fought against: Stalinophobia. Wohlforth’s position against any common action with Stalinists is blind sectarianism, the obverse of the U. Sec. capitulation to such currents, reminiscent of Stalin’s own “Theory of Social Fascism” according to which the Communists were ordered to avoid any common action with the Social Democrats, who were held to be as bad as the Nazis. When will the Healyites openly label their current position the “Theory of Social Stalinism” or “Third Period Healyism”?

The POR must, through unsparing criticism of their own history and scrapping the centrist program leadership which led to the defeats in 1953 and 1971, discover the Leninist road to power (see article on page 3, “Centrist Debacle in Bolivia”), They can expect no help from the Healyites shouting their Leninist orthodoxy and “continuity” to cover their limitless opportunism, blind sectarianism and ignorance.

PABLOISM, INVERTED PABLOISM, AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

DRAFT THESES ON PABLOISM, INVERTED PABLOISM, AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

by the Communist Working Collective

[First printed in Marxist Bulletin #10, “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the Development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angelos”]

Pabloism

1. Following World War II, the International Trotskyist movement was thrown into a profound theoretical, political, and organizational crisis. Large numbers of Trotskyist cadre were physically destroyed through the joint efforts of the imperialists and Stalinists. World capitalism underwent a relative stabilization due chiefly to Stalinist and Social-Democratic betrayals of the revolutionary working class upsurge following the cessation of fighting. In addition, Stalinist and petit-bourgeois leaderships were successful in overthrowing capitalism and establishing deformed workers states in Eastern Europe and China. All these factors posed very sharply to the Trotskyist movement the problem of building independent proletarian vanguard parties.

2. The Pabloite revisionist trend emerged as an attempt to make the Trotskyist movement more “effective” by accommodating it to the existing “left” movements in the world. The role of Trotskyists was essentially confined to that of pressure groups upon these formations, integrating themselves into whichever forces seemed to have the most potential and hoping that these groupings, under the influence of the objective march of events and prodding by the Trotskyists, would be forced to adopt a revolutionary orientation. For this reason, Pabloism can be called aliquidationist tendency. Thus, during the 1950’s Michel Pablo and his International Secretariat pursued such policies as liquidation (“deep” entrism) into the’ social-democratic and centrist parties of Western Europe, the national bourgeois and petit-bourgeois formations in the colonial countries, and the ruling Stalinist CP’s of Eastern Europe.

3. Fundamental to the Pabloite world perspective is the theory, borrowed from Stalinism, that the world balance of forces has shifted in favor of socialism, resulting in a “new world reality” in which the tide of revolution is irreversible. For this reason, Pabloism can also be characterized as empiricist. This conception has gone through several variations. Around 1950, Pablo forecasted a Third World War, launched by imperialism to regain the upper hand, which would lead to the final downfall of capitalism and Stalinism. In 1953, the International Secretariat claimed that the isolation of the USSR had ended, eliminating one of the fundamental conditions for the bureaucracy’s existence and leading to the imminent demise of Stalinism. More recently, the Pabloites have declared that the colonial world is the main center of revolution in the world, that the anti-imperialist struggles there are uninterrupted and irresistible, and that therefore the working class can come to power there with a “blunted instrunent” instead of a Leninist proletarian party. Thus the problem of overcoming the crisis of proletarian leadership, the central problem of the world socialist revolution, is avoided, or else left to be resolved by the “objective process” going on in this “new world reality.”

4. Although the Socialist Workers Party had broken with the Pabloites in 1953, by the early 1960’s it became clear that the SWP was moving increasingly toward the revisionist methodology it had once opposed. This regressive trend most openly manifested itself in the SWP majority line on the Cuban revolution: support to Castro’s governmental bureaucracy in the hope that Castroism would be transformed into Trotskyism. On the organizational level, the SWP’s abandonment of a revolutionary proletarian line became definitive with the “Reunification Congress” of 1963, in which “minor” political differences were overlooked in order that the SWP could carry out an unprincipled reunification with the International (USec). In fact, the main political resolution passed at this Congress included all the basic theses upon which Pabloism was based: the change in the world balance of forces, the centrality of the colonial revolution, and the end of the USSR’s isolation.

5. Since the 1963 Congress, it has become obvious that, although Pablo has been discredited, Pabloism the method dominates the entire USec. The European sections have carried the “colonial epicenter” theory to its conclusion and have called for armed struggle based on rural guerilla warfare and entrism into the Castroite organizations of Latin America. At the same time, the SWP has moved sharply to the right, becoming little more than a support group for black nationalism, petit-bourgeois feminism, bourgeois liberal pacifism and the Cuban bureaucracy. (This is true although now the SWP claims that the Cuban revolution has degenerated — implying it was once undeformed.) The main work of the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), is building anti-war demonstrations based on single-issue politics — a plainly reformist and Popular Front approach. Thus all tendencies within USec, from the ultraleftist adventurism of the European parties to the reformism of the U.S. section, adopt the liquidationist and empiricist Pabloite method.

Inverted Pabloism

6. Another international tendency which adapts to the methodology of Pabloism, despite proclamations of representing the only anti-Pabloite international trend, is the International Committee of the Fourth International (lCFl), principally led by the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). The SLL, in its analysis of Cuba, uses the same objectivist premises of Pabloism and in so doing fails to grasp the critical difference between the establishment of a state, led by a Bolshevik-Leninist party, where organs of power are democratically administered by the working class (soviets) and the formation of a workers state which from its very inception is ruled by a Bonapartist bureaucracy. With this method they cannot adopt a correct attitude toward Stalinist and petit-bourgeois leaderships. They are forced, in order to maintain a firm “stand” against the Pabloites’ capitulation to these leaderships, to categorically deny the possibility that, under certain conditions (the most important being timely material support from the Stalinist camp), these leaderships can in fact establish deformed workers states. This position leads them to conclude that Cuba is not a deformed workers state but some form of “statism” (despite the fact that the Castroite leadership of Cuba has expropriated the bourgeoisie, set up monopoly of foreign trade, and established the rudiments of a planned economy. From this it is clear that the methodological approach of the SLL and its followers can be characterized as inverted Pabloism

7. This reaction of the SLL and its co-thinkers to Pabloism ultimately serves to reinforce the Pabloite current, for it cannot effectively deal with Pabloite accommodationis in a theoretical way. In essence both trends equate the deformed workers state with the road to socialism. Pabloism does this explicitly, by its support of Castroism and its one-time veiled support of the Chinese bureaucracy. The inverted Pabloites begin with the same premise, and are forced therefore to deny the fact of a social transformation in order to avoid giving this type of support. A correct Trotskyist appraisal of strategy and tactics toward these bureaucracies must start with the understanding that they are an:obstacle to building socialism, thereby ruling out any possibility of support, however critical, to these leaderships, and removing the basis of the ICFI’s Pablophobia.

The Fourth International

8. With the development of capitalism into imperialism the basic tendency of capitalism to weld all areas of the world regardless of their level of development into a common economic system which dominates and subordinates to itself each of its parts is greatly reinforced. The hegemony of imperialism over world economy tends not only to level out the various stages of development of one area as compared with another, one country as compared with another, but simultaneously increases the differences between them and sets one up against the other — thus greatly aggravating the contradiction betwleen the further development of the world productive forces and the national-state boundaries. This dynamic of imperialism inevitably leads to wars for the conquest and redistribution of markets and to the wholesale destruction of the productive forces on which human culture is based. The continued existence of imperialism thus threatens to plunge mankind into barbarism. It is on this basis, “on the insolvency of the national state, which has turned into a brake upon the development of the productive forces” (Trotsky), that the internationalism of communism ultimately rests.

9. The proletariat is the oniy class capable of destroying international capitalism and constructing a communist society which would forever eliminate all war, exploitation, and social inequality, thereby creating the conditions for the limitless development of human civilization. However, without the leadership of a communist party the: proletariat cannot come to power and establish a genuine workers state in a single country. Further, the international proletarian revolution can only triumph if it is led by a revolutionary communist international, i. e., a world party of the proletariat. This has been completely verified by the experience of the October revolution and by the subsequent defeats the international proletariat suffered at the time when all the necessary conditions for successful world revolution were present except for a revolutionary international which could lead the insurrection. Finally, to attempt to construct a revolutionary party separate from, outside of, or opposed to the struggle to build an international can only mean capitulation to national narrow-mindedness which is inseparably linked with reformism. Thus any communist organization which does not take the fight for the construction of a cornniunist international as its strategic starting point must inevitably degenerate.

10. The Fourth International which was founded by Trotsky in opposition to the degeneration of the stalinist Third International no longer exists. The advent of Pabloism has destroyed the Fourth International to the extent that revolutionary Trotskyism finds its programmatic continuity only in small disunited groupings scattered throughout the world and which for obvious reasons cannot lead significant sections of the working class in struggle. Consequently, the main international focus of revolutionary Trotskyism must be directed toward the conducting of programmatic discussions with these organizations in order to achieve the theoretical clarity necessary for an early regroupment which would result in an international revolutionary tendency which would thus become a pole of attraction around which future and more complete communist regroupment could take place. Only by using this·method is it possible to start the rebuilding of the Fourth International along the lines of the 1938 Transitional Program. .

11. To lay the basis for the complete reconstruction of the Fourth International, it is necessary to decisively defeat Pabloism through ideological confrontation in all arenas of the class struggle. Such a victory over revisionism would carry Marxist theory forward and thus provide the necessary foundation on which genuine international unity based on democratic centralism could be built. As for now, however, it is important to stress that the battle against Pabloismhas not yet been won.

12. Although an international revolutionary ·tendency has not yet been fully crystallized, the process of revolutionary· communist regroupment can and must be started. Sufficient clarity on the basic questions posed by Pabloism has to a large degree been reached thus opening up the possibilities for principled fusion of national and international organizations. It is to this task, to the rebuilding of the Fourth International through a process of revolutionary communist  regroupment, that the· Communist Working Collective is dedicated.

19 August, 1971

Proposal for Workers Vanguard

Proposal for Workers Vanguard


The following piece of fusion correspondence between the Communist Working Collective and the Spartacist League was reprinted in
Marxist Bulletin #10 “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the Development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angelos”]

 

May 14, 1971

 

Dear comrades Jim and Helene,

 

We were very enthused over our discussions of last week. It is clear to us that the Spartacist League is approaching a new period in its existence. This new period is a reflection of the ferment within the proletariat which in turn is a result of the growing political and economic crisis faced by imperialism. We were particularly encouraged by the decision to publish a national newspaper. Such a newspaper is critical if we are to accomplish our tasks of collective organizing and collective propagandizing. We believe that this step will significantly transform the Spartacist League into a force within the working class and will therefore greatly contribute to the formation of a vanguard party within the U.S. and to the rebirth of the 4th International.

 

We have long upheld the view that the role of a central organ is an indispensable component of the Leninist theory of party building. Naturally we consider this a generally valid proposition which must be assessed anew in the concrete circumstances of present-day party building. Prior to your visit we suspended judgement with regard to the tactical advisability of the Spartacist League launching such an organ at the present time.  We were not sure whether there were sufficient forces, whether finances could be met (a not  unimportant consideration), etc. We were sure it was necessary; our discussion with you convinced us it was both possible and timely.

 

We believe the discussion held in L.A. around the paper was a poor one. We feel many of the key issues were clouded over and that we must take up the. question again upon your return trip. Permit me to elaborate.

 

The conception you put forward of a central organ dangerously veers toward a half-way house between a genuineparty organ and an arena paper. What leads us to this conclusion? During the discussion we suggested that the Bulletin provided a model from the standpoint of form and organizational origins. You countered that the Lambertist paper. (Trade Union oriented I believe) provided a better model and that you wouldn’t even want to be in an organization that only put out a paper as is the tendency of the Workers League. Perhaps our example was a poor one and we should have suggested Iskra as a model for then we could have zeroed in on the key issue: Will the paper reflect more truly than before the party’s line in an arena, or, will the paper be a central party organ reflecting all phases of the party’s work? We completely agree that the Workers League tends to narrowly stand outside the class struggle with its “paper,” but that is first and foremost a problem of their line and not that they have a national organ. The approach taken by the Lambertists appears to us as an incorrect one, one that minimizes the significance of therelative weight given to the independent standpoint of the party.

 

The dilemma is concentrated most acutely in the decision to retain the name Workers Action. Unfortunately I stressed aesthetic objections to the title and format and therefore clouded over what was most germane. The real argument for changing the name is to make crystal clear the NEW CHARACTER OF THE NEW ORGAN in such a way that there can be no question of confusion with the old, arena organ. When we place the question in this way, we will be able to avoid tendencies (which are bound to arise) to transform the new organ into one that is partially an arena organ for labor and partially a central organ for the party. It is not enough to say it will be a party organ; we must take steps to ensure it. In this way we will also be able to face clearly and directly the absence of an arena organ for labor while there are such organs for women and youth. We must uphold the idea that we do not need a new “transitional. organ” of a hybrid type, but a party organ which fights for the full transitional program and educates the class around the socialist goal.

 

Last night the CWC voted unanimously to propose to the Spartacist League that the new paper in order to distinguish itself from arenaism and break a fresh path abandon the name Workers Action.

 

We should mention in passing that the continuation of Spartacist as a theoretical journal, or its merger with the new paper into a single organ are both viable alternatives within the framework of this plan. It may also, for legal and/or diplomatic purposes, prove advisable to state “sponsored or endorsed by SL” or some such thing, but this will not affect the questions of substance. Furthermore, it should be stated that these brief remarks hardly exhaust our thinking on the subject and we are prepared if necessary to write a more lengthy paper justifying our position. It is not in our nature to suggest these steps without considering our responsibilities with regard to them. Assuming that all goes well in connection with our joint discussions, our comrades are fully prepared to assist such a paper (and whatever other work is necessary) in every possible way.

 

We have also discussed and have proposals regarding steps toward an early fusion, perhaps September 1, as a realistic date. We should include this topic on our agenda of next week. Let us know when you will arrive.

 

We hope we are beating a dead horse… but then the L.A. discussion did seem inconclusive.

 

On behalf of the CWC [Communist Working Collective]

with comradely greetings,

Marv [Treiger]

 

P.S. You may show this to whomever you please

POLICE MILITANCY vs. LABOR

THE STRIKEBREAKERS GO ON STRIKE…

POLICE MILITANCY vs. LABOR

[First printed in Workers’ Action #8, April-May 1971.]

On the night shift of January 14, New York City patrolmen left their beats to begin a a six day work stoppage; the first such action by the police in the history of the city, The action, unauthorized by the leadership of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), was precipitated by a court ruling effectively barring payment of $2700 in retroactive pay claimed by the PBA as part of a parity arrangement based on a 3 to 3.5 pay ratio of patrolmen to police offcers. During the course of the action PoIice Commissioner Murphy backed up by Mayor Lindsay threatened to call in National Guard to maintain “law and order.” Following their return to work, a subsequent ruling in favor of the PBA claim resulted in a total $3,300  payment in retrocative salaries, bringing base pay of cops up to a whopping $12,150 per year.

The police action has resurrected some serious questions for trade union militants and, significantly, has smoked out some extremly dangerous attitudes within the trade union movement and even among a couple of ostensibly revolutionary organizations regarding the relationship of labor militants to the police action and police in general. What was the real nature of the New York police action? What are “militant policemen”? Are police a part of the working class? How do we define class divisions in society? What are the main features of a capitalist state? Should labor have supported the police action? Is the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) a “union”? The answers to these questions have assumed critical importance because of the recent intensification of struggles by public employees at all levels. In this situation an incorrect understanding of the police and their social role can have immediate disastrous consequences for the trade union movement. It also calls seriously into question the credibility of any political organization claiming to support workers’ struggles that could be so wrong on such a basic question, one going to the very heart of the life and death struggle between Labor and Capital. In order to understand more clearly the reactionary and anti-labor nature of the recent police action, we should examine two partly parallel developments; the attempts by the Lindsay Administration to seek out a confrontation with the municipal unions in the current collective bargaining and a bit of recent history of the dangerous politicalization of the cops in New York City, and elsewhere.

CITY ANTI-LABOR OFFENSIVE

Lindsay, like a number of other big city mayors, has gone over to the offensive in order to resolve the city’s financial crisis by increasing the tax burden and cutting the living conditions of the working’ people of New York. A major element of this offensive has been a virtual declaration of war on city employees and their unions with threats of pay cuts, payless paydays, “furloughs,” and layoffs, since wages are the single biggest item on the City’s budget. These threats became a reality in November when 500 “provisional” city employees were laid off, the first such layoffs in 35 years since Mayor LaGuardia fired thousands of city workers during the depression of the ‘Thirties, After a series of empty threats and much blustering by Victor Gotbaum, Executive Director of District Council 37 (DC 37) which supposedly reprseneted the workers concerned, no action was taken and the handwriting was on the wall for all City  employees. Around the same time as bargaining began with the firemen, sanitation workers, sodal services workers and others, the City declared that there would be no increase in basic wages, except for minimal cost-of-living increases, Most recently, the layoff of 10,000 substitute and 7, 000 regular teachers was narrowly averted, when the City Comptroller “borrowed” $35 million from next year’s budget,

ECONOMIC CRISIS

Behind all this is more than the usual bargaining period dramatics. A deep economic and social crisis, consisting of increasing widespread unemployment and general economic recession plus the war-based inflation, is affecting the country as a whole and local governments in particular. What this boils down to for New York City is a sharp reduction in revenues from income tax, sales tax, stock transfer tax, etc. As transportation, housing and other living conditions worsen thousands of middle class people and hundreds of businesses are leaving the city, further reducing the tax base. Compounding this are increased costs as thousands of low income workers are driven to welfare because of high unemployment and slashes in Medicaid eligibility, while hundreds of thousands more have their last wage increases eaten up by inflation and increased cost of living, When Lindsay threatened to “cut off” welfare payments to thousands of families, this was a direct attack on poor working people,

Lindsay’s solution to this is simple: cut the wages and jobs of City employees, increase prodoctivty, and tax the hell out of everyone else. But in order to accomplish this, Lindsay must either defeat the unionized city employees or at least neutralize the unions’ responses by persuading the sellout leaders of the unions covering some 360,000 City employees to “cooperate for the common good,” which means joining forces to keep the rank and file under control. But if the carrot (for the labor fakers) doesn’t work the stick is ready too, in the form of a recently enlarged and high-paid police force, as well as troops to be used as announced in “contingency plans” in case of big strikes by city labor. Hanging over the heads of all city workers is the vicious Taylor Law which prohibits strikes by public employees with penalties of unlimited fines and loss of dues checkoff as well as double loss of pay for every day on strike for individual workers,

BUREAUCRATS’ BETRAYAL

The union bureaucrats, instead of organizing a general strike against the Taylor Law, hide behind it to counsel moderation. In a recent issue of DC 37’s Public Employee Press (Jan, 29, 1971), Victor Gotbaum complained that the worst feature of the Taylor Law is that it doesn’t really stop strikes and therefore puts sellout leaders like himself on the spot with “dissident members” when bureaucrats opposed such strikes, causing them to be called “coward” and “chicken. ” But his alternative, however, along with Albert Shanker of the UFT and Theodore Kheel, is a local version of the Taft-Harley Law, which while nominally permitting public employee strikes, would provide for a mandatory 60-day “cooling off’ period, as well as binding arbitration for grievances. In fact these same provisions are contained in a bill now before Congress, HR 17383, drafted by DC 37’s parent organization, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and endorsed by its president Jerry Wurf, which is intended to cover all state and public employees if passed!

It is obvious that despite the attempts at betrayal and compromise by fakers like Gotbaum, there can be no compromIse for the thousands of city workers who face these proposed cuts. The City also knows this and has already launched the attack. In the battles that are certain to follow not only does the question of militant leadership assume critical importance, but also the question of who are allies and who are enemies – which brings us back to the question of the police.

STRIKE WAVE INTENSIFIES

It has been a long time in this country since we have seen large scale clashes between organized labor and capital such as the strike wave that has been building force over the last four years. During the 1950’s, following the strike waves after World War II, whole layers of rank and file leaders and militants were purged from the unions along with the “reds,” in the name of patriotism and anti-communism and as a result there was a sharp break in the continuity of tradition and class consciousness in the working class movement. Under these conditions, and during long periods with very little strike activity the real social role of the police sometimes becomes obscured. Add to this, temporary antagonisms between various strata of the population – white vs. black, workers vs. students, one ethnic group against another or any combination of these – and you have a fairly widespread (and often racist) attitude among many woerkers that the police are their “friends,” A couple of violent strikes tends to sort this out, but in the meantime many workers are content to see the cops get the other “real troublemakers.” For instance, the unity between patriotic New York construction workers and the police against “long-haired” anti-war students witnessed last spring will come to an end when the same construction workers go on strike to protect their wages from Nixon’s attack and their “friends” the police come along to beat their heads and break their strike. But the present pro-police attitudes are also reflected in the opportunist positions of many trade union bureaucrats, especially those in municipal employee unions. Outstanding among these are Victor Gotbaum of New York’s DC 37 and Jerry Wurf of AFSCME.

In the issue of Public Employee Press referred to above, Gotbaum referred to the PBA as a “union,” the police action as a “strike” and a “police labor-management crisis,” as well as congratulating Ed(!) Kiernan as a felllow bureaucrat who “kept cool” in the face of “dissident members.” Much worse than this, however, was an outrageous editorial by Jerry Wurf in the Jan.-Feb. 1971 issue of AFSCME’s Public Employee entitled “Policemen as Public Employees.” It would be bad enough if Wurf had only lumped cops in with other public employees, but he actually tries to evoke sympathy for the “oppressed” police, sheds a tear for them: “Boiling underneath the surface was a deepseated, long-held anger about working conditions, anger about what the patrolmen see as a lack of public appreciation for the role they play and the work they do, anger about a society that has burdened the policeman with responsibilities he has neither the tools nor the experience to handle.” Wurf weeps on, “It is even more reflective of the reasons police in America carry a burning anger that the following kind of situation was repeated…” He then goes on to describe an account of six New York cops being attacked by 40 persons when they attempted to make an arrest. Wurf’s analysis of recent police “militancy” is that it reflects “the frustration of today’s under-30 youth who comprise about 40% of the patrol force in New York City.” The editorial then quotes one of these misunderstood youths, “Being a policeman has nothing to do with it. I’m a working man.” What Wurf’s editorial doesn’t mention is that AFSCME presently has some 10,000 cops, including the guard s at Tennessee State Penitentiary, as members, whose substantial dues undoubtedly are no small factor in his sympathetic attitude. We wonder if it will be some of Wurf’s cops that will enforce the 60-day cooling off period called for in his bill? By any standards of labor tradition this man should be denounced as a class traitor and expelled from his lucrative post.

NOT ONLY UNION BUREAUCRATS

This catering to and reinforcing of the present backward class consciousness of sections of organized workers is not confined to cynical, dues collecting union bureaucrats, however. Two “socialist” organizations who are supposed to understand the role of the police in the present social system have recently carried accounts of the New York police action in their papers that agree with Jerry Wurf and the young cop quoted above that “police are workers too.” The Communist party has long been isolated in the trade union movement for its treacherous support of “progressive” bureaucrats like Reuther and Woodcock against the rank and file, its bootlicking support to liberal capitalist politicians, and its groveling apologies for a bureaucratic, Stalinist perversion of socialism. With these dubious credentials it editorializes in the Jan. 16 issue of the Daily World for a “fighting unity of the working class” to defend the police right to strike for “justified wage demands” as municipal workers. Another article in the same issue stated that “New Yorkers (were left with about one-fourth the regular police protection as thousands of cops today began a wildcat job action.” In New York, being “protected” by the police usually means a beating and subsequent charge of assault. Nonetheless they felt obliged to offer a few criticisms which makes their support even more grotesque, referring to the cops’ “racist currents” and “brutality,” their “beating up of strikers, support of “hardhat” beatings of students, and “John Birch cells in the Police Department,” as a few bad features that prevent the police from “winning allies among the people.” Their answer to it all is “community control” of the police, which used to include demands for more black cops until the Red Squad fuIfilled their demand and sent black cop-informers into the Black Panthers. You can’t “control” the police. The ruling class and the state the police work for has to be dismantled. But more of that later.

THE “WORKERS” LEAGUE

The other organization that thinks the cops are workers is a small allegedly revolutionary group called the Workers’ League that fortunately has no influence in the trade unions (except for supporting’ “lesser-evil” candidates for union office) and very few workers. Nevertheless, their position on the police strike is so incredible it affords us the opportunity to argue some important points.

Their paper, the Bulletin, generally consists of labor articles from the N. Y. Times re-written by their “labor correspondents.” This fake workers’ paper is apparently printed by non-union labor at scab wages, since a union bug is conspicuously absent. Their history on the police question actually pre-dates the recent police action by about eighteen months. At that time a spokesman for “the “Committee for New Leadership” (CNL), a small group in the welfare workers’ Local 371 in New York which is supported in the pages of the Bulletin, attempted to get that union to support the demands of the welfare police for “peace officer” status on the grounds that it was a “labor issue.” The welfare cops, however, had been trying for several years to be allowed to wear guns like the rest of the police. Peace Officer status, while bringing higher pay, would also authorize them to wear guns, which is what they were primarily after. The then president Morgenstern argued against the motion on the grounds that the only people the welfare cops could shoot would be social service staff and welfare recipients and the motion was defeated. The Workers League has now resurrected this position in two articles in the Jan. 25 and Feb. 15 issues of the Bulletin. The first article is entitled, “New York Labor Begins Showdown” and is accompanied by a picture of marching cops described in the caption as “militant policemen.” The general gist of the article is that the action by the police had “triggered a whole fight on the part of the city labor movement” creating a situation “which can only be described as on the verge of civil war.” This presumably refers to the threatened use of National Guards to replace the police if their action continued. (This actually happened in the 1863 draft riots when New York police refused to stop rioting pro-Confederate, pro-slavery Irish immigrants from burning down black orphanages in protest to being drafted in the Union army. The entire police force was fired and replaced by Federal troops. That was another action “by “militant” police.) The article describes a meeting where “rank and file patrolmen, raising the clenched fist salute, shouted ‘Kill Kiernan…” A veteran cop is quoted as referring to them as “nothing but hoodlums.” We agree, and would observe that the Nazis also copied their salute from the German communists. Since the cops were carrying their guns and do often kill people, including each other, this was not a hollow threat, although frankly, we would not grieve the loss of Patrolman Kiernan. This “defiance of their leadership symbolizes a change which is occurring in the labor movement as well” the author claims. The article concludes with a call for a general strike to support the police action: “When the patrolmen went out DeLury (sanitationmen), Maye (firemen) and Gotbaum refused to call out their ranks.” Clearly this article, the first enthusiastic response of the WL to the police action, characterizes the police as abandoning their role as the repressive armed force of the capitalist state, ready to take on the National Guard in pursuit of their alleged working class interests, dragging the rest of city labor behind them. What else does the author mean by “Lindsay and the entire capitalist cIass must very well be asking themselves what they face if those they pay to break strikes are themselves striking, if those who advocate and defend ‘law and order’ now defy it .. ” .

ERSATZ REVOLUTIONARIES

The second article, called, incredibly, “In Defense of the Working Class,” is intended as an authoritative statement of position, written by the General Secretary of the Workers League, Timothy Wohlforth. While more cautious in tone it more systematically lays bare the theoretical bankruptcy of this group of ersatz “revolutionaries.” The key section of Wohlforth’s hypothesis draws a parallel with the general strikes of 1919 where the Boston police also went on “strike”’ and is worth quoting: “The significance of all this is the importance of placing the recent New York police strike within the framework of the general movement of the working class and at the same time seeking to understand what underlies this movement of the class. When the repressive arm of the ruling class itself goes on strike, this is not an isolated phenomenon, but a reflection of a very general, deep and profound movement of the working class.” (our emphasis). A key premise to this conclusion is the same as that stated by our youthful cop and Jerry Wurf above, that cops are workers too: “Are we to see only the side of the police as the repressive arm of the state but at the same time not understand that the police are also employees of that state?” and, “when this repressive arm goes on strike it immediately does express the deepest crisis in capitalism and when the question of bringing another repressive arm of the state to smash the police comes up, then the question of civil war is in the air. ” Later he compares the police “strike” to “the growng insurrectionary situation in the Army”. We are being asked to believe nothing less than what we are witnessing now is the beginning of a civil war between the working class and the capitalists rapidly escalating to a classic situation of dual power, where the workers are ready to challenge the government for state power, but with thepolice being cast in the role of a conscript army, insurrecting and coming over (“for the moment, ” says the author) as the vanguard to the side of the working class! This is such a misreading of the current situation and ignoring of the historical experience of the workers’ movement, it is grotesque! Major metropolitan police have never played such a role. In a general strike or a revolutionary situation the police are always the first to clear out because they know what bastards they are.

ANTI-LABOR ACTION

The truth is just the opposite of the conclusions of the Workers League, the Communist Party, Jerry Wurf and Victor Gotbaum. The police work stoppage was fundamentally an anti-labor action. It was a political strike by a police force that has become dangerously conscious of its social role as the armed defenders of the social system of big business and the “law and order” that protects and maintains the power and privilege of this ruling class. It reflects the general motion of the woring class only in a negative sense, for the motion of the police is the symmetrical, polar opposite of that in the working class and in fact more resembles the recent re-emergence of fascist organizations attacking striking workers in France and Italy, or vigilante bands of police terrorists in Guatemala and other Latin American countries that have been assassinating labor leaders and members of revolutionary workers groups. The New York police are sick and tired of “having one arm tied behind their back” in dealing with militant blacks and Puerto Ricans, anti-war activists, trade union militants, and Lindsay himseif, whom they regard as some kind of “communist.” In short, they and their “employers” are anticipating and preparing for a counter attack against organized labor. The Bulletin article unwittingly admits this very phenomenon when it casually notes, “It should be pointed out that the strike wave of 1919 was shortly followed by a severe witchhunt… ” There are indeed lessons to be learned from 1919 and other turbulent periods of the working class movement, but not the lessons drawn for us by the Workers League. They had better go back to their textbooks on the labor movement, because they have missed the whole point. The police are our enemies, and they are dangerous.

THE PBA’S PAST

The New York cops began to organize in 1963 when the PBA went over from being a paper organization to the “bargaining agent” for all city cops with parallel organizations among transit cops and others. The PBA is not a union – it is basically a right-wing paramilitary political organization with a number of reported overlaps in the John Birch Society and Minutemen-type organizations, with an annual income of $10 million a year from dues and pension contributions. In the last years of the Wagner administration the cops were given an “open season” on Blacks and Puerto Ricans. The phony “Blood Brothers” panic, the 1964 Harlem police riots, the series of “accidental” killings by the cops in 1964-65 (paralleling the current rash of “suicides'” in City jails) were all a part of this. During this period the cops acquired a new consciousness as the City’s armed enforcers of racism – and they liked it! When Lindsay became mayor in 1966 and broke up the old police hierarchy, known as the “Irish mafia,” that controlled the Police Department and later attempted to set up a token Civilian Review Board to play “soft cop” the police organized politically, joining forces with the Conservative Party, the John Birch Society and an assortment of racist and right-wing groups anddefeated that timid proposal. Was that picket line of 10,000 armed, off-duty police around City Hall chanting “Lindsay is a commie” and “No Civilian Review Board” a “militant action” also? The same John J. Cassese that was a key figure in organizing the New York PBA (until he left under the cloud of an alleged embezzling scandal in 1969) Is now attempting to form a national organization of police called the Brotherhood of Police Officers (BPO), a move we regard as extremely dangerous, posing the spectre of a centrally directed political organization. Is that a “union” that these champions of police “militancy” would have the trade unions support when it tries a national strike to protest the refusal of the AFL-CIO to charter it? (The BPO’s first attempt at such a charter was recently scuttled by Jerry Wurf who regarded it simply as an attempted “raid” on AFSCME’s cop members.

EVEN GEORGE MEANY…

Are cops then workers and a part of the labor movement? Even George Meany said “no” to that some years back when the New York PBA first applied for AFL-CIO recognition. Since then he’s moved so far right he sees eye to eye with the cops on most questions. But he has a lot of company these days, and some pretty strange bedfellows at that. Well, how do we figure out who are workers and who aren’t? In a class society like ours the main social divisions are based upon the difference in the relationship of persons to the process of production. The way in which people enter into economic relations with each other for the purpose of production decide the social relations between them, that is, decides which class each person belongs to and the ensuing class relations. This division gives us one class, the capitalists, composed of those who own all the means of production and exchange – factories, mines, mills, railroads, banks – and a class of workers composed of those who own only their mental and physical abiity to work, and who must sell that ability to the capitalists by the hour or week in order to live. This includes public employees who sell their labor power to local, state, or federal governments as postal workers, motormen, clerks, sanitation workers, teachers, welfare workers, etc. There are also a variety of middle classes – small merchants and farmers, professional people, etc. – but the main decisive classes in society are workers and capitalists. Despite Wurf’s and the Workers League’s protests that the police are workers simply because they are salaried employees, ignoring entirely their very special social function, it is obvious that based on the above criteria, cops, as professional strikebreakers, fall entirely outsidethe social relations of the process of production, regardless of their social origins, and so are neither workers, nor part of the working class. While most policemen are generally of working class social origins, they are specifically hired and trained to function as class traitors, and bear a greater resemblance to a mercenary army, de-classed socially and economically. This was easier to see in the company towns of the late 19th century where the police were often hired by the coal mine or factory owners. As late as the early 1940’s, old Henry Ford had his own goon squad to keep the workers in line and breakup unionizing attempts. The mere fact that these scum were paid for their dirty work obviously didn’t make them “workers,” in any scientific class sense of the word. The same goes for Pinkertons, FBI agents, labor spies, informers, etc.

ROLE OF THE POLICE

The police, then, are special bodies of armed men. separated entirely from the rest of the population. These police, and also the Army and National Guard, etc., backed up by a system of prisons, are the backbone, the very essence, of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain through force or threat of force the rule of that class in order to economically exploit the working class. In every important and decisive conflict, the cops are the instrument of that state apparatus and stand on the side of private property and big business, backed up by pro-capitalist laws, judges, courts, and prisons.

In no sense are these bodies of armed men “neutral” in the class struggle, although great efforts are made to convince people that they are. It isn’t often that one sees the class character of the state power of big business operating in its naked form. Where the government is an outright capitalist dictatorship, which ruthlessly suppresses all trade unions and workers political organizations, wiping out representative government and all democratic rights and institutions, as was the case in Nazi Germany, the class character of the system is easily recognizable and unmistakable. But this causes a great deal of trouble for the capitalists and they only resort to naked military rule when the working people are no longer fooled by the sugar coating of law and order” and “peaceful, legal. means” and decide to struggle to run their own society in their own name, directly threatening therefore the social rule of big business. Every strike has all the elements of this life and death struggle with the company having the pickets arrested, hauled into court by the police, charged by the judge with violating some right of private property, and sent off to prison for daring to challenge the rule of the company.

This is why the question of the role of the police, as raised by the New York police action, is of such fundamental importance. It goes to the very heart of the struggle of the working class and does not allow for any mistakes. Labor bureaucrats understand this and constantly strive to obscure the real nature of the system, since it is their job to keep the workers under control. But for us there’s only one conclusion to draw from this issue: the cops are our enemies, and they are dangerous!

The Wohlforthite Ultimatum

The Wohlforthite Ultimatum

[The following exchange between the Communist Working Collective and ther Workers League’s Tim Wohlforth was reprinted by the Spartacist League in Marxist Bulletin #10 “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angeles.”]

April 21, 1971

Dear Comrade Wohlforth,

I have enclosed two copies of a letter to a Maoist on the crisis in Maoist strategy and an elaboration of some of Trotsky’s basic ideas. We have made the letter available to the L.A. Branch of the Workers League. We should be interested in your comments and reactions to the letter as well as any ideas you might have for making use of it.

Our group (Communist Working Collective) has definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and, following the 24th, we intend to begin an investigation into the 4th International in a more developed way.

I am also enclosing some copies of a proposal for joint action which we drew up and submitted to a number of local groups. The Liberation Union, a semi-Trotskyist group with no fundamental disagreements with the SWP, begged off a joint meeting for “lack of time”. The Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March agreed to a joint meeting but declined joint action in favor of marching in an “anti-imperialist contingent”.

We have also participated in a number of interventions with the Workers League and we are presently preparing a leaflet of our own for the 24th. We believe the combination of joint theoretical discussions as well as joint practical activities is the best way to determine where we have unity.

Looking forward to an early reply.

With communist greetings,

Marvin Treiger

********

B U L LET I N

weekly organ of the workers league

Sixth Floor, 135 West 14 Street, New York, New York 10011

April 27, 1971

Dear Comrade Treiger,

We have received your letter together with your statement on Trotskyism and Stalinism and your leaflet on April 24th. The statement is a good summary of some of the differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism historically.

However there is no discussion of the Fourth International. Your cover letter states: “Our group (Communist Working Collective) has definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and, following the 24th, we intend to begin an investigation into the 4th International in a more developed way.”

We are completely opposed to the methodological and theoretical position which such a stand reflects. It is not possible to separate out “Stalinism” and “Trotskyism” from the actual development of the Third International and the Fourth International. To do so is to go over to the idealist outlook of Deutscher who abstracts Trotsky the “hero” and his, “ideas” out of and opposed to Trotsky’s actual struggle to construct the Fourth International.

In this respect I urge that you and your group look over Trotsky’s “writings” recently republished by the SWP.

Next both the statement on “Trotskyism” and the leaflet reflect a removal from the strategic expression of Trotskyism, that is Marxism, in this period of international crisis. If, as you state in your leaflet, the ruling class is preparing for civil war, then we, too, must prepare through a battle to construct the Fourth International in the United States around a strategic approach. This is why it is completely wrong of you to call for a demonstration on April 24th which does not mention either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.

Finally we understand that in addition to holding joint discussions and joint actions with the Workers League you are holding at least discussions with Spartacist. This organization is completely hostile to the Fourth International and bears no relationship whatsoever, to Trotskyism.

You cannot have joint discussions or joint actions with us while you at the same time maintain relations of any sort with Spartacist. Wle are sure that a study of the historical development of Trotskyism will make this quite clear to you.

Finally we wish to make clear in any event we are not interested in any kind of “regroupment” or joint actions on the basis of some minimal agreement on so-called “class” issues. You say the Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March declined having joint action with you and we assume also us on April 24th.

In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists. Maoism today means bodies of revolutionaries lining the streets of Dacca and floating down the rivers of Ceylon. We do not understand how you can say you have “consolidated around Trotskyism” while at the same time you seek joint actions with the supporters of the butchers of the Bengalis and even with the Liberation Union which you characterize as “semi-Trotskyist” and then say it has “no fundamental disagreements with the SWP.” Could it be in your confusion you hold that the SWP is “semi–Trotskyist”?

We urge you to take up a serious study of Trotskyism and the development of the Fourth International and make a break with such riff-raff as the above mentioned groups. Then we will be more than happy to hold discussions with you and organize common actions based on the firm principled party grounds of Trotskyism as the continuator of the Leninist Bolshevik heritage.

Make up your mind. You cannot have it both ways.

Yours fraternally,

Tim Wohlforth

for the Political Committee

Workers League

***********

May 18, 1971

Dear Comrade Wohlforth,

We are writing you in reply to the letter we recently received and which, we assume, was discussed by the Political Committee (PC) of the Workers League (WL). We were taken aback by the approach you and the PC took towards our organization. There was hardly a single point you made with which we agreed or felt was historically accurate.

Take for example your evaluation of Comrade Treiger’s methodological approach in his cover letter and in what we will refer to as a “Letter to a Maoist”. Your position that since there was no discussion of the Fourth International in Treiger’s main letter and since, at least in our opinion, we have ” …definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and … intend to begin investigation into the Fourth International in a more developed way”, we ” …separate out ‘Stalinism’ and ‘Trotskyism’ from the actual development of the Third International and the Fourth International”, and therefore “…go over to the idealist outlook of Deutscher who abstracts Trotsky the ‘hero’ and his ‘ideas’ out of and opposed to Trotsky’s actual struggle to construct the Fourth International”. From this, we gather, you implied our methodolological approach will lead us to oppose the Fourth International. Nothing could be more wrong! What your position shows is that you completely misunderstand the nature of Treiger’s “Letter to a Maoist”. Let us explain. True, there was no formal discussion of the Fourth International in “Letter to a Maoist”, whose main purpose was to confront a Maoist organization in San Francisco with the basic truths of Marxism which were distorted for so long by the Stalinists. However, to draw the conclusion you did means to completely miss the spirit if not the letter of Treiger’s document. The entire document is a restatement of the Marxist position of proletarian internationalism, analyzes the bankruptcy of the Maoist international “strategy” and poses the question of why the CCP has never attempted to build a new International to all Maoist organizations. It further shows that the failure of the Chinese to develop a new International is an excellent exposure of their departure from internationalism. This stand of ours can only mean that we see an international party of the working class as absolutely indispensible, without which there can be no proletarian revolution. Moreover, “Letter to a Maoist” in stating: “The ideas embodies in the Transitional Program [which was developed during the first four congresses of the Third International–G.R.] find their historic continuation in the 1934 program of the Fourth International”, clearly indicates that we saw the program of the Fourth International as the theoretical continuation of Leninism. We purposely avoided the question of the Fourth International as it stands today because of our insufficient research at that time. The statement “…we intend to begin an investigation into the Fourth International in a more developed way” only means that there is still much ground to cover before we are soundly familiar with Trotskyist strategy and tactics and with the state of the present International. Nothing else can be read into this position.

Concerning the action on April 24th. We were dismayed by your attempting to avoid the question of our differences on the nature of the rally by implying that we called for our own demonstration, what else could this statement of yours mean? “This is why it is completely wrong for you to call for a demonstration on April 24th which does not mention either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.” And once again. “You say the Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March declined having joint action with you and we assume also us on April 24th.” [my iitalics–G. R.] At no time did we call for a demonstration independent of the WL demonstration. If so, where was this rally of ours? where did it take place? The Bulletin report of the San Francisco events by Jeff Sebastian stated the following “…the Workers League and supporters broke from the march, and… proceeded to the park where an independent meeting “Was held and addressed by Workers League spokesmen and by representatives of the Communist Workers [sic] Collective in Los Angeles.” The Bulletin completeley contradicted this fantastic notion of yours. Our position “las calling for “All out support of the Workers League call for a United Front rally of the working class against the war.” The error we made was that we misunderstood the nature of the WL’ s proposed action. This was mainly due to our misreading of the April 5th B’ulletin editorial. Instead of realizing that it was supposed to be a rally of the WL and its supporters, we thought (also because of the loose usage of “joint action” on the part of some comrades of the WL) that it was intended as a call for a united front working class action against the war. On this point we were totally wrong. However, this does not mean you can simply pass over our differences on the form the rally should take by falsely implying we called our own rally. That just will not do!

With regard to our not mentioning “…either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.” We didn’t have a consolidated collective position at that time (nor, incidentally, do we now) on these specific demands of the Transitional Program. The reason for this is we have not yet evaluated the history of the labor party demand in light of the present US conditions. Thus we don’t know whether it is correct to call for a labor party in opposition to aworkers party or vice versa. Same is true for the general strike call. Under what conditions, circumstances, etc., does one call for a general strike? This is why we didn’t take a position on these demands. However, in no way did our abstention on these questions prevent, us from supporting the rally at which these slogans were raised.

We further object to your position that we cannot have joint discussions or joint actions with the WL while maintaining relations of any sort with Spartacist. Our group is now in the process of thoroughly investigating the present anti-Pabloite Trotskyist organizations and are not about to conclude that Spartacist “…is completely hostile to the Fourth International and bears no relationship whatsoever to Trotskyism” just on your word. We may conclude your analysis of their organization is correct, however we feel, this conclusion must be made on the basis of our own independent investigation. Nevertheless Spartacist has shown a healthy attitude towards encouraging and aiding our investigation (which is more than we can say about your approach). That is why we will continue holding discussions with them. For these reasons we sincerely hope the PC of the WL reconsiders its present organizational position towards our group. If however, the PC decides to keep its present policy, we will still continue to investigate the WL in spite of any roadblock you may throw up in our way.

Further. We oppose the sectarian position you expressed toward the Maoists and other working class tendencies. “In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists. Maoism today means bodies of revolutionaries lining the streets of Dacca and floating down the rivers of Ceylon. We do not understand how you can say you have ‘consolidated around Trotskyism’ while at the same time you seek joint actions with the supporters of the butchers of the Bengalis and even with the Liberation Union…”. First of all you make a methodological error in seeing these organizations as finished party formations rather than groupings going through tremendous change. The October League and the Long March are based in Los Angeles and have between fifteen to twenty members each. The “semi-Trotskyist” Liberation Union is also a strictly local organization made up of Maoists and “Trotskyists” and has no more than thirty to forty members. Because of the crisis of world capitalism and the capitulation of the Chinese Stalinists to imperialism, many of these groups (as we did) are in fact looking to Trotskyism to lead them out of the Stalinist swamp. Your position would objectively hinder this development. Secondly, refusing to hold joint actions with Maoists on the basis that they support the foreign policy of the Chinese government is absolutely ludicrous. The Stalinists, Pabloites, Social-Democrats, and trade unionists all currently support either the existing Stalinist states or some kind of reactionary capitalist government. Furthermore, all of them have at one time or another either objectively or subjectively supported the annihilation of revolutionary struggles and are thus responsible for the deaths of thousands of revolutionaries. However, does this mean that you categorically refuse to engage in joint actions with any of these types of organizations? We feel the logic of your position must lead to either a sectarian liquidation of the united front reminiscent of Third Period Stalinism or to a series of opportunist zig-zags–now condemning joint action, now pragmatically entering into it.

From your position on our relations with Spartacist and from your approach to joint action with other working class tendencies, we can make the following evaluation of what seems to be your tactical approach. The WL has no intention of engaging in action with any tendency that does not objectively recognize it as the leading Leninist party.How else can your approach toward our organization be explained? What purpose could your “proposal” at the end of the letter possibly serve than to make us immediately acknowledge the leading role of the WL in the U.S. revolution? What other explanation can there be for your bombastic declaration in the April 5th Bulletin editorial “…either McGovern-Hartke or the Workers League…”? Here is a manifestation in practice of the sectarian danger of which we spoke. There is nothing wrong in principle in calling your own rally. But when you do so vaguely speaking of joint action, not building a united front and then counterposing your organization and your few supporters to everyone else, then we can only conclude that this represents nothing but an extreme example of “left-wing” childishness. Such an approach if persisted in can only hinder the development of the WL into a mass Bolshevik-Leninist party.

Finally, we must make it absolutely clear to you that we will not capitulate to your pressure tactics. In no way will we be forced into a position of holding discussions with only the WL on your “principled party grounds” For us to take such a step would mean that we concluded that the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WL were the continuators of Trotskyism in our time. The next step could only be discussions on organizational merger after which fusion would take place. Needless to say, so far there is no basis for us to reach such a conclusion.

In concluding, we hope that for the above stated reasons you consider re-evaluating your methodological approach toward us and towards other working class tendencies in general. Hope to hear from you soon.

With communist greetings,

George Rep

for the Communist Working Collective

“Pequenos rachas” na Arte e na Política

“Pequenos rachas” na Arte e na Política 

Leon Trotsky

Trecho de ‘Arte e Política em Nossa Época’, publicado originalmente em Partisan Review em junho de 1938 e depois na Fourth International de maio-junho de 1950. Esse trecho foi traduzido ao português pelo Reagrupamento Revolucionário em 2013 a partir da versão disponível em inglês em http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm.
“Na edição de junho da sua revista, eu encontrei uma curiosa carta de um editor de uma publicação de Chicago, a qual eu desconheço. Expressando (por erro, eu espero) a simpatia dele pela sua revista, ele escreve: ‘Eu não vejo nenhuma esperança, porém [?], nos trotskistas e outros pequenos rachas anêmicos que não tem base de massas’. Essas palavras arrogantes dizem mais sobre o autor do que ele talvez quisesse dizer. Elas mostram, acima de tudo, que as leis do desenvolvimento da sociedade permaneceram para ele como um livro selado a sete chaves. Nem sequer uma ideia progressiva começou com uma ‘base de massas’, do contrário não teria sido uma ideia progressiva. É apenas no seu último estágio que a ideia encontra suas massas – isso se, é claro, ela responder às necessidades do progresso. Todos os grandes movimentos começaram como ‘pequenos rachas’ de movimentos antigos. No começo, o cristianismo era apenas um ‘pequeno racha’ do judaísmo; o protestantismo um ‘pequeno racha’ do catolicismo, quer dizer, do cristianismo em decadência. O grupo de Marx e Engels surgiu como um ‘pequeno racha’ da esquerda hegeliana. A Internacional Comunista germinou durante a guerra a partir de ‘pequenos rachas’ da Internacional Socialdemocrata. Se esses pioneiros foram capazes de criar uma base de massas, foi precisamente porque eles não temiam o isolamento. Eles sabiam de antemão que a qualidade de suas ideias se transformaria em quantidade. Esses ‘pequenos rachas’ não sofriam de nenhuma anemia; pelo contrário, eles traziam consigo os germes dos grandes movimentos históricos do amanhã.” 
“É exatamente da mesma forma, para repetir, que um movimento progressivo ocorre na arte. Quando uma tendência artística exauriu suas capacidades criativas, ‘pequenos rachas’ criativos capazes de olhar o mundo com novos olhos se separam dela. Quanto mais ousadamente os pioneiros expressam suas ideias e ações, quanto mais severamente eles se opõem à autoridade estabelecida que se apoia em uma conservadora ‘base de massas’, mais as almas convencionais, os céticos e esnobes se inclinam a ver nesses pioneiros meros excêntricos impotentes ou ‘pequenos rachas anêmicos’. Mas, em última análise, são as almas convencionais, céticos e esnobes que estão errados – e a vida passa por cima deles.”
[…]
“Toda nova tendência artística ou literária (naturalismo, simbolismo, futurismo, cubismo, expressionismo e assim por diante) começou como um ‘escândalo’, quebrando com a velha e respeitável tradição, ferindo muitas autoridades estabelecidas. Isso de forma alguma flui apenas da busca por atenção (embora não haja falta disso). Não, essas pessoas – artistas, assim como críticos literários – tinham algo a dizer. Eles tinham amigos, tinham inimigos, eles lutaram, e exatamente fazendo isso, eles demonstraram o seu direito de existir.”

Lutando Contra a Corrente

Lutando Contra a Corrente

Leon Trotsky

Escrito em abril de 1939. Originalmente publicado em The Fourth International (Nova York) Vol. 2 No. 4, em maio de 1941. Traduzido para o português pelo Reagrupamento Revolucionário em 2013 a partir da versão em inglês disponível no Marxists Internet Archive.

[NOTA: A seguir está uma transcrição em linhas gerais, não-corrigida, de uma discussão realizada em abril de 1939 entre Trotsky e um membro inglês da Quarta Internacional que levantou uma série de questões a respeito do desenvolvimento da Quarta Internacional na França, Espanha, Grã-Bretanha e Estados Unidos. Em suas respostas, Trotsky esboçou as principais razões para o isolamento e lento progresso da Quarta Internacional nas primeiras etapas do seu desenvolvimento e mostrou como um novo rumo na situação mundial, como a presente guerra, iria inevitavelmente levar a uma mudança radical no ritmo do desenvolvimento, composição social e ligações da Quarta Internacional com as massas].

TROTSKY: Sim, a questão é por que nós não estamos progredindo em correspondência ao valor das nossas concepções, que não são tão insignificantes quando alguns companheiros acreditam. Nós não estamos progredindo politicamente. Esse é um fato que é a expressão de uma decadência geral do movimento dos trabalhadores nos últimos quinze anos. Essa é a causa mais geral. Quando o movimento revolucionário em geral está em baixa, quando temos uma derrota depois da outra, quando o fascismo está se espalhando pelo mundo, quando o “marxismo” oficial é a mais poderosa organização de enganação dos trabalhadores, e assim por diante, é uma situação inevitável que os elementos revolucionários devam trabalhar contra a maré histórica, mesmo se nossas ideias, nossas explicações, são tão exatas quanto se possa exigir.
Mas as massas não são instruídas por concepções teóricas prognosticas, mas pelas experiências próprias de suas vidas. A explicação mais geral é de que toda a situação está contra nós. Deve haver uma mudança na percepção de classe das massas, nos seus sentimentos; tal mudança nos dará a possibilidade de um grande sucesso político.
Eu me lembro de certas discussões em 1927 em Moscou, depois que Chiang Kai-shek imobilizou os trabalhadores chineses. Nós havíamos previsto isso com dez dias de antecedência e Stalin se opôs a nós com o argumento de que Borodin estava vigilante, e que Chiang Kai-shek não teria a possibilidade de nos trair, etc. Eu acho que oito ou dez dias depois a tragédia aconteceu e os nossos camaradas expressaram otimismo porque nossa análise era tão clara e todo o mundo iria perceber, e nós com certeza ganharíamos o partido. Eu respondi que o estrangulamento da revolução chinesa era mil vezes mais importante para as massas do que nossas previsões. Nossas previsões podem ganhar alguns intelectuais que se interessem por tais coisas, mas não as massas. A vitória militar de Chiang Kai-shek inevitavelmente iria provocar uma desmoralização, e isso não contribui para o crescimento de uma fração revolucionária.
Desde 1927, tivemos uma longa série de derrotas. Nós somos como um grupo que tenta escalar uma montanha e que sofre, a cada momento, uma avalanche de pedras ou de neve, etc. Na Ásia e na Europa, as massas adquirem uma nova sensação de desespero. Elas ouviram do Partido Comunista há dez ou quinze anos atrás algo parecido com o que nós estamos dizendo e elas ficam pessimistas. Essa é a sensação geral dos trabalhadores. Essa é a razão principal. Nós não podemos escapar da corrente histórica geral, do conjunto de forças principais. A corrente está contra nós, isso está claro. Eu me lembro do período entre 1908 e 1913 na Rússia. Também houve uma reação. Em 1905, nós tínhamos os trabalhadores conosco; em 1908, e mesmo em 1907, começou a reação.
Todos inventaram palavras de ordem e métodos para ganhar as massas, mas ninguém as ganhou; elas estavam em desespero. Nessa época, a única coisa que podíamos fazer era formar os quadros, e estes estavam se dispersando. Houve uma série de rachas à direita ou à esquerda, ou em direção ao sindicalismo e assim por diante. Lenin permaneceu em um pequeno grupo, uma seita, em Paris, mas confiante de que haveria novas possibilidades de se levantar. Isso chegou em 1913. Nós tivemos uma nova maré, mas aí veio a Guerra para interromper essa evolução. Durante a guerra, reinava um silêncio tumular entre os trabalhadores. A conferência de Zimmerwald era uma conferência de elementos muito confusos em sua maioria. No profundo recuo das massas, nas trincheiras e em outros lugares, havia um novo sentimento, mas ele era tão profundo e aterrorizado que nós não podíamos atingi-lo e dar-lhe expressão. É por isso que o movimento parecia aos próprios olhos ser tão fraco e mesmo os elementos que se encontraram em Zimmerwald, em sua maioria, se movimentaram à direita no ano seguinte, e mesmo no mês seguinte. Eu não os livro da sua responsabilidade pessoal, mas ainda assim a explicação geral é que o movimento tinha que nadar contra a corrente.
Nossa situação agora é incomparavelmente mais difícil do que a de qualquer outra organização em qualquer outra época, em razão da terrível traição da Internacional Comunista, que vem logo depois da traição da Segunda Internacional. A degeneração da Terceira Internacional ocorreu tão rápida e inesperadamente que a mesma geração que viu a sua formação, agora nos ouve e diz: “Mas nós já ouvimos isso antes!”.
Ocorre então a derrota da Oposição de Esquerda na Rússia. A Quarta Internacional está geneticamente conectada à Oposição de Esquerda; as massas nos chamam de trotskistas. “Trotsky deseja conquistar o poder, mas por que ele perdeu o poder?”, É uma questão elementar. Nós devemos começar a explicação pela dialética da história, pelo conflito de classes, e que mesmo uma revolução produz uma reação.
Max Eastman escreveu que Trotsky coloca importância demais na doutrina e que se ele tivesse mais senso comum não teria perdido o poder. Nada no mundo é tão convincente para as grandes massas quanto o sucesso e nada tão repelente quando a derrota.
Você também tem a degeneração da Terceira Internacional por um lado e a terrível derrota da Oposição de Esquerda com o extermínio de todo um grupo. Esses fatos são milhares de vezes mais convincentes para a classe trabalhadora do que o nosso pobre jornal, mesmo com uma tremenda circulação de 5 mil como o Socialist Appeal.
Contra a Corrente
Nós estamos navegando num pequeno barco contra uma corrente terrível. Há cinco ou dez barcos e um deles naufraga e nós dizemos que é por causa de um mau timoneiro. Mas não foi essa a razão; foi porque a corrente era forte demais. Essa é a explicação principal e nós não devemos nos esquecer dessa explicação para não nos tornarmos pessimistas; nós que somos a vanguarda da vanguarda. Existem elementos corajosos que não gostam de nadar contra a corrente; essa é uma característica sua. Há também os elementos inteligentes de mau-caráter que nunca foram disciplinados, que sempre procuraram por uma tendência mais radical ou mais independente e encontraram nossa tendência, mas todos eles são mais ou menos gente de fora da corrente geral do movimento dos trabalhadores. O seu valor tem inevitavelmente um lado negativo. Aquele que nada contra a corrente não está conectado com as massas. Também, a composição social de cada movimento revolucionário no começo não é operária. É feita de intelectuais, semi-intelectuais ou trabalhadores conectados com os intelectuais que estão insatisfeitos com as organizações existentes. Você encontra em cada país um monte de estrangeiros que não se encaixam facilmente no movimento operário do país. Um tcheco nos Estados Unidos ou no México se tornaria mais facilmente um membro da Quarta do que na Tchecoslováquia. O mesmo vale para um francês nos EUA. A atmosfera nacional exerce uma grande influência sobre os indivíduos.
Os judeus em muitos países representam semiestrangeiros, pessoas não totalmente assimiladas, e eles aderem a qualquer nova tendência revolucionária ou semirrevolucionária na política, na arte, na literatura e assim por diante. Uma nova tendência radical dirigida contra a corrente geral da história nesse período se cristaliza ao redor dos elementos mais ou menos separados da vida nacional de qualquer país, e para eles é mais difícil penetrar entre as massas. Nós somos todos muito críticos à composição social de nossa organização e de que devemos muda-la, mas nós entendemos que essa composição social não caiu do céu, mas foi determinada pela situação objetiva e por nossa missão histórica nesse período.
Isso não significa que nós devemos nos satisfazer com a situação. No que diz respeito à França, essa é uma longa tradição do movimento francês conectado à composição social do país. Especialmente no passado, a mentalidade pequeno-burguesa: individualismo de um lado, e do outro uma tremenda capacidade para o improviso.
Se você comparar no tempo clássico da Segunda Internacional, você vai ver que o Partido Socialista Francês e o Partido Socialdemocrata Alemão tinham o mesmo número de representantes no parlamento. Mas se você medir as organizações, você verá que elas eram incomparáveis. Os franceses só podiam coletar 25 mil francos com a maior dificuldade, mas na Alemanha, enviar meio milhão não era nada. Os alemães tinham nos sindicatos milhões de trabalhadores e os franceses tinham alguns milhões que não pagavam suas cotas. Engels certa vez escreveu uma carta na qual ele caracterizou a organização francesa e encerrou a carta com “E como sempre, as cotas não chegaram”.
Nossa organização sofre dessa mesma doença, a tradicional doença francesa. Essa incapacidade para organização e, ao mesmo, tempo uma falta de condições para improviso. Até mesmo quando nós tivemos agora uma boa maré na França, ela estava conectada com a Frente Popular. Nessa situação, a derrota da Frente Popular foi prova da exatidão das nossas concepções, da mesma forma como foi o extermínio dos trabalhadores chineses. Mas uma derrota é uma derrota e ela se dirige contra as tendências revolucionárias até que uma nova maré num nível mais alto apareça em um novo momento. Nós devemos esperar e preparar esse elemento novo, um novo fator nessa constelação de forças.
Nós temos camaradas que chegaram até nós, como Naville e outros, 15 ou 16 anos atrás, quando eles eram jovens. Eles hoje são pessoas maduras e em toda a sua vida consciente eles encontraram golpes, derrotas e terríveis reveses em escala internacional e estão mais ou menos acostumados a essa situação. Eles apreciam altamente a exatidão das suas concepções e eles podem analisar, mas nunca tiveram a capacidade de penetrar, de trabalhar com as massas, e eles não adquiriram tal habilidade. Há uma tremenda necessidade de olhar para o que as massas estão fazendo. Nós temos tais pessoas na França. Eu sei muito menos sobre a situação britânica, mas eu acredito que nós tenhamos tais pessoas lá também.
Por que nós perdemos pessoas? Depois de terríveis derrotas internacionais, nós tivemos na França uma maré em um nível político muito primitivo e muito baixo, sob a liderança da Frente Popular. Parece-me que a Frente Popular em todo esse período é um tipo de caricatura da Revolução de Fevereiro. É vergonhoso que em um país como a França, no qual há 150 anos se gestou a maior revolução burguesa do mundo, o movimento dos trabalhadores deva passar por uma caricatura da Revolução Russa.
JOHNSON: Você não lança toda a responsabilidade sobre o Partido Comunista?
TROTSKY: Ele é um tremendo fator na produção da mentalidade das massas. O fator ativo foi a degeneração do Partido Comunista.
Do Isolamento à Reintegração com as Massas
Em 1914 os Bolcheviques estavam dominando absolutamente o movimento dos trabalhadores. Isso foi no limiar da guerra. As estatísticas mais exatas mostram que os Bolcheviques representavam não menos que três quartos da vanguarda proletária. Mas a partir da Revolução de Fevereiro, o povo mais atrasado, camponeses, soldados, mesmo os antigos trabalhadores bolcheviques, foram atraídos para essa corrente de Frente Popular e os Bolcheviques ficaram isolados e muito fracos. A tendência geral estava num nível político muito baixo, mas poderoso, e se movia em direção à Revolução de Outubro. É uma questão de ritmo. Na França, depois de todas as derrotas, a Frente Popular atraiu elementos que simpatizavam conosco teoricamente, mas estavam envolvidos com o movimento das massas e nós nos tornamos ainda mais isolados do que antes. Você pode combinar todos esses elementos. Eu posso até mesmo afirmar que muitos (embora não todos) dos nossos camaradas de liderança, especialmente nas seções antigas, seriam, com um novo giro na situação, rejeitados pelo movimento revolucionário de massas e novos líderes, uma liderança nova, irá emergir na onda revolucionária.
Na França, a regeneração começou com o entrismo no Partido Socialista. A política do Partido Socialista não era clara, mas ganhou muitos novos membros. Esses novos membros se acostumaram a uma grande audiência. Depois do rompimento, eles se desencorajaram um pouco. Eles não eram tão firmes. Então eles perderam o seu interesse pouco firme e foram ganhos novamente para a corrente da Frente Popular. É lamentável, mas é explicável.
Na Espanha, as mesmas razões desempenharam o mesmo papel com o fator suplementar da conduta deplorável do grupo de Nin. Ele estava na Espanha como representante da Oposição de Esquerda russa e durante o primeiro ano, nós não tentamos mobilizar, organizar nossos elementos independentes. Nós esperávamos poder ganhar Nin para a concepção correta e assim por diante. Publicamente, a Oposição de Esquerda lhe dava o seu apoio. Em correspondências privadas, tentávamos ganha-lo e fazê-lo avançar, mas sem sucesso. Nós perdemos tempo. Foi correto? É difícil dizer. Se na Espanha nós tivéssemos um camarada com experiência, nossa situação seria incomparavelmente mais favorável, mas nós não tínhamos. Nós pusemos todas as nossas esperanças em Nin e a sua política consistiu em manobras pessoais para poder evitar responsabilidade. Ele brincou com a revolução. Ele era sincero, mas toda a sua mentalidade era a de um menchevique. Era um tremendo obstáculo, e lutar contra esse obstáculo apenas com fórmulas corretas, e ainda falsificadas por nossos representantes no primeiro momento, os Nins, tornou-se muito difícil.
Não esqueça que nós perdemos a primeira revolução em 1905. Antes de nossa primeira revolução, nós tínhamos uma tradição de profunda coragem, autossacrifício, etc. Depois nós fomos empurrados de volta a uma posição de minoria miserável de trinta ou quarenta pessoas. E depois veio a guerra.
JOHNSON: Quantos havia no Partido Bolchevique?
TROTSKY: Em 1910 em todo o país havia algumas poucas dúzias de pessoas. Alguns estavam na Sibéria. Mas eles não estavam organizados. As pessoas com que Lenin podia se comunicar por correspondência ou por agentes estavam entre 30 e 40 no máximo. Entretanto, a tradição e as ideias entre os trabalhadores mais avançados era um tremendo capital político que foi usado posteriormente durante a revolução; mas em termos práticos, nessa época nós estávamos completamente isolados.
Sim, a história tem suas próprias leis que são muito poderosas; mais poderosas que nossas concepções teóricas da história. Agora temos na Europa um declínio catastrófico, um extermínio de países. Isso tem uma baita influência sobre os trabalhadores quando eles observam esses movimentos da diplomacia, dos exércitos e tudo o mais, e do outro lado um pequeno grupo com um pequeno jornal que faz explicações. Mas é uma questão de o trabalhador ser convocado amanhã e de seus filhos serem mortos. Há uma terrível desproporção entre as tarefas e os meios.
Se a guerra começar agora, e parece que ela vai começar, então no primeiro mês nós vamos perder dois terços do que nós temos na França. Eles vão se dispersar. Eles são jovens e serão convocados. Subjetivamente muitos vão se manter fiéis ao nosso movimento. Aqueles que não forem presos e que permanecerem (pode haver três ou cinco, eu não sei quantos) estes estarão completamente isolados.
Apenas após alguns meses as críticas e as insatisfações vão começar a se mostrar em larga escala e por toda parte os nossos camaradas isolados, em um hospital, em uma trincheira, uma mulher em um vilarejo, vão encontrar uma atmosfera diferente e dirão uma palavra corajosa. E o mesmo camarada que era um desconhecido em uma seção de Paris se tornará o líder de um regimento, de uma divisão, e se sentirá um poderoso líder revolucionário. Esta mudança está no caráter do nosso período.
Eu não quero dizer que devemos nos reconciliar com a impotência de nossa organização francesa. Eu acredito que com a ajuda dos camaradas norte-americanos nós podemos ganhar o PSOP e dar um grande salto a frente. A situação está amadurecendo e ela diz para nós: “Vocês devem aproveitar essa oportunidade”. E se nossos camaradas virarem suas costas, a situação vai mudar. É absolutamente necessário que nossos camaradas norte-americanos vão para a Europa novamente e que eles não apenas deem conselhos, mas decidam junto com o Secretariado Internacional que nossa seção deveria entrar no PSOP. Ele tem alguns milhares. Do ponto de vista da revolução não é uma grande diferença, mas do ponto de vista do nosso trabalho é uma tremenda diferença. Com novos elementos nós podemos dar um grande salto a frente.
Já nos Estados Unidos nós temos um tipo diferente de trabalho e eu acredito que nós podemos ser muito otimistas sem ilusões e exageros. Nos Estados Unidos nós temos a grande vantagem do tempo. A situação não é tão imediata, tão grave. Isso é importante.
E eu concordo com o camarada Stanley, que escreveu que nós podemos agora ter importantes sucessos nos países coloniais e semicoloniais. Nós temos um movimento muito importante na Indochina. Eu concordo absolutamente com o camarada Johnson de que nós podemos ter um movimento negro muito importante, porque essas pessoas não passaram pela história das duas últimas décadas tão intimamente. Como massa elas não sabiam sobre a Revolução Russa e a Terceira Internacional. Elas podem começar a história do princípio. É absolutamente necessário para nós ter sangue novo. É por isso que nós temos mais sucesso entre a juventude. Quando temos sido capazes de nos aproximar dela, temos tido bons resultados. Ela é muito atenta a um programa revolucionário honesto e claro.
Abril de 1939

What Is Revolutionary Leadership

What Is Revolutionary Leadership

SECOND EDITION (1970)

Articles originally printed in Labour Review (theoretical journal of the Socialist Labour League of Britain) and republished by the Spartacist League with introductory and supplemental material.]

Building the Bolshevik Party: Some Organizational Aspects Brian Pearce
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/pearce/1960/02/bolsheviks.html

What Is Revolutionary Leadership? Cliff Slaughter
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1960/10/leadership.html

Lenin and Trotsky On Pacifism and Defeatism Brian Pearce
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/pearce/1961/xx/defeatism.html
(Appendix) Learn to Think: A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists by Leon Trotsky
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/05/think.htm

Class, Caste and State in the Soviet Union Tom Kemp
[coming soon]

The Class, the Party and the Leadership Leon Trotsky (included in the second edition)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm

INTRODUCTION

The progress of a social science such as Marxism is by no means always in a forward direction. The history of the Marxist movement on a world scale has almost from the first been characterized by an internal struggle over tendencies to blur Marxism’s revolutionary outlook and conclusions, and to undermine its reliance on the industrial working class. These non-revolutionary tendencies have been generally designated by the word “revisionism.,”

To persons not acquainted with the specialized usages of the Marxist movement, antirevisionism may seem equivalent to a dogmatic defense of articles of faith promulgated in other decades and under other conditions, and a futile if not reactionary exercise in sectarian obscurantism. In reality, however, quite the opposite is the case. Those tendencies grouped under the general name of revisionist represent not new insights in social analysis but rather a return to positions long since rendered untenable by the sharpening theoretical analysis and the increasing historical experience of the socialist movement.

Revisionism cannot be understood, however, as a purely intellectual sin. The constant reappearance of previously discredited notions among socialists is an attribute of Marxism’s character as a social movement, a movement that defines its essential nature in the interplay and conflict of classes and social strata. Its ideology at once guides its adherents in that struggle, and is at the same time molded and developed by the non-ideological phenomena of social reality. The explanation of the endemIc character of revisionist tendencies — ever defeated and ever reappearing –lies in their constant regeneration by non proletarian social forces within bourgeois society. As the decay of that society deepens while its demise is postponed, the tendency toward the generation of revisionism is strengthened.

The Fourth International International of Leon Trotsky was an organized in the 1930’s to supplant the bureaucratically degenerated Third International of the Stalin era. However, revolutionary origins alone could no more protect the Fourth International than its predecessor. By the 1950’s revisionism had gained a major foothold in the Trotskyist camp. With the passage of the American Socialist Workers Party into the revisionist camp in the early 1960’s, the situation in the Fourth International reached the stage of acute crisis.

Generally characteristic of revisionism Is a motion away from reliance on the proletariat in the leadership of the revolution, and a reliance on other strata, usually petty bourgeols, and other methods, either parlimentary or adventurist. Essential to its ideology is an objectivist outlook in social thinking. The making of history is removed from real people and given to abstract social forces. “History, like truth, becomes a person apart, a motaphysical subject of which real human individuals are but the bearers.” (1) The thinking which is being evolved by the new revisionists in the Fourth International uses “the objective unfolding of social forces” to abolish the need for a revolutionary party, for conscious revolutionary leadership, and thus clears the way for reliance on various national bourgoisles and petty bourgeois bureaucratic elements to bring about the now social order.

Grouped chiefly around the International Secretariat and Its successor, the United Secretariat in Paris, this group has as its chief spokesmen such figures as Pierre Frank, Ernest Germain, and until recently, Michel Pablo. In the colonial sphere, this group looks to petty-bourgeois nationalist tendencies such as Ben Bella’s FLN to carry out the social revolution, declaring the colonial working class to be bourgeoisified. The ultimate concrete application of this theory is to be seen in the act of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party which entered a bourgeois government in Ceylon. The belated repudiation of this course by its intellectual authors can not absolve them of the responsibility for the results of their teaching and guidance. The United Secretariat increasingly embraces various forms of the theory of the self- liquidation of the bureaucracies in the Stalinized countries, and now no longer regards China as a deformed workers’ state, i.e., it no longer believes that the Chinese People’s Republic is basically bureaucratic in character. In the metropolitan countries these forces content themselves with the role of ginger groups within various centrist formations.Thus the revisionists carry out a simulataneous political accomodations and organizational capitulations to the national bourgoisie in the colonial countries, to liberalizing sections of the,Soviet bureaucracies and to left-posing political leaders and trade union centrists at home. Since the Trotskyist movement has historically lacked a mass base, this course poses the threat not only of revisionist degeneration but of ultimate total liquidation as well.

The Socialist Workers Party has now definitively embraced these revisionist tenets as the basis for its world view. At home it has eagerly capitulated to the reactionary ideology of black nationalism, thus undercutting its role on the only active front in the U.S.A. Having proclaimed Cuba a workers state without significant deformations, the S.W.P. is unable to bring forward even a blush at Comrade Castro’s endorsement of peaceful coexistence, or more than asotto voce “they had it coming” at the arrest and imprisonment of the entire Cuban Trotskyist leadership. In the crisis over the Kennedy assassination, it crawled before bourgeois public opinion. With political decay has come, inevitably, decay of internal life. For the last year the S.W.P. majority has taken to expelling its left critics from the party.

The four pieces which we now present to an American radical audience are part of the struggle against this revisionist tendency in the world Trotskyist movement. They were published in 1960, 1961, and 1962 in Labour Review, theoretical organ of the Socialist Labour League of Great Britain. With the defection of the S.W.P. to the enemy camp, the burden of the struggle has fallen mainly on this organization. Labour Review, and its successor, the British Fourth International, have been valued weapons for English reading Marxists. Although dealing with such apparently disparate topics as pacifism, the Soviet social order, and the history of the Russian Bolsheviks, the articles illuminate various aspects of one central question, the need for conscious Marxist leaderships organized in a revolutionary party, at the head of the industrial working class. (2) They are a sharp attack on the spontaneous growing-over theories of the revisionists. One need not be In agreement with every detail they contain to find in them understanding and guidance on the central tasks of revolutionists today. It is enough that they are, taken as a whole, an invaluable collective contribution to the current phase of the struggle for revolutionary socialism.

Geoffrey White

Berkeley,
August 1964

(1) Karl Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1956) P. 107.

(2) The revolutionary Marxist program flowing from this aim has been systematically and comprehensively set forth in the international resolution “World Prospect for Socialism.”

Preface to the Second Edition

The re-issuance of this pamphlet, after a long period of unavailability, is indeed a welcome event. These articles on revolutionary leadership are still, as Geoffrey White’s introduction of 1964 described them, “an invaluable collective contribution to the current phase of the struggle for socialism.” The title piece by Cliff Slaughter is perhaps the best restatement of the Trotskyist purpose in English since the death of Trotsky. Furthermore, we have been able to add to the pamphlet Trotsky’s long out-of-print superlative article, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership”, which stands among the most valuable and incisive treatments of the revolutionary vanguard and its relation to the class in Marxist literature.

The unfortunate fact that the movement to which the authors of the original four articles from Labour Review belong, the Healy-Banda Socialist Labor League of Great Britain and its International Committee of the Fourth International, has degenerated considerably from the anti-revisionist position it held earlier requires some explanation. These articles reflect a stage through which the SLL was passing, a stage in which it possessed the formal political program of Trotskyist opposition to the Pabloite revisionism within the Fourth International discussed in White’s introduction, as well as the not inconsiderable talents of Marxist scholarship to be found here. It lacked the fundamental theoretical keys to understanding the origins of Pabloism, however, and its rigid orthodoxy was incapable of answering the questions which gave rise to the revisionism in the first place. Furthermore, the Healy group persisted in such destructive political and tactical errors that its actual program-that is, the sum total of its actions, as opposed to its words—was one of splitting and sabotaging the struggle to rebuild a Trotskyist international movement. Since the period in which this pamphlet was first printed, the SLL’s mistakes and, theoretical incapacities have led to greater and greater contradictions, and finally, in a process not yet complete, to an abandonment of Trotskyism and capitulation to the very Pabloism it supposedly set out to combat.

This history is intimately bound up with the origins and development of the Spartacist League of the U.S. The S.L. grew out of a tendency within the Socialist Workers Party which, in its struggle against the rampaging Pabloism seizing control of the SWP in the early sixties, attempted to align itself with the International Committee on the basis of agreement with the IC’s formal anti-Pabloist stand. This collaboration proved difficult at best, and was ultimately smashed in a grotesque split engineered in truly Stalinist fashion by the Healy clique at an IC international conference in London in 1966.

The Healyites, including Healy’s subservient American mentors, the “Workers League” of Wohlforth & Co., continually attempt to make political capital out of the fact that the SL existed separately from the IC for a long period of substantial political agreement. Wohlforth has just completed a six-part, 24-page series on Spartacist in hisBulletin, which, among many other distortions, outright lies and horrendous slanders much too numerous to go into here, asserts that we of the SL are unable to explain the political basis for the split. Parodying Trotsky, Wohlforth demands that we explain the “social origins” of Healy’s well-documented Comintern-like bureaucratism, which includes physical gangsterism and use of the bourgeois apparatus of repression against other tendencies within the labor movement. Actually, the Spartacist League and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Tendency in the Socialist Workers Party, were cognizant of the errors of Healy—both organizational and political—at least since 1962. Indeed it was the fact that the Spartacist tendency spoke of these errors and sought to correct them within the framework indicated by the principled political agreement with the IC, which made the Healyites seek to drive us from their midst at all costs!

The theoretical problems which had led to the dominance of Pabloism within the Fourth International centered on the expansion of Stalinism after World War II, and, particularly, on the creation of new, anti-capitalist states in Yugoslavia and later in China and finally Cuba, not on the basis of proletarian revolution, but on the basis of independent Stalinist or petty-bourgeois-led movements based primarily on the peasantry. The Pabloist response to these developments involved abandonment of the vanguard party and a working-class perspective (see White’s introduction). The Spartacist tendency felt that the early opposition of the SWP to Pabloism was based on a rigid orthodoxy which failed to solve the problem and left the SWP open to make the same capitulation themselves on the question of Cuba a decade later, and furthermore that the opposition of the IC to Pabloism had much the same character. In his remarks on the political report at the 1966 London conference, Spartacist delegate Robertson said, “Two decisive elements have been common to the whole series of upheavals under Stalinist-type leaderships, as in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietrinm: 1) a civil war of the peasant-guerrilla  variety, which …if victorious… smashes capitalist property relations… (and) 2) the absence of the working class as a contender for power, in particular, the absence of its revolutionary vanguard: this permits an exceptionally independent role for the petty-bourgois sections of society…” These circumstance do not open the road to socialist development without a further, political revolution,nor do they in any sense deny the need for proletarian revolution or assert an historically independent role for the petty-bourgeoisie: “On the contrary, precisely the petty-bourgeois peasantry under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable could achieve no third road. . Instead all that has come out of China and Cuba was a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counter-revolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the degeneration of October.”

Comrade Robertson then went on to warn of the fundamental nature of the SLL’s mistakes, which prevented them from developing any analysis at all of the origins of the Chinese Revolution, and led them to see Castro’s Cuba as still capitalist: “This is a bad method: at bottom it equates the deformed workers’ state with the road to socialism; it is the Pabloite error turned inside out, and a profound denial of the Trotskyist understanding that the bureaucratic ruling caste is an obstacle which must be overthrown by the workers if they are to move forward.”

One year later, the SLL endorsed the Chinese bureaucracy’s “Cultural Revolution” and Mao’s Red Guards, despite “…some of the extravagant, improbable and Utopian ideas of Mao Tse Tung;… his refusal to repudiate Stalin, his support of the Soviet intervention in Hungary, (and) his acceptance of ‘socialism in a single country‘…”! (SLLNewsletter 14 Jan., 1967, emphasis mine) Healy and Banda (who wrote the article) know that “socialism in a single country” is the very essence of Stalinism, not just “some improbable Idea of Mao’s”. This is a complete abandonment of the Trotskyist program in favor of capitulation to a wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Wohlforth attempts to slide over this by tossing off the horrendous, total lie that the SL gave “support to the Liu faction in China against the Red Guards…” ! (Bulletin, 10 Aug. 1970, emphasis mine) Soon thereafter, the IC adopted the equally unprincipled position of support to the “Arab revolution”, which, somehow, seems to have a consistent outward thrust and to be dominated by pop front alliances with reactionary Arab regimes. Thus a political departure from Trotskyism has been the result of a course which began with the Healy movement’s inability to develop Marxism theoretically in response to new events.

The Spartacist tendency opposed many other mistakes of Healy-Wohlforth. The complete failure of Healy & Co. to comprehend the concept of principled factional struggle led them to substitute opportunist and sectarian gyrations which undermined the international struggle against Pabloism. Thus Healy ordered the split in the tendency in the SWP in 1962—demanding that the majority renounce their views as a precondition for membership in the “Reorganized Minority Tendency”—In order to consummate an unprincipled bloc with the central leadership, which was Pabloist! Wohlforth now admits the unprincipled character of this maneuver when he says, “we considered the current positions of the SWP to be centrist and revisionist and its movement to be back into the petty-bourgeois revisionist Pabloite camp under the pressure of alien class forces.” (Bulletin  22 June 1970) This is the very same position he and Healy demanded the tendency renounce in 1962 as against their assertion that the SWP was still revolutionary I After solidarizing with the Dobbs-Kerry leadership of the SWP by helping to expel the Revolutionary Tendency leaders, Wohlforth-Healy then flip-flopped, engineered their own expulsion from the party and declared that it had never been-revolutionary! (Documentation on the 1962 split may be found in Marxist Bulletin #3, from Spartacist).

Beneath this abominable behavior lay a fundamentally false perspective, which led to worse behavior later and to an eventual excuse for abandonment of any factional struggle against Pabloism in the Fourth International. The Healyites didn’t want a real fight for a Trotskyist international based on struggle, splits and fusions, but instead, having failed In their earlier maneuvers, merely wanted to consumate a split, grab what they could and have a pond of their own to swim in. Hence their righteous proclomations that the IC is the Fourth International, despite its failure to break the Pabloite grip in more than a few countries, and that Pabloism has been smashed, etc. This latter claim, which we fought as being pure illusion and an excuse for abandoning the struggle, now seems somewhat contradictory with Healy’s call recently for joint discussions with the Pabloite Unified Secretariat leading to an international conference!

Recognizing that the struggle is still going on in the Pabloite sections, Healy is now making his attempt to crawl back in typical opportunist fashion, but this time, the principled, Trotskyist political basis for confronting Pabloism is gone. In its place, now standing more fully revealed, is a cravenly opportunist movement which furthermore deals wantonly in financial chicanery, and provocation, violence, and use of capitalist “justice” against its socialist opponents! The Healy-Wohlforth gang is a complete fraud; their avowed Trotskyism is totally foreign to their actual method and now to most of their formal politics as well. It is to be regretted that the potentially serious Marxists we see here have been unable or unwilling either to see this fraud for what it is or to struggle against it. Time is running out for them but, meanwhile, the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International and a Leninist vanguard party in the U.S.  continues — set back, perhaps, but enriched by the experience and moving ahead. We are determined to incorporate the contributions to Marxism which members of the Healy movement were able to make, and, like the lessons of the struggle with the Healyite bandits themselves, put them to good use in the struggle for socialism.

-Chris Kinder

September 1970

Link to Labour Review archive (January 1953- Summer 1963)
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/lr/index.html

The Working Class & The Park

The Working Class & The Park

[First printed in Spartacist West #16, 27, June 1969.]

Wikipedia entry on the Poeple’s Park and it’s early history.

There are a large number of people who would have us believe that the turmoil around the campuses is the work of spoiled, irresponsible students and hippies, who should have felt more of the lash from their parents, and who should be punished like children now for every single infraction of “law and order.”

Despite the widespread support for this “law and order” line, fortunately. most people are aware that there are realissues behind the disturbances and that large scale (discontent is not the work of a few malcontented idiots but is a sign of something wrong in society.

A few brief facts about the park issue will make this more understandable. We all know that legal title to the peoples’ park plot belongs to the University of California, but how many know how this came to pass? What is behind this “legal” title? Apparently there is a plan (a much more powerful “plot” than any students or hippies are capable of) on the part of the Board of Regents of U.C. and the Berkeley campus administration to destroy the south campus community. This is a political decision, taken because this mere handful of powerful men – none of whom were ever elected by the people and none of whom can ever be recalled from office – felt that the south campus community is a source of revolutionary activity and therefore a threat to society (which really means a threat to the power of this handful of powerful men and those who appointed them).

This decision was made at a closed meeting of the Board of Regents (all meetings of supposedly “public” bodies should be open to the public!), about which reports have filtered down to the “common” folk who make up the vast majority of the University community! Anyone who doesn’t want to believe this, however, can look at the public record of the reason for the University purchase of the plot which is now peoples’ park: plainly stated, it was to remove undesirable elements! This was accomplished by simply tearing down the buildings that were there; this was done long before the University had any idea of what it wanted to use the land for.

THE UNIVERSITY

Speaking of the University and its plans for the park land, just who is “the University” about which everyone speaks, and who is it who wants the park and who doesn’t? Is the University the Board of Regents? The Board of Regents is a small group of men who are supposed to be administering the University in the name of the people of California. They are appointed by the governor, but they are by no means representative of the people of California. They are very much like the board of directors of a large corporation, and most of their members come from the executives of the largest corporations in the state, such as Bank of America, the Hearst empire (publishing) and Safeway. They run the University in the interests of these large corporations and capitalists who own them, not in the interests of the people.

Back on the campus, the students and faculty are overwhelmingly for the park and against another unnecessary soccer field or any other phony “use” for the land that the chancellor has been able to come up with. The student vote which was held on this issue had a larger turnout than any previous student vote on anything, and the majority in favor of the park was 6 to 1, a greater majority than has ever been attained before for anything. The Berkeley faculty has also voted in favor of the park.

Back to the south campus community: who does it threaten, and why? Clearly there is no threat to the students or faculty, since these groups are for the park and against those who want to destroy this community. Is there then a threat to the south campus cornmunity? Reagan has used a petition signed by about forty people to prove that the local comrnunity doesn’t want the park; however, a survey by the university found 85% of the local residents in favor of the park. The only threat is obviously to the Board of Regents and the capitalist ruling class which they represent. The threat is that the students will stir up too much noise about racism both in the University and in the surrounding community, that they will hold protest demonstrations against the war, that they will refuse to attend classes and other such “dangerous” pressure tactics, and that they will spend too much time aiding strikes of workers in the Bay Area such as in the recent strike of oil workers in Richmond.

WORKERS’ INTERESTS

Working people should take the side of the students and park people in this issue, not because the park is a way to improve the working man’s condition, but because the students’ and park peoples’ enemy is the workers’ enemy, and if this enemy wins this battie, he will have legitimized his tactics and thus will be all the more able to achieve his real aim, which is to move against the working people by attacking the unions and lowering living standards for the sake of improving and maintaining profits.

The policy that the Board of Regents has set for itself does benefit somebody: the landlords who own buildings in the campus community. They are happy because they can charge outrageously high rents for housing which is in shorter and shorter supply as “the University” buys up buildings. The rest of the south campus comnlUnity is threatened with extinction, and this is not just hippies and dope addicts. There are many students, mainly the poorer ones, and small home owners in this community. When were they ever consulted about this “clean up” plan?

Despite the militancy, numbers and revolutionary ferver surrounding the peoples’ park issue, the left has been confused and hesitant, and the leadership effectively passed to liberals. Thus the big Memorial Day march, which could have easily pulled down the fence or a section of it, was dominated by monitors doing the bidding of the cops and flower-power “love thy enemy” theory. Many radicals wondered how this movement, which started so strong and in which a brother was killed, could have been so effectively defused.

CONTRADICTORY ISSUE

A good part of the answer lies in the nature of the original issue. On the one hand, it was very apolitical and consistent with “hippie” thinking to fight the ruling class by simply planting flowers on a vacant lot. On the other hand, the park met a very real need of the south campus community and challenged in the most immediate and direct way the private property upon which capitalist society is based, making it very political and revolutionary at the same time.

The problem is that as a revolutionary tactic it was a hopeless adventure: to win would mean bringing down the whole system right now. On the other hand, since it was a fight over just one plot of land, it was easy to see how some deal could be made by which part or all of the park would be preserved (perhaps by a “small” sacrifice of the spontaneous planning that went into it at first) while the system, including the University’s campaign to buy up south campus property, would remain untouched. It was thus a very real and important struggle of a large community of people, and, superficially at least, very revolutionary, but one which was easily co-opted by the liberals. Much of its power came, of course, simply as a reaction to the murderous brutality of the cops and the national guard occupation.

Some ostensible Marxist-Leninist organizations, like PL and the Workers League, “solved” this complex question for themselves very neatly by simply rejecting the whole thing as a stupid, hippy adventure which could never reach the working class. This sectarian, formalistic position ignores the very real struggle out of which the park issue emerged and the need of Marxists to intervene in such struggles to educate and recruit cadre to build a revolutionary vanguard party. Lenin strongly warned against precisely this kind of spontaneous, adventurous struggle against a well organized and armed system, but he also pointed out the need for Marxists to intervene in all the struggles of the people for the purpose of redirecting and uniting them. We might also point out in passing that the Workers League is in international solidarity with the only tendency in France – the Lambertist O.C.I. – which denounced and pulled out of the student barricade struggles in the Latin Quarter only days before the great general strike of last May.

The approach of the park people to the National Guard was encouraging. It showed that the movement sees that the guardsmen are oppressed working and middle-class individuals who should be won over, and it showed that favorable responses can be obtained. It also showed something else, however, that the movement is in no way powerful enough at this stage to bring about a mass response from the armed forces of the such as would be required in a revolution.

Only a well organized working-class movement would be able to do this. Guardsmen and troops will not throw down their weapons and go over to the people’s side unless they are really convinced that the people are powerful, and that means power to take over the whole society and prevent the old rulers from disciplining them as “traitors.” Only the workers can do this.

GENERAL STRIKE

A general strike would have been the way to accomplish this in the recent Berkeley occupation. The movement should have raised the demand for a general strike, and attempted to convince the workers of their interest in opposing the occupation in ~ way. One way would have been to call a demonstration for a strike at the local labor temple in Oakland. This would focus attention on the do nothing bureaucrats who run the workers’ unions and would have served as a basis for alliance with the growing ranks of militants in the unions who are working to toss these bureaucrats out.

The drastic increase in police power and police repression against the student movement, and most severely against the Black Panthers, is merely a prelude to greater things to come. The workers and the workers organizations are what the ruling c1as s is really after. They are preparing to crush the workers’ attempts to prevent drastic cutbacks in their standards of living, job conditions, etc., which will soon be neces sary for the capitalists. Workers must b~ able to see this before it is too late. They should form defense guards to protect their meetings, unions and picket lines. They should fight to restore their unions to the militant I instruments of struggle that they should be, instead of platforms for wheeler-dealers that they are now. They should also build a party of their own, a Freedom-Labor Party based on the unions and controlled by the rank-and-file. Militant students and park people would do well to heed this same warning, since without a militant workers movement, their interests will remain subordinate to the whim of the capitalist system.

The Fight For Women’s Liberation

The Fight For Women’s Liberation

[Revolutionary Marxist Caucus position paper presented at the Students for a Democratic Society December 1969 conference. Originally posted at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/910/ysp-womenslib.html ]    

I. SDS and Women’s Liberation

SDS needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women’s liberation. No other radical youth group has yet undertaken this task. The YSA substitutes enthusiastic tail-ending for program; the ISC in their Statement of Principles patronizingly caters to the separatist mood by telling women that socialist revolution won’t solve their problems automatically—as if other sorts of oppression would disappear without the intervention of consciousness!

The existing women’s liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic “class division” in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However, we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only form of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.

The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exist as well —e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women’s oppression. To deny that Marxist revolutionaries must concern themselves with these issues is sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist. It is vital that revolutionaries participate in these struggles. The basis of such participation must be the realization that the class question is decisive and thus any movement which fails to identify itself with the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is doomed to be beset by utopianism, crackpotism, liberal illusions and—ultimately—irrelevance.

The SDS resolution (which was sponsored by the WSA caucus and opposed by us) passed by our June convention (after the walk-out of the RYM [Revolutionary Youth Movement] splitters) did not provide a correct analysis or program. This failure was primarily due to an anti-historical, unMarxist method which resulted in an entirely incorrect position on the family.

II. Oppression and the Family

The June WSA resolution included the following statement: “The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class.”

This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the family in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false consciousness in the working class.

As a pro-working-class student organization, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property-owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hence, the institution of marriage emerges.

Following the method of Engels, examining the oppression of women in class society and the nature of class society itself, we must seek its roots in the primitive division of labor, which resulted in the social division of man and woman, placing the latter in a subordinate position, as class society was born. Subsequently the class divisions transcended the sexual division, and class became the dominant reality of society. To put it another way, Mrs. Rockefeller and her maid both suffer in varying degree from the pervasive oppression of females and have some issues in common, but the maid has more in common with her own husband than with Mrs. Rockefeller.

Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferiority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be “under-achievers”; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal “self-liberation” but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family. As communist revolutionaries, further, these women will lead incomparably richer lives. They will come to understand their own oppression and the origins, the nature and the future of the family. As stated by Engels:

“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other.

“For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, inheritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting…. The position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike whether or not they are, in bourgeois legal jargon, legitimate.”

This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses’ press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic unit with voluntary forms better suited to people’s physical and emotional needs. Since the institution of the family is an integral part of the capitalist system, the struggle for women’s liberation is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.

III. The Family and the Class

The WSA resolution states: “With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labor force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism.

To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans. To quote Marx in Capital:

“The value of labor power was determined not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of the family into the labor market, spreads the value of man’s labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor power.”

Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by the early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.

The bourgeoisie of this period actually devised ideological apologia for female and child labor (see Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class, Chapter 2, “The Working Class Emerges”). The limitation of female and child labor (by, e.g., the Factory Acts in Britain) represented concessions wrested by the working class from capital. The progressive withdrawal of this super-exploited labor from the factory system compelled the capitalists to employ machinery in their stead if they wished to remain in business.

The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possibility of founding the relationship between the sexes on a new economic basis. But, the spontaneous way this employment developed with the rise of capital was, to quote Marx, “a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery” which the advanced sections of the working class fought. The kernel of this contradiction is that under capitalism the family remains—because there is no other socio-economic institution to replace it.

An Institution of Indoctrination

The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumulated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome. For this reason the bourgeoisie learned to pay public obeisance to the ideals of religion and the family whether they personally believed in them or not. When economically necessary, the capitalist class will tolerate and even encourage female and child labor—but without allowing the development of institutions to replace the family. The working woman is not really freed from her role as household slave by obtaining work outside the home; she merely has one responsibility added to another.

Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed—by capitalism, the family as an institutionwas not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and the churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. “The family that prays together stays together”: both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.

Functions of the Family

Women and children left the process of production, not chiefly because the capitalists feared for the nuclear family and forced them out but in large part because under capitalism no substitute for the family is available. The domestic labor performed by the housewife has no exchange value, and the family is socially necessary to maintain the working class. The necessity of the bourgeoisie to concentrate and transfer its wealth via inheritance makes the family an ideological necessity for capitalism. Also, the struggle by the working class to limit the exploitation of women and children necessarily caused production to become more capital-intensive, hence ultimately raising the standard of living of the entire working class while in the long run diminishing the amount of labor needed in production.

In the present period, a period of capitalism in decay, there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Women, because of the domestic role they of necessity (under capitalism) must more or less fulfill, are on the fringes of the reserve army of the working class. When they are needed in production (such as World War II) the capitalists have no compunctions about the sanctity of hearth and home, and will gladly hire them to do “men’s” work and will just as gladly drop them from production when they are no longer needed. (An unemployed male ex-soldiery would be a far greater threat to the bourgeois order than the more docile women unemployed workers.)

The hollow satisfactions of male supremacy within the home oppress both the men and the women and encourage false consciousness (male chauvinism). By way of comparison, segregation is similarly a tool of oppression (the hollow satisfactions of white supremacy in the U.S. encourage whites to oppress blacks) and false consciousness (racism). The working man learns to direct his anger and frustrations against his wife, rather than against the bosses. He is told that he is the boss in his own home (“a man’s home is his castle”). Thus, the family as an economic and social institution is a shackle on the consciousness of the men workers as well as that of women.

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers’ states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.

For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers’ state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers’ democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap Forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.

The survival of most features of bourgeois family life within the non-capitalist world simultaneously reveals something about both the family and the nature of these societies. The bourgeois family is still the family, similar in decisive respects to the family in non-capitalist but not classless (e.g., feudal and slave) societies. The family unit represents a division of social labor far older than capitalism, dating back to the first “class” division of labor, that between man and woman. As such, the family will require more than the abolition of capitalism (in and of itself) before it is superseded entirely by a freer system of relations between men and women, parents and children. Needless to say, the overthrow of the capitalists and their state by the regime of workers’ power is absolutely essential to the liberation of individuals from the narrowness, authoritarianism and sexual inequality inherent in family life. But we should recognize that this task will not be fully accomplished until the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historic mission: until class distinctions and their vestiges have been eradicated from society, i.e., mankind has reached the stage of classless society, communism. The same holds true for other features of class societies in general—aspects not simply peculiar to capitalism, such as the need for a state power over society, the existence of a certain amount of religious superstition, what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life,” etc.

No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers’ states, however, is the fact that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin’s time never glorified the family as an instrument—real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Russian economy and culture permitted, they passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family. All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the Soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abortion, enhanced parental authority, and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism! For reasons which Stalinists find difficult to explain, the Soviet Great Leap Backward in policy regarding women and the family was led by the same parasitic gang who murdered the Old Bolsheviks of all viewpoints, throttled the Spanish revolution and let Hitler take power without firing a shot. Just as Stalin was willing to use Great Russian chauvinism against national minorities, praise the Orthodox Church and foster anti-Semitism, so he found that the backward Russian family created a base for his bureaucratic and authoritarian aims. Even where private property no longer exists, the institution of the family serves—at best—to hinder the development of a socialist society. At worst it provides a base of support in the culture for the parasitic bureaucrats who barter away the gains of the revolution. SDS cannot wish away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it “a unit for fighting the ruling class.” Reactionary institutions serve reactionary ends.

IV. The Working Woman

The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able to use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers—that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, “a woman’s place is in the home,” “a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to.”

The assumption is that the woman’s main role is that of the tender mother; hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed “unnatural” or “unfit.” The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.

Women make up one third of the American labor force, but the wages of the full-time working woman average only 60% of those of the average male working full-time. The non-white working woman, suffering under a double load of exploitation and oppression, must indeed be the most victimized category in American capitalist society. In itself, the lower average income of women workers roughly indicates the degree of their oppression, not their super-exploitation relative to working men. (They might—and do—take home less money because they are concentrated in less productive jobs.) But women, even more than other oppressed groups such as Black male workers, frequently receive less for work identical to that performed by more highly paid men. In addition to suffering oppression and discrimination, working women are super-exploited in the literal and technical sense of the term.

Militancy or Passivity?

In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.

Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn’t “ladylike” or “feminine” to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and must be fought. Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women’s oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women’s liberation has an important role to play in the struggles of the working class. Further, situations sometimes arise where the women—because they are more oppressed by poor working conditions, low wages and speed-up—are more militant than the men. Women are not pale, fragile, helpless creatures; as workers engaged in industrial production, they can wield workers’ power!

V. Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement

The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply imbedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinism as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognize also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women’s liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debate in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.

Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the fact that women’s male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement. Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organization which they believe is indifferent to women’s oppression. It is a fact that a good number of the ersatz, crackpot and separatist tendencies in the existing women’s liberation groups are a reaction to the male chauvinism in the student movement. These groups blur over class lines and stress “individual liberation” and other utopian schemes.

Many of the women who do enter radical politics tend to play supportive roles and are not encouraged to develop politically or exercise leadership. SDS must rid itself of male chauvinism and utilize the full talents of all its members.

VI. SDS and Special Groups

It is not enough to fight individual aspects of women’s oppression within the labor movement and in SDS. Separate women’s liberation groups offer an opportunity to tie together all aspects of women’s oppression in the minds of their members, and hence to suggest a single solution—which is socialism. As Marxists, we recognize that special oppression calls for special defensive and combative organizations of the oppressed. For this reason, SDS should give critical support (determined by program) to Black groups which fight the special oppression of Black people; similarly SDS should support women’s groups which fight on the basis of a Marxist program for the special needs of women.

Armed with a more developed political and economic analysis of society, SDS members should be able to win the more serious groups away from petty-bourgeois amateur therapy sessions, liberalism, female separatism and vicarious anti-male terrorism, to a working-class perspective. Women’s liberation groups are a good arena for winning militant women over to SDS and to socialism.

VII. Program for Women’s Liberation

When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women’s liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political sophistication.

We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands:

For the abolition of family restrictions:

1. Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.

2. Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.

3. Freely available birth control devices and information.

4. Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state. Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.

5. Establishment of free voluntary cafeterias in the factories and other places of work.

6. Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.

7. Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.

To fight the super-exploitation of women workers:

8. Full and equal pay for equal work.

9. Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay (“30 for 40”) to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists’ expense.

To fight male chauvinism:

10. An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.

SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women’s liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally-oriented women’s liberation publication.

Racial Oppression & Working Class Politics

Racial Oppression & Working Class Politics

  

[Revolutionary Marxist Caucus position paper presented at the December 1969 PL-SDS Conference. Originally posted online at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/897/ysp-rmc.html ]

It hardly needs saying that increasing black-white conflict is the dominant feature of the current American political scene. The polarization of U.S. society along racial lines has been reflected even within the left, which has become increasingly split between supporters of Black Nationalism and advocates of an oversimplified pro-working-class line, indifferent and sometimes hostile to the Black liberation movement. One effect of the increasing black-white hostility is that any struggle involving Black people is viewed as the same struggle. Everything, from demands for Black Studies departments to integrating the building trades, is seen as part of a larger Black liberation movement, and attitudes toward each particular struggle are determined by general theoretical outlook.

The position of this paper is that Marxists must aggressively fight against the oppression of the Black masses while rejecting Black Nationalist pseudo-solutions. This must be done in ways that are compatible with the over-all goals of socialism. This means making clear and careful distinctions between different demands and struggles of the Black movement and different facets of the race question generally. Our guiding concern must be to link up a pro-working-class political line with demands aimed at fighting the pervasive double oppression of Black workers.

Racism and Racial Oppression

One result of the ghetto uprisings in Watts, Detroit, Newark and elsewhere was that it was no longer possible to deny that Black people were deeply hostile to the state of American society. The liberals argued (e.g., in the Kerner Report) that the oppression of Black people was a result of the racism of the white population, rather than locating the source of oppression and hostility in the working of the economic system and the policies of the ruling class and deliberately obscuring the fact that some whites have qualitatively more social power than others. To blame the oppressed condition of Black people on pervasive racist attitudes is a variant of the classic reactionary argument that social ills stem from a flawed human nature. By placing the blame for racial oppression on the white population en masse, the liberal wing of the ruling class not only deny their own responsibility, but even pose as champions of the Black people against the ignorant and bigoted white workers. In some cases, blaming racist attitudes begs the question. Many liberal capitalist bosses do not believe any of the myths of racial inferiority, yet deliberately pursue oppressive policies aimed at dividing workers along ethnic lines.

The widespread acceptance on the left of the liberal myth that the oppression of Black people results from the racism of the white lower classes has been totally destructive of the left. Its most extreme exponents are, of course, the Weathermen, who regard the white working class as hopelessly corrupted by racism, and, therefore, “the enemy.” However, even those who realize that racism is against the long-term interests of white workers, such as the Worker-Student Alliance caucus, see changing racial attitudes as the key to the problem.

It is essential to make a distinction between those actively responsible for racial oppression and the masses, who passively accept it. An analogy of the relation between national chauvinism and imperialism is useful here. National chauvinism is rampant in the U.S.—look at the recent proliferation of American flag decals. Yet, no one would contend that U.S. counter-revolutionary policy in Viet Nam is the result of the nationalist attitudes of the American workers! National chauvinism helps sustain U.S. imperialism, but is not the cause of it. In a like manner, the racist attitudes of the white working class help sustain the oppression and economic degradation of the Black masses, but do not cause it.

Most white workers are neither active racists nor thorough-going integrationists. Rather, their attitude toward Black people is contradictory and differs according to the context. Many white workers will treat Black workers on the job as equals. Many believe Blacks should have equal rights, yet maintain racist attitudes on social and sexual questions. (A white worker might vote for a Black as union official, yet, as the saying goes, wouldn’t let his daughter marry him.) In general, there are many more white workers who will support the political and economic rights of Blacks and unite with them in struggle than there are who are really free of race prejudice. In addition, the level of racism is affected by the level of class struggle. Involvement in a militant strike action, for example, often combats backward consciousness on many levels.

The Southern Populist movement of the 1890s was the highest point of class struggle reached in the post-Reconstruction South. It not only united poor white and Black farmers around their shared economic interests, it also aggressively fought for the political rights of Black people. Yet, in deference to the white supremacist attitudes of most Southern farmers, the leaders of the Populist movement stressed that they were not in favor of social integration. Thus, by today’s standards, the Populist movement would be considered racist, although it aggressively fought for the political rights of Blacks. Certainly we should make no concessions to racism. But this example shows that fighting racism and fighting racial oppression are not identical.

For a Materialist Approach

The practical conclusion to be drawn from making this distinction between racism and racial oppression is that SDS is more likely to gain the support of white workers if we oppose concrete acts of racial oppression in the name of democratic rights and class solidarity, than if we rant about “fighting racism” as a social attitude (which has a moralistic tone to it—like fighting sin). Again, an analogy with the fight against imperialism is useful. In fighting American imperialism, we make specific demands, such as the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Viet Nam and all other countries. We do not approach this struggle mainly by calling moralistically on the American working class to give up its national chauvinism and solidarize with the international proletariat. To be sure, the demand for immediate withdrawal from Viet Nam implies an attack on patriotic attitudes, just as the demand to integrate a union implies an attack on racist attitudes. But we attack these attitudes at their weakest point, where they come into conflict with other powerful social attitudes.

There is an important tactical reason for using the terminology of fighting racial oppression rather than fighting racism. To announce that we are fighting racism within the working class implies that the rank and file white worker is the target of our hostility. To say we are opposing the double oppression of Black workers puts the responsibility where it belongs—on the capitalists and trade union bureaucrats. Rather than saying we expect the mass of white workers to oppose us, we are calling on white workers, as potential comrades, to fight the oppressors of Black people, who are the oppressors of white workers as well.

Black Rights and Economic Insecurity

Within SDS, the Labor Committee is considered the main exponent of the view that the widespread hostility of white workers to the Black liberation movement stems from a belief that Black equality will be achieved at their economic expense. So far as this view goes it is substantially correct. However, the Labor Committee has drawn a fundamentally wrong conclusion which leads to de facto tolerance for most forms of racial discrimination—namely that equality for Blacks be made conditional on whites not suffering any loss.

Given the insecurity of white workers, it is necessary to combine demands for equal opportunity for Blacks with demands aimed at assuring white workers that the benefits accruing to Blacks will not come at their expense. Thus, in demanding that more Black workers be admitted into skilled jobs, we should also raise demands (such as a shorter work week with no loss in pay) aimed at expanding total employment. However, an end to discrimination should not be made conditional to these broader demands being realized.

Under normal conditions, demands aimed at improving the condition of the working class as a whole are less within the power of the presently constituted labor movement than demands for the upgrading of one section of the class. Socialists have traditionally contended—and rightly—that permanent full employment and a continuously rising standard of living are not possible under capitalism. We can and must raise demands which take the level of consciousness outside the framework of capitalism—transitional demands which workers will accept as necessary but which cannot be achieved under this social system. But it would be a cruel joke on the legitimate aspirations of Black workers involved in struggle for socialists to make struggling for their rights conditional on the acceptance of other demands. If the attack on the economic oppression of Black people is to be postponed until the eradication of economic insecurity on the part of whites, racial oppression would continue to exist until several decades after the victory of the socialist revolution.

Labor Committee Default

In practice, the Labor Committee’s politics have meant toleration of racial oppression while posing ultimatistic solutions to the problem of the limited resources available to the working class under capitalism. A good example of this is the Labor Committee’s opposition to the so-called CCNY solution. After considerable agitation by Blacks, the City University system officials agreed to replace the existing admissions selection—based on academic qualifications—with an ethnic quota system increasing Black admissions. (The city government later rejected the agreement.) The Labor Committee argued that this was no solution to the problem and, correctly, called for open admissions for all working people. So far, so good. However, instead of critically supporting the CCNY solution against the present system, which is both class and race biased, while continuing to agitate for open admissions, the Labor Committee supported the status quo in effect, until the advent of free universal higher education. In other words, according to them the whites might as well have the lion’s share of social services until these services become unlimited.

The Labor Committee’s empathy for white workers worried about losing their jobs to Black militants causes them to blur an important distinction. It is the distinction between firing a white worker to replace him with a Black and eliminating discrimination in hiring. We should almost always oppose firing a white worker to replace him with a Black. On the other hand, we should always oppose discrimination in hiring even if this means (as it will in the building trades) that a larger percentage of the white labor force would be unemployed. The former would exacerbate racial antagonisms; the latter would tend to unite the working class in the fight against unemployment. The underlying principle is that Black workers should be treated as equals. We wouldn’t expect any employed worker to give up his job to an unemployed worker regardless of color. In a like manner, an unemployed Black worker should have the same chance to find a job as a white worker, and vice versa.

If the Labor Committee’s principle that the economic oppression of Blacks can be opposed only provided there is no re-distribution of income against whites is accepted, Blacks are slated to remain on the bottom of American society until socialism. If the desires of white workers must be substantially met before attacking the problem of racial discrimination, the benefits accruing to the Blacks will lag behind those of the class as a whole. In the Labor Committee schema, Blacks are given the role of residual claimants on the social and economic gains of the working class.

Black Rights as Class Demands

The Labor Committee’s belief that racism is simply a result of economic insecurity and will disappear when that insecurity is alleviated is as naive and wrong as the Weathermen’s view of racism as the radical equivalent of original sin. The Machinists and Shipbuilders unions attempted to maintain their white-only policies in shipyards and aircraft plants even in the middle of the World War II employment boom! On the other hand, some unions were established on an integrated basis during the Depression. The widespread racial oppression in the labor movement isn’t going to be eliminated without a political fight in the trade unions. Economic prosperity makes that fight easier to win. It doesn’t make it any less necessary.

The Labor Committee’s propaganda presents the economic effects of racial equality as only negative—namely, that such gains come only at the expense of white workers. It appears the Labor Committee has taken the arguments of racist demagogues too much at face value or that, for all their pretensions to expertise, they know very little about the economic facts of life. The upgrading of Black workers provides a higher floor for general wages and strengthens the competitive position of all workers. From the integration of the Mine Workers in the 1890s, the main factor bringing Black workers into the trade unions has been a desire to eliminate cheap, non-union labor, not moralism. One doesn’t have to be very sophisticated to see the connection between the systematic terrorization of the Black population and the maintenance of the South as a bastion of anti-unionism, low wages, and the runaway shop. If the indirect benefits of Black equality are not as obvious to white workers as the direct losses, part of our job is to make them obvious. Socialists have a responsibility to refute the lies of racist demagogues like [Alabama governor George] Wallace, that Black liberation means white workers will lose “their jobs, their money, and their women.” SDS should present the economic case for combatting racial oppression in the most attractive manner possible.

Black Liberation and Upward Mobility

An important aspect of the oppression of Blacks is the small size of the Black middle class. Not only are Black workers concentrated in lowest paid jobs, but there is a relatively small percentage of Black professionals, administrators and businessmen. Moreover, much of the Black middle class is restricted to the Black communities rather than being integrated into American corporate society.

Given the petty-bourgeois leadership of the Black movement, it is not surprising that many demands of that movement are aimed at increasing the upward mobility of the Black population. In its reaction against bourgeois aspirations in the Black movement, the WSA has made a major error—namely, it has refused to oppose those aspects of racial oppression expressly designed to keep Blacks out of the middle class. It is correct and necessary to denounce expanding the “Black bourgeoisie” as the solution to the problems of the Black masses. However, the WSA has taken the further step of refusing to fight discrimination against Blacks for middle-class positions. (Their position recalls a section of the French Marxists who thought they should be indifferent to the Dreyfus Case of anti-Semitism in the French officer corps. This sectarian disorientation actually facilitated their later collapse into opportunism.) The petty-bourgeois “hustlerist” aspect of the Black movement must be defeated politically, by being rejected by the Black masses. It will not and should not be defeated by erstwhile revolutionaries making a de facto alliance with the most reactionary sections of the ruling class to keep Blacks out of middle-class positions.

There is a parallel between the Labor Committee’s reaction to white workers’ fear of economic integration and the WSA’s approach to bourgeois goals in the Black movement. Both begin with correct premises, but reach conclusions which mean tolerance for certain forms of racial oppression. Thus, the Labor Committee opposes the CCNY solution because they don’t want educational resources redistributed against the white population, while the WSA opposes it because they don’t want more black B.A.s. Of the two positions, the Labor Committee’s is worse because it leads to acceptance of the worst forms of economic exploitation. However, the WSA’s position is also fundamentally sectarian.

The Worse the Better?

The principle of not opposing racial discrimination to the extent equality would strengthen the upward mobility of the Black population is impossible to implement. This is so because any improvement in the condition of the Black masses provides a basis for upward mobility. If the quality of ghetto primary school education is improved, for example, Black youth will be better able to compete for college admission. If Black workers have access to better-paying jobs, more of them will send their children to college.

The WSA’s position on this question is also incorrect at a higher theoretical level. Socialists have usually contended that racial oppression is inherent in capitalist society. The WSA, however, seems to be afraid that the ruling class is going to seriously ameliorate the oppression of Blacks. The whole line of argument has a “the worse, the better” flavor to it—Blacks should be kept down so they’ll be more revolutionary. It is similar to the position one usually associates with the Socialist Labor Party—opposition to reforms for fear that they may work! Coming from people who consider themselves orthodox Leninists, this faith in the ability of reformism to dampen class struggle and change class structure is as surprising as it is false, to say the least.

Moreover, from the standpoint of proletarian socialists, the expansion of the Black middle class would not be an unmitigated disaster. To the extent that the social structure of the Black population resembles that of the white population, class rather than race consciousness will be strengthened among both Black and white workers. The split between those Black Nationalists who consider themselves revolutionary and the “pork chop” Nationalists occurred precisely because the government was successful in co-opting large sections of the Black liberation movement. A Black worker who slaves for a few years under a Black boss is much more likely to see class, not race, as the fundamental division in American society.

The converse is also true. A white worker striking with fellow Black workers against a company which had a significant percentage of Black executive and managerial personnel would develop a more class-conscious attitude toward the Black population. It is precisely the overwhelming concentration of the Black population at the lowest social levels that tends to cause white workers to view Blacks with feelings of fear and contempt. The integration of sections of the ruling class would be paralleled by increased Black-white unity in the working class.

Trade Unions and the State

One of the most difficult problems facing American radicals is the widespread racial discrimination in the trade unions. In dealing with this problem, there is considerable social pressure, particularly on a campus-based group, to follow the lead of the liberals and use government action against discriminatory unions. Thus, most of the California left, including the Independent Socialist Clubs (now called International Socialists [predecessor of the International Socialist Organization]), supported a suit against Harry Bridges’ International Longshore and Warehouse Union under the Civil Rights Act. Likewise, there has been no significant left-wing opposition to the Nixon Administration’s “Philadelphia Plan” for the construction industry [aimed at breaking union hiring halls by setting quotas for minority hiring].

That liberals should look to the state to enforce equal rights in the labor movement is understandable. The fundamental principle of liberalism (and all other forms of capitalist political philosophy) is the supreme authority of the state over all other social institutions. However, Marxists consider the state an instrument of class oppression and regard the labor movement as the legitimate source of all social authority. In calling upon the state to integrate the unions, radicals are calling upon the capitalists to fight their battles for them, in a movement radicals eventually intend (or should intend) to lead against that very state. This is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled. Any increase in state control over the unions, regardless of the ostensible reason, must strengthen capitalism politically and ideologically.

A section of the ruling class realizes that the civil rights issue is an effective way to weaken the unions by turning Black people and middle-class liberals against them. Thus, a recent issue of Fortune magazine—an authoritative organ of the liberal bourgeoisie—contained an attack on the monopolistic abuses of the building trades unions. It concluded with a ten-point program, addressed to construction companies, on how to break the power of the unions. One of the ten points was union de-certification for failing to comply with the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

As the above example shows, ruling-class efforts to control the unions in the name of “public good” are usually a cover for union busting. The Nixon Administration is openly wooing Southern racists and doesn’t even pay lip service to civil rights. The only area of American society where Nixon is pushing civil rights is where unions are the target. This indicates that the motives behind the “Philadelphia Plan” are neither concern for the welfare of Black workers nor response to pressure from below. Rather, the only purpose is to discredit and weaken the labor movement.

When the ruling class seeks to weaken the power of the unions, they do not openly state they’re out to gouge the working class. They look for an attractive-sounding pretext. We are all against organized crime and for internal democracy in the unions. But the Landrum-Griffin Act hasn’t reduced gangsterism in the labor movement. Its principal effect has been to railroad Jimmy Hoffa, a tough and troublesome business unionist. And these laws would be used faster and harder against a communist union leadership than they will ever be used against the Mafia!

Permitting the government to determine the racial policies of unions gives the state a powerful weapon for union busting and influencing the selection of union leadership. And this weapon will not be used in the best interest of the working class. Whatever doubtful immediate gains Black workers get by the government opening up some jobs for them will be more than offset by the losses sustained by the entire working class due to the long-run effects of expanding state control over the labor movement. The only force on which we can rely is an organized, militant, class-conscious rank and file defending the gains of their unions against the bosses, the bureaucrats and the state.

Resolutions

I. In its propaganda and actions, SDS must concentrate on fighting concrete acts and practices of racial oppression, rather than simply opposing racism as a pervasive social attitude.

II. It may at times be necessary to support gains against Black oppression even if they imply short-term economic losses for sections of the white working class. However, our basic propagandistic thrust must be to keep gains for Blacks from being counterposed to white workers’ interests by raising the appropriate demands, and to seek to unite Black and white workers in common struggles.

III. SDS must oppose all forms of racial inequality, including those that are specifically designed to limit the upward mobility of the Black population.

IV. Under all circumstances SDS must oppose the expansion of state control over the labor movement, even when this is done in the name of the rank and file (e.g., fighting corruption, securing racial justice).

Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom

BLACK AND RED

Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom

–General line unanimously adopted and Editorial Commission appointed by Spartacist League/US Founding Conference, 4 September 1966.

–Report of Negro Commission on revisions accepted by Political Bureau, 27 March 1967.

–First published in Spartacist, Special Supplement, May-June 1967

I. Introduction

The struggle of the Negro people for freedom and equality has been the most dynamic struggle going on in the United States in the past ten years. It has taken place in the context of, and has been conditioned by, the general passivity of the organized labor movement. The militancy of the Negro people and the tempo of their struggle increased enormously in the fifties and early sixties, but the achievements have been minimal–limited entirely to token advancement of democratic rights. In fact, the fundamental conditions of life for the vast majority of Black people, particularly in the key areas of employment, wages, housing and education, have worsened. The Civil Rights movement, geared to the aspirations of the small Negro middle class, though professing to speak for all Negroes, has been stopped dead in its tracks in dealing with these fundamental needs, and in fact has functioned partly as a brake on the unorganized and leaderless pressures from below. In the absence of an alternative, revolutionary, leadership these pressures and frustrations explode from time to time in undirected, non-political outbursts that change nothing. Thus in the midst of dissipating militancy, disillusionment in struggle and seemingly vain aspirations among the black masses, the movement is at an impasse. A crisis of leadership is the essence of this impasse.

Economic Prospects

At present U.S. capitalism is attempting to maintain and increase its profits by placing the cost of the Viet Nam war on the working class.

The prolonged and extensive expansion of the productive capacity of the U.S. following upon the Second World War was conditioned by the massive destruction engendered by the imperialist slaughter, and by the world-wide demand for goods which resulted. The period of rapid capitalist development since the war has been marked by periodic mild recessions and interspersed by long periods of boom. Recently the curve of world capitalist development has begun to point downward. The rise in inventories, the drop in investments in capital goods production, and in industrial production, indicate that a world-wide economic downturn is at hand.

While economic indicators pointed to a downturn in 1966, the boom was prolonged another year by the political decision to escalate the aggressive war against Viet Nam. A decision by the U.S. ruling class for another massive escalation could again serve to postpone the downturn.

The upsurge of militant strike action testifies to the growing refusal of workers to submit to further erosion of their living standards by the inflationary pressures generated by the war on a booming economy, and to their readiness to fight for real gains. Black workers, bearing an even greater disproportionate share of the burden of the war, would be the most militant and ready for greater struggle.

On the other hand, if the war is ended or even continued at the present level of war spending, the economic downturn would prevail. While the black workers would be hit hardest by the ensuing unemployment, lay-offs would also rapidly accelerate among white workers. Again, this poses the perspective of a unity in struggle of black and white workers, and a leap in the level of consciousness of basic sectors of the working class.

Black Workers and Imperialism

Thus the struggle for Negro freedom takes place not only within the national arena, but within an international context. U.S. capitalism, which doubly exploits black workers, is the cornerstone of world imperialism. The abandonment of a perspective which looks to the working class to lead the struggle for the liberation of mankind from oppression is the hallmark of all revisionism. The Pabloist concept that the epicenter of world revolution has shifted to the colonial countries, the Maoist concept that backward countries will encircle and conquer the industrial countries, and the black nationalist concept that the Negro people are essentially part of the movement of African nationalism and will be liberated by the industrially backward countries are all revisionist concepts.

The bankruptcy of revisionism has become apparent with the smashing of the so-called “Third World,” “Socialist” regimes and the tragic massacres of the masses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The definitive victory of the world revolution will only be secured by a victory of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries. The U.S. working class now has “the most revolutionary of all revolutionary tasks,” the destruction of the bastion of world imperialism, the U.S. capitalist system. To the extent that the black workers, the most militant in the U.S. working class, become infused with a revolutionary socialist perspective, and thereby become able to provide leadership to the class as a whole, they play a vital role in the success of the world revolution.

II. Integration Or Separation?

From their arrival in this country, the Negro people have been an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. As chattel slaves they were the labor force on which the Southern planter aristocracy maintained its economic and political dominance until the Civil War. Various factors–the variety of African origins, the deliberate dispersal of slaves with common tribal backgrounds, the fact that most slaves brought from Africa were male–facilitated the total destruction of African languages, social institutions and cultural memories among the slaves and allowed the imposition of a new language and new habits to fit the needs of the economic system into which they were being integrated. In particular, an eclectic Christianity was early instilled to teach the slave to meekly accept his position.

Escape from slavery, not return to Africa, was the goal of Negro efforts toward freedom during the pre-Civil War period. In the Civil War itself, when the political needs of the vigorous and growing capitalist class in the North came into fundamental conflict with the continued political dominance of the Southern planters, freed slaves played an important part in the victory of the progressive forces and destruction of the slave system.

Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the suppression of the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common interests. In fact, it was the Negroes themselves who, within the protective framework provided by the Reconstruction Acts and the military dictatorship of the occupying Union army, carried through the social revolution and destruction of the old planter class. However, the Compromise of 1877 and the formation of a powerful new bloc of Northern industrial capital and subordinate Southern Bourbons allowed the majority of ex-slaves to be forced back onto the land as tenant farmers or share-croppers.

Southern Populism

Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of the ex-slaves were able to acquire their own small farms. The white small farmers, who had also been “freed” by the destruction of the slave system, were driven in some cases to join hands with their black counterparts in the defense of their common interests against the new plantation masters. Yet this tentative union–the Southern Populist Movement–was doomed to failure. The small-farmer class itself could not be a real contender for political power in a capitalist society, while the dynamics of private farming inevitably brought about sharp competition among the farmers. This competition was exploited by the new political alliance of big planters, Southern capitalists and certain Northern financial interests, in particular, investors in Southern railroads, land, mining and timber. This bloc initiated a campaign of violent race hatred among their political opponents which succeeded in destroying the developing black-white unity. In the context of the new racism the Black people were disenfranchised, stripped of all legal rights, and permanently denied access to adequate education. Those setbacks were codified into a series of laws institutionalizing the rigid segregation which has been the dominant feature of the South ever since. It was the racism launched during this period which has since kept wages in the South at approximately half those of the rest of the country (and wages of Negroes at half those of whites in the country as a whole), prevented effective union organization and perpetuated a crushing poverty on the land for black and white alike, though today the Southern economy has come entirely under the control of Northern capital.

By the First World War 90 per cent of all Negroes still lived in the South, though by this time nearly one million had made their way from the land into hundreds of Southern towns. Then, with the great expansion of demand for unskilled labor unleashed by the War, a vast migration of black workers into the North took place, and for the first time a sizeable portion of Black people became integrated into the mainstream of American capitalist society. This integration did not last. With the 1921 recession the new workers found themselves forced out of their jobs. This, along with the extremely harsh conditions of Northern ghetto life–instead of the “Promised Land” which many had expected–caused thousands in despair and frustration to turn to the “Garvey Movement” built on the thesis that the Negro would never receive justice in the white man’s land and calling for a separatist solution. This first important mass movement with nationalist aims folded later in the ’20s due to internal contradictions, the imprisonment of its leader and the recovery in Negro employment in the boom years following the post-war depression. Far more significant during this decade in terms of American social reality was the successful organization of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

During the ’30s once again black workers were forced out of the economy in large numbers–but this time not alone. Radical ideologies and the gains of mass struggle made a deep impact among workers of both races. The organization of the CIO–the culmination of the upsurge in labor struggle–was a joint venture and bound large numbers of the less skilled and unprotected black workers to the most advanced section of the proletariat. Yet the betrayals of the Communist Party during the war years helped wipe out Negro gains and served to discredit all radical movements, even though a significant number of Negro workers came into the Socialist Workers Party at this time. The subordination of the CIO to the bourgeois Democratic Party and Cold War ideology, its affiliation with the conservative AFL and its failure in the context of unexampled prosperity and labor passivity to come to the defense of the Negro freedom struggle have caused black militants to lose confidence in the organized labor movement or in the perspective of common struggle in the future. The SWP’s failure to take a clear position on integration vs. separation contributed to its loss of hundreds of black workers and of the opportunity to forge a significant black Trotskyist cadre.

But the objective basis for future common struggle of black and white workers not only exists but, unlike the Populist Movement of black and white farmers, holds the promise of success, while struggle along nationalist lines is a delusion and an impossibility. The vast majority of Black people–both North and South–are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life to those who buy labor power in order to make profit. The buyers of labor power, the capitalists, are a small minority whose rule is maintained only by keeping the majority who labor for them divided and misled. The fundamental division created deliberately along racial lines has kept the Negro workers who entered American capitalism at the bottom, still at the bottom. Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.

Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.

“Pseudo-Nationalism”

Black nationalism accepts present American class society and working-class divisions as unchanging and unchangeable, and from this static vantage point separation is seen as the only solution. Yet this solution is unrealizable in terms of the realities of American class society. True nationalism is, in essence, the struggle to establish an independent area for the development of a separate political economy. Historically it has come at those times and in those places, usually within a common geographical area among those with a common language and cultural heritage, when an emerging capitalist class must free itself from the shackles of a decayed feudal economy or from external imperialism in order to develop freely, i.e., in order to exploit its “own” working class. But there is practically no black capitalist class in America. Instead, the so-called “Black Bourgeoisie” consists in reality of a small, weak, petty-bourgeoisie catering to service needs arising out of segregation, and of white collar workers–which latter are rapidly achieving a remarkable degree of integration into the white middle class, and thus have an identity of interests and outlook far removed from those of the majority of working-class Negroes.

The present mood among black ghetto youth, “nationalism,” could more correctly be termed “pseudo-nationalism” since the conditions fostering genuine nationalist sentiment do not exist. This mood arises from growing racial self-confidence and pride–a positive development as it is a precondition for real combativeness–coupled with bitterness at the failure of the struggle to gain significant results without support from the rest of the working class. It develops in the context of a generally correct criticism of the middle-class oriented Civil Rights leadership while an alternate, proletarian leadership has not yet been created. The dominant feature of this pseudo-nationalism, like all variants of black nationalism, is its inability to generate a program of struggle–a further proof of its spurious nature. Such “nationalism” is divisive and interferes with the development of class consciousness and a program to sharpen class struggle.

Thus the Negro struggle in America is more directly related to the class struggle than any essentially national question could be. The falling rate of profit makes it impossible for the ruling class, even during a spurt of unequalled prosperity, to meet the demands of this super-exploited layer for improvements in the basic conditions of their lives. Hence any steps forward in this struggle immediately pose the class question and the need for class struggle in its sharpest form.

III. Broad Tasks

  

Transitional Organization

The necessity for mass organizations of strata of working people with special needs and problems was recognized by the Leninist Comintern, which worked out the tactics of the relationship of such transitional organizations to the revolutionary party and to the class struggle as a whole. These organizations are a part of the revolutionary movement, and their struggles advance the overall class struggle. They are neither substitutes for nor opponents of the vanguard party of the entire class, but are linked to the vanguard party through their most conscious cadres. Examples of transitional organizations are militant women’s organizations, revolutionary youth leagues, and radical trade-union caucuses. Such a transitional organization is necessary for Negro workers at a time when large sections of the working class are saturated with race hatred.

With its program of transitional struggle around the felt needs of a section of the class, the organization mobilizes serious struggle by the largest possible number. Such an organization, while not itself “socialist,” leads those participating in its struggles to the realization that a fundamental overturn of the existing society is necessary.

In the Northern ghettoes a great organizational vacuum exists. The objective basis of the traditional middle-class organizations such as CORE and the NAACP is growing ever narrower as more and more of the Negro middle class is able to flee the ghetto. (For example, over the past decade, 40,000 employed Negroes moved from Harlem into other, more “desirable” parts of the city or suburbs, where their incomes were sufficient to break some of the barriers of segregation. The Harlem CORE chapter recently has had only a few active members who actually reside in Harlem!) As the objective basis of these groups narrows, they grow subjectively ever less related to the needs and interests of the black masses. This is reflected in the move towards an increasingly consistent position by the middle-class groups that since the basic problems are economic, government intervention–secured by pressures on or within the Democratic Party–must be the primary aim of the Civil Rights movement. In 1964-65 this took the guise of “Liberal Coalition” politics as expounded most articulately by Bayard Rustin, and the delivery of the black vote to Johnson. This year’s guise are the more militant-sounding slogans of “Black Power” and “independent political action” as interpreted by certain Northern Civil Rights leaders to mean black judges, black cops and black Democrats or, as regards “independent” political action, to mean a black voting bloc which will supposedly “swing” its vote to whichever capitalist party promises the most to Negroes. The ultimate meaning of the latter is to build support for Bobby Kennedy’s projected presidential candidacy. As the old Civil Rights movement becomes more and more subordinated to the political arm of the very forces responsible for the oppression of the Negro people, it will serve increasingly to function solely as a brake on real struggle and a diversion from revolutionary alternatives.

Oppose Federal Infiltration

Furthermore, these reformist organizations have already become so exposed in their ineffectiveness, even in gaining token reforms, that the government has found it necessary to create its own reformist organizations in order that some alternative to proletarian organization and program will exist. The millions of dollars poured into HARYOU-ACT have succeeded in confusing or buying off a large number of potential youth leaders in Harlem through a combination of money and pseudo-radical nationalistic rhetoric. The so-called “anti-poverty” projects have also served to foster a certain amount of illusions among the ghetto masses. The witch hunt in Mobilization for Youth when some idealistic young people tried to use it as a vehicle for support to rent strikes, school boycotts and community actions against police brutality shows clearly the outcome of attempting to use government fronts as instruments of real struggle.

The vast black ghettoes of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and numerous other cities are wide open for the formation of a proletarian mass organization of struggle. Only the smallness of the black revolutionary cadre, together with the temporary aftermath of police terror during the “riots,” and in some cases sectarianism, have kept such organizations small. The Spartacist League will do all in its power to encourage and aid such organizations, and favors the unity in action of all working-class oriented organizations in the ghetto.

Ghetto Defense

For the last three summers ghettoes across the country have been rocked by elemental, spontaneous, non-political upheavals against the prevailing property relations and against the forces of the state which protect these relations. In no case have they been genuine race riots. The risings have usually been provoked by the police, in the course of “normal” brutalities (Watts 1965) or in an effort to crush a movement which is exceeding the bounds set for it by bourgeois society (Harlem 1964). As the struggle against the police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expanded and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give these outbursts political direction.

The Northern ghettoes will be organized only by revolutionary ghetto organizations. The beginning of such organization is possible now, while the form remains open. One form is the building of block and neighborhood councils based on tenants councils. Experience has shown that tenants councils must be introduced to the whole transitional program and tied to as broad an organizational base as possible if they are to achieve stability. Block and neighborhood councils of this sort would be able to speak for a whole area, put forward their demands, and call out the people in militant actions to back up those demands.

One of the most important functions of such representative popular organs would be the organization and direction of effective self-defense against police and racist violence. The potential for rapid growth by the American fascist movement adds to the seriousness of this task, given the sharp contradictions confronting U.S. capitalism in the next period. Ghetto action might take the form of block patrols of neighborhood men, preferably union members with past military training. The need for the immediate formation of such patrols is shown by the indiscriminate beatings and killings by police during the suppression of ghetto “riots.”

Such terror will be unleashed whenever the black people approach a breakthrough in changing the fundamental condition of their lives. Block patrols would also help prevent the day-to-day acts of terror against individual ghetto residents by racist cops and would serve to control the crime victimizing ghetto residents which the capitalist cops ignore or participate in. Such neighborhood patrols will become a part of that workers militia which will defend the future American proletarian revolution.

Independent Political Action

The struggle for black freedom demands the total break of the Negro people from the Democratic Party, the preferred political weapon of the forces which profit from the suppression and super-exploitation of the Negro people. The only alternative is a new party based on the needs of the poor and working people. The formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the South, initially with a mass base, indicated the potential and feeling which exist for independent political action. However, the MFDP, as its name indicated, was not independent but was simply a means whereby certain Southern and Northern civil rights leaders hoped to pursue their ambitions within the national Democratic Party at the expense of the interests of the Negro people. This situation has since been recognized by the most militant sections of the Southern movement, and the party has now lost its mass support.

The formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, was a step forward inasmuch as it was consciously organized in opposition to the Democratic Party. Based on the sharecroppers and farmers of a single rural blackbelt county, its program is by these very factors limited to reforms realizable within the system such as improved schools and roads, development of farmer cooperatives, and purchase of land for dispossessed sharecroppers. In order to go beyond these albeit needed reforms and pose a real challenge to the Southern system and the basic structure of society, the idea of independent political action must be extended to the cities and developed among workers. The perspective of the Black Panther Party for a federation of county-wide parties must be replaced by a perspective for a South-wide Freedom Labor Party.

Only by the development of a working-class program and by explicitly opening the door to support by white workers can real political independence be maintained, real gains won and the basis laid for eventual working-class political unity. This unity will come about when the exploited section of the white South is driven into opposition and is compelled to forego color prejudice in order to struggle along class lines against its real enemies–the owners of land and industry.

The creation of a South-wide Freedom Labor Party would serve as a tremendous impetus for similar action by Northern workers. The struggle for such a party would necessitate a rank-and-file revolt within the organized labor movement to overthrow the present labor bureaucracy. In the absence of a labor party, the Spartacist League supports all independent candidates whose programs are based on the needs of the ghettoes.

Negroes as Workers

In this period when primary attention has been focused on the ghetto, the importance of Negro militants within the organized labor movement must not be overlooked; black unionists form an immediate, existing, organizational link with the white section of the working class. Militant Negro and other super-exploited minority workers together with their labor partisans must organize within and without the existing unions in order to fight for their urgent needs. Union bureaucrats, with their public lip service to the Civil Rights movement, will be hard put to suppress “Civil Rights” caucuses within their unions or condemn Labor Civil Rights Committees as “dual unions.” Yet under conditions in which struggle reaches revolutionary heights, such committees would be precursors to factory committees. Should dual power be posed, these in turn would be vital elements in workers councils and, in victory, of workers power.

In addition to anti-discrimination demands, the “CR” caucuses should raise the following demands:

1. Organization of the Unorganized. At the same time this demand is raised, the black worker militants should themselves begin this organization.

2. Organization by the Unions of the Unemployed. Again, this demand should be accompanied by the actual organization of unemployed workers by the black worker militants. The aim is to create links between the ghetto and the labor movement and to counteract the lumpenization process proceeding apace in the ghettoes among the unemployed. Welfare recipients should be organized around a program calling for full employment and their organizations should be associated with welfare worker unions.

3. For a Sliding Scale of Wages Controlled by Labor. All workers are being hit hard by inflation caused by the war in Viet Nam. The bourgeoisie’s attempts to freeze wages to save profits must be countered by the demand that wages be scaled according to the purchasing power of the dollar, with the power of the sliding scale in the hands of workers’ committees, not bourgeois agencies.

4. Fight for the Shorter Work Week. The rate of Negro unemployment is twice that of white workers, and the gap is increasing. Yet white workers also face the threat of unemployment due to automation. The struggle for more jobs for all, rather than competition between black and white workers for a few jobs here or there, can unite workers. At the same time, the demand for a shorter work week poses racial equality in union hiring without making the white worker fear for his job.

5. Oppose Government Intervention. At all times we oppose using the Government to “integrate” unions, and rely solely on the working class for this task. Such ruling class tactics as decertification of discriminatory unions are intended to destroy union independence, foster division among union members and worsen the position of all workers.

For Negroes the fight for full employment at decent wages is not just the key to better housing, schools, etc., but a fundamental and necessary defense. If Black people are forced out of any economic role and become lumpenized as a group they will be in a position to be used as a scapegoat and could be totally wiped out during a future social crisis–just as the Jews in Germany were–without affecting the economy. The fight must be fought now to maintain Negroes as part of the working class.

The struggle for this program within the labor unions will entail a simultaneous fight for full union democracy and ultimately a struggle for leadership against the present labor lieutenants of capital. The most essential feature of this struggle will be the break of the labor movement from all its present ties to the capitalist state.

IV. The South

The Southern economy is today controlled entirely by Northern capital and is an integral and essential part of American capitalism. The contradictions of capitalism culminating in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall necessitate the maintenance of this vast area of low wage, non-unionized labor as a source of super-profits, and prohibit either any fundamental improvement in living standards for Southern workers whatever their color or any real change in the Southern political system of terror against Negroes. The problem of the South is more than merely one problem among many in the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism can oftentimes remove some problems through reforms in the system, always of course at the expense of exacerbating problems elsewhere. But the Southern system lies at the very heart of American capitalism; its essentials cannot be removed without destroying capitalism itself. Yet capitalism in the course of its own development has now created in the South a Negro proletariat larger than the rural Negro population and brought together black and white workers in the social process of production. Thereby the objective basis is laid by capitalism itself for a future revolutionary struggle against the inhuman Southern system.

Because only a direct anti-capitalist struggle can eradicate the Southern system, any struggle short of that must soon either turn against capitalism or else fall into a swamp of hopeless reformism and soul searching. Perhaps the most critical problem of the Southern Negro struggle has been its lack of revolutionary theory. Much energy and much blood have been sacrificed, but the gains have been few. The struggle has gone slowly as the movement has painstakingly groped its way along, hammering out by trial-and-error a program and method of struggle which is still in flux.

Without any theoretical weapons, the movement first struck out blindly but boldly at the most immediate signs of oppression–segregation in public transportation, eating places, educational institutions, etc. The basic demand was equality within the system, while the method of struggle was dominated by non-violence. This struggle reached its height in the early 1960’s with the sit-ins, Freedom rides, Old Miss confrontation, etc. A good deal of publicity was achieved, but the system was basically untouched. As if to indicate the reformist nature of the demands, the bourgeoisie adopted the entire Civil Rights program and called it the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But the civil rights movement was beginning to learn several important lessons. It was learning that one cannot merely make demands–one must have political power. What kind of political power was still to be learned. The emphasis was on registration of Negroes for the vote. Once again, though, the bourgeoisie adopted this basically reformist demand, this time calling it the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But the bourgeoisie in the era of imperialism is so decadent, so dependent upon reactionaries, that it can no longer extend even simple bourgeois democratic rights. At this point, then, the Southern civil rights movement was pushed outside the traditional two party system by the bourgeoisie itself. At the 1964 Democratic Party Convention where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tried to enter the regular Democratic Party, the bourgeoisie rejected this chance to absorb the Southern leadership and so pushed the leadership into its more militant phase.

Rise of the Black Power Movement

The Negro movement in the South has been confronted with two roads: reform vs. revolution, liberalism vs. communism. In recent years, through trial-and-error, the movement has seen the bankruptcy of traditional liberalism. The well-hated “white liberal” who dominated the earlier movement insisted on confining the movement within the system, for a real social overturn would threaten his class position. This attitude was held not only by the white liberals, but also by the petty-bourgeois Negro leaders like Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King.

The most militant section of the civil rights movement has sensed the inadequacy of traditional reformism, and its suspicions were empirically confirmed by the experience of the MFDP. This healthy though empirical reaction has its center in SNCC and the “black power” movement.

The adherents of “black power” are usually the most militant elements who have adopted the term partly because of its militant sound and partly because of its repugnance to white liberals. Thus the “black power” movement contains a number of radical points and methods which have caused the bourgeois press to shower vicious abuse on it. Some “black power” advocates profess to reject middle-class values and desire to serve “human” values; they generally favor independent political action such as the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County; they see the connection between the Negro struggle at home and anti-imperialist struggles abroad, as in SNCC’s recent statement on Viet Nam; and they discuss the use of armed self-defense against racist terror. In short, the “black power” movement is raising questions whose answers lie outside the framework set up by the capitalist class.

However, as yet the movement has not become consciously anti-capitalist. It has rejected what it knows as liberalism but is unsure of how to go further. Lacking a conscious orientation towards the working class, and constantly surrounded by bourgeois propaganda, the movement may yet fall prey to bourgeois politicians with radical phrases or else become hopelessly isolated and demoralized.

Another facet of the “black power” movement is the proposition that black militants should organize Black people and forget about whites for now, since most whites are racist, and that it’s a white man’s job to organize whites. But the achievement of Negro liberation depends on the radicalization of white workers, and every class-conscious white worker means a new ally for the Negro struggle. The lessons that black militants have gained through bitter struggle can best be transmitted to white workers by these militants making clear that their aim is to build an integrated anti-capitalist movement, North and South. This means that the slogan “black power” must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the “black power” movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South. The possibility of this is indicated by Stokely Carmichael’s endorsement of the so-called “National Conference for New Politics,” a Social-Democratic front group which is leaning towards Robert Kennedy for “peace” candidate for President in 1968.

At this stage of the Southern struggle where the most militant elements are groping for new solutions to the problems reformism is demonstrably not able to overcome, the Spartacist League, as the only professed revolutionary organization with any sort of base in the South, is in a unique position to intervene in the movement to advance the development of consciously anti-capitalist struggle.

Advancing the Southern Struggle

In addition to the programmatic points discussed earlier under “Broad Tasks,” additional demands are pertinent to the Southern struggle.

1. For a Southern Organizing Drive Backed by Organized Labor. Organized labor is being hurt as many companies move South to tap the vast source of cheap, unorganized Southern labor. Black workers meanwhile suffer from low wages and little job security due to lack of unions. A labor-backed Southern organizing drive would thus help both black and white workers. The demand for a Southern drive is complementary to the demand for a Freedom Labor Party, and, if achieved, would lay the material basis for such a party by creating an organized Southern base.

2. Armed Self-Defense. While this slogan is also applicable in the North, the demand has a more immediate urgency in the South and is already being acted upon. The Deacons for Defense and Justice is a tremendous step forward for the Negro struggle, not only because it saves lives, but because it raises the level of consciousness of the civil rights movement by discouraging reliance upon the institutions of the bourgeois state. However, the Deacons exhibit a curious duality: highly militant, paramilitary tactics are used to protect the struggle; however, their political perspectives are characterized by comparatively mild, anti-discrimination politics. This contradictory character will eventually result in a crisis which will reveal the urgent need for revolutionary theory and program along with self-defense if the social liberation of the Black people is to be achieved. The demand for organized self-defense must be counterposed to Federal intervention which preserves Southern “law and order” and the racial status quo.

3. For a Workers United Front Against Federal Intervention. As the bourgeoisie loses political control of the working class, it must rely more and more on direct Government controls, sometimes thinly disguised as “arbitration panels,” “wage guideposts,” etc. In the recent Machinists’ strike a naked anti-strike bill was almost passed. In 1963 Federal troops were deployed to prevent a threatened uprising by black workers in Birmingham during a campaign of racist bombings. All workers have a vital interest in opposing Federal intervention.

V. Black Workers and the Revolutionary Party

There is one state power in this country, and its destruction will be accomplished only by a united working class under the leadership of a single revolutionary vanguard party. The SWP’s concept of the continued division of the working class along color lines with two separate vanguards which would coordinate their activities in a revolutionary period would be like having two command centers during a war, issuing separate orders and disorganization and confusion in the face of the wealthiest and most powerful ruling class in history. The struggle against this concept of a federated vanguard is similar to the struggle carried on by Lenin at the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party against the Jewish Bund’s demand for autonomy within the party and for their sole right to work among Jewish workers. Trotsky argued that to grant such autonomy to one group would in effect be granting autonomy to any particular section of the working class, i.e., would be the institution of a federated party and the destruction of a centralized organization, in addition to an explicit challenge to an internationalist outlook. As it is the goal of socialism to sweep away national and racial barriers, a socialist organization struggles to overcome such barriers. Furthermore, the perpetuation of a “dual vanguard” concept within the United States would actually prevent the struggle from reaching a revolutionary level. Only common struggle for common aims can unite the working class and overcome the lifelong racial prejudices of American workers.

Our immediate goal is to develop a black Trotskyist cadre. We aim not only to recruit Negro members–a short-cut to the working class in this period–but to develop these black workers into Trotskyist cadres who will carry a leadership role in organizing the black masses, within the League itself, and elsewhere. As Trotsky said:

“We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class…. If it happens that we…are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.”

In recruiting and holding a Negro cadre there are several problems:

1. Color hostility. Only the demonstrated determination of the Spartacist League to carry through its revolutionary tasks will convince black militants to join and remain in our ranks. To avoid disappointment and demoralization, we must make clear to our black recruits that only the patient construction and theoretical preparation of a revolutionary vanguard party will produce significant results.

2. Class and educational differences. At present a predominant number of recruits to any radical organization are from the middle class. In addition whites in the U.S. as a whole have access to more and better formal education than Negroes. These factors, to the extent that they are reflected in our organization, may create a certain social gulf between black and white members. This gulf will only be overcome through conscious, common struggle, and the education of all our members in Marxist theory and practice.

3. Daily oppression and the problems of life. The struggle for livelihood and the immediate problems of daily life create additional pressures on our black members which draw them away from full participation in the revolutionary movement. Our black comrades should be aided in gaining job skills that will make the immediate day-to-day problems of living less pressing and free them for revolutionary activity and concentration.

4. Over-Activism. Because the Negro struggle has been the most active struggle in the country, our Negro members have been intensely active party members. The demands of the mass organizations in which they participate tend to occupy so much time that little is left for the study of Marxist theory and the lessons of past class struggle. Unless there is a balance between these two forms of activity our goal of creating a black Trotskyist cadre to intervene in the mass struggle and lift it to a higher consciousness of its anti-capitalist goals will not be realized. The Spartacist League is confident that it will be able to overcome these problems and create an integrated revolutionary vanguard capable of reaching and eventually uniting in struggle the entire class.

Final Victory

The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class. The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.

Spartacist Statement to the International Conference

Spartacist Statement to the International Conference

[Jim Robertson’s remarks and summary made during the discussion of Cliff Slaughter’s Political Report at the International Committee Conference on 6 April 1966 on behalf of the Spartacist delegation (with minor editorial corrections). First printed in Spartacist  #6, June-July 1966, Transcribed fromhttp://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/1966conf.html and http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/1966final.html ]          .

In behalf of the Spartacist group, I greet this Conference called by the International Committee. This is the first international participation by our tendency; we are deeply appreciative of the opportunity to hear and exchange views with comrades of the world movement.

Therefore, we feel we have the responsibility to present to you our specific views where they are both relevant and distinctive, without adapting or modifying them for the sake of a false unanimity which would do us all a disservice, since we have, in our opinion, some valuable insights to offer.

We are present at this Conference on the basis of our fundamental agreement with the International Resolution of the I.C.; moreover, the report of Comrade Slaughter was for us solidly communist, unified throughout by revolutionary determination.

1. What Pabloism Is

The central point of the Conference is “The Reconstruction of the Fourth International, destroyed by Pabloism.” Therefore the issue, “What is Pabloism?” has properly been heavily discussed. We disagree that Pabloism is but the expression of organic currents of reformism and Stalinism, having no roots within our movement. We also disagree with Voix Ouvrière’s view that Pabloism can be explained simply by reference to the petty-bourgeois social composition of the F.I., any more than one could explain the specific nature of a disease by reference solely to the weakened body in which particular microbes had settled.

Pabloism is a revisionist answer to new problems posed by the post-1943 Stalinist expansions. And Pabloism has been opposed within the movement by a bad “orthodoxy” represented until the last few years by the example of Cannon. We must answer new challenges in a truly orthodox fashion: as Gramsci put it, we must develop Marxist doctrine through its own extension, not by seeking eclectic absorption of new alien elements, as Pabloism has done.

The pressure which produced Pabloism began in 1943, following the failure of Leon Trotsky’s perspective of the break-up of the Soviet bureaucracy and of new October revolutions in the aftermath of the war: this failure resulted from the inability to forge revolutionary parties. 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.

Inevitable Struggle

The fight against Pabloism is the specific historic form of a necessarily continual struggle against revisionism, which cannot be “finally” resolved within the framework of capitalism. Bernstein, Bukharin, and Pablo, for example, have been our antagonists in particular phases of this struggle, which is both necessary and inevitable, and cannot be “solved.”

These are some of our views about Pabloism; they are not exhaustive, for they are shaped by the particular aspects of Pabloism which have loomed large in our own struggle against it.

We take issue with the notion that the present crisis of capitalism is so sharp and deep that Trotskyist revisionism is needed to tame the workers, in a way comparable to the degeneration of the Second and Third Internationals. Such an erroneous estimation would have as its point of departure an enormous overestimation of our present significance, and would accordingly be disorienting.

We had better concentrate upon what Lenin said concerning the various, ubiquitous crises which beset imperialism (a system essentially in crisis since before 1914); Lenin pointed out that there is no impossible situation for the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to throw them out. Otherwise, “crises” are all in a day’s work for the mechanisms and agencies of imperialism in muddling through from one year to the next. Just now, in fact, their task is easier, after the terrible shattering of the Indonesian workers’ movement; add to this the other reversals which expose the revisionists’ dependence on petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic strata, like the softening of the USSR, the isolation of China, India brought to heel, Africa neatly stabilized, and Castro a captive of Russia and the U.S. The central lesson of these episodes is the necessity to build revolutionary working-class parties, i.e., our ability to intervene in struggle.

2. Anti-Pabloist Tactics

A French comrade put it well: “there is no family of Trotskyism.” There is only the correct program of revolutionary Marxism, which is not an umbrella. Nevertheless, there are now four organized international currents all claiming to be Trotskyist, and spoken of as “Trotskyist” in some conventional sense. This state of affairs must be resolved through splits and fusions. The reason for the present appearance of a “family” is that each of the four tendencies—“United Secretariat,” Pablo’s personal “Revolutionary Marxist Tendency,” Posadas’ “Fourth International,” and the International Committee—is in some countries the sole organized group claiming the banner of Trotskyism. Hence, they draw in all would-be Trotskyists in their areas and suppress polarization; there is no struggle and differentiation, winning over some and driving others to vacate their pretense as revolutionists and Trotskyists. Thus, when several Spartacist comrades visited Cuba, we found that the Trotskyist group there, part of the Posadas international, were in the main excellent comrades struggling with valor under difficult conditions. The speeches here of the Danish and Ceylonese comrades, representing left-wing sections of the United Secretariat, reflect such problems.

The partial break-up and gross exposure of the United Secretariat forces—the expulsion of Pablo, the Ceylonese betrayal, the SWP’s class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war, Mandel’s crawling before the Belgian Social-Democratic heritage—prove that the time has passed when the struggle against Pabloism could be waged on an international plane within a common organizational framework. And the particular experience of our groups in the United States, which were expelled merely for the views they held, with no right of appeal, demonstrates that the United Secretariat lies when it claims Trotskyist all-inclusiveness.

We Must Do Better

Up to now, we have not done very well, in our opinion, in smashing the Pabloites; the impact of events alone, no matter how favorable objectively or devastating to revisionist doctrines, will not do the job. In the U.S., the break-up of the SWP left wing over its five-year history has been a great gift to the revisionist leadership of the SWP.

At present, our struggle with the Pabloites must be preponderantly from outside their organizations; nevertheless, in many countries a period of united fronts and organizational penetration into revisionist groupings remains necessary in order to consummate the struggle for the actual reconstruction of the F.I., culminating in a world congress to re-found it.

3. Theoretical Clarification

The experiences of the Algerian and Cuban struggles, each from its own side, are very important for the light they shed on the decisive distinction between the winning of national independence on a bourgeois basis, and revolutions of the Chinese sort, which lead to a real break from capitalism, yet confined within the limits of a bureaucratic ruling stratum.

Two decisive elements have been common to the whole series of upheavals under Stalinist-type leaderships, as in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietnam: 1) a civil war of the peasant-guerrilla variety, which first wrenches the peasant movement from the immediate control of imperialism and substitutes a petty-bourgeois leadership; and then, if victorious, seizes the urban centers and on its own momentum smashes capitalist property relations, nationalizing industry under the newly consolidating Bonapartist leadership; 2) the absence of the working class as a contender for social power, in particular, the absence of its revolutionary vanguard: this permits an exceptionally independent role for the petty-bourgeois sections of society which are thus denied the polarization which occurred in the October Revolution, in which the most militant petty-bourgeois sections were drawn into the wake of the revolutionary working class.

However it is apparent that supplemental political revolution is necessary to open the road to socialist development, or, in the earlier stages, as in Vietnam today, the active intervention of the working class to take hegemony of the national-social struggle. Only those such as the Pabloists who believe that (at least some) Stalinist bureaucracies (e.g., Yugoslavia or China or Cuba) can be a revolutionary socialist leadership need see in this understanding a denial of the proletarian basis for social revolution.

On the contrary, precisely, the petty-bourgeois peasantry under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable could achieve no third road, neither capitalist, nor working class. Instead all that has come out of China and Cuba was a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counter-revolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the degeneration of the October. That is why we are led to define states such as these as deformed workers states. And the experience since the Second World War, properly understood, offers not a basis for revisionist turning away from the perspective and necessity of revolutionary working-class power, but rather it is a great vindication of Marxian theory and conclusions under new and not previously expected circumstances.

Weakness and Confusion

Many statements and positions of the I.C. show theoretical weakness or confusion on this question. Thus, the I.C. Statement on the fall of Ben Bella declared:

“Where the state takes a bonapartist form on behalf of a weak bourgeoisie, as in Algeria or Cuba, then the type of revolt occurring on June 19-20 in Algiers is on the agenda.”

—Newsletter, 26 June 1965.

While the nationalization in Algeria now amounts to some 15 per cent of the economy, the Cuban economy is, in essence, entirely nationalized; China probably has more vestiges of its bourgeoisie. If the Cuban bourgeoisie is indeed “weak,” as the I.C. affirms, one can only observe that it must be tired from its long swim to Miami, Florida.

The current I.C. resolution, “Rebuilding the Fourth International,” however, puts the matter very well:

“In the same way, the International and its parties are the key to the problem of the class struggle in the colonial countries. The petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders and their Stalinist collaborators restrict the struggle to the level of national liberation, or, at best, to a version of ‘socialism in one country,’ sustained by subordination to the co-existence policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. In this way, all the gains of the struggle of the workers and peasants, not only in the Arab world, India, South East Asia, etc., but also in China and Cuba [our emphasis: Spartacist], are confined within the limits of imperialist domination, or exposed to counter-revolution (the line-up against China, the Cuban missiles crisis, the Vietnam war, etc.).”

Here Cuba is plainly equated with China, not with Algeria.

The document offered by the French section of the I.C. several years ago on the Cuban revolution suffers, in our view, from one central weakness. It sees the Cuban revolution as analogous to the Spanish experience of the 1930’s. This analogy is not merely defective: it emphasizes precisely what is not common to the struggles in Spain and in Cuba, that is, the bona fide workers’ revolution in Spain which was smashed by the Stalinists.

Overcoming Bad Method

The Pabloites have been strengthened against us, in our opinion, by this simplistic reflex of the I.C., which must deny the possibility of a social transformation led by the petty-bourgeoisie, in order to defend the validity and necessity of the revolutionary Marxist movement. This is a bad method: at bottom, it equates the deformed workers’ state with the road to socialism; it is the Pabloite error turned inside out, and a profound denial of the Trotskyist understanding that the bureaucratic ruling caste is an obstacle which must be overthrown by the workers if they are to move forward.

The theoretical analysis of Spartacist concerning the backward portions of the world strengthens, in our estimation, the programmatic positions which we hold in common with the comrades of the I.C. internationally.

4. Building U.S. Section

The principal aspect of our task which may be obscure to foreign comrades is the unique and critically and immediately important Negro question. Without a correct approach to the Negro young militants and workers we will be unable to translate into American conditions the rooting of our section among the masses. We have fought hard to acquire a theoretical insight in the course of our struggle in the SWP against Black Nationalist schemes which disintegrate a revolutionary perspective—defending the position that the Negroes in the U.S. are an oppressed color-caste concentrated in the main in the working class as a super-exploited layer. And we have acquired a considerable experience for our small numbers and despite a composition which is still only about 10 per cent black. We have a nucleus in Harlem, New York City. We intervened in several ways in the Black Ghetto outbursts over the summers of 1964 and 65, acquiring valuable experience.

[The balance of the remarks was not written out before delivery; it is given as reconstructed from the rough notes. The issue of propaganda and agitation was not significantly gone into in the report, but is in the Spartacist draft document on tasks assembled the night before the oral report was given, hence the relevant section of that draft is also quoted below.]

Our draft resolution before you states regarding our Southern work that, “Perhaps our most impressive achievement to date has been the building of several SL organizing committees in the deep South, including New Orleans. This is a modest enough step in absolute terms and gives us no more than a springboard for systematic work. What is impressive is that no other organization claiming to be revolutionary has any base at all in the deep South today.”

Black and White

The race question in the U.S. is different from that in England. In fact it is part way between the situation in England and that in South Africa. Thus some 2 per cent of the British population is coloured; in South Africa over 2/3rds of the people are black. In the U.S. if some 20 per cent of the population is Negro and Spanish-speaking, then within the working class, given the overwhelming concentration of whites in the upper classes, the others comprise something like 25 or 30 per cent. What this means is that in England the intensity of exploitation is spread unevenly, but rather smoothly throughout an essentially homogeneous working class. At the other extreme in South Africa, the white workers with ten times the income of the black, live in good part themselves off the blacks, thus imposing an almost insuperable barrier to common class actions (witness the European and Moslem workers’ relations in Algeria). In the U.S. the qualitatively heavier burden within the class is borne by the black workers. In quiescent times they tend to be divided from the white workers as in the lower levels of class struggle such as are now prevalent. Therefore theblack youth in America are the only counterparts today to the sort of militant white working class youth found in the British Young Socialists.

Uniting the Class

However, we are well aware that at a certain point in the class struggle the main detachments of the workers, as such, i.e., black and white in common class organizations such as trade unions, become heavily involved. Every strike shows this. In preparation for the massive class struggles ahead we have begun to build fractions in certain accessible key sections of the working class. But today the winning over of young black militants is the short cut to acquiring proletarian cadres as well; virtually all such militants are part of the working class.

Finally, we know that under the specific conditions in the U.S. to build a genuinely revolutionary party will require the involvement in its ranks and leadership of a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the most exploited and oppressed, the black workers.

A Fighting Propaganda Group

The Spartacist draft theses state: “The tactical aim of the SL in the next period is to build a sufficiently large propaganda group capable of agitational intervention in every social struggle in the U.S. as a necessary step in the building of the revolutionary party. For this intervention we seek an increase in our forces to at least tenfold. From our small force of around 100 we move toward our goal in three parallel lines of activity: splits and fusions with other groups, direct involvement in mass struggle, and the strengthening and education of our organization.”

…………….

Spartacist Delegation Final Statement to 1966 London Conference

Comrades: We believe that it is a violation of Leninist practice to demand that a comrade affirm to his comrades what he does not believe. I have in substance said several times that if I had known of the rule I would certainly have abided by it. I wish to assure the comrades that my action was in no way intended to constitute a violation of the procedures governing the conduct of individuals participating in the Conference. However, this has been deemed not good enough. Instead, in the guise of discipline, the Spartacist organization has been subjected to a series of slanderous attacks, despite our basic political agreement on the necessity of the fight against revisionism. This is an attempt to substitute for international democratic centralism for the American section a mechanism  not of consciousness and discipline but of fear and obedience. Hence an incident without significance of an unintentional violation of protocol has been uniquely singled out and inflated into an accusation of petty-bourgeois arrogance and American imperial chauvinism. If the comrades go ahead to exclude us from this Conference, we ask only what we have asked before–study of our documents, including the 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.

Revolution and Truth

Revolution and Truth

First printed in Spartacist #8, November – December 1966. Copied from http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/04/revolution-and-truth.html

  

G. Healy, general secretary of the British Socialist Labour League, and his publicists in the American Committee for the Fourth International are evidently striving to compensate with volume for what they lack in cogency. Determined to do a “job” on the Spartacist League, Healy’s efforts to discredit our “clique of petty-bourgeois friends” is frankly impressive: very heavy coverage in five issues of Wohlforth’s Bulletin, four of the SLL’s Newsletter, sections of the August issue of Fourth International, and a 38-page pamphlet reprinting the first six attacks. As if the split itself did not have enough of a Kafkaesque quality, Healy and his ACFI mouthpiece accuse Spartacist of “sectarianism,” “declaring war,” and “pouring out slanders and lies” – in replying to the attack which the Bulletin initiated.

But the split’s grotesqueness must not obscure its seriousness. The Hansen pamphlet, Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fourth International, published by the SWP, only suggests the value of the breach to the revisionists. Healy and Wohlforth, with whose organizations the Spartacist League remains in essential political agreement, actually seem to gloat that unity with us was not consummated, yet we have already expressed our bitterness over “the temporary set-back to the world movement and to our prospects in the U.S.,” “the resultant aid and comfort given to the SWP and to Pabloist revisionists internationally,” and the “delight to Stalinists of all varieties who have for years attacked Trotskyists as unprincipled splitters.” (Letter of Spartacist leader H. Turner to Healy, 30 April 1966.)

The Calculated Lie

A set-back of another sort has also resulted: ACFI’s efforts to rationalize Healy’s anti-Leninist organizational practices have driven these comrades into a truly appalling anti-Marxist direction: the conscious embrace of calculated deception as political methodology. Our comrades formerly in the Socialist Workers Party first fully tasted Wohlforth’s talents in 1963 when, as de facto party prosecutor, his lying accusations were the basis for their expulsions. The April conference debacle has again revealed Wohlforth’s and Healy’s expertise. Striving defensively to project the image that everybody is a bit of a liar, they challenge our assertion that James Robertson, Spartacist editor and a delegate, was expelled from the conference for refusing to acknowledge our “petty-bourgeois” nature and other characterizations. These charges constituted the bizarre motivation of a demand for an “apology” for Robertson’s absence from a session.

ACFI brands our version as “mythology”; but they and Healy have inadvertently let slip a glimmer of the truth. The 12 September Bulletin, While ignoring Robertson’s several apologies to the delegates for an unintentional infraction of “protocol,” describes the ultimatum thus “Only when he continued to refuse to acknowledge that he had caused the conference to be inconvenienced was his attitude characterized as that of a petty-bourgeois… . But he continued, for the next 24 hour period of the conference …. to refuse to apologize.” Healy’s letter of 15 April to Turner picks up the story: “At the end of this session … Robertson was then asked if he would carry out the unanimous request of the Congress and apologize for his attitude towards the Congress. He refused to do this and was accordingly asked to leave.” (Our emphasis.) Healy’s docile words fail to convey the full flavor of this verbal hate session, culminating in our delegate’s expulsion.

Wohlforth and Struggle

Our ACFI comrades have been particularly hard put co defend, the allegations that we “write off the white working class as quiescent and oppose any agitational work,” especially since this charge emanates from a group which in its entire existence has issued three leaflets directed to situations of struggle – and two of these were issued jointly with Spartacist, which has more than 90 of its own to its credit! Wohlforth’s isolation from civil rights struggles, as from the labor movement, is reflected in his obsequious “Open Letter to SNCC” (Bulletin, 10 October) and more significantly in ACFI’s incapacity to recruit a single Black member. Apparently as a wishful consolation, the Bulletin prints a photograph of a tin-hatted Black worker as its “Labor Scope” mascot; and while claiming to be “printed entirely by union labor,” the paper lacks the authority of a printers’ trade label – a suggestion of cynical ignorance of even the anti-scab traditions of militant trade unionism.

Having many times acknowledged the Spartacist League’s modest but real involvement in mass struggle, our ACFI comrades had to explain their post-conference public fabrication. After first expressing unconcern, ACFI members tragically began to suggest that dishonesty as such is correct in principle. On 17 September, at ACFI’s first public function since their April rupture with us, a Coordinating Committee member privately boasted, in the presence of unafiliated members, that ACFI would stoop to any debasement to safeguard its connection with Healy. Similar cynical admissions began to accumulate. Finally on 2 October, in the first of several classes on “Leninism” (actually an Aesopian re-run of the split aimed at hardening ACFI’s Membership) Wohlforth codified his “method.” Discussing Trotsky’s 1925 denial of Lenin’s Testament, Wohlforth acknowledged that Trotsky misled his comrades. But, said Wohlforth, exalting this desperate evasion into a principle, “Trotsky taught us when to lie and when not to lie.”

The fact that Trotsky’s disavowal was committed at the decision of the leading body of the Opposition, and under terms dictated by Stalin, did not prevent it from accruing heavily to Stalin’s advantage and producing no little disorientation among Trotsky’s followers. But the profoundly cynical assertion of deception as a principle – which represents Wohlforth’s abdication of any intention to function as a revolutionist – was learned from Healy, not Trotsky. In fact, Wohlforth takes that action which our opponents have sought to exploit as the “core” of Trotskyist practice and himself turns it into the essence of Trotskyist practice!

The minuteness of Wohlforth’s literary sect does not deflect from the power of this poison. What is at stake is no less than whether the future Leninist vanguard – of which we today are the progenitors – will have the capacity to carry through the task of leading working people to revolutionary victory. But the proletariat’s conscious understanding of its tasks, central to Marxism, is only nourished to the extent that the workers realize the clear and sober truth – including about ourselves and our opponents.

Treating this problem in Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky reasoned:

“The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves. There is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off defeats as victories, friends as enemies, bribing workers’ leaders, fabricating legends, staging false trials, in a word, doing what the Stalinists do. These means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already condemned by history. But they cannot serve to liberate the masses.”

The Bulletin itself of 29 March 1966, describing the “political methodology” of Progressive Labor, anticipated its own tragedy:

“It has been said by someone who probably learned the hard way, ‘never trust anyone who lies to you.’ … It would be thought that anyone belonging to an organization that aspires to revolutionary victory of the working class would examine the history … and see the political method of the lie as an important component of the reformist degeneration of the Communist parties throughout the world.” 

Wohlforth’s Method

Armed with this “method,” Wohlforth has had no difficulty in subordinating theory and truth to his tactical needs. Thus, to resurrect the slander of Spartacist’s denial of the working class, Wohlforth in the Bulletin of 10 October isolates a quotation from our last issue referring to the New Leftists “image of an apathetic white working class” – in order to attribute this view to us in the very article by us calling for “arousing the working class” to a political struggle against capitalism! Similarly Wohlforth, like Healy, relishes in endlessly slandering individuals who break with the movement. Thus Wohlforth vituperates against Shane Mage while printing in the 24 October Bulletin, without a single acknowledgement, an article on Hungary almost wholly adopted and plagiarized from Mage’s work!

Our experience with Healy’s and Wohlforth’s opportunism, which predicates such dishonesty, dates back to our original split in 1962. Rewriting the history of his relations with us in a series, “Problems of the Fourth International” (Newsletter, 22 and 29. October), Healy serves up as, “educational assistance” the ultimatum given our comrades then in the SWP – not simply to accept the discipline of his group with which they had only close but ill-defined relations, but to renounce their views before the party. Healy explains that he was “opposed to any attempt to sharpen up the internal faction struggle inside the SWP…” (Newsletter, 22 October), and, through Wohlforth at the time circulated charges of our comrades’ “indiscipline” and “split perspective” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, June 1963); yet Healy’s 29 October version endeavors to prove our alleged anti-internationalism by citing that we were “ready to accept SWP discipline”! Healy’s contradiction reflects his flip-flop at the time: Healy was willing to police our tendency in exchange for a deal with Dobbs; when this proved fruitless, Healy had Wohlforth drop the “party loyalty” line and virtually invite expulsion. Our comrades, on the other hand, steered one straight course until their expulsion: aprincipled, vigorous struggle inside the SWP for a revolutionary program.

While Healy largely just rehashes the Bulletin‘s well-worn lies, these articles further reveal the man’s Stalinist-conditioned idea of an International: not a disciplined collective of peer sections, guided by a democratically-selected center, but a network of puppets obedient to Healy for his “revolutionary integrity and rich experience.” A dubious integrity, indeed, after the “rich experience” of “advice” to our “goodselves” like the following: “We do not want to impose [our proposals] on you. If you do not like to accept them, then there is no need to accept them. All those comrades who do accept them will be considered as part of an international tendency….” (Healy’s letter to Revolutionary Tendency of SWP, 12 November 1962.)

As the servant reflects the master, Wohlforth exposes the political character of Healy; and their performance as micro-careerists repudiates their literary Leninism. The latest manifestation of ACFI’s left-centrist behavior has been their electoral positions: in New York City they supported the middle-class Hal Levin campaign; meanwhile ACFI’s man on the West Coast caved in to the “boycott” ‘line Of the Scheer liberals – placing ACFI to the right of even theNational Guardian, which supported the SWP’s write-in campaign. Such opportunism links to Healy’s own shortcomings which we would have sought to correct within the International Committee had we not been expelled: especially his tendency towards a Great-Power insensitivity on the national question; the SLL’s tactical vacillations between unprincipled concessions and violent sectarianism; and the Healy regime’s anti-Leninist bureaucratism. ACFI, parodying Trotsky, begs these questions by “defying ” us to explain the “social roots” of Healy’s practices. The Voix Ouvriere comrades have observed that while a bureaucracy such as the Stalinists’ has a basis in social and economic causes, including the conservative protection of material privilege, Healy’s bureaucratism is a product primarily of his incapacity as a revolutionist!

Trotskyism and Truth

While Healy’s practices, aped by Wohlforth, increase our opponents’ vulnerability, the Spartacist League takes no pleasure in the business; the 29 March Bulletin‘s sober commentary on PL ironically well-foretold our present assessment of ACFI:

“We do not simply gloat over the self-destruction of a political organization… Progressive Labor’s behavior can have no other effect than to isolate and demoralize its own membership as well as creating, skepticism and mistrust in the minds of working class and student militants toward communist organization and struggle. All in all, a criminal waste!”

Yet Wohlforth assails us for not “closing ranks with the IC” by denying that a crime was committed! There is compounded irony here – the Spartacist League is politically much closer to the IC than, for example, to Voix Ouvriere, with whom we have strong differences over their state-capitalist position on the Sino-Soviet states, their tendency towards syndicalism, and their erroneous assessment of the Fourth International. But we, like VO, recognize that true solidarity with the International Committee forces requires that we help it purge its ranks of criminals, not deny their deeds. The honest engagement of this task itself facilitates the rebuilding of a Leninist Fourth International

Healy “Reconstructs” the Fourth International

Healy “Reconstructs” the Fourth International

[Originaly published in June 1966 by the Socialist Workers Party in the US with a preface by Joseph Hansen as “Healy ‘Reconstructs’ the Fouth International: Documents by Participants in a Fiasco.” For archival completeness we are including Hansen’s preface.]

CONTENTS

Preface by Joseph Hansen

Letter from G. Healy to Jim Robertson

Letter from G. Healy to Tim Wohlforth

Letter from A. Nelson to All Locals, Organizing Committees, and Members at Large

Letter from Rose J. to the Bay Area Spartacist Committee

Letter from G. Healy to Cde. H. Turner and Cde. Sherwood

Letter from Harry Turner to Comrade Healy

Comments on the Letter of Comrade Healy to Comrades Turner and Sherwood on the Third Conference of the International Committee by Mark Tishman

Letter from J. Robertson to the Coordinating Committee, American Committee for the Fourth International

Letter from D. Freeman, for the Coordinating Comm., American Comm. for the Fourth Int. to J. Robertson

Letter from J. Robertson, for the REB, to the Coordinating Committee, A.C.F.I.

Letter from Daniel Freeman for the Coordinating Committee, American Committee for the Fourth International to James Robertson, Resident Editorial Board, Spartacist

After the April 1966 Conference which Took as Its Task to Reconstruct the Fourth International. By G. Kaldy

SECTARIANISM AND TINPOT DESPOTISM — AN EXAMPLE FOR THE TEXTBOOKS

By Joseph Hansen

“In their own circles they [the sectarians] customarily carryon a regime of despotism.” — Leon Trotsky.*

The documents included in this pamphlet deal with a conference sponsored by the so-called “International Committee.” Official accounts of the gathering, which was held early in April 1966, are readily available. However, the accounts are far from complete. References to certain happenings remain obscure and puzzling. The documents assembled here make it possible to now fill in these dark areas, at least partially. In view of their educational value, plus the likelihood that they might otherwise be buried in thearchives, the Socialist Workers party, which received copies of them by chance, is making them public in this form.

As for the official accounts, their nature can be gathered from the following sentence which appeared in the May 9 Bulletin of International Socialism: “The third International Congress called by the International Committee of the Fourth International, held in London from April 4-8, has been called the most impressive conference of the international Marxist movement since the Founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938.”

The author of these words (Tim Wohlforth?) does not indicate who made this impressive historical judgment. Perhaps it was wise to preserve his anonymity; for the truth is that in the history of the various groups that have proclaimed adherence to Trotskyism, whether justifiably or unjustifiably, it would be difficult to find a conference that opened with such fanfare and ended with such a disaster for its promoters.

The conference, which was guided in its deliberations by Gerry Healy of the Socialist Labour League, did not succeed in one of the main points on its agenda — to unite the two groups in the United States (Wohlforth and Robertson) that have vied in proclaiming political solidarity with the SLL and each other.

In fact, James Robertson, whom the betrayal caught by complete surprise (he came to believe his own propaganda about Healy being a model leader), was summarily thrown out in the most scandalous way, as can be judged from the documents in the following pages.

The delegation of the Voix Ouvriere [Worker’s Voice] group, representing a bigger organization than the existing French component of the “International Committee” (the La Verite [The Truth] group headed by Pierre Lambert), were victims of a comparable sellout. In the middle of the conference Healy suddenly switched the political basis on which they had agreed to participation as observers and served them with an ultimatum to vote for a new line. They walk out.

The conference, anonymously described as the most impressive of it’s kind since 1938, thus ended up with two splits and what would appear to be a through poisoning of relations with the only two formations in the entire scane, aside from the  Wohlforth group and an individual here or there, that have evinced any interest in the politics and perspectives offered by Healy-Lambert.

In one of the documents, Healy contends that he planned this outcome from the very beginning. In response to that boast we can only offer the SLL leader congratulations on his success in organizing the conference in such a way as to make it a completely cut-and-dried affair before it even opened. But was it really necessary to utilize such elaborate means to drive away his closest allies and supporters? It may be, of course, that we should congratulate Healy for no more than an impressive ability to waive aside setbacks and defeats.

Unfortunately no congratulations of any kind to the Robertson and Voix Ouvrieregroups seem in order. They don’t claim to have planned it that way. However, they might seek consolation in the thought that they asked for it. After all, they were well aware of the fraud built into the very foundations of this conference.

In 1963 the majority of the International Committee participated in a Reunification Congress which brought together on a principled basis the overwhelming majority of the world Trotskyist movement after a ten-year split. Of all the organizations in the International Committee, or sympathetic to its aims, only Healy’s Socialist Labour League and Lambert’s La Verite group rejected reunification, refusing to go along with the majority. After the International Committee participated in the reunification of the Fourth International, Healy and Lambert set up a rump “International Committee,” representing no one but themselves. It was to be a conference sponsored by these splitters that the Robertson and Voix Ouvriere groups decided to send observers. What did they expect there? Freedom to voice an opinion? A fair hearing for ideas they wished to advance for consideration? Observance of democratic rights?

They overlooked the undemocratic origins of Healy’s “International Committee.” It was set up from from the very begining as private property, well posted with “No Tresspassing” and “No Hunting” signs — which ought to have been though of before responding to the notices in the “Discussions Wanted” column of the Healyite press.

***

The testimony of the Robertson delegation on Healy’s undemocratic practices, the main subject of the documents included here, is well worth study by all those who are interested in the health of the Socialist Labour League and the good name of Trotskyism in the British labor movement.

An apparently trivial incident occured at that conference. Robertson was absent from one of the sessions.

In the Socialist Labour League, under National Secretary Healy, something like that is not “trivial.” You can be hauled up on charges for it, That’s not all. You must acknowledge your guilt. Moreover, you must admit it in a way to meet some exacting specifications. If you don’t, the charges can rapidly escalate.

Thus Robertson found himself, to his consternation, suddenly sinking in quicksand.

(1) He was charged with being absent from a session.

(2) He admitted his guilt.

(3) A motion was passed demanding that he apologize and admit having committed a “petty-bourgeois act.”

(4) He apologized in an emphatic way for having been absent but refused to acknowledge that he had committed a “petty-bourgeois act.”

(5) The escalation proceeded. Healy, according to Rose J., scored Robertson’s absence and his refusal to vote for his condemnation, characterizing it as a “petty-bourgeois, reactionary act expressing the chauvinism of American imperialism, etc.”

(6) Robertson was threatened with expulsion if he did not voice approval of the motion branding him with the alleged

class nature of his crime.

(7) The dazed man still said, no.

(8) He was expelled.

The incident and the procedures followed in handling it become even more astonishing when examined in detail.

Rose J. reports that Robertson had been sick for three weeks, had spent the night working on a document, and had continued in the morning by presenting his views to the conference. Evidently exhausted, he sought to take a nap. “He mentioned to Comrade Healy that he was going.”

Healy states in his letter to H. Turner and Sherwood, ” … he asked me if it would be all right to leave the meeting to go to bed since he was working all night on a document …. I told him that I would convey his request to the appropriate comrades controlling the congress … “

This august body met and “unanimously decided that he be requested to return … ” The necessity for an indisposed person to request permission not to attend a session is in itself a scandal. The proper procedure would have been to accept without the slightest question Robertson’s admission that he was exhausted. In fact, if it had been learned that he was feeling ill or exhausted, and he had nevertheless insisted on remaining. he should have been persuaded to at least skip a session and get some rest. The arrangements committee, set up for such purposes in any well-organized gathering, should immediately have seen to it that every facility was made available to the comrade, including prompt medical attention if necessary.

In the evening, again according to Healy, Robertson returned. He was “asked to apologize for not having attended the session.”

Robertson, still according to Healy, “refused to do this on the grounds that he did not know the rules. It was pointed out that these rules were implicit in all Bolshevik Congresses, otherwise everyone would do as he pleased.”

This set of “implicit” rules for “Bolshevik congresses” is spun out of thin air. Harry Turner is completely in order to demand of Healy, “Can you cite any written precedent in any previous Bolshevik Congress for this rule?” And Turner might well have reminded Healy — which he didn’t, unfortunately -that without established written rules, or agreed-upon rules placed in the record at the beginning of the gathering, any petty bureaucrat could do as he pleased.

That’s aside from the ludicrous pretension that this was a “Bolshevik congress” or anything remotely resembling one.

Turner states that the acknowledgment demanded of Robertson, in view of the accusations leveled at him, would have signified making a “false confession to a petitbourgeois outlook, American chauvinism, and capitulation to Black Nationalism. “

Rose J. can hardly bring herself to say it — she apologizes for the great man who was steering the conference; it was “a mistake”; it is “almost” a “Stalinist version of democratic- centralism. “

No, Comrade Rose J., it was no “mistake”; it was a crime; it is not “almost” a Stalinist version; it is a Stalinist version. No epithet is involved — that is the-Correct label for the way National Secretary Healy ran his conference.

Harry Turner sums it up quite accurately in his letter to Healy: “Your attacks on Robertson were designed to make him knuckle under and adopt an attitude of humble worship for the omniscient British leadership. You were not interested in creating a movement united on the basis of democratic centralism with strong sections capable of making theoretical contributions to the movement as a whole and of applying Marxist theory creatively to their own national arenas. You wanted an international after the manner of Stalin’s Comintern, permeated with servility at one pole and authoritarianism at the other.”

Of course, Healyism is not the equivalent of Stalinism — meaning the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste wielding power in a workers state without checks or controls. Healyism is simply a case of factionalism and cultism, a not uncommon phenomenon among ingrown sects, as Trotsky observed in his time. Thus, fortunately, Healyism is but a grotesque caricature of Stalinism. After all, the most the tinpot autocrat could do to Robertson was to expel him.

Let us recapitulate. The atmosphere is such that Robertson feels compelled to ask Healy to take up with the “appropriate comrades” in control his need to drop out for a couple of hours. Robertson doesn’t simply tell Healy, as would be normal — “he asked me if it would be all right … ” Robertson has in fact already both asked permission and apologized. He apologized for being unable to stay on his feet; he asked permission to lie down. Where are we, on a slave plantation?

Thumbs down, comes the response of the “appropriate comrades” in control. They issue an order. Robertson is to stay on his feet. What should we call this? Insensitivity? Rudeness? Brutality? It is at least a good sample of the bureaucratic mind, all the purer because it lacks even the check of a serious sociological base.

Robertson returns to the next session, feeling, let us hope, no longer near collapse. The welcome he gets does not exactly reflect fraternal interest in his health. His comrades constitute themselves into a court and pass sentence. He must make a formal apology to the body as a whole. It is becoming monstrous!

Robertson, attempting to meet this strange situation, does apologize. He is in a foreign land … among unusual people given to unusual ways. In fact, of all the organizations he has been in, it can safely be said that he has never seen anything like this. He says he didn’t know it was against the rules.

The man has claimed ignorance of the law! The inquisition replies at once to that hoary dodge. The rules, if not written down, are “implicit.” It’s been that way since the time of the Druids. Therefore the apology is rejected. (Harry Turner reports that Robertson made the apology “in a written statement” — apologies, say these remarkable “implicit” rules, must under no circumstances be left implicit.)

Something more is demanded of the miserable culprit than the squirming half-confession he has offered up to this point. He’d better come clean! But what do they want from him?

The “real political face of Robertson” must be “thoroughly exposed.” The “thoroughly reactionary attitude” shown in the written half-confession must be dealt with implacably. The “idealist, pragmatic, petty-bourgeois basis of the Spartacist group” must be brought to light. The inner nature of this two-faced criminal who “retained his greatest venom and hatred for the congress itself” must be exposed before the entire body. (All the phrases in quotation marks appear in Healy’s letter to H. Turner and Sherwood.)

Healy and the other “appropriate comrades controlling the congress” dictate an apology for adoption by Robertson. The man must confess that he committed a “petty-bourgeois act’:; he must confess the correctness of the charge that he is guilty of “American chauvinism and capitulation to Black Nationalism.”

Robertson, however, feels he just can’t do it. The response of the judges is swift and merciless. The “Congress,” as Healy reports it, “unanimously … decided that he should leave.”

But the national secretary, who instigated all this, who is obviously a past master at dishing out super “Bolshevism,” plays the cat-and-mouse game. “At this point I proposed a motion that he should stay until the end of the session, thus giving him time to reconsider his position.”

Instantly the entire body falls into line; instantly the national secretary’s motion is approved. They are like seals who have done all this many times before. Only Voix Ouvriere abstains, as Healy is careful to note. (He mentions it in hls letter to H. Turner and Sherwood.)

After the reprieve is up, the victim is again seated in the dock. “Robertson was then asked,” continues Healy, “if he would carry out the unanimous request of the Congress and apologize for his attitude towards the Congress.” Robertson “refused to do this and was accordingly asked to leave … “

Expelled forthwith! At the end of the same session where he was first confronted with the ultimatum to apologize! In Healy’s organization the rope is very short …

Is there anyone who knows the first thing about the abominations of Stalinism whose blood doesn’t boil on reading about such procedures?

If such things could occur in an international gathering where Healy presumably had his best foot forward, what is the atmosphere like inside the Socialist Labour League?

For years rumors have circulated in the British labor movement about Healy’s methods. Generally the sources turned out to be dissidents who walked out or were expelled from the Socialist Labour League. Some of the stories they told sounded to Trotskyists in other countries like gross exaggerations and thus tended to be discounted as due to factionalism. Yet it had to be noted that in the international scene, Healy’s organization was the only one claiming to represent Trotskyism that had such an ugly reputation in the labor movement because of continual tales about gross violations of the democratic rights of its own members.

The facts reported by the Robertson delegation are different from anything yet revealed since they come from people who were pathetically loyal to Healy and who could scarcely believe their eyes as they witnessed what was happening. Their report of how Healy expelled Robertson, backed as it is by Healy’s own boasts and admissions, is utterly convincing. And all the more so in view of their reiteration, after the event, that they still have no political differences with him — even on Cuba, which Healy holds to be capitalist and which they maintain is a workers state!

One can well appreciate why the Wohlforth group, as shown by one of the documents, is afraid to agree to hold even a debate with another group without first getting approval from Big Brother. What if he should jerk the rug they’re standing on! And so Wohlforth, who used to take pride in standing in opposition to no matter whom, ends up as a rubber stamp for a . .. Healy.

***

But let us move on. With the exception of the article by Georges Kaldy, the documents included here touch on the political issues only incidentally. This, of course, is due to the nature of the material. The authors of the correspondence were dealing with what was really going on at the conference and what was most important to them and the members of their groups. Their political interpretations, which are something else again, can be found in their publications. Unfortunately, with all their studied poses, self-delusion, wrong theories, sectarian attitudes and carelessness about facts, what they write for the public is generally simply boring. Certainly it doesn’t compare in educational value with this material in which- the real world they live in tends to break through.

Kaldy’s article about the famous conference lacks this vitality. Writing for the Voix Ouvriere audience, the author is concerned about maintaining a certain public image which apparently can admit to dueling but not to brawling — at least when the weapons are broken beer bottles a la Healy. We have made it available in an English translation as a courtesy inasmuch as it is rather doubtful that this service will be rendered by either Healy, Wohlforth or Robertson.

The most interesting political question is: What brought these groupings to stage an international conference if a face-to-face confrontation would only cause them to fly apart?

It is as easy to find the answer as it is to put the question. Their common opposition to the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers party — which they claim is really opposition to “Pabloism” — brought them together. The uneven development of the different groups in their evolution away from Trotskyism caused them to split, an outcome none of them foresaw.

This becomes completely clear if considered against the background. Among the key issues that led Healy, the main figure at the conference, to separate from the majority of the world Trotskyist movement a few years ago was a difference in appreciation of the colonial revolution, its importance and its course of development. The dispute occurred concretely over the events in Cuba which led to the overthrow of capitalism under the leadership of Fidel Castro.

Healy decided that nothing fundamentally decisive had really happened in Cuba. To this day he maintains that Cuba is capitalist. A free discussion of several years’ duration was held in the Socialist Workers party on the nature and results of the Cuban Revolution. The party ranks almost in their entirety decided that Cuba was a workers state.

This view, which had been reached in parallel fashion by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, became a strong element in healing the ten-year breach in the world Trotskyist movement.

At the same time, the outcome of the discussion greatly intensified the differences that had already appeared between the Socialist Workers party and the Socialist Labour League. In the Socialist Workers party, Robertson and Wohlforth, who stood in a minority on this question, were drawn politically toward Healy. He in turn decided that the best field of practical activity for them in the United States was to serve as a faction in the SWP run by remote control from London. This brought them into increasing violations of discipline, the upshot of which, after several warnings over a considerable period, was their expulsion.

Despite their common adherence to Healyism, Robertson and Wohlforth had differences with each other, including the tactical side of their struggle against the SWP. Unable to resolve these differences by themselves, they turned to Healy as the arbiter and were thus led into competition for his favor. Healy preferred Wohlforth, the main reasons being that Wohlforth came closer to sharing his ultraleft sectarian views on Cuba and on black nationalism as well as displaying a flattering degree of appreciation for the thought of Healy, particularly on the organizational level. However as can be gathered from the correspondence made available here, Healy’s choice of Wohlforth was not generally accepted, particularly among Robertson’s followers. To complicate matters, the Wohlforth, contingent was outnumbered by the other group. Thus if the two groups were combined, Robertson would exercise a majority. How to get around that without appearing to be against majority rule? A ticklish question!

Healy maneuvered for time, deferring consummation of the projected unification of the two groups, probably in hope that Wohlforth might pick up enough at Robertson’s expense to gain a majority. However, the scheme could not be put across in time for the conference. Healy delayed no longer. As Rose J. reports it ina letter included in this collection, “Mike Banda said the next day — ‘we decided to make war on you’!” That was when the moment of truth came for Robertson. Or as Rose J. so graphically puts it, that was when “the bull hit the fan.”

From a certain point of view, of course, it could be said that it was only a case of destiny utilizing Healy as a blind instrument to mete out poetic justice on Robertson for the way he flouted majority rule in the Socialist Workers Party for such a long period. Or, as a Freudian might see it — it was just a case of Robertson demonstrating once again that he is faction prone.

It is not clear from the documents how the Voix Ouvriere group really fitted into the strategy, explained rather boastfully by Healy in his letter to H. Turner and Sherwood, which called for inviting them to come to his conference so they could be kicked out of it.

Possibly this was Lambert’s contribution to the masterful wheeling and dealing. Healy favored it because he is in sad need of international reinforcements and because, in his general ignorance of things outside Britain, the declamations of the Voix Ouvriere group against “Pabloism” sounded very good — good enough to warrant putting them on the list for a ticket to the conference, compliments of the house.

When Healy learned during the conference for the first time what the group really stood for, he was flabbergasted. Some kind of state caps! China, these “theoreticians” maintained, is still capitalist although it is obviously a workers state, as all the facts show. What does that make the Voix Ouvriere group but state capitalist? Their position on China, in truth, sounded almost indistinguishable from Healy’s own position on Cuba. Instead of being the fox, as he had thought, he was in the position of the goose. There were no if’s, and’s or but’s about it; he had to get out of the trap … fast! With the energy typical of the man, he went to work at once; and, of course, succeeded beautifully. As he himself testifies, that was the plan from the beginning …

What did the wily politicians of Voix Ouvriere see in the conference? Probably a heterogeneous, amusingly ignorant, thoroughly unconscious grouping of British Insulars, American colonials and French syndicalists who stood at the beginning of a familiar enough road, one they themselves had traveled since they split from the Fourth International a quarter of a century ago. Now given an opportunity through a lucky break to play the role of teachers and mentors to a contingent already far enough advanced to be considered fellow travelers, they were only doing their duty in bringing consciousness into the common deliberations. Besides, in the way of immediate practical dividends, they stood a good chance of chipping off something, particularly from Lambert’s group.

On the political and theoretical level, the Voix Ouvriere delegation was not far wrong in their estimate of the conference. All these groups do stand at different milestones along the same road.

By taking the position that the state in Cuba today is capitalist in character, Healy, for instance, places in question the Trotskyist position that China, North Vietnam, North Korea, Yugoslavia and the other countries in Eastern Europe have overthrown capitalism and established workers states. He does this by virtue of the fact that in all these cases the same basic criteria apply as in CUba. Healy was challenged on this during the internal discussion in the SWP on the subject; as yet he has not bothered to respond. Probably it is beyond his depth. Nevertheless, the view that all these countries are state capitalist is the logical conclusion to Healy’s position on Cuba. Or rather it is a logical stage in the possible evolution of Healy’s state capitalist position on Cuba, for by the same reasoning, the Soviet Union is state capitalist and it can even be questioned that it was anything but state capitalist in the time of Lenin and Trotsky.

Such a view is erroneous, of course, so glaringly erroneous that even Healy draws back when a group like Voix Ouvriere congratulates him on his progress and beckons him to proceed further.

***

Last December, while Healy was getting out the publicity for his coming circus, the Fourth International held the Second Congress since Reunification (the eighth since the movement was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938). There was no attempt at describing it as more than it was, or pulling any bluffs.

Differences of opinion on some points were freely expressed at the congress. This was expected and, in fact, was welcomed as an indication of the democracy and free atmosphere reigning in the internal life of the movement. It was a serious gathering of delegates and observers from well-established sections and parties in a number of countries. Their main objective was to consolidate the reunification, bring the main political analyses of the movement up to date, and open a new stage of expansion for the world Trotskyist movement.

These aims were accomplished and a period of healthy growth can be expected on the basis of the very solid gains made since the reunification of the movement in 1963. The periodic funeral orations pronounced by its enemies have not succeeded in convincing the Fourth International that it is dead. It is very much alive and its prospects are excellent.

***

Since the documents included in this pamphlet all emanate from groupings that maintain that the Fourth International is either dead, bankrupt or sadly in need of reconstruction — due, as they explain it, to the influence of Pablo — it is not without interest that they have a significant new recruit to the gloomy view that the International founded by Trotsky must be buried or rebuilt from the ground up. The new recruit is Pablo himself. Pablo split after the Reunification Congress as a result of deepening political differences. He finally came to the conclusion that under its present leadership the Fourth International is finished and he gave up his option under the rules of democratic centralism of trying to win over a majority of the membership to his views.

Will the crepehangers welcome this distinguished newcomer to their ranks? They seem embarrassed. But Pablo’s voice, it must be admitted, does blend in rather harmoniously with Healy’s. Perhaps Healy should consider the question more closely.

Is it possible that Healy would seek a bloc with Pablo against the Fourth International? I would not venture to reply in the affirmative. On the other hand, Georges Kaldy of Voix Ouvriere, after the recent first-hand experience with Healy at the most impressive conference of its kind since 1938, deserves to be listened to attentively. His judgment of Healy and his circle is that “even in denouncing Pabloism, they could not rid themselves of the Pabloist methods of analysis.” With “Pabloism” that deeply ingrained in your system, nothing is ruled out, is it?

————————————————————————————–

186a Clapham High Street,

London, S.W.4, England

16th March, 1966

VERY URGENT

AWAITING YOUR REPLY IMMEDIATELY

Jim Robertson

Dear Comrade,

I have heard this afternoon from one of our Central Committee members who has seen Cde. Tishillan, that you may not be attending the International Conference which is being held from April 4th – 8th.

This will indeed be a big setback to the Conference since we want you as well as representatives of the Wohlforth group to be here. Cde. Tishman cannot under any circumstances be regarded as a representative of yours at this conference. He has no real knowledge of the present situation in the United States and he was not present at the Montreal discussions.

I am therefore asking you urgently to attend this Conference of the international movement, otherwise there cannot be in my opinion any real settlement of the problems in the United States.

Enclosed is a copy of a letter I have sent to Cde. Wohlforth.

Yours fraternally,

/s/ G. Healy

National Secretary

GH/JS

(Copy to Wohlforth)

***

186a Clapham High Street,

London, S.W.4, England

16th March, 1966

VERY URGENT

AWAITING YOUR REPLY

Tim Wohlforth

Dear Comrade,

I am enclosing a copy of a letter I am sending to Cde. Robertson. It seems to me absolutely impermissible that neither you nor he should attend the International Conference. Please understand that you cannot manoeuvre with the international movement. No matter what your difficulties are with your work in the United States,. you and he must attend.

I will personally take the floor at the conference and oppose both your absences.

Yours fraternally,

G. HEALY

National Secretary

GH/JS

(Copy to Robertson)

***

–FLASH–

New York

9 April 1966

TO ALL LOCALS, ORGANIZING COMMITTEES, AND MEMBERS AT LARGE:

Word has arrived by phone from our delegation that the SLL and the IC have broken off unity with Spartacist! The break came in the form of a full, savage at ack on the Spartacist by the SLL that totaled 18 hours. The attack was artificially precipitated by a super-inflated incident. Our delegation arrived late at one of the sessions. Upon arrival they were confronted with an attack from the floor by Healy and the SLL leadership characterizing their absence as an example of “American arrogance and chauvinism” and “pettybourgeois indiscipline.” We were denounced at one point or another as “Pabloites”, anti-democratic centralists, being in a bloc with the SWP, etc., etc. These attacks will continue in the pages of the Newsletter. The ACFI delegation participated fully in the assault. Fred Mazelis did a better job than Slaugter (leading SLLer) in denouncing us and explaining why we had to be broken or driven from the movement. After the ridiculous incident — coming late to a session without informing the chairman when no prior mention of such a “special rule” had been made — had been so grotesquely inflated, a verbal apology to the IC Conference for our “petty bourgeois indiscipline” was demanded of Comrades Robertson and our delegation. We of course refused and in a prepared statement stated that this was a violation of Leninist practice and represented singling out of the Spartacist for special “treatment”, using fear and intimidation as substitutes for international discipline based on political consciousness, and that to apologize would be to vote for false charges. After attacks and denunciations (with other IC delegates beaten into line by the SLL), we were expelled from the Conference. It was clear that, whatever incident was utilized, the attack on us had been planned before-hand. Michael Banda, editor of Newsletter, stated that they had decided to declare war on the “Americans” and the French “Voix Ouvriere” group. The VO group was also driven from the Conference after being similarly attacked.

Remarks made by Healy, as well as examination of previous experience with Healy (1962 and the Northern Conference) indicate that this was an attempt to blackjack us into “submission”, figuring that the process of unity had gone too far for us to pull back and that we would have to submit.

There are preliminary indications that a number of the members of ACFI are determined to consummate unity no matter what. We are not hostile to the members of ACFI, and remain in political solidarity with the International Committee. Whoever rejects this move by the SLL and wishes to solidarize himself with the Spartacist will be welcomed.

ALL PUBLIC SALES OF THE NEWSLETTER AND THE ACFI BULLETIN WILL BE DISCONTINUED IMMEDIATELY.

Until further notice this information must be kept inside our organization. We will have detailed information upon the arrival of our delegation on Monday.

We must stand firm in the face of this unprincipled attack. Nothing must get in the way of building a revolutionary movement here as part of the rebuilding of the Fourth International. Attempts may be made to “raid” our membership. Any communications or contact from ACFI or IC members should be reported immediately to the REB. A full report of the Conference and the break by the SLL will be mimeographed and sent out as soon as information is received or our delegation returns.

Granite Hardness!!

Al Nelson, National Office

***

London, 9 April 1966

To the Bay Area Spartacist Committee:

Dear Comrades,

I am sending this letter to you as a member of the Bay Area Spartacist Committee who was also a member of the delegation to the IC conference. As you know, we have been kicked out of the conference on the contrived groups [grounds?] of a breach of democratic centralism.

The immediate circumstances:

Many delegates and observers had been absent from parts of one or another session. Jim, who had been sick for 3 weeks and had spent the night working on a document, and had made a presentation of the Spartacist’s views in the morning, went over to take a nap in the afternoon. He mentioned to Comrade Healy that he was going. The next thing we knew, there was an announcement from the chairman that Jim had “requested” to be absent from this session. Then the bull hit the fan. The SLL was very angry because it seems that Comrade Mike Banda had prepared an answer to our views on Cuba. The rest of the delegation might have made it clearer that these views were not a personal contribution but from the Spartacist, and that the delegation had caucused over these points, although I did speak to explain why the charges of black nationalism which were leveled against us were unfounded and ludicrous. There was no basis for singling out Jim from among those who had missed parts of sessions. We were sharply aware of our junior status at the conference and felt that our contribution to the discussion would evoke little response.

All this is beside the point, for the incident was then used by Comrade Healy to open a vitriolic attack against the Spartacist organization. Healy said that Jim’s absence from the session, and refusal to state that this absence was a petty-bourgeois act, was deemed an act of contempt — a petty-bourgeois, reactionary act expressing the chauvinism of American Imperialism, etc. Gerry kept saying that he’s dealt with arrogant Americans before, Cannon and Hansen, and if there is one thing the Americans have to learn it is to take orders.

It became clear to us at this point that the SLL was using this to attack and exclude the Spartacist from the conference (as Mike Banda said the next day — “we decided to make war on you”!). In hindsight, it was probably a mistake for Jim not to have attended that session, or to have done, or said anything which could be misinterpreted, for that matter.

But I’m very saddened and fearful of the kind of mistake which leads the SLL to an almost Stalinist version of democratic-centralism. This concept of obeying the majority will to the extent of declaring oneself a petty-bourgeois expression of American chauvinism is quite dangerous and is part of the “methods” of fake Bolshevik discipline such as that practiced by the SWP to avoid political struggle with factions.

At the conference, there were signs of weakness on the obedience question. The fight they pick with us will enable them to rally their forces around for a while, but their capacity to maintain this kind of obedience won’t last. In other words, they’re in for some problems.

A very sad effect is that this lets the SWP with their rotten politics and organizational methods off the hook for a time. The SLL, like the SWP, has raised a similar type of “Bolshevik discipline” to a basic political principle, a methodological concept which supposedly differentiates workingclass organizations from petty-bourgeois organizations.

So, I guess, in addition to turning outward to educate people on Trotskyism, we will be dealing with a lot of attacks from the SLL and Wohlforth. So, shortly you will be getting the reports and documents from the conference.

We are very much in agreement with the basic principles of the IC. The strongest and best worked out point is on the crisis of leadership, though with the sectarian leadership of the SLL, this necessity of revolutionary leadership has been distorted in three areas: 1) the colonial revolutions, 2) the serious defeats, such as Indonesia, which are seen merely as a reflection of an increasing crisis of capitalism and the bureaucracy, rather than setbacks for the working class in addition, and 3) the inability to assimilate other groups, such as Voix Ouvriere and ourselves, which should be a part of the IC.

Well, on to a study of the French IC and the Voix Ouvriere groups. I find myself quite curious about them and the rest of the continent. My address in Paris will be in care of the Thomas Cook Travel Agency, 2 Place de la Madeline (mark “Passenger’s Mail”).

With warm and comradely greetings,

Rose J.

P.S. We have gotten some news from some of the other observers at the conference about what went on after we left. ACFI was the brunt of some attacks, evidently aimed at making clear once again just who is boss. Also a motion as proposed by Lambert, head of the French IC section, and adopted as part of the work of the Commission on rebuilding the F.I. It reads: “We agree to democratic centralism and intervention in principle, but at present it is impossible. The only method of arriving at decisions that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity.” This contradicts the excuses which were used to get rid of both the Voix Ouvriere group and the Spartacist, since 1) the attack on Voix Ouvriere was based on the assertion that the F.I. as an organization has not been destroyed (how can this be squared with the “impossibility” of democratic centralism?) 2) the demand for an apology was justified as the necessity for Spartacist to abide by the majority will through democratic centralism. The observers, from the Ceylonese LSSP(R) and the Danish Trotskyist party, previously sympathetic to the IC, were repelled by Healy and the SLL. They no longer believe that the IC under the leadership of the SLL can rebuild the Fourth International.

***

London

15th April, 1966.

To: Cde. H. Turner and

Cde. Sherwood

Dear Comrades,

We concluded the Third Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International a week ago.

There were present at this Congress delegates from Japan, Greece, France, Hungary and Britain. Those from the Congo and Nigeria were unable to obtain the necessary papers on time. There were observers from Denmark, Germany, Iraqui students in Great Britain, the French youth section Revolt, Young Socialists in Britain, Ceylon, the Voix Ouvriere in France, the American Committee for the F.I. and the Spartacist group from the United States.

The main political resolution and report before the Conference was adopted with only one vote against (Japan), his difference being that he and his group considered China state capitalist.

The main political strug~le at the Congress consisted in an attempt by the Voix Ouvriere group, and supported to some extent by the Hungarian delegate, to declare that the Fourth International had in fact collapsed and would have to be reorganised completely.

Considerable discussion took place on this point which in the opinion of the Congress was an attempt to play down the historical and theoretical struggle of the F.I. and in this way to open up the gates for an anti-theory tendency, especially represented by the syndicalist Voix Ouvriere. This trend was decisively repudiated.

As a result, the Congress in a very powerful way vindicated the fight of Trotsky in relation to Marxist theory and opened up the way to reconstitute the Fourth International on a very solid political foundation. A discussion revealed the connection between the theoretical struggle of the F.I. and party building today. It was in my opinion the most important congress of our movement since the founding congress in 1938. From the beginning of the Congress it was clear that the Robertson delegation were not at home in a Congress of this description. The English comrades made them as comfortable as possible and treated them with every courtesy due to visiting members from another country. It was clear, however, from the start that the relations within the delegation resembled that of a clique. We had the impression that insofar as Robertson said things that were correct he was in fact attempting to hide his real political opinions.

Things came to a head on the third day of the Congress when he made a report on the United States. He especially disagreed with the main line of the report made on behalf of the I.C. by Cde. Slaughter. He claimed that their role in the United States could only be that of a propaganda group, and in his speech implicitly adopted the Posadas attitude on Cuba, as a deformed workers’ state. Immediately after his report Conference broke for lunch and at the end of the meal, he asked me if it would be all right to leave the meeting to go to bed since he was working all night on a document. It should be understood here that Robertson had had at least four months to prepare this document prior to the Congress which he had not done. Instead he brought the anti-Trotskyist Mage into one meeting of the Negotiating Committee which this renegade effectively broke up. I told him that I would convey his request to the appropriate comrades controlling the congress and when the session resumed it was unanimously decided that he be requested to return to the Congress in order to hear the debate on his report. He refused to do this.

A number of delegates, including M. Banda, sharply criticised his report while his delegation remained silent. As soon as he returned to the evening session where the final summing up was to be made by Cde. Slaughter, he was asked to apologise to the Congress for not having attended the session. He refused to do this on the grounds that he did not know the rules. It was pointed out that these rules were implicit in all Bolshevik Congresses, otherwise everyone would do as he pleased. He refused to apologise and the Congress unanimously, including the observers from the Voix Ouvriere, decided that he should leave. At this point I proposed a motion that he should stay until the end of the session, thus giving him time to reconsider his position. This was approved with the Voix Ouvriere abstaining.

At the end of this session, Robertson while voting for the main amended resolution, abstained on the report of Cde. Slaughter on the grounds that he disagreed with the position in the United States In relation to the theoretical continuity of the Fourth International he voted for the midway position of Cde. Varga who at this point had proposed an amendment which was unanimously rejected, apart from the vote of the Hungarian delegation. Varga subsequently rejected Robertson’s support as unprincipled.

Robertson was then asked if he would carry out the unanimous request of the Congress and apologise for his attitude towards the Congress. He refused to do this and was accordingly asked to leave, with the proviso that the remainder of his delegation could remain and participate in the Congress. The content of Robertson’s statement was to the effect that Congress had no right to ask him to do something he did not want to do and this was not a Leninist conception.

I need not stress to you comrades the thoroughly reactionary attitude shown in this statement. It confirmed the opinion formed by all the leading comrades in the Congress of the idealist, pragmatic, petty-bourgeois basis of the Spartacist group. The Greek delegate, a comrade 76 years old who had been in the Trotskyist movement since its foundation asked Robertson to apologise and the latter laughed in his face. The decision to remove Robertson was unanimous, delegates and observers alike.

Prior to this episode, the Voix Ouvriere group had submitted a statement that if we did not recognise that Trotsky’s Fourth International was completely finished and needed to be rebuilt then they could not stay at the Congress. An appeal to them was made to stay and fight for their position but regardless of this they walked out of the Congress. When Robertson was asked as to his attitude to the Voix Ouvriere group behaviour, he declared that he thought they were good comrades but misguided. He retained his greatest venom and hatred for the congress itself, which he said had driven them out. In the debate preceding Robertson being asked to leave, many comrades dealt with this unprincipled amalgam and thoroughly exposed the real political face of Robertson. It must be stressed to all who are interested that the Congress was completely unanimous on the Robertson question. There have been far too many experiences of the role of cults and cliques in the Trotskyist movement, from Field in the early 30’s to Abern, Johnson and Haston in England. The essential basis of these combinations has always been anti-centralist.

Robertson would have liked a charter for a unified section in the United States with which he could do as he pleased, while strictly excluding the politics of the International except those aspects with which he had particular agreement. To have effected a unification on this basis would have been disastrous and would have strengthened the antiinternationalist trend of the S.W.P.

Some comrades might ask if our Montreal meeting served a useful purpose. We are confident that it did. We knew from the beginning the anti-internationalist attitude of this man and his tendency when they split from the Wohlforth group, but it was necessary to clarify before the entire international movement their real political positions. That is why we postponed the actual unification until after the International Congress. We had to bring him to the Congress the same as Voix Ouvriere in order to reveal the nature of these tendencies.

Some comrades might believe that our movement has taken a step back because there will be no unification. This is an entirely superficial activist conception of building the revolutionary party in the United States. Our movement in the United States has been considerably strengthened in a qualitative way. We can now proceed to draw the real lines of political differences between ourselves and Robertson. This group may for a while exist on the basis of renewed hostile activity towards the International Committee. In this, of course, it will find many supporters amongst the American radical petty bourgeois. But it cannot last because it has no political future. We think that the basis for the building of the movement in the United States must be on correct internationalist Trotskyist foundations. That is why we hope you will understand what took place at the Congress. If you have any points which you wish to write to me about I will be very pleased to answer them.

Yours fraternally,

G. Healy

***

New York, New York

April 30, 1966

Dear Comrade Healy,

Cde. Sherwood and I wish to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of April 15, 1966 in which you present an account of events at the London conference of the International Committee of the Fourth International. We, for our part, wish to acquaint you with our own approach and that of the Spartacist comrades prior to the conference as well as our reaction to the proceedings.

Spartacist recognizes its historic responsibility for the development of a working-class vanguard in the stronghold of world capitalism and the significance of this vanguard for mankind’s future. Our members consequently hailed the unity agreement between Spartacist and the American Committee for the Fourth International arrived at in Montreal as an important step in the process of building this revolutionary vanguard and wholeheartedly welcomes the prospect of the reestablishment of an international of revolutionary Marxism.

Meaningful unity, in practical activity and in the progressive elimination of political differences between Spartacist and ACFI, seemed to be develcping — toward the SWP, on the Negro Question, and on economic perspectives in the United States. we therefore saw excellent prospects ahead for the rapid growth and influence of the Spartacist League-to-be. Similarly, we foresaw a reconstructed F.I. gaining in numbers and influence on a world scale, particularly now that the ideological shipwreck of the Pabloist revisionists following events in Algeria, Indonesia, Cuba, and Africa.

The possibility that Cde. Robertson would be expelled or that the Voix Ouvriere group would withdraw from the conference was never entertained by any of our members. Extraordinary attention was therefore paid by the New York local membership to the full account of the positions and actions of our delegates and to the conference proceedings presented to them two days before the receipt of your letter. Your account of the conference serves to reenforce the report by Cde. Robertson and makes very clear that the Socialist Labour League leadership which organized and directed the conference, and you in particular, chose to focus on and magnify either secondary theoretical differences or minor procedural disagreements in the spirit of Stalinist monolithism and not in a manner consistent with Trotskyist principle and organizational practice.

Thus, the SLL leadership insisted on the V.O. group giving up the erroneous conception held since 1943 that the F.I. had been both organizationally and politically destroyed, refused to accept Cde. Varga’s amendment that the world movement had managed to maintain political continuity, and treated the Spartacist delegation’s support to Cde. Varga’s amendment as a monstrous deviation. You fulminate about an “unprincipled amalgam”. Yet our document, “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International” written in 1963 and reprinted in our first edition of SPARTACIST in February-March 1964 states that the manifestation of the ” …theoretical, political, and organizational crisis” of Trotskyism” …has been the disappearance of the Fourth International as a meaningful structure.”, that “The struggle for the Fourth International is the struggle for a program embodying the working-class revolutionary perspective of Marxism.”, and that “The Trotskyists, lineal continuers of the earlier stage, have an indispensable contribution to make to this struggle [the overthrow of the Soviet bureaucracy]: the concept of the international party and of a transitional program required to carry through the political revolution.” As can be seen, Spartacist held a position identical with Cde. Varga’s amendment for approximately three years. Moreover, you were thoroughly acquainted with this position, or should have been. Had Cde. Varga not presented his amendment to the conference, it would have been completely correct for our delegation to have done so.

You similarly attacked Cde. Robertson’s report for reaffirming Spartacist’s position on Cuba as a deformed workers’ state — a position also held by us for at least three years. You did this despite the existence of complete programmatic agreement between the SLL, ACFI, and Spartacist on this question, e.g., overthrow of the Bonapartist bureaucracy, establishing of workers’ power, unconditional defense of the Cuban Revolution, etc. Your letter seems to indicate that our Cuba position came as a surprise to you. Yet our documents, both internal and external, e.g., SPARTACIST Nos. 2 and 3, have been made available to you over the years. Furthermore, you personally engaged in extended debate on just this question with Spartacist comrades in Montreal last winter. You must also have been aware that Spartacist was prepared to subordinate this position, as a democratic centralist organization, to that of the world movement after full discussion and binding vote.

Again you attack Cde. Robertson in your letter for stating that Spartacist sees the immediate tasks of revolutionary Marxists in the U.S. to be the building of a viable propagandist organization. You must be aware that Robertson meant by this what Lenin meant when he wrote of the work of the propagandist who “counts in thousands” and who must “still concentrate on winning the proletariat’s vanguard” (Left-wing Communism). You must certainly be acquainted with Spartacist’s record of involvement in trade-union, anti-war, and Negro rights struggles, and therefore have known that Robertson was not proposing a literary orientation for the movement in the U.S., but merely pointing out that our activity at this time can only have an exemplary quality and cannot pose the question of leading the class.

Your account of the conference is both malicious and dishonest. Thus you do not indicate that Robertson had, in effect, apologized to the conference for missing a session in a written statement which pointed out that he had not been aware of the European rules of procedure and that no discourtesy to the conference had been intended. Neither do you indicate that the apology you had demanded would have been a demeaning and false confession to a petit-bourgeois outlook, American chauvinism, and capitulation to Black Nationalism.

Your statement that from the start ” … relations within the delegation resembled that of a clique” and that Robertson initially tried to “hide his real political opinions” is contrary to all that is known about Cde. Robertson and the actual relations obtaining within Spartacist. It is because Robertson and the members of our tendency are not trimmers and would not call a centrist swamp a revolutionary organization that a split in the Revolutionary Tendency was engineered by Wohlforth and Muller with your help in 1962. It was precisely the refusal by Robertson and other members of our tendency to hide their real political opinions that enabled Wohlforth and Muller to conspire with the SWP majority to have our tendency expelled. It is just because Robertson and the members of Spartacist do not conceal their views that their positions have been completely consistent and have stood the test of time from 1962 until today — on the Negro, the Russian (China, Cuba) and the American Questions. Compare this record with Wohlforth’s gyrations!

As for Cde. Robertson and relations within Spartacist, Robertson owes his position of leadership in our organization to his knowledge of Marxism, his devotion to the revolutionary movement, and to the quality of his leadership. Robertson, more than any other leader of our organization, is responsible for the fact that Spartacist has attempted to function as a model Bolshevik organization. Thus, Spartacist is democratic centralist in character with minorities having the right to publish and express their views within the organization and to representation on higher bodies. The minutes of our local and central committee meetings will show both the dynamic interaction of ideas and the unity in action of a revolutionary Marxist organization.

Your characterization of Shane Mage as an anti-Trotskyist renegade who broke up a session of the negotiations of the Joint Unity Committee after being “brought” into it by Robertson is also spiteful and untrue. Mage has recently and publicly revealed political differences with Spartacist which, in our opinion, effectively removes him from the ranks of revolutionary Marxists. However, he is neither anti-Trotskyist nor a renegade. Mage was a central committee member at that time and, therefore, had every right to attend a session of the JUC. He was “brought” into the session because of his considerable background in economics and before his differences with Spartacist had emerged. It was not Mage who broke up the meeting but Wohlforth! Wohlforth deliberately aborted the perspectives discussion by failing to respond to criticisms raised by Mage and other Spartacist representatives. Your purpose in interjecting Mage’s name into your report is clearly an attempt to identify Spartacist’s politics with Mage’s present outlook. An old trick, Cde. Healy! On this basis, the SLL could be smeared with the present politics of Ken Coates, Peter Fryer, or Brian Behan.

Several other questionable points require answers which were raised either by your letter or at the conference.

You indicate that “implicit” rules of procedure “in all Bolshevik Congresses” prevent a member of a delegation from absenting himself without prior permission from the Congress. Can you cite any written precedent in any previous Bolshevik Congress for this rule?

Do the minutes of the third day of the Congress indicate that Voix Ouvriere voted with the Congress to expel Robertson? Did anyone from the V.O. group or observers from other groups witness the incident you recount in which Robertson was supposed to have laughed in the face of the 76 year old Greek delegate who asked him to apologize? I must inform you that a copy of your letter is being sent to the V.O. group and to other delegates for their answers to the above questions.

You state in your letter that you brought the Spartacist delegation to the London conference (at great expenditure of their money and time) only to expose “before the entire international movement their real positions.” How can we reconcile this statement with your expressed views in Montreal last winter about the necessity and desirability of unity based upon our agreement with the I.C. perspectives resolution and our agreement with other fundamental documents of Trotskyism, e.g., the transitional program, and the principles embodied in the decisions of the first four congresses of the Communist International? When were you being dishonest, then or now?

Much was made at the conference of Robertson’s supposed American chauvinism. Why does your letter not say a

word about this?

A final question, assuming for a moment that Cde. Robertson is the individual you say he is, when in the history of revolutionary tlarxism has the personality and attitudes of an individual rather than the politics and program of a movement been the basis for a decision on unity? Can you offer a single precedent?

You indicate that Spartacist “may for a while exist on the basis of renewed hostile activity toward the International Committee.” This concept is also completely erroneous. We have never initiated hostile activity toward the I.C. and do not contemplate it now. We intend to maintain a correct attitude toward the I.C. indicating that we share with them the same spectrum of political views. We consider ourselves to be a part of international revolutionary Marxism. We will defend ourselves from public attack, but it is not our desire to advertise the unprincipled attacks on Cde. Robertson and Spartacist by the SLL leadership. We will, of course, reserve the right to disagree publicly with the SLL when we do so in principle.

We cannot help feeling bitter about the temporary setback to the world movement and to our prospects in the U.S. We hold the SLL leadership responsible for this and for the resultant aid and comfort given to the SWP and to Pabloist revisionists internationally. You have also given delight to Stalinists of all varieties who have for years attacked Trotskyists as unprincipled splitters.

The reason for the behavior of the SLL leadership toward the Spartacist delegation is not hard to find. You obviously wish to create a Trotskyist movement in the U.S. which would be completely subservient to the SLL leadership. Your attacks on Robertson were designed to make him knuckle under and adopt an attitude of humble worship for the omniscient British leadership. You were not interested in creating a movement united on the basis of democratic centralism with strong sections capable of making theoretical contributions to the movement as a whole and of applying Marxist theory creatively to their own national arenas. You wanted an international after the manner of Stalin’s Comintern, permeated with servility at one pole and authoritarianism at the other. You are attempting to fashion an international modeled after the internal regime of the SLL and currently in vogue in your youth movement.

The question is why such a profoundly anti-Leninist organizational approach should exist. Your origin from a bureaucratically degenerated Communist movement and your carry-over of organizational practices obtaining there may be a factor as may traditional petit-bourgeoise British insularity acting to produce a caricature of internationalism. An adequate answer will have to be sought in the historical development of an SLL leadership molded under the pressures of social classes. “Any serious fight in the party is always in the final analysis a reflection of the class struggle,” said Trotsky.

The bureaucratic practices of the SLL leadership would seem to relate to the theoretical incapacity shown by the followers of Trotsky after the second World War with the development of deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe and China. Under cnnditions of pronounced isolation of the world movement from the working class, the revisionists abandoned a working-class revolutionary perspective for an orientation toward petit-bourgeois formations such as Stalinist bureaucrats, social-democratic labor bureaucrats, and the nationalist leaderships of the colonial countries The British Trotskyists while having correctly and necessarily attacked the revisionists for their capitulations, have similarly demonstrated an incapacity to creatively develop Marxism, as witness their current position on Cuba as a capitalist state. The British leaders seem to have responded to the “theoretical, political, and organizational crisis” of Trotskyism by retreating into “orthodoxy,” Their reaction to revisionism seems to have been that of high priests entrusted with the protection of holy writ; thus the emergence of an iron-fisted, authoritarian leadership.

Bureaucratic centralism is also an abandonment of the working class in its own way. The bureaucratic centralism of the SLL, in separating the top leadership from the party ranks, acts to reinforce the isolation of the movement from the working class and from validation of the party’s tactics and program. Certain sectarian and ultra-left approaches by the SLL in the recent past are explainable on this basis: for example your bragging that at the Morecambe Young Socialist conference, your youth tore up the leaflets of the Young Communist League distributors and “sent them packing,” A contradiction has now developed between the organizational methods which were possible under conditions of deep isolation from the working class of a numerically weak movement and the present position and potential of the British workers under conditions whereby decaying British capitalism is attempting a solution to its problems on the backs of these same workers The prospects for British Trotskyism are bright with the SLL currently the largest party of Trotskyism in the world and having a large base among British youth.

For these bright prospects to be realized, it is essential that the SLL abandon the organizational methods now prevalent under the regime of Healy and Banda. These methods will act as a brake on the future development of the movement and prevent the SLL from meeting its responsibility, now being placed on the historical agenda, to root itself in the working class and give it leadership.

The desire to manipulate and dictate to other national sections is a negation of internationalism. Unfortunately, some of our new, young cadres and potential recruits may take the bureaucratic behavior of the SLL leadership for good internationalist. coin and thereby be drawn toward a narrow, ingrown nationalism. We shall do everything in our power to guard against such a development. We well know that the abandonment of internationalism leads to the political death of revolutionists It is our hope that future developments will soon enable Trotskyists to unite to provide the international working class with the vanguard movement without which world capitalism, the enemy of mankind, cannot be vanquished.

This response to your letter was formulated by both Cde. Sherwood and myself. We would be pleased to receive your reaction to it.

Fraternally yours,

Harry Turner

***

COMMENTS ON THE LETTER OF COMRADE HEALY TO COMRADES TURNER AND SHERWOOD ON THE THIRD CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE

Healy’s discussion on the debate over the state of the Fourth International is rather unsatisfactory. As a matter of fact, the debate on that issue at the Conference itself was extremely confused, largely because of the vague and often incantatory way in which the I.C. delegates used the term “Fourth International”. To pose the question, “Is the Fourth International dead or alive?” full-stop, is simply meaningless. On the one hand, the Fourth International can be regarded as simply the fundamental tenets of Trotskyism, which includes the idea that a world revolutionary party is a necessary pre-requisite to successful socialist revolution. In this minimal sense, the Fourth International is synonomous with Trotskyism and is obviously very much alive. At the other end of the spectrum one can regard the Fourth International as a full-bodied international revolutionary party, whose ultimate validity will not be secure until it has led the working class to power on a world scale. In this sense, the Fourth International is not only dead, but has never existed. Between these two extremes, exists a wide spectrum of organizational forms, and programmatic and theoretical concepts, which can be considered as representing the Fourth International or not, depending upon how one uses that term.

However, it should be clearly stated that the discussion was not really about the definition of the term “Fourth International”, or still less about the historical and theoretical continuity of the Trotskyist movement. That was simply a thin rationale to disguise the real issue, which was whether the present International Committee, in which the Socialist Labour League is far and away the most important national section, constitutes the sole organized successor to the Trotskyist movement. That this is he case was indicated by the S.L.L. delegates at the Conference and also in Healy’s present letter, particularly the section discussing the relationship between “Robertson’s group” and “the International”. In fact, the whole business was a crude semantic ploy to identify the S.L.L. leadership with the Fourth International and the Fourth International with Trotskyism, so that any criticism of the leadership of the S.L.L. would appear to be a criticism of Trotskyism.

The assertion in paragraph No.5, that Voix Ouvriere’s opposition to the amendment was based on their “anti-theory” position (another meaningless phrase — evaluation and organization of thought is a necessary part of the cognitive process) is incorrect. V.O.’s position that the Fourth International is dead seems to stem from a well-documented historical interpretation of the Trotskyist movement, the substance of which is that the main organs of the F.I. have been Pabloite since 1940. One may accept or reject this interpretation, but it does not reflect “anti-theory syndicalism”.

Comrade Healy’s astute observations of our delegation’s behavior at the C,onference are not worth commenting upon.

On paragraph No. 10 — Comrade Robertson did not “implicitly adopt a deformed workers’ state position on Cuba”, he explicitly stated it, although his analysis was quite different from that of Posadas.

On paragraph No. 11 — The statement that the Spartacist delegation remained silent during criticism of our positions, with the implication that we were unable to answer the trenchant criticisms of our position, is almost the exact opposite of the truth. A speakers’ list had been prepared the previous day and no more Spartacists were listed. Comrade Jersawitz attempted to get on the list, was refused permission and finally was allowed permission to speak for five minutes, during which time she carefully explained that we were not supporters of Black Nationalism. This is a good example of the appositeness of Comrade Banda’s criticism.

On paragraph No. 13 — Comrade Robertson did not say “that the Conference had no right to ask him to do something he did not want to do”. He said that neither the Conference, nor anyone else, for that matter, had the right to make him say something he didn’t believe to be true — i.e., to apologize for something he did not think was wrong — although he said, had he known of this rule (a rule which apparently applied to no one else), he would have allowed it.

The logical process by which Healy derived from this single statement the conclusion that it “confirmed” (? — and what is the other evidence?) … “the idealist, pragmatic, petit-bourgeois basis of the Spartacist group.” (An organization of over 80 members and a three-year history), is beyond my meager understanding. It should be noted that the S.L.L. is a group which prides itself on its “anti-impressionism”.

Paragraph No. 14, on V.O.’s leaving the Conference, is a pack of lies. V.O. did not leave the Conference because the Conference refused to accept their position on the state of the F.I. Nor did they submit any requests that the Conference do so. They left because during the discussion on the subject numerous personal attacks were made upon them; they were called petit-bourgeois enemies of Trotskyism. At one point, Healy claimed that if he had known their real position, he never would have invited them to the Conference. Their criticisms of the main resolution were published a month before the Conference. At this point, it should be emphasized that the statement saying “the Fourth International was dead and had to be rebuilt” was a statement in the main I.C. resolution, the basic document of the Conference and the one on which groups were invited to the Conference and agreed to come. The controversy arose when the I.C. leadership attempted to amend their own major document, with an amendment which said, in effect, “Fourth International is alive, and We’re it”.

Paragraph No. 15 dealing with the Spartacist and supposed political differences with the I.C. is interesting. Unless one regards “the International” as a kind of sacred document, which one accepts or rejects en toto, differences between the Spartacist and the majority of the I.C. have nothing to do with the Spartacist’s “internationalism”, but simply represent differences between two political organizations, which should be resolved by the usual democratic processes, designated for that purpose. It is strange that methods of settling political differences within the I.C. or the organization of the I.C. in general was one topic not discussed at the Conference. It is even stranger when one considers that, had the unity taken place, the Spartacist and its present leadership would have constituted the majority faction of the second or third largest national section of the I.C., which now has six national sections, three of them very small indeed.

To be fair to Healy on this point, it should be noted that he never irtended to go through with the unity agreement anyway, so possibly he regarded it as an unimportant point.

Paragraph No. 16 speaks all too eloquently for itself.

Paragraph No. 13 again, Comrade Robertson did not laugh in the face of Comrade Raktos.

In closing, I would again like to remind the comrades that Comrade Healy is a liar.

received

7 May 1966

Mark Tishman

Alternate Delegate

Spartacist League

to the 1966 International

Committee Conference

***

Coordinating Committee,

American Committee for

the Fourth International

19 April 1966

Dear Comrades,

Two weeks have passed since the spokesman for the Spartacist delegation was expelled from the London Conference. This action was taken upon the initiative of G. Healy of the British Socialist Labour League despite the exhibition by Spartacist of its clear-cut political solidarity with the International Committee even under conditions of extreme provocation. This exclusion of our organization, supported by your delegation, effectively disrupted the projected fusion of our two groups.

As a pre-condition for a responsible outcome to the present situation, we believe that the membership of our two organizations should have the opportunity to hear and compare conference reports by participants in the two delegations.

Therefore we ask for a joint New York membership meeting to be scheduled at the earliest convenient date to hear the delegates and discuss fully and freely the alternatives open before us now.

We also ask that a Spartacist delegate to the IC Conference speak to your Minneapolis local, either along with an ACFI reporter or sephrately as you wish. If this is acceptable we would readily grant the same privilege to your organization to speak before our San Francisco Bay Area group and in any case would seek to bring our entire East Coast membership into the NYC joint meeting where they could hear and discuss reports on the Conference and resulting situation facing us.

We make these proposals because we continue to believe firmly that a fusion in the U.S. of the principled Leninist type projected in the Montreal agreement remains a political responsibility for genuine Trotskyists.

Fraternally,

J. Robertson, for the Spartacist

National Office

***

April 22, 1966

J. Robertson

Spartacist National Office

New York, N.Y.

Dear Comrade Robertson,

In reply to your letter of April 19 the Coordinating Committee of the American Committee for the Fourth International states as follows:

The American Committee for the Fourth International concurs completely with the actions of the International Committee on Spartacist. It is our oplnlon that your organization has broken politically in an unprincipled manner with the world Trotskyist movement. Since we maintain our political solidarity with the International Committee we view your organization as an opponent organization and must conduct ourselves accordingly. Unification between the two groups is out of the question.

Under such conditions a joint membership meeting along the lines of the one held prior to the IC conference is of course out of the question. Your proposal assumes a relationship between our two groups completely apart from solidarity with the International movement. However, if you wish to organize a formal debate to explain the positions of the two organizations before the memberships in New York this would be acceptable to us.

If we are able to work out debate arrangements in New York City it should be simple to organize similar debates elsewhere. The next issue of the Bulletin will explain our position more fully.

Fraternally,

D. Freeman, for the

Coordinating Comm.,

American Comm. for

the Fourth Int.

***

2 May, 1966

Coordinating Committee,

A.C.F.I.

Dear Comrades,

We are in receipt of your letter of 22 April responding to our request for joint membership meetings to hear and discuss the reports of our two delegations to the London Conference.

We regret your absurdly false accusation that we have “broken politically … with the world Trotskyist movement” and your willfully hostile self-characterization as an “opponent organization” to us.

Nonetheless we believe the complete and sudden somersault on reunification of our two groups and the resulting confusion makes it mandatory for us to seek whatever discussion and clarification we can. Therefore we are willing to settle for the formal debate between our groups which you make clear is the only form of oral discussion between us you would accept.

As regards the debate in New York City we propose that it be held on Saturday evening, the 21st of May. Because many of our comrades will drive long distances to attend, a Saturday evening meeting would maximize our participation and avoid compelling comrades to drive all night. We cannot propose an earlier date because the preceding Saturday will be the occasion for mass picketing of the student draft deferment tests and many of our comrades will be involved. And to set a later date would again cut deeply into the attendance of student comrades because of the scheduling of school final examinations.

In line with the usual practices for such events we propose holding the meeting in a neutral, rented hall with either an agreed, acceptable outside chairman or failing that two chairmen, one from each group, with one presiding over the first half and the other over the second half of the debate. We accept the standard arrangements for formal debates of this sort: that the speaking order be set by the toss of a coin; that floor discussion be held tightly to one round of three minutes each; and that summaries be reversed. We suggest that the speaking times be: presentations by each reporter — 1.5 hours each; summaries — 0.5 hour each; that total speaking time for each reporter be held rigidly to within the set amount of time by the chairman, but that small shifts of time between presentation and summary be permitted if desired by the speaker.

We further propose that all other details be explicitly worked out in advance by consultation between our two NYC organizer.

We request that you inform us as soon as possible when it would be convenient for you to schedule a similar debate

in the Twin Cities.

Fraternally,

J. Robertson,

for the REB.

***

May 5, 1966

James Robertson

Resident Editorial Board

Spartacist

Dear Comrades,

We are in receipt of your letter dated May 2nd on the matter of a debate between our two organizations over the Third World Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

We are referring this letter, as we have our past correspondence, to the International Committee for its opinion.

As soon as we receive a reply from the IC, we will get in touch with you.

Yours fraternally,

Daniel Freeman for

the Coordinating Committee,

American Committee’

for the Fourth

International

***

AFTER THE APRIL 1966 CONFERENCE WHICH TOOK AS ITS TASK TO RECONSTRUCT THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

By Georges Kaldy

[The following article has been translated from the May 2, 1966 Voix Ouvriere, semimonthly newspaper of a group in France that stands “For the construction of a Revolutionary Workers party.” Subheadings appear in the original.]

Today, as much as in the past, every individual revolutionary and every revolutionary organization feels the cruel lack of a revolutionary international which would be able to analyze the experience of the class struggle on a world scale and establish an organizational and political link between the revolutionary vanguards of the industrialized countries, the underdeveloped countries and the countries ruled by the bureaucracy.

The Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 has been the only international organization whose program was compatible with revolutionary activity, but it was never able to playa leading role in the class struggle. After the death of its founder, the Fourth International ended by foundering on the shoals of petty-bourgeois opportunism and gave birth to what. is known today as Pabloism, which amounts to the abandonment of Marxism, both organizationally and politically.

There is no International today even in the formal sense. Four fragments of it survive, each claiming that it alone continues the Fourth International of Trotsky’s time.

The so-called official Fourth International led by Frank and Germain.

The Latin-American Bureau of Posadas.

The so-called “Marxist-Revolutionary” tendency of Pablo.

 And the International Committee.

Until recently, the latter, which bases itself on the 1952 split, was the only one of these groups which demonstrated an entirely relative modesty by not calling itself “The Fourth International.” It was this group which recently called an International Conference with the aim of reconstructing the Fourth International. (We have dealt with this conference and our attitude toward it and the groups that called it on several occasions, in nos. 53, 55, 56 and 57 of our paper.)

Our Participation

We decided to take part in this congress. First of all, we cannot stand aside from any attempt to recreate an international revolutionary organization. And secondly, because we found three positive elements in the draft document of the I.C. and in the attitude of the host organizations:

1. A sharp, definitive critique of Pabloism, of both its organizational and political principles.

2. MOST IMPORTANTLY — the Fourth International is DEAD and therefore it MUST BE RECONSTRUCTED IN ITS ENTIRETY and there can be no question of simple adherence to any of the existing shops, including that of the I.C., as the document recognized.

3. The I.C appeared to disavow the antidemocratic organizational concepts of the Fourth International in the years 194-3-52.

We proposed to participate on a CRITICAL basis and we made that clear in advance. For we had no political illusions about the organizations that make up the International Committee, either before or after the conference. Their past both in the Fourth International and after the split, has been an aggregate of monumental political mistakes, beginning with their nationalism during the war, and continuing with their analyses of Yugoslavia, of the Peoples Democracies, of China, and more recently of the MNA [Mouvement National Algerien].

Their document itself proved that even in denouncing Pabloism, they could not rid themselves of the Pabloist methods of analysis. We made all these criticisms prior to the conference. We said that the most serious fault in their document was that although they condemned Pabloism vigorously, they were unable to explain HOW and WHY it appeared and how to fight against the causes of such a phenomenon.

Nevertheless, we participated in the conference, because, even if its organizers were unable to analyse the causes of Pabloism, in breaking with Pabloism and in stating that the International no longer exists, the I.C. had laid the necessary foundations for such an analysis. From there a serious discussion on the causes of the failure of the Fourth International, and thus on the methods by which to reconstruct it, could be initiated.

In contrast to the other fragments who content themselves with a fictitious International (or Internationals), which exists only in their own minds, and to which they can give no reality, and with which they are perfectly content, one group originating in the International had the courage to half-open its eyes to the sad reality. To be sure, that was very little, all the more since they were men who, in the face of the enormity of the task, might well quickly close their eyes again and return to their ever so much more comforting and, above all, more convenient illusions.

It was very little but it was a chance that had to be taken.

Obvious Lack of Seriousness

Unfortunately, our expectations were confirmed during the conference, as our predictions in 1943 have been confirmed with the elapse of time.

We found ourselves confronted with organizations which were incapable of discussing the real problems, the methods and the tasks of the construction of a world revolutionary organization. We found people who made a pretense of analysis by playing with words. We were confronted with people who, instead of making an attempt to explain the reason for the failure of the International spent their time in congratulating themselves on the past, which, as one of them said, “gives us no cause to blush.”

We certainly did not go there to make anyone blush and, certainly, we had no idea that we could do it. But, all things considered, if thirty years after its founding, the International does not exist otherwise than in the program left by Trotsky; if the balance sheet of the organizations that make up the Fourth International comes to nothing or almost nothing, after twenty years; if the Trotskyist organizations have never been able to compete for the leadership of the proletariat with the reformist and Stalinist machines, anywhere or at any time; isn’t there some reason for it?

Did we go there to discuss, or to learn what would make each other blush?

We were confronted with people whose internationalism scarcely went beyond the limits of the conference hall. Not that declarations and speeches were lacking! But it would seem that a necessary, if not sufficient precondition for engaging in an international discussion with other groups would be a knowledge of their political positions.

But there were leading delegates there who meted out their advice and their thunderbolts, with an admirable selfsufficiency, to groups of which they knew nothing at all except that they existed!

Thus the major speaker for the principal host organization stated on the third day of the conference that he had learned with amazement about our position on China only that morning and by chance!

Let us leave aside the fact that it could amaze a Trotskyist to define as bourgeois a state which was established without the participation of the proletariat and in opposition to it. We must bless the happy chance that gave the comrade in question the opportunity to learn of our position on a vital question.

We might note, all the same, that there are many other ways besides happy chance through which an international leader can learn the position of a group which he proposes to advise, one of them being through reading their press!

Is this just an anecdote?

Yes, but it reveals the lack of seriousness with which they dealt with questions which were serious.

Reconstruct or Rebuild?

In this conference where the length of the speeches could scarcely make up for the emptiness of the remarks, we were treated like troublemakers when we tried to initiate discussion on the real problems. Indeed, there was no discussion. Just like the International in 1943, its present day fragment refused discussion, and in a way which was quite characteristic.

If, in taking the floor, we did not convince the I.C., at least they got a better understanding of their own draft document. They came to understand what we hoped they had understood– namely; that stating that the Fourth International no longer exists carries with it the obligation to analyze the causes for its failure. They understood, in a word, that what they had written contained the kernel of our criticism and implied our analysis.

But we can only believe that they are incapable of making this analysis. In fact, in the very middle of the conference, rather than undertake this analysis, they chose to revise their own document! By means of an amendment added to a secondary phrase, they completely changed the spirit of their own draft resolution. Here is the original phrase:

“Petty-bourgeois opportunism, in the shape of a hardened revisionist tendency penetrating all sections of the Trotskyist movement, has destroyed the Fourth International as an organization founded on the Transitional Programme and now necessitates a complete break from the theoretical, political and organisational methods of the revisionists.”

The amendment proposed to modify this sentence by beginning with:

“The Fourth International defended itself against and won a victory over petty-bourgeois opportunism which … etc.”

While the original edition said that the International had been destroyed, according to the amendment the same International was not only very much alive but had won a victory!

We had to tell them that if this amendment was voted, the ENTIRE meaning of the document would be changed, including the conclusion where it says:

“The Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky no longer exists,” and including the title which speaks of the “reconstruction of the Fourth International.”

It is true that one of the zealous supporters of the amendment, the editor of La Verite, realized that it was hardly logical to speak of the reconstruction of something that had never been destroyed. With a fine eye for delicate shades of meaning, he proposed to replace the word, “reconstruct,” now considered to be inadequate, with the word, “rebuild” [rebatir].

We were not the only ones to lose our way in these subtleties. The translator — no pun intended — also got lost. Although up to then he had translated the French word, “re-construction,” with the English word, “rebuilding,” he now resolved the difficulty brilliantly by translating the word “rebatir” [rebuild] with the Gallicism, “reconstruction.”

At a congress which had been called originally to discuss the task of the RECONSTRUCTION of the International, we learned that this International had not been destroyed, and that thanks to the I.C. the continuity of the International had been safeguarded!

And what is more, before continuing, or more exactly, really beginning the discussion, it was demanded that we vote on a document according to which the Fourth International continues to exist and that it is none other than the International Committee. Naturally, we refused. And since our participation in the conference had lost its point, we left the hall.

It is easy to offer quotations where those who identified the Fourth International with the International Committee during the conference, developed a diametrically opposite idea.

The draft resolution itself from beginning to end dealt with the question of an International which had been “destroyed” or no longer existed, etc.

We will add some quotations from the preparatory documents of the French section:

The pamphlet published by La Verite on this subject (p. 4) referred to the destruction of the Fourth International “as a coherent political whole.” In the French preparatory document, it is stated that “the development of the class struggle has confirmed the program of the Fourth International but it has DESTROYED the International.”

Elsewhere, one reads:

“The I.C. is NOT the Fourth InternationaL .. ,” etc.

We could quote more abundantly; there is quite a choice. But we know that a few contradictions will not bother the I.C. No doubt, they will even find a way of claiming that there is no contradiction there and that the terms, the destroyed International and the living International, which is identified with the I.C., mean the same thing. No doubt, they will add also that anyone who doesn’t understand this understands nothing about dialectics!

We will be delighted to read in the next number of La Verite how these comrades explain the positions they took in the I.C., in view of what they wrote in the two previous issues of La Verite.

Unless they think (as is their habit) that their readers deserve no explanation for the change in their political attitude.

Lenin said that you can’t trap an opportunist with quotations. And we don’t want to trap the I.C. in this way.

We know the organizations of the I.C. too well to be surprised at the ease with which they tear up the evening’s documents the following morning.

Nonetheless, it must be said that they made a choice when they voted for the amendment. The former draft resolution contained an ambiguity which our remarks brought into the open.

The Pabloist Continuity

Anyone who says that the International has been destroyed must analyze the causes of its destruction; this, however, would force the I.C. to submit its own past to a severe and painful criticism. The I.C. has chosen the second path. Since it is incapable of analyzing the reason for this failure, it ended by denying that there was a failure.

The decision made by the I.C. is more than erroneous. It proves in reality the inability of the organizations which compose it to analyze and criticize the political and organizational methods which were at the origin of Pabloism and consequently their inability to break with it. It proves that the causes that engendered Pabloism in the majority of the International mortally infected the minority which broke, formally, with Pabloism.

We will not make a point of our numerical size with respect to the La Verite group, but it is certainly this incapacity of theirs which causes them to vegetate and to fail to develop, whereas in 1945 they had an organization that was able to get some tens of thousands of votes in the elections.

The decision made by the I.C. also proves that this organization, like the other fragments of the International contents itself in reality with illusions and grandiloquent phrases, and that it refuses even to discuss with those willing to seriously take up the task at hand.

The Incapacity of the I.C.

We left the conference with no regrets. But in leaving it, we did not break with the organizations in the International Committee. We break definitively with no one.

On the contrary, we will show these comrades that if they follow the same path they followed during and after the war, if they use the same methods, if they hold to the same attitudes, if they pursue the same policies; they will give up any chance of participating in building a real International which would play a leading role in the class struggle.

They would have their international conferences, perhaps. Their so-called “International,” so quickly reconstructed in two days, would doubtless grow from conference to conference, at least in words; in the same way that this meeting called to construct the International was transformed on the second day into the third conference of the International Committee.

And since reality will not yield to their desires, they will brush reality aside.

During our stay, we read an article in a recent issue of the Newsletter, the weekly paper of the English section of the I.C., devoted to the student strike against the Fouchet reform.

We read the following report: “Led by Trotskyists, 70 percent of the 23,000 students (from the Faculty of Law) went on strike on Wednesday [Thursday?], March 17.” There was something to pick up the morale of the English comrades. It is too bad that these 16,000 law students led by the Trotskyists exist only in the pages of theNewsletter, and not in the Faculty of Law in Paris!

Doubtless, they think that by brushing reality aside this will make their International stronger every day. But a revolutionary organization cannot be built on bluff. And you can’t build it with people who are satisfied with bluff.

It is not sufficient to proclaim yourself to be an heir of Trotsky to immediately achieve the stature of a great revolutionary.

Before any group proclaims itself to be an International in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, it must prove that it has the right to do that and prove it politically. If Trotsky’s writings educated an entire generation of militants, the same cannot be said for the stack of theses, documents, resolutions, proclamations and speeches published since 1945 by the organizations that call themselves the Fourth International. Furthermore, even for them, these documents are useless, if not superfluous and embarrassing. In any case they appear to pay little attention to them.

The I.C. can entertain illusions about itself, but other organizations are taken in much less than they think.

We know that the I.C., as such, is incapable of leading the necessary work of reconstructing the Fourth International. We have no confidence in the International Committee.

But we have great confidence in the Trotskyist movement.

For a Genuine New Course

We make no claim that we will reconstruct the International. But we know that it will be reconstructed and that we will have a role to play in this work.

We will play our role, and it is up to the I.C. to choose whether it will playa positive or merely an ineffectual role. It is beyond its strength to playa negative one.

We went to the conference to begin discussion on the tasks of reconstructing the Fourth International. Those that we found there were not ready to engage in this discussion. But it is our custom to do what we say we will do. Therefore, we will pursue this discussion, outside of the framework set by the I.C. certainly, but we will pursue it because it is vital for the future of the revolutionary movement.

Furthermore, we are certain to find favorable echoes inside the organizations of the I.C. themselves.

Because superficial unity based on documents which mean nothing and can bind no one since they can be disavowed three days later, shouldn’t fool anyone. Quite a few members of the delegations represented at the congress were not far from sharing our opinion on the nature of the tasks to be undertaken in order to do something else than reenact for the nth time the same play which has already proved a fiasco a number of times

What we want, what we are fighting for, is that the Trotskyist organizations which exist nearly everywhere in the world should take on this task, without hiding their weaknesses, without bluffing, without disrespect for their own ideas or for the ideas of others. We know that much effort and many struggles are necessary before an international revolutionary organization can be brought into being. But the effort required does not frighten us nor the distance which separates us from the goal.

And we will not abandon tomorrow’s reality for today’s illusions

Black Power–Class Power

Black Power–Class Power

Once Again On Black Power

[Reprinted from Spartacist West, Vol. 1, No. 8, 30 September 1966]

Until fairly recently the dominant tone of the black movement in this country, in its image if not its reality, was that set by the liberal integrationists, the Martin Luther Kings and the Bayard Rustins. Theirs was the politics of black liberalism. The goal was formal, legal, equality; civil rights; or the northernizing of the south. The beneficiaries of this campaign were to be that narrow segment of the black population which is middle class or close to it and is commonly called “the black bourgeoisie.” The political strategy was to seek the support of, and to avoid antagonizing, the liberal establishment, and, logically enough, to seek to bring to bear the powers of the federal government which is controlled by this establishment. The tactics to be used were characterized by a heavy reliance on non-violence and moral confrontation.

The civil rights movement was thus a coherent whole, one whose politics, tactics, and ideology were well adapted to the social stratum which led it and benefitted by it. The hitch, of course, was that this movement meant very little for the overwhelming mass of the black people in America, who are either working class or economically and socially marginal and hence even more deprived. The black troops of the bourgeois generals began to demand that the movement turn its attention to their needs. This pressure was able to throw up a militant left wing, mainly but not exclusively within SNCC. At the same time, the locus of the struggle began to shift to include the northern ghettos, the bastions as well as the prisons of the black masses.

In contrast to the reform program of the civil rights movement, the demands of the black masses are necessarily and inherently class demands, and demands which the ruling class cannot meet. The call for jobs, for housing, and for emancipation from police brutalization (attacking the very basis of the state)–these cannot be answered by another civil rights bill from Washington. Their pursuit leads inevitably to a sharper and sharper confrontation with the ruling class. It is this transition which is represented by the black power slogan. Its popularization represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces.

However, this development occurs at a time when the working class as a whole, except for its black contingent and isolated cases here and there, is quiescent, and in a mood to go along with the status quo. This contradiction between the black vanguard and the rest of the class distorts the black movement, and this distortion is reflected in the “black power” slogan. “Black power” has class content only conditionally, that is, the slogan in the abstract is classless, and takes on class content only from the specific historical context from which it emerges. This weakens the slogan profoundly, and opens it up to various kinds of abuse. It can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system. To Adam Clayton Powell the slogan means, or he hopes it will mean, just himself and a bunch of black aldermen.

For these reasons, the support that Marxists give to this slogan must be critical, seeking always to deepen its class content. To say that the slogan now has nothing to offer the white workers, has no appeal to them, is true, but irrelevant. This is an error into which I feel C.K.’s article in our previous issue falls. The black movement today sees the white working class mainly in the form of the Cicero rioters, to whose sensibilities no concessions are due. When the class as a whole, including its backward white section, emerges as a self-conscious and active force, then it will be possible realistically to raise the question of transcending the old slogan. “Black power” will become “workers’ power.” In the meantime, black power represents a new and more advanced stage of the social confrontation in America.

–G.W.

On the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

[The following material on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was produced by the Spartacist group during 1964-1965. The first piece is a lengthy article by Geoff White supplemented by a short leaflet directed to FSM activists on campus. Both were originally posted online at www.fsm-a.org ]

The Student Revolt at Berkeley

by Geoffrey White

[Originally published in Spartacist, May-June 1965. The FSM web site states on Whites involvement that “he ran for Berkeley City Councilman in April, 1965, receiving 2,051 votes (6%) ‘against a full slate of liberals.'”]

          The free speech revolt on the University of California’s Berkeley campus is another indication that the great society is unlikely to get beyond the press-agentcy stage. The revolt was, in the last analysis, directed against the values and assumptions that are essential to the liberal consensus, and indicates a deep-seated dissatisfaction, if not open revolt, among social groupings whom the establishment might legitimately expect to support it. The students and teaching assistants at Berkeley are not among the economically deprived marginal groups. They do not represent forgotten pools of poverty which the President’s domestic war is supposed to mop up. On the contrary, the students at Berkeley are by and large drawn from middle class families, especially the intelligentsia, and from the upwardly mobile working class. Regardless of their social origins, they have every prospect of being able to share in the benefits of the economy of abundance. A U.C. diploma, or advanced degree, is virtual assurance of split-level income opportunities for the aspiring student. The Great American Way of Life is open and accessible to these students, and this fact gives their rejection of the established way a profound meaning.

          Attempts by the detractors of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) to dismiss the whole matter as confined to a few disaffected radical students are futile in the face of the mass participation which the events evoked. The strike which climaxed the struggle brought the University to a virtual standstill and involved in one degree or another of active participation a majority of the graduate students (a large majority in the case of the liberal arts), and a minority of the overall student body which approached fifty percent. Movements of this proportion cannot be considered mere ideological by-play out on the fringes; rather, they must reflect underlying social discontent in significant strata of the population, whether this discontent manifests itself in economic or, as in this case, in intellectual and moral forms.

          The political periphery of the Berkeley campus has of course been making small waves for a number of years. Since the fifties there have always been diverse organized radical movements on the campus, sometimes relatively large and sometimes smaller, but never deeply rooted among the students, and even on the most popular issues, able to involve only numerically insignificant percentages of them in political and social struggle. All three of the basic radical tendencies have been represented, Social Democratic, Stalinist; and Trotskyist, with now one and now the other rising to greater prominence. Since the beginning of the sixties, there has been a generally increasing degree of student political activity, but even at its height this has been little more than an interesting part of the over-all campus background and has had little impact on the lives and consciousness of the great majority of the students.

Restless Students

          Probably the most famous of these earlier controversies was the loyalty oath fight of 1960-51. However, this was largely a faculty affair, to which the students were mainly spectators, and the eventual ignominious capitulation of the great majority of the liberal faculty was scarcely an example to inspire students. Later, however, a larger (but still very small) number of students began to be involved in political action. SLATE, originally organized to challenge Greek control of the official student organization, the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), became a general issue-oriented catch-all organization of liberals and radicals, and directly or indirectly organized student participation in a number of causes such as abolition of capital punishment (around the Chessman case), fair housing, and most spectacularly, in opposition to the HUAC. The response of the students to the hosing of spectators and hecklers at the May 1960, HUAC hearings in San Francisco brought the first mass turnout of students, when about three or four thousand people, roughly half of whom were students, protested the police action on the following day. However, this event proved episodic in character and it was not until the build-up of the national civil rights movement a few years later that significant numbers of students again became involved in politics and social action.

          In 1963 and 1964, campus political action, around the civil rights question, began to have real impact on the outside community. The Berkeley campus contributed more than its share of cadre elements to the national movement, and to such actions as the Mississippi summer project. Locally, a series of job actions began, starting with the picketing of Mel’s Drive-Ins by Youth for Jobs. The Ad Hoc Committee to End Job Discrimination then spearheaded an attack on the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco which culminated in an all-night sit-in by a thousand or so demonstrators, the majority of whom were students, the first mass arrests, and a substantial victory. The auto-row demonstrations kept things going and added new mass arrests. Meanwhile, in Berkeley itself, CORE’s campaign against Lucky’s Stores, while involving fewer people, created widespread controversy, over the militant economic sabotage tactics used by CORE. This action also brought out the first rank and file counter-movement, with fraternity and law school types helping Lucky’s to clear away the check stands swamped by the CORE demonstrators. These student activities drew real blood, and when, in the period before the election, the Ad Hocers turned to picketing William Knowland’s Oakland Tribune, they took on the most powerful single force in Alameda county. Simultaneously, students were harassing the world’s largest bank, Bank of America, with picket-lines and “bank-ins.”

          Thus, at a time when the civil rights movement nationally was in a state of decline, the Berkeley students had scored a number of victories over significant, if relatively minor, opponents, and were now a real annoyance to the most powerful forces in the state. Furthermore, the trend of developments made it clear that the student civil rights movement and student activity in directly related political fields was creating an incipient mass movement, and that given the right developments nationally and internationally, the establishment would be dealing with something much more significant than a few score dedicated individuals.

A Long Chain of Abuses

          In this context it is not surprising that the University administration chose the fall of 1964 to renew its campaign against student political and social action. True to its tradition as a liberal institution, the University of California has a long history of infringements on student and faculty political rights. In the recent past there was the Regents’ loyalty oath, which had purged the faculty of some of its more principled members. For several years Communist Party speakers had been banned from the campus. Eventually President Kerr lifted this ban (wisely, it turned out, for when the students flocked to hear the first “legal” CP speaker, it became. painfully apparent that the CP had nothing to say), but replaced it by a series of unreasonable restrictions applying to all outside speakers, such as 72 hours notice and the presence of a tenured faculty member. The Kerr directives of 1959 attempted to restrict involvement of campus organizations in off-campus political questions, and the Administration stooped to such petty harassments as requiring student groups to pay for unneeded and unwanted police protection for their meetings.

          Shortly after the beginning of the fall term, Dean of Students Katherine A. Towle announced that the tables which the various organizations had been in the habit of setting up in the area next to the main entrance to the University campus were in violation of University rules, and would no longer be tolerated. Since this was the main means by which the student action groups operated, the enforcement of this regulation would have been an insupportable blow to the student organizations. These organizations agreed jointly to resist, not only by protesting through channels and by legal picketing, but also by ignoring the ban. Thus was established the basic pattern for the future development of the FSM.

          At the core of the united front were the civil rights organizations, aided by the radical groups — Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), Independent Socialists, DuBois Club, and Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) — liberal groups, religious organizations, and even organizations of the right like Campus Young Republicans, Students for Goldwater, and University Society of Individualists. Its demands were simple:

   1. The students shall have the right to hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject, except when it would cause a traffic problem or interfere with classes.

   2. Persons shall have the right to participate in political activity on campus by advocating political action beyond voting, by joining organizations, and by giving donations. Both students and non-students shall have the right to set up tables and pass out political literature. The only reasonable and acceptable basis for permits is traffic control.

   3. The unreasonable and arbitrary restrictions of 72-hours’ notice, student paid-for police protection, and faculty moderators, required for speakers using University buildings, must be reformed.

          The administration was evidently taken by surprise at the student resistance. Their first excuse was that the tables blocked traffic, but this was so manifestly absurd that it was dropped in favor of arguments based on a state law forbidding political activities on public property. When, in the face of the unexpected strength of the student protest the administration revised the ruling to permit tables with “informational material” but not calls for action or recruitment, the real political nature of the ban became clear. The next move came from the administration which took the names of five students who were manning illegal tables and ordered them to report to the dean’s office individually for disciplining. The students replied by turning in to the dean’s office a statement by four hundred students that they too had been manning tables or were intending to, and demanding equal treatment with the five. All reported to the dean’s office en masse, and the first Sproul Hall (Administration Building) sit-in resulted. The students continued to man the tables and the five students and three others were indefinitely suspended.

Students Capture a Car

          Two days later the authorities attempted a showdown. University policemen approached Jack Weinberg who was manning a campus CORE table and asked him to desist from this illegal activity. When he refused he was arrested and placed in a campus police car which had been driven up to the spot However, before the police could drive away with their prisoner the car was surrounded by students who sat down in front of it and behind it and would not let it move. In almost no time five hundred or so students were surrounding the car, and if the police had arrested Weinberg, the students had in effect arrested the police. Without prior planning, but on the basis of what they had learned in previous civil rights demonstrations, the students showed an ingenuity and boldness which amazed even friendly outsiders, and terrified the administration. FSM made the top of the captured car their speakers’ platform, setting up a loud-speaker system which turned the Sproul Hall Plaza into a giant open-air rally. The crowd was continually addressed by a series of FSM spokesmen and others, exhorted, informed, and entertained. A commissary was set up, and food and cold drinks passed out for the hot afternoons, and hot coffee and food in the cool night. The inevitable sleeping bags and bracket rolls appeared, and it became apparent that the students were determined to stick it out.

          The actively participating crowd varied in size from time to time, but five hundred was probably the average, and at no time did it fall below three hundred. On the second evening of the siege, the fraternity-football contingent put in an appearance, but finding themselves outnumbered, they confined themselves to desultory heckling. Within an hour or two the hostile elements melted away, and tensions relaxed. Around the central core of committed demonstrators was a constantly shifting periphery of the uncommitted. Mainly students and campus community people, they observed, listened, discussed. For most it was a conflict of values, between their commitment to the traditional rules of free speech and fair play on one hand, and to the sanctity of property and orderly process on the other. Two months later it was the ultimate decision of many of these people to support the protest which made the strike a success.

          As long as the students made no attempt to release the prisoner by force, and as long as the police made no attempt to use force to release the car, the situation was at an impasse. However, with the newspapers and TV yelling “anarchy,” and the right wing press and politicians calling for blood, the impasse had to be resolved. Demonstration leaders were summoned to a conference with President Kerr who had previously refused to negotiate with them. They were offered an agreement whereby if the students released the car and promised to “cease illegal forms of protest,” they would in turn be guaranteed against reprisal; the matter of student political activities was to be referred to a committee which would include FSM leaders and the case of the eight taken to “the student affairs committee of the academic senate.” The academic senate is the organization of the tenured faculty members on the campus. The arrested man was to be taken to the station, booked, and released on his own recognizance. Kerr told the student leaders that if they rejected this proposal, the matter would be turned over to the five hundred police who were being held close at hand. After negotiating a slight improvement in the wording which would not cut them off indefinitely from “illegal forms of protest,” the leaders returned to the demonstration, explained the situation, and while warning against probable bad faith on the part of the administration, recommended acceptance of the truce. Under the prevailing conditions, no formal vote, of course, could be taken, but it was clear that the leaders’ position had the support of the overwhelming majority of those present, and thirty hours after the original arrest, the crowd quietly turned its back on the car and walked away

Students Capture Sproul Hall

          The following two months were a period of prolonged negotiations and much confusion, with the now formally-constituted FSM waxing and waning according to underlying moods among the students and the degree of tactless provocation exhibited by the administration. When it turned out that there was no Academic Senate Committee on Student Affairs, suspicions of official bad faith were strengthened. The Chancellor obligingly filled the gap by appointing a tripartite committee of faculty, student, and administration representatives. Of the student representatives, two were from the FSM, and two from the official ASUC Kehilah. However, FSM refusal to deal seriously with this suspect committee did produce reforms in its composition, and the committee itself finally called for mitigation of the disciplinary action against the eight. As weeks passed without decisive action, there appeared to be a distinct possibility that the momentum of the student movement would be dissipated in the maze of official channels and committee meetings.

          This period of confused negotiations, however, was ended by action of the administration. On Friday, November 27, Chancellor Strong, chief administrative officer of the Berkeley campus, sent letters to four of the top leaders of FSM, including Mario Savio, initiating new disciplinary action on the basis of the siege of the police car. Students hitherto only mildly interested were outraged at what appeared to them to be simultaneously double jeopardy (all the students involved had already been suspended), ex post facto, and the administration’s repudiation of the recommendations of its own hand-picked committee. FSM recognized that with its leaders’ heads on the block there was no more room for negotiation, and held three consecutive rallies on Sproul Hall steps, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, each larger than the previous one. At the end of Wednesday’s rally over 800 demonstrators occupied Sproul Hall. The great Sproul Hall sit-in was on.

          Once in possession of the administration building, the students proceeded to such varied activities as showing old Chaplin movies and holding regular classes and seminars as part of the Free University of California. They draped their FSM banner across the front of the building, and most important, set up a public address system which they used to speak to the constantly changing but always huge crowd in the plaza in front of the hall. All efforts by the administration to persuade the student leaders to evacuate the building failed, and some time during Wednesday evening, President Kerr, at the end of his resources, appealed to Governor Brown. Brown i8 a true liberal Democrat, and further has a reputation for weakness, indecision, and mildness. However, when such a vital part of the system as the University faces a serious threat, he is capable of quick action. Some five hundred police, from Berkeley, Oakland, the Alameda County sheriff’s office, and the California Highway Patrol were sent to the campus with orders from Brown to evacuate Sproul Hall, by force if necessary.

          The demonstrators were told they might leave the building freely, but if they did not do so at once they would be arrested. Very few left, and in the small hours of Thursday morning the arrests began. Some walked out with the arresting officers, but the great majority followed the standard civil rights technique and went limp. After carrying, dragging and throwing the demonstrators down the stairs of the building, the police took them in buses and police wagons to the Santa Rita County Prison Farm where they were charged with such offenses as trespassing, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and failure to leave a public building. 801 demonstrators were arrested; about eighty percent of them were students or employees of the University, or their wives, one was a faculty member, and many of the remainder were people more or less closely associated with the broader University community. These mass arrests constituted a serious defeat for the administration forces. By appealing to outside authority and resorting to armed force they lost still more stature in the eyes of many members of the University community hitherto uninvolved in the controversy. The governor’s action, however, was very well received by the press, both conservative and liberal, though the specific techniques of the police, such as dragging students down the steps by their heels, did receive some criticism.

Students Strike the University

          The FSM, through its affiliated Graduate Coordinating Committee, had long been laying plans for a strike in the case of just such an emergency. Even with most of its leaders only slowly filtering back from Santa Rita prison, the machinery automatically clicked into action Thursday morning. But no machinery, no call, was necessary to instigate the strike. On Thursday morning the arrests were still taking place in Sproul Hall, and the wave of indignation generated by the police occupation of the campus, and especially the sight of the notorious Oakland police, virtually closed the University. Preliminary strike talk had prepared the minds of the students for this form of action, and they now took it more or less automatically. The previously created apparatus of the FSM organized, channeled, and sustained the spontaneous outburst. Picket lines were set up at all entrances to the campus, and some delivery trucks were turned back. The major buildings were also picketed, and roving picket lines moved about the campus. Students were asked not to attend classes, teachers not to teach, and staff not to report for work. The student appeal won a response in all these categories, and in the liberal arts departments the strike was an overwhelming success. For two days the administrative machinery and the academic heart of the University were paralyzed.

          Key to the success of the strike was the role of the teaching assistants, graduate students studying for their Ph.D.’s. At Berkeley, as at so many other prestige universities, the actual teaching duties of the faculty members are of secondary importance to their role as researchers, writers, ideologues, and in many cases providers of technical services for outside interests. The major teaching of undergraduates is done by the teaching assistants, whose status is intermediate between that of students and faculty, and whose rather meager teaching salaries see them through to their- doctorates. The support of these men and women, who of course bad no tenure or union and only their own solidarity to protect them from reprisals from their department heads or the University administration, was crucial to the success of the strike. Support from teaching assistants in the liberal arts was overwhelming, and in the departments of philosophy and mathematics it was virtually unanimous. All in all the strike was an outstanding success, far more so, in fact, than the FSM leadership had anticipated.

Epiphany in the Greek Theater

          The climax of this decisive battle of the free speech revolt took place, appropriately enough, in the Greek Theater, a gift by the Hearst family to their University. The Academic Senate, comprising the tenured faculty members and those others who had been with the University two or more years, had been a complaisant tool of the administration since the days of the Regents’ loyalty oath fight in the 1950’s. Now, however, it could no longer be considered reliable from Kerr’s point of view. With administration prestige at a low ebb and a large minority of the students in open rebellion, Kerr needed faculty cover for his next move. He found this through the well-known liberal Professor Robert A. Scalapino, chairman of the Department of Political Science. This academic politician was generally reputed to have realistic ambitions to replace the inept Edward W. Strong as Chancellor of the Berkeley campus.

          Short-circuiting the Academic Senate, Scalapino brought together all the department heads. These professors, on the whole men who either have a disposition to be attracted by the administrative side of affairs or at least less aversion to it than the average faculty member, were in the aggregate more inclined to be sympathetic to Strong and Kerr than the average faculty member. For the minority who were strongly opposed to the administration’s position, Scalapino used the blackmail of threats of a legislative investigation, the immediate replacement of the liberal Kerr by a right-wing reactionary (Max Rafferty, the ultra-rightist State Superintendent of Education, always seemed to be lurking somewhere in the wings), and other frightening pictures of the utter destruction of the University. Thus he was able to secure unanimous approval of a series of proposals which, while saying many kind words about freedom of speech and political discussion, in actuality made as their sole concession to the students the promise of amnesty from the University, but not civil, discipline for all actions hitherto taken. With this fig leaf of faculty covering, Kerr made his play.

          Kerr called a University meeting for Monday morning, December 7, in the Greek Theater. A University meeting is for all students, faculty and employees. It automatically suspends all classes and closes administrative and department offices, so that the effectiveness of the strike on the morning of its third day was obscured. The meeting was well attended by some eighteen to twenty thousand persons, overwhelmingly students but with an unusually large attendance by faculty and a healthy sprinkling of employees. The convening of this assembly provided a convenient way of making a rough estimate of the nature of public opinion among the students at this time. When President Kerr was introduced, about one third of the audience cheered him, while about one third jeered. Considering that it is not at all customary for American students to jeer their president on solemn occasions, even in times of stress, this small event gives an additional indication of the depths of the feelings involved.

          Scalapino presented the Department Heads’ proposals, striving to put behind them the full weight and prestige of the faculty. Then Kerr spoke. Unlike Chancellor Strong, Kerr is a man of tremendous accomplishments and ability, and a key member of the liberal establishment in California. Having come up through the Institute of Industrial Relations, he is by experience and training a man of the highest skills in the use of the liberal rhetoric, in the art of that kind of compromise, adjustment and accommodation which somehow always leaves the positions of the power structure intact, and the opposition with the feeling that the great man was really on their side, but for some reason unable to help them.

          That Monday morning Kerr was making the fight of his life and used all his skills. But he was speaking to an audience whose intelligence and sophistication he and his supporters had consistently underestimated and who, by and large, had learned more in the past two months than many students do in the full four years. Many had read “The Mind of Clark Kerr,” a clever critique by Hal Draper of Kerr’s theory of the role of the “multiversity” as set forth by the president in his Godkin Lectures at Harvard. To this audience Kerr presented himself as a mature and benign statesman, firm in the defense of principle but always ready to reason together with others if only they, like him, would be reasonable men and show due respect for the principles of law and order which guaranteed everyone’s freedom. He was one willing even to concede that his opposition might have some legitimate grievances, which no doubt could be met in the right atmosphere. But above all he was one who would fight to the death to defend the principles of his beloved University, now threatened by anarchy within, and by implication by the now awakened dogs of know-nothing reaction without. On an exalted note he pledged his personal honor to the amnesty provisions of the Department Heads’ proposals, announced the resumption of classes at one o’clock, and declared the meeting closed. Would this great performance have won the uncommitted center? It is doubtful, but we shall never know for sure. As Kerr ringingly announced, “This meeting is now closed,” Mario Savio, the charismatic leader of the FSM, began walking across the stage toward the microphone. Before a stunned audience of 18,000, Savio was seized by half a dozen campus policemen, knocked down, and carried bodily off the stage.

          In thirty seconds the delicate, laboriously created image so skillfully worked up by Kerr and Scalapino was smashed beyond all recall. The instant revelation of what lay behind the dignity, the beautiful rhetoric, the air of sweet reasonableness, galvanized the audience. Kerr was ashen and visibly shaking. Scalapino, of whom it was said in cruel jest that he had been Chancellor of the Berkeley campus for twenty minutes, was distraught. In one instant the uncommitted were committed, and shouted their shock and protest. This soon settled down into the steady chant, ‘~We want Mario!” The hard core of Kerr supporters left as instructed, but the great majority, the hitherto silent ones as well as the hitherto committed, stayed to wait for Mario. Behind the stage Savio was being held in a small dressing room by the police while FSM lawyers were demanding that he be charged or released. Steve Weissman, leader of the striking graduate students, encountered Kerr and said, “It sounds as if the students want Mario.” The shaken president replied, “Yes, I guess they do.” In a few minutes, Kerr collected his wits and ordered Savio’s release. With that feeling for the occasion and rapport with his audience which has made him the outstanding public figure in the FSM, Savio walked to the microphone and said: “I just wanted to announce that there will be a rally on Sproul Hall steps at noon today.” On that note, the meeting ended.

The Faculty’s 4th of August

The rest, although formally of greater importance, seemed like anti-climax. Some of the Department Heads began to repudiate Scalapino, who they felt had compromised and misled them. Scalapino and other Department Heads were subject to attack in departmental meetings which were unprecedented in academic circles. The Academic Senate was to consider the problem at its Tuesday meeting. At its Monday noon rally immediately following the Greek Theater meeting, FSM announced that in order that the Senate might meet in the calmest possible atmosphere the strike would end Monday night, and that no activities would be scheduled for Tuesday. On Monday afternoon the strike was about 80% effective.

          When the Senate met, it was presented with a resolution from its Committee on Academic Freedom. Its text was as follows:

   1. “That there shall be no University disciplinary measures against members or organizations of the University community for activities prior to December 8 connected with the current controversy over political speech and activity.

   2. “That the time, place, and manner of conducting political activity on the campus shall be subject to reasonable regulation to prevent interference with the normal functions of the University; that the regulations now in effect for this purpose shall remain in effect provisionally pending a future report of the Committee on Academic Freedom concerning the minimal regulations necessary.

   3. “That the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University. Off-campus student political activities shall not be subject to University regulation. On-campus advocacy or organization of such activities shall be subject only to such limitations as may be imposed under section 2.

   4. “That future disciplinary measures in the area of political activity shall be determined by a committee appointed by and responsible to the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate

   5. “That the Division urge the adoption of the foregoing policies and call on all members of the University community to join with the faculty in its effort to restore the University to its normal functions.”

          With the administration forces demoralized and in disarray, positive action was virtually assured. The most serious opposition came in the form of an anti- force-or-violence amendment offered by Lewis Feuer, who claims to have once been a Marxist and is entrusted by the University with the task of instructing students in the obscurities of this ideology, and Nathan Glaser, who as co-author of The Lonely Crowd no doubt wished wholeheartedly for the good old days of “other-directedness” on campus. The depth of Feuer’s intellectual and moral degradation can be judged by his main supporting argument — that the KKK might use the resolution as cover for organizing synagogue defacements and pogroms! The Klan threat not being a particularly pressing problem on the UC campus, this amendment was supported by only about 150 out of the nearly one thousand faculty present. It is interesting to note that this hard core of opposition was characterized by the presence of a disproportionate number of ex-radicals of one kind and another, who for various reasons of Stalinophobia, fear, and cynicism were totally unable to respond to the moral challenge FSM presented. The final vote on the unamended resolution was 824 yes to 116 no. Thus the faculty, after months of hesitations and pettifogging, finally placed itself formally on record in support of the students’ demands. This was without doubt the high-water mark of the whole campaign, and no matter what retreats the faculty might later make, no matter how much it might fink on its own position, that vote stands in the record and validates the student movement in a way that permanently altered the terms of the equation.

          No doubt the fiasco in the Greek Theater contributed heavily to the lopsided nature of the vote, but it is likely that the majority position represented a more fundamental response to the continuing pressure of the students which posed the question to the faculty in sharper and sharper terms. For those like Feuer and Glaser, especially the former who had had some pretensions to influence among the thinking elements in the student body, their opposition to the resolution marked the end of their political and moral, and to a considerable extent also of their intellectual, influence among all sections of the students with the exception of the fraternity-football elements, and these are not interested in ideas anyway.

Triangle of Forces

          Throughout this struggle the faculty has played the role of the third part in a three-part equation involving students, faculty, and the external society represented by the administration and the Regents. That section of the FSM leadership whose background was p.imarily in civil rights, which usually deals with situations wherein an independent third force is not present, tended at first to underestimate the importance of the faculty and also, when the faculty acted, to overestimate its reliability as an ally. However, the healthy skepticism of the politicals in the leadership combined with the militancy of the civil rights elements to develop the tactics best designed to force this wavering group to take a stand, and to utilize that stand once made. When liberal Democrats, both real and pseudo, raised counsels of caution lest the faculty be antagonized, the FSM rejected this suicidal advice and redoubled its pressure. This tactic, combined with the very real felt grievances of the faculty itself which has been disregarded and treated with refined contempt by the administration, won the faculty to its position of December 8, and prevented its effective use by Kerr and company.

          On Wednesday noon, following the Tuesday Academic Senate meeting, FSM called a victory rally and declared its wholehearted acceptance of the Senate’s resolution. Some have attacked this action as premature, contending that it fostered illusions and that no real victory was won. While it is true that the action of the Senate did not mean that the students had won the concrete points they were struggling for, this was never claimed by the FSM leaders. It was a profound victory all the same, for it transformed the FSM from a group of marginal malcontents disrupting the University into the legitimate spokesmen for the whole academic community. It meant that as long as the struggle was confined within the framework of the academic community (and the Regents really form no part of this community, being on the contrary the means by which this community is controlled by the outside), the victory was complete, the administration forces utterly routed.

Where the Power Lies

          This marked the end of the militant phase of FSM activities. All that could be done to force the Regents’ hands had been done. A petition and letterwriting campaign was organized, but after what had gone before this was generally recognized as futile and meaningless. The campus waited for the Regents’ decision. Two phenomena were noticeable in the mood of the campus during this period. One was a rapid decline in the euphoria engendered by the faculty action and an increasing pessimism about the reaction of the Regents. The other was an intense emotional feeling of solidarity and comradeship among the students, a feeling which included for the first time much of the faculty and which transcended the rigorous hierarchical lines of the academic set-up.

          The reply of the Regents came just before the Christmas vacation, and by this time everyone anticipated what it was going to be. The Regents, after many declarations in favor of free speech and other good things and denial of any intent to prohibit advocacy, in substance rejected the demands of the Berkeley Academic Senate, brusquely as far as the attempt to take over disciplinary power was concerned, indirectly on other matters. From this model of unclarity one thing emerges distinctly. The Regents reassert their authority and treat with demeaning contempt the demands of their faculty and students. They will dispose, and they alone. At the moment they chose to be relatively conciliatory, but they do not negotiate. They will run the University as they also run the Bank of America, the Tejon Ranch, Signal Oil, and the like.

          At this stage, February 1965, it appears that the students have won de facto, if not de jure, most of their demands. The obdurate Chancellor Strong was replaced in a face saving way by the affable Martin Meyerson, a man of far greater sensitivity and sophistication and therefore perhaps in the long run a more dangerous opponent, but one far less likely to back himself into a corner where he cannot make concessions when they are called for. The new rules when they come out are likely to be relatively reasonable, and Kerr’s pledge of University amnesty for the FSMers stands. There is even a widespread rumor that he had to lay his personal prestige on the line to prevent gorilla elements on the Regents from exacting reprisals. Thus, even on the level of their formal demands the students appear to have won a major victory, in substance if not in form. It is probable that it will be quite some time before there is any further serious harassment of the student political organizations. Tables will be set up, action mounted, illegal acts advocated, and speakers heard. Of course another round will come, especially if state politics shift, as appears likely, to the right.

Future of the FSM

          Barring the unforeseen, the current intentions of the FSM are to disband, leaving only a skeleton apparatus to serve two functions: First, as an information center which can get material telling the story out to interested parties, and especially to other campuses; and second as an agency to defend the 801 now facing charges in the civil courts and others who may be victimized in any way as a result of their part in FSM. Having won the right to advocate, the students now want to get back to that task, and others want to explore the possibilities of more genuine intellectual communication between students and teachers and within each group opened up as a by-product of the free speech struggle.

The Deeper Gains

          The gains of the students are not, however, limited merely to gaining more elbow room for their social and political action, gaining more favorable conditions for operating the anti-establishment underground, important though these gains are. The intangible gains have been summed up by Bob Starobin, a teaching assistant in History, a former editor of Root and Branch, and delegate to the FSM Executive Committee from the Graduate Coordinating Committee, in the following eight points:

   1. The myth of liberalism has been completely shattered.

   2. The students have a much better understanding of the bureaucratic mentality and how to deal with it.

   3. They have had an education in political alignments and how political power is distributed. They know better how power is achieved and held.

   4. They have developed serious doubts about the Democratic Party and in many cases overt hostility toward it.

   5. They have had an education in tactics, especially in the uses and limitations of civil disobedience.

   6. They learned about the unreliability of the press. Even the Chronicle lies.

   7. They have received an education on the role and nature of the police.

   8. The faculty felt, correctly, that they had lost the respect of their students.

          These points are very well taken, and some require further elaboration. Persons not acquainted with the Berkeley situation should bear in mind that this is not a reactionary institution run by political and academic Neanderthals. On the contrary, it is a truly liberal institution. Its president is seriously considered for a Cabinet post in the Great Society administration. The most clearly political of its Regents are in a majority Democratic appointees, many by the liberal Democrat Brown who called out the troopers. Even Scalapino, Kerr’s faculty spokesman at the Greek Theater meeting, had earned a liberal reputation both in his academic work and as a radio commentator. The faculty has a strong liberal leaning, especially in the liberal arts, and those faculty members like Glaser, Feuer, and Lipset who were most vicious against the FSM had a reputation as left liberals and even aspired, in the case of Feuer and Lipset, to be considered some sort of radicals. The moral collapse of such an institution and such a set of individuals cannot but, for the students involved, sweep away much of the liberal myth in its wake.

          The lesson in power is also of vital importance and two-sided. If the movement had any collective heroes, it was the teaching assistants, the elite of the graduate student body. Given the present set-up, this group, previously of low status and apparently powerless and exposed to the worst hazards of reprisal and victimization, has in actuality the power “to bring the machinery to a grinding halt.” In the December strike they discovered that power and used it. They are not likely to lose this consciousness, nor awareness of the fact that their role has won the respect of faculty and undergraduates alike. The teaching assistants now have a viable trade union affiliated with the AFT.

          There is also the negative side of the power equation. The students have learned that even after totally defeating the administration within the academic community the administration still stands, intact, because the ultimate sources of power lie with the outside power structure, represented by the Regents. More and more students see this power structure correctly, not as a bureaucratic monster but, by one name or another, as a self-conscious, organized ruling class. Its academic representatives, Kerr, Strong, and the like, have much autonomy, and ordinarily its many internal splits obscure its character. But when the chips were down in the FSM fight, it acted as a disciplined, conscious class. Knowland and Brown were united. This lesson too is not lost. To return for a moment to the comments of Starobin: “The greatest single gain of the FSM is the politicization to one degree or another of a major portion of the.student body.”

          This struggle also appears to mark the end of principled non-violence as an issue in this area. Faced with armed cops in the hundreds, the students were obviously in no position to adopt tactics of self defense, so that the question was never sharply posed. However, the whole spirit of converting the enemy through love, the self-righteous condemnation of “un-CORElike attitudes” which had been a dominant theme in the actions around 1960 was notably absent. The students were most grateful for the support of folksinger Joan Baez, for example, but when she called on them to enter Sproul Hall with love in hearts this plea was received with considerable cynicism. When, during the arrests at Sproul Hall, a large detachment of police tried to seize the microphone of the public address system which the students were using to address the crowd in the plaza, the students resisted by grabbing the policemen’s legs and clubs, trying to trip them, and in general pushing non-violence to its extreme limits. For the demonstrations following the HUAC affair in 1960, male students were told authoritatively to wear jackets and ties if at all possible. Now, however, the search for middle-class respectability is treated with contempt, and on the ideological level the doctrine of pacifism, though still strong, no longer predominates.

A Few Questions

          For Marxists and revolutionaries the whole FSM must be not only a source of great satisfaction and inspiration but also the occasion of raising some serious questions. The first and most obvious of these is to what extent can we expect similar phenomena elsewhere? Really, this is the same as saying, “Why Berkeley?” A number of reasons suggest themselves. First, the University of California is probably more heavily infiltrated by the federal government, and especially by the military and the AEC, than any other major university. This increasing identity between the government in its most coercive aspect and the University has had its effect on the over-all institution, to the detriment of free scholarship and undergraduate instruction. Second, Berkeley is a prestige university, in academic standing second probably only to Harvard. It is indisputable that it is among the best students that the disaffected are to be found. An independent study of the academic standing of those arrested in Sproul Hall, for example, revealed that they had a grade-point average much higher than that of the general student body. Indeed, a local sports columnist suggested that the best way to lick the Reds in FSM was to give more athletic scholarships to deserving patriotic footballers who couldn’t make the grade at present.

          Third, the local bourgeoisie tends to have more of a coexistence attitude toward dissidence than elsewhere . . . up to a point! Bay Area cops beat where New York cops would shoot. The local labor movement too is influenced by a large number of ex-radicals who retain the rhetoric of their past while jettisoning its content. In such an atmosphere it is easier for dissidence to gain a foothold.

          Fourth, Berkeley has accumulated over the years a sizable fringe of disaffected semi-bohemian elements who, while they have no formal connection with the University, cluster around it and form a supportive element for student radicals. Among these fringe elements are many radicals who, while not yet ready to quit politics altogether, are also not anxious to pursue them strenuously, and find in Berkeley an atmosphere conducive to living on their political, light-duty slips. In short, the student radical does not face a harshly hostile environment once he steps beyond Sather Gate.

          Fifth, there is the class character of the student body itself which is drawn mainly from the intelligentsia, the professional classes, and the comfortable section of the working class. Pop may have been a working man, but the home has provided enough security to make chance-taking possible. In a period like the present the response is bound to be greater among these middle-class elements than among the children of the working class in such neighboring institutions as Oakland City College. There, working class students are desperately anxious to get out of the class and won’t jeopardize their chances by agitating. Finally, all of this of course is self-reinforcing. The word gets around and dissatisfied elements transfer in from the University of Nebraska.

          At the moment the Berkeley campus seems isolated from the rest of the students in America. However, the news is being spread by direct contact, and the media are now taking it up more seriously. FSM leaders expect that the isolation will end soon, and their?expectation may be well founded. Surely where similar conditions prevail and where there is sufficient provocation, the same underlying dissatisfactions may be expected to find open expression in forms influenced by the FSM experience.

Role of the Left

          The FSM was not hostile to the traditional left, and there was absolutely no red-baiting. Rapport with the various left tendencies, and FSM identification with left ideologies, was limited, however, by a number of factors. One, of course, is the traditional American pragmatism and eclecticism, in which the Free Speech Movement participates. The FSM and its allied organizations have been unable to jell an over-all ideological attitude. The impact of the organized left was further diminished by its highly fragmented state wish Stalinists, Trotskyists, and social-democrats all split and in one degree or another of disarray. Moreover, the majority of the FSM people have a strong reaction against what they interpret as infantile factionalism and sectarian attitudes. Given the students’ pragmatic attitudes, the inability of the left in the last quarter century to create a mass movement or to develop impressive intellectual leadership significantly reduces its appeal. The empiricism which infects American society generally has not left the radical movement unscathed. Having lost confidence in its own role, the left tends to deprecate the need for theory and wax euphoric at each outburst of militancy, happy to follow where it would never think to lead.

          More fundamental, however, is the fact that objective circumstances do not permit the students to link up with decisive social forces. This reinforces their tendency to see their struggles in isolation. Although many elements among them would be overjoyed at the prospect of outside support, they see a working class in actuality largely passive, if not hostile, to their aspirations, and because of their own middle-class character they are cut off from what small sparks of militancy do exist.

          These factors taken together have tended to make the FSM regard the ideology of all the left groupings as equally irrelevant. This empiricism is a serious weakness in the movement. No one with a realistic view of the scene would expect this mass movement to submit meekly to the embraces of some branch of the traditional left, to accept uncritically the pre- conceived ideology of the older groups. However, if the necessity of a world view of sufficient clarity is not recognized, the movement stands in peril of dissipation and disintegration in the face of larger questions which can be approached only in the light of a more general over-view.

          The movement can ill afford to repeat all the errors and false starts of previous generations whose efforts in the main ended in downright betrayal of the subjective desires and intentions of the participants. The past can only be transcended by learning from it, not ignoring it. Otherwise, for example, the same stale old class-collaborationist platitudes that sunk the movements of the 1930’s through support of Roosevelt and then of World War II would seem like exciting new ways to manipulate for radical ends capitalist-imperialist politicians like Pat Brown, Lyndon Johnson, and their successors.

          Bridging the gap with living struggles is also a vital necessity for the Marxist movement. To succeed would be revitalizing, organizationally and ideologically. To fail would encourage all those sick symptoms which grow out of prolonged isolation and impotence. There is no reason to be unduly pessimistic concerning the possibility of making this link. The FSM is now entering its evaluation stage and is breaking down into its component parts. It has been highly politicized and has been exposed to the power structure which many of its supporters have come to see clearly as a ruling class. With this basis, continued openness on the part of the students and an approach by the revolutionary left, at once ideologically self-confident and also willing to recognize the unique break-through which the students have achieved on their own, can build an enduring and powerful movement, an important step toward the creation of a revolutionary force in the United States.

Two Currents in FSM

          Finally, it is noticeable that two separate currents come together in FSM. One, which supplies a large part of its leadership, especially on the tactical level, consists of those for whom the primary issue is one of certain specific rights and demands, freedom of advocacy and organization, freedom from unreasonable harassment by the authorities. What these elements want is enough elbow room to conduct their political and social campaigns, at this point primarily around civil rights, but including other issues as well.

          There is another current which joins this one, and for whom the symbol of the enemy is the IBM machine. They speak less in terms of civil rights and civil liberties, of political and social action, than in terms of alienation, of the intellectual degradation of the university by the multiversity, knowledge factory, concept. They feel cheated in their education, and dehumanized by a soulless machine. Only a small minority of those who supported FSM were interested in personally participating in political and social action. FSM became a truly mass movement because of this second current — because these students felt that this way they could strike back at the machine, reassert their humanity and individuality, and perhaps make the University into a true community of scholars. Their moral integrity is one of the most impressive things about the FSM revolt.

          However, while the first current, the politicals, were able to win the limited demands they were fighting for — that is, in essence, more favorable conditions for their underground movement — the hopes of the second group were doomed to disappointment. True, after the Academic Senate meeting of December 8 there was a brief period of euphoria when it seemed that honest communication and mutual respect could be established between faculty and students, and that the community of scholars could exist apart from and in spite of external social forces; but already now this mood is evaporating, the old barriers coming up again, the faculty retreating, and the IBM machines are clicking on. As long as the university is a vital part of the capitalist establishment no community of scholars can exist, and the moral corruption of moribund capitalism must taint the campus as well as every other social institution. This section of the students, naive if you will, hoped with the aid of the faculty to be able to take the University away from the ruling class. This was a vain illusion, of course.

          The bourgeoisie will no more give up its knowledge factory than it will its General Motors plant, and it needs the one as much as the other. Some educational reform may be forthcoming, but nothing that will meet the needs of these students. The question is, then, what will their reaction be? On the one hand, it could be a retreat into a personal world, marijuana and bohemianism for some, and surrender to split-level values for others, and in both cases disillusionment and cynicism. But this is not necessary. They have been in intimate contact now with the underground opposition, the civil rights advocates and the politicals. There is genuine communication and respect between the two groups, and perhaps their values can lead them to understand that the road to the free university, and the intellectual freedom and honesty that this concept implies, lies only through the overthrow of the capitalist system which corrupts their environment. In that case we may come to see a transformation of the whole social and political climate in the United States.

The University and Capitalism

          With the changes which are currently taking place within the structure of western capitalism, the university becomes a more and more critical part of the over-all system. As automation eats away at the traditional working class and the white collar elements as well, the bourgeoisie more and more needs its trained specialists. Not only have they technical tasks of the highest order to perform, but the bourgeoisie is also in increasing need of reliable and skilled ideologues and of social engineers to manage the manipulated society. Their dilemma is that this job cannot be done by third rate, unskilled, uncreative people. Giving more athletic scholarships won’t meet their needs. Their professional people, if they are to do the job, must have education as well as training. But to the degree that education, intellectual freedom, and creativity are permitted, to this degree there is the danger of the kind of revolt which took place in Berkeley.

          It was a middle class revolt of people to whom the system offered its most attractive material rewards, and status gratification too. These students had it made, but in the FSM revolt they rejected the whole set of values and assumptions of the split-level society. What they want is something else, not yet sharply defined but not to be found in the Great Society. But the Great Society needs these students, and in their revolt against it they expose a sickness in that society from which it is not likely to recover.

PLURALISTIC SOCIETY OR CLASS RULE?

[issued early December 1964]

All good political science majors know how this society functions. It is a dynamic balance of various interests and pressure groups ranging from organized labor, to downtown merchants to the John Birch Society. Of course. To speak of class rule is to exhibit naivete and bad taste. Worse yet, it is to “use the rhetoric of the thirties.”

Now Governor Brown (the good, gray “vector zero” product of the pluralistic society) has turned the cops loose on Berkeley students and is vowing to put down “anarchy and revolution.” Does the governor’s charge have any substance? The issue which first brought the students onto the scene was civil rights. In theory, racial equality is fully compatible with the present social order. Indeed, the abstract model of the society works better with racial equality than without it. Civil rights, therefore, is a reformist demand. The actual society, however, is so beset by internal contradictions and external conflicts, and racism so deeply imbedded in it, that the demand for racial equality in practice takes on a revolutionary character. Hence the crackdown on student civil liberties. The campus had to be sealed off from the community because, with the prospect of deepening struggles in the black ghettos, the students were not only a powerful force in their own right but also threatened to provide a link between the ghetto and potential anti-status-quo forces in the white community. The fight for civil rights led to a fight for civil liberties. Civil liberties, too, are theoretically a reformist issue and are even enshrined in the political constitution of the society. But the actual exercise of civil liberties by dissidents (as opposed to their theoretical expostulation by establishment intellectuals) is also a revolutionary threat and is reacted to as such by the authorities.

What have the Berkeley students uncovered? First, in pursuance of civil rights, they have taken on such bastions of private property as the Bank of America and the Oakland Tribune. The response of the UC administration, which, via the Board of Regents, is responsible to these same forces, was to curtail student civil liberties. Finding themselves unable to secure their rights within the rules made and changed at will by their enemies, the FSM resorted to militancy, civil disobedience, and a traditional class weapon, the strike. While the faculty sweated and equivocated, the liberal Democratic governor, who knows what power is, called out the cops.

What the Berkeley students have exposed is not merely a vast and inept bureaucracy, but a coherent ruling-class structure. It runs all the way from the agro-business, banking, mining, railroad, utility, and newspaper capitalists and their direct representatives on the Board of Regents through the Democratic governor and the university administration down to the point of application, the police club. When Brown calls the FSM revolutionary, he speaks the truth, despite the fact that FSM fights only for rights supposedly guaranteed within a democratic capitalist society. In this struggle the students, whatever their intentions may have been, have given a clear and dramatic demonstration of how bourgeois class rule works. They have shown it too moribund and fearful to grant even those rights which are supposed to be its moral justification.

These exposures are invaluable lessons for other actual and potential enemies of this ruling class, such as the automation victims, farm laborers, the ghetto masses, indeed, all sections of the working class. To the extent that they learn these lessons, and come to understand their stake in this Free Speech Movement, they will aid the embattled students with their numerical strength, organization, and economic power. This revelation of class power will mark a significant step in a process of increasing political and class consciousness which must lead to a movement that will have the strength to effect the final solution of the whole gamut of problems which are now the students’ concern.

Pat Brown calls it “revolution.”

Malcolm X [Obituary]

[First printed in Spartacist #4, May-June 1965]

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the libberals’ frontman has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn’t play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have litle reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which could encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm’s death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic ntional leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burglar, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emnacipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm’s organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. One the one hand.there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm’s murder on “Chinese Communists” will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the oher hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike as a heroic and tragic figure in a dark period of our common history.

Bay Area Spartacist Committee
2 March 1965

Introduction to The Fight For Socialism

Introduction to The Fight For Socialism: The Principles and Program of the Workers Party,

by Spartacist.

Introductory works on socialism too often oversimplify to the point of being liberal mush. At the same time the author should avoid such vapid abstractions from reality that he cannot be easily understood. The essential value of The Fight for Socialism by Max Shachtman is that it is systematic, does not talk down, and concretises its generalizations in terms of the life-experience of a conscious worker. The book sets forth the lessons from the history of class struggles, analyzes modern society by applying those lessons, and outlines the means by which “socialism…—a practical possibility and urgent necessity” can be achieved.

Those acquainted with the socialist movement of 1965 may know Max Shachtman only as a certified political swine, who as a leader of the right-wing of the American social-democracy, defended the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion and today supports the imperialist rape of Vietnam, both the counter-revolutionary war in the South and the bombing of the North. He was for a good part of his earlier life, however, a dedicated and able revolutionist, who was extremely proficient at expressing Marxist ideas clearly in the form of the written word. The Fight for Socialism was authored in an intermediate period when Shachtman had not yet degenerated sufficiently to impair his general ability to write about socialist values and ideas. However, in the field of philosophy and methodology he had already definitively broken with the Marxian dialectic in favor of an explicit indifferentism. Consequently discussion of these subjects is notably absent from this book.

The political position occupied by Shachtman and his party in the period this book was written can best be described as centrist, that is revolutionary in words but opportunist in actions. Such a position is the result of the incessant and at times extreme material and ideological pressures brought to bear on the consciousness of the workers’ movement by capitalist society. This pressure first broke through in the case of Shachtman at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact when it became extremely difficult in the United States to hold to a position of military defense of the USSR against imperialism. Shachtman at that point clashed with Leon Trotsky, and began to develop a new theory of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of the world’s “Communist” parties. Shachtman saw Stalinism as a new ruling force which was seeking to conquer the world. Consequently he gave no credit to the nationalized and planned economy in the Soviet Union for eliminating gaping contradictions of the capitalist economy, e.g., the tendency for the rate of profit to fall leading to the recurring crises of overproduction and the insatiable drive to continually expand markets and investment abroad.

Since the bureaucracy ruled totally in a political sense, it was too easy in 1946 to project the Stalinist oppressions and slave-labor camps into essentials of the social system. Later experience, particularly the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, has confirmed that the strongest class force in the Soviet-bloc countries in a long-term historic sense is the working class, and that the bureaucracy is merely an appendage which sits on top of the collective economy–the social basis for workers’ power. But according to Shachtman, the revolutionary potential of the working class had been largely forfeited in the world to the Stalinists. Gradually Shachtman drew away from the logical conclusions of a revolutionary Marxist perspective in this country (the need for a revolutionary vanguard party), so that he and his group, overawed by the advances of Stalinist totalitarianism since World War II, finally capitulated completely to their own country’s ruling class and in 1958 dissolved into the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation.

This book remains the best of its kind available, despite the serious differences which revolutionary Marxists have with it on the Russian question. It is recommended to those who are new to socialist ideas and want a systematic exposition of them.

Resident Editorial Board 12 July 1965

(Text inserted into previously published copies of book)

On the U.S. Trotskyist History

On the U.S. Trotskyist History

[Extract first printed in Marxist Bulletin No 3 Part IV  “Conversations With Wohlforth: Minutes of the Spartacist-ACFI (American Committee for the Fourth International) Unity Negotiating Sessions June-October 1965” Originally posted at http://www.bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/CWW3.html ]

Spartacist-ACFI Unity Negotiations

Third Session

9 July 1965

Present:

    Spartacist: Robertson, Turner, Stoute; (Harper, Secretary).

    ACFI: Wohlforth, Mazelis, Michael (alternate for van Ronk).

Meeting convened at 8:10 p.m.

Chairman: Stoute

Agenda:

    1.SWP:

    a.historical

    b. current

    2.Minutes

    3. Election statements

    4. Social. Topic and time of next meeting

1. SWP Discussion:

Wohlforth: The essential feature of the American Marxist movement has been its failure to really develop theory, and while certain progress has been made in some periods toward coming to basic working-class consciousness, and even going beyond that in adherence to the world movement and later the Trotskyist movement, through its entire history it has never mastered the Marxist method. Rather it sought to build a movement with theory inherited from past leaders like Marx or worked out elsewhere and imported. Americans learned lessons rather than the method leading to those lessons. Cannon came out of the midwest fusion of the Populist-Wobbly movement, and the Cannon-Foster faction within the CP (while the healthiest of the factions) was representative of that empiricism. Cannon learned from Zinoviev, etc., a way of treating political questions in an organizational way. Trotsky warned him against this, but this tradition has remained to this day. SWP was a bloc between Cannon and Trotsky in which Cannon took the political line of Trotsky but developed the SWP in his own way organizationally. The struggle of the SWP with Shachtman showed the failure of the SWP to develop theoretically. It was Trotsky that insisted the struggle center around questions of dialectics and method. Discussions between Trotsky and the SWP leadership revealed that Trotsky was anything but an uncritical supporter of Cannon, was worried about Cannon’s adaptation to the liberal-trade-union sections and the incapacity and unwillingness of the Cannon people to break from that sort of collaboration. Cannon’s conduct during the Minneapolis trials has been used as a precedent for today. In the post-war period Cannon failed to understand the international conjunctural situation and came up with the theory of inverted American exceptionalism. But world capitalism was restabilizing itself and the American struggle would thus retreat. The International never understood this fundamental turning point in world history (1946-47), but instead the line of Pablo was that this was a period of ascending socialist revolution. Cannon never confronted the problem of Stalinism in the post-war period, but felt that the SWP would be thrown into leadership. Degeneration of the SWP during the ‘50s was then not merely a simple reflection of negative conditions, though these accentuated the sickness of the party. Internal problems forced Cannon into an international bloc he never wanted, explained this on the basis of “orthodoxy”. This was short-lived and prepared ground for growth of revision. The crisis of the SWP has been brewing for 20-25 years. The central cadre of the party was fashioned in this sick situation. Understanding the history of the SWP is related to our tasks of building the movement today. Are we simply to be a more orthodox copy of the SWP or recognize the necessity of theoretical development, of applying the Marxist method, of going beyond “orthodoxy”? Our tasks are essentially Iskra tasks, bring theory and consciousness to an economist movement. Study of the history of the SWP is essential to our own development and tasks.

Robertson: Your document was a good and serious effort to understand the SWP, but was best in its particular analyses. However, it would seem that you have loaded too much on American empiricism. Actually it is American exceptionalism to single out what happened in the U.S. alone as reason for the decline of the Marxist movement (though it is undeniably true that the American movement had a theoretical incapacity). To counterpose the sickness of the U.S. to the world movement would be good if objective development confirms, but it doesn’t. In the U.S., the most significant failure was that of the American working class to develop any political movement of its own. You often talk about “theory” and “method” but are weak in definition. In order to deal with Marxist method it is necessary to understand it not merely to refer to it–“theory” by itself is an empty word. Theory is a sufficient simplification of reality that it can be shoved into our heads and give us an active understanding as participants of what is going on–that is, what we hold in our heads is also a factor. Program generates theory. What are decisive are programmatic questions. The SWP in post-war years had a theory that was inadequate on Yugoslavia, China, etc. Pabloism was a revisionist attempt to fill that gap in a way that turned the movement toward programmatic shift and opened up the whole world movement for degeneration. Largely for objective reasons the SWP moved into the post-war period deproletarianized, isolated and with an aging cadre; a qualitative transformation took place. It is important to appreciate what the main driving forces were in the degeneration of the SWP for no party has ever performed anywhere in the world longer better than the SWP has and that includes the Bolshevik Party–no party has ever outlived the aging of its cadre.

The SWP managed to hold a revolutionary line for some decades–the ’50s was the worst period any movement faced anywhere. The entire world Trotskyist movement had developed an estimation of Stalinism which was developed on the basis of a single kind of experience–the pre-war role or the Stalinist parties in the face of working class mobilization in struggle. In the post-war years the SWP line had a ritual character. Program is decisive. Wohlforth’s analysis is fine, but has an idealist streak. His “theory” and “method” have a categorical quality. Though I have come down hardest on the critical side, I thought “Marxism in the U.S.” was a good statement.

Turner: Wohlforth’s document will be helpful for those who have not gone through the struggle in the SWP, though there is a tendency to oversimplify in the document. The subjective aspect of Cannon has been elevated and made into a factor beyond the normal weight that should be assigned. After all, the entire international movement failed to deal with the new situation that had arisen–the failure was not merely Cannon’s but that of the whole movement. In raising questions about the application of Marxist method, it would have been useful to concretely show method in application in terms of dialectics rather than just repeating the word “method”.

Wohlforth: The points raised on the need for more concrete material on theory and method are quite welcome. As far as R’s questioning my placing too much emphasis on American empiricism, failures of the whole international working class were obviously involved. I mentioned empiricism because this was the way the theoretical failure developed in the U.S., while in Europe, especially France, the failure was in the direction of formalism. As to the criticism that the document was weak in definition of theory and method, I wanted to show what they were through concrete analysis. The “Assimilation” document goes into it theoretically, and I consider it to be a complementary document, was how Marxist method should have been applied to the major problems of post-war period. Theory and method are not simple reflections of reality, but have an independent existence precisely because they are an abstraction from reality of the underlying process which may not be apparent through simple reflection. Theory seeks to reflect independent reality from beginning to end, not just present reality. The Pabloites had a theory that reflected a period of the expansion of Stalinism. Program does not generate theory; rather one comes to programmatic conclusions on the basis of theoretical understanding. There is an interaction between program and theory. Program in the concrete becomes part of the process and leads to theory; your mind is part of the reality. The weakness of the SWP would have failed in a good period in another way. It was headed for failure in 1946 by its false combination of sectarianism and opportunism, and would have led to the destruction of the SWP as a revolutionary party barring theoretical development. Can’t say no party performed better than the SWP. It is to the Bolshevik party we must return today, not to the SWP. Trotsky was the continuator of the Bolshevik party, but he was incapable given his time of creating a new formation that would be able to withstand his death. The Trotskyist movement was a failure but the Bolshevik movement was not. Bolshevism had within it greater revolutionary forces, more cadre who understood Marxist method, than any movement since. We will be playing only a transitional role. We don’t come out of the old tradition; the SWP did not create a cadre capable of doing what Trotsky did in the world movement. It is not that the analysis of Stalinism developed in the 1930’s is inadequate to explain current reality, but that they didn’t understand the method by which that theory was arrived at. Stalinism is degenerative, not progressive. Cannon is a key person in the history of the SWP, and in essence Cannon is the SWP. The degeneration of the SWP is related to the degeneration of Cannon. We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism. Cannon subordinated politics to organization. Organizational questions should not have a life in and of themselves. Our role is not simply to gather together workers where we can find them but to take to the working class the theoretical understanding without which the working class is incapable of organizing itself into a force to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Must have a conjunctural analysis of the development of capitalism as a world system in order to supplant the bourgeoisie.

Robertson: On theory being a reflection of reality–you have defined this as current reality. But that is impressionism. The greatest reality is during crises when superficial reality is stripped away. 1923 was such a turning point–that is how I used the word “reality”. I don’t like the word “process” because it has an objectivist tone. Slaughter is the most outstanding Marxist theorist today because of his denial of the autonomy of “facts” and his insistence that what we think is part of the process and part of the social outcome. We differ on program generating theory. If you sought to adhere to program at the time of failure of theory, you would either have to freeze or else seek a stronger guide to action, examining full reality, not just present nor just past. Only Cuba allowed one to finally make sense of the entire post-war problem; the problem was not solved historically until the Cuban developments. But anticipations were possible. Regarding Cannon’s worth as a Trotskyist political leader, as late as 1948 his writings on the Wallace campaign were a model. Trotsky was not part of the old Bolshevik cadre but issued out of Bolshevism partly in opposition to the Bolshevik Party which fell apart. The SWP has produced us. We are a link, for better or worse, from the Bolsheviks to Trotsky to SWP to us. Cannon was the best Communist politician produced in this country. It is not a question of copying the SWP but of going beyond. Future Trotskyists will have to meet the measure of Cannon’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. This is a real challenge. We have to learn from him positively as well as negatively. On Philips’s criticisms of your history project, some were correct, but basically he was making a Philistine response.

Turner: On the subjective factor of Cannon vs. the whole objective situation in which Trotskyism found itself–even in its most positive periods, Trotskyism existed in a context in which Stalinism as a world system looked and was large. The Trotskyist movement, even while Trotsky was alive, was not able to make a dent in the European Stalinist movement. The failure was not basically that of the individual, Cannon. While the individual can play an important role in all the processes of history, you cannot eliminate the objective forces. For example, in the degeneration of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky never considered the subjective to be the main factor.

Mazelis: It is wrong to say Trotsky did not come out of the Bolshevik party. He joined in 1917. This was qualitatively different from us coming over to the SWP. We came over to Trotskyism, not Cannonism. Our development must be viewed separately from the SWP. Trotsky came over to Leninism. What we learned in the SWP was not of the order of what Trotsky learned from Leninism. The British movement is already on a higher level than the SWP ever was here. We feel Cannonism was unable to develop Marxism but this is not saying we and the British have developed it, but we have scratched the surface. The “Assimilation” document was an extremely important contribution, and the international conference will make other contributions.

Michael: Robertson gives the impression that program yields theory, that you have a program that draws you into contact with events taking place and then cast about for theory. This view doesn’t take into account the things one uses to construct a theory.

Robertson: The best way to look at these questions is in situ–truth is always concrete. In the first workers movement in Russia a new problem was broached. The Bolsheviks and Lenin had an incorrect theory, a sufficient but not a correct theory, but up to the supreme moment they had the correct political conclusion of not making alliances with the liberals. In 1917 Lenin became a Trotskyist. In the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants, the proletariat must take the lead–there was something new in the Russian situation which cleared this up; the old experience was not enough. Trotsky made these predictions in 1904 without there yet being a party to carry out the program’s content. The Bolsheviks remained steadfast to their program. None of the individuals or groups at the time had the whole truth.

Turner: The basis of Marxism is materialism. In the beginning was the deed. History, life, pose certain tasks which men must solve, so they project a construction. To the extent the construction is related to the reality, men solve the tasks. This is fundamental to Marxism. There can be no disagreement on this.

Wohlforth: You are mistaken. Theory is more than a reflection of reality, it is an active part of reality. We must get out of a mechanism which has almost destroyed the Marxist movement. Theory is an interacting part of reality itself. Cannon was not a communist politician because he was never a communist in that he never mastered the fundamental of communism which was necessary to combine theory with the building of the party. Cannon was the world’s best factionalist. He kept control over the party but he destroyed the party–a criminal act. The best communist politician in the history of the SWP was Wright–he almost understood. There is a basic difference between us: The Spartacist group has yet to complete the theoretical break with the SWP and Cannonism while we have taken this step and have done it in large part under the urging of’ the SLL. It was they who urged us take on the history project. They had already come to the understanding of the need to break with Cannon. On program begetting theory–this is completely wrong. We are fundamentally counterposed to that position. That is not Marxism. You must begin with reality not with program. Lenin was in no sense an empiricist. He sought to implement a theory which wasn’t totally wrong. His program was an adequate reflection of his theory. Trotsky didn’t develop the theory of the Permanent Revolution out of program. He started with the reality of the 1905 revolution which led to theoretical understanding which led to program. “Working out theory to explain program”… “In the beginning was the deed”… I’m not interested in this, this is nothing. In this discussion we are concretizing what we mean by theory and method. Read Lenin’s Notebooks — he uses the word “process” 500 times. Process is essential to dialectics. If Robertson rejects the concept of process, he rejects the dialectic. To ignore or refuse to accept process loses that which is central to the dialectic, the internal process of life and matter. Everything is always in process. We continue to have important theoretical and methodological differences. This rather than barring unification and discussion, necessitates discussion, makes this dialogue and process between us more urgent.

Robertson: The question has been raised as to what is the program of a party. This is a class question, anticipation of the limits of what that class or section of the class can hope to achieve for itself, the codification of the possibilities of a class, for the workers a question of the victory of the socialist revolution–that is what program is. What is it that shapes theory? The appetites of men shape out their intervention. The SWP was not a bloc with Cannon–that implies they had different programs which they did not. The SWP was the American branch of the world Trotskyist movement, it was not the SWP vs. the Trotskyist movement. Theory does not always grow and develop. We know less about the world now than was known at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. We know less of the world at present because we have less means to change the world. I did not say Lenin was an empiricist, but that there was a certain theoretical weakness in the program of the Bolsheviks which was shared by Lenin, a slight empiricism. Trotsky did not start with the Revolution of 1905 for the theory of the Permanent Revolution, but had seen the need 18 months before that for a labor dictatorship. Because of this Trotsky seized on the Soviets more quickly than the Bolsheviks. Internal contradiction is the heart of dialectics. The word “process” grates on me, invoking an image of “process industries” such as the automated American oil refineries; hence I object … because we (or our absence!) are part of the “process”.

Turner: Wohlforth should avoid trying to score debating points, but consider what is being said, not take words out of context and try to give it some implied meaning. That is not a dialectical approach. Generally we have very unimportant and minor differences, as far as the discussion here reveals.

Robertson: We don’t propose to take a vote on your document, on views on these historical questions and on methodology. We ourselves have a running internal discussion on method.

Mazelis: I disagree strongly with Comrade Turner, with his entire approach. We have very serious differences, as the discussion shows. But we shouldn’t be afraid of differences, they should be thoroughly explored, and not avoided. As W. said, they are anything but a bar to unity. It’s perfectly understandable that you wouldn’t have a position on a particular document. It’s another thing that it should be stated the way you stated it–you don’t anticipate taking a position. There are important differences between us.

Wohlforth: You will take a position on method at your coming conference whether you want to or not. Marxist method will or will not be reflected in your documents. Spartacist will not be able to avoid taking a position on method.

CASTRO EM MOSCOU (Revista Spartacist 1)

CASTRO EM MOSCOU

por P. Jen

O premier Fidel Castro, preso na complexa rede de relações Washington-Pequim-Moscou, começou a se tornar mais claramente enredado nas maquinações da liderança russa. Declarações feitas tanto na entrevista de Castro na TV soviética de 21 de janeiro, quanto no Comunicado conjunto cubano-soviético de 22 de janeiro, revelam incontestavelmente que Khrushchev começou a consolidar seu controle sobre o PURS [Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista] (o partido cubano) e seu líder. Apesar de que haverá, sem dúvida, futuras vacilações, está fora de questão que Castro começou a seguir a política externa da União Soviética.

Aparecendo na TV de Moscou em 21 de janeiro, Castro disse: “Ao mesmo tempo [após a crise dos mísseis em outubro], houve um relaxamento da tensão internacional, um relaxamento na guerra fria. Tudo isso foi resultado da política e dos esforços da União Soviética e do campo socialista em nome da paz.” (ênfase adicionada).

Um dos resultados “concretos” desses esforços foi, no Comunicado cubano-soviético de 22 de janeiro, saudado favoravelmente pelo governo cubano: “O governo da República de Cuba considera o sucesso alcançado pela União Soviética na luta pela descontinuação dos testes nucleares e o acordo sobre veículos não-orbitantes com armas nucleares como um passo à frente para promover a paz e o desarmamento”.

Apoiava ainda além as políticas da burocracia soviética: “O camarada Fidel Castro expressou sua aprovação sobre as medidas tomadas pelo Comitê Central do PCUS para eliminar as diferenças existentes e consolidar a coesão e unidade nas fileiras do movimento comunista internacional”. (Comunicado conjunto cubano-soviético).

Está claro a partir disso que, no contexto da disputa sino-soviética, Castro incontestavelmente se uniu aos “líderes do PCUS” que, nas palavras dos chineses, “são os maiores de todos os revisionistas, assim como os maiores sectários e divisionistas conhecidos na história” (impresso em 4 de fevereiro no Jenmin Jih Pao, o jornal diário do PC chinês).

Não apenas a política soviética, mas a vida política soviética de forma geral, e o líder do PCUS em particular, receberam aprovação de Fidel Castro. “Eu estou muito interessado na experiência”, disse Castro na TV soviética em 21 de janeiro. “Eu estou muito interessado no papel desempenhado por seu Partido, o papel do destacamento avançado, o papel do organizador e inspirador de toda a atividade na União Soviética. Eu estou interessado na participação do Partido em todas as frentes operárias – na agricultura, na indústria, nas atividades culturais, em todas as esferas da produção, em todas as esferas da política e no exército. Atraiu minha atenção o maravilhoso papel que o Partido tem desempenhado na União Soviética por cerca de meio século.”

Nas últimas três – quase quatro – décadas, entretanto, “o maravilhoso papel que o Partido tem desempenhado na União Soviética” incluiu os julgamentos conspirativos de Stalin; a decapitação do Exército Vermelho à véspera da Segunda Guerra Mundial; as traições da revolução proletária na China (1925-27). Alemanha (1929-33), França (1934-36; 1945-presente), Itália (1944-presente), Iraque (1958), etc.; e a atual perspectiva estratégica de capitulação ao imperialismo.

Nós pudemos observar”, disse Castro na TV de Moscou, “a forma na qual o Partido [PCUS] tem treinado especialistas, tem difundido a forma revolucionária de pensamento no povo, treinado astronautas, cientistas, tem produzido quadros que hoje estão desenvolvendo a economia e toda a vida na União Soviética, tem produzido os quadros que estão agora construindo o comunismo. O Partido é um símbolo de continuidade revolucionária e da confiança do povo em si mesmo.” (ênfase adicionada).

A avaliação de Castro sobre Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, o líder do dito Partido “Comunista” que está construindo o “comunismo” em um só país, é cheia de carinho e admiração. “Eu tenho o pleno direito de avaliar e admirar este homem, que combina, em uma pessoa, tantas qualidades esplêndidas: intelecto, excelente caráter, gentileza e força – as qualidades que fazem dele um grande líder. E quanto mais eu conheço o camarada Nikita Sergeyevich, quanto mais tempo eu passo com ele, mais afetuosos se tornam meus sentimentos por ele, mais eu o admiro, mais alta é minha opinião dele como homem.” (Castro na TV de Moscou, 21 de janeiro).

As palavras de Fidel Castro dispensam comentário. Aqueles interessados no texto completo da sua entrevista na TV de Moscou, assim como o Comunicado conjunto, podem encontrá-los no suplemento do Moscow News, 25 de janeiro de 1964.

Para socialistas que viam na postura militante de Castro uma liderança comunista revolucionária ou uma reprodução disso, o recente giro para a direita deve vir como surpresa e mesmo choque. A perceptível complacência de Castro à pressão econômica soviética, enquanto talvez equivocadamente compreensível de um ponto de vista (o de construir a economia nacional), é indesculpável de outro (o da revolução proletária internacional), e, de fato, derrota estrategicamente a última. É somente na base da revolução proletária nos países avançados que a economia cubana pode desenvolver seu pleno potencial. Considerações táticas devem ser vistas como parte e subordinadas às estratégicas. Fluindo do empirismo da liderança cubana, o objetivo estratégico de revolução proletária mundial (se algum dia existiu) foi sacrificado ao objetivo estreito, limitado, “pragmático” de preços estáveis para o açúcar cubano. Se ainda é objetado que Castro não tinha escolha, então nós, ao menos, não temos nos desculpar por suas ações em Moscou. Castro, de fato, não tinha escolha: ele foi o prisioneiro de sua própria origem histórica que foi a base de sua política. Basta dizer que se o nosso movimento tivesse chegado ao poder em Cuba, ele teria estado em uma situação histórica bastante diferente. Nós criticamos a liderança de Castro como parte do processo de construção da liderança Bolchevique que deve ser parte integral numa situação como essa. O jogo histórico de trocar de lugar com vários líderes não é algo em que os marxistas se envolvam. As técnicas de chantagem econômica soviética são, é claro, bem conhecidas dos povos da Albânia e da China, e é mérito de Castro que ele tenha persistido por tanto tempo quanto o fez.

A vacilação da liderança de Castro entre as posições defendidas pelas burocracias soviética e chinesa, e sua aderência, mais ou menos, à linha da última, permitiu a muitos socialistas manter certas ilusões sobre a natureza da liderança cubana – ilusões que tal liderança começou ela própria a dissipar.

Além disso, esses mesmos socialistas estão sustentando uma ilusão ainda mais fundamental com a sua crença de que uma perspectiva proletária revolucionária motiva a posição chinesa, superficialmente revolucionária. Enquanto a liderança maoista falar com um vocabulário revolucionário, muitos socialistas estão inclinados a tomar sua palavra como verdadeira. Entretanto, está claro por toda a história da revolução chinesa, que a tentativa de construir uma base de seguidores em torno da linha do PCC é apenas para o propósito de pôr pressão no imperialismo para forçá-lo a se acomodar ao atual governo do Estado chinês.

O giro à direita da liderança de Castro colocou agora a questão da teoria marxista e sua relação com a prática diante de todos aqueles que se consideram comunistas revolucionários. Se o movimento revolucionário dos trabalhadores quiser avançar, terão que acertar as conta com essa e outras questões, e chegar a uma solução com base na ação da classe trabalhadora independente.

A liderança cubana, apesar de responder à pressão das massas, permanece acima e é organizativamente independente dela. Essa independência organizativa é consequência de usa origem histórica, na qual ela chegou ao poder como liderança, não de sovietes operários e camponeses, mas sim de um exército de guerrilha. Desta base social é que flui a natureza empírica, e não marxista, da liderança cubana, conforme foi declarado claramente por Che Guevara: “Para saber para onde vai Cuba, o melhor é perguntar ao governo dos EUA quão longe ele pretende ir”.

Se muitos socialistas que apoiam o governo Castro em oposição ao regime contrarrevolucionário de Khrushchev não viam a necessidade de uma visão dialética da sociedade, acreditando, em vez disso no curso “natural” dos eventos, o seu impressionismo idealista recebeu, ao menos, um golpe rude pelas vacilações empíricas da liderança de Castro.

A estratégia dos marxistas na época de decadência imperialista flui da compreensão do desenvolvimento total e por toda a parte da luta de classes internacional, e, portanto, das necessidades do proletariado internacional. Essa visão, que observa a interdependência e interconexão de todos os fenômenos, nada tem em comum com o empirismo não apenas da liderança cubana, mas também, infelizmente, de muitos comunistas.

Os líderes cubanos têm reagido empiricamente a todas as pressões, não apenas dos imperialistas dos EUA, mas também dos burocratas soviéticos, e não apenas falharam em realizar as tarefas essenciais diante do movimento revolucionário dos trabalhadores, mas sequer compreenderam quais são estas tarefas. E eles falharam em compreender essas tarefas precisamente por sua incapacidade, que flui das suas origens sociais em um movimento camponês democrático-burguês, de pensar de qualquer outra forma que não seja empírica. O empiricismo, a ideologia da burguesia depois de ter estabelecido o seu poder, é necessariamente o método de todas as tendências que não se baseiam na estratégia da revolução proletária mundial.

Mesmo as reformas democrático-burguesas mais elementares não podem ser mantidas nos países atrasados, exceto sob a ditadura do proletariado. Depender de que outros movimentos similares liderem revoluções que vão tão longe em sua transformação quanto a revolução cubana foi, é deixar a iniciativa passar para as mãos do imperialismo. Foi apenas a incapacidade do imperialismo americano de se acomodar a uma revolução radical pequeno-burguesa que forçou o regime de Castro a ir tão longe quanto foi – mais longe, de fato, do que qualquer um no Movimento 26 de Julho havia planejado. Os imperialistas europeus têm sido, até o momento, mais astutos que seus pares americanos. Aqueles compreenderam mais corretamente a maré do movimento nacionalista e cederam muito do seu poder político e um pouco do seu poder econômico na África e na Ásia precisamente para evitar o que aconteceu em Cuba. Eles permitiram que os “socialistas” Ben Bella e Nkrumah se voltassem contra os imperialistas; estes preferiram perder status do que perder áreas para investimento, mesmo se tais investimentos enfrentam certas restrições.

A justificável tremenda onda de entusiasmo pela revolução cubana transbordou para um tipo de adulação acrítica da liderança de Castro que é inteiramente inaceitável para marxistas. As causas disso são, entretanto, claras: a pequenez do movimento comunista americano; a calmaria relativa da classe trabalhadora americana; e o sucesso de uma revolução radical pequeno-burguesa que desafiou o imperialismo americano e mexeu com as imaginações não apenas dos oprimidos trabalhadores e camponeses das colônias, mas também dos radicais americanos. Diante das enormes tarefas à frente dos poucos comunistas revolucionários neste país, alguns de nós olharam para outro lugar e se tornaram adoradores do fato consumado – Fidel Castro e Mao Tse Tung, para não mencionar Jimmy Hoffa e Malcom X. Aqueles de nós que não nutrem quaisquer ilusões sobre esses líderes, são atacados como sectários. Entretanto, nossa análise, no caso de Castro, foi dramaticamente confirmada. É necessário encarar a verdade inflexivelmente, nos livrarmos de noções românticas fáceis e começar a tarefa crítica de construir um partido marxista neste país. Um partido baseado em ilusões jamais liderará a classe trabalhadora até o poder.

DEFENDER A REVOLUÇÃO CUBANA!

A ESQUERDA ANTE O ASSASSINATO DE KENNEDY (Revista Spartacist 1)

A ESQUERDA ANTE O ASSASSINATO DE KENNEDY

O assassinato do presidente Kennedy foi um teste ácido da posição de classe de cada movimento de esquerda nos Estados Unidos. Entre os grupos radicais nos EUA, uma divisão qualitativa pode ser percebida entre aquelas tendências que se viraram resolutamente para a classe trabalhadora e uma alternativa independente ao estadismo burguês, e aquelas formações que juntaram seu choro ao lamento liberal pelo presidente morto.

PROGRESSIVE LABOR

27 de novembro, 1963 – “O assassinato do Presidente Kennedy, por um atacante ainda desconhecido, não apenas reflete a existência de sérias contradições políticas para a classe dominante dos EUA, mas eleva essas contradições a novas alturas….
Enquanto é essencial que os revolucionários avaliem todos os aspectos políticos do assassinato, também é necessário para os revolucionários rejeitar o assassinato como uma forma concebível de luta política. A morte de um homem não pode alterar o curso da história. Somente os esforços de milhões para mudar um sistema político e econômico particular pode ser decisivo… Finalmente, assassinato somente tende a confundir as verdadeiras questões diante dos trabalhadores. Encoraja a classe dominante a elevar a opressão do povo.
Assassinato e violência individual, entretanto, são parte do sistema capitalista…
Em várias ocasiões, nosso governo arquitetou ou apoiou verdadeiros assassinatos organizados com grande gosto. O assassinato de Patrice Lumumba foi recebido contentemente pela administração Kennedy. Além disso, o assassinato também tem sido uma maneira de eliminar amigos que viveram além de sua utilidade para o governo. Apenas semanas antes do assassinato de Kennedy, o governo (e muitos que agora choram lágrimas hipócritas por Kennedy) estavam rindo descontroladamente do assassinato, inspirado pelos EUA, de Diem e seu irmão no Vietnã do Sul….
Diante de sua contínua crueldade e terror, o povo e, especialmente, aqueles que se consideram combatentes pelo socialismo, não deveriam ser pegos no emaranhado das contradições da classe dominante. O povo deveria utilizar todo momento para pressionar por suas demandas. Ele não deveria esperar para que a administração Johnson restabeleça a ofensiva – o que ela vai fazer – contra os povos que lutam por uma vida melhor. O histórico de Johnson é parte integral da opressão da classe dominante – com uma pitada de tempero sulista adicionada por boa medida.
O povo ainda se vê diante do racismo, desemprego, péssimas moradias e educação, altos aluguéis e serviços médicos de altos preços (ou inexistentes). O povo, se realmente for se unir, deveria se unir em torno de programas lidando com seus problemas.”

WORKERS WORLD

25 de novembro de 1963 – “Os Estados Unidos da América se aproximaram de um golpe de Estado fascista, e do estabelecimento de uma ditadura totalitária reacionária de direita.
Esse é o fato principal e fundamental a emergir do assassinato do presidente Kennedy.
Que o golpe de Estado não tenha acontecido de fato, só pode se explicar pelo fato de que forças políticas da reação, racismo virulento e militarismo a favor de ‘guerras preventivas’ falharam em se reunir no momento crítico e emergir como ‘salvadores da pátria’.
A tendência à ditadura totalitária só pode ser revertida pela intervenção de uma massa multitudinária ainda maior do movimento da classe trabalhadora, e da unidade entre os trabalhadores negros e brancos contra um opressor comum.”

(Workers World merece crédito por ter reimpresso extratos da excelente declaração de Fidel Castro sobre o assassinato).

RED FLAG

(Órgão britânico do grupo de Posadas, a tendência trotskista com base na América Latina).

Janeiro de 1964 – “O assassinato de Kennedy é o resultado de uma luta entre bandidos. Uma facção liquidou um membro da facção rival.
No coração do imperialismo ianque, há duas tendências. Uma tendência é centrada no que se chama o Pentágono e é erradamente chamada ‘direita’ (não existe esquerda ou direita para o capitalismo, mas simplesmente diferentes posições em relação à mesma política) e a tendência ‘Kennedy’….
“O imperialismo da tendência Kennedy tenta lucrar com os interesses conservadores da burocracia soviética de prolongar sua própria existência ao máximo.
A assim chamada facção Pentágono está ciente dessa situação e sente que o próprio atraso significa uma perda direta para seus interesses econômicos, políticos e sociais. Essa é a razão para a ofensiva que ela acaba de realizar…
O Pentágono matou Kennedy dentro da rede política construída para lançar uma guerra de surpresa no momento mais conveniente para si mesma.”

Das publicações dos três grupos acima, pode-se ver que a posição de classe básica foi mantida em suas discussões do assassinato de Kennedy. Uma linha de classe deve não somente continuar a orientar a classe trabalhadora contra seu inimigo de classe, a burguesia, mas deve oferecer uma análise correta para os trabalhadores em um período de confusão e consternação. Os três grupos acima não perderam de vista seu inimigo na classe dominante – nem hesitaram em apontar isso a seus leitores.

Houve exageros e erros, tais quais a confusão de Workers World entre fascismo e golpe de Estado. Ou a referência do grupo Progressive Labor ao “nosso” governo. E, é claro, a conclusão da tendência de Posadas de que o Pentágono assassinou Kennedy só pode ser considerada uma especulação interessante a essa altura.

Essas posições se destacam em claro contraste aos periódicos e organizações cujo “socialismo” e “marxismo” as levaram, num momento de pânico, a se recolherem junto à classe dominante. Declarações sobre “Amar (!) este país (!!)” e coisas do tipo só servem para confundir e desorientar os militantes socialistas. Compare os exemplos a seguir.

NEW AMERICA [Partido Socialista]

13 de dezembro de 1963 – “Estou escrevendo no dia de luto sob um profundo sentimento de choque e perda, e vergonha. Nós lamentamos a perda de um presidente valente, sinceramente interessado na paz e na liberdade, que estava ganhando força….
Você estará lendo essa coluna após o Dia de Ação de Graças, quando teremos esse dia de luto em perspectiva. Pelo que nós, americanos, podemos ser gratos nesse tempo de tragédia? Podemos ser gratos pelo enriquecimento da memória. Podemos ser gratos pela explosão geral de luto e reconhecimento da vergonha pela atmosfera de ódio na qual a tragédia aconteceu. Podemos ser gratos pela sucessão ordeira e ausência de partidarismo amargo na subida do presidente Johnson ao seu alto cargo.”
Norman Thomas

O Partido Socialista se une à nação inteira ao lamentar profundamente a trágica morte de nosso presidente. O assassinato insensível e covarde que tirou a vida de John F. Kennedy foi um dos maiores crimes e tragédias na história do nosso país. À Sra. Kennedy e a toda a família Kennedy, estendemos nossas mais sinceras e cordiais condolências”.
Resolução do Comitê Nacional do Partido Socialista

THE WORKER [Partido Comunista]

26 de novembro de 1963 – “Nação em luto por líder martirizado” (manchete da primeira página).
Nós compartilhamos – com todos os outros americanos – incomensurável luto diante do monstruoso e chocante assassinato do presidente John F. Kennedy.
Estendemos nossa mais profunda simpatia à Sra. Kennedy, ao seu filho e filha, e toda sua família….
Embora angustiados pela tristeza sobre da perda do maior oficial da nossa nação, o povo americano não entrará em pânico. Se reunirá ao redor da Constituição, defenderá suas tradições democráticas e direitos básicos e não será distraído da sua determinação para que nossa nação trilhe o caminho de uma democracia cada vez mais ampla, do progresso social e da paz.”

THE MILITANT [SWP]

2 de dezembro de 1963 – “Se nós realmente amamos esse país, devemos renunciar ao ódio” (manchete de capa citando o chefe de justiça Earl Warren como “voz da sanidade”).
O povo americano passou por uma das mais traumáticas experiências em sua história. A estonteante notícia de que o presidente Kennedy havia sido assassinado, seguida tão rapidamente pelo assassinato inexplicável e televisionado do seu suposto assassino na prisão municipal de Dallas por um capanga da polícia, deixaram os americanos perplexos e em choque. Uma onda de apreensão correu o mundo com a notícia do assassinato de Kennedy conforme as pessoas de todos os países tentavam decifrar a causa e o presságio do trágico evento….
Antes de todos os outros, é dever do governo federal fornecer ao povo uma análise completa da atmosfera de ódio e violência que estimulou tal tragédia. Antes de todos os outros, é dever do governo federal defender efetiva e completamente as liberdades civis dos americanos de todas as visões políticas, não importa quão críticos aos que estão no poder, e a liberdade civil de todos os americanos, independente de sua cor. Somente assim a nuvem de ódio e violência que paira sobre o país pode começar a se desfazer”.
Os Editores

O Socialist Workers Party condena o brutal assassinato do presidente Kennedy como um ato desumano, criminoso e contra a sociedade. Estendemos nossa mais profunda simpatia à Sra. Kennedy e às crianças em seu luto pessoal.”
O ato vem da atmosfera criada pela agitação e atos inflamatórios de forças racistas e ultraconservadoras. O terrorismo político, como a supressão da liberdade política, viola os direitos democráticos de todos os americanos e pode apenas fortalecer as forças da reação. Diferenças políticas no interior de nossa sociedade devem ser resolvidas de maneira ordeira pela decisão da maioria após um debate público livre e aberto no qual todos os pontos de vista sejam ouvidos.”
Farrell Dobbs, Secretário Nacional do Socialist Workers Party

E, agora, um sopro de ar fresco!

THE NEWSLETTER

(Órgão da Socialist Labour League, os trotskistas britânicos).

30 de novembro de 1963 – “Este político milionário foi destruído pelas próprias contradições que pensou que poderia superar suave e pacificamente.
Venhamos ou não a conhecer a verdade sobre os assassinatos de Dallas, Texas, a morte de Kennedy foi, sem dúvida, resultado de um agonizante conflito no interior da classe dominante americana.
Na questão da integração dos negros e de política externa e defesa, o programa de Kennedy, refletindo as necessidades de um setor do grande capital dos EUA, fez surgir uma aguda hostilidade dos grupos políticos e econômicos poderosos.
O papel das autoridades estaduais do Texas torna isso muito claro. Se Oswald foi vítima de uma conspiração, e isso parece bastante provável, o trabalho foi organizado em um alto nível da máquina de Estado….
Nós não estamos de luto por John F. Kennedy.
Como socialistas internacionais, o vemos como um líder mundial do inimigo de classe.
Se ele era um homem de visão, era no interesse da continuação da exploração capitalista em toda a parte.”
John Crawford

7 de dezembro de 1963 – “Marxistas e o assassinato de Kennedy” (manchete da página dois).
O assassinato do presidente Kennedy fez emergir uma rodada mais que usual de histeria, lágrimas e louvor pelos representantes políticos e literários da classe média.
Ao ler alguns dos artigos na imprensa assim chamada socialista e liberal, um leitor desavisado pensará que Kennedy defendia a liberdade do povo negro e era, de fato, um socialista em tudo menos no nome.
Assim, os ajudantes do capital internacional se esforçam para embelezar a mais reacionária potência imperialista no mundo em seu momento de crise.
Kennedy foi, é claro, um representante muito capaz de sua classe. Tudo o que ele fez foi em razão de um objetivo, fortalecer o imperialismo americano…
Quando falou sobre os direitos dos negros, ele estava meramente usando uma fraseologia liberal bonita para que pudesse, em nome de sua classe, continuar a melhor escravizar o povo negro.
Marxistas não expressam qualquer forma de simpatia a respeito da morte de Kennedy
Não apoiamos o ato de terror individual responsável por sua morte, não porque sejamos frágeis ou humanitários sobre como foi feito, mas porque o terror individual não é substituto para a construção de um partido revolucionário.
Desorganização — Terrorismo é uma arma que, de fato, desorganiza e deixa a classe trabalhadora sem líderes. Ele cria a impressão de que a remoção de políticos capitalistas proeminentes ou homens de Estado pode resolver os problemas da classe trabalhadora.
Mas para cada tirano atingido, há outro pronto para assumir seu lugar. Apenas a derrubada do sistema capitalista nos Estados Unidos e sua substituição pelo poder da classe trabalhadora e pelo socialismo pode resolver os problemas da classe trabalhadora americana, branca e negra.
Tal tarefa não pode ser alcançada por terroristas como Lee Oswald. A resposta não está com eles, mas através da preparação e construção de um partido revolucionário que, por meio da ação de massa, tome o poder….
A tomada do poder pelo partido revolucionário não acontece sem terror. A classe dominante não hesitará em aterrorizar a classe trabalhadora, o povo negro e os povos coloniais….
A simpatia dos marxistas, enquanto não concordando com o método de Oswald, deve ser dada aos milhões de Oswald, brancos e negros, que foram levados à pauperização pelo capitalismo. A tarefa do movimento marxista americano é direcionar sua atenção para essas pessoas, e não em mandar mensagens de simpatia à Sra. Kennedy.
Fatal — Quando Lee Oswald disparou o tiro fatal, ele fez algo mais que assassinar o presidente.
Ele também destruiu completamente a mentira de que o Socialist Workers Party dos Estados Unidos é um partido trotskista e que ele mantém as tradições nas quais foi fundado na luta para construir a Quarta Internacional.
The Militant, órgão semanal do SWP que, de acordo com seu cabeçalho, é ‘publicado nos interesses da classe trabalhadora’, incluiu essa notícia na sua edição de segunda-feira, 2 de dezembro, com o título ‘Líder socialista denuncia o assassinato do presidente’:
(Segue-se a declaração de Farrell Dobbs que foi citada acima).
Essa declaração nauseante repudia cada princípio pelos quais Trotsky e o Partido Bolchevique lutaram. É uma declaração escrita por liberais covardes, cujos olhos estão voltados unicamente em direção à classe média americana.
“‘Nós estendemos’, diz Farrell Dobbs, ‘nossa mais profunda simpatia à Sra. Kennedy’.
De fato! E quem é a Sra. Kennedy?”
Reacionário — Ela é a filha de um milionário de Wall Street, e foi esposa do líder da potência imperialista mais reacionária na Terra. Os marxistas não podem ter qualquer simpatia com a Sra. Kennedy e sua classe.
“‘Diferenças políticas no interior de nossa sociedade devem ser resolvidas de maneira ordeira’, diz Dobbs.
De fato! Diga isso aos negros de Birmingham, Alabama, e aos mineiros do Kentucky. Diga isso aos milhões nos países coloniais que lutam contra o imperialismo.
A resolução das questões de classe não ocorrerá de maneira ordeira, mas de forma violenta, porque a classe dominante nunca vai desistir do seu poder pacificamente. Para os milhões de trabalhadores em luta contra o imperialismo ao redor de todo o mundo, Dobbs é só mais um liberal americano que fala a linguagem da ‘ordem’ para mascarar a brutalidade de seu próprio governo imperialista.
Como Trotsky teria odiado essa declaração do líder do Socialist Workers Party. Ele teria esfolado vivo o seu autor em qualquer idioma que dominasse. É uma vergonhosa lambeção de botas dos pequeno-burgueses americanos, vinda de um homem que se reivindica um marxista!”
Ataque — Dobbs envia suas condolências à ‘Sra. Kennedy e às crianças’, mas nenhuma palavra sobre a Sra. Oswald, uma pobre mulher russa cujos filhos e ela própria serão visados para ataque onde quer que vão.
Em vez de tomar o lado dos pobres dos Estados Unidos, Dobbs vira seus olhos para os representantes dos ricos e poderosos.
Houve, é claro, uma possibilidade distinta de que uma repressão anti-operária utilizasse o assassinato de Kennedy para atacar a esquerda. Mas tal ataque não poderia ser impedido enviando condolências à Sra. Kennedy. A resposta a qualquer repressão é explicar as questões de classe envolvidas no assassinato, que só pode ser feito por meio de uma completa exposição do papel de Kennedy.
Traição — Farrell Dobbs não vê a classe trabalhadora como seu único aliado real na luta contra a repressão. Ele olha na direção oposta, para a classe dominante. Nessa questão, assim como em todas as outras, Dobbs traiu o movimento marxista….
Sua degeneração política é um alerta para marxistas em toda a parte. Ela se segue imediatamente à dita ‘reunificação’ com os pablistas, que apoiaram o assassinato dos líderes sindicais argelinos pelos capangas contratados da FLN em Paris, em 1957 e 1958.
Essa unificação foi uma aliança dos renegados do trotskismo para passar da classe trabalhadora aos benfeitores cujo único objetivo é embelezar o imperialismo.
Esperamos notícias sobre se James P. Cannon, fundador do movimento trotskista americano, estava disposto a assinar a mensagem de condolências à Sra. Kennedy.”
Gerry Healy, Secretário Nacional da Socialist Labour League

O teste ácido para qualquer organização que se apresenta como socialista ocorre em períodos de crise ou oportunidade revolucionária. Todas essas organizações foram testadas em sua habilidade de manter seus princípios no momento do assassinato de Kennedy. Para quem o conceito de trotskismo é sinônimo com posição de classe sob as mais adversas circunstâncias, a declaração de Farrell Dobbs e toda a edição do Militant sobre o assassinato de Kennedy vieram como profundo choque. Em um momento mais calmo e propenso a reflexão, até próprios os líderes do Socialist Workers Party ficariam mortificados e surpresos com sua falta de fibra.

É verdade, é claro, que é uma tática perfeitamente principista evitar cuidadosamente o uso de frases provocativas quando a existência organizativa legal e, possivelmente, a vida dos revolucionários, está em risco. Entretanto, as palavras de Dobbs e do Militant não foram as de um socialista revolucionário, mas sim de social-democratas e de liberais burgueses, merecendo os ataques de Gerry Healy e da Socialist Labour League.

A Tendência Revolucionária têm criticado repetidamente a tentativa de converter o SWP em um apêndice das formações radicais pequeno-burguesas. O abandono do conceito de que a classe trabalhadora e sua vanguarda devem liderar as massas, evidente e inevitavelmente levam, em um momento de crise, ao abandono da essência de todas as posições proletárias revolucionárias.

NOTAS EDITORIAIS (Revista Spartacist 1)

NOTAS EDITORIAIS

Na falta de uma declaração política geral:

Nós estamos publicando SPARTACIST porque nossa expulsão do Socialist Workers Party interrompe a expressão de nossas posições dentro desse partido. Nós continuaremos a produzir um órgão público até a nossa readmissão ao SWP e até reassumirmos nosso papel dentro dele.

Nós buscaremos resumir nosso ponto de vista com uma breve declaração “Nossa Posição” em uma edição próxima de SPARTACIST. Nesse meio tempo, enquanto esta edição tem a intenção de lidar especificamente com o SWP, todo seu conteúdo também expressa o que somos de uma forma mais geral.

Temos a intenção de que nosso periódico seja uma publicação propagandista direcionada aos mesmos dois objetivos que nós buscávamos, até agora, exclusivamente entre os membros do SWP. Queremos influenciar grupos e setores radicais que estejam se movendo à esquerda e também buscar clareza e direção marxista. Nós declaramos francamente de antemão que o propósito da nossa ação é propiciar o reagrupamento revolucionário de forças neste país para o surgimento de um partido leninista de vanguarda da classe trabalhadora. Em segundo lugar, queremos ganhar apoiadores individuais para nosso ponto de vista dentre a juventude radical, militantes da luta pelos direitos civis, e buscamos criar modestos núcleos dentro de setores-chave da classe trabalhadora. Crítica para nosso sucesso será a habilidade de nossos camaradas de, ao mesmo tempo, serem revolucionários envolvidos nas lutas sociais do nosso tempo e de realizar uma elaboração efetiva sobre as questões teóricas e políticas candentes postas diante dos marxistas hoje.

Nosso nome:

Nós escolhemos o título SPARTACIST em homenagem à Liga Espártaco, nome adotado pela esquerda revolucionária alemã liderada por Rosa Luxemburgo e Karl Liebknecht durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial. Os espartaquistas alemães travaram uma brava luta contra seus senhores imperialistas no tempo de guerra e, além disso, tiveram que marchar, a cada passo do caminho, em oposição à Maioria social-democrata, patriótica e degenerada, do seu tempo.

Nos Estados Unidos, a juventude trotskista no começo dos anos 1930 chamou seu jornal de Young Spartacus [Jovem Espártaco]. Foi uma extraordinária fusão jornalística da defesa de ideias revolucionárias com um guia para a ação. Não aspiramos a fazer nada além de servir, também para honrar o nome que escolhemos, à missão de expressar o ponto de vista do trotskismo consistente, o marxismo revolucionário de nossa época.

E sobre o SWP:

Qualquer tendência a se render ao sentimento de luto diante dos absurdos cometidos pela direção do partido deve ser combatida. Certamente, os principais autores da perseguição no partido traçaram uma linha separando-os das normas elementares da prática socialista revolucionária. Enquanto esses indivíduos podem provavelmente ser descartados, esse, de forma alguma, é o caso para o grosso da base do partido, que mostrou, ao contrário, a fraqueza menor e mais facilmente reversível de insensibilidade diante de ataques contra a democracia do partido e aquiescência a maus líderes.

Acima de tudo, uma resposta política é necessária. As expulsões impedem uma clarificação necessária sobre o que está na base das disputas intrapartidárias nos anos recentes: ou seja, a luta pelo socialismo pode ser travada de forma bem-sucedida hoje com os supostos marxistas revolucionários agindo como auxiliares de terceiros? Ou o objetivo estratégico dos trotskistas necessariamente segue tendo como centro que eles próprios ganhem a liderança da classe trabalhadora? Essa questão ainda precisa ser respondida concreta e decisivamente pelo SWP. Isso não é senão a formulação contemporânea de uma velha questão entre os socialistas. No fundo, ela revolve em torno da divisão básica – reforma ou revolução! O atual caráter não-resolvido da questão aparece subjetivamente no partido pela contradição na consciência dos seus membros. Eles ainda pensam em si mesmos como trotskistas, enquanto seguem líderes revisionistas cada vez mais distantes do marxismo! Nós não pretendemos permitir que medidas organizativas de pequenos burocratas fiquem no caminho da futura polarização em torno de uma linha de princípios no centrista SWP. Pois sabemos muito bem que muitos que hoje depositam seu apoio fracional na liderança majoritária irão, amanhã, se encontrar na ala esquerda revolucionária.

Nós incitamos:

A todos os apoiadores da nossa tendência, amigos e simpatizantes, e defensores dos nossos direitos na base do SWP, nós incitamos vocês a permanecerem firmes diante das expulsões. Apoiem-nos em nossos esforços para sermos readmitidos ao partido. Sigam a disciplina do partido e persistam na defesa de vossas visões. Em suma, permaneçam e lutem no SWP!

Nós, da nossa parte, pretendemos exaurir todos os recursos para reverter as expulsões. Mais – nós não ficaremos contentes apenas em submeter à linha e às ações do partido as críticas necessárias por meio das páginas de SPARTACIST e por outros meios. É igualmente nossa responsabilidade apoiar as ações públicas do SWP de forma principista. Em particular, declaramos nossa intenção de participar integralmente no trabalho da campanha presidencial de 1964 do partido.

EXPULSÕES NO SWP (Revista Spartacist 1)

O Comitê Nacional do Socialist Workers Party expulsou cinco membros da ala esquerda minoritária do partido em uma plenária em Nova York no fim de dezembro. Os cinco militantes expulsos da Tendência Revolucionária do SWP foram Shane Mage, James Robertson, Geoffrey White, Laurence Ireland e Lynne Harper. O Comitê Político do partido tinha suspendido-os dois meses antes sob o argumento de que uma investigação da Comissão de Controle havia revelado que Robertson, Ireland e Harper haviam expressado opiniões “desleais” por escrito de forma privada dentro da sua própria tendência. Os acusados havia escrito que o SWP havia deixado de ser um partido revolucionário e se tornado centrista, e que uma luta irreconciliável nos limites da disciplina partidária era, portanto, necessária contra a linha e a liderança da maioria. Mage e White foram acusados também de liderarem uma tendência que mantinha ou permitia tais posições. Ao se recusarem a voltar atrás ou se desassociarem uns dos outros, todos os cinco foram sumariamente expulsos.

Aceitação da disciplina

Essas expulsões marcam uma nova fase na história de trinta e cinco anos do trotskismo nos Estados Unidos. A degeneração do partido nos anos recentes atingiu tal ponto que, pela primeira vez em toda a experiência do SWP, a liderança usou expulsões para livrar o partido de uma oposição interna que cumpria as condições bolcheviques para serem membros do partido – aceitação disciplinada das políticas impostas pela maioria.

Amplo apoio

Dentro do partido, todas as tendências de oposição, dissidentes e críticos, totalizando mais de um quarto de todos os membros, saíram em defesa dos camaradas expulsos após as suspensões preliminares. Entre aqueles que se opuseram e protestaram contra a ação do CP estiveram: Myra Tanner Weiss, por várias vezes candidata a vice-presidente do partido; Arne Swabeck, líder fundador do trotskismo americano, assim como muitos membros de sua tendência pelo país; membros proeminentes do partido, tais como Jack Wright de Seattle e Wendell Phillips do Sul da Califórnia; o grupo Wohlforth-Philips; várias regionais do partido, incluindo as de New Haven e Seattle.

Comissão de controle

Duas fortes reações sentidas no partido são responsáveis por essa enxurrada de apoio dos mais diversos e antagônicos setores do partido. Uma reação foi indignação diante da expulsão de camaradas acusados de terem “atitudes desleais”. Intensificou esse sentimento o desgosto com relação aos meios que foram e que geralmente são usados em uma caça às bruxas como essa. Os líderes do partido se recusaram conceder mesmo a formalidade de um julgamento. As expulsões ocorreram após uma sórdida investigação dirigida pelo membro da Comissão de Controle Anna Chester, esposa de um membro da maioria do CP e notória por sua fé fanática na liderança do partido. Os investigadores primeiro exigiram acesso a rascunhos de documentos e correspondência privados da minoria. Sob extremo protesto, os militantes da TR aceitaram essas exigências. Aparentemente insatisfeitos com os resultados, a Comissão de Controle procedeu convocando camaradas jovens e novos para interrogatórios a serem gravados em salas do escritório nacional do partido. Foi pedido aos jovens para confessarem que eles próprios e a tendência eram culpados de indisciplina, deslealdade e menchevismo. Ao fracassar em conseguir tais confissões, os investigadores então passaram a um questionário que era grosseiramente projetado para faze os jovens se confundirem em confissões involuntárias de culpa!

A segunda maior razão para a saída em defesa da Tendência Revolucionária foi o medo do precedente estabelecido por tais expulsões. As exclusões vieram como o clímax de uma crescente série de provocações e repressões nos últimos anos contra os opositores do que agora se transformou no regime de Dobbs. O golpe contra a TR foi ampla e claramente dirigido contra o direito de qualquer grupo organizado, que não seja a fração da Maioria, de continuar a existir fora dos períodos de convenção. Assim, todos os elementos de oposição sabem que estão ameaçados com um tratamento semelhante.

A lógica política por trás das expulsões é uma simples extensão da noção de que a perda de uma perspectiva operária revolucionária pela Maioria fez da democracia partidária supérflua, do seu ponto de vista. Combinando suas características com a presença de uma oposição interna bastante difundida, a Maioria descobriu que o luxo de uma prática democrática, acima de tudo o direito a tendências, se torna intolerável. Hoje, ao enfrentar seus críticos internos, a liderança de Dobbs defende abertamente o slogan “A Maioria é o partido!”.

Base política

A Tendência Revolucionária se formou inicialmente como minoria partidária em 1961, em resposta à linha da Maioria sobre a questão cubana. A Maioria foi além do apoio acrítico ao governo Castro; a liderança do partido acabou colocando a revolução cubana no mesmo patamar que o Outubro Russo como modelo histórico para ser emulado.

A Minoria acusou essa resposta de ser uma abdicação impressionista das posições leninistas e trotskistas fundamentais sob vários aspectos. A Maioria zombou da Revolução Permanente ao se livrar do seu aspecto essencial – a luta para alcançar o poder operário para consumar a revolução colonial. A Maioria rasgou o cerne da nossa compreensão da democracia proletária como uma condição vital para abrir caminho ao socialismo. A Maioria foi levada necessariamente a negar a necessidade de um partido de vanguarda consciente da classe trabalhadora. Similarmente, ao reduzir a luta internacional pelo socialismo a incidentes nacionais autônomos, separados, a Maioria enfraqueceu a luta pela construção do partido mundial da revolução socialista, a Quarta Internacional.

A Tendência Revolucionária opôs à linha específica da Maioria do SWP sobre Cuba, um ponto de vista que evoluiu até a posição de que Cuba havia se tornado um Estado operário deformado similar ao resultado das revoluções Iugoslava e Chinesa.

Seguindo a revisão do marxismo sobre Cuba, os líderes da Maioria procederam para aprofundar e estender sua nova visão da realidade. Assim, foi descoberto que Ben Bella, na Argélia, estabeleceria a base para um socialismo agrícola. E quanto aos regimes burocráticos do bloco soviético, ocorreram todos os tipos de embelezamento e acomodação. Como passo adiante, o SWP preparou um reagrupamento internacional de forças, rompendo a sua associação de dez anos com os revolucionários marxistas do Comitê Internacional da Quarta Internacional, para se aliar com os pablistas que haviam, por anos, sido agentes de imprensa para os estratos burocráticos mais radicais nos movimentos operários e de libertação colonial.

Conforme o SWP se tornou mais profundamente enredado vicariamente nas aspirações externas de movimentos impressionantemente maiores, apareceu uma nova deterioração. O próprio partido ficou preso, por escolha própria, em um padrão de grosseira abstenção das lutas, conjuntamente com uma hostilidade sectária a forças genuínas se movendo para a esquerda, e portanto potencialmente competitivas.

O ano de 1963 viu o SWP demonstrar a mais central capitulação de todas – perda de confiança na sua própria concepção e papel na futura revolução americana. O partido tomou o crescimento do Muçulmanos Negros como substituto para o objetivo de construir nos Estados Unidos um partido de vanguarda unificado com base no programa leninista, não na cor da pele. Em vez disso, a resolução da Maioria à Convenção Nacional projetou um esquema de um Movimento Negro pela Libertação Imediata paralelo à luta pelo socialismo, separada, branca e operária, liderada pelo SWP. A resolução sugeria esperançosamente que os dois movimentos poderiam um dia colaborar por meio de uma unidade entre as duas vanguardas. Que o SWP tivesse o objetivo de não ser mais do que um partido branco nos EUA é o mesmo que descartar qualquer perspectiva revolucionária. L. D. Trotsky notou, em 1939, que:

Se acontecer de nós no SWP não encontrarmos o caminho para esse setor [os negros], então nós seremos um desperdício completo. A revolução permanente e todo o resto seriam somente uma mentira.”

Em novembro de 1963, a liderança de Dobbs no partido fez a primeira grande transição clara de uma acomodação revisionista com relação às formações pequeno-burguesas para a velha capitulação reformista à sua “própria” classe dominante em um momento de crise. Como mostrado extensamente em outras partes dessa edição de SPARTACIST, a resposta da liderança do SWP ao assassinato de Kennedy não foi diferente daquela dos Partidos Comunista e Socialista. A plenária do SWP que aprovou essa ação dos líderes do partido foi a mesma que nos expulsou.

NOVA EXPULSÃO!

Roger Abrams, apoiador da Tendência Revolucionária, foi expulso do Socialist Workers Party em 13 de fevereiro pela filial de Nova York por 28 votos contra 11. O camarada Abrams, um estudante de 22 anos, tinha participado em um piquete convocado precipitadamente em 22 de janeiro, na Universidade de Columbia, para protestar contra concessão de um título honorário à rainha grega Frederica. Abrams apareceu proeminentemente na cobertura televisiva do protesto quando foi carregado por guardas que objetaram ao seu cartaz, “Liberdade aos presos políticos gregos!”.

O camarada Abrams foi acusado pela Maioria do SWP de ter se unido a um piquete “sem consulta ou aprovação prévia da filial ou da liderança da filial”. Quando Abrams declarou que ele não conhecia dessa nova política e que passaria a segui-la, ele também foi acusado de deslealdade interna e expulso.

For Black Trotskyism

For Black Trotskyism

-Against the P.C. draft “Freedom Now”

-In defense of programmatic fundamentals

-For building a black Trotskyist cadre

by James Robertson and Shirley Stoute

3 July 1963

[First printed in SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 30, republished in Marxist Bulletin No. 5. Copied fromhttp://www.bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/MB5_02.html ]

“If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this strata [the Negroes], then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.”

    —by L.D. Trotsky, quoted in the SWP 1948-50 Negro Resolution

I. General Introduction

The Negro Question has been posed before the party for exceptional consideration and with increasing sharpness as the gap has widened over the past ten years between the rising level of Negro struggle and the continuing qualitatively less intense general Trade Union activity.

1. Basic Theory: National or Race-Color Issue? Breitman vs. Kirk, 1954-57

To our understanding, what was involved then was a shading of theoretical difference. Breitman saw the Negro people as the embryo of a nation toward whom the right of self-determination was acknowledged but not yet, at least, advocated. Kirk interpreted the Negro question as a race issue which, under conditions of historic catastrophe (e.g., fascism victorious) could be transformed into a national question. Hence he agreed to the support of self-determination should it become a requirement in the Negro struggle, but he assumed it could conceivably arise only under vastly altered conditions. Both parties agreed to the inappropriateness of self-determination as a slogan of the party then.

The present writers agree essentially with Kirk’s view of the time, in particular with the 1955 presentation, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” (SWP Discussion Bulletin A-30, August 1955). We concur in noting the absence among the Negro people of those qualities which could create a separate political economy, however embryonic or stunted. This absence explains why the mass thrust for Negro freedom for over a hundred years has been toward smashing the barriers to an egalitarian and all sided integration. But integration into what kind of social structure? Obviously only into one that can sustain that integration. This is the powerful reciprocal contribution of the Negro struggle to the general class struggle.

It is the most vulgar impressionism to see in Negro moods of isolationist despair over the winning of real points of support from other sections of society today as some kind of process to transform the forms of oppressive segregation into a protective barrier, behind which will occur the gestation of a new nation. Negro Nationalism in ideology and origins is somewhat akin to Zionism as it was from the turn of the century until the Second World War. The large Negro ghettos of the Northern cities are the breeding grounds for this ideology among a layer of petit-bourgeois or declassed elements who vicariously imagine that segregated residential areas can be the germ sources for a new state in whichthey will exploit (“give jobs to”) black workers. Hence it is that separatist moods or currents among Negroes have a very different foundation and significance than as a national struggle.

As for the specific issue of self-determination, we find that the 1957 party resolution makes a good and balanced formulation:

“Theoretically the profound growth of national solidarity and national consciousness among the Negro people might under certain future conditions give rise to separatist demands. Since minority people have the democratic right to self-determination, socialists would be obliged to support such demands should they reflect the mass will. Yet even under these circumstances socialists would continue to advocate integration rather than separation as the best solution of the race question for Negro and white workers alike. While upholding the right of self-determination, they would continue to urge an alliance of the Negro people and the working class to bring about a socialist solution of the civil rights problem within the existing national framework.”

2. From Theoretical Weakness to Current Revisionism

However, it is of immediate importance to point out that this background dispute is far from the central issue in our criticism of the 1963 Political Committee Draft Resolution, “Freedom Now: the New Stage in the Struggle for Negro Emancipation and the Tasks of the SWP.” Thus the 1948-50 party resolution, titled “Negro Liberation Through Revolutionary Socialism,” even though it contains the theoretical outlook that Breitman upheld, is a solidly revolutionary document in its intent and aims. What has happened in the interval is simply that the present party Majority has made the earlier theoretical weakness the point of departure for the profound degradation now arrived at in the 1963 Majority document of the role of the working class in the United States and of its revolutionary Marxist party as well. With evident loss of confidence in a revolutionary perspective by its authors, the essential revision in the 1963 draft is, however qualified, nothing other than the substitution of the axis of struggle as oppressed versus oppressor to replace class versus class.

3. The 1963 Revisionism

The essence of what is “new” is found in the following portions of the 1963 PC draft:

“But here, as in Africa, the liberation of the Negro people requires that the Negroes organize themselves independently, and control their own struggle, and not permit it to be subordinated to any other consideration or interest.

“This means that the Negroes must achieve the maximum unity of their forces–in a strong and disciplined nationwide movement or congress of organizations, and ideological unity based on dividing, exposing and isolating gradualism and other tendencies emanating from their white suppressors. This phase of the process is now beginning.

 “Having united their own forces, the independent Negro movement will then probably undertake the tasks of division and alliance. It will seek ways to split the white majority so that the Negro disadvantage of being a numerical minority can be compensated for by division and conflict on the other side.” [emphasis added]

and

“The general alliance between the labor movement and the Negro fighters for liberation can be prepared for and preceded by the cementing of firm working unity between the vanguard of the Negro struggle and the socialist vanguard of the working class represented by the Socialist Workers Party.”

The lesser sin of this schema of the future for the Negro struggle is the complete capitulation to Negro nationalism. (For one to see this vividly, re-read the quotations above substituting, say, “Algerian” for “Negro” and “French” for “whites.”) It is serious enough that the draft envisions no effort to compete with the black nationalists’ understandable reaction to liberal-pacifist toadying. Certainly it is the duty of Marxists to struggle to separate militant elements from a regressive ideology. To say that the Negro struggle must not be subordinated to any other consideration is to deny proletarian internationalism. Every struggle, without exception, acquires progressive significance only in that it furthers directly or indirectly the socialist revolution internationally. Any struggle other than the workers’ class struggle itself has, at best, indirect value. Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks were obligated to wage a two-front ideological dispute in order to free the revolutionary vanguard from misconceptions on this score–against the petit bourgeois nationalist socialists who saw the national struggle as having a progressive historical significance in its own right; and against the sectarian view of Rosa Luxemburg and the workers’ party in Poland which, from the correct premise that the nation-state had become reactionary in the modern world drew the over-simplified and erroneous conclusion–“against self-determination (for Poland).” Lenin pointed out that independent working class involvement in the struggle for national self-determination in several important ways furthered the class struggle and thereby acquired justification. Similarly Trotsky pointed out that defense of the Soviet Union was subordinate to and a part of the proletarian revolution internationally and that in the event of a clash of interests the particular lesser interests of the part (and a degenerate part at that) would for revolutionists take second place.

It is worthy of note that the Negro struggle in America is more directly related to the class struggle than any essentially national question could be–for the Negro struggle for freedom is a fight by a working class color caste which is the most exploited layer in this country. Hence any steps forward in this struggle immediately pose the class question and the need for class struggle in sharpest form.

The graver consequence of the proposed Majority draft is its necessary corollary that the Majority would see the revolutionary workers’ party excluded from one more area of struggle. In their 1961 Cuban question documents the Majority made it clear that for them the Cuban Revolution and, by implication, in the Colonial Revolution as well, the revolutionary working class party is, prior to the revolution, a dispensable convenience. This view has now been explicitly generalized and confirmed by the Majority, as in Section 13 of their “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement”:

 “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 or 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.”

By their extension of this line to include the Negro question in the U.S., the SWP Majority has made the most serious overt denial yet of a revolutionary perspective. What they have done is to a priori exclude themselves from struggling for the leadership of a most crucial section of the American working class, and instead to consign that struggle to a hypothetical parallel united Negro Peoples’ Organization which would “probably” one day work with the socialist working class leadership in the U.S. In essence the erroneous conclusions drawn by the Majority from the Cuban Revolution will now be incorporated into the party’s American perspective in the form of “waiting for a black Castro.” Thus the party’s supreme responsibility, the American revolution, is being vitiated!

II. To the Socialist Revolution—and the Broad Masses

1. Method of Objectivism versus Analytical Approach

In surveying current developments the descriptive articles and reports of Breitman have been valuable (for example, his “New Trends and New Moods in the Negro Struggle,” SWP Discussion Bulletin, Summer 1961). However, the material is flawed and limited by its shaping and presentation through an approach which is “objective, “sociological,” “descriptive.” This stands in contrast to the indicated analytical approach for Marxists. Underlying this difference in method of treatment is the closely correlated difference between viewing the developments as an external observer–now given formal codification in the PC draft resolution–as against conceiving developments from the standpoint of involvement in their fundamental solution. For the Negro struggle to this solution integrally involves the revolutionary Marxist party which is missing in Breitman’s approach to current events.

2. Our Point of Departure–The Socialist Revolution

Our point of departure comes in turn as the conclusion that the Negro question is so deeply built into the American capitalist class-structure–regionally and nationally–that only the destruction of existing class relations and the change in class dominance–the passing of power into the hands of the working class–will suffice to strike at the heart of racism and bring about a solution both real and durable. Our approach to present struggles cannot be “objective.” Rather it rests on nothing other than or less than the criteria of what promotes or opposes the socialist revolution.

Therefore we can find an amply sufficient point of departure in a key statement of the 1948-50 resolution:

“The primary and ultimate necessity of the Negro movement is its unification with the revolutionary forces under the leadership of the proletariat. The guiding forces of this unification can only be the revolutionary party.”

3. Negro Mass Organizations and the Revolutionary Party

It would be fool-hardy and presumptuous to seek after any pat schema detailing the road to be traveled in going from today’s struggles to our ultimate goals. But there are certain qualities and elements which, as in all such social struggles, do and will manifest themselves along the way.

One such matter is that of the basic approach to organizations of Negro workers and youth. The generality is that in an American society in which large sections of the working people are saturated with race hatreds and intolerance of the particular needs of other parts and strata, special organizations are mandatory for various strata. This consideration finds its sharpest expression in the Negro struggle. Today in the wake of the upsurge in mass civil rights struggles there is a felt and urgent need for a broad mass organization of Negro struggle free of the limitations, weaknesses, hesitancies, and sometimes downright betrayal which afflict the currently existing major competitors. This need will be with us for a long time. Participation in the work of building such a movement is a major responsibility for the revolutionary party. Very likely along the way a complex and shifting combination of work in already existing groups and the building of new organizations will be involved. But as long as we know what we are aiming for we can be oriented amidst the complexities and vicissitudes of the process.

At bottom what the Marxists should advocate and aim to bring about is a transitional organization of the Negro struggle standing as a connecting link between the party and the broader masses. What is involved in working from a revolutionary standpoint is to seek neither a substitute to nor an opponent of the vanguard party, but rather a unified formation of the largely or exclusively Negro members of the party together with the largest number of other militants willing to fight for that section of the revolutionary Marxist program dealing with the Negro question. Such a movement expresses simultaneously the special needs of the Negro struggle and its relationship to broader struggles–ultimately for workers’ power.

This approach to the special oppression of the Negroes stems from the tactics of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Comintern. It was there that the whole concept was worked out for relating the party to mass organizations of special strata under conditions where the need had become evident and it becomes important that such movements contribute to the proletarian class struggle and that their best elements be won over to the party itself. The militant women’s organizations, revolutionary youth leagues, and radical Trade Unionists’ associations are other examples of this form.

Parenthetically, it should be noted how little there is in common between this outlook and that of the 1963 PC draft. Thus even in the hypothetical case that a separate social and material base was somehow created sufficient to generate a mass Negro national consciousness, the Bolshevist response is not just to back away and talk of facilitating eventual common work between a “them” of that nationality and an “us” of the (white) socialist vanguard of the (white) working class. Even if a new state–a separate black Republic–were created, our Negro comrades, even at this greatest conceivable remove, would become nothing other than a new section of a politically common international party–the Fourth International. And their struggle for socialism would continue to be our cause too.

4. Toward a Black Trotskyist Cadre

To return to the realities of the Negro struggle as it is and to the SWP as it is, there is one vital element without which the basic working program remains a piece of paper as far as actual involvement in the struggle is concerned. That element is an existing section, however modest, of Negro party members functioning actively and politically in the movement for Negro freedom.

Viewed from this aspect the current PC draft is at once a rationalization and an accommodation to the weakness of our party Negro forces, and, moreover, will exacerbate this weakness. This organizational abstentionism is obtrusive in the draft’s direct implication that it doesn’t really matter about the SWP because the Negro movement can get along well enough without the revolutionary working class party and one day the Negro vanguard may turn in our direction anyway. The key paragraph of the PC draft quoted in this article sums up a permeating thread of the entire resolution, places the party’s role as one of fraternal relationship between two parallel structures: the (white) working class and its vanguard on the one side, and the Negro people and their vanguard on the other. This conception denies the fundamental necessity that the party will lead, must lead, or should even try to lead the decisive section of the working class in America. The resolution gives credence to the concept that “we cannot lead the Negro people.” This is absolutely contradictory to a revolutionary perspective. Our leadership means the revolutionary class struggle program carried out by revolutionists in the mass movements, fused into the revolutionary party. Just as trade unionists will not join the revolutionary party if they do not see it as essential to winning the struggle, so Negro fighters for liberation will not join the party on any basis other than that the only road to freedom for them is the revolutionary socialist path of struggle through the combat army. Negro militants will not see any advantage in joining a party which says in effect: “We cannot lead the Negro people. We are the socialist vanguard of the white working class, and we think it is nice to have fraternal relations with your vanguard (that of the liberation movement).”

Likewise, once we have recruited Negro militants to the party, the line expressed in the PC draft serves not to help them to develop as Trotskyist cadre and to recruit other black workers on the basis of our program, but rather would serve to waste and mislead them. When the party denies its role of leadership of the black messes, then for what reason do we need a black Trotskyist cadre? The logic of this position means that there is no role for a Negro as a party member that differs from that he could play without entering the party, or, as in the case of the position taken on southern work, membership in the party would actually isolate him from important areas of work because “the party is not needed there.”

Some comrades, in response to the criticisms made here, will say that the party is not giving up a revolutionary perspective, but is only being realistic and facing the fact that the majority of our membership is white and that we have only a tiny and weak Negro cadre. We must seek to become in reality what we are in theory, rather than the reverse–i.e., adapting our program to a serious weakness in composition. If we take this road of adaptation the party program in a process of gross degeneration will become based on a privileged section of the working class.

Negroes who are activists in the movement, such as, for example, the full-time militants around SNCC, are every day formulating concepts of struggle for the movement. The meaning of the line of the PC draft is that we are not interested in recruiting these people to our white party because we have the revolutionary socialist program for the section of the working class of which we are the vanguard, and they (Negro militants) must lead their own struggle, although we would like to have fraternal relations with them. This is the meaning of the PC draft.

To the concept of the white party must be counterposed the concept of the revolutionary party. For if we are only the former, then black workers are misplaced in the SWP. There are three main elements which we recruit to the party: minority workers, white workers, and intellectuals. In the process of the work which brings these elements to the party there are special considerations which must be made with reference to the suspicions of minority peoples (“white caution”) in regard to personnel, etc. However, once inside the party we are all only revolutionists. All of these elements are fused in the struggle to achieve the revolutionary program into revolutionists who as a whole make up the revolutionary party. Thus the “white caution” in Negro organizations is wrong inside the party. An internal policy of “white caution” equals paternalism, patronization, creation of “party Negroes,” etc., and has no place in a Bolshevik party.

The statement by Trotsky, quoted at the head of this article, that if the SWP cannot find the road to the Negroes then it is not worthy at all, finds its concurrent counterpart in the choice now before us. Either the revolutionary perspective in the U.S. has become blunted and lifeless or else its expression today as a living aim of the party pivots, in the context of relative working-class passivity and active Negro struggle, upon the development of a black Trotskyist cadre.

The principal aim of this article is to show that this deficiency in forces is not the fault of objective conditions–isolation and the like–but is rooted in the complex of related political and organizational faults stemming from a loss of confidence and orientation toward the proletarian revolution by the SWP majority.

*****

[Because of the pressures of other work upon the authors, the last two sections of this article have not been completed in time for the bulletin deadline even in the rough form of the first sections. The sections which it had been hoped to include are:

III. The Party

(1) External and inner party aspects of winning and building a Negro cadre.

(2) Against “ours is a white party” end against patronization.

(3) Qualitative difference of required approach inside and outside the party.

(4) Priorities in Negro work–defining the most recruitable layers by the party.

IV. Mass Work Today

(1) Essential and common flaw in agitation based on either Federal Troops to the South!” or “Kennedy–Deputize and Arm Birmingham Negroes!”

(2) Against Union decertification hearings as a way to fight Jim Crow; for mass picketing to break racial exclusion in unions.

(3) Specific aims and balance of our work–North and South.

(4) Appraisal of existing organizations, including SNCC, the Muslims, etc.

In lieu of these developed sections, we are concluding with a few fragmentary notes. It is our hope that the coming party Convention will act to continue a literary discussion following the Convention in the fast changing Negro Question. In addition, for a brief statement of views on mass work, attention is directed to the Minority Tendency’s amendment to the PC draft on the American Question (in Discussion Bulletin Vol. 24, No. 23, June 1963).]

1. The Black Muslims are, with many contradictions, primarily a religious organization. Their political activity is primarily limited to the propaganda sphere. They do not have a program for struggle to meet the demands of the black masses in the community today, although their promise of political candidates would represent somewhat of a turn. We take exception to comrade Kirk’s statement that, “The foundation of the Muslim movement is basically a reflex of the lumpen proletariat to gradualism, to the betrayal of the intellectuals and the default of the union movement.” The Muslim movement has a petit-bourgeois program–black business, black economy, separate on this basis, for this goal, is the answer to the oppression. Their internal organization is bureaucratically structured, with heavy financial drainage on the rank-and-file membership to the enrichment of “The Messenger.” On the other hand, while they call to all levels of black society, businessmen, workers, even socialists and communists, as long as they’re black, in reality the appeal is attractive mainly to the working class and especially to the lumpen layers, but they are no longer lumpen when they join the movement. One tendency of the leadership represented by Malcolm X condemns American capitalist society and shows favor toward Cuba and Red China as opposed to Chiang Kai-shek. Another tendency claims that international affairs don’t concern them and the black man’s problems in America have no relation to the Cuban Revolution, etc. It is realistic to expect that we may be able to win some of its periphery and membership to the revolutionary program, but because of the religious, non-action oriented, exacting and bureaucratic nature of the organization, this can best be done through discussion and common action where possible, rather than on the inside.

2. R. Vernon as prosecuting attorney of “The White-Radical Left on Trial.”

In his article comrade Vernon states: “The absurdity of a Militant talking trade unions and Negro-White unity at the same time that it sounds like the very voice of the depths of the Negro ghetto is offered with a straight face.” This is but one blatant indication that comrade Vernon is not making criticism from the point of view of a revolutionary and does not see the struggle for socialism–the class struggle–as having any essential connection to the Negro struggle for equality. Vernon’s current writings, “Why White Radicals are Incapable of Understanding Black Nationalism” and “The White Radical Left on Trial,” are based on the premise, or attempt to prove, that Marxism and revolutionary socialism have no place in the struggle of the most exploited section of the American working class nor in the colonial revolution either. For Vernon the building of a revolutionary party aiming toward the American revolution is at best irrelevant and international working class solidarity meaningless. In short, there is little in comrade Vernon’s articles that is common to Marxism. Furthermore, his views are saturated with the spirit of the treacherous justification “that ours is a white socialist revolutionary party”–the logic of which is liquidationist.

Lest any comrades think we are too harsh in criticizing Vernon as having theoretically surrendered to black Nationalism and rejected Marxism (with or without quote marks), let them ponder such a remark as, “The problem of revolutionary nationalism has never been dealt with adequately in any Marxist or ‘Marxist’ movement anywhere. Lenin only scratched the surface….” Of the entire, penetrating, historically verified theory of the Permanent Revolution, Vernon says not a word! Yet, above all, Trotsky’s theory tackles “the problem of revolutionary nationalism” and lays bare its solution.

Moreover, even if “Lenin only scratched the surface,” our luck has finally turned. Vernon coolly informs us that the SWP has now proved its unique worth: “It is the only group whose internal life can, and did, produce the WWR [‘Why White Radicals…’] document….” Apparently Vernon, the author of WWR, has capitulated to his own ego even more fully than to nationalism!

We are happy to accept comrade Vernon’s finding that the Tendency we support is the most distant from his views of any in the party.

OPPORTUNISM AND EMPIRICISM

OPPORTUNISM AND EMPIRICISM

[by the National Committee of the Socialist Labour League, March 23, 1963. Copied from http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/opportunism_empiricism.pdf]

‘Only by learning to assimilate the results of the development of philosophy during the past two and a half thousand years will it be able to rid itself on the one hand of any isolated natural philosophy standing apart. from it, outside and above it, and on the other hand also of its own limited method of thought, which was its inheritance from English empiricism.’

It is clear from this passage that Engels considers empiricism to be a barrier to the dialectical conception of the world. Hansen’s talk about ‘consistent empiricism’ is sheer nonsense. The point about empiricism, a reliance on ‘the facts as they are perceived’, is that it cannot be consistent.

Empiricism, and its transatlantic younger brother, pragmatism, refuse to admit the possibility of answering the question: ‘What is the nature of the objectively existing external world?’ They thus leave the way open to subjective idealism which explains the world in terms of mind alone. Empiricism, ignoring the history of philosophy, rejects the dialectical theory of knowledge as ‘metaphysics’. Only the dialectical materialist view can explain the world, because it includes a materialist explanation of the development of our concepts as well as of the material world which they reflect. Empiricism must be rejected, not made ‘consistent’. There are many sides to this methodological error of Hansen’s.

Trotsky warned the SWP leadership in his last writings that they must encourage a determined struggle on the theoretical front against the ‘American’ philosophy of pragmatism, a more recent development of empiricism; unless this was done, then there would be no real Marxist development in the U.S. Today Hansen and Cannon are ‘confirming’ Trotsky’s warning in a negative fashion. In the discussion concerning the future of the Fourth International, Hansen leads the tendency which calls for ‘unification’ with a revisionist tendency on the basis of purely practical political agreement on immediate tasks. From this point of view he rejects an examination of the history of the split and of the differences between the tendencies. This is only part of his substitution of impressionism for scientific analysis (see Trotskyism Betrayedand C.S.’s reply to J.H.’s Report to the Plenum, International Bulletin No. 11). What is the methodological basis of Hansen’s approach here? The dominant question for him is always ‘what will work best?’- asked always from the narrow perspective of immediate political appearances. This is the starting point of pragmatism, the ‘American’ development of empiricism by Pierce, James and Dewey. It leads Hansen to advocate unity with the Pablo group because that will ‘work’ better as an attraction for people pushed in a ‘leftward’ direction, even if the causes of the split are never clarified. Such an approach, as we have explained in earlier documents, destroys the theoretical basis of the movement. The incorrect concepts and methods of our political work can only be overcome through conscious theoretical and practical struggle, not by sweeping them under the carpet.

Pragmatism and the Cuban Crisis

Cannon’s letter to Dobbs, summing up the Cuban crisis, could similarly serve as a model of the pragmatist method. After a lifetime of struggle for revolutionary Marxism, particularly against Stalinism, he denies that whole career in two pages with the kind of politics which Hansen’s pathetic essay in ‘theory’ is meant to justify: ‘What else could he have done under the given circumstances?’ asks Cannon. What were these ‘given circumstances’?

‘1. The U.S. naval blockade was set for a clash with Soviet ships which would escalate into nuclear war. Kennedy gave clear notice that the U.S. would not stop. at the use of the most forceful measures.

‘2. The Pentagon was ready to bomb and invade Cuba and crush its revolution. Newspaper accounts report that this was one of the alternative moves considered even for (from?) the start, and it was to be put into effect if Moscow did not yield on the missile bases.’

Cannon replaces class analysis of social forces and political tendencies with pragmatic prescriptions. The so-called ‘given circumstances’ (equivalent of Hansen’s ‘the facts’) are the product of a policy of class collaboration by Khrushchev and the Stalinist bureaucracy in relation to U.S. imperialism. We must evaluate Khrushchev’s conduct aspart of the process which produced these circumstances. Only in that way can Marxists work out their political programme in relation to other class tendencies.

Empiricism versus Revolutionary Politics

Indeed Cannon’s letter on Cuba illustrates the class role of empiricism and pragmatism, those tendencies in philosophy which accept ‘the given fact’, etc. Inevitably this acceptance becomes what Trotsky once called a ‘worshipping of the accomplished fact’. In effect this means accepting the forms of consciousness proper to those who are adapted to the existing structure, such as the bureaucracy in the USSR and in the labour movement. They develop their ideas as ways of rationalising and justifying their own position between capitalism and the working class. Cannon’s justification of Khrushchev, like the recent contributions of Murry Weiss in justification of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the constant avoidance of the questions of political revolution and construction of revolutionary parties in the workers’ states by SWP spokesmen and the Pabloites, are an abandonment of principled revolutionary politics, flowing from the abandonment of dialectical materialism in favour of empiricism. Dialectical analysis insists on seeing facts in the context of a whole series of interrelated processes, not as finished, independent entities about which ‘practical’ decisions have to be made. In the sphere of politics, that means to see each situation in terms of the development of the international class struggle, to evaluate the policies of the various political forces towards this situation in terms of their relation to these class forces and to their whole previous course. This is why it is nonsense to pose the Cuban problem as Cannon poses it-’What else could he have done under the given circumstances?’ Taken to its logical conclusion, this type of argument can be used to justify anything. It is not even surprising, once the extent of this theoretical departure from Marxism is grasped, that Cannon utters an absurdity like ‘ … people unaffected by imperialist propaganda have, I believe, breathed relief over the settlement and thanked Khrushchev for his sanity. Bertrand Russell and Nehru expressed themselves along this line.’ Who would have thought that at the same time, Nehru was head of a government engaged in armed conflict, with imperialist support, against the Republic of China? In the course of that conflict mass arrests of Indian Communists were carried out. At the same time, Soviet fighter planes were being supplied to the Indian government by Khrushchev. No doubt Nehru praised Khrushchev (as well as Kennedy and Macmillan) for this piece of practical ‘wisdom’. Perhaps Cannon will say ‘What else could he have done under the given circumstances?’ Cannon’s method leads to this end not by a trick of logical development, but because the forces for whom he becomes the apologist are tied in reality to imperialism and its present needs. Trotskyism is no more an exception to the laws of history than any other phase in the development of Marxism and the labour movement. Once theoretical development stops, then the movement is subject to the dominant ideologies of the time, however gradual and subtle the process of adaptation-and however venerable the ‘cadre’.

Hansen’s Method

Hansen’s document ‘Cuba – The Acid Test’ is therefore an important contribution to the international discussion. It states explicitly the empiricist and anti-dialectical basis in method for the opportunist tendencies in the SWP’s politics as well as for their unprincipled and un-historical approach to the problem of unity and development of the world Trotskyist movement. From the beginning of the discussion, the SLL, described by Hansen as ‘the ultra-left sectarians’, have insisted that basic differences of method underlay the different political lines and attitudes to organisation. Hansen now confirms this. His insistence on ‘the facts’, as being the same for empiricism as for Marxism is effectively answered by Lukacs:

‘These facts are indeed not only involved in constant change, but also they are-precisely in the structure of their objectivity-the products of a historically determined epoch: that of capitalism. Consequently this “science” which recognises as fundamental to their value for science the immediately given form of phenomena, and takes as a correct point of departure for scientific conceptualisation their form of objectivity, this science finds itself planted simply and definitely in the ground of capitalist society, accepting uncritically its essence, its “objective” structure, its laws, as an unalterable foundation of “science”. In order to progress from these “facts” to facts in the real sense of the word, one must penetrate to their historical conditioning as such and abandon the point of view which starts from them as immediately given: they must undergo historical-dialectical analysis …’
(History and Class Consciousness)

In support of his capitulation to empiricism, Hansen quotes the verdict of Hegel.

‘Generally speaking, Empiricism finds the truth in the outward world; and even if it allows a supersensible world, it holds knowledge of that world to be impossible, and would restrict us to the province of sense-perception. This doctrine when systematically carried out produces what has been latterly termed Materialism. Materialism of this stamp looks upon matter, qua matter, as the genuine objective world.’
(The Logic of Hegel, translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, p. 80).

Hegel’s opposition to empiricism is correct in one sense. If ‘empiricism systematically carried out’ led to dialectical materialism, then why would Hegel, the Absolute Idealist, figure so decisively in the development of Marxism? The ‘materialism’ to which empiricism leads, according to Hegel, is of course mechanical materialism, which remains unable to explain the role of consciousness and the material unity of the world, including human action and thought. This ‘defect of all hitherto existing materialism’, as Marx called it, meant that ‘it could not be consistently carried out, and it left the door open to dualism and subjective idealism. Hegel overcame the dichotomy of subject and object, introducing a unified conception of a dialectically interconnected whole, by making spirit the content of all reality. Marx had only to ‘stand him on his head’ to arrive at dialectical materialism. This is in fact how dialectical materialism developed, through contradiction, and not through Hansen’s businesslike logical formula of ‘empiricism systematically carried out’. The relation between empiricism and dialectical materialism has a history, which shows a struggle of dialectical materialism against the empiricists and their development in positivism and pragmatism. It is contrary to the method of Marxism to examine empiricism for its ‘strong points’ and its ‘weak points’. As a trend in philosophy it has formed the soundest basis for pseudo-scientific attacks on materialism ever since Marx, and in politics it has always formed the philosophical basis for opportunism.

Hansen avoids this type of discussion by quoting Hegel and then introducing his own paraphrase of Hegel. Hegel said that empiricism systematically carried out issued in ‘materialism’, by which he naturally meant the materialism of his own day. We must surely appreciate historically what Hegel meant when he said that empiricism ‘systematically carried out’ led to materialism, which ‘looks upon matter, qua matter, as the genuine objective world’. The vulgar materialism of that time had a metaphysical view of the world, seeing the given facts of experience as fixed, dead, finished products interacting according to mechanical principles, with mind reflecting this reality in a dead, mechanical fashion. Hansen must surely agree that it was this kind of materialism which Hegel attacks here. He could hardly have had in his head the theory of dialectical materialism as the product of ‘empiricism systematically carried out’. The dialectical materialist method of thought was born only after Hegel, through the struggle against Hegel’s dialectical idealism. And yet Hansen, with a very clumsy sleight of hand, uses his quotation from Hegel to identify ‘empiricism systematically carried out’ with dialectical materialism:

‘I would submit that “Lenin and others” did not bring from Hegel his opposition to empiricism on idealistic or religious grounds. On the other hand Marxism does share Hegel’s position that vulgar empiricism is arbitrary, one-sided and undialectical. But ‘empiricism “systematically carried out”? This is the view that the “genuine objective world”, the material world, takes primacy over thought and that a dialectical relationship exists between them. What is this if not dialectical materialism?’

‘Facts’ are Abstractions

The vital phrase ‘a dialectical relationship exists between them’ (matter and thought) is introduced from the outside by Hansen. It leaps over the whole development to dialectical materialism through the Hegelian school and ‘standing Hegel on his head, or rather, on his feet’! All Hansen’s respect for ‘the facts’ does not seem to have helped him to proceed from the simple ‘fact’ that ideas have a history as part of the social-historical process, and that the vulgar materialism of the bourgeoisie cannot be systematically developed into dialectical materialism by a mere stroke of the pen. It took some years of very hard struggle, of determined theoretical and practical grappling with the objective development of bourgeois society in the first half of the 19th century, to achieve that result.

When we attack empiricism we attack that method of approach which says all statements, to be meaningful, must refer to observable or measurable data in their immediately given form. This method insists that any ‘abstract’ concepts, reflecting the general and historical implications of these ‘facts’, are meaningless. It neglects entirely that our general concepts reflect the laws of development and interconnection of the process which these ‘facts’ help to constitute. Indeed the so-called hard facts of concrete experience are themselves abstractions from this process. They are the result of the first approximation of our brains to the essential interrelations, laws of motion, contradictions of the eternally changing and complex world of matter … of which they form part. Only higher abstractions, in advanced theory, can guide us to the meaning of these facts. What Lenin called ‘the concrete analysis of concrete conditions’ is the opposite of a descent into empiricism. In order to be concrete, the analysis must see the given facts in their historical interconnection and must begin with the discoveries of theory in the study of society, the necessity to make a class evaluation of every event, every phenomenon. The empiricist, who pretends to restrict himself to the bedrock of ‘facts’ alone, in fact imposes on the ‘facts’ an unstated series of connections whose foundations are unstated. With Hansen and the Pabloites, their new reality is actually a list of abstractions like ‘the colonial revolution’, ‘the process of de-Stalinisation’, ‘irreversible trends’, ‘leftward-moving forces’, ‘mass pressure’, etc. Like all statements about social phenomena, these are meaningless unless they are demonstrated to have specific class content, for class struggle and exploitation are the content of all social phenomena. This discovery of Marx is the theoretical cornerstone which Hansen has lost, with all his talk about ‘the facts’.

Empiricism: a Bourgeois Method

All this argument that ‘the facts’ are the objective reality and that we must ‘start from there’ is a preparation to justify policies of adaptation to non-working-class leaderships.

Empiricism, since it ‘starts with the facts’, can never get beyond them and must accept the world as it is. Thisbourgeois method of thought views the world from the standpoint of ‘the isolated individual in civil society.’

Instead of taking the objective situation as a problem to be solved in the light of the historical experience of the working class, generalised in the theory and practice of Marxism, it must take ‘the facts’ as they come. They are produced by circumstances beyond our control.

Marxism arms the working class vanguard in its fight for the independent action of the Labour movement; empiricism adapts it to the existing set-up, to capitalism and its agencies in the working-class organisations.

‘In the beginning was the deed,’ quotes Hansen. But for Marxists, action is not blind adaptation to ‘facts’, but theoretically guided work to break the working class from petty-bourgeois leaderships. To ‘join in the action’ led by such trends, merely seeking ‘to help to build a revolutionary-socialist party in the very process of the revolution itself’ is a renunciation of Marxism and an abdication of responsibility in favour of the petty-bourgeoisie.

Hansen says:

‘If we may express the opinion, it is an overstatement to say that anyone finds himself “prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in Cuba and Algeria” because he refuses to follow the SLL National Committee in thinking that a Trotskyist can clear himself of any further responsibility by putting the label “betrayed” on everything these leaders do. It is an error of the first order to believe that petty-bourgeois nationalism – petty-bourgeois nationalism, has no internal differentiations or contradictions and cannot possibly be affected by the mass forces that have thrust it forward.’

In the first place, no one has said that there cannot be differentiation within the petty-bourgeois national movement or that they remain unaffected by mass pressure. Who has denied that? What is at stake is the method by which this ‘fact’ is analysed and what consequence it has for the construction of independent revolutionary parties to lead the struggle of the working class. Hansen and the Pabloites, on the other hand, use this ‘fact’ of ‘left’ swings of some petty-bourgeois nationalists to justify capitulation to those forces. Is this point separate from the differences over method and philosophy? Certainly not: Marxist analysis of the whole modern epoch has established that the political leaderships representing non-working-class social strata can go only to a certain point in the struggle against imperialism. The objective limits to their revolution lead them eventually to turn against the working class, with its independent demands which correspond to the international socialist revolution. Only a course of the construction of independent working-class parties aiming at workers’ power, based on the programme of Permanent Revolution, can prevent each national revolution from turning into a new stabilisation for world imperialism. The struggle to create such parties has been shown to involve a necessary fight against opportunists and counterrevolutionary trends within the movement, in particular against Stalinism which subordinates the working class to the nationalists, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois, on the grounds of the theory of ‘two stages’, which conforms best to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s line of an international understanding with imperialism. It is in line with these ‘facts’, facts established through the struggles and theoretical work of Lenin, Trotsky and others, that we evaluate the posturings and the actions of present-day political tendencies, and not by regarding the latter as facts ‘in themselves’ or as ‘given circumstances’ à la Hansen and J. P. Cannon.

Class Analysis is Needed

Hansen and the SWP leadership approach the whole international situation in this non-Marxist, empiricist manner. Hansen complains about the SLL ignoring facts, refusing to analyse ‘new reality’, since they don’t seem to fit the prescriptions of Lenin and Trotsky. On the contrary, comrades in the SLL have made a small beginning in analysing the real class basis of the surface ‘facts’ of the present situation. Hansen is satisfied to list the ‘mighty forces of the colonial revolution and the interrelated process of de-Stalinisation’. We have published several articles (see Labour Review 1961 and 1962, articles by Baker, Kemp, Jeffries, and the resolution ‘World Prospect for Socialism’) beginning a class analysis of the relation of these two processes (struggles in the colonial countries and crisis in Stalinism) to the international revolution of the working class against imperialism. We have yet to find any such attempt in the publications of the SWP or the Pabloites. What we do find is a search for the most positive or progressive trends within the Stalinist and nationalist movements. This means taking surface ‘facts’, like the pronouncements of the Chinese or Russian Stalinist leaders, and abscribing to them positive or negative values. Germain, for example, arrived at the conclusion that apart from the idea of the revolutionary International, there existed ‘bits’ of the Trotskyist programme in a ‘broken’ way in the various Communist parties of the wor1d, from Jugoslavia with its factory committees, through Italy, Russia and China, to Albania with its insistence on the rights of small parties! No doubt this is a good example of empiricism systematically carried out. It would be interesting to ask minorities within, say, the Albanian Communist Party what the ‘pragmatic’ consequences of this ‘systematic empiricism’ have been for them! (See also the ‘critical support’ for various wings of Stalinism in the IS Resolution on the 22nd Congress.)

Was Evian a Victory?

But to return to Hansen’s reply. It is of the greatest interest that Algeria is almost completely dropped from the argument. This is because the SLL’s accusation about ‘prostration’ before nationalist leaders is best exemplified there.

In earlier documents Hansen made great play of the SLL’s condemnation of the Evian agreement between the Algerian government and French imperialism. We said that this was a ‘sell-out’. Hansen said that here was an ultra-left mistake, showing failure to recognise that at least Evian included national independence and should be welcomed as a victory. We proceeded from an analysis of the class tendency which has asserted itself through the FLN leadership in arriving at a compromise with French imperialism, preventing the Algerian people from going on to win their own revolutionary demands. Those who concentrated on the ‘victory’ and speculated about Ben Bella developing in the direction of Castro only helped Ben Bella to deceive the masses, and turned the energies of Socialists towards alliances with the bourgeoisie rather than the construction of an independent revolutionary party. We characterised this as a well-known form of opportunism, and we say now that by this kind of approach the Pabloites and the SWP are sharing in the preparation of defeats for the working class of Algeria instead of carrying out the responsibilities of revolutionary Marxists in constructing working-class parties. Pablo himself works as a functionary of the Algerian government in some technical capacity. By itself, this fact could mean anything or nothing. The important question is his political line and that of his organisation. There is not the slightest doubt that Pablo’s position in the administration will not be endangered by this political line (which does not at all mean to say that he may not be removed). Hansen’s articles in The Militant and the campaign of the Pabloites on ‘aid to the Algerian Revolution’ are confined to an appeal to aid the poverty-stricken victims of the legacy of French imperialism. Instead of a campaign in the labour movement, we have a humanitarian appeal. Pablo and his friends even press for the organisation of volunteer technicians and administrators to go to Algeria, take their place as servants of the Ben Bella government, and thus counteract the possibly reactionary influence of French and American aid and personnel. In this way the ‘objective’ conditions will be created for a move to the left rather than to the right on the part of Ben Bella. In the course of all this, the Algerian Communist Party was banned, a new French aid programme was announced, and the direct control of Ben Bella’s clique established over the Algerian trade unions. Meanwhile Ben Bella makes great play of tidying up the ‘bootblack’ racket and takes a ‘firm stand’ in telling the French to explode their bombs farther South in the Sahara. Are not these ‘Trotskyists’ conniving at the suppression of any democratic rights for the working class while the nationalist leaders carry out ‘left’ measures ‘on behalf’ of the masses? If this is not prostration before the national bourgeoisie, what in the world constitutes such prostration? Hansen claims that ‘everybody knows’ we need revolutionary parties, the only difference is on how to construct them. But in practice the Pabloites are not for the construction of such parties, they avoid the necessity of such construction. If objective developments in the ‘new’ reality will inevitably push petty-bourgeois nationalists towards revolutionary Marxism, perhaps the role of Trotskyists is only to encourage these background ‘objective forces’.

Pierre Frank, prominent leader of the Pablo group, recently visited Algeria and reported his findings in The Internationalist, supplement to Quatrieme Internationale, No. 17, 13.2.63). There is hardly need to comment on the meaning of the following passages;

‘If the government is composed of variegated social and political elements, one must say nevertheless that the central nucleus, the decisive nucleus found at present in the Political Bureau of the FLN (National Liberation Front) is based on the poorest masses of the cities and above all the countryside. This is its main strength. But it cannot automatically head toward extensive nationalization of the economic structure without running the risk of catastrophic consequences. For some years, it will have to permit a development of bourgeois forces, to compromise in certain spheres with foreign capital and to create bastions in the countryside and the towns in order to pass later to the construction of a socialist society. This will not be done without crises or without international and domestic developments that will run counter to this difficult orientation.

‘To conclude: Everything is in movement. It is an experiment, a struggle that must be supported throughout the world, but which demands constant determination of bearings so that the development of the various forces operating on the terrain can be gauged. In this way we can contribute to this new revolutionary experience with its altogether specific traits, its difficulties and its potentialities, and help it move toward the socialist outcome.’

At the level of methodology, this illustrates the extreme consequences of a ‘contemplative’ rather than a ‘revolutionary-practical’ attitude. To the former, empiricist recognition of the ‘given circumstances’, ‘the facts’ is a natural starting point (and finishing post). At the political level, it illustrates the capitulation to existing forces, existing forms of consciousness in the political movement, amounting in the end to support for the servants of imperialism, which flows from the abandonment of the dialectical method.

Who has Corrected Whose Errors?

Hansen says that we are harking back to the original differences of 1953 instead of demonstrating that the Pabloite revisions of that year have resulted in an opportunist course by the Pabloite ‘International’. Because Hansen acceptsthe present position of the Pabloites on Algeria does not alter the fact that this course is an opportunist one. In any case, Hansen must still answer our question (See reply of C.S. to Hansen’s Report to the Plenum. International Bulletin No. 11) in connection with this matter of ‘correcting errors’. He advocates unification on the grounds that the Pabloites have corrected their course of 1953. But the Pabloite Executive Committee insists that unification is possible for the opposite reason-the SWP has overcome its failure at that time to ‘understand’ the programme of Pablo (Declaration on Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement, June 23/24, 1962).

In the advanced countries too, we have drawn attention to the current policies of the Pabloites. Hansen pretends that our criticisms have amounted only to seizing on isolated statements of Pabloite sections; ‘Not even leaflets put out by this group of comrades (the Pablo group) in this or that local situation escape the sleuths. A phrase torn from a leaflet distributed at the Renault plant in Paris in defence of Cuba against U.S. imperialism serves for elevation to front-page attention in The Newsletter in London, so hard-pressed are the leaders of the SLL to find evidence of the revisionism of the IS.’ (Cuba The Acid Test, p. 30).

In the first place, our reply to Hansen’s last Plenum report on unification (International Bulletin No. 11) goes through Pabloite material on the main political questions of today, and it is nonsense to say the SLL has made no general criticism. If Hansen wrote ‘Cuba – The Acid Test’ before reading this reply, perhaps he will now defend the Pabloites against what we wrote in it. Secondly, what is wrong with examining the leaflets put out by Pabloite sections? It is precisely the way policies work out in the work of sections which illustrates most clearly our differences of method. Surely the section in Paris is a fair example of a Pabloite section-the nerve centre of the Pablo International is there. And is the Renault factory just ‘this or that local situation’? It is a vital concentration of French workers. In 1953 was it not a leaflet put out in the Renault factory which came under the scrutiny and attack of the SWP when it made the public break from Pablo? Thirdly, if Hansen claims that the passage criticised by The Newsletter was torn from its context, why does he not produce the context and demonstrate our methods of distortion? He cannot do this; the phrase concerned put international working-class solidarity action on the same level as ‘aid’ given by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hansen prefers to quote not a single word either from the leaflet or from The Newsletter’s criticism!

(We omit here a short reference to the Italian section of the IS, as it was based on a faulty translation of an article in their journal.)

Cuba and Spain

The major part of Hansen’s attack on the ‘ultra-left sectarians’ is concerned with the attitude of the SLL towards Cuba. Hansen begins his document by trying to make an amalgam of the SLL and its IC supporters on the one hand, and the Posadas group which recently broke from the IS on the other. Hansen knows these are absolutely separate and distinct tendencies. He makes literally no evaluation whatsoever of their political content or the evolution of their present position. They are both opposed to ‘unification’, therefore, he implies, they must be responding to the same social forces and must be essentially similar. Here again we have an excellent illustration of the pragmatist method. The objective relations between these tendencies, their history, and their response to the major political problems, are ignored. It is useful, it ‘works’, to identify them with each other as saboteurs of unification-they are ‘ultra-left currents’. Hansen reports that the Posadas group includes in its programme the prospect of a nuclear war against capitalism. This is thrown together with the SLL’s opposition to characterizing Cuba as a workers’ state. Posadas, says Hansen, must agree that Cuba is a workers’ state, because it would be ‘political death’ to think otherwise in Latin America. The differences are thus to be explained geographically. Politically the Posadas group and the SLL are the same – ultra-left sectarians, driven to this by their fear of unification. How is this cussedness to be explained? Hansen is unclear: the heading of the Trotskyist ‘mainstream’ (the SWP leadership and the Pabloite IS) towards unification comes from the ‘mighty forces of the colonial revolution and the interrelated process of de-Stalinisation’.

‘The Trotskyist movement has not escaped the general shake-up either. The Chinese victory, de-Stalinization, the Hungarian uprising were reflected in both capitulatory and ultra-left moods as well as strengthening of the main stream of Trotskyism. What we have really been witnessing in our movement is the outcome of a number of tests – how well the various Trotskyist groupings and shadings have responded to the series of revolutionary events culminating in the greatest occurrence in the Western Hemisphere since the American Civil War. The move for unification and the symmetrical resistance to it are no more than logical consequences to be drawn from reading the results, especially those supplied by the acid test of the mighty Cuban action.’

Where is the explanation? Two opposite viewpoints are here ‘explained’ by the same thing. They were just different ‘logical’ results of approaching the same events. Could anything illustrate more clearly the barren consequences of refusing to deal with the history of the controversies and splits, and to probe to their basis in theory and method? Hansen found it more ‘practical’ to produce, by sleight of hand, an identification of his opponent, the SLL, with the views of the Posadas group.

The note by the French comrades, appended to this reply, raises similar points about the demagogic results of these methods of controversy. As they point out, their own document on Cuba comes under fire from Hansen but has not been issued to the members of Hansen’s party. They also correctly indicate the unprincipled character of the argument which runs: nobody who counts in Latin America agrees with the SLL characterisation of Cuba; therefore it is suspect and shows how stupid and sectarian they are. As the French comrades remark, the ‘opinions’ of the Soviet and Spanish people were often quoted in a similar way against Trotsky’s characterisation of the state and the ruling cliques in both countries. In addition, they take up Hansen’s laboured jokes about their reference in an earlier document to a ‘phantom’ bourgeois state in Cuba. What Hansen must do is explain why such a concept is a matter for joking, and in what way he thinks it departs from the kind of analysis made by Trotsky of the class forces in Spain in 1936-37. Either Hansen has forgotten, or he chooses not to remind his readers, of the concept advanced by Trotsky at that time of an ‘alliance’ with the ‘shadow of the bourgeoisie’. Perhaps he knows some good jokes about that too.

It would be pointless to take up every step in Hansen’s documents in a similar way. His whole method is to argue from incidents and impressions, combined with the vaguest generalisations like ‘the might of the colonial revolution’ and the ‘interrelated process of de-Stalinisation’.

Our Record on Cuba

On the question of Cuba itself, Hansen raises no new arguments in the discussion and no new facts on the regime there. We see no need to reply in detail to Hansen’s caricature of the record of The Newsletter in defending Cuba before and during the blockade of October-November 1962. Hansen concerns himself entirely with the pages of The Newsletter: we take every responsibility for everything written in our journal, but we would also point out that Hansen was in Europe during the crisis. He, and The Militant correspondent in London, made not the slightest effort to acquaint themselves with the campaigning activity of the SLL during the crisis. Hansen correctly says that there were many demonstrations against the blockade – and he contrasts this with the ‘insular’ Newsletter! This is nothing but a slander. SLL members were right in the forefront of everyone of those demonstrations. They instigated and led a great many of them. The first mass meetings and demonstrations in Britain were led and addressed by our members. No one except the SLL organised a single factory-gate meeting against the blockade. Our comrades also fought tooth and nail to turn the protests especially into the Labour movement and to the factories. They had to fight resolutely against the right wing and the Stalinists in order to do so. They led these demonstrations against imperialism, and in defence of the Cuban Revolution, at the same time educating the workers and students in the role of the Soviet bureuacracy. They explained the causes of Khrushchev’s contradictory policies, instead of joining Russell and the pacifists in praising his ‘brilliant’ diplomacy. In order to do this they had to fight the Stalinists, a fight which won the support of many Communist Party members for Marxism. That could not have been done without training the SLL in the spirit of revolutionary Communist methods of work and a struggle against revisionism. How well would our comrades have performed had they been armed with the heritage of Pabloism – ‘the new situation restricts more and more the capacity of counter-revolutionary measures by the bureaucracy’ – or with Cannon’s apologia: ‘What else could he have done under the given circumstances?’; and calling up of Nehru and Russell, ‘unaffected by imperialist propaganda’, in his support? We are proud of our record in the Cuban events of last autumn, and we are ashamed of the identification of ‘Trotskyism’ with the capitulation to the Soviet bureaucracy of Cannon and the Pabloites. Hansen’s long list of quotations from The Newsletter is really only a mask for that capitulation.

Abstract Norms

Hansen’s case is basically the same as Pablo’s in 1953. ‘Objective’ forces pressing towards Socialism make it impossible for the Soviet bureaucracy to betray, and press even petty-bourgeois groupings to adopt a revolutionary path. We have seen above how in Algeria this means calling on Marxists to simply help along the ‘objective’ forces that will favour a course to the left by Ben Bella and his nationalist government. For all the talk of firmness against imperialism which is supposed to be involved in calling Cuba a ‘workers’ state’, the actual ‘defence’ of the Cuban Revolution by the SWP and the Pabloites was unable to even separate itself from the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy of Khrushchev! This is one of the things we mean when we say that Hansen is not analysing Cuba from the point of view of the development of the international class struggle, but by the application of abstract norms to isolated cases.

Hansen approaches the question of definition of the Cuban state by trying to relate it to the history of such discussions in the Trotskyist movement. The analysis of that discussion is certainly a vital part of the Marxist answer to the problems posed by Cuba today, but it will have to be along a different line to that taken by Hansen. He takes the SLL National Committee to task for ridiculing the imposition of abstract norms from Trotsky’s definition of the USSR to the economy and political system of Cuba today. He says that we thus ‘sever the connection’ between the present and the past discussion.

Hansen even says we have cut out Trotsky’s definition of the USSR ‘by declaring it has no relevance to the Cuban discussion’. Is that the same thing as saying that the question of the Cuban state cannot be resolved abstractly by ‘criteria’ from this earlier discussion? It is always easier to demolish your opponent if you write his case afresh in your own terms. The real point of a historical analysis of the development of our concepts is to establish the way in which they scientifically develop by reflecting the objective world. Just as Trotsky’s definitions of the USSR were hammered out on the basis of changing conditions in the USSR and in the world, of struggles against revisionist trends, and of the struggle to build a new International, so the historical threads of the discussion today must be seen as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary International able to lead the working class to power. The whole political line of the different tendencies in the Trotskyist movement must be the content of an analysis of their discussion on these questions. What looks like ‘historical’ analysis turns out in Hansen’s hands to be the most rigid and unhistorical treatment.

Petty-Bourgeois Leaderships and the Working Class

For example, he criticises Trotskyism Betrayed for failing to characterise the Soviet bureaucracy as a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy. Hansen’s insistence on this point has a specific purpose: ‘What was new in this situation-and this is the heart of Trotsky’s position on the question – was that a reactionary petty-bourgeois formation of this kind could, after a political counter-revolution, wield power in a workers’ state and even defend the foundations of that state while being primarily concerned about their own special interests.’ It follows therefore that under certain circumstances petty-bourgeois formations will be forced to lead the revolutions of workers and peasants and abolish the capitalist state. Says Hansen: the SLL leaders accepted this for Eastern Europe and China, why not for Cuba? (They should even be more willing, he suggests, since ‘the Cuban leadership is in every respect superior to the Chinese’.) We now see what Hansen means by ‘continuity’ in the discussion. Trotsky saw that a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy could lead and even ‘defend’ a workers’ state. After the Second World War this petty-bourgeois formation could even take the leadership in the extension of the revolution and the establishment of new, ‘deformed workers’ states’. So why should the SLL strain at the notion that petty-bourgeois leadership can lead the establishment of workers’ states in countries like Cuba? There you have the whole of Hansen’s playing with ‘the history of the controversy’. He picks out from the history one aspect, the characterisation as petty-bourgeois of certain social groups. This aspect is selected because it is the one essential to the justification of his present political course. Now it is, of course, absolutely essential that the characterisation ‘petty-bourgeois’ be very precise. This class is continually being differentiated into the main classes of society, bourgeois and proletarian. Its various political representatives reflect this intermediate, dependent and shifting position. They are capable of no independent, consistent political line of action, Only if a petty-bourgeois intellectual joins the proletariat, in Marx’s terms, can he achieve that independence and consistency of theory and action. The bureaucracy in the labour movement was often characterised by Lenin and Trotsky as petty-bourgeois in terms of its way of life, its approximation to the standards and acceptance of the ideology of the middle classes, its going over, in the special conditions of rich imperialist countries, to the way of life and social functions of the middle classes. They formed part of the ‘new middle caste’ of society in the imperialist countries, In the USSR the bureaucratic ruling group consisted of the elements listed by Hansen – ‘a reflection of the peasantry, the remnants of the old classes, the elements who switched allegiance from Czar to the new regime – all these and the political-military administrative levels of the new government who, under pressure from the Capitalist West, drifted from the outlook of revolutionary socialism or came to prominence without ever having understood it’.

The term petty-bourgeois is not at all sufficient to characterise this bureaucracy for the purpose of the present (or any other) discussion. A decisive sector of the Soviet bureaucracy was Stalin’s faction in control of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state. The historical relation between this party, this state, and the Soviet working class gave a specific character to the bureaucracy. It was not at all simply a question of relation between old, middle classes and a new governing elite. The existence of nationalized property relations established by a Soviet revolution, with the Bolshevik Party in power, gave us a historically produced petty-bourgeois stratum at the head of the first workers’ state, a group which represented, as Trotsky so painstakingly insisted, not the general laws of development of classes in the transition from capitalism to socialism, but the particular and unique refraction of these laws in the conditions of a backward and isolated workers’ state. In extending this ‘capacity’ of the petty-bourgeois, as petty-bourgeois, to defend and even extend workers’ states, Hansen and Co. do precisely what Trotsky fought against in the discussion. Our French comrades are right to insist that the evaluation of the history of this discussion in the Trotskyist movement is more than a day’s work, and the pre-condition of any useful results will have to be a much more serious and scientific handling of Marxist concepts than is displayed by Hansen with his easy identification of a ‘petty-bourgeois formation’ like the unique bureaucracy of the first workers’ state with the petty-bourgeois leadership of the July 26th movement in Cuba.

Hansen on Permanent Revolution

In the coming months the French and British sections of the IC will publish contributions on the history of the discussion of ‘workers’ states’. Meanwhile we confine ourselves to differences in method to which Hansen draws attention, particularly in relation to Cuba, Nothing that Hansen says in ‘Cuba – The Acid Test’ answers the main argument in our section on Cuba in Trotskyism Betrayed. But before taking up particular points from Hansen’s document it might be useful to state the general position from which we think Marxists must begin. One reason for doing this is that Hansen accuses us of treating Cuba only as an ‘exception’, and of seeing no continuity between past and present discussions on the character of the state. Castro set out as the leader of a petty-bourgeois nationalist party. His party has led a revolution and been able to hold power in Cuba. How has this been possible? What is its significance?

In the Russian Revolution, the petty-bourgeois (the ‘democracy’) could not resolutely seize the power on its own account, let alone ‘retain’ power, because of the strength of the proletariat and its ally the peasantry at that period. Given resolute revolutionary leadership, the working class proved able to overthrow the ‘democracy’ and achieve power. This power, in the view of Lenin and Trotsky, was an international breakthrough. It was seen essentially, in this backward country, as a power to be defended ‘until the workers of Western Europe come to our aid’.

In this summary are contained the basic ideas of the ‘permanent revolution’. Those countries who arrive at the stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution late cannot achieve this revolution under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The latter, and its spokesmen in the petty-bourgeois parties, are too incapable of an independent development. Their relation to international capital and their fear of the proletariat make their task an impossible one, and they will run to the support of reaction. The proletariat is the only class which can carry through the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. But in the course of its revolutionary actions and the creation of its own organs of struggle, there arise independent class demands. From the first stage of the revolution there is a rapid transition to workers’ power. The condition for the maintenance and development of this power and its social base is the international socialist revolution.

Petty-Bourgeoisie in the Anti-Imperialist Struggle

The nations drawn into the struggle against imperialism now cover the entire world. The class composition of these nations varies enormously. In many of them, there is no industrial proletariat even to compare with the Russian proletariat of 1905, or the Chinese of 1919. In many of them, the development of industry has been forcibly restricted in the special interest of the ruling imperialist powers, so that the population consists almost entirely of a poverty-stricken peasantry. This peasantry is not at all identical with the ‘peasantry’ of Marxist writings in the 19th century. In many cases the majority of cultivators are landless sharecroppers and occasional wage-labourers. The special requirements of extractive and primary processing industries often create a special type of worker-migrant workers, spending half their time employed in mines or on plantations for low wages, the other half unemployed or back in small-scale cash-crop production or subsistence agriculture. The actual relationship of exploitation between international capital, banks, native money-lenders and merchants, landlords, etc., on the one hand, and the direct producers, peasants and workers, on the other, presents new and original forms. These forms are often hideous combinations of the ruthless drive for profit of advanced finance-capital and the backward social relations of feudal sheikhdoms and chiefdoms. At the political level, the peoples of these countries suffer the same deadly combination. All the horrors of modern war are visited upon them, either in direct conflict between the imperialist powers or through the equally effective ‘pacifying’ activities of the United Nations. In each case, we must see a particular combination of the forces and the laws analysed by Trotsky and Lenin in their work on imperialism and the Permanent Revolution.

Cuba is one of those countries where capitalist development has been almost entirely a function of foreign investment and control. The dependence of the economies of Latin American countries upon a single crop or resource (for Cuba, sugar) has often been described. The national bourgeoisie could never be an independent social force in Cuba. It could function only as a political or commercial executive for U.S. investments. Under these conditions the petty-bourgeois democratic ideologists could not long play their classical role in the bourgeois revolution, that of providing a political leadership tying the workers and peasants first to the bourgeois struggle against absolutism or for independence, and then tying these lower classes to the new regime. In the Russian Revolution the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks attempted to do this. The leadership of the Bolsheviks over a proletariat concentrated in a few advanced centres, particularly Petrograd, in the vanguard of a peasant war, won Soviet power. The alternative would have been a repressive regime founded on the capitulation of the petty-bourgeois parties to the counter-revolution. Even in Germany and Italy, more advanced countries with much larger working classes, the failure of the proletarian revolution was replaced within a short time, not by bourgeois democracy, but by the naked oppression of Fascist regimes. Mankind had entered an epoch where the alternatives were Socialism or Barbarism, in the shape of Fascist reaction.

Capitulation to Soviet Bureaucracy

In the world today, we have a more advanced stage of the same situation. Not only barbarism but complete annihilation presents itself as the alternative to Socia1ism. This fact on a world scale, together with the preservation of the workers’ state under bureaucratic domination in the USSR and the setting up of similar regimes in other backward countries (Eastern Europe and China), have led some ‘Marxists’ to view the present situation as qualitatively different. The Stalinists have concluded that the threat of war and the power of their own military forces make practicable a strategy of peaceful competition with the leading imperialist powers, and peaceful and Parliamentary roads to Socialism within the individual nations. This is quite clearly not a theory but an ideological apology for the actual capitulation of the Soviet bureaucracy, determined above all to preserve its privileges by balancing between the working classes and imperialism. The current Sino-Soviet dispute raises these questions for discussion throughout the Communist Parries. Never was there greater need for theoretical clarity and decisiveness by the Trotskyist movement, for only the scientific development of the theory of Permanent Revolution can provide any answer to the problems raised. In our opinion the revisions of Trotskyism by Pablo, leading to the split in 1953, and now manifested in opportunist policies for the advanced countries, the workers’ states, and the colonial countries, were a political capitulation to the forces which stand between the working class and the overthrow of imperialism. The power of the Soviet bureaucracy, and the slowness of the European and U.S. labour movements to resolve the crisis of leadership in the 1930s and 1940s, had an impact on the ideas of Pablo and his group which was not interpreted scientifically, in a class way, but impressionistically. This abandonment of the dialectical method, of the class criterion in the analysis of society and politics, resulted in the conclusion that forces other than the proletariat organised behind revolutionary Marxist parties would lead the next historical stage of struggle against capitalism. We have seen how Hansen explains this for China and Eastern Europe. We remember Pablo’s insistence that the Stalinist parties in countries like France could lead the working class to power. We have seen since then the ‘rehabilitation of the revolutionary peasantry’ by Pablo and the current belief that petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders can lead the establishment and maintenance of workers’ states. In Cuba, even an ‘uncorrupted workers’ regime’ has been established, according to these ‘Marxists’. All this is possible because there is a ‘new reality’; as Hansen says: ‘To this we must add that the world setting today is completely different (?) from what it was in 1936-39. In place of (?) the entrenchment of European fascism, the Soviet Union has consolidated a position as one of the two primary world powers. The Soviet economic structure has been extended deep into Europe. China has become a workers’ state. The colonial revolution has brought hundreds of millions to their feet. De-Stalinisation has altered the capacity of the bureaucracy to impose its will in flagrant fashion as in the thirties …’

The similarity here to the analysis of the ‘new situation’ presented by the Stalinists is remarkable. They, too, discuss at the level of ‘the strength of the Socialist camp’, ‘the colonial revolution’, ‘the defeat of fascism’ and ‘the growth of the Soviet economy’. They, too, try to protect themselves from the formation of new revolutionary parties by claiming that it is their defensive reaction of ‘de-Stalinisation’ which assures the future of the Communist movement. Those who refer to Lenin are ‘dogmatists’! Capitulation to the bureaucracy in political questions will eventually involve a descent into their methods of thinking, in narrow empiricism and pragmatism, combined with demagogic generalisations. This is the type of thinking which underlies the present revisionist barrier to the building of the Fourth International.

The SLL’s Position on Cuba

Let us briefly now summarise the ‘refutations’ made by Hansen of our position on Cuba as stated in the documentTrotskyism Betrayed and see how they stand up.

1. We criticised the ‘normative’ method of applying separate ‘criteria’ abstractly and unhistorically without specific historical and class analysis. We demanded instead a class analysis of the political forces and of the government and state in Cuba. Hansen replies by accusing us of ignoring the historical continuity in the discussion on the class character of the USSR, China and Eastern Europe and Cuba. We have seen above the way in which he establishes this ‘continuity’ – by finding in it justification for acceptance of petty-bourgeois formations as leaders of the working class. We have tried, in anticipation of future analysis, to lay down the general Marxist framework for a discussion. We have suggested that the analysis carried out over the last two years in Labour Review form the basis for a class evaluation of the nationalist and Stalinist forces in Cuba and other countries.

2. We stated categorically that the new unified party (IRO) of Castro and the Stalinists could not be a substitute for the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party in Cuba. Hansen does not take up this question at all. He presumably defends the position stated earlier by Cannon, that the Trotskyists should take a loyal place within the IRO. Hansen replies to the French comrades that in their writings, ‘The meaning of the attacks on the Cuban Trotskyists (by government officials and spokesmen) is exaggerated and placed at the wrong door besides not being properly balanced against the ideological influence which Trotskyism exercises in a significant sector among the Cuban revolutionary vanguard.’

He still must explain the clear statement of Guevara that no factions shall exist in the IRO, whose ‘democratic centralism’ will thus be of the Stalinist type. He must explain who is responsible for the attacks on Trotskyists. And he must not ask us to take seriously his gentle hint that the SWP or someone else has secret influential friends by Castro’s side. When did that become a Marxist argument, and what has it got to do with the question whether a Marxist party can be built? No doubt we will also be told that in Algeria there is ‘ideological influence’ by Trotskyists like Pablo in ‘a significant sector among the revolutionary vanguard’, but we find it difficult to get excited about that. Hansen had the opportunity in this part of the, argument to expand on his earlier theme: ‘We all know the ABC – we need revolutionary parties – but the question is how to go ahead and build them.’ But he has nothing to say except that it is ‘exaggerated’ to defend the Cuban Trotskyists from attack by the State apparatus and that it should be remembered we have some friends in there.

3. We stated our opinion that the dictatorship of the proletariat had not been established in Cuba, and that therefore the label workers’ state was wrong. Hansen does not take the question head-on – or perhaps this is one of those old ‘norms’ of Lenin which are too old fashioned to apply. To our argument that the state machine remained a bourgeois structure despite the absence of the bourgeoisie, Hansen replies only with attempted ridicule, despite the fact that, as the French comrades have pointed out, this involves him in the necessity of revising Trotsky’s conclusions about Republican Spain in the 30s (Spain-The Last Warning 1936). The SLL, says Hansen, should revise their opinion because: the imperialists disagree about it being a bourgeois state; the ‘people’ of the USSR and the other workers’ states disagree(!); the Cuban people disagree; other Marxists disagree; and finally, the present SLL position was once stated by Pablo himself, before he learned better. All these arguments amount to precisely nothing (see the letter from F. Rodriguez, in this bulletin).

Hansen does not take up at all the question of Soviets or workers’ councils as the form of State power, and the meaning of a ‘militia’ without such workers’ self-government. He does not say how this ‘militia’, controlled in fact through the army by the centralised state apparatus, differs from ‘the people in arms’. Is it not a fact that the arms supply is regulated through the army and not through the militias? Through the State apparatus and not through workers’ councils or committees? Why does not Hansen take up our argument that the old state machine was not smashed but was staffed with personnel from Castro’s own movement, later supplemented by the Stalinist bureaucrats? Is it a ‘norm’ from Marx and Lenin which must now be dropped? We insist that so long as the petty-bourgeois leadership of Castro keeps hold of this state machine, bureaucratically independent of any organs of workers’ power, in control of force in Cuban society, then it will function as the main hope for the re-entry of the bourgeoisie into Cuba, nationalization notwithstanding.

4. Essentially connected with the last point was our characterisation of Castro’s government as a Bonapartist regime resting on bourgeois state foundations (Trotskyism Betrayed, p. 14). Certainly Castro has leant heavily on the proletariat and the poor peasantry up to now, but he also is careful to preserve a relationship with the rich peasants, and the exigencies of the economy may force him to rely on them more and more. Hansen should think out how far he is prepared to go with Castro in such an eventuality. Already Pablo, with whom Hansen wants to unite, has been working out a theoretical line to justify Ben Bella’s insistence that in Algeria the peasants are more important than the workers. If Hansen is to answer the case far saying Castro is a left Bonaparte, balancing between imperialism and the working class, then he must give an alternative explanation for the absence of proletarian democracy in Cuba. If Cuba is an ‘uncorrupted workers’ regime’ how do we explain the absence of workers’ councils? What explanation is there other than the preservation of the independence of the State power by Castro and his movement, against the working class as well as against imperialism? Stalin’s regime was also characterised by Trotsky as a Bonapartist one. Does that mean that Cuba, like the USSR, is therefore a workers’ state? No: we say that Stalin’s was a bureaucratic regime resting on the proletarian state foundations conquered by the Soviet workers in 1917; Castro’s is a Bonapartist regime still resting an bourgeois state foundations. If the Cuban revolution can be successfully defended from foreign invasion, then the next stage will be a short period of dual power, with the workers and peasants led in their Soviets by a new revolutionary party behind the programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

5. Hansen makes no reply to our statement: ‘The attack on Escalante was motivated by a desire to keep power centralised in his own hands and not by hostility to bureaucracy or any other such thing.’ (Trotskyism Betrayed, p. 14). Hansen still writes as if it does not need proving that Escalante was removed from office as a step against Stalinist bureaucratism. But we must repeat that he leaves several points unanswered. What is the significance of the fact that the majority leadership of the Cuban Stalinists also condemned Escalante, and that Pravda welcomed his removal as a blow against ‘sectarianism’? Does it mean that they are now taking their place in Castro’s crusade against Stalinism? But would not this imply that the Stalinist movement is reforming itself along the right lines? Or does it mean that the Cuban CP and Pravda decided to humour Castro for the time being, acknowledging his strong position in Cuba itself? In that case the nature of the relation between the July 26th movement and the Stalinists should be exposed by the SWP, and its implications for the nature of the new ‘united revolutionary party’ recognised.

The main basis for interpreting Escalante’s removal appears to be the speech of Castro ‘Against Sectarianism and Bureaucracy’. In this speech Castro gave many examples of favouritism and bureaucratic discrimination in the State administration. Escalante and his group, according to Castro, used their power to staff the state apparatus at all leve1s with their own (Communist Party) nominees. All this seems to be very fine, but if the speech is read carefully, and compared with earlier speeches and writings, it becomes clear that there is more there than meets the eye.

In condemning Escalante’s appointments, Castro repeatedly remarks that the men appointed were not proved revolutionists but Party intellectuals, some of whom were under their beds while the revolutionaries were risking their lives against Batista’s regime. The clear implication of this part of the speech was to assert the leadership of the July 26th group over that of the Communist Party, and to threaten the Communist Party with calling up the sympathies of the people behind the ‘real revolutionaries’. It was probably against this very real danger to their own bureaucratic positions that the Stalinists decided to join in the attack on Escalante and cut their losses. It is very interesting to compare this speech with Castro’s equally well-known one, also published by the SWP, in which he claimed to have always been at least close to communism. In this latter speech, made at a stage when he was more dependent on the Communist Party for the staffing of the State bureaucracy, Castro almost apologised for whatever hostility he had shown to Stalinism in his earlier career. He explained that only his ‘lack of understanding’ prevented him from being a Communist; he thus glossed over the betrayals of Cuban Stalinism in the past. He called upon the militants of the July 26th Movement to learn Marxism from the old hands of the Communist Party. What else can we call these rapid changes in emphasis except the adaptation of a Bonaparte to the changing necessities of preserving his domination? Could anyone suggest that they bear any relation to a serious or revolutionary evaluation of Stalinism as a political trend?

In this matter, do Castro’s speeches to the populace bear any relation to the process of ‘educating the masses’ at which he is supposed to be so adept? An article from Hansen on this question would be interesting. In ‘Cuba – The Acid Test’ he makes only the briefest references to the question: ‘the alleged take-over of Castro’s forces by the Cuban Communist Party has been sufficiently exploded by events’ (p. 28).

Hansen chooses here to ignore the point that even if he was right about the significance of Castro’s actions ‘against bureaucratism’ this would largely confirm what had been said about the dangers to the Cuban revolution of Castro’s dependence on the Stalinists in staffing the State apparatus. He makes no analysis of the actual relations between the July 26th Movement and the Communist Party, and simply refers once again to ‘the measures taken by the Castro regime against Stalinist bureaucratism’ (Cuba – The Acid Test,p. 16) as if nobody could question their ‘revolutionary’ or progressive character. But a reading of Castro’s own speech makes the matter quite clear. In condemning the bureaucratic appointment to State positions of Communist Party members by Escalante, Castro is defending not workers’ rule, proletarian dictatorship, but the independence of the State machine. He insists in so many words that the state must have the right to place all personnel. These officials will be loyal to the State and not to any outside organisation. The assertion of the worth of the July 26th fighters against those who were ‘under their beds’ is a justification of this independent power of the centralised state apparatus itself, under the direct control of Castro’s government. Guevara’s speeches against workers’ control in industry, and the attacks on the Cuban Trotskyists, are in the same line.

6. Hansen repeats all the arguments about nationalization carried out by the Castro government, without introducing anything new to the discussion. We had indicated that nationalization today could mean many different things, and was often carried out on a large scale by bourgeois governments, particularly in backward countries. The longer capitalism continues in the absence of proletarian victory in the advanced countries, the more capitalist economy will have to adopt measures which conform to the character of modern industry, division of labour and communication, yet still restricting the economy within the contradictions of capitalism. Hansen makes a terrible hash of the argument at that point. He says: if nationalizations like those in Cuba can be carried out by a bourgeois state, doesn’t this lead you to the conclusion that capitalism can still have a progressive role? This is only the argument of the revisionists (‘Capitalism can make itself work’) stood on its head. Hansen is taking at their face value the claims made by the governments and capitalist spokesmen for such changes. The fact is that the economy of Cuba, or Israel, or Egypt, or any other country, will be hampered by such a framework from becoming part of the rationally planned international economy of Socialism. Does the use of atomic fission prove that science and industry can still advance under capitalism, and that Marxism is wrong? Or doesn’t it demonstrate that every technological advance, so long as imperialism is not abolished, turns into its opposite, i.e., that all development involves greater economic and political contradictions?

Hansen does not take up the relevance of his criteria of ‘nationalization’ for say, Egypt or Burma, where a military-nationalist government recently nationalized the banks and many foreign holdings. Perhaps these will have to be called workers’ states, since if somebody else (bourgeois or petty-bourgeois governments) nationalized these enterprises, that might imply further progressive roles for the capitalist class and the capitalist system. We raised the question of the SWP’s evaluation of these states in our earlier document, but Hansen gives no reply. On the question of nationalization of the land, one small point will show the incompleteness of Hansen’s presentation. Hansen says that the alienability of land (whether it can be bought and sold) is ‘beside the point in this discussion’ but takes the opportunity to attack the SLL for its ‘ignorance of the facts on this question’. He goes on: ‘It so happens that the Agrarian Reform Law specifies that the “vital minimum” of land, to which a campesino gets a deed, “shall be inalienable”. Exempt from taxes, this land cannot be attached and is not subject to contract, lease, sharecrop or usufruct. It can be transferred only by sale to the state, or through inheritance by a single heir on the death of the owner, or, in the event there is no heir, by sale at a public auction to bidders who must be campesinos or agricultural workers: Now a very interesting omission from this passage (a passage whose only meaning is that the Castro government has tried to create a stable, small and middle peasant class in Cuba) is that besides the vital ‘minimum’ there is also the possibility of much larger holdings, up to a maximum of 1,000 acres. Between the minimum and the maximum, the land can be sold on the market. Hansen’s correction of our ‘ignorance’ here may perhaps serve as a model of how to start with ‘the facts’.

7. Finally, we raised the question of a new revolutionary party in Cuba. Hansen ignores this completely. He prefers the ‘facts’.

Hansen’s Silence

In this reply to Cuba – The Acid Test we have restricted ourselves to the methodological principles raised by Hansen, and to a number of illustrations of the differences between us on these principles, particularly on Cuba. Other questions which we took up in Trotskyism Betrayed are ignored by Hansen, and we await his reply. For example, we took several pages to answer the accusation of ‘subjectivism’ in our evaluation of the world situation. Taking up Trotsky’s Transitional Programme and the International Resolution of the SLL (World Prospect for Socialism) we showed that our evaluation of the relation between leadership and the objective contradictions of capitalism was the same as Trotsky’s. Hansen makes no attempt to return to the attack an this point; perhaps he thinks it enough to say that ‘the world setting today is completely different from what it was in 1936-39’. (p. 28). We also made a detailed reply defending our characterisation of the Algerian leadership and the Evian sell-out. Once again, nothing from Hansen in reply (see above). What kind of discussion is Hansen going in for? We try to take up all the points raised, to carry them to the end, and Hansen simply drops them. Such discussion soon becomes profitless. Similar treatment is given to the question of the Leninist approach to party-building. We tried to establish, from the documentary evidence, the falseness of Hansen’s claim that Lenin and Trotsky had built the Party primarily through flexibility and unifications. We pointed out the essential theoretical firmness and the ability to insist on splits characteristic of Lenin, and Trotsky’s recognition of this essence. Hansen replies not a word.

Finally, we take up once again the relation between the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and in the backward nations. We especially insisted an the political implications of the SWP’s statement that ‘the pronounced lag in the West, this negative feature (was) the most important element in the current reality.’ All the talk of the revisionists about ‘favourable objective forces’ amounts in fact to the opposite of what it appears. Times are good, and getting better, but for what? Far the construction of revolutionary parties around the programme of the Fourth International? No! For the emergence of Marxists from the petty-bourgeois political groupings, a development which Trotskyists should direct all their efforts to supporting! This is the most that can be gathered from Hansen and the Pabloites. Their ‘deep entry’ and their silence on the principled questions of new revolutionary parties, Soviet democracy, and the political revolution, are designed to find ways of ‘getting in on the act’. Someone else is going to do the job, and at the moment the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist leaders are getting on with it. As for the advanced countries: ‘In fact experience would seem to indicate that the difficulty of coming to power in the imperialist countries has increased if anything since the time of the Bolsheviks.’ This is used to back up Hansen’s agreement that the construction of revolutionary parties is an ‘absolute necessity in the advanced capitalist countries’. In the advanced countries it’s difficult: you need Marxist parties. But in any case the ‘epicentre’ of the revolution is elsewhere, and there it can be done by someone else. In effect the ‘parties’ of Hansen and the Pabloites in the advanced countries become cheer-leaders for the petty-bourgeois nationalists in Algeria, Cuba, etc. Hansen chooses to ignore the line of those Pabloites in Europe who ‘keep their heads dawn’ in the Social Democracy, hoping to be discovered as the core of some future centrist parties, rather than constructing independent parties in opposition to the reactionary leaderships.

Hansen’s document, Cuba – The Acid Test, is a serious warning to Marxists. It parades as a serious contribution to an international discussion, yet ignores a whole series of vital questions raised immediately before, questions concerning the whole record and orientation of Bolshevism.

In place of this, Hansen insists on ‘the facts’, and in particular, the fact of the Cuban Revolution. Into this part of the discussion he introduces nothing new except a demagogic distortion of the SLL’s position and a crude attempt to gain something from the different evaluations of the Cuban state by the French and British sections of the IC.

All this indicates that Hansen is running away from the fundamental political questions. His insistence on ‘The Acid Test’ of Cuba is a plea for ‘commonsense’ to override theory. It is this which underlies the wholly different concepts of building the International now dividing the SWP and the SLL. Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary party.

The great benefit to be derived from Cuba – The Acid Test is that it makes explicit the foundations of this abandonment of revolutionary theory, of dialectical materialism. Hansen has now placed out in the open his defence of empiricism as a method, a method which has a natural expression in the politics of opportunism. It is to these politics that Hansen’s method now leads. It is for this reason that he and Cannon drive for unification with Pabloism, whose opportunist and liquidationist revisions 1953 have not been in any way corrected. All that has happened is that the theoretical stagnation of the American Trotskyists has led them inescapably to the same end.

Adapted unanimously by The National Committee of The Socialist Labour League on 23rd March, 1963.

ADDENDUM

It is characteristic of the Castro regime that not a single leading body of the ORI is elected. While Castro inveighs against sectarianism and dogmatism in the party, he is at the same time responsible for the installation of an autocratic and self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

For example, the ‘reorganising process’ in the ORI is carried out by the National Board – which is appointed. Who reorganises the National Board? Presumably Castro. There is no freedom for dissident tendencies and no provision for minority representation.

All policy decisions are made behind closed doors by a small clique of Castro and his supporters. There is no democratic debate and little discussion. For instance, during the last missile crisis, it transpired that ‘some people’ in the ORI favoured UN inspection. Who these people were and what chance they had to express themselves we do not know. We had to wait until Castro spoke to get what facts we could.

Again recently the workers of Havana were treated to a piece of organisational skullduggery without precedent in the revolution. This was the decision to dissolve the acting Provincial Committee (37) of Havana, its executive board and Secretariat. It was replaced with a small Provisional Executive Board (11) with ‘limited functions considered indispensable at this stage’.

The ostensible – and official – reason for this arbitrary action was the failure of this important leading organ to carry out the ‘reorganising work’ but the real reason was probably a political one – the elimination of the remnants of Escalante’s forces in the ORI.

The Provincial Committee – one of the most important in Cuba – has no right of appeal to any Congress of the ORI for the simple reason that there has been no democratically convened Congress, and there is little prospect of seeing one in the future.

At the same time, too, all the party organisations in the Province of Havana have been placed under the direction of eleven Regional Commissions which are not subject to election and renewal.

The bureaucratic centralisation going on in the ORI is the antithesis of working-class democracy and is the surest symptom of Bonapartism in the revolution.

We do not wish to make a fetish of democracy – nor do we wish to minimise the importance of the bullet vis-à-vis the ballot in a revolution. But dictatorship if it is to remain popular and viable must be tempered by the widest democracy. Comrade Cannon in his own inimitable style expressed this thought succinctly when he wrote:

‘When the founders of scientific socialism said the workers must emancipate themselves, they meant that nobody would do it for them, and nobody could. The same holds true for their organisations, the instruments of struggle for emancipation. If they are really to serve their purpose, these organisations must belong to the workers and be democratically operated and controlled by them. Nobody can do it for them. So thought the great democrats, Marx and Engels.’ (Notebook of an Agitator, p. 239, Pioneer Publishers 1958).

We cannot say more.

RELATED

For important criticms of this document, see
Cuba & Marxist Theory (1961-1973)

The Centrism of the SWP and the Tasks of the Minority

The Centrism of the SWP and the Tasks of the Minority

By Jim Robertson & Larry Ireland

[The following 9/6/62 document from the internal discussions of the Revolutionary Tendency inside the Socialist Workers Part was republished in Marxist Bulletin #2 titled “The Nature of the Socialist Workers Party – Revolutionary or Centrist”. It was originally posted at http://www.bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/MB2_05.html]

I. The Centrism of the SWP

1. The Decisive Importance of the Nature of the Party.

The American Minority has been nurtured in the SWP and is a tendency within the party. The SWP (& youth) continue to loom large as a shaping influence upon the minority. How the SWP is analyzed and summed up determines a) the tasks of the minority which are carried out within and through the SWP, b) the nature, scope, and very existence of the minority grouping, flowing from our conclusions about the state and direction of development of the party. Thus the question of the nature of the SWP is of decisive and central importance to our perspective and tasks.

It would be an error to view the “nature of the party” as some kind of a priori or external label to be applied to the SWP. To know the nature of the SWP is to know how the party is moving and will move in response to events, opportunities, and challenges in the class struggle and in relation to the aim of the Socialist Revolution.

It is possible to perceive the broad outlines of the party’s political shape even under conditions of relative quiescence. It must be our continual responsibility to do this, checking our expectations against results, so as to properly orient our tasks. To do otherwise would render our entire role directionless and random, at the mercy of chance impressions and momentary situations.

2. Some Relevant Party History (A Sketch of Highlights since 1940).

a. The American Trotskyists took a stunning double blow in 1940. Over half of the movement broke away and a few months later Leon Trotsky was murdered. Among those breaking away from the movement (40% of the party and 80% of the youth) were most of the party’s writers, theorists, as well as a whole political generation who had made up the youth leadership. The party lost nothing in the way of intransigence and solidity through these blows as was shown by its resolute role in the Smith Act trial and the upsurge in the working class trade-union struggles during 1943-47 out of which issued Cannon’s affirmation, “The Coming American Revolution.” However, a theoretical sterility and blunting of political alertness took place and was never made good. All these circumstances underlie the recent statement of the British SLL that the SWP had made no political contribution to the world movement since 1940 [in “Trotskyism Betrayed” by SLL-NC, July 21, 1962].

b. The response of the SWP to the Tito-Stalin split marked the opening of a period in the party’s existence which was concluded with the end of the regroupment period. (The response to the Cuban Revolution is on a new and different plane.) It was a period in which, when opportunities opened up somewhere, the party typically would initially respond in a revolutionary manner. Failing to get sufficient results, it would begin to water down its approach, enthuse over dubious elements and press hard against the limits of formal revolutionary doctrine. Then a halt would be called, a cooling off took place and its “historic opportunity” or “hero” of only yesterday, though perhaps unchanged, became completely passé.

The eulogistic and shameful scrabble after “comrade” Tito in 1949-1950 was a reaction to disappointments in the reversal of the trade-union struggle, a sharp decline in the party’s size and influence, all in the context of the growing witch hunt, which started Cochran-Clarke’s restlessness to break out of the revolutionary movement.

Similar reactions set in internationally in the Fourth International; but it was not until the Cochran group in the United States was ready to break overtly with Revolutionary Marxism that the then US majority recoiled and led a world split which arrested the rightward drift in the party for a time. Yet, the split was weak and defensive for the following reasons:

1.) It placed organizational over political issues. The split of the FI was simply announced in the pages of the Militant as a reaction to the world center’s support of the Cochran-Clarke group. It was not fought out to a culmination and rupture, thus catching the SWP’s co-thinkers by surprise and unprepared and left the neutrals perplexed and inside the FI.

2.) It placed national over international considerations, as was in addition shown by the SWP’s endorsement of the expulsion of the French majority by the Pablo center in 1952 [See SWP International Bulletin of November, 1952, “Documents on the Crisis of the PCI (French Section of the FI).”] This took place only a year prior to the SWP’s own break with Pablo.

Immediately in 1954, at Weiss’ instigation, the party was made to undergo the strange experience of the anti-McCarthy campaign in which McCarthy was dished up as a full-blown fascist who had to be fought in the streets by the trade-unions. This qualitative overstatement of McCarthy’s role was accompanied by an agitational campaign in the very depth of a period of terrible isolation, reaction, and passivity, while the Militant, week after week, shredded and reduced to a parody the Trotskyist understanding of fascism.

Then in 1956-1958 came the series of regroupment activities growing out of the Stalinist crisis which began with the adoption of the excellent SWP “Statement on Socialist Regroupment” and which correctly facilitated the SWP’s involvement in open forum discussions. It also facilitated and encouraged the winning-over of a left-wing from the liquidating Shachtmanite YSL. Soon, however, the impatient attempt at a pay-off at any price led to flattery in theMilitant of the Gatesites who were heading for the Democratic Party and to an adaptation to the National Guardian, as in the building of Guardian supporter clubs. Then came the treatment of the ISP with an approach of rubbery principles. Only the intransigence of anti-Trotskyist elements saved the SWP from being a partner to a common electoral New York State slate which would have placed the SV/P in the compromising position of being in an electoral block for propaganda. The feverish assertion in the PC draft resolution of March 1959 that regroupment was bigger and better than ever, came just when the regroupment period had palpably come to an end. But then J.P. Cannon called a halt and that was that. The party was contained rather formally within nominally principled limits.

3. The Present Political Positions of the SWP (i.e. the “autocatalytic” or “chain-reaction” breakaway of the SWP from the programmatic fundamentals of Revolutionary Marxism.)

Revolutionary parties are not immune to errors (e.g. the Bolsheviks’ “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”.) However, the further and clearer the departure from the politics of a consistently class-struggle character, the stronger the restorative (correcting) force within the party. But, after an incubation period of some years (see point 2) the party, unclearly over the youth, openly on the Cuban Revolution (i.e., the permanent revolution), and grossly over Pabloism and the Fourth International (i.e., internationalism) has not merely broken with Leninism, but has overtly replaced it with something else. What had been in recent years a tendency to give an opportunist twist in practice to attempts of the party to seize on opportunities, until a halt was called by restorative forces within the party (characteristically J.P. Cannon), has changed to an overt breakaway from Marxism with the party’s response to the Cuban Revolution, so that the accumulated opportunist forces and appetites within the party were not only unleashed but outright encouraged by Cannon’s initiative in attacking the SLL. With the response to the Cuban Revolution, the variance between words and deeds has become qualitative. The dominant motives and practice today are a clash of attempts to recruit dubious human material at the expense of revolutionary principles, opposed by the fear that any recruitment efforts might alienate the “friendly” leadership groupings of whatever organization the majority can locate (i.e., July 26, Local 1199, NNCC, etc.)

4. The Degenerative Process–The SWP as a Centrist Party.

Centrism is a catch-all word to describe any of those organizations which in Lenin’s words are “revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds.”

The SWP in particular has fallen victim to degenerative processes similar to those which overtook the pre-World War I German Social Democracy and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, so that the party stands today:

a. in opposition to the most essential aims of the Trotskyist movement for a major part of the globe in the declared dispensability of a revolutionary proletarian party to lead the colonial masses to victory (victory as opposed to the stalemate of the deformed workers’ states or the still more illusory “victories” that do not transcend the entanglements of capitalist imperialism);

b. internationally no longer for a world party, a Fourth International as the self-organized, international vanguard of the working class; instead the SWP seeks a limited unity of mutual amnesty with other centrists in order to form both an “international publicity agency for assorted ‘leftward-moving’ bureaucracies” and to retain an organizational fig leaf to cover their break with the essential substance of proletarian internationalism–the struggle to build a world party of the workers.

Given these profound differences with Revolutionary Marxism, it is to belabor the obvious to insist merely upon the centrist character of the SWP. On the contrary, it is critically important, in accepting the characterization of the SWP, not to be swept away and into a split perspective as though centrism equaled some kind of political leprosy. To quote a “Letter to Ed” of October 1961 which deals with this question:

“In the past few years the party has began to react to opportunities by turning each one into a cycle of opportunism until the given opening is exhausted. Each time a selection takes place, some–notably the Weiss group–get worse and move toward liquidationism, but others react and are impelled in a leftward direction. This process has just begun, if one stops to view the SWF historically. There are two roads open. Either each wave of oppositionals will let themselves get washed out of the party, making it even harder for succeeding left-wingers, or each opportunist venture into fresh fields will augment the revolutionary Marxists with additional forces.”

5. The SWP as a Rightward-Moving Centrist Party.

Centrism is a phrase which covers a multitude of sins. As Trotsky put it: “Speaking formally and descriptively, centrism is composed of all those trends within the proletariat and on its periphery which are distributed between reformism and Marxism and which most often represent various stages of evolution from reformism to Marxism–and vice versa.”

The SWP falls short of being a left-centrist party, that is, one of those organizations or groupings (often moving left from the social democrats or out of the CP) which genuinely desires and seeks to work for the socialist revolution but suffers some internal limitation in the form of ideological or organizational baggage which it is unable to transcend in practice (eg. the Workers Party-USA, 1941-46; the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists, 1934-38; the left-wing of the POUM at various times.)

The SWP’s practical excursions into activity bear not merely the stamp of being mistaken or inhibited in some way from a revolutionary standpoint, but in addition have become opportunist in intent. The theoretical or political “explanations” are just that, not guides to revolutionary action, rather “covers”–rationalizations to maintain a revolutionary rhetoric. Comrade Mage’s recent “Critical Notes on the Political Committee Draft ‘Problems of the Fourth International and the Next Steps’” is nothing but a political exposé of a whole series of such rationalizations.

The disease of the SWP is degenerative in character and some insight and guidance can be gained for us by comparison with the CPUSA which was undergoing a degenerative process in the period 1924-34. However, it is important t» keep in mind the quite different circumstances and mechanism in the case of the SWP.

The SWP in its leadership has become a very old party. From 1928 to the present–54 years–it has been led by the same continuous and little changing body of personnel. Thus it is the most long-lived, ostensibly revolutionary, organization in history. Its current National Committee must have one of the highest average ages of any communist movement ever.

While the leadership is old, many of the leading rank and file party stalwart at the local branch level are middle-aged and comfortably well off–skilled workers with many years’ seniority and homeowners to boot. Most extreme, but by no means unique in this respect, is one of the two largest party branches, Los Angeles.

6. General and Long-Term Conclusions re the SWP.

The divisions within the SWP are irreconcilable since they reflect differences which are and will ultimately be reducible to the difference of reform vs. revolution. It is a strong temptation in politics to succumb to impatience and seek to artificially accelerate what is deemed inevitable in the long run into an immediately posed issue. The break of the SWP with Marxism has taken place over “foreign” issues about which many subjectively revolutionary members are insensitive and unaroused.

The process of clarification within the SWP will not be complete until the party has to face up to major class struggles within the United States. From now until such a time the role of the revolutionary Marxists within the party must be that of an aggressive, political polarizing force.

II. The Tasks of the Minority

7. The fundamental task of the minority must be to win unambiguously the mantle of Trotskyism, of recognition as the revolutionary Marxist party, within this country. The basic character, course and [crises] of this undertaking are determined by the irreconcilable differences generated by the rightward-moving and degenerative process of the SWP and the resolute opposition to this process which must be undertaken by the minority. The heritage and unbroken tradition of Marxism in the United States must not be allowed to falter and be dragged through the slime of centrist politics which can have no other effect than of selling short the American revolution.

That the leadership of the SWP is well on this road can be seen not only in the positions taken by the party on such international questions as Cuba, Algeria and the Colonial Revolutions in general, but in a more fundamental sense in the common denominator running throughout these and all other positions and actions taken by the party which run counter to or tend to sabotage the formation of revolutionary Marxist parties. The slighting of revolutionary parties is well illustrated in an absurd and criminal half-quote selected by the National Committee from Trotsky’s Stalinism and Bolshevism: “… The party is not the only facto of development and on a larger historical scale is not the decisive one.” Thus does the SWP signal its retreat from Marxism and here the battle for Marxism begins in the American Section of the Fourth International.

8. The battle for the preservation of Marxism in this country is not, however, one which has begun only in the past few months. On the contrary, the discussions on the reunification with Pablo and the panegyrics of the party over the course of the Algerian revolution can be traced quite easily to those positions decided on in the course of the Cuban Revolution. The failures to undertake a principled and critical defense of the Cuban Revolution have, in turn, their roots far back in the history of the SWP.

Principally, however, the organizational and tactical battle has been going on since the organization of the minority evolved over the course of the discussion on Cuba. We have been struggled against not only politically, but organizationally as well since we began to raise a concerted voice concerning the new course followed by the SWP. The shape and nature of this battle have only recently come to be recognized as such a vicious and severe one simply because the minority has only recently realized the seriousness of this struggle and attempted a more vigorous resistance. In other words the party has been attacking us all along and primarily in the area which they have come to understand best–the organizational area of bureaucratic manipulation.

9. It is time that we appraise not only the sources and nature of this fight within the party but further that we correctly evaluate the likely path of struggle in order to best prepare and implement the most determined, resolute and conscious opposition. Basically the speed with which this conflict is finally resolved will depend upon how swiftly events move on the national and international arenas. It will also depend in large measure on the degree to which we are successful in swelling our membership, that is, comrades who adhere to our fundamental program. From most indications on the American scene, this is likely to take some time; a period of several years.

However, there are at least two areas of important and immediate unrest and conflict. By all criteria, the largest and most important of these is the civil-rights struggle in the United States and particularly in the American South. This clash contains the genuine seeds of pre-revolutionary conflict in this country.

The other area lies in the direction of the peace movement which in many cases marks the attempts of youth to break away from the cul-de-sac of bohemianism and locate a base from which they can express their militant dissatisfaction with the cold and hot war policies of the Washington government.

There are many ether potential areas of conflict as well, not the least of which is the trade union movement. It is, for example, highly interesting to note that many trade unions in this country have contributed funds to the SNCC which is at the moment the left-wing grouping of the civil rights movement in this country.

10. It will therefore, be a period of years in which we are involved in this struggle for Marxism. We must not slight the serious, bitter and protracted nature of this struggle since each delay, every detour and all indecisive actions on our part can only contribute to the further strangulation of revolutionary opportunities in the United States. It is absolutely necessary that we utilize what Trotsky called “the superiority of foresight over ‘astonishment’” and reject all forms of crass empiricism which have become so popular with the majority.

For instance, some majority comrades are currently assaying as the real item the “crisis view of history” which amounts to the proposition that the economy is headed for another severe slump which will (automatically) assure a mighty gain in membership and influence for the party. According to this view Fascist and other Bonapartist possibilities are severely discredited. The revolutionary party is reduced to a colossal container to catch the cast-offs of this process. Minority comrades are well able to discern the falsity of this approach. But we must beware all temptations to sit back and wait for a split in the majority ranks or a major social upheaval as a substitute for decisive actions now. That we will gain from these clashes is incontestable only if in the interim we have become a viable revolutionary grouping! As Leninists we seek no quack formulas for quick revolutionary victories.

11. Knowledge of the immediate and forthcoming struggle with revisionism can only serve to help prevent shock, disillusionment and “astonishment” over the highhanded techniques with which the majority bureaucracy are currently attempting to quash the minority. Throughout, of course, the party leadership will genuflect in the direction of “democratic” centralism. But none will be surprised at times when centralism elbows democracy aside.

Thus the party welcomes all minority comrades who wish to blindly do party work. But as the recent episode of Comrades Shirley and Steve strikingly portray, we can expect the most vicious resistance when seeking to be placed in positions of genuine importance. The disgusting and unprincipled tactics utilized by the Carl Feingolds and LeRoy McRaes only serve to underscore the profound mistrust of the SWP towards all fresh, youthful, revolutionary currents. The majority with “good” reason does not trust us and will attempt to veto any attempts of ours to integrate ourselves into the party. Fighting by their rules, we will never raise ourselves above an errand boy (or girl) position. Even those few comrades left of the tendency who hold responsible positions within the party are on their way out with the possible exception of one or two who will be permitted to remain if only to keep the majority au courant with the latest positions of the minority.

12. The majority rank and file, however, contains many valuable elements who will more and more become disgusted at this unprincipled behavior and find it increasingly difficult to reconcile this activity with their conceptions of democratic centralism. One of our major tasks must be to recruit these comrades to our tendency. This in fact is our first line of recruitment and is of vital importance. Those majority comrades who currently refuse to join us may well comprise groups who will join us at later times as the SWP continues its reckless course. It is important that we remain sensitive to the stirrings of the majority and give them as many openings as possible to reach us and exchange ideas, opinions, etc. On the other side, we must incessantly attempt to contact them and push their doubts about the party into the open. But this process, although one of the most important, is but one of the ways in which we will increase our numbers; it is by no means the only one and we must seriously begin to consider the possibility that we will not gain a majority following within the party.

13. We seek to recruit to the tendency. All organizational tasks must be undertaken with this concept in mind. Leninists seek everywhere to carry out the revolutionary program of the Fourth International and today that revolutionary program is embodied in the principles and program of the American minority. At present, largely because the SWP is the ostensible revolutionary party in the eyes of the radical public and the party membership, we work through the SWP. But we can have no intention of building centrism. We work within the party because it provides us with the best possible opportunity for building our tendency and not through any mistaken concepts of loyalty to a diseased shell.

14. Our discipline is with the ranks of the tendency as well. Discipline binds us to a program of action and functions through the form of a party. But in this period, when the program has become separated from the majority of the party, our discipline must be with the minority until that time when program and form are again united. It is imperative that this uniting take place as quickly as possible, but for the various reasons given above, it is likely that this will take some time. In the interim, we must not allow ourselves to drift back and forth confusing, now, discipline with the form of the SWP and, then, with the minority.

15. Ours will be a problem of a “double” recruitment. As we seek to build the tendency, therefore, and as we have the perspective of working within the SWP in the coming period, recruitment of new cadres from outside the party will involve considerable effort. There can be no question of meekly handing this raw material over to the party for conversion into careerists or a probable speedy disillusionment. At the very least, we must exercise as complete communication and access a possible with these elements when they are first introduced to the party. But the source of cadres for our tendency is second only to recruitment within the party and is therefore of the utmost importance.

16. As our tendency builds its ranks, the SWP will become more and more reluctant to accept members in its various branches who are evidently supporters of the minority. On one pretext or another the SWP leadership will refuse to take these comrades in, or suggest that they do not have “enough experience”, etc. Thus Goran Moberg was refused admittance to the party on the grounds that he was living in Puerto Rico which was not a part of the United States. Requests to make him a member-at-large were considered out of the question by Carl Feingold.

We can not drop these comrades! On the contrary, we must keep them in as close a contact as possible with the functioning and activities of the Socialist movement. Under no conditions must this vigorous new material be allowed to wither up and drift away because of insufficient political and organizational contact with revolutionary Marxism.

17. Gathering all of our forces together, and acting in a cohesive fashion, we must press the struggle within the party on an organizational level as well as on a political one. But our primary battle is a political one and we must not allow ourselves to succumb to the majority disease of organizational manipulation in lieu of political struggle. We have, nevertheless, much to learn on the organizational plane, but we must learn these techniques while battling against them. In many meetings, it is possible to utilize tactics which will at the very least give us an opportunity of being “heard”, that is, of carrying our arguments to the other comrades.

18. To repeat, our major battle is a political one and we must seek whenever possible to counterpose revolutionary arguments and programs to those of the SWP. The effect of this tactic will be a two-fold one. That is, it will help to bring over additional majority comrades to our ranks and at the same time it will help to crystallize the political thinking of the minority comrades who carry out these appeals. No item in the Militant or the ISR should be too small for us to fasten upon and expose its true nature. We must seek to open political discussions at all times if only during the coffee break at branch meetings. There are no shortages of areas on the American scene in which we can ask for discussion: the civil rights movement, etc.

19. In general we must pick and choose our battles in order to avoid defeats and losses which might weaken the fighting spirit of the minority. But there is no reason why we can not act as united blocs within the party when approaching some outside activity as a strike, campus activity or the like. This will always be a highly difficult proposition because of our position within the SWP, but we must attempt to utilize every opportunity possible for recruitment. Planned and united actions within the party will exact a much greater reward than haphazard and self-contradictory actions. This places a tremendous burden upon the various minority comrades who are expected to carry out these actions, but they are therefore not the less needed.

20. The situations in the various branches are differentiated in degree from that in New York. Thus, there is an opportunity present in certain cities such as Berkeley-Oakland or New Haven of our winning organizational control. All comrades in these critical areas should be encouraged and aided as completely as possible. Visitations by groups or individuals, many letters, and material aid should be made available in order to make the most of any opportunities which may present themselves. Organizational control in a branch would render the task of recruitment much easier. Control would also make it much more possible to reach other majority comrades through the National Convention, etc. Therefore, in addition to the suggestions above, comrades should be encouraged to move to places where they can be most politically effective.

21. The situation facing our forces is qualitatively the same in the YSA as in the party. But in the youth a more open and revealing process takes place, paralleling the course of the SWP. The process is the more open because those currently carrying out the majority line there are usually not as skilled as the SWP’s Carl Feingold in manipulating organizationally. But that they are less skilled does not mean that they are less dangerous. Still, by virtue of their fluster and bluster they can often be temporarily beaten or side-tracked. Comrades operating in the YSA can speedily detect those times when it can be most advantageous to attack with vigor and those when it will be best to maintain a silence. But at no time must we fall into the trap of lending other than critical or conditional support, depending upon the circumstances, to the various proposals and activities. At other times, we must resolutely offer, in the words of Comrade Harper, “a revolutionary alternative on the issues under discussion.”

22. The document submitted by Comrade Harper (Orientation of the Party Minority in Youth Work [draft]) on 8 August 1962 to the New York Tendency contains our basic position in regard to youth work. This document should be supported, developed and implemented at every opportunity.

23. The essential prerequisite for developing and implementing the minority program and tasks is a high caliber of political and theoretical training. Without this preparation and continued development of cadres, we can have no other option than to function on the basis of personalities and “facts” rather than on the basis of Marxist theory and dialectical processes. It makes absolutely no sense to demand that comrades be more “active”, particularly in such a danger-laden situation as the one we are presently in, without at the same time demanding a tendency program designed to continue the development of political awareness which forms the sine qua non of our existence as socialists.

24. One of the charges which has been made amongst the minority is that our tendency stands in danger of becoming a “study circle”. Presumably, the reference attempts to characterize a latent or explicit desire for minority comrades to shirk from mass contact and (centrist) party building concomitant with a preference to discuss revolutionary work as abstractly as possible. But not a single member of the minority fills this bill of goods! Each has at the very least taken the significant step of joining what he or she took to be the revolutionary party in this country. In addition, the minority is primarily composed of comrades who have worked tirelessly in the party on a political and organizational level and who have made many of the most outstanding contacts with mass groupings. One of the most noteworthy complaints of these comrades is not that they do not wish to do party work, but that they do not care to be reduced to cogs in an autocratically managed centrist party, that is, a party which limits the areas of political usefulness. Our comrades want to be active, but they want to be active as revolutionary Socialists.

Therefore, one of our major tasks at this moment is to become a study circle! The ability to reason and develop our program, both individually and collectively is absolutely necessary if we hope to win new elements while carrying on a sustained struggle. We are the vanguard precisely to the extent that we become capable of carrying out the tasks of a vanguard. The carrying out of these tasks necessarily presupposes study on all problems facing the proletariat as a class engaged in struggle as well as on all problems before its vanguard.

25. It is necessary to develop both formal and informal political discussion among ourselves. To this end we seek to have forums, educationals and the like in the SWP and YSA given by members of the minority. In addition, we must supplement this pattern of education by a full range of programs within our local tendency units. More, we must see to it that minority comrades are provided with the fullest and widest possible knowledge of national and international developments. There can be no meaningful development and application of Marxism without the greatest practicable exchange of information concerning the various moods, trends and events in the world Trotskyist movement. It must be an unquestioned obligation for all comrades to see that others are furnished copies of relevant correspondence whenever possible. At the very least full and continued access to these documents must be the right of all minority comrades. Any inclination to build personal prestige or status by the arrogation and withholding of reports must be checked.

26. Fundamental to the tasks of our tendency which can only be successfully carried out by means of raising the caliber of the minority as Marxists is the resolute shattering of the petty-bourgeois and reactionary division between Marxist “thinkers” and Marxist “doers”. Any notions along this line in our ranks can only, if encouraged, bring a most pernicious outcome to our struggle. All comrades should be included in the happenings and encouraged in every imaginable way to take part. This is particularly important at a time when we are so few in numbers. And since we are so few there can be no excuse for failing to carry out this proposal. Failure to include comrades in discussions, consult with them, and heed their proposals indicates an attitude of contempt for the very idea of a Leninist party.

27. Yet even our short-term perspective is not that of becoming a “permanent discussion group” or a Marxist coterie. But we must realize that lacking a clearly thought out–and discussed!–set of tactics, strategies and programs we will only function to see ourselves drowned by the Charybdis of sectarianism or rent by the Scylla of opportunism and petty-bourgeois accommodationism. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary action” is an absolutely correct maxim. Nowhere today is the need for the correct application of this maxim more necessary than in the struggle ahead.

28. Let us take the motto of Karl Liebknecht for ours in the coming period: “Studieren, propagandieren. organisieren”–Study, propagandize, organize. The success of our struggle to seize the mantle of Trotskyism depends upon it.

Jim Robertson
Larry Ireland
6 September 1962

Trotskyism Betrayed

The SWP accepts the political method of Pabloite revisionism

by the National Committee of the Socialist Labour League, July 21, 1962

[reprinted in Trotskyisn versus Revisionism: Vol. 3]

1. The document ‘Problems of the Fourth International and the Next Steps’ adopted by the Political Committee of the SWP on June 16 and 17, 1962, marks a new stage in the international discussion. For the first time the SWP has acknowledged explicitly the questions of principle which at the moment divide the SWP and the SLL.

2. A discussion on these questions must not be confined to the leading bodies of the SLL and the SWP, nor only to the leading committees of the IS and the IC. It must be extended throughout the ranks of every section of the world movement.

3. The SWP draft claims to ‘take for granted’ that there are many things on which the SLL and the SWP have full agreement. The document goes on to deal with ‘points of disagreement and misunderstanding’. One of these points of disagreement and misunderstanding is said to be the question of ‘ways and means’ of building mass parties of revolutionary Marxism. We must point out, however, that this discussion is not at all a question of listing points of agreement and disagreement: we are convinced that a whole difference of theoretical and political method is involved. This is acknowledged even by the SWP Political Committee document when it says that the SLL comrades give ‘primacy to the subjective factor’. The international discussion now beginning cannot be simply a matter of clearing up misunderstandings and partial differences. Our opinion is that the method in the SWP document is a fundamental revision of Marxism and is different in no way from the revisions of Pablo which led to the split of 1953. It is difficult to see how the SWP leadership can claim to have agreement with the SLL ‘on many points’ if in fact their document is correct in saying that we have an ‘incorrect conception of the interplay between the objective and subjective factors in shaping the course of the revolutionary process’.

4. The basic differences in method as we shall show are centred upon the basic questions of Leninism, how to proceed to the construction of an international revolutionary party.

5. The fact that a new stage has been reached in this discussion is itself part of a new stage in the construction of these revolutionary parties of the Fourth International, for which the defeat of revisionism is necessary. In the advanced countries, the contradictions of capitalist economy are producing a great revival of proletarian class struggle. All over Western Europe, the strength of the organized working class stands in the path of the imperialists’ plan to solve their problems at the workers’ expense. Already in Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and Spain militant industrial actions take place alongside a severe political crisis of the ruling class and its state machine. The imminent entry of Britain into the European Common Market, and the massive electoral turn away from the Conservatives, promise big class battles as the long-privileged position of British imperialism rapidly crumbles. The sensitivity of the US economy to all the contradictions of world economy and politics will make it very difficult for the imperialists to solve their internal economic problems. In all these advanced countries, the working class will show itself able to fight on a massive scale.

The ruling class prepares for these struggles by strengthening its military and repressive machine, and by subordinating the workers’ organizations to the State, thus preparing to smash them. Extreme right-wing political tendencies in all the advanced countries keep pace with the revival of militancy. In these conditions the construction of revolutionary Marxist parties is a great historical responsibility. Only an organization based on theoretical analysis of these struggles and unswervingly committed to the struggle for power can answer the needs of the working class. It is at such times that the most tragic betrayals can take place, if the opportunists, Stalinists as well as Social-Democrats, are not defeated in the working-class movement.

6. The theoretical struggle is a vital part of this task. Only theoretical clarification of the new stage in the class struggle, a clear perspective of the working class as the only revolutionary class and of the advanced countries as the core of the world revolution, can form the basis for the revolutionary parties necessary in the coming struggle for power. The SWP criticism of the SLL starts from the Cuban revolution. In doing so, it reveals its whole mistaken method. We must begin from the need to establish Leninist parties in every country, and in the first place to defeat revisionism.

Revisionist ideas appear in the revolutionary movement as a result of failure to advance theory in preparation for concrete struggles for working class power. The pressure of the class enemy as it prepares for the struggle finds its reflection in this theoretical stagnation. All revisionism departs from the central ideas of the dictatorship of the working class and the need for independent working-class political parties to achieve this aim. Revisionism is an onslaught on the ideas needed by the working class to prepare its struggle for power. The SWP leadership has now arrived at a position where it delivers just such an onslaught on Marxism.

Its ‘determination’ to unite with the Pabloites and to attack the SLL are not surprising in this context. In 1953, as the crisis of Stalinism came into the open with the East German uprising, the Pablo group adapted Trotskyism to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and in the capitalist countries. Instead of seeing the upsurge of the workers as the objective basis for building revolutionary parties and the preparation of the political revolution, with similar construction in the capitalist countries, they centred attention on the concessions of the bureaucracy. The demands of the workers would be represented not by their own independent revolutionary leadership, but by their bureaucratic enemies, adapting themselves to ‘mass pressure’. Had the whole movement followed this line, no successful intervention would have been possible in the next stage of Stalinist crisis in 1956. Now, in 1962, the SWP leadership makes approaches to the Pabloites because a similar adaptation is taking place. This time it is a much more serious adaptation. The workers of the advanced countries are entering big struggles. These will result in lasting defeats unless they become struggles for state power, for which Marxist leadership is necessary. Social Democracy and Stalinism are thrown into crisis by this new round of struggles. Capitulation to centrists or ‘leftwardmoving currents’ at this stage amounts to a betrayal on a bigger scale than that of 1953. Apologies for the non-Marxist leaderships, assertions that petty bourgeois leadership can become Marxist ‘naturally’ through the strength of the ‘objective forces’ — these threaten to disarm the working class by disorientating the Marxist leadership. If capitulation to the centrists takes place now, preventing the working class from breaking with the Social Democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracy, then the revisionists will have the responsibility for enormous working-class defeats.

7. The Socialist Labour League is not prepared to go any part of the way with this revisionism, and will fight it to the end. Those Pabloites with whom the SWP proposes unification are in England working alongside adherents of the ‘state capitalist’ theory in the Labour and youth movements, and find themselves supported (against the Marx­ ists) by opportunist groupings like Tribune and the New Left. In other words, as we need to prepare a revolutionary organization for struggle against the Social Democracy, which attempts to witch-hunt all left-wingers from the Labour movement, those trends with whom the SWP finds an affinity are compromising with the Labour bureaucracy. The connection between the revisionism of the Pabloites and of the SWP leadership on the one hand, and the fight to build revolutionary parties, is not an abstract one; this revisionism represents a definite offensive against revolutionary Marxism, in line with the interests of imperialism, which needs above all to prevent the new upsurge of the working class from finding a conscious expression and leadership. The problem is qualitatively the same in the backward countries. In Latin America, North and South Africa, in the Middle East and West Africa recent events show very clearly that it is the urban working class which now moves on to the scene. The organized workers in these countries seek their own independent politics and are bound to dash with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in their struggle against native and foreign capital. Only if this proletariat, through Bolshevik parties, places itself at the head of the peasant movement for agrarian reform, can imperialism be defeated in these countries. Without a perspective of class alliance with the workers of the advanced countries, such parties will not be successfully built. Trends like Pabloism and the recent revisionism of the SWP, with their impressionistic judgments about the central place occupied by the ‘colonial revolution’, about the tendency for Stalinism to play a ‘progressive’ role, about the ‘superb’ nationalist leaderships, and even, as in Algeria, about the necessity for agreement with the imperialists (see below) all these have a counterrevolutionary role in disarming the working class.

8. In the whole theoretical trend of the SWP exemplified by the famous theory of the ‘confirmation’ of the concept of Permanent Revolution, there is an acceptance of non-Marxist, petty-bourgeois tutelage over the masses, but in the guise of recognition of the ‘strength’ of the masses in pushing the politicians to the left. Theory has been degraded from a guide to action to a dead commentary on the accomplished fact. Behind this there is a long theoretical stagnation, reflected in the failure of the SWP to go beyond a superficial criticism of the last round of revisionism, Pabloism and in the absence of any theoretical contribution by the SWP since Trotsky’s death. It is in the construction of the revolutionary party in the USA itself that the necessity of defeating the SWP leadership’s revisionism is most urgent.

In this reply to the SWP Political Committee’s document, we emphasize the nature of the Marxist method because we believe that the attack on this method by the present leadership of the SWP will, if not defeated, prevent the working class from effectively struggling against imperialism in the great class battles now beginning.

9. The Political Committee draft distorts the position of the Transitional Programme in an attempt to brand the SLL international resolution as ‘subjective’. ‘The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International says that in our epoch “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership”. The SLL reiterates this correct declaration. But their Resolution overlooks the fact that it is the conclusion from a prior consideration of “The Objective Prerequisites for Socialist Revolution” ‘. The SLL document in fact begins in the same way as the Transitional Programme, with a section on ‘The Necessity for Socialist Revolution’ and continues, ‘it is upon this revolutionary crisis, with its dialectical relationship between the struggle of the workers in the advanced countries and of those oppressed by imperialism in the colonies and former colonies, that Marxists base their revolutionary strategy’. (Labour Review, Winter 1961, p.86) Strangely enough, the SWP document chooses to quote this latter sentence in order to attack the SLL on another point (relations between underdeveloped and advanced countries) in the strategy of world revolution, but to ignore it in the consideration of he basic question of programme and method. Trotsky’s emphasis on he ripeness of the objective situation for socialism served always to lighlight the responsibility of leadership and to criticize the betrayals )f the reformists and the Stalinists. To argue from the objective conditions in order to excuse the non-revolutionary leadership is a :omplete distortion of the Transitional Programme.

10. This point is worth discussing in more detail, since it underlies fill the political differences. Like Pablo before them, the SWP spokesmen quote as justification of their attitude a phrase torn from its context in the Transitional Programme, ‘the orientation of the masses is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism and second by the treacherous politics of the old workers’ organizations. Of these factors, the first of course is the decisive one: the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus’. The whole document emphasizes the last sentence of this quotation to justify the view that historical forces and revolutionary tendencies will suddenly and automatically produce a leadership; in other words, that the bureaucratic apparatus will be defeated by ‘the laws of history’ whatever happens. But when Trotsky wrote this paragraph it was an expression of confidence in the possibility of creating a Marxist lead­ ership on the basis of the objective conditions to overthrow the bureaucratic apparatus both in the USSR and in the international workers’ movements. The last thing in his head was any idea that ‘the laws of history’ would get along without the conscious leadership of the class. The ‘treacherous policies of the old workers’ organizations’ must be fought and defeated by the revolutionary party based on Marxist theory. Talk of the ‘laws of history’ accomplishing this as a process separate from the development of the party is an abandon­ ment of the Marxist position on the relations between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Under the guise of correcting the SLL by quotations from the Transitional Programme, the SWP document in fact aban­ dons the thesis of the crisis of leadership. It does not carry out any historical analysis of the real results in politics of the failure to resolve this crisis of leadership; had this been done it would have been impossible to disagree with the conclusion reached by the SLL inter­ national resolution, that the present relationship of forces in the advanced countries is to a great extent precisely the product of the crisis of leadership. To argue that this ‘relationship of forces’ somehow produces international revolutionary trends is sheer distortion < the Transitional Programme. This distortion inevitably extends into revision of the whole history of Bolshevism; a revision which i necessitated by the SWFs current political attitude towards nor Marxist leaderships as the following quotation shows: ‘If th revolutionary forces do not have a suitable leadership prepared i advance of their drive toward supreme power, they are compelled t create or re-create one in the process of the revolution. Even Lenin’ Bolshevik Party had to be re-oriented by the April Theses an< reformed between February and October 1917′. Lenin’s life work ii clarifying the basic theoretical issues and in constructing an indepen dent revolutionary party through periods of reaction as well as revolu tion is mutilated and dragged into the argument only in order to maki even the ‘re-arming of the party’ in 1917 an ‘example’ of the theoriei discovered by the SWP. Somehow even the Bolshevik party must b< made to have been ‘created or re-created’ in the process of the revolu­ tion. Such a distortion of history, and particularly the history of out own movement, is a sure indication of political degeneration.

11. The severity of the SWP document’s conclusion that the SLL is suffering a ‘subjective’ deviation arises from their own departure in the opposite direction, that is, towards pure ‘objectivity’. In fact, when the SWP document attacks our stress on revolutionary consciousness, this amounts to an evaluation which helps the class enemy. The anti-Marxists attack above all the possibility of the working class achieving political independence; the Leninist party is thus the central target. There must be a conscious construction of this party if the working class is to take power and build Socialism. From the outset, spokesmen of the IC pointed out to the Pabloites that their position on the Soviet bureaucracy and the ‘irreversibility’ of the revolutionary process could only lead to the conclusion that independent revolutionary leadership was unnecessary.

The SWP document, however, repeats the method of the Pabloites in dividing history into progressive and reactionary periods. Certainly there are major ebbs and flows of the revolution internationally, but each of these situations is appraised by Marxists from the point of view of revolutionary tasks; in no case do we begin from the reflection of the class struggle in the consciousness of petty-bourgeois politicians. Our starting-point is the objective needs of the working class, and the consequent tasks of the revolutionary party. Questions of alliances and relations with the tendencies axiomatically can only follow the clarification of these primary questions.

12. For all its claims to objectivity, the SWP in none of its documents for the last two years has made any objective economic and political analysis of the development of imperialism or of the Soviet Union. It is substituting for this a series of impressionistic estimates of these processes —  ‘The Stalinist monolith is fracturing’, the masses ‘cannot wait’ for the revolutionary party to be formed. Crass optimism takes the place of revolutionary confidence based on an analysis of capitalist contradictions and the power of the working class. Whereas the SLL international resolution begins a serious analysis of new trends in the economy of imperialism and judges the various political trends in relation to this objective development, the SWP simply searches for examples to confirm the thesis that ‘history is on our side’. Once it is accepted that the existing petty-bourgeois trends, either nationalist or Stalinist, will be forced by mass pressure to complete the proletarian revolution, to ‘confirm the permanent revolution’, then the way is wide open for the abandonment of the independent politics of the working class. This flows so irrevocably from the theoretical apologies for the petty-bourgeois leadership, that the longing of the SWP for unity with the Pabloites comes as no surprise.

In 1953, an SWP document correctly criticized the Pabloites’ resolution ‘The Rise and Decline of Stalinism’, which claimed that the victory of the Chinese Revolution marked a new stage, ‘basically marked by a relation of international forces favourable to the revolution and evolving on a global scale more and more favourably for the revolution. The revolutionary wave spreads from country to country, from continent to continent. It has recently reached the Soviet Union itself and the buffer zones’. Pointing out the consequences of this judgment, the SWP remarked ‘If this is really so, it will have to be recognized that we have entered upon a qualitatively different epoch in which all previous political values would have to be revalued’.

The SWP’s judgment of 1953 applies to its own position today just as precisely as it did to the Pabloites then. The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International based itself on the crisis of humanity brought about by the overripeness of capitalism for revolution. Was it wrong to raise the banner of the Fourth International in the ‘unfavourable relationship of forces’ of the 1930s? Were the defeats from 1933 to the present day due to an unfavourable relationship of forces? On the contrary, in a ‘favourable’ objective situation, the workers were betrayedby Social Democracy and Stalinism. The crisis of humanity resolves itself into the crisis of leadership — this thesis has in fact been abandoned by the SWP leadership, and it is sheer hypocrisy for the SWP document to quote the Transitional Programme in its support.

13. In our communications with the SWP we provoked a strong reaction by daring to suggest that talk about ‘confirming the permanent revolution’ without the revolutionary parties was nonsense. In practice, however, both the Pabloites and the SWP find themselves prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in Cuba and Algeria, which they have chosen to regard as the touchstone of revolutionary politics. Our view of this question is not opposed to that of the SWP simply in terms of who can best explain a series of events. It is a question rather of the actual policy and programme of Trotskyist leadership in these backward countries. The theory of permanent revolution is, like all Marxist theory, a guide to action; analysis becomes the pointer to the need to organize an independent and determined working class and its allies in the peasantry for their own soviet power. ‘Confirming the permanent revolution’ is not an accolade to be conferred by Marxists on approved nationalist leaders, but a task for which Marxists themselves have the responsibility. We find it difficult to comment on the SWP’s complaint that we failed to recognize that any other line on Cuba would have made things more difficult for them in the American radical movement. We are less impressed by the fact that the SWP ‘drew the favourable attention of a whole new layer attracted by the Cuban Revolution including such significant figures as C. Wright Mills’, than by the fact that their theoretical position is a revisionist one, and if adhered to will lead to the liquidation of the SWP as a Trotskyist party. The very fact that the SWP document resorts to such criteria should be a warning signal.

14. The failure of the SWP spokesmen to provide an objective analysis of the role of the nationalist leaderships; their reliance on impressions of the strength and ‘progressiveness’ of the nationalist movements, a consequence of the theoretical stagnation of the SWP, has also led to a falsification of the historical truth about the relations between consciousness and the development of the revolutionary movement. Lenin’s implacable opposition to all opportunism and compromise on principles, his insistence on analysing the economic roots of all political difference, his lifelong insistence on the primary importance of political clarification before organizational steps — all this is ignored, in order to justify the SWP’s present orientation. Their document says ‘experience has shown conclusively that the way to bring together wider forces is through collaboration, fusions and unifications with leftward-moving currents freshly radicalized by the class struggle.

‘Limiting our review to the twentieth century, the history of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party involved more than splits. It also involved unifications and attempted unifications with other tendencies in the Russian Social Democracy, including the Mensheviks. Five years after 1912 when the Bolsheviks first constituted themselves as an independent party and in the midst of the 1917 revolution they merged with Trotsky and his Inter-District group — a fateful decision which helped pave the way for the victory in October. Even after the conquest of power, the Bolsheviks held the door open for any signs of a revolutionary turn by the Left Mensheviks or the Communist Anarchists’. In fact, Trotsky and his followers joined the Bolsheviks and for the rest of his life Trotsky defined better than anyone else the great significance of Lenin’s work in preparing the Bolshevik party for 1917. The document devotes one paragraph to the foundation of the Communist International. It abstracts from the process a single feature which appears to support its case: ‘The Communist parties of Germany, England and the US were all formed after the First World War, not by molecular accretions to the single original nucleus, but by fusions of a number of groups, none of which had originally been Bolshevik’. Nothing at all is said here about the strict conditions on programme and Bolshevik organization, above all on Soviet power, which the Communist International insisted upon for its affiliated bodies. Lenin’s contribution in this discussion, with the hard-hitting criticism of all those trends which wanted the same kind of affiliation to the Communist International as had been possible to the Second International are completely ignored by the SWP document.

Trotsky’s own words shed an interesting light on this part of the discussion

It was not flexibility that served (nor should it serve today) as the basic trait of Bolshevism but rather granite hardness. It was precisely of this quality, for which its enemies and opponents reproached it, that Bolshevism was always justly proud. Not blissful ‘optimism’ but intransigence, vigilance, revolutionary distrust, and the struggle for every hand’s breadth of independence — these are the essential traits of Bolshevism. This is what the communist parties of both the West and the East must begin with. They must first gain the right to carry out great manoeuvres by preparing the political and material possibility for realizing them, that is, the strength, the solidity, the firmness of their own organization’.

(The Third International After Lenin by L. Trotsky)

The reason for this distortion is to be found not in the ignorance of those who wrote this document nor in the unavailability of the relevant documents but in the present political line of the SWP. This line is one which wants ‘unity’ of all Trotskyist forces, but without clarification of differences or a thorough examination of the roots of revisionism, and which abandons revolutionary criticism of ‘left’ trends in the movement. This leads to a denial of the historical foundations of the communist movement. In their anxiety to present a unified and peaceful Trotskyist movement to ‘leftward-moving currents’, primarily from the ‘Stalinist monolith’, they are led to the distortion of the very political foundation upon which the reconstruction of the international communist movement depends. When the SWP tries to justify its present line by saying that Trotsky made approaches to ‘Left-centrist elements’ it is once again selecting those ‘facts’ which suit its case and neglecting other vital aspects of the process. The document itself acknowledges that Trotsky initiated this discussion after the basic cadres of international Trotskyism had been consolidated. In fact this consolidation, like the great theoretical transformations forced through by Lenin between 1900 and 1917, was a process of political clarification which had to be carried through, before any question of numbers, or of organizational mergers, could be considered. The position of the Trotskyist movement today requires above all this theoretical ‘consolidation’. It is not possible to ‘forget’ the split of 1953, a split which the SWP itself described as a fundamental breach based upon the complete departure from Marxism of Pablo and his followers.

15. It is not surprising that the basic methodological differences should find expression in a sharp clash on matters of urgent political importance. The SWP’s attitude towards the Algerian struggle, and particularly the condemnation of the SLL’s characterization of the FLN leadership and its agreements with French imperialism, will serve as the best example. On this question it has to be said that the SWP now finds itself at the end of a long historical line, beginning with the Mensheviks and continuing through the Chinese revolution o the post-war struggles of the Arab, African and South-East Asian peoples. It is no accident that the publications of the SWP have not contained a fundamental analysis of the Algerian revolution for some fears. No article on Algeria has appeared in International Socialist Review. Little has appeared since 1958 in The Militant on the national movement in Algeria. From our side, over a number of years an attempt has been made to analyse the nature of the Algerian war and revolution and to specify the character of its leadership. In this process, mistakes have been made, but certainly we did not suddenly discover that the Evian agreement was a sell-out. We did not argue that the FLN had conducted the struggle against the French correctly up to a certain point and then blame it for making peace with French imperialism. The Algerian war did not end as it began; the men and movements involved were not the same at the beginning as at the end. We attempted to trace out the development of the elemental struggle of the Algerian peasantry and urban plebeians led, as it was, by a narrowly -based, petty-bourgeois leadership subject to all kinds of international pressures. We foresaw, while the peace negotiations were going on last year, what the likely, indeed, inevitable outcome would be. We were prepared for the result and did not, therefore, have to exhaust our resources of vocabulary to turn the Evian agreement into a major defeat for French imperialism or to find excuses for the nationalists. We should, therefore, say that our criticism is not one merely of the Evian agreement, but extends to the conduct of the struggle by the FLN over the whole course of the war. It is not, of course, true that we overlooked the responsibility of the leaderships of the workers’ movement in France for the Algerian tragedy; that has constantly figured in the treatment of the French crisis in our press. The Evian agreement was not the result only of these, or only of the FLN. A different policy, that is a really revolutionary policy on the part of the French working class movement, could only have been waged under different leadership, but such a change in leadership in France would have profoundly affected the Algerian movement. It would have swept the Ben Kheddas and Ben Bellas away like chaff in the wind. They have only survived because of the defeats of the French workers. The behaviour of the GPRA leaves little doubt that the talk of agrarian reform and even social revolution is no more than a blind. The Algerian petty bourgeoisie seeks to fill the place vacated by French colorualism, while continuing to be a loyal guarantor of the fundamental interests of French capital in North Africa. We see the Evian agreements as the expression of this willingness, in which the FLN leaders remain true to their nature. We cannot forget that the ‘centralist’ leadership have never really desired more than this and that they have not stopped at assassination to strike down those proletarian elements in the nationalist movement who long ago pointed out where they were leading. The role of the revolutionaries is not to bow down before a leadership which has nothing to commend it except the ability to control, for the moment, the elemental forces of the Algerian revolution. We do not take seriously its professions of revolution. All nationalist petty-bourgeois groups today pose as socialists and Marxists. The FLN is actually a coalition of tendencies, but though some of them have potentialities, we see no proletarian tendency. What we do see is a willingness for compromise, a fear of the masses, a desire to co-exist with imperialism, which may well make ‘independent’ Algeria no more socialist than Nasser and Bourghiba. Does the SWP wish to extend the accolade to these leaders as well? Considering the deep crisis of French imperialism in Algeria it had retreated in relatively good order, leaving its interests to custodians it has at length decided to trust. Some rightists think, of course, that Algeria will ‘go Communist’ and attack de Gaulle for making the agreement with the nationalists. We think those who see in an ‘independent’ Algeria under the FLN the last hope of keeping that country within the circuit of the capitalist world market to be more in line with the existing facts.

Of course, the situation in Algeria remains unstable. The survival of the FLN leadership is bound up, in fact, with its ability to carry out the terms of the Evian agreement. It is bound hand and foot by its relationship with world imperialism. This relationship prevents it from satisfying the social demands of the Algerian masses or from consolidating its power for a prolonged period. The need is for a proletarian movement against the FLN leaders, against the Evian agreement, to continue the struggle for independence: which means, for the masses, not only peace but also bread and land. We do not equate existing leaders with ‘the living movement’, least of all in Algeria. Nor do we judge the movement from the existing leaders, which is what the SWP has more and more come to do.

16. It is necessary to clearly characterize the way in which this latest SWP document provides ‘theoretical’ cover for the betrayal of the Algerian revolution. The SLL, it appears, is wrong to call the Evian agreement a sell-out. We should have recognized, says the SWP document, that the ‘main thing’ is a victory for the independence struggle and a set-back for French imperialism. This type of formulation is of course not new: it is the classical Stalinist criticism of the Trotskyist programme in backward countries. We note that in Section II, the SWP document quotes with approval the following sentence from the pages of The Militant — “The first step in Algeria is the consolidation of independence, the second must be the socialist transformation of Algerian society’. Is this different in any way from the Stalinist ‘two stage’ theory of the revolution in backward countries? Would it be possible to find a clearer example in practice of the abandonment of the Permanent Revolution, an abandonment which is not made any better by the fact that the theory is said to be ‘confirmed’? The sentence which follows the above quotation, ‘The Marxists there will strive to fight together with the worker-plebeians against the bourgeois elements in the nationalist camp in order to direct the revolution along the second course’, amounts to nothing more than a habitual repetition of phrases which the SWP leadership do not as yet omit from their political statements. That this talk of ‘the fight against the bourgeois elements’ is nothing more than revolutionary phraseology is clear from the document itself. A Marxist, it says, ‘should participate in the forefront of the revolution at each stage — including its nationalist stage in colonial and semi-colonial lands’. Such formulations can only disarm the most advanced workers. We are asked to ‘make alliances with the most combative elements among the leaders and the ranks while bringing forward their own programme and proposals in contending for leadership’. (Our emphasis). What this opposition amounts to is not an independent course towards working-class power, but a loyal opposition within the nationalist camp.

Lenin’s words on some of these questions, as set down in the resolutions of the Communist International in 1920, need no commentary:

A resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries which are not genuinely communist in communist colours. The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties –which will be truly communist and not only in name — in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic trend in their own nation

and

It is essential constandy to expose and explain to the widest masses of the working people everywhere, and particularly in the backward countries, the deception practised by the imperialist powers with the help of the privileged classes in the oppressed countries in creating ostensibly politi­ cally independent States which are in reality completely dependent on them economically, financially and militarily

17. It is all very well for the SWP document to say that ‘Between them Cuba and Algeria encompass most of the basic problems confronting the Marxists in the present stage of the colonial revolution’, but what is entirely lacking in the SWP presentation is any attempt at an overall analysis of the experiences of nationalist movements and revolutions in backward countries. What does the SWP document mean by the phrase ‘encompass most of the basic problems’? It is a matter here not of good and bad examples, but of a whole process in which the mass struggle in under-developed countries has been contained by petty-bourgeois leaderships. Besides Cuba and Algeria — and in order to understand both of these — the experience of Iraq, Iran, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, lndo-China, and many other countries must be taken into account. What would emerge from such a historical analysis is the true role played by those leaders of the working-class who have proceeded from the theory of ‘two stages’. Stalinism, far from being ‘forced to play a progressive role’, has in fact disarmed and betrayed the advanced workers in every one of these countries and has enabled a new bourgeois government to establish temporary stabilizationâ –which is all imperialism can hope for at the present stage. It is in this sense and this sense only that the ‘theory of Permanent Revolution has been confirmed’. The SWP document calls the Evian agreement ‘a major victory for the Algerian people, for the Arab and colonial revolution’. No attempt whatever is made at any general evaluation of this new animal, the ‘Arab revolution’. Instead of a concrete analysis of the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi experiences, we have acceptance at face value of the claims of the Arab leaders themselves. Meanwhile their jails remain full of communists and militant workers. The SWP by this position, falls along with the Pabloites into conniving at similar results in Algeria.

Role of the Workers in Advanced Countries.

18. At this point is is worth reiterating our basic differences in method. The SWP condemns the SLL for ‘a loss of Marxist objectivity’. Meanwhile it proceeds to ignore every one of the basic requirements of Marxist objectivity. A Marxist evaluation of any movement insists upon an analysis of its economic basis in the modern world. This must begin from the international needs of imperialism. Secondly the political tendencies must always be considered in their relation to the whole historical experience of working-class theory. The relation of our party to past trends in the socialist movement must be clearly stated, in working out its approach to the nationalist movements and the tasks of revolution in the underdeveloped countries. The SWP ignores completely these requirements of an objective analysis. The method is in fact a collection of impressions.

It is in Section III, ‘The relations between the underdeveloped and the advanced countries in the strategy of the world revolution’, that the SWP’s departure from the Marxist method stands most clearly revealed. In the first draft of the 1961 international resolution of the SWP, the decisive role of the revolution in the advanced countries was omitted. The final version ‘corrected’ this omission in the manner of the Pabloites referred to above. However, the first draft was a more correct expression of the actual policy of the SWP on all points of programme. The objective relationship between the advanced countries and the struggle in the backward countries is not analysed at all. The SWP resolution of June 1961 runs as follows: ‘The strategic necessity of the world revolution at its present juncture is to combine into one mighty movement these three titanic historical processes; the anti-capitalist struggles of the workers in the highly industrialized imperialist centres; the anti-imperialist movements of the colonial peoples; and the anti-bureaucratic movements of the workers, peasants and intellectuals in the Soviet countries’. The latest political committee document only confuses still further this estimation, which amounts in fact to no more than a survey of the struggles in different parts of the world. It now appears that ‘the main area and most dynamic sector of the world revolution is today located in the under-developed countries where imperialism and capitalism are breaking at their weakest links. The mood of this sector stands out in sharp contrast with the prolonged passivity of the labour movement in the advanced industrial countries where imperialism retains its strongholds’. This statement is followed by a sharp ‘attack’ on those who assume the contrast to be permanent ”’They fail to grasp the meaning of the irregular rate with which the different constituent sectors of the anti-capitalist battalions enter into action or the central place occupied by the workers in the metropolitan centres in the overall struggle for socialism’. In the absence of any objective analysis of the state of the class struggle in the advanced countries since the Second World War, the formal stress on the decisive role of this sector in the SWP document can only appear as a Utopian faith in the revival of the struggle in those countries. Along with this we find formulations which excuse the betrayals of the Stalinists and Social Democrats in these countries, e.g. ‘The intolerable conditions imposed by imperialism upon the colonial masses have driven them into revolt before the workers in the metropolitan centres were prepared to settle accounts with their own capitalists’. What should have been said here is that the outright betrayals of the Stalinists and Social-Democrats, their consequences in the rise of Fascism and the carnage of the Second World War, the collaboration of the reformists and the Stalinists in the restoration of European capitalism after 1945, made it possible for capitalism to remain in existence despite the organization and will to struggle of the workers in the advanced countries. Only a prepared struggle against these tendencies and the construction of an independent revolutionary party can guarantee the prospect of victory in the mass struggles now beginning in the advanced countries. Once the problem is posed in this way there results an entirely different political orientation from that of the SWP. The present ‘relationship of forces’ is a product of past betrayals and not of the strength of imperialism in the advanced countries. The road forward will be found through the qualitative analysis of what produced the present ‘relationship of forces’ and of the forces which can change it. The SWP document talks about ‘irregular rates’ for the different sectors, ending with a conception of the ‘central place occupied by the workers in the metropolitan centres in the overall struggle for Socialism’ (our emphasis).

19. We are asked, once again, to start from the main thing, as with the Algerian ‘victory’. “Even authoritative defenders of capitalism admit that since the end of the Second World War the socialist movement has been gaining at the expense of international capitalism. Today one-third of the human race has thrown off capitalist relations, and this trend is continuing. The impressive successes of the Soviet bloc in many fields and the advances of the colonial revolution have considerably weakened imperialism and shifted the balance of class forces on a world scale to its detriment”.

Hastening to correct any impression that they had changed their position on the vital importance of the struggle in the advanced countries, a final version of the SWP resolution was drafted in June 1961. Although the SLL is accused of undue stress on leadership and of being ‘subjective’, nevertheless the SWP resolution runs as follows:

The confinement of revolutionary advances to the less developed parts of the world, together with the pronounced political lag in the West, has set its stamp upon our entire period. This negative feature, the most important element in the current reality, involves the citadels of imperialist power as well as the proletarian forces that must be mobilized to take them’, (our emphasis).

One is bewildered by the statement that ‘this negative feature’ is ‘the most important element in the current reality’ after having already read that the general trend is one in which ‘the Socialist movement has been gaining at the expense of international Capitalism’. Our stress on the importance of revolutionary consciousness in resolving the crisis of leadership is a positive and optimistic stress starting from the objective contradictions in capitalism. The SWP resolution can only find the advanced countries ‘a negative feature’ as ‘the most important element in the current reality’. This presents no guide to any kind of way forward. Instead it says, ‘the chief problem is how to loosen the deadlock, break the stalemate, by overcoming the passivity of the workers in this decisive sector of the international class struggle’. What is missing is any analysis of the class struggle, the economic contradictions, and the role of leadership in Europe and America. Instead, as in the Pabloite documents since 1953, we find abstract evaluations of the relative importance of the various sectors of the world labour movement.

It is true that this section of the SWP political committee document is followed by a section ‘How can mass parties of Revolutionary Socialism be created?’ But as we have seen above it is precisely on this question that the false method of the SWP degenerates into distortion of the history and classical positions of Bolshevism. Ail this section adds to the points already considered is a potted history which the SWP document generously describes as ‘objective proofs from a long and honourable record’. This is supposed to show that it is really unthinkable that the SWP could possibly have abandoned the perspective of constructing revolutionary parties — all we can say about this particular contribution to the discussion is that it might help in clearing up what the SWP leadership means now by the word ‘objective’.

Cuba

20. Our differences on Cuba are only part of these general and fundamental disagreements. The SWP document states that ‘a workers state has been established in Cuba, a consequence of the first victorious Socialist revolution in America’.

It is interesting to compare this evaluation with that of the Pabloites, who share the view of Cuba as a workers’ state. We have given our estimation of the Pabloite position in the Labour Review (Vol. 7 No. 1).

The SWP political committee has now announced its determination to unite with the Pabloites, on the grounds that political differences are now minimal. Does the SWP see Pablo’s position on Cuba as part of this ‘coming closer together’? We see it, on the contrary, as the logical conclusion of the capitulation of the Pabloites to petty bourgeois tendencies subjected to such strong criticism in the SWP’s Open Letter of 1953. Here again the SWP comrades have not considered Pablo’s line on Cuba in relation to his whole approach to the Permanent Revolution and the struggle in backward countries. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the Pabloites have abandoned Lenin and Trotsky’s positions on independent working-class action and organization, subordinating themselves to ‘progressive’ nationalist leaders.

21. The determination of the SWP and the Pabloites to consider Cuba a workers’ state, or, to quote the SWP document, ‘an uncorrupted workers’ regime’, is another example of the departure from Marxist method. The SWP document tries to present the differences over Cuba in a false way, accusing the SLL of not recognizing the workers’ state in Cuba only because the revolution there was not led by a Trotskyist party. The SWP, not misled by such ‘subjectivism’, bases itself on other ‘criteria’. The discussion in the 1930s on the class character of the USSR, and particularly the struggle against Burnham and Schachtman for the defence of the USSR as a workers’ state, are an essential background to the question of Cuba. But it is ridiculous to think that the question of the Cuban state can be resolved abstractly by ‘criteria’ from this earlier discussion, even at the end of which Trotsky was still saying that the last word had still to be said by history. Trotsky and the Fourth International adjudged Russia a workers’ state because in the October Revolution the armed workers, organized in Soviets, took the State power, which they then used to expropriate the capitalists and to defeat the counter-revolution. The peasant revolt was able to expropriate the landlords because the successful proletarian revolution guaranteed their initial conquests. (Incidentally, does anyone in the SWP leadership think that the proletariat would have been able to retain the state power without the leadership prepared in the Bolshevik party? Who organized the Red Army and the great dynamic relationship of people to government which was preserved through the Civil War? Does the SWP think that a Marxist leadership to carry out these tasks would have been thrown up ‘in the process of the revolution itself?)

22. For reasons which have been well analysed in our movement, these victories of the proletariat degenerated. Trotsky fought a long battle against those essentially petty-bourgeois trends in the movement who used this degeneration to absolve them from the defence of the workers’ state. In defending the USSR as a workers’ state, Trotsky himself considered that the social and economic conquests of October were still intact. The bureaucracy which usurped the government power in the social economy of Russia was a parasitic group and not a necessary fundamental class. Its power was unstable, based on a temporary relation between the proletarian revolution in backward countries and the continuing existence of imperialism in the advanced countries. Trotsky’s basic definition still holds: the conquests of October are still intact. The power of the bureaucracy remains unstable and parasitic. It is clearer now than it was then that the Stalinist regime was not a new type of society destined in a makeshift way, taking into account the special historical problems of the isolation of the revolution in a backward country. The states established in Eastern Europe in 1945 were extensions of the Russian revolution by the military and bureaucratic methods of the Stalinist leadership. They were possible under the circumstances of special difficulty for imperialism and the chaos in Europe consequent on the defeat of German capitalism. In fact the betrayals of international Social-Democracy and Stalinism restricted the advance of the revolution to Eastern Europe (and later China). This perpetuates the essential conditions of the survival of the bureaucracy in the workers’ states. There was by no means the same dynamic in the foundations of the deformed ‘workers’ states’ as there had been in Russia in October 1917. Our movement’s characterization of all these states was not simply a question of applying ‘criteria’ like nationalization to the finished product.

23. These historical considerations are not irrelevant to the dispute over Cuba. Trotsky insisted that his discussion and definition of the USSR were to be taken historically, and in relation to the world struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. At every stage of his eleven-years-long work towards a ‘definition’ of the USSR, Trotsky insisted on a rounded, critical perspective and not simply on the ‘normative’ method applying definition criteria. The SWP method is the opposite, taking certain ‘criteria’ from the discussion of one particular manifestation of the revolutionary struggle in one part of the world as a unique stage in the development of the world revolution. They apply this criteria to another part of the world a generation later, to a particular sector at a particular stage of the struggle. Thus nationalization and the existence of workers’ militias are sufficient to make Cuba a ‘workers’ state’ and to make the Cuban revolution a socialist revolution. This ‘normative’ method is the theoretical cover for the practice of prostrating themselves before the present unstable and transitory stage of the struggle — the victory of the petty-bourgeois revolutionary nationalists — instead of starting from the perspective and tasks of the working class. The objective basis for such a perspective would have to be an analysis of the present relation of classes and parties in Cuba and Latin America, in relation to the struggle against American imperialism. Our essential differences with the SWP on this question are, therefore, not over the ‘criteria’ of workers’ states. We do not accept such a framework for the discussion; if, in fact, we had defined a workers’ state by the existence or non-existence of Trotskyist parties then this would be a lapse into ‘subjectivism’, but we have not done this. We have tried to understand and discuss the Cuban question in terms of our own analysis of the economic position of Cuba and the evaluation of the present struggle in Cuba and the rest of America. We are in no circumstances prepared to join in the adulation of the ‘superb’ leadership of the Cuban revolution. We are in no circumstances prepared to liquidate the Trotskyist leadership in organizations like the IRO of Castro and the Stalinists in Cuba. The only possibility of holding on to the gains so far made in the struggle against imperialism is through the building of workers’ councils and the extension of the revolution into Latin America. Only a Marxist leadership can orientate the Cuban masses for these two aims. Neither the July 26th movement nor the Stalinists will take up either of these slogans.

24. What does a ‘workers’ state’ mean in concrete terms? It means the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in one form or another. ‘It is only the domination of a class that determines property relations . . . ‘ (Lenin: Report to the Ninth Congress of RCP).

Does the dictatorship of the proletariat exist in Cuba? We reply categorically no! The absence of a party squarely based on the workers and poor peasants makes it impossible to set up and maintain such a dictatorship. But what is even more significant is the absence of what the SWP euphemistically terms ‘the institutions of proletarian democracy’ or what we prefer to call Soviets or organs of workers’ power. This is the paradox which lies behind all the so-called ‘democratic and socialist tendencies of the Cuban revolution’. To substitute a workers’ militia for Soviets does not help. Workers’ militias without Soviets are no better, no worse than Soviets without workers’ militias.

We would refer the SWP comrades to Lenin on this subject. Referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is what he wrote:

Only he is a Marxist who extends the acceptance of the class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is where the profound differences lies between a Marxist and an ordinary petty (and even big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and acceptance of Marxism should be tested’.

and on the question of Soviets:

the . . . revolution is one continuous and desperate struggle, and the proletariat is the vanguard class of all the oppressed, the focus and centre of all the aspirations of all the oppressed for their emancipation! Naturally, therefore, the Soviets as the organs of struggle of the oppressed masses reflected and expressed the moods and changes of opinions of these masses ever so much more quickly, fully and faithfully than any other institutions (that incidentally, is one of the reasons why soviet democracy is the highest type of democracy)’. (Lenin in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

The SWP comrades have discovered a new type of democracy — different from soviet democracy — symbolized by Castro and typified by the Havana declaration. What is the class content of this democracy? And in what way does it substitute for Soviets?

In our opinion, the Castro regime is and remains a bonapartist regime resting on capitalist state foundations. Its bonapartist nature is determined by the fact that the working class, because of the Stalinist misleadership, is unable to take and wield state power — while on the other hand the big comprador-bourgeoisie which supported Batista is too weak and decimated to retake the power in the present period.

Castro continues to lean upon the working class and peasantry in the struggle against the latifundists and their agents in and around Cuba. He is helped in this task by the economic concessions made to the workers and peasants. But it is the peasantry who have benefited most from the Castro regime. It is to this group and the urban petty-bourgeoisie that Castro turns and will turn for aid whenever there is a threat from the Left. Castro balances between contradictory and antagonistic class forces. This is what explains the smallness of the ruling clique, the absence of democratic discussion, the instability of the regime marked by recurrent splits and purges and the mystique of the Castro cult.

The regime, however, is a variety of capitalist state power. The Castro regime did not create a qualitatively new and different type of state from the Batista regime. What it did do was to clear out the old judges, administrators, bureaucrats, diplomats and policemen and replace them with people who supported Castro. The old institutions were filled with new personnel. His present honeymoon with the Stalinists is dictated by the expediency of creating a staff of reliable administrators and functionaries. The attack against Escalante was motivated by a desire to keep power centralized in his own hands and not by hostility to bureaucracy or any other such thing.

The ‘militia’ is subordinate to Castro’s state not to Soviets, not even to a constituent assembly. In this sense they do not constitute workers power or even dual power.

The nationalizations carried out by Castro do nothing to alter the capitalist character of the state. In this case there is a close analogy with Nasser’s Egypt. Faced with intense competition in the struggle for the Middle Eastern and African markets, the Egyptian bourgeoisie — the most rapacious of the Arab bourgeoisies — has been forced to undertake a series of nationalizations of a state capitalist variety. In the summer of 1961, Nasser nationalized by decree the entire banking and insurance business, the shipping lines, the cotton processing industry, 96 big commercial and industrial firms and the entire press. He established state control of the buying and selling of all cotton. He set up a monopoly of the entire import trade and reduced the maximum land holdings by half. There is not a single industrial, financial or commercial firm which is not owned, directed or partly owned by the state. Yet Egypt remains an integral part of the capitalist world and is no more a workers’ state than imperialist Britain. It remains an extreme example of state intervention in a capitalist economy.

A basic criterion for a workers’ state in the economic sphere in an underdeveloped country is the nationalization of the land and thorough political measures by the ruling power to prevent the growth of the kulaks. Neither in Egypt nor in Cuba has this been done. On the contrary, in Cuba Castro has recently promised (under the impact of the food crisis) to give the land back to peasants. So long as land remains alienable, so long will petty-commodity production continue and so long will Cuba remain a capitalist nation.

Despite or rather because of all the economic and social changes that have taken place in the last two to three years, Cuba has witnessed, not a social revolution which has transferred state power irrevocably from the hands of one class to another, but a political revolution which has transferred power from the hands of one class to another section of that same class. In the course of such a transfer, substantial concessions have been made to the working masses, but these concessions do not transcend the limits of capitalist rule and exploitation. In this context it is childish nonsense for the SWP leaders to declare that Cuba affords ‘fresh confirmation of the correctness of the theory of the Permanent Revolution’.

Here is what Trotsky says on this subject:

No matter what thefirstepisodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realization of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is concei only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution). (Our emphasis) (The Permanent Revolution by L. Trotsky).

Thus Cuba constitutes, in fact, a negative confirmation of the permanent revolution. Where the working class is unable to lead the peasant masses and smash capitalist state power, the bourgeoisie steps in and solves the problems of the ‘democratic revolution’ in its own fashion and to its own satisfaction.

Hence we have Kemal Ataturk, Chiang Kai Shek, Nasser, Nehru, Cardenas, Peron, Ben Bella and Castro (to mention a few).

That is why the Socialist Labour League fights for the construction of a Marxist party based on the working class and armed with the finest and latest weapons from the arsenal of Marxism. The first task of such a party would be to establish the political and theoretical independence of the working class from the capitalist class, its state and its ideological servitors. This implies complete organizational and political independence from that bureaucratic fusion of Stalinism and Castroism which is the Unified Revolutionary Party. Only on such a basis can a really revolutionary struggle for working class power be waged.

In conclusion we state that such a policy does not inhibit the struggle for the defence of Cuba against imperialist attack, nor does it prevent episodic alliances with the Castroite forces in the struggle against the latifundists. On the contrary, it would immensely facilitate the tasks of defending Cuba and defeating landlordism.

The defence of Cuba and Castro against imperialism is a tactic. Our strategy remains the overthrow of capitalism and the setting up of a real workers’ state with real workers’ power. This task still remains to be done in Cuba.

25. One final word on the section of the SWP document concerned with Cuba. The SWP political committee circulates among its members and presumably throughout the world movement the following criticism of the SLL:

On the other hand, the fallacious theoretical approach of the SLL to the Cuban Revolution has impeded practical activities. The SLL lost the initiative in Cuban defence efforts to centrist forces in England. The rejection of an Embassy invitation to celebrate the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1962 needlessly widened the gulf between the British Trotskyists and the Cuban Revolutionists. Recently the SLL has started promoting a ‘Food for Cuba’ campaign. This kind of solidarity action is sure to be appreciated by the hard-pressed Cubans. We hope this improvement in their practical work will be followed by reconsideration of their theoretical views on the Cuban Revolution.

We cannot understand this pronouncement. No evidence is given for it, and we would like to know which ‘centrist elements’ have gained the initiative in Cuban defence efforts. There have in fact been no such initiatives or efforts in Britain by anyone else except the SLL. Furthermore, in our efforts we have found the Cuban Embassy and their supporters in the Communist Party to be a major stumblingblock to any organized aid for the Cuban people. We hope that this section of the SWP statement will be withdrawn.

We will not dwell here on the questions which we have previously taken up with the SWP leadership concerning the supposed attitude of Castro towards revolutionary Marxism. It is enough to note that this repeats a fundamentally mistaken notion of the nature and role of consciousness which is at the root of the SWP revisionism. The SWP document looks at Cuba in isolation, despite its claims to see Cuba as a focus of all the important problems in the colonial revolution. The actual relations between the Cuban revolution and the world situation of imperialism and the world revolution are not examined. Cuba is taken in isolation and formal ‘criteria’ of workers’ states then applied. The necessary result is ‘the worship of the accomplished fact’.

The Fourth International

26. Our emphasis on leadership, both in the underdeveloped and in the advanced countries, is perfectly justified by an examination of the facts. When the SWP speaks of the ‘prolonged passivity’ of the workers in the advanced countries, what is it doing but finding another form of words to express the crisis of leadership? What is the reason for the failure of the workers in the advanced countries to come to the assistance of the colonial workers and peasants who have revolted ‘before the workers in the metropolitan countries were prepared to settle accounts with their own capitalists’ but the crisis of leadership? Does the SWP want to blame the working class? Is it looking for asubstitute for the working class in action as a force under revolutionary leadership? Yes, it tries to make the colonial movement, the ‘objective forces’ and ultimately even the Communist Parties the substitutes for this. The talk about the success of the Soviet bloc, etc. reads very much like an adaptation of the Khrushchev line of competitive co-existence. In this respect some of the declarations of the SWP during its election campaign in 1960, as well as articles in its press on the USSR leave more than a suspicion that in the course of cooperating with fellow travellers since 1956 some of their war paint has rubbed off on to the SWP. Why is it that the Soviet successes are seen only in positive terms? Nothing is said about the conditions for the political revolution in the USSR. The counter-revolutionary policy of the Soviet bureaucracy remains a shackle on the world working class movement, holding back not only the workers in countries like France and Italy, but also in the underdeveloped countries like India and Indonesia. Support for the national bourgeoisie, like support for anti-monopoly coalitions, flows from a desire for a deal with world imperialism. We suggest that the SWP political committee re-read the documents produced during the course of the struggle against Pabloism in 1953-4. When it speaks of the ‘narrowing of the political differences’ with the Pabloites, we take it that this is done with full cognizance of the documents and articles which they have produced in recent years. Some of the crass mistakes of these effusions have been dealt with in our press and documents. To pick a way through all the erroneous nonsense, pretentious verbiage and arrant absurdities which masquerade as Trotskyism in the Pabloite publications is a task which we have great reluctance in assigning our comrades to. If the SWP finds the political differences have narrowed to the point where they are prepared to conceive of organizational fusion in the near future, we can only conclude that the change has come from the SWP and not from the Pabloites and that there has been a failure to get to grips with the theoretical problems of the Marxist movement.

27. We do not agree that the SWP or anyone else has ‘an impeccable record’. What a claim to make! Only people who do not do anything politically necessary make no mistakes. We note with some amusement the petulance with which our serious and fraternal criticism has been received. Does it not occur to our American comrades that we are only referring to well-known dangers in the environment in which they are working and that it would be more than surprising if they were entirely blameless of the kind of flaw which we suggest has been present in some of their recent work? In any case, the best way to meet this criticism is for the SWP to draw up its own balance sheet of recent experiences, beginning with that of ‘regroupment’ since 1956. We should also appreciate an examination of industrial and trade union work and the extent of the work carried on to draw closer to the most depressed strata of the North American working class, including the Negro people, the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. We should be much more impressed by successes recorded here than by a parade Of names of newly won friends from the ranks of fellow travellers, new lefts and other assorted radicals.

28. Having allowed their principles to become blunted as a result of some of their manoeuvres within the context of American radicalism, the SWP has now decided that the Pabloites have in some way ‘corrected’ their earlier revisionism by similar adaptations to the harsh world of events. This estimate ignores the need for consideration of the basic differences in method and not simply questions of programme and organization which divided the SWP and British Trotskyists from the Pabloites in 1953. Marxist politics start from a theoretical analysis of the whole, and any ‘corrections’ must flow from the conscious criticism of previous positions. The empirical adaptation to events characteristic of the Pabloites is the opposite of Marxist method. The SWP’s conclusion, namely that the differences between us and the Pabloites have narrowed to a point where the breach can be healed organizationally, is only possible because the SWP has ended up with exactly the same method as the Pabloites themselves.

29. Moreover, because it can argue in this way, we must draw the conclusion that the SWP has not really understood Pabloism. Indeed we would extend this criticism to the whole political treatment of Pabloism since the split. It treats it as an accidental, theoretical deviation using wrong organizational methods. It is not able to give an account of the social and historical roots of this deviation in Marxist terms, if only because, in doing so, it would expose its own weaknesses. Pabloism has not changed, or if it has, it has only become more crass in its theory and more bureaucratic in its organization. It is, in any case, now in a state of profound crisis. The Latin American Bureau is now in open revolt. In Europe a number of groups have broken away in the past year or find themselves critical of such practical aspects of Pabloism as ‘deep entry’ in the Communist Parties or the conduct of Belgian Pabloite leaders during the General Strike. At this time, therefore, it seems particularly inappropriate for the SWP to assert that the differences have become narrower. If Pabloism has social roots and the SWP finds itself more and more in sympathy with it, the time has come to turn the searchlight of criticism into the SWP itself. The SWP has set a false course and is drawn irresistibly into the morass of Pabloite thinking. We propose to continue to combat Pabloism, as we have done consistently in the past, as a dangerous revision of Marxism. We now call upon the comrades of the SWP to take a good look at themselves and at the course they are following and to draw back before it is too late.

30. A warning signal was given in the Fall 1960 issue of the International Socialist Review in an article by Murry Weiss on ‘Trotskyism Today’. Among its other faults this article managed to ignore completely the basic differences which split the Trotskyist movement in 1953. In other words, Weiss was already taking the course now belatedly pursued by the SWP – that of covering up and minimizing the differences with the Pabloites in order to appear more attractive to dissident Stalinist elements or to Castro or to anyone else who may be interested. Such an attitude to its own history is inexcusable. If a Marxist party which has a public and international split on basic political issues later sees this to be only a temporary misunderstanding, then this very fact would require us to make a thorough analysis of the process by which we came to make such a serious mis judgment. For a serious struggle against revisionism, Weiss and the SWP leadership substitute a pragmatist method of covering up differences to make alliances, which may temporarily ‘work’.

31. Once again this crisis necessitates looking into our own history. Whereas in 1953 the SWP’s Open Letter insisted that the Pabloites had broken with the very fundamentals of Marxism; they now say:

In our opinion, three main reasons were responsible for the rupture nine years ago. One was an apparent tendency shown by the International Secretariat, under Pablo’s direction, to conciliate with Stalinism and look upon the Soviet bureaucracy as capable of self-reformation into a political agency of the working class and to impose this view without prior discussion or authorization upon other sections of the movement. This tendency was most explicitly expressed by Clarke in our own party, by the IS failure to condemn the role of Soviet military intervention in the East German uprising, and by its attitude in the French General Strike of 1953.

Second was its apparent conception that a small literary circle could constitute a full-scale authoritative international leadership superseding and substituting itself for self-governing parties in the various countries. This view and method of operating tended to prevent leaders and cadres in various sections from standing on their own feet.

Third, the super-centralization of the IS resulted in arbitrary interference within those national sections which had leaders of different opinions accustomed to think for themselves on problems confronting their parties and the world movement. This was disruptive, provoking unnecessary splits.

Instead of a basic departure from all Marxist principles, we now find the Pabloite position characterized as ‘as apparent tendency’ to conciliate with Stalinism, etc. Nine years later, the SWP lays most of the stress on organizational differences, forgetting the fundamental lessons of its own history in the 1930s. Organizational differences flow from basically different political positions. Once the political differences of 1953 have been ‘cut down to size’, they are easily shown by the SWP document to have disappeared in the course of the years.

 Since 1953 significant changes have taken place.

The first sign of a turnabout came in 1954 when the IS backed away from the pro-Stalinist tendencies it had inspired and protected in France, Great Britain and the US. This was certified by the break with Clarke, Lawrence and Mestre, threefigureswho pressed the IS line to its logical conclusion, the first abandoning Trotskyism, and the latter two joining the CP with their followers.

Then in 1956 the IS reacted very differendy to the Polish and Hungarian events than it did to the East German uprising the French General Strike in 1953. They took positions substantially the same as the orthodox Trots­ kyists.

32. The facts are that Pablo and the IS defended Lawrence in his struggle with the majority in Britain even though at that time his course towards the Stalinists was clear and recognized by the majority. In fact when two of Lawrence’s own members complained to Pablo about his course towards the Stalinists, Pablo, far from taking up the complaint, denounced these members to Lawrence. Clarke in America, Lawrence in Britain, Mestre in France all completed their development to Stalinism, and thus made their break with Trotskyism. It was only later that the IS denounced them. In any case the Pabloites and the SWP must surely examine the whole method and the nature of the revisionism which nurtured this capitulation to Stalinism. No matter how the SWP now estimates the events of 1954, they found it necessary along with other sections of the IC to circulate Peng’s document against Pabloite revisionism in 1955. The criticism of Pabloism contained in this document is just as severe as those of the Open Letter of 1953. As for the position taken up by the IS on the Hungarian and Polish struggles in 1956, here again history is being doctored. There was no basic difference in the IS statement concerning Hungary and Poland in 1956 from their statements on the East German rising in 1953. Commenting on the Soviet declaration of October 30th, 1956 they say, “This statement attempted to establish relations between the people’s democracies and the USSR on a new basis . . . The immediate repercussions of the Hungarian revolution can stimulate a momentarily predominant “glacis”. But the pressure of the masses cannot fail to grow in these countries. The process of transformation of relations among workers’ states to relations of equality and fraternal collaboration is irreversible’. In other words, while repeating phrases about the need for the working class to overthrow the bureaucracy, Pablo’s own attitude towards this bureaucracy in fact disarmed the workers. The British section, therefore, did not agree in any way that the political differences were narrowed. Our experience of the British Labour Movement confirmed us in that opinion. The Pabloites not only failed to support us in the fight against the right-wing Social Democrats, they made unprincipled alliances with elements defecting from our own ranks, such as Fryer and Cadogan, who soon abandoned all claims to revolutionary socialism. We have stated elsewhere our views on the Pabloites’ liquidationism in the Algerian struggle. If the SWP is right in saying that ‘the political positions of the majority of the IS, a number of IC affiliated groups, and some Trotskyist organizations affiliated with neither side on most of the vital issues of the day, from the de-Stalinization process and the Sino-Soviet conflict to the Cuban Revolution, are so close that they are indistinguishable to any unprejudiced reader of their respective publications’, we can only hope we are not included.

33. The SWP document tries to give the impression that the congenital sectarianism of the SLL led it to prevent international Trotskyist unity, e.g. ‘While the English and French representatives on the International Committee supported the SWP unity proposal (1957) in words, they sabotaged it in practice’. In the document ‘A Reply to Comrade Peng’ (July 1961) the National Committee of the SLL has dealt with this accusation which flows from a misunderstanding of our whole approach to international Trotskyist unity, and again this approach is part of our basic differences with the SWP. Organizational unity must follow political clarification, and we insist on a thorough settlement of all revisionism whatever its source before any organizational fusions can take place.

34. The following extract from ‘A Reply to Comrade Peng’ will clear up this question.

Let us cite the facts and hope that in the course of this comrade Peng will at least learn something about the need for accurate reporting.

The parity proposals of comrade Cannon arrived in England towards the end of April 1957. They had already been transmitted to the LSSP in Ceylon. We protested about this since we felt that it would have been far better to have them first of all discussed inside the International Commitee before they were sent to Ceylon. Later, in November 1958, during the Toronto meeting when we had a chance to talk the matter over face to face, comrade Cannon did agree that this would have been a more correct procedure.

Our national conference in May 1957 was held simultaneously with a conference which Pablo had called to launch his so-called English section. He embarked upon a campaign of widening the split in Britain by an open attack against our organization. Nevertheless, we presented the parity proposals of the SWP to our conference and they were unanimously adopted. These were submitted to the Pabloite organization on July 7, 1957.

Whilst our doubts about the success of the proposals were increased by the fact that Pablo had launched an attack against us, we felt that the international movement was not fully aware of the pernicious role of Pabloism in practice, so we instructed comrade Sinclair to write a critique of the Pabloite document for his Fifth Congress. This document of Sinclair did not in the least interfere with our attitude towards the parity proposals. We felt and we still do today that these proposals must be backed by a clear political line.

The first sign of difficulty we had so far as the SWP was concerned was when we received intimation during the Summer of 1957 that there were comrades in the SWP who disagreed with our political criticism of Pablo. Here was the main reason why we held up our reply to Germain. We wanted time in order to see if it was not possible to obtain political agreement with the SWP.

The International Committee met in Switzerland in early September 1957 and adopted the parity proposals. These were sent to the Pabloites in the same form as they were drafted by the SWP. Comrade Peng knows this because he was present at the meeting. We received no reply from the Pabloites apart from a brief acknowledgment.

This is how matters stood until the Toronto meeting, in November 1958. The parity proposals were rejected by Pablo. Of course comrade Peng and some comrades in the SWP say that because the English organization raised political criticism they gave Pablo an opportunity to reject the proposals. Our reply to that is that if our own forces are unclear on Pabloism, the parity proposals could have brought nothing but further splits.

35. The proposals made, by the IC to the IS for the opening of international discussion in all sections of the world movement take on more urgency in the light of the SWP’s criticism of the SLL. Our intention in making these proposals is not to arrive at any summit agreement between the leading committees of the IC and the IS, but to carry on an unrelenting struggle against revisionism throughout the ranks of all sections of both organizations. Only in this way can the Fourth International be reconstructed. We make no apologies for saying that we regard the defeat of the ideas contained in the documment entitled ‘Problems of the Fourth International and the Next Steps’ as a first necessity in this process.

RELATED

For important criticms of this document, see
Cuba & Marxist Theory (1961-1973)

Statements on the Cuban Missile Crisis

Declaration on the Cuban Crisis

The Cuban revolution is now at its hour of greatest peril. The result of the round trip of the Soviet missiles has been to make a deal between Khrushchev and Kennedy at the expense of the Cuban people no longer merely a perspective but an immediate threat. U.S. armed aggression in the form of an all-out invasion of Cuba, though still not the optimum variant of U.S. imperialism, is now for the first time guaranteed the tacit support of the Kremlin if a formal “negotiated” settlement restoring U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean cannot be imposed on the Cuban people.

In this situation the duty of the Trotskyists toward the Cuban revolution only begins with demonstrations of sympathy and support for Cuba. The obligation of the Trotskyists, which no other tendency can even claim to fulfill, is to provide a political analysis, a political line upon which the defense of the revolution must be based.

The decisive point in the political line in defense of the Cuban revolution against all its enemies is explicit denunciation of the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the concrete instance of Cuba. The Cuban revolution cannot be defended by arms under the control of Kremlin bureaucrats whose only interest is to turn the revolution to the service of Russian foreign policy, including selling it out entirely if the price is right. The only defense of the Cuban revolution is the determination of the Cuban people to resist by any and all means, and the conscious solidarity of the international working class against all the enemies of the revolution. The false policy of the Castro leadership, its political bloc with the Stalinists, has gravely undermined this defense.

The International Committee of the Fourth International, in its statement entitled “Defend the Cuban Revolution” published in the November 3rd Newsletter, defined the basic lines of a Trotskyist defense of the Cuban revolution, particularly in its statements: “Installation of Soviet missile bases in Cuba is not for the defense of the Cuban revolution, but part of the diplomatic game of Khrushchev…the setting up of Soviet missile bases as a substitute for international working-class struggle cannot defend the revolution…the counter-revolutionary policy of Stalinism prepares the crushing of the Cuban revolution, not its defense.” We ask the editorial board of the Militant to print this I.C. statement.

We furthermore ask the PC to adopt the political line of the International Committee declaration as the basic line of the party in its defense of the Cuban revolution. This should be the starting point of a campaign for international working-class solidarity with the Cuban revolution based on the establishment of workers’ democracy in Cuba and full, open collaboration of the Cuban revolution with the international working-class movement in all phases, military as well as political, of revolutionary defense.

****

November 30, 1962

Roger Ahrams (New York)

Dorothy Bell (Oakland-Berkeley)

Emily Cavalli (Oakland-Berkeley)

Joyce Cowley (San Francisco)

Paul Curtis (Oakland-Berkeley) (1)

Maria di Savio (San Francisco)

Roy Gale (San Francisco)

Lynne Harper (New York)

Larry Ireland (New York)

Rose Jersawitz (Oakland-Berkeley)

Stanley Larson (Oakland Berkeley)

Ed Lee (Oakland-Berkley)

Albert Nelson (New York)

Shane Mage (New York)

Charlotte Michaels (New York)

Roger Plumb (Oakland-Berkeley)

Tony Ravich (New York) (2)

Leigh Ray (San Francisco)

James Robertson (New York)

Shirley Stoute (New York)

Marion Syrek, Jr. (Oakland-Berkeley)

Polly Volker (San Francisco)

Geoffrey White (Oakland-Berkeley)

Jack Wolf (Connecticut) (2)

(1) “I take exception to the last sentence of paragraph three. There may have been no alternative for the Castro leadership. The policy however, is a false one.”

(2) “I favor publication of the I.C. statement on the Cuban crisis. I am in general sympathy with this statement.”


Defend the Cuban Revolution

Statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International

From The Newsletter (published by the Socialist Labour League, London) November 3, 1962

The U.S. imperialists are bent upon the destruction of the Cuban revolution and have shown that they are even prepared to risk the danger of world war. The Cuban Revolution, expropriating U.S. capital in Cuba, makes it necessary for U.S. imperialism to take these measures in order that their strangle-hold over all Latin America shall not be threatened. Wall Street seized the pretext of Soviet missile bases to bring a showdown.

The working class of the world must act to prevent the Cuban Revolution from being crushed. Such action must be independent of the policies of Khrushchev and the Soviet bureaucracy. Their line of peaceful co-existence designed only to preserve their own privileged rule by diplomatic deals, is opposed to the spread of the Cuban Revolution and to independent workers’ action, which are the only guarantees of Cuba’s defence. Installation of Soviet missile bases in Cuba is not for the defence of the Cuban Revolution, but part of the diplomatic game of Khrushchev.

A heavy responsibility rests on the shoulders of the official leadership of the Labour movement for their failure to support the Cuban Revolution by fighting the capitalists in their own countries.

The International Committee of the Fourth International calls on all its sections to take their place in all actions for the defence of the Cuban revolution from the U.S. imperialists.

Cuba, as a sovereign state, has the right to accept whatever military aid it decides. But the setting up of Soviet missile bases as a substitute for international working-class struggle cannot defend the revolution. On the contrary, it shows the dangers of the policy of peaceful co-existence in exposing the Cuban Revolution to enormous dangers, providing a pretext for U.S. intervention. In this situation, the counter-revolutionary policy of Stalinism prepares the crushing of the Cuban Revolution—not its defence.

Any policy of United Nations intervention or of summit agreements over Cuba must be opposed. Such methods will destroy the revolution, which only the international independent class action of the workers can defend.

We stand for the defence of the USSR and of the Cuban Revolution, but such defence means determined opposition to the Stalinist bureaucracy and its methods.

In the advanced countries, especially the USA, the working class must organise actions in full support of the workers and peasants of Cuba. End the blockade! End the invasion preparations!

In Latin America, a decisive struggle against U.S. imperialism and its agents, for the extension of the revolution, must be waged to defend Cuba. Without this action, and without defeat of the Stalinist policies of defence of Cuba, the fate of that revolution will repeat the story of Greece, Guatemala and Spain.

We call particularly on the members of the Communist Parties to oppose the policies of their leaders to break from the policy of agreement with the imperialists, to demand independent class action in defence of Cuba.

The sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International must take part in all actions in defence of Cuba, struggling within these movements to build an independent, anti-imperialist movement led by the working class.

28.10.1962

[Reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 3 Part 1. Originally posted online at http://www.bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/MB3_PtI_12.html  andhttp://www.bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/MB3_PtI_13.html ]

In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective

In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective

March 1962; Statement of Basic Position by the Revolutionary Tendency. Presented to the June 1962 plenary meeting of the SWP National Committee. Reprinted in Marxist Bulletin #1 and copied fromhttp://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1962/perspective.htm

Preface

The material bearing on the history and struggles of the Revolutionary Tendency inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) occupies a special place in the Marxist Bulletin series. Without a serious and critical attitude toward its own development, no political formation can go beyond the first stages in meeting the central challenge facing Marxist-Leninists in the United States the building of a revolutionary party.

Marxist Bulletins Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all devoted to the period from the consolidation of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the SWP to the expulsion of the RT leadership from the SWP, which covered the two-year span, 1962-1963.

Origin of the Revolutionary Tendency

The nucleus of the RT originated in the central leadership of the Young Socialist Alliance, and first came together as a left opposition to the SWP Majority’s uncritical line toward the course of the Cuban Revolution. This preliminary dispute culminated in the adoption of a thoroughly revisionist position by the SWP Majority at the June 1961 party convention. The party’s theoretical revisionism, together with its abstentionist and opportunist practice, were carried into the party’s general international line and began to turn the party away from a revolutionary perspective in the United States as well. (The causes of this dramatic degeneration of the SWP constitute a principal theme in Marxist Bulletin No. 2, “The Nature of the SWP”.)

Need for a Basic Document

The left oppositionists responded to the general assault of the Majority upon the party’s past positions by counterposing a revolutionary program. This document, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” (INDORP for short), achieved three results which led to a crystallization of the RT: (l) INDORP analyzed and made explicit the general political basis of the left opposition; (2) in gaining co-authors and signers, INDORP drew into the organized opposition a number of older party comrades, thus giving authority to the RT beyond its numbers; (3) INDORP linked the American opposition to the Majority of the International Committee (IC) of the Fourth International by endorsing the international resolution prepared by the British Socialist Labour League and adopted by the IC, “The World Prospect for Socialism.”

Drafting INDORP

“In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” was the result of a lengthy, collective effort. The need for such a statement was first advanced by Tim Wohlforth in the Fall of 1961 with the advice of Gerry Healy in Britain. Geoffrey White authored the first draft; comrades Shane Mage and Cliff Slaughter contributed sections and criticism on Marxist method and theory. Wohlforth furnished general editorial expansion, and several others made lesser contributions.

The final approved version was presented by the Revolutionary Tendency to the National Committee of the SWP in March 1962. After the expanded party plenum in June 1962, where the document was voted down 43 to 4, it was printed for the SWP membership in the internal Discussion Bulletin (Vol. 23, No. 4, July 1962). This statement of basic position by the RT now becomes available to the general radical public for the first time.

After INDORP

Even as INDORP was being introduced into the party discussion, the contradiction between the course of the SWP and a revolutionary position was becoming ever more acute and apparent. Thus the RT had just affirmed in INDORP that the opposition regarded the SWP as “the American section of our world party” (section “Where We Stand”, point 10). Yet the co-thinkers of the RT in Britain, the Socialist Labour League, felt obliged in July 1962 to attack the SWP in a major document significantly entitled “Trotskyism Betrayed—The SWP Accepts the Political Method of Pabloite Revisionism.” In September of the same year IC representatives at an international meeting officially stated that “they did not politically represent the SWP”.

Since the IC which thus repudiated its earlier ties with the SWP was then equivalent to the world party, the relation of the SWP Majority to the RT in the U.S. was rendered moot. Thus within the American tendency arose a necessary political discussion to examine the nature of the SWP and clarify the relation of the RT to the SWP Majority (see subsequent numbers of the Marxist Bulletin series).

Despite the demise of the SWP as a revolutionary organization, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” remains unimpaired to this day as a statement of basic position.

—SPARTACIST Editorial Board

January 1965

IN DEFENSE OF A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

—A statement of Basic Position

The decisive instrument of the proletarian revolution is the party of the class-conscious vanguard. Failing the leadership of such a party, the most favorable revolutionary situations, which arise from the objective circumstances, cannot be carried through to the final victory of the proletariat and the beginnings of the planned reorganization of society on socialist foundations. This was demonstrated most conclusively and positively in the 1917 Russian Revolution. This same principled lesson derives no less irrefutably even though negatively from the entire world experience of the epoch of wars, revolutions and colonial uprisings that began with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

—“Theses on the American Revolution” adopted at the 12th National Convention of the SWP in Chicago, November 15-18, 1946.

Introduction: The Method of Marxism

The contradictory character of the present historical period presents the gravest dangers, as well as the highest potentialities, to the Trotskyist movement. The combination of the great revolutionary upsurge throughout the colonial and non-capitalist sectors of the world with the seeming stabilization and progress of capitalism in its heartland; the prolonged crisis of proletarian leadership and domination of the world labor movement by social-democratic and Stalinist agents of capital combined with the continual resurgence of working class struggle; these are the terms of a situation in which our world movement constantly risks ideological disorientation and consequent political collapse as a revolutionary force. Only the fullest grasp of the dialectical materialist method, the constant development of Marxist theory, will enable our movement, in a perpetually changing reality, to preserve and develop its revolutionary perspective.

The essence of the political methodology of Marxism is to pose all problems actively from the specific and purposive viewpoint of the only consistently revolutionary class in modern society, the proletariat. This proletarian class viewpoint has its highest expression in the scientific theory of Marxism. Marxists, in other words, analyze all problems in terms of a rigorous and scientific theoretical structure. At the same time they are full participants in the historical process itself as the most advanced section of the working class and their action is guided by theory. Thus the conclusions derived from Marxist theory, and accordingly the theory itself, are continually being tested in practice.

“Revisionism” is the view that every new development requires the abandonment in practice of basic aspects of previously held theory. Ultimately this drift from the dialectical materialist method leads to a drift from the working class itself. Marxism, on the contrary, develops through the continual integration of new elements, new realities, into its theoretical structure. It explicitly criticizes and rejects, where necessary, erroneous or outlived propositions, while maintaining at every point its character as a systematic, rigorous and unified scientific structure.

The pressure of the capitalist class is most intense precisely against this methodology of Marxism, which its ideological agents revile as dogmatic fanaticism. Unless Trotskyists are able to use and develop Marxist theory they, like many other Marxists before them, inevitably succumb to this pressure, fall into a vulgar, pragmatic, empiricist view of reality, and convert Marxian theory into a set of sacred dogmas useful only to provide labels which can be slapped on an unruly and uncomprehended reality.

Particularly in the present period, when the working class seems to the empiricist to be under the complete and everlasting domination of reformist bureaucracies, this ideological pressure is the result of a terribly strong social pressure. The Trotskyist groups feel small and isolated at the very moment that significant leftist forces are clearly in motion throughout the world. These forces, however, are under the leadership of non-proletarian tendencies: “left” social democrats, Stalinists of one or another variety, and “revolutionary” bourgeois or petty-bourgeois groups in the colonial countries.

The revolutionary party, if it does not possess a real comprehension of the methodology of Marxism, is condemned merely to reflect the contradiction between its own relative isolation and the mass upsurges. This reflective pose finds expression in an objectivist outlook where one views from afar an unfolding panoramic process from which theconscious active factor is completely divorced. Instead of posing the problem of principled struggle against these ultimately pro-capitalist leaderships with the goal of developing a new proletarian leadership, the party then seeks only to influence the movement as it is and in order to affect the policy of the existing leadership, enters into a process of political, organizational and theoretical accommodation to, and regroupment with, these alien tendencies.

Once the thread of Marxist theory is lost, the concepts of other social forces come to dominate the thought of socialists. The party thus comes to lose its revolutionary perspective—it comes to see in other political and social groupings, rather than in the working class led by its Marxist vanguard, the leadership of the revolution. The Trotskyists relegate themselves to an auxiliary role in the historical process.

The world Trotskyist movement has been in a political crisis for over ten years. This crisis has been caused by the failure of theory and leadership in the Fourth International, resulting in the loss of a revolutionary perspective by important sections of the Trotskyist movement under conditions of isolation from the masses and under pressure from the capitalist class through its petty-bourgeois agents within the labor movement. Only the re-establishment of a revolutionary perspective in our world movement and the definitive rooting out of defeatist, accommodationist, and essentially liquidationist politics from our ranks can lay the basis for the rebuilding of our world cadres and thus for the victory of the world revolution.

It was Pablo’s theory of accommodation to alien tendencies that led those Trotskyists determined to preserve a revolutionary perspective to break with the International Secretariat (IS) in 1953, a move crippling to the International, but deemed by the party at that time to be essential to the preservation of a principled revolutionary movement. However, the continued paralysis of our world forces since that time and the present deep division within the International Committee (IC) are signs that the forces that were operating on Pablo were also affecting, to a lesser degree, the Socialist Workers Party. With the passage of the eight years since the split the signs of this same disease in our own ranks are reaching major proportions. We feel that this process has now reached a point where resistance is essential.

In this statement we are attempting to assess the degree to which this empiricist methodology and these accommodationist views have penetrated our party and what we feel can be done to reaffirm our revolutionary world perspective. It is only on this political basis that we will be able to rebuild our world forces. This statement is our contribution to the forthcoming party plenum which, in our opinion, should prepare the party for participation in the discussion now going on in our world movement. As this discussion is preliminary to the forthcoming World Congress of Trotskyism, called by the International Committee of the Fourth International, our political participation in it is essential.

The Nature of Pabloism

Pabloism is essentially a revisionist current within the Trotskyist movement internationally which has lost a revolutionary world perspective during the post-war period of capitalist boom and the subsequent relative inactivity of the working class in the advanced countries. The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organized vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success. Fundamental to their political approach is an “objectivist” world outlook which sees capitalism collapsing and Stalinism shattering under the impact of an abstract panoramic world historic process, thus removing the necessity for the conscious intervention of the working class through its Marxist vanguard. The role of the Trotskyists is relegated to that of a pressure group on the existing leaderships of the workers’ organizations which are being swept along by this revolutionary process.

In its methodology the Pablo group is essentially empiricist. It reacts to the constantly changing world political situation with seemingly radical changes of political line but without recognizing, much less giving a theoretical accounting for, the previous errors. Underlying these reversals, however, is a fundamental proposition: the existence of a “new world reality” in which the balance of forces has shifted definitively in favor of socialism and in which, accordingly, resolution of “the crisis of proletarian leadership” is no longer the sine qua non of the world socialist revolution. On this basis, the Pabloites have consistently maintained their objectivist approach, and have proposed one substitute after another for the revolutionary role of the working class and its Marxist vanguard.

In 1949 Pablo put forward his theoretical conception of “centuries of deformed workers states.” Reacting impressionistically to the expansion of Stalinism in East Europe and China, he envisioned a whole historic epoch during which bureaucratized states of the Stalinist type, not workers’ democracy, would prevail. This theory was as deeply revisionist as that of Burnham and Shachtman, which projected a historical epoch for “bureaucratic collectivism.” Like the Shachtman-Burnham theory, this theory denied a revolutionary perspective for our movement and saw in Stalinism the objective expression of the revolutionary forces in the world.

Soon thereafter, Pablo, in his “War-Revolution Thesis” made this theoretical abandonment the basis for a new political line. World War III, he forecast, would break out in the immediate future. This war would be essentially a class war. It would result in the victory of the Red Army (aided by the European workers led by the Communist parties), and the formation in Germany, France, and England of “deformed workers states.” The experience of East Europe and China would be repeated in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. Therefore, in the short time remaining before the onset of the “War-Revolution,” it was essential for the Fourth International to integrate itself, on any terms and at all costs, into the Stalinist parties (where there were mass parties) which would soon “project a revolutionary orientation” and emerge as the objective leaders of the European revolution.

These concepts (never subsequently repudiated by Pablo) were present in somewhat concealed form in the main theses of the Third World Congress of the F.I. (1951) and immediately thereafter were openly revealed as the practical orientation of the Pablo leadership. During the period around the Third World Congress, Pablo carried on a worldwide factional battle against the French, British and Canadian sections of the world movement in order to develop forces capable of carrying out this essentially liquidationist entry into the Stalinist parties. In this country the Cochran grouping was a legitimate reflection of Pabloism. There were two elements involved in the Cochran group. The Bartell-Clarke wing wished to adapt to the Stalinist movement in this country while the Cochran wing wished to adapt to the labor bureaucracy. Both sections of this liquidationist minority shared with Pablo the same objectivist outlook which no longer gave to our world forces any independent role.

The “Fourth (1954), Fifth (1957) and Sixth (1961) World Congresses” (these were not “world congresses” but rather meetings of a revisionist faction of the world movement) of the Pabloites have all expressed this outlook. There were, of course, important political shifts as the Pabloites responded impressionistically to the changes in the world situation. The later congresses do not emphasize the imminence of war, nor is everything banked on the onrolling sweep of Stalinism. Rather they tend to see the Stalinist bureaucracy collapsing automatically without the necessity of our own conscious intervention.

As a new substitute for the working class and its vanguard, the colonial revolution tends to replace the Stalinist bureaucracy, damaging the critical importance of the advanced working class and its struggles. The Sixth World Congress formally declares that the new “epicenter of World Revolution is in the colonial sector.” Thus socialism is now advancing on the tide of leaderless revolution in the colonial countries.

In 1949 it was a form of Stalinism that would prevail for centuries; in 1951 it was imminent war that would force the Stalinists to project a revolutionary orientation; today it is the colonial revolution that is unfolding automatically. At no time has it been the working class organized under Marxist leadership that is central in the world revolutionary strategy of Pabloism.

On the tactical level the Pabloites generalized their deep entrist perspective to include the social democratic and centrist parties in Europe and the national bourgeois formations in the colonial areas. They entered these parties with an adaptationist political line; they were seeking to pressure the leadership of the centrist opposition into becoming the revolutionary leadership; they were not entering in order to build a new alternative revolutionary leadership based on the rank-and-file workers.

The role of Pabloism in England and in Belgium expresses clearly in action the true nature of this tendency. In England our comrades have devoted many years to the development of an alternative revolutionary leadership to both the right-wing Labour Party leadership and the Stalinists. They have based their tactics at all times on the rank-and-file class conscious workers.

The Pabloites in Britain, with the full support of the IS center, have had another orientation. They have attempted to function as a pressure group on centrist trends within the BLP. Thus they state in Socialist Fight (organ of the English Pabloites): “Above all pressure must be applied at Branch and district level” and the Fourth International (Fall, 1960) sees “The central task of the British revolutionary Marxists” not as building an alternative revolutionary leadership, but rather “regrouping inside the Labour Party, all these scattered forces of the labor left.” When our British comrades organized the Socialist Labour League, the Pabloites joined the hue and cry of the BLP leadership and the capitalist press and attacked them for “irresponsible adventurism.”

Since the formation of the SLL, our comrades have continued to gain substantially within the BLP especially from the youth. The Pabloites, on the other hand, have been unable to build an effective group in England. The British experience has dramatically proved that only an entry policy based entirely on an attempt to create an alternative revolutionary leadership representing the true interests of the rank-and-file workers can build an effective force. Such a policy is based fundamentally on the maintenance of a revolutionary world perspective for the working class under Marxist leadership. The policy of the Pabloites in Britain is a reflection of their abandonment of a revolutionary world perspective: their seeing in others the forces with revolutionary potential. Thus the differences between Pabloism and Trotskyism in England are fundamental, not simply tactical.

The same lesson can be learned from the Belgian experience. In Belgium the Pabloites have had a group functioning for several years under the leadership of one of the IS’s central international figures. This group has devoted its energies to seeking positions of influence within centrist circles in Belgium rather than attempting to develop roots on a rank-and-file basis in the Belgian working class. During the 1960-61 Belgian General Strike, the most important radical development on the Continent in several years, the Belgian Pabloites were unable to put forward a revolutionary political line independent of the centrist circles they were working in. Thus Trotskyism played no independent political role in the revolutionary events and the strike generally failed because of the inadequacy of the centrist trade union leaders that the Pabloites were supporting. The inability of the Pabloites to play an independent role in these crucial events was simply an expression of a central political outlook which places little emphasis on the revolutionary role of our movement.

After 12 years of experimentation the Pabloites have little to show for their efforts. The European movement has been decimated under their leadership. The Latin-American sections of the IS are small and weak. The only organizations on the continent having real working-class roots are affiliated with the IC. In Asia all they have is the formal affiliation of the LSSP (Ceylon) which, over the years, has been evolving in an opportunist direction and at present has reached the point of giving critical support to the bourgeois government.

The International Committee, despite its organizational weaknesses and political problems that have plagued it (due to lack of clarity on Pabloism in some groups), contains the only sections of our world movement that have shown substantial, solid growth. The development of the British section from a small group into a sizable, effective organization with deep roots in the working class and significant support among the youth is a major development for the whole world movement. The growth of the new Japanese section and of the Chileans and Peruvians was based on their break with Pablo.

The experience of our Chilean group illustrates this pattern. In 1954 the Chilean Trotskyist group split over the decision of the “Fourth World Congress” that it should carry out a deep entry tactic in the SP. Fifty members of the group followed the IS’s instructions and entered the SP while only five comrades refused to enter and broke with the IS. These five comrades became the nucleus of the present section of the IC in Chile. This section today is the strongest Trotskyist force in Chile with important roots in the Chilean trade union movement and a very fine potential for the future.

The Argentine section of the IC, however, like the LSSP, has fallen into an essentially Pabloite political line. Its adaptation to the current left capitalist leadership of the Argentine working class has brought it to glorify Peron and to present itself merely as a left-Peronista movement. Organizational advantage bought at such a price can only pave the way for ultimate disaster. The evolution of the Argentine group can be attributed to the failure of the IC to carry through the political struggle against Pabloism in the period since the 1953 split.

Our whole approach to the problem of our world movement must therefore begin with an understanding that Pabloism is a revisionist current which negates the essential revolutionary content of Trotskyism while still clinging to a formal adherence to Trotskyism. It is as much a revision of Trotskyism as Kautskyism was of Marxism. The present division of our world forces is the most fundamental and longest lasting political crisis in the whole history of our world movement. What is at issue is the preservation of Trotskyism itself!

In 1953, our party, in the “Open Letter” (Militant, 11/11/53), declared that “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s 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 Differences with the SLL

Over the past year, differences within the IC forces that had been smouldering for some time broke out into the open. Differences first began to crop up between the SWP and the Socialist Labour League over conflicting approaches towards Pabloism. The SLL insisted that the time had come to deal with Pabloism politically rather than simply with organizational unity proposals. The British felt that a political approach must begin with an understanding of Pabloism as a revisionist political current. They therefore insisted that a full political discussion must precede any unity moves internationally, for the unification of the world movement must be based firmly on a sound principled political program.

The SWP majority defended exactly the opposite approach. They saw political differences between themselves and Pabloites growing less. Quite logically, from this point of view, they therefore emphasized the organizational basis for unity, taking it for granted that the political basis existed.

When a situation occurs within our world movement creating confusion on such an essential question as the role of the movement itself, it is necessary to prepare a document which presents the essential views of Trotskyism in application to the current world situation. Then it is possible, on the basis of discussion around such a basic document, to determine exactly wherein lie the agreements and disagreements in our world forces. The SLL took on this responsibility and prepared its International Resolution.

This resolution puts forward all the essentials of a revolutionary perspective. It starts with the centers of world capitalism, understanding that it is the struggle of the working class in these centers which is critical for the development of the World Revolution. It replaces ephemeral hopes in an automatic revolutionary process in the colonial countries with revolutionary optimism about the future struggles of the working class in the advanced countries. It sees in the working class the only force in modern society that can overthrow capitalism on a worldwide basis. It sees the world Trotskyist movement as the only movement which represents the true interests of the working class as the only movement capable of carrying through the world revolution. It sees in the existing cadres of world Trotskyism the essential conscious factor in the modern world. It relates all revolutionary tactics, all revolutionary strategy to the development of the working class and its vanguard—the world cadres of Trotskyism. It puts Trotskyism, embodied in the living human beings organized into existent groups and parties, back into our historical perspective.

Significantly, the majority responded to this initiative not by warmly supporting this important effort but by producing an international resolution of its own. While the SWP document is not designed as a worked out theoretical alternative to the position of the SLL—it is equivocal, and contains in eclectic fashion many absolutely correct propositions—as a whole it expresses a different political position from that of the SLL. Certainly, if it did not, it would be difficult to explain why the majority wrote the resolution immediately after receiving the SLL resolution. It is also significant that the majority rejected minority amendments containing the same essential line as the SLL resolution because, they claimed, these amendments projected a line contradictory to the majority resolution.

The SWP Majority’s International Line

The majority international resolution marks an important political step in the direction of the objectivist international outlook and methodology of the Pabloites. The resolution begins by claiming that the victory of the Chinese Revolution “definitively altered the world relation of forces in favor of socialism.” This concept permeates the document and is repeated throughout in one form or another.

The conception of a qualitative transformation of the world situation is the essence of the Pabloite “new world reality” which can be found in the documents of the “Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth World Congresses.” In our 1953 resolution “Against Pabloist Revisionism“ (Discussion Bulletin A-12, November, 1953), which analyzed the central document of Pablo’s “Fourth World Congress,” “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” we rejected this concept, stating: “A rounded review and realistic resume of the net result of the march of the international revolution from 1943 to 1953 leads to this conclusion. With all its achievements and greater potentialities, the failure of the revolution to conquer in one of the major industrialized countries has thus far prevented the revolutionary forces of the working class from growing strong enough to overwhelm the Kremlin oligarchy and give irresistible impetus to the disintegration of Stalinism. There has not yet been such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of class forces.

“Up to date the counter-revolutionary intervention of the bureaucracy itself in world politics has forestalled the objective conditions for such a consummation. It caused the revolution to recede in Western Europe, weakened the working class in relation to the class enemy, and facilitated the mobilization of the world counter-revolution. The struggle between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution is still inconclusive, and far from being settled. This very inconclusiveness, which it strives to maintain, at the present time works to the advantage of the Kremlin.”

This brings us to the heart of the matter. In 1953 our party rejected the concept that the balance of forces is now in favor of revolution. We did this because, in our opinion, the decisive factor was the conscious element. As long as the working class does not come to power in an advanced country, the revolutionary forces cannot be dominant on a world scale. Stalinism and social democracy are essential forces preventing the working class from coming to power in these countries—therefore it is our task to defeat them and create a Trotskyist vanguard movement of the working class. This was our strategic orientation in 1953.

Today the SWP resolution claims that the forces of revolution are dominant despite the fact that the working class since 1953 has not come to power in an advanced country and our own forces remain weak. Thus, consciously or not, the SWP leadership has accepted the central theoretical position of Pabloite revisionism.

This objectivism is reflected in other ways throughout the document. The resolution tends to minimize the danger of Stalinism as a world counter-revolutionary force. In fact it goes so far as to suggest that Khrushchev is taking a “left turn,” allying himself with the colonial revolution. Without specifying the counter-revolutionary objectives and methods of Kremlin diplomacy, the resolution ”recognizes” that “in the diplomatic arena, since the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union has displayed growing boldness and flexibility, scoring gains among the ‘neutral’ countries through aid programs and through exposures of Washington’s aggressive policies” and that “in this ‘new reality’ of enormous pressures, inviting openings and deadly dangers, the Soviet bureaucracy has had to revise and adapt and shift its line.” In the Plenum discussion on Cuba last year Comrade Stein made the same point in a more blatant fashion, stating: “…The Soviet Union is compelled today, instead of playing a counter-revolutionary role—to place itself on the side of revolution.” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2, p. 21.)

In 1953 the Pabloites took an identical stand in their resolution. They did not claim that Stalinism was no longer a counter-revolutionary force—rather they claimed it no longer could be effective as a counter-revolutionary force because of the objective sweep of revolution. At that time we stated clearly:

“It is true that world conditions militate against the Kremlin’s consummation of any lasting deals with imperialism or its bargains with the national bourgeoisie. But the objective consequences of its attempts to maintain the status quo or arrive at such agreements have much more than ‘limited and ephemeral’ practical effects. Its maneuvers help block the advance of the revolutionary movement and adversely affect the world relationship of forces. The bureaucracy together with its agencies is not simply a passive reflector and acted-upon object of the world relationship of forces; the bureaucracy acts and reacts on the international arena as a potent factor in shaping the latter…Not only is the vanguard miseducated by this minimizing of the pernicious results of the Kremlin’s course, but it is disarmed in the struggle to dispel illusions about Stalinism among the workers in order to break them from Stalinist influence…The fact that the Soviet bureaucracy couldn’t ‘smash and arrest’ the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions where the revolutionary tide broke through its dikes, doesn’t wipe out the fact that elsewhere, by and large, the bureaucracy succeeded in turning the revolutionary tide in the opposite direction. This has influenced the relationship of forces for an entire period.”

In addition to minimizing the real danger of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary world force, the resolution accepts the Pabloite view that the changes in the world objective situation have ended the isolation of the Soviet Union and declares bluntly: “The Soviet Union is no longer isolated internationally.” But in 1953 we stated:

“How then, can it be so unqualifiedly asserted in the resolution that the isolation of the S.U. has disappeared? The isolation has been modified and mitigated, but not at all removed. The pressures of the imperialist environment weigh upon the entire life of the Soviet people.”

At that time we insisted that only the breakthrough of revolution in Western Europe could end the isolation of the Soviet Union.

Much of the treatment of Stalinism in the resolution is given over to speculation on the fissures within the bureaucracy with the “break-up of Stalinist monolithism.” However, in 1953 we clearly stated:

“The proposition that no significant segment of the bureaucracy will align itself with the masses against its own material interests does not mean that the bureaucracy would not manifest deep cleavages under the impact of an uprising. Such disorganization, disintegration and demoralization was observable in East Germany. But the function of a revolutionary policy is to organize, mobilize and help lead the masses in their struggle, not to look for, even less to bank upon any real break in the bureaucracy.”

In 1953 we reasserted the essential concept of the Transitional Program that the destruction of Stalinism required the conscious intervention and revolutionary struggle of the working class both within the Soviet countries and in the advanced countries. And for the victory of such struggle a Marxist vanguard party was essential. Much is made in the 1953 statement of the fact that while the Pabloite resolution formally mentions the political revolution it does not specifically refer to our strategy of creating Trotskyist parties in these countries. The current SWP resolution not only does not mention the need to create these parties—it does not even mention the political revolution. Instead the restoration of Soviet democracy is treated simply as a reflex of the objective changes in the world situation and within the Soviet Union.

The majority resolution formally states that the struggle of the working class in the advanced countries is the critical struggle and thus differentiates itself from the position of the Pabloite “Sixth World Congress” resolutions. However, this correct proposition, far from being central to the resolution and its perspectives for revolutionary strategy, was in fact inserted only after the rest of the document had been written. Thus in contrast to the uncritical optimism pervading its sections on the colonial revolution, the sections on the advanced countries are mere commentary, lacking in revolutionary analysis and perspective. In fact the SLL resolution treats the American scene and its relationship to the world revolution more fully and more adequately than does the American document itself.

Our central task of creating Marxist parties in all countries of the world is not given proper emphasis in the resolution. Within a general context which gives main weight to objective factors which have already tipped the scales in favor of revolution, it is stated: “Now mighty forces, gathering on a world scale, project the creation of such parties in the very process of revolution.” While every effort must be made to create revolutionary parties during a revolutionary uprising, it is also the duty of our movement to explain that this is no simple task. The failure of the European revolution following the victorious Russian Revolution was due to the failure to create effective Marxist parties in the various European countries prior to the development of revolutionary situations. The resolution does not make this point; rather the implication is that in the “new world reality” the “mighty forces” (what forces? the objective tide of revolution?) will create the needed party automatically as the revolution unfolds. This is indeed a serious weakness of the resolution and another expression of an “objectivist” outlook which minimizes the importance of the arduous task of creating the revolutionary vanguard.

It is our opinion that the international resolution of the majority represents a serious departure from the essential views of our movement in the direction of the revisionist political thinking of the Pabloites. This political move has been taken hesitatingly, ambiguously, and therefore the resolution is eclectic. But the move is nevertheless being taken. The failure of the party to fight politically against Pabloism internationally is now leading to the growth of Pabloite methods of thinking in our own movement.

Cuba, China, and Guinea

Pabloite methods of thought have penetrated different layers of the party in differing degrees and around different political questions. For instance, the entire national leadership of the party was swept up in the Cuban events and lost sight of the basic strategic approach that our movement must take towards such a revolution. The party’s whole orientation was towards the governing apparatus in Cuba and its leaders. It was hoped that through its virtually uncritical support to this government, the leadership could be won over wholesale to Trotskyism. A Trotskyist approach to Cuba, however, must begin with the working class, not the governmental apparatus. The Trotskyists should remain politically independent of the Castro government even though they may deem it tactically advisable to enter the single party. The Trotskyists should urge the workers to consciously struggle for democratic control over the governing apparatus rather than expecting the government to hand over such control to them on its own. Our strategic orientation in Cuba, as everywhere, should be based on the workers themselves rather than on other forces which we hope will be transformed into Trotskyists by mass pressure.

Others in the party have begun to carry out the logical implications of this Pabloite approach in other areas, and the results of their efforts should pull up short every party member. For instance, Arne Swabeck and John Liang have shown that they see the logic of the majority’s position better than does the majority itself: Mao could, like Castro, produce a real workers’ state without relying on the workers support in the revolution, without workers democracy, and without, presumably, a Marxist party either. Swabeck and Liang proclaimed the Chinese CP to be no longer Stalinist, and if not exactly Trotskyist, something well on the road to that. They declared that the Chinese workers state is not deformed, but genuine; and that the slogan of the political revolution as applied to China must be withdrawn. Here again, on a much more significant scale, workers democracy—workers’ control—is regarded as optional and accessory, the role of the working class is undermined, and the revolutionary task is assigned to another, hostile political tendency. Making Mao an honorary Trotskyist does not change the significance of this position.

Frances James, in an article issued during the Cuba discussion, suggests that Guinea is becoming a workers state. In the short time since she wrote this article events have proved how disastrous such impressionism can be. Sekou Toure has imprisoned Communist and other opponents, has suppressed an important teachers’ strike, and has launched an attack against “Marxist disruptors.” Frances James’ line in Guinea or Ghana or Mali would be completely suicidal for our forces there.

These approaches towards Cuba, China and Guinea are but concrete expression of the Pabloite objectivist line. Neither the party leadership on Cuba, nor Swabeck on China, nor James on Guinea, have a revolutionary orientation which starts with the working class and the task of organizing its Trotskyist vanguard.

The Drift from the International

The essential differences in our party and our world movement are brought into focus by one question, the question of the International. As accommodationism makes further inroads into the SWP, the political break with Pablo is more and more seen as easily remediable. Our differences with Pablo, say the majority, are narrowing. This is true, but it is the American majority that has shifted its ground, not the IS. As Pabloism becomes more and more acceptable to the majority, conversely, the SLL with its firm adherence to the Trotskyist position and the principles of the Open Letter, becomes an embarrassment. It is obvious from the published exchange of letters between the SLL and the SWP, from James P. Cannon’s “Letters to the Center,” from the political critique of the SWP international resolution presented by the SLL within the IC, that our long established and deep-rooted solidarity with the British section has been seriously eroded. That such a situation should be allowed to develop without any discussion whatsoever within the ranks of our party is an intolerable state of affairs.

It was the political inspiration of the SWP with its Open Letter which brought the IC into existence. When we issued the Open Letter we took upon ourselves the responsibility for the split in the International. Yet, as the British have charged and documented, we have been politically neglectful of it since its founding. Now when a most fundamental political conflict breaks out between the party majority and the British section, the majority does everything it can to prevent a political discussion of the serious political questions that have been raised. The majority international resolution was originally prepared as a contribution to the international discussion. The British comrades have presented their opinions of this resolution now it is the responsibility of the party majority to defend its political line within the world movement. The British have responsibly brought their critique of the SWP resolution to the International Committee. This Committee, with only one opposing vote, expressed its opposition to the line of the SWP Resolution at its July meeting. Then in December the IC voted in favor of the general line of a revised version of the SLL international resolution.

We fully support the general line of the international resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International, though we disagree with major aspects of its evaluation of the Cuban Revolution. We are in fundamental political solidarity with the International Committee and its sections throughout the world. It is this resolution and this solidarity which are the principal bases upon which we stand. Where does the majority stand? Why will it not carry out its political responsibility to defend its views within a world organization it did so much to bring into existence?

If the present drift of the SWP continues unchecked it will lead to one of two equally disastrous situations. The SWP majority may carry its political coming together with the Pabloites to its proper conclusion and announce its solidarity with the IS or some faction within it as against the IC. Or, the SWP majority may drift away from any political relationship with the IC or the IS. Thus it would break from its 30 years’ tradition of political solidarity and support to the party of the world revolution, the Fourth International. Such a drift away from the world organization of Trotskyism would be a sign that a provincialism which has not been completely absent from the SWP in the past has taken a profound grip on the organization, a grip which cannot but be disastrous for the party’s domestic course as well. It was the essentially provincial outlook of the LSSP, its real lack of deep concern or connection with the Fourth International, which has contributed to its present opportunistic domestic course. Such inevitably will be the future of the SWP if it continues to drift away from the Fourth International. A return to real support and political participation in the International is the indispensable first step toward the reaffirmation of a revolutionary world perspective.

Theses on the American Revolution

In 1946 the Socialist Workers Party issued an important document, the “Theses on the American Revolution.” This document projected a revolutionary course for the party, and it was the ideas contained in this document—the concept that all tactics, all strategy must be related to the goal of creating the Leninist party that will lead the American Revolution—which kept the party going over the difficult years that lay ahead. By 1952 an important section of the central party cadres had succumbed to the pressures of isolation and prosperity and had lost this revolutionary perspective. Comrade Cannon put forward this document once again and insisted quite correctly that despite its inaccurate evaluation of the economic perspectives of American capitalism its essentials were still correct and should be the central policy of our party. He called for the re-education of the party cadres around the principles embodied in the “Theses.”

The way in which this question arose in 1952-53 is quite instructive for the problems which our party faces today. The Cochranites claimed that the decisions of the Pabloite-dominated Third World Congress brought the “Theses” into question and in fact superseded them. Thus, they saw in the world view of Pabloism the theoretical basis for jettisoning a revolutionary perspective in this country.

At first the party majority attempted to answer this attack on the very fundamentals of the program of our party by affirming support for both the “Theses” and the Third World Congress decisions. Thus, they seemed to hold that the Third World Congress decisions held for the rest of the world while the “Theses” held for the U.S. This was an untenable position politically, for the “Theses” themselves theoretically destroy any concept of “American exceptionalism,” making it clear that the laws of world capitalist development hold sway here too. Thus, if the “Theses” apply to the U.S. they must also hold for other advanced capitalist countries, and the same holds for the Third World Congress decisions. This theoretical bind was finally resolved when the party majority decided to carry through a political struggle against Pabloism on a world scale in order to maintain its domestic revolutionary perspective.

Today again we face a situation where a world revolutionary perspective is being challenged—this time by the party majority itself. It is our strong conviction that the party cannot maintain a revolutionary perspective in this country while at the same time slighting a world revolutionary perspective. This contradiction between a domestic and an international perspective will in time be resolved. For the sake of the world revolutionary movement, it must be resolved by projecting the revolutionary orientation of the “Theses” on an international scale rather than by putting the “Theses” on the shelf and allowing an accommodationist spirit to penetrate our work in this country as well.

So far the party maintains its revolutionary perspective for this country. However, there is much confusion in the party as to exactly where we are going, and at times it seems as if the party is drifting from campaign to campaign not fully in command of its own political course. We must at all times realize that we seek to become the vanguard of the American working class. This means that all our work must be related to the central task of developing roots in the trade union movement and in the Negro movement. This is not simply a matter of winning recruits here or there; rather it is the development of the cadre itself as leaders of the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class and against its own false leaders.

Some in the party attempt to counterpose hollow “party building” to this essential task of building the party by developing its roots in the class. These people tended to view our regroupment or Cuba defense work as asubstitute for rather than as an auxiliary to our central tasks. We do not claim that these tendencies to drift from a revolutionary perspective in this country have become dominant in the party. But we do feel strongly that complacency about our party and its perspectives would be very harmful at this time.

Where We Stand

In sum, we believe that the failure of the SWP leadership to apply and develop the theory and method of Marxism has resulted in a dangerous drift from a revolutionary world perspective. The adoption in practice of the empiricist and objectivist approach of the Pabloites, the minimization of the critical importance of the creation of a new Marxist proletarian leadership in all countries, the consistent underplaying of the counterrevolutionary role and potential of Stalinism, the powerful tendencies toward accommodation to non-proletarian leaderships particularly in the colonial revolution—these pose, if not countered, a serious threat to the future development of the SWP itself.

What do we counterpose to this drift?

(l)   We look to the working class and only the working class as the revolutionary force in modern society.

(2)  We consider the creation of revolutionary Marxist parties, that is, Trotskyist parties, as essential to the victory of socialism in every country of the world.

(3)  We call for the reviving of the traditional Trotskyist emphasis on workers democracy as an essential part of our program and propaganda.

(4)  We hold that Stalinism is counter-revolutionary in essence, that it is the deadly enemy of revolution, that it stillremains the major threat within the working-class camp to the success of the world revolution,

(5)  For these reasons we call for full support to the general line of the International Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

(6)  We call for a political struggle against Pabloism internationally and Pabloite ideas and methodology within our own ranks, recognizing in Pabloism a centrist disease which counsels liquidationism to our world cadres.

(7)  We favor the reunification of the Fourth International on the political basis of a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of Trotskyism and the application of these fundamentals to the current world situation. We call for support to anystep which furthers the international discussion process, for this brings us closer to our goal of a healthy, strengthened international movement capable of expanding into a powerful world force.

(8)  We call for a return to true internationalism, in the spirit of which our party was built. We must fully participate in the discussion process now going on within our world movement; we must give full support to the International Committee and its struggle to rebuild our scattered world forces. We must realize that we can build an effective party in the United States only by playing an important political role in the development of our world movement.

(9)  We must continue to educate the entire membership in the spirit of the fundamental principles laid down in the “Theses on the American Revolution.” We hold that those fundamentals are as valid today as they were in 1946, and they were in 1952. We hold that those fundamentals are internationalist to the core.

(10)  Finally, we regard the SWP with the YSA, in the political sense, as the American section of our world party. In our party are to be found the most principled and developed Marxists in our country and the embodiment of the rich experiences of our 30 year battle for Leninism and Trotskyism. In presenting our views to the party on these critical issues we are acting in the most fundamental interests of the party and the world revolutionary movement. This document, taken with the IC International Resolution, expresses the essentials of the political outlook to which our party must return.

We approach our party in the spirit of the “Theses on the American Revolution” which concludes as follows:

“The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the U.S., does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY. It is the sole legitimate heir and continuator of pioneer American Communism and the revolutionary movements of the American workers from which it sprang. Its nucleus has already taken shape in three decades of unremitting work and struggle against the stream. Its program has been hammered out in ideological battles and successfully defended against every kind of revisionist assault upon it. The fundamental core of a professional leadership has been assembled and trained in the irreconcilable spirit of the combat party of the revolution.

“The task of the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY consists simply in this: To remain true to its program and banner; to render it more precise with each new development and apply it correctly in the class struggle; and to expand and grow with the growth of the revolutionary mass movement, always aspiring to lead it to victory in the struggle for political power.”

Submitted by:

Joyce Cowley (San Francisco)
J. Doyle (Philadelphia)
Albert Philips (Detroit)*
Ray Gale (San Francisco)
Margaret Gates (Philadelphia)
Ed Lee (Berkeley-Oakland)
Shane Mage (New York)
Jim Petroski (Berkeley-Oakland)
Liegh Ray (San Francisco)
Jim Robertson (New York)
Geoffrey White (Berkeley-Oakland)
Tim Wohlforth (New York)

*Differences in sociological evaluation aside, I want to indicate support for the general thrust of this statement and of its political conclusions.

In defence of the revolutinary programme

In defence of the revolutinary programme

Declaration of the Trotskyist Faction

“On the most general level the Belgian events teach that the prime necessity is to build a revolutionary cadre. This task cannot be evaded by any consideration of immediate tactical success or to win approval from centrists of other tendencies. It cannot begin if major theoretical questions are not brought forward for discussion or if efforts are made to form combinations in which principled questions are put to one side. It cannot begin by support for centrist ‘personalities’ or the establishment of relationships which involve concessions on principle.”

The World Prospect for Socialism, resolution of Socialist Labour League, 1961

“We are told by the comrades that we did not take up the IMG adequately at the [second CDLM] conference. That we should have made a clear statement on their role as a left cover for the Stalinists. Such a course of action would have been a disaster. It would have been certain to drive the IMG out of the CDLM…. Had we done that [driven the IMG out of the CDLM ] the possibilities we have now in Scotland would have been out of the question. Had the platform or the organising committee made such a statement the Scottish people would have walked out with Grogan and Pennington convinced that we were sectarians.”

— Comrade Thornett’s reply to “ The WSL and the Governmental Crisis ”, Internal Bulletin 21, p 7

For the International Committee’s struggle against Pabloism

(1) The International Committee — In this epoch of capitalist decay the only hope for humanity is the ability of the international working class led by a Leninist party to make a socialist revolution. This was the political basis of the International Committee’s fight against the liquidationist Pabloist tendency, both in 1951-53 and at the time of “reunification” in 1963. Any revolutionary organisation today must base itself upon this initial fight, despite that fight’s flaws and shortcomings. Arguing against the idea that Stalinist parties or petit-bourgeois nationalists could make the socialist revolution, the IC clearly stood for the building of Trotskyist parties in every country, for the central role of the working class in the colonial revolution and for the programme of political revolution in the Soviet Union and the deformed workers’ states.

The IC was flawed by the delayed and incomplete nature of the fight against Pablo and by its failure to establish an international democratic-centralist structure. These inadequacies, coupled with isolation in imperialist America during the Cold War period, prepared the way for the defection of the initially dominant section, the Socialist Workers Party, in 1963. Nevertheless the IC maintained an essentially correct stand against Pabloism during the fifties and early sixties, exemplified by the SLL’s international resolution of 1961, The World Prospect for Socialism, which reaffirmed that:

“… Any retreat from the strategy of political independence of the working class and the construction of revolutionary parties will take on the significance of a world-historical blunder on the part of the Trotskyist movement.”

(2) Cuba — The correct programmatic stance of the IC lacked a firm theoretical underpinning — a consequence of the hasty and in some respects superficial fight carried out against Pablo in 1953. This weakness was graphically revealed in the IC’s inability to assess correctly the Cuban revolution.

The Pabloites, joined by the American SWP, prostrated themselves before Castro and described the Cuban regime as a healthy workers’ state. By maintaining that Cuba remained capitalist after the expropriations of 1961, the SLL avoided capitulation to the Cuban leadership’s immense popularity among petitbourgeois radicals but only at the expense of denying reality — ie, denying that a deformed workers’ state had been established in Cuba. The SLL’s refusal to make a correct characterisation was at bottom Pabloism afraid of itself. The SLL accepted the Pabloites’ false premise that to say Cuba was a workers’ state (even if deformed) was necessarily to say that Castro was indeed a genuine, if only “instinctive”, Marxist. This laid the basis for the Healy leadership’s subsequent Pabloite capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracies of China and Vietnam — undeniably (deformed) workers’ states.

At this time only the Revolutionary Tendency in the American SWP had the correct position on the Cuban question: that the class character of the regime established by the petit-bourgeois guerrillaists was, from the time of its consolidation in mid-1961, that of a deformed workers’ state. As they pointed out at the time, the destruction of the Batista state apparatus by Castro’s petit-bourgeois guerrilla forces, the feebleness of the domestic bourgeoisie and the weakness of the organised proletariat as a contender for power in its own right together produced a situation where, when US imperialist hostility forced the Castro regime to look to the Soviet Union for material assistance, the guerrillaists were able to establish a deformed workers’ state. Essentially similar conditions had produced the Chinese and Yugoslav deformed workers’ states after the Second World War and were subsequently to result in the Indo-Chinese deformed workers’ states. While insurgent petit-bourgeois guerrilla forces can in certain situations successfully overturn capitalist property relations they are inherently incapable of establishing a revolutionary workers’ state — that is a workers’ state in which the class-conscious proletariat holds political power — precisely because the guerrilla strategy relegates the proletariat to an essentially passive role. The workers’ states which come into being in these circumstances are necessarily deformed from their inception by the rule of a bureaucratic caste, originally centering on the guerrilla leaders. The active intervention of the working class, led by a Trotskyist party, is required to overthrow the bureaucracy and establish workers’ democracy through political revolution, allowing the fight for socialism to be carried forward.

(Some members of the WSL look to some revised variant of Mandel/Wohlforth’s theory of “structural assimilation” as an alternative explanation of the guerrilla-derived workers’ states, including Cuba. This pretentious “theory” has not only the disadvantage of falsely posing the whole question solely in terms of the military might of the Soviet Union, but it is also profoundly reformist in methodology: the new guerrilla-initiated states are held to be originally bourgeois, and to be transformed into deformed workers’ states through a peaceful process of reforms.)

(3) Pabloism undefeated — The incomplete character and ultimate failure of the IC’s opposition to Pablo and his followers is testified to by the subsequent convergence of the SWP with the International Secretariat forces, the continued existence and growth of the “United Secretariat of the Fourth International” and the rapprochement between the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste of France and the United Secretariat. Only by deepening and making consistent the IC’s assault on Pabloism will it be possible to destroy politically the United Secretariat and thus lay the basis for the re-creation of the Fourth International.

The degeneration of the IC and the development of the WSL

(4) Programmatic degeneration — Marxists must take the history of their own movement seriously. In the case of the WSL this means above all a critical assessment of the history of the IC, and particularly of the SLL/WRP. However, thus far the WSL leadership has dealt with the question of the date and character of the SLL/WRP’s qualitative degeneration in the most haphazard and confused fashion. In the proposed submission to the XIth World Congress of the United Secretariat, “The Poisoned Well”, the leadership suggests that the SLL abandoned the Transitional Programme in 1971, but that in any case this programmatic question is subordinate to the question of the later loss of “precious worker cadres”. Similarly The Battle for Trotskyism suggests that the expulsion of the WSL comrades at the end of 1974 marked the point of qualitative degeneration in the SLL/WRP. Yet when the WRP’s Workers Press collapsed in early 1976 it was called a “savage” “blow to Trotskyism” (Socialist Press 28) so perhaps there was no qualitative degeneration at all! To straighten out this mish-mash we must recognise that the question of programme is central to our characterisation of a political tendency.

The flaws in the IC’s formal defence of Trotskyism crystallised into a qualitative revision of programme in 1966-67. During this period the SLL, the dominant section of the IC, adopted an approach which was indistinguishable from the Pabloite revisionism that the IC had originally been formed to fight. On a number of decisive questions the SLL began to look to forces other than the proletariat under Trotskyist leadership as the revolutionary “vanguard”.

(a) Stalinism — The SLL’s growing softness on Stalinism was consolidated into blatant tail-ending of the Vietnamese NLF leadership and the Chinese Red Guards. The apologetics for Vietnamese Stalinism seen in the WRP’s press in 1975 were presaged almost a decade earlier by a posture of first silence on, and later uncritical support for, the NLF. According to M Banda, writing in the Fourth International of February 1968:

“[Vietnam] demonstrates the transcendental power and resilience of a protracted people’s war led and organised by a party based on the working class and the poor peasantry and inspired by the example of the October revolution….

“It is indisputably true to say that, on the basis of the Vietnam experience, guns combined with the courage and endurance of individual guerrillas would have meant little or nothing if Ho Chi Minh and the other leaders were unable to analyse the principal and secondary contradictions within Vietnam as well as between Vietnam and imperialism and on that basis outline a strategy for the conquest of power.” (emphasis in original)

Similarly, the SLL enthusiastically took sides in the bureaucratic infighting of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”, praising the Red Guards as “those who are fighting to defend the conquests of the Chinese revolution and to extend those conquests” (Newsletter, 14 January 1967), and even equating the Maoist youths with the SLL’s own Young Socialists in Britain.

(b) Arab nationalism — The SLL’s support for Arab nationalism (dressed up as support for something called the “Arab Revolution”) betrayed the same approach. The political independence of the working class, and the consequent necessity for the Trotskyist vanguard was abandoned in favour of the “national revolution” and Nasserism:

“Nasserism is progressive insofar as it represents the hopes of millions of downtrodden fellaheen and workers, artisans and professional workers for a better future and a happier one in a united Arab world.”

Newsletter, 24 June 1967

This capitulatory policy, which amounted to nothing less than a complete denial of the validity of the strategy of Permanent Revolution for the Arab East, was adopted by the SLL to justify support for the “progressive” Arab bourgeoisies in their 1967 war with Israel — a predatory, inter-capitalist war which resulted from the conflicting territorial ambitions of the Israeli and Arab ruling classes.

(c) “Make the Lefts Fight” — This slogan was first advanced by the Newsletter on 3 December 1966. The demand was aimed at the left social-democrats, who were called upon to adopt a programme of “socialist policies” (a phrase which could easily be seen to encompass the existing policies of the reformists), and who were put forward as an alternative leadership against the top rightwingers of the Labour Party.

The OCI did not share the SLL’s grosser programmatic revisions, but as the passive and subordinate partner of the IC’s federated bloc it made no public critique of the SLL’s revisions. Since then the OCI has moved markedly to the right, particularly in its capitulation to the “Union of the Left” and its wholesale adaptation to social democracy.

It is clear that the degeneration of the IC predated the factional struggle in the WRP by seven years. What then did the development of the WSL represent?

(5) Development of the WSL — In the fight against Healy the group that went on to form the WSL broke partially from the WRP’s conception of party-building as simply a matter of meeting recruitment targets and sought to develop policies which could mobilise the working class over basic attacks on living standards and jobs. The mystifications of Healy’s “philosophy” were pragmatically abandoned and a stance of openness to questions which the Healyites addressed inadequately, if at all — such as the history of the Fourth International, the development of consistent trade-union work, Ireland, or the oppression of women — was adopted. But without a serious investigation of the origins of the SLL/WRP’s degeneration, with nothing approaching a consistent revolutionary programme, nor even any real will on the part of the leadership of the WSL to develop such a programme, this initial apparent openness was to have little effect on the organisation’s subsequent development.

What has been central to the WSL’s development though is the trade-union work at Cowley [Oxford car plant]. The rejection of Healy’s sectarian ultimatism, which first produced the fight within the WRP, represented a positive response to the WRP’s crisis-mongering and maximalism. More importantly, however, this rejection did not signify a willingness to take up a fight for the full Transitional Programme in the unions but in fact signalled a retreat from political confrontation with the existing consciousness of the working class in favour of radical trade unionism. The WSL’s break from Healyite maximalism was, in the final analysis, a break towards economism and minimalism.

It is from the worst period of the SLL/WRP, the period following its qualitative degeneration in 1966-67, that the WSL has inherited and developed its central orientation — its programmatic adaptation to the existing consciousness of the masses, and the fraudulent mass work justified by that adaptation. Likewise, the WSL’s accommodation to social democracy comes from this period, and even the slogan which most aptly expresses that accommodation, “Make the Lefts Fight”!

The WSL’s opportunist, step-at-a-time interpretation of the Transitional Programme, was developed in part in opposition to the WRP’s inconsistent and unserious attitude to trade-union work. But the claim that “programme… begins from the existing state of consciousness…and directs towards the necessary policies” (Socialist Press 72) directly contradicts Trotsky’s understanding of the nature and role of our programme:

“The program must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as it is and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness…. We cannot guarantee that the masses will solve the crisis, but we must express the situation as it is, and that is the task of the program.”

— Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, 1st edition, p 125, “The Political Backwardness of the American Workers”, discussion of 19 May 1938

The leadership’s desire to opportunistically short-cut the fight for revolutionary leadership in the working class is demonstrated by the chronic unwillingness to advance in full the basic principles of the Transitional Programme. Two recent examples of the use of such a partial (ie minimal) programme are in the recent Cowley election campaign and in the CDLM — neither of which could be characterised as anything other than left-reformism.

The programme and practice of the WSL

(6) The Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement — The CDLM encapsulates the WSL’s parochial and opportunist practice. Although it has turned out to be a miserable failure, it was first founded as an ambitious organisational expression of the WSL’s aim to get closer to the working class and carry its politics into the trade unions. It therefore deserves the closest scrutiny.

(a) Programme — The programme of the CDLM is a programme of minimal trade-union reformism which omits many points that the WSL leadership agrees with formally. The only two clauses which address questions outside of the trade-union area: “For Women’s Rights!” and “Stop Racialism!” — were introduced only as a result of pressure from the Pabloites of the IMG and the ICL [International-Communist League, now Alliance for Workers Liberty].

The CDLM programme ignores the vital internationalist obligations of the working class in Britain: there is no reference to Ireland, to South Africa, or to NATO and the EEC (both of which are anti-Soviet, imperialist alliances which we have a duty to fight and expose, a task which is particularly important at this time because of the Carter administration’s current “Human Rights” campaign which is designed to garner popular support for the military mobilisation continually underway against the Soviet Union).

The reformism of the CDLM programme lies in its failure to even attempt to connect the daily struggles of workers with the struggle for state power. Thus while the CDLM is for the nationalisation of “genuinely bankrupt” companies, it has nothing to say about the necessity for the working class to expropriate the capitalist class as a whole, in order to lay the basis for a planned economy. There is no call for a workers’ government (which for revolutionaries is a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat), nor is there any statement on the need to oust the bureaucracy in the trade unions and replace it with a revolutionary leadership.

The CDLM programme ensures that the political struggle between the revolutionary party and the present inchoate and reformist consciousness of the masses of workers will never occur. This conflict is vitally necessary for the training of a Trotskyist cadre in the trade unions.

(b) The CDLM Mark II — The warmed-over version of the CDLM presented in the NC majority’s British Perspectives document is designed by the leadership to forestall criticisms of the disastrous organisation it has created by adding a hard, organised image to the unprincipled programme and practice of the existing CDLM. Although there is a gesture to the left — mention of international questions that must be taken up by workers in this country — it is clear that in all its essential features the “new” CDLM will closely resemble its discredited reformist predecessor. Already we are told that the new organisation will have “a programmatic answer to the immediate burning questions facing trade unionists and industrial workers” — which for the leadership means another minimum programme.

(c) Propaganda bloc — The tactic of the united front has a dual aim: to advance the struggle of the proletariat around elements of our programme, while simultaneously providing an opportunity for the revolutionary vanguard to destroy political formations that are hostile to it. This is achieved through the conclusion of limited agreements with other political tendencies to undertake joint action around a particular question while retaining full freedom of criticism. If the reformists and centrists refuse to cooperate with us, this provides an opportunity to expose their unwillingness to fight for the interests of the working class.

It is, however, impermissible for revolutionaries to bloc with centrists or reformists to produce common propaganda purporting to offer a general political perspective to the working class or a section of workers. The CDLM is such a rotten propaganda bloc, in which the WSL shows no qualms about liquidating itself into a partnership with the IMG and, to a lesser extent, the ICL. This is not surprising: since the programme of the CDLM is not revolutionary, non-revolutionaries like the IMG and ICL have no trouble agreeing with it. The joint intervention at the SWP Rank and File conference, the jointly produced car bulletin and the Scottish CDLM conference have one common implication: that the Pabloites and ourselves do not essentially differ when it comes to the “real” struggle. The opportunist logic of this bloc is produced in Cde Thornett’s reply to the document “The WSL and the Governmental Crisis” quoted at the beginning of this document, where he clearly states that he is more concerned about jeopardising the WSL’s friendly relations with the Pabloites by appearing “sectarian” than about exposing their revisionist politics. In typical opportunist fashion this snuggling up to the Pabloites was excused by reference to “the possibilities we have now in Scotland”, and the argument that accommodation to the politics of the IMG would help win over a section of the Scottish Socialist League. But softness towards revisionism never won anyone to revolutionary politics, and sure enough, it did not win the SSL — which is now ensconced within the IMG . Left elements can be broken from the IMG only if we ruthlessly criticise the revisionism of their leadership.

(7) Trade-union work — The WSL’s trade-union work has no overall national plan and is without clear perspectives. No attempt has been made to concentrate forces in particular factories or unions of importance. In an unconscious way the WSL has turned to work in support of particular strikes as a primary field of activity, without any consideration of what political lessons can be drawn from them, and with no consideration of whether we have the resources to do this work without damaging other fields of work or the training of cadres.

(a) Trade-union groups on the full Transitional Programme — We counterpose to the liquidationist perspective of haphazard “mass work”, exemplified by the CDLM, the organising of trade-union groups which include members and sympathisers of the WSL, to be built in selected factories and trade unions where our work will have the maximum political impact and which can serve as an example of how communists do trade-union work. Such groups should be based on the fundamental demands of the Transitional Programme, culminating in the slogan of a workers’ government. Membership in them should be conditional on agreement with this programme and willingness to fight for it under the discipline of the group. Naturally the programme of such groups must be amplified in accordance with the specific conditions in the unions concerned as well as the political issues of current importance to the working class both nationally and internationally.

( b ) Trade-union election policy — Despite its ritual obeisance to the Transitional Programme as the programme on which it supposedly bases its trade-union work, the recent election campaign at Cowley was waged around the realtrade-union programme of the WSL: opposition to corporate bargaining, opposition to participation, advocacy of a sliding scale of wages combined with a call to “kick out the Right Wing”. We call for a break from this opportunist practice. Where we stand candidates for election they must present a revolutionary political alternative to the reformists and centrists — they must stand on our full trade-union programme, the Transitional Programme, otherwise we are only campaigning for reformism within the unions. Where we are not able to stand our own candidates for election, we may use the tactic of critical support to vote for a candidate of another political tendency but only if he or she is committed to fighting for something which in a crucial way would represent a gain for the working class. The record of the League to date has been to promiscuously extend its none-too-critical support to various reformist bureaucrats. One outstanding example of this is Bob Wright who campaigns on his record as a proven scab, a loyal enforcer of the Social Contract and an advocate of reactionary chauvinist import controls, but whom the leadership has decided to support in the second round of the forthcoming AUEW [engineering union] ballot just as they did the last time he stood.

(c) Trade-union work at Cowley — The WSL’s roots in the working class are deepest at Cowley, and it is as a result of the work carried out there that the organisation is best known. Victories at Cowley can point the way forward for the class, while mistakes represent real setbacks for at least a section of it. Bearing in mind the pressures towards opportunism and economism which inevitably operate on cadres in the unions, the organisation must exert tightly centralised control over all trade-union work. In particular the work at Cowley must be closely supervised by the National Committee and the day-to-day lessons of our most important area of work must be made accessible to the whole membership.

(8) The Labour Party — The inability to see politics except through the grimy spectacles of the Labour Party is a chronic affliction on the British left. Two opposite but complementary deviations result from this. The economists of the SWP/IS exemplify one pole: the dismissal of parliamentary and governmental events as irrelevant to workers. By confining themselves to militant trade unionism and leaving the reformist leadership of the working class unchallenged, they in fact strengthen the Labour Party’s hold on the working class. The Militant group represents the other extreme: the subordination of the proletariat’s struggles to the pre-ordained necessity to elect a Labour Government (or to keep one in power) and the abandonment of any perspective of politically destroying the Labour Party or of attempting to build a revolutionary party. The strategy of the Militant amounts to pressuring the Labour bureaucracy towards “socialism”. While it stands to the left of both organisations, the League veers between these twin courses of capitulation. The fundamental impulse is “radical” trade unionism which divorces “trade-union struggles” (for which the minimum programme of the CDLM is sufficient) from “politics” — a sphere worthy of comment in internal discussion or in the pages of Socialist Press, but which the leadership really views as the preserve of the “lefts” and members of the Labour Party. The central strategy of the leadership with relation to the existing leaders of the working class is summed up by the phrase “Make the Lefts Fight”. The slogan derives from an ill-formed conception that the Labour Party falls into two quite distinct wings, left and right, seen by the leadership as in some way representing the proletariat and the bourgeoisie respectively. Hence the “critical” support given to the “Lefts”. Rather than offering an alternative to the betrayals of the right, the “Make the Lefts Fight” slogan only serves to lend our authority to the “left-wing” credentials of the thoroughly rotten counter-revolutionary parliamentary cretins in the Tribune group and thus serves to tie the political development of the working class to a wing of social democracy.

(9) The Lib/Lab coalition — The refusal to counterpose the programme of Marxism to the Labour Party and all currents at present in it (shown in the “Make the Lefts Fight” policy and by the opposition to the WRP standing candidates against Labour in the 1974 General Election) is confirmed by the leadership’s policy on the Lib/Lab coalition. The coalition with the Liberals is equivalent to a Popular Front. Labour Party candidates in this period stand as representatives of a bourgeois political formation, the coalition, and thus to extend even the most critical support to them is a breach of principle.

With some exceptions, the resurgence of bourgeois coalitionism in Western Europe in recent years has taken place in the absence of extra-parliamentary mobilisations on a scale which can produce soviet-type bodies that can be counterposed directly to the class collaboration of the reformist bureaucracies. It is therefore vitally necessary to confront Popular Frontism in the context of parliamentary politics through principled electoral opposition to coalitionism, thereby drawing the class line between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie with the greatest clarity. Only an organisation which is capable of drawing this line can act as a firm pole of opposition in the workers’ movement to the class collaboration of coalitionism.

(10) The oppression of women — The crisis of proletarian leadership must be resolved through sharp political warfare against all tendencies which would mislead the working class. The WSL’s abject failure to tackle this job in the Women’s Liberation Movement (a failure which derives from the Healyites’ economist and male-chauvinist disdain for the struggle against the oppression of women) abandons women who are politicised through their particular oppression in bourgeois society to the leadership of feminists (both openly bourgeois and “socialist”), revisionists and reformists. As Lenin stated in What is to be Done?, a revolutionary must seek to be “the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 5, p 423).

The oppression of women today is rooted in the bourgeois family, an essential economic and social unit of capitalism. In our intervention in the women’s movement we must seek to win the best elements to the understanding that only through proletarian revolution will it be possible to create the material conditions for the replacement of the family and the ending of the oppression of women. We stand for an aggressive intervention into the Women’s Liberation Movement against the infinite number of petit-bourgeois utopian “solutions” to the question of women’s oppression. Our objective must be to build a communist women’s movement, based on the Transitional Programme and linked to the revolutionary party through its leading cadre.

(11) The national question — We uphold the Leninist position on the national question. Basing ourselves on the fundamental democratic principle of the equality of all nations and peoples, we recognise the right of all nations to self-determination. However, the recognition of this right by no means predetermines our attitude to every particular national question. In some cases the right of self-determination for nations must be subordinated to other, higher principles — such as the defence of a workers’ state. We would not, for example, support the right of a bourgeois-led Ukrainian nationalist movement to separate from the Soviet Union, regardless of popular support. In other cases, for example Scotland, we are for the right of self-determination, but call on the Scottish people to exercise that right by choosing to stay in the same state as the other peoples of Britain.

The recognition of the right to self-determination in no way implies support to nationalism, a thoroughly bourgeois ideology completely counterposed to the interests of the proletariat, unable indeed to even accomplish the basic bourgeois democratic tasks which, in this epoch, can only be achieved through proletarian revolution. While we support any anti-imperialist actions of nationalist movements (unless they are merely acting as the instruments of a rival imperialist power) our main task with regard to the nationalist movements of the various oppressed peoples of the world is to separate the working masses from the petit-bourgeois nationalist leaderships. By championing the right of self-determination, the revolutionary vanguard can counter the attempts of the nationalists to portray the oppressor people as a monolithic whole, thus undermining divisions in the working class along national lines and sharpening the fundamental international conflict in capitalist society — the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

(12) Ireland — A correct approach to the complex national question in Ireland must begin with the recognition of the simple fact that there is no single “Irish nation”. The Loyalist Protestant majority in the Six Counties, although not at this point in history itself a nation, is a people separate from the Catholics with whom they share the region. The oppressed minority Catholic grouping is an extension of the Catholic Irish nation which has achieved a deformed and partial self-determination in the Republic of the South. Consequently the slogan of “self-determination for the Irish people as a whole” is either meaningless or is a backhanded way of siding with the nationalism of the Catholics against the Protestants as a people. Instead of cutting across the division between the two communities to allow the development of class struggle the slogan merely exacerbates the division by counterposing the Northern Catholics to the Protestants (who will resist forced unification arms in hand).

Our attitude to the Protestant working class must be based on the Marxist understanding that their objective interests are counterposed to those of both the Orange bourgeoisie and British imperialism. However this objective contradiction has been suppressed through most of recent Irish history and the Protestant workers have been led to identify with their own masters through the legitimate fear of being forcibly incorporated into a Catholic-dominated united bourgeois Ireland within which they would be an oppressed minority. It is this fear, far more than any material privileges, which has produced the virulent Loyalism of the masses of the Protestant proletariat today. Those who close their eyes to the reality of this key barrier to class consciousness among Protestant workers will be unable to mobilise them as part of a united proletariat and in effect hand them over, in advance, to their present reactionary Loyalist leadership.

We are against any forced unification of Ireland under a bourgeois regime. Only under the rule of the working class can the conflicting interests of the intermingled communities in the North be resolved in a democratic manner. We are unconditionally opposed to British imperialism’s occupation of the North and call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops. We fight against the oppression of the Catholics and support actions of the Catholic nationalists which are aimed against imperialism, or are in genuine self-defence, while opposing sectarian anti-working-class communal terror directed at either population. Only integrated workers’ militias built in the course of a united class struggle against imperialism and its agents (a struggle which can only be led by a Leninist party) can successfully defeat sectarian terror.

(13) The state — On certain key questions the leadership reveals a reformist attitude to the state. This attitude takes the form of promoting the belief that under pressure from the Labour Party, the trade unions or both, the capitalist state can be neutralised or even made to act in the interests of the working class.

(a) Imperialist arms to South Africa — Just as a number of tendencies supported sending troops to Northern Ireland in 1969 and in 1974 the American SWP began to advocate sending troops to Boston, the WSL today calls on British imperialism to intervene militarily in South Africa by dispatching arms to the black nationalist forces (Socialist Press 37, 41, 44). The illusion that British imperialism administered by a Labour government can be forced to aid the struggles of the black masses is not so far from endorsement of the Labour-Liberal coalition government’s proposals to send a “ peacekeeping force” to Rhodesia.

(b) The police — The NC majority has rejected the Marxist position on the question of the police. By refusing to oppose on principle the organisation of police for better pay and conditions and the admission of police “unions” into the TUC, the NC majority leaves the door open for future support to demands for “improved working conditions” for capital’s professional thugs and for supporting their “rights” to membership in the workers’ organisations. To the NC’s apparent hopes of being able to neutralise the police as part of the state we counterpose the most basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism — the necessity to smash the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie.

(c) The fascists — The equivocation of certain leading NC members over the question of Labour Council bans on fascist meetings betrays a similar mentality — that the state under the “control” of the Labour Party can be made to operate as something other than an organ of capitalist class rule.

(14) Programme first — The WSL is in chaos. It has no clear idea of its tasks or direction. The organisation struggles to maintain a weekly paper which is grossly out of proportion to the financial and human resources possessed. The numerical growth of the organisation, which is increasingly touted as the solution to all ills, shows no sign of materialising.

This situation has a political origin — to put it bluntly the movement as yet lacks any programmatic basis for existence as a distinct political tendency. Every political current from Trotskyism to reformism is represented on the NC and among the membership. For too long the leadership has tried to relegate the resolution of outstanding political questions to the background by promoting one scheme after another (the CDLM, the weekly press) each of which in turn was supposed to solve the political problems of the movement through spectacular breakthroughs in mass work. Today the leadership is still unable to address the manifest crisis of the movement with more than routine organisational measures — voluntaristic exhortations to the membership to work harder, to “follow through” interventions, sell more papers and recruit more raw contacts. All these are not enough; neither is it enough for the leadership to prate about “method” by which it means getting close to the mass movement of the working class, adopting a programmatically vague attitude of generalised hostility to the trade-union bureaucracy and showing more thoroughness in political work.

A disciplined combat party of professional revolutionaries can only be forged on the basis of agreement on programme. Conversely any political organisation which lacks a clear and coherent programme must inevitably take on the characteristics of a swamp. The primary reason that the leadership has not been able to create a politically hardened cadre nor even lay out a clear set of priorities for the organisation is that it is itself unclear and divided over key political questions. This is reflected in Socialist Press where virtually anything that is handed in gets printed and readers can frequently see counterposed political positions presented in different articles on the same question. Somehow, dealing with political questions or elaborating programmatic positions is always shoved to the bottom of the list of priorities. Consequently it is impossible for the leadership to give importance to the training of members in political struggle. Instead members must be exhorted by the leadership to hide from the political problems by throwing themselves into frenetic “mass” work without any perspectives, and sales of a newspaper without any clear line. It is no wonder the movement is in bad shape.

At this point in its history the WSL is at a crossroads. Only by a determined struggle for programme (and this means in the first place a determined struggle within the movement over political line) is it possible to make any progress at all in a revolutionary direction.

(15) The fetishisation of organisational forms — As a substitute for programme, and for the struggle for programme as the road to an international, there is a distinct tendency in the movement to pose as strategically crucial various specific organisational forms which are supposed to have some inherently revolutionary content, irrespective of the level of class struggle at which they are produced, or the leadership and programme which guide them. With neither a revolutionary programme nor the possibility of becoming real organisations of the masses, the “price committees”, “Councils of Action”, or whatever, which the WSL would agitate for today can be nothing better than a diversion in the course of the class struggle and can have nothing to do with the real organs of dual power that will be built in the coming turmoil of pre-revolutionary class struggle. Trotsky’s dissection of some ILP positions is appropriate. He starts by quoting their erroneous theses:

“…‘The workers’ councils will arise in their final form in the actual revolutionary crisis, but the party must consistently prepare for their organization’ [Trotsky’s italics]. Keeping this in mind, let us compare the attitude of the ILP toward the future councils with its own attitude toward the future International… ‘the form which the reconstructed International will take will depend upon historic events and the actual development of the working class struggle.’ On this ground the ILP draws the conclusion that the question of the International is purely ‘theoretical,’ i.e., in the language of empiricists, unreal….

“…The theses turn the actual tasks of the party upside down. The councils represent an organizational form, and only a form. There is no way of ‘preparing for’ councils except by means of a correct revolutionary policy applied in all spheres of the working class movement: there is no special, specific ‘preparation for’ councils. It is entirely otherwise with the International. While the councils can arise only on the condition that there is a revolutionary ferment among the many-millioned masses, the International is always necessary: both on holidays and weekdays, during periods of offensive as well as in retreat, in peace as well as in war. The International is not at all a ‘form,’ as flows from the utterly false formulation of the ILP. The International is first of all a program, and a system of strategic, tactical, and organisational methods that flow from it. By dint of historic circumstances the question of the British councils is deferred for an indeterminate period of time. But the question of the International, as well as the question of national parties, cannot be deferred for a single hour: we have here in essence two sides of one and the same question. Without a Marxist International, national organisations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation, and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism.”

Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36], 2nd edition, p 146-7

The re-creation of the Fourth International

(16) Party-building and the struggle against centrism — A revolutionary party capable of giving direct leadership to large numbers of workers is impossible without the existence of a firm cadre — a central core of professional revolutionaries at all levels of leadership in the party. Given the destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloism the concrete job that we have is the construction of such a cadre — the nucleus of a vanguard party — which must be trained through an all-round political conflict with hostile political tendencies, upholding the party’s reason for existence — the programme for power. The further development of theory and programme, indeed, comes out of this political struggle.

The approach of the WSL leadership directs the membership away from conflict with our immediate competitors of the centrist and revisionist groups and continually threatens the liquidation of our cadre through their chaotic and fraudulent “agitational” perspectives.

(a) Regroupment —Without a determined fight to politically destroy one’s opponents it is impossible to establish an organisation that is a real pole in the political life of the workers’ movement. In this struggle we will win individuals and groups from other tendencies to the revolutionary programme, resulting in splits among our enemies and crucial additions to our forces. It is always the case that a revolutionary organisation gathers cadre through winning leftward-moving tendencies in other political parties, in the fight for the Marxist programme.

Revolutionaries today, like the Left Oppositionists of the 30’s, will not assemble their initial forces primarily through a strategy of direct recruitment of trade-union militants whom we have been able to lead in struggle, but through a central emphasis on the struggle to win subjectively revolutionary elements in the workers’ movement through the power of our ideas, of our programme.

( b ) Priorities —No small organisation can perform all the possible tasks it faces, or work in all arenas open to it, so it must be through careful delineation of priorities that a responsible leadership develops perspectives appropriate to the organisation. As Cannon said:

“…the adoption of a correct political program…alone does not guarantee victory. …the group [must] decide correctly what shall be the nature of its activities, and what tasks it shall set itself, given the size and capacity of the group, the period of the development of the class struggle, the relation of forces in the political movement, and so on.”

The History of American Trotskyism, p 80

(17) Building an international tendency — Inevitably the planlessness and inconsistency of the WSL’s work in Britain is accompanied by a parochial and light-minded attitude to the central task of Trotskyists today: the re-creation of the Fourth International.

Unable to build an anti-revisionist, democratic centralist international tendency on the basis of a clear programmatic attitude to the basic tasks of revolutionaries in this epoch and the decisive issues of the class struggle internationally (opposition to popular frontism, defence of the deformed workers’ states, political struggle against nationalism and the necessity to re-create the Fourth International), the central leadership has led the WSL into a world of rotten blocs, cover-ups, diplomacy and intrigue — masquerading as the fight to “reconstruct” the Fourth International. The struggle for programme has been discounted in the WSL’s very limited international work.

(a) The WSL’s international relations — The WSL, the CIL [Greece] and the SL(DC) [US] are grouped together by a common past in the IC and a shared enthusiasm for liquidationist “mass work”. The fact that the CIL are Pabloites and the SL(DC) are lower-than-reformist wretches who stand in the tradition of one Albert Weisbord against Cannon and Trotsky has not in the least disturbed the tranquillity of this cozy non-aggression pact. There has been no serious accounting whatsoever of the programme and record of these organisations. The only work carried out abroad by the WSL, in Turkey, has in the past been characterised by a total lack of information or discussion with the WSL. The leadership document on the Turkish work shows it to be opportunist, adventurist, Bundist and in opposition to the leadership’s stated desire to build a democratic centralist international tendency.

(b) The United Secretariat — The current focus of the leadership’s international attentions is the Pabloite United Secretariat. Here in Britain a taste has been acquired for cozying up to the IMG , exemplified by the sweaty exertions to obtain its endorsement for the third CDLM conference.

While the present uneven and semi-conscious course towards unity with the United Secretariat runs counter to the WSL’s formally anti-Pabloite stance, in reality there is no good political reason why the leadership should not be able to find itself a home in the all-encompassing swamp which is the United Secretariat. The entire thrust of the document “The Poisoned Well” despite the promised amendments is to attempt to straighten out what the leadership sees as “methodological” weaknesses of the thoroughly reformist American SWP so as to better equip it for the fight against the centrist ex-International Majority Tendency wing. If agreement can be reached on the uncontentious theses at the end of the document, then the “reunification” (sic) discussions can begin. The EC of the WSL is taking the organisation down the road to liquidation into the United Secretariat.

Until the political line of the present document has been accepted and assimilated and the organisation redirected towards a correct revolutionary perspective, we strenuously oppose any intervention into the XIth World Congress of the United Secretariat. Similarly we call for a public break with the CIL and SL(DC) and a thorough public critique of their bankrupt positions.

In contrast to the air of urgency surrounding the reply to the IMG’s regroupment letter the EC took it upon itself to refuse point blank any discussion with the Pabloite ICL which is not part of the United Secretariat.

(c) The Spartacists — The international Spartacist tendency, the only organisation to reply to the document “Fourth International: Problems and Tasks”, has — more than a year-and-a-half later — not yet been accorded an answer. At the last WSL conference a now-buried amendment was passed, recognising the principled position of the Revolutionary Tendency (the predecessor of the Spartacist tendency) in the American SWP in the early sixties. In its fifteen years of independent existence since then the Spartacists have proved their seriousness and have, to our knowledge, committed no betrayals of principle. It is urgent that we seek to test out this anti-Pabloite tendency through a process of discussions, which must explore the possibilities for reaching programmatic agreement and moving towards fusion.

(18) The re-creation of the Fourth International — The re-creation of the Fourth International means the establishment of Trotskyism as the political tendency with unique authority in the international proletariat as therevolutionary alternative to the Social Democratic and Stalinist reformists.

The central obstacle to this is the United Secretariat, whose size, geographical spread and verbal “Trotskyism” give it a significance in the workers’ movement internationally which can only be done away with through its political defeat and organisational destruction. The Fourth International will be re-built not by making friendly overtures to the Pabloites, not by passing around them and not by ignoring them but only through implacable aggressive opposition to both wings of the United Secretariat.

Only a hardened Leninist cadre organisation, determined to fight for its programme “against the stream” will be capable of resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class by triumphing over the welter of treacherous centrist and reformist misleaders whose influence today constitutes the most important obstacle to proletarian revolution internationally. Those who capitulate to the Labourite illusions of the British working class; who yearn for “détente” with the Pabloite revisionists; who seek to subordinate questions of programme and principle to the petty organisational chicanery of the “mass method” will never be able to forge the nucleus of the future World Party of Socialist Revolution. We must set ourselves the task of building that party!

“Program first! ‘Mass paper’? Revolutionary action? Regroupment? Communes everywhere?… Very well, very well…. But program first! Your political passports, please, gentlemen! And not false ones, if you please — real ones! If you don’t have any, then pipe down!”

— Trotsky, The Crisis of the French Section [1935-36], p 119, ellipses in original

Alastair Green (Birmingham)

Joe Quigley (Manchester)

Alan Holford (Birmingham)

Jim Short (West London)

16 January 1978

— reprinted from [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin no 8, February 1978

  

originally posted online at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/203/indorp.html

Race — Social or Biological?

Race — Social or Biological?

by David Dreiser

Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No. 1, Winter 1960, pp.26-27.

Transcription: Daniel Gaido.

Mark up: Andrew Pollack for ETOL. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol21/no01/racesocbio.htm

Caste, Class & Race

by Oliver Cromwell Cox

Monthly Review Press, New York. 1959. 600 pp. $7.50.

This penetrating and scholarly work originally appeared in 1948 and it is a well-deserved recognition of the author and a happy occasion for students of race relations that a new edition has appeared.

Dr. Cox has come to grips with the most basic and difficult aspects of the question of racial discrimination, that is, its fundamental nature and origin. He deals with the subject analytically, historically, all with substantial success.

It is evident that he found very early the necessity for proper differentiation of race from other social divisions such as class, caste, estate and nationality. Since identity of race and caste as social relations is the dominant view in academic circles, Dr. Cox has made an independent treatment of caste based on Hindu and other Indian sources. Oddly, the chief proponents of the caste theory of race relations in American sociology, including Gunnar Myrdal, have eschewed any serious study of Indian caste relations.

There is an intimate connection between the theory that caste originated in a supposed racial antipathy between Aryan invaders and Dravidians in ancient India. In exploding this myth, Cox has contributed greatly to the proper understanding of caste as a peculiar social phenomenon in India, and also further to establish that race relations are a conjunctural aspect of history peculiar to capitalism and did not exist in the ancient world anywhere.

Cox treats race strictly as a social relation and not from the viewpoint of physical anthropology. As he points out, the same man may be recognized as a Negro in one country and as a white person in another and enter into race relations in both situations. The assumed races need not be biologically defined. It is enough that they have imputed physical differences which make them distinguishable.

He thus views anthropology as involving another subject with “no necessary relationship with the problem of race relations as sociological phenomena. Race relations developed independently of tests and measurements.” While true, it cannot be concluded so readily that anthropological tests and measurements developed independently of race relations. Cox might have done a great service to probe the extent to which “biological” classification has conformed with and depended on the world system of race relations.

Cox has traced the development of race relations from their origin in modern chattel slavery. This system was a commodity producing society that was an inevitable step in the birth and growth of industrial capitalism. Although reproducing the form of ancient slavery, it was by no means an anachronistic throwback. Slavery provided the accumulation of capital and raw materials necessary for the “industrial revolution.”

That the slave was physically distinguishable from the master was an historical accident born of the long previously established distribution of people of varying skin color over the globe, and the sudden development of military supremacy by Europeans enabling them to enslave. Long after the initial enslavement came the association of skin color with the status of the slave.

Out of this came a relation in which the inferiority of the slave was transferred to the person of color and the perpetuation of the relation after slavery no longer existed was based on skin color alone. Such constituted a race relation in the pure form. Thus a relation between people is racial if its conditions are determined primarily by recognized physical differences. The perpetuation of such a relation after the death of slavery became a vital element in the system of political control and economic exploitation by the American capitalist class.

Cox concludes that the primary need of race relations is subjugation for purposes of exploitation. The maintenance of the relation requires prohibition of intermarriage and other social intercourse. For this segregation is required and from a segregated and economically subject condition race prejudice flows. Prejudice is a by-product and by no means a cause of race relations. From this can be seen the fallacy of all theories of education against prejudice as an answer to the race problem. Cox has presented a valid theoretical basis for the conclusion in action of Negroes everywhere that it is segregation that must be fought first. Education of whites comes in the process or later.

Cox analyses other relations which involve intolerance, but in which the conditions differ. The primary demand that society makes of Jews is that they assimilate. Their religion and culture are designed to unite Jews in resisting assimilation. The Negro is in an opposite situation; he wants to assimilate, but is prevented from doing so although Negroes are among our oldest and most “Americanized” inhabitants.

Intermarriage between castes is generally proscribed as between races but with vital differences. Caste is an organized membership group and an individual may under special circumstances change caste. Offspring of an occasional inter-caste marriage may enter the higher caste. No one can change his race and an offspring of a Negro-white marriage is always a Negro unless indistinguishability permits passing.

Without making a specific reference to the Communist party, Cox rejects their former idea of a “forty-ninth state” or any form of national separatism as an aim of American Negroes. “Its social drive is toward assimilation” which would not just modify the conditions of race relations, but would eliminate the relation altogether. He sees an intimate connection between the Negro movement and the struggle of the working class at large against capitalism.

An Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Labour League and Other Marxists

An Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Labour League and Other Marxists

by Peter Fryer 11/14/59

[First posted online at http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Healy/Fryer.html ]

Dear Comrades,

The explanation given in The Newsletter for my resignation as editor was true as far as it went. But it did not say what had made me ill. Nor did it tell the members about the quite improper pressure that was put on me, through persons close to me, to try to compel me to return to a post that it had become impossible for me to fill. The methods used by the general secretary both before and after I left The Newsletter have nothing in common with Marxism, with socialist principles, or with the relationships that should prevail among comrades inside a revolutionary working-class organization. If persisted in, these methods can only hold back the growth of the Socialist Labour League and make it impossible to carry into effect the programme and policy adopted by the League’s inaugural conference … a programme and policy which I support in all essentials.

We who came into the Trotskyist movement from the Communist Party, hard on the heels of the experience of Hungary and our struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy in Britain, were assured that in the Trotskyist movement we would find a genuine communist movement, where democracy flourished, where dissenters were encouraged to express their dissent, and where relationships between comrades were in all respects better, more brother and more human than in the party we had come from. Instead we have found at the top of the Trotskyist movement, despite the sacrifices and hard work of the rank and file, a repetition of Communist Party methods of work, methods of leadership, and methods of dealing with persons who are not prepared to kotow to the superior wisdom of the “strong man”.

I personally joined the Trotskyist movement with many reservations, which were made quite clear verbally at the time of joining. The defects which I and others could see at the top of the movement we attributed to the exceptionally unfavourable conditions under which it had had to operate since it arose: above all, the persecution which we as Communist Party members bore some share of the responsibility for, even if we had not personally participated in it. We fully recognized that we, as ex-Stalinists, had much to learn from our new comrades. But we also felt – and we said so openly – that we had something to teach them as well. We were willing to learn. They, it appears, were not. They were not willing to slough off the ingrained sectarian suspicion of other people’s motives, the cynicism towards other comrades and other socialists, which has been and remains the biggest single obstacle to the healthy growth and development of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. They were not willing to allow working-class democracy to flourish inside the organization, but insisted on retaining, even during the brief period of rapid growth, a regime whereby effective authority lay in the hands of one man, to whom his colleagues and co-workers were not comrades to be consulted and discussed with but instruments to be used quite ruthlessly.

The outstanding feature of the present regime in the Socialist Labour League is that it is the rule of a clique – the general secretary’s personal clique – which will not allow the members to practise the democratic rights accorded to them on paper, and which pursues sectarian aims with scant regard to the real possibilities of the real world.

The ordinary members of the Socialist Labour League, who have joined because they want to build a revolutionary leadership as an alternative to Stalinist and social-democratic betrayals, should know how this clique operates, and how the general secretary maintains his control of it. His domination is secured by a series of unprincipled blocs with various leading members against various other leading members who happen to disagree with him on any given point at any given time. There is scarcely a single leading member of the League whom the general secretary has not attacked in private conversation with me at some time or other, in terms such as these: “I have enough on P to get him sent down for seven years.” “I don’t know what game P is playing. He could be a police agent.” “C is a bad little man who would put a knife into anyone.” “There will have to be a showdown, with B. He’s trying to take over. I come back to find he is appointing his own full-timers.” “B is a primitive Irish peasant.” “I don’t trust P. He is not a Marxist. He doesn’t accept dialectical materialism.” “S won’t stay in the movement long.” “G is a lunatic.” “A is quite mad. He beats his wife.” “S is completely useless. He has built nothing and never will build anything.” “F is a stupid kid.” “H is only out for personal prestige.” There is no principle whatever in the general secretary’s attitude to his comrades.(Thus when he discovered that the wife of one leading member was having an affair with another leading member he criticised the latter very strongly, was going to have him removed from his position, etc. A few months later, when he needed this comrade’s services very badly for a particular job, he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the resumption of the affair.)

That the ruling clique is an instrument of the general secretary is shown by the way it was elected. How many comrades know that the panel presented by the panel commission to the inaugural conference was first presented in toto by the general secretary to a meeting of the executive committee, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, then presented by the executive committee to the outgoing national committee, then presented by the national committee to the panel commission. MB’s job on the panel commission and at the conference was to make sure that the general secretary’s list was accepted. This accounts for the general secretary’s anger when B muffed the job and when it was suggested that to comply with the constitution the conference has only just passed a ballot vote should be taken. In the Communist Party we criticized the way the new executive was appointed by the old executive. In the Socialist Labour League the national committee and the executive committee alike are appointed by the general secretary.

After long reflection I have come to the conclusion that the way the Socialist Labour League was formed (I do not say its formation, which I supported and still support) was no less fundamentally undemocratic. That a turn of this magnitude should have been carried through without a national conference and without the production and discussion of documents was alien to all the Bolshevik traditions that the Marxist movement claims to uphold. It was unscientific as well as undemocratic. A number of quite different ideas has been canvassed at successive national committee meetings. The final form the new organization took was a panic reaction to the Birmingham expulsions and the hue and cry in the South London newspapers against the general secretary.

Over two years’ close work with the general secretary has convinced me beyond any doubt that he will permit no real criticism and no real differences of opinion within the organization. All the fine talk we heard two and a half years ago about the rights of minorities turns out to be so much eyewash when anyone who ventures to open his mouth is told he succumbing to “class pressures” – what a travesty of Marxism! – when critics are summoned to the executive and browbeaten into withdrawing their criticism, when critics are threatened, intimidated and expelled, when lies are told about them, when the details of their personal lives are ultilized, for blackmail and character assassination. Month after month I was assured by the general secretary and BB that the Nottingham branch was a “centre of degeneracy”, that it consisted very largely of “drug addicts” and that one of its members had “indoctrinated young girls into drug taking”. To my shame, I accepted the slanders without any enquiry. I now find that they are quite baseless. I was told that KC was being expelled for “inactivity”. I now find that during his period of “inactivity” this comrade was studying for a degree, and that his work included the writing of a dissertation on the Marxist theory of alienation which has earned him a first-class honours degree. This original contribution to the subject, of which our whole movement ought to be proud, is likely to be published. I was told as a fact, over and over again, that John Daniels was going to see Pablo in Cannes while on the Continent. I now find that JD never had any intention of seeing Pablo and that in fact Pablo was not in France during the relevant period. The general secretary now states that this was a rumour retailed to him by a child. Wherever there is a comrade with a critical attitude lie after lie is told to discredit that comrade. I was lied to too much in the Communist Party to take a favourable view of being lied to in the Socialist Labour League, in which there should be no place whatsoever for those methods.

The lack of democracy in the organization, with the general secretary going to any lengths to prevent a real confrontation of ideas, provides the soil in which panic methods of political leadership can take root and flourish. The members are educated not through the clash of ideas but through alarms, emergencies and crises. The past year has seen a succession of attempts to pull ourselves up by our own bootlaces. BB will rush into the office in the morning seized with some burning idea for a poster parade, a leaflet, a “special” or a last-minute change in The Newsletter, and all the slender resources of the organization have TO BE GEARED TO THE FULFILMENT OF HIS IDEAS. Now it is excellent to have “ideas men”; but surely the task of the general secretary is to canilize their energies into fruitful team work instead of letting then fly off at a tangent. We have been operating without continuity, without proper planning, without thought, without Marxist analysis of the actual state of affairs, and without honest examination of how far predictions and “perspectives” have in fact been borne out by events.

A few weeks ago the general secretary told no that JD now “doubts the whole of our economic analysis”. I find this is a gross exaggeration. JD’s point, and I agree with him, is that the slump has not developed in the way that we expected: ought we not therefore to bring our analysis up to date? To this I would add that the turn to open organization was predicated on the continuing growth of unemployment. But unemployment, for the time being at any rate, has ceased to grow. So ought we not, as Marxists and materialists, to be willing to look facts in the face to find out how far we were wrong and why? Failure to make a sober and frank assessment of our earlier forecasts is all of a piece with the general secretary’s constant braggadocio, his continual exaggeration of the movement’s achievements, and his consistent opposition to any scientific examination of those achievements and of its defects and shortcomings.

Panic methods of leadership are soon at their worst in the print-shop, whose administration is nothing short of a scandal. A large part of the London membership was transformed during the summer into a reservoir of voluntary labour for print-shop work. Some of these comrades wore working round the clock, some twice round the clock. The compositor, TB, works from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. or later and often till 1 a.m., six or seven days a week. The general secretary now holds in his own hands the posts of general secretary, international secretary, editor of The Newsletterand … print-shop manager. This extraordinary concentration of responsibility makes it impossible for any of those jobs, least of all the last one, to be done satisfactorily. The general secretary bitterly resists any delegation of authority in the print-shop. There is no proper planning or progressing of work there. Extravagant promises are made to customers. Intolerable pressure is put on comrades working full-time at the print-shop in an effort to fulfil these promises. Slave labour is always uneconomical in conjunction with machinery. MB had had three hours’ sleep a night for a week and was dog tired when, alone in the machine-room, he failed to check that a forme had been tightened and a week’s work crashed to the floor and was scattered and irretrievably lost.

In order to consolidate his domination, the general secretary refrains from taking a position of principle on various controversial questions, preferring to ride two horses as long as he can. This was seen on the question of the character of The Newsletter, where the issue was whether it was to be purely an industrial bulletin eschewing cinema and theatre reviews and other articles of cultural interest, as BB demanded in a speech which included the words “I am a Philistine”, or a workers’ newspaper which, while giving all the news of industrial battles, strove to broaden its readers’ horizons, as was Gramsci’s vision of a workers’ paper. The general secretary made a speech at the national committee which gave a sop to B and a sop to me on this question and avoided the issue of principle. He has done the same thing on many occasions, coming down simultaneously on both sides of the fence wherever it was inexpedient to challenge the Philistinism and the simplist and primitivist conceptions of Marxism that are rife inside the organization. This conflicts glaringly with the general secretary’s professed regard for “theory”, “principle”, and “the books”.

The denial of democracy to members of the organization is summed up by the general secretary himself in two phrases he has employed recently: “I am the party” and – in answer to the question “How do you see socialism?” – “I don’t care what happens after we take power. All I am interested in is the movement”. Politically this is revisionism, all too clearly reminiscent of Bernstein’s “the movement is everything the goal nothing”. Philosophically it is solipsism: if the movement is everything and “I am the movement”, then “the world is my world” – and “I” inhabit a fantasy world less and less connected with the real world. It is just such a fantasy world that the general secretary inhabits, in which “we” can “watch ports” (to stop me leaving the country!) and be “absolutely ruthless” to the point of carrying out “killings” (as the general secretary declared to PMcG) – when “we” have in cold fact fewer than 400 members.

It will be asked why I did not speak out about those things earlier and conduct a fight about them on the leading committees. A person with a different temperament might have done, though I doubt whether he would have got very far. But I have never seen myself as a politician or as a leader, and I certainly lack the ability to contend against the “strongmen” who have moulded the Socialist Labour League into what they want it to be. Moreover I did not care to admit to myself that the organization I had joined in the belief that it was very different from the Communist Party in fact shared many of the latter’s worst features. Ever since the end of 1957 I have fought a long battle within myself, trying to blind myself to what I saw going on around me, trying to excuse it, above all trying not to see the pattern running through a whole series of events and incidents. Considerable pressure was put on me to attend meetings of the executive committee. When I did so I found it merely a sounding board for the general secretary, packed with his own nominees who not merely never raised their voices against him but in some cases never raised their voices at all.

I tried to do The Newsletter and Labour Review jobs as well as I could; and I wrote The Battle for Socialism in the hope that the remarks there about leadership would become true as the League expanded; but it became less and less possible to do my work adequately without waging war on the sectarianism and lack of democracy, inefficiency and mismanagement, squabbling and capriciousness. I heard HO told that she was sacked – and then bullied by the general secretary until she wept. I heard the general secretary and BP come near to blows as each uttered throats of violence and vengeance. I saw the general secretary take off his coat and fling it to the ground in fits of rage that invariably hindered any constructive solution of a particular problem and so did harm to the movement. I used to ask myself what I was doing to be caught up in such a situation. Several times I offered my resignation, even begging to be released from the job, but it was made abundantly clear that my resignation would never be accepted. Last February, after one especially irrational tantrum of the general secretary’s, I walked out. I went back because I wanted to serve the working class in struggle. But precisely the same attitude to human beings that in the end produced the Hungarian revolution was rampant at the top of the Socialist Labour League. I dreaded the thought that comrades would say I had let the movement down if I left, and this dread expressed itself in bad dreams and a lasting mood of depression.

A different type of person night have reacted differently. But I had the Rajk trial, the massacre of Magyarovar and the whole Hungarian tragedy behind me. Since Hungary I had devoted my energies to a struggle against Stalinism. I lacked the inner resources for a new, long and probably bitter fight to put things right in the movement to which I had given my energies without stint. Finally I wrote a letter to the general secretary telling him in the plainest possible terms that I could carry on no longer. He met me the same evening and refused to accept my resignation. I told him I felt I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. But he refused to contemplate the possibility of my leaving the job. Next day I saw the paper through the press. The day after that I walked the streets sick with worry and anguish. I decided that the only way to convince the general secretary that it was impossible for me to continue to work with him, that his methods, his approach and his attitude to people sickened me, disgusted me, and filled me with dread for the success of our movement, was to go where he could not reach me, have a long period of rest and reflection, and devote myself to some other kind of work altogether. So I went away.

If leading comrades’ efforts were devoted to finding me, I’m sorry they were made to waste their time. It is strange that the day after the general secretary wrote to me at my mother’s house in Yorkshire saying no one was pursuing me – there would be no calls, no visits, no molestations – CS arrived at 11 p.m. looking for me. According to CS’s later account to JD, the general secretary himself was with him in the car!

The general secretary threatened JF on the telephone – he would have her expelled; he would seek me out and “destroy” me wherever I was; she had “destroyed” me; etc. etc. – when she refused to disclose my whereabouts. Then MG visited her and told her a whole string of lies, including the allegation that I had written letters derogatory to her (no such letters exist); that PMcG (with whom I am living) had given BP details of our physical relationship, when they met on a poster parade the previous Sunday; and PMcG was an OGPU agent who had shanghaied me out of the country. He told her that if they did not hear from me within seven days The Newsletter would carry a banner headline: “Where is Peter Fryer? – Has the OGPU got him?” I do not think that this kind of thing has anything to do with socialism. What right has the general secretary or MG to utilize their knowledge of people’s private lives in this shameful way? In order to protect myself against these methods I caused solicitor’s letters to be sent to MG and the general secretary warning them not to interfere with me or JF any more, nor to spread false statements about me. I have no apologies to make to anyone for seeking this measure of protection against blackmail and political gangsterism.

It is up to the members of the Socialist Labour League who believe in the principles they profess – and I think these are the majority – to put things right. The removal of the general secretary and the establishment of a collective leadership which trusts the members and is trusted by them, the establishment of mutual confidence among members and a spirit of socialist brotherhood in place of suspicion, lies, bullying and blackmail: these are what is needed, in my opinion, if the League is to do the job it was founded to do.

September 19, 1959

POSTCRIPT. After writing the above I decided not to circulate it for the time being because I did not want to bring a personal complaint forward if it could be avoided. I thought then – and I still think – that comrades’ attention should be concentrated on abuses such as the Nottingham case and the attempt forcibly to enter the Knights’ house at 12.30 a.m. in the morning. Two circumstances have made me change my mind: (a) Many comrades are puzzled by my silence and want to hear my case and some think I have treated the members with contempt; (b) Peter Cadogan has been expelled on a formal point. To me the expulsion of Cadogan means that I could no longer remain a member of the Socialist Labour League. I am therefore putting out this personal statement, together with a few points in reply to the executive committee statement in The Newsletter of November 14.

This statement is wrong when it says that I “was charged with the main drafting of the present constitution”. In fact Brian Behan did it. The statement also suggests that I am in agreement with Peter Cadogan, where it says my “sympathies extend to” him. This is not the case. I have many disagreements with Peter Cadogan. But I regard his expulsion as a blow at the right of every member to discuss freely and to have full access to the information necessary for free discussion and intelligent decision-making. This right is not only a requirement of democracy in a working-class organization; it is also a requirement of any scientific consideration of events. The expulsion of Peter Cadogan is a nodal point in the development of the Socialist Labour League. From now on all honest comrades who went through the experience of the Communist Party crisis must repudiate this organization. It has gone wrong. The lessons of the recent past are too fresh in our memory to allow us to blind ourselves to the truth or to fail to take the necessary action. To those comrades who still feel as I did in the last paragraph I wrote on September 19 I say “Good luck”. But events since that time have made it clear to me that the reformation of the Socialist Labour League from within is no longer possible.

The offer in the last paragraph of the executive committee statement is disingenuous. With Healy as general secretary, the cards are stacked against anyone who wants to take “every opportunity to present their opinions to the membership in person and in writing”. Healy told Cadogan in September: “I am determined to have you out now.” This is the answer to those latest protestations and promises.

Those who are treating the membership with contempt are those who behind the scenes do exactly what they like to critics and dissenters, and in public make pious pronouncements about “the fullest possible discussion”.

November 14, 1959

PPS. Three other things occur to me. Comrades should know:

(a) As far as the libel action pending against me is concerned, Healy’s suggestion that my refusal to meet him is prejudicial to the conduct of the case is wholly false. I have every intention of fighting the case; all the parties are represented by the same lawyer; and if Healy has any problems about it all he has to do is go and see the solicitor in question.

(b) I myself took the initiative in having legal ownership of The Newsletter properly handed over to the nominee of the Socialist Labour League.

(c) On Friday, I received a letter from Ray Nash of the News Chronicle offering me “the usual rates” for an 800-word feature article on my differences with the Socialist Labour League. Needless to say, I tore the letter up.

The Russian Revolution & the American Negro Movement

The Russian Revolution & the American Negro Movement

by James P. Cannon

[Originally printed in International Socialist Review, Summer 1959. Originally posted online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1959/black.htm ]

All through the first 10 years of American communism, the party was preoccupied with the Negro question, and gradually arrived at a policy different and superior to that of traditional American radicalism. Yet in my published recollections of this period, the Negro question does not appear anywhere as the subject of internal controversy between the major factions. The reason for this was that none of the American leaders came up with any new ideas on this explosive problem on their own account; and none of the factions, as such, sponsored any of the changes in approach, attitude and policy which were gradually effected by the time the party finished its first decade.

The main discussions on the Negro question took place in Moscow, and the new approach to the problem was elaborated there. As early as the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, “The Negroes in America” was a point on the agenda, and a preliminary discussion of the question took place. Historical research will prove conclusively that CP policy on the Negro question got its initial impulse from Moscow, and also that all further elaborations of this policy, up to and including the adoption of the “self-determination” slogan in 1928 came from Moscow.

Under constant prodding and pressure from the Russians in the Comintern, the party made a beginning with Negro work in its first 10 years; but it recruited very few Negroes and its influence in the Negro community didn’t amount to much. From this it is easy to draw the pragmatic conclusion that all the talk and bother about policy in that decade, from New York to Moscow, was much ado about nothing, and that the results of Russian intervention were completely negative.

That is, perhaps, the conventional assessment in these days of the Cold War when aversion to all things Russian is the conventional substitute for considered opinion. But it is not true history—not by a long shot. The first 10 years of American communism are too short a period for definitive judgment of the results of the new approach to the Negro question imposed on the American party by the Comintern.

Historical treatment of Communist Party policy and action on the Negro question, and of Russian influence in shaping it in the first 10 years of the party’s existence, however exhaustive and detailed, cannot be adequate unless the inquiry is projected into the next decade. It took the first 10 years for the young party to get fairly started in this previously unexplored field. The spectacular achievements in the ’30s cannot he understood without reference to this earlier decade of change and reorientation. That’s where the later actions and results came from.

I I I

A serious analysis of the whole complex process has to begin with recognition that the American communists in the early ’20s, like all other radical organisations of that and earlier times, had nothing to start with on the Negro question but an inadequate theory, a false or indifferent attitude and the adherence of a few individual Negroes of radical or revolutionary bent.

The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognised any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.

The best of the earlier socialists were represented by Debs, who was friendly to all races and purely free from prejudice. But the limitedness of the great agitator’s view on this far from simple problem was expressed in his statement: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of colour—the whole working class of the whole world.” (Ray Ginger: The Bending Cross) That was considered a very advanced position at the time, but it made no provision for active support of the Negro’s special claim for a little equality here and now, or in the foreseeable future, on the road to socialism.

And even Debs, with his general formula that missed the main point—the burning issue of ever-present discrimination against the Negroes every way they turned—was far superior in this regard, as in all others, to Victor Berger, who was an outspoken white supremacist. Here is a summary pronouncement from a Berger editorial in his Milwaukee paper, the Social Democratic Herald: “There can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race.” That was “Milwaukee socialism” on the Negro question, as expounded by its ignorant and impudent leader-boss. A harried and hounded Negro couldn’t mix that very well with his Milwaukee beer, even if he had a nickel and could find a white man’s saloon where he could drink a glass of beer—at the back end of the bar.

Berger’s undisguised chauvinism was never the official position of the party. There were other socialists, like William English Walling who was an advocate of equal rights for the Negroes, and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1909. But such individuals were a small minority among the socialists and radicals before the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

The inadequacy of traditional socialist policy on the Negro question is amply documented by the historians of the movement, Ira Kipnis and David Shannon. The general and prevailing attitude of the Socialist Party toward the Negroes is summed up by Shannon as follows:

“They were not important in the party, the party made no special effort to attract Negro members, and the party was generally disinterested in, if not actually hostile to, the effort of Negroes to improve their position in American capitalist society.” And further: “The party held that the sole salvation of the Negro was the same as the sole salvation of the white: ‘Socialism’.”

In the meantime, nothing could be done about the Negro question as such, and the less said about it the better. Sweep it under the rug.

Such was the traditional position inherited by the early Communist Party from the preceding socialist movement out of which it had come. The policy and practice of the trade union movement was even worse. The IWW barred nobody from membership because of “race, colour or creed”. But the predominant AFL unions, with only a few exceptions, were lily-white job trusts. They also had nothing special to offer the Negroes; nothing at all, in fact.

I I I

The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the ’20s and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it.

The true importance of this profound change, in all its dimensions, cannot be adequately measured by the results in the ’20s. The first 10 years have to be considered chiefly as the preliminary period of reconsideration and discussion and change of attitude and policy on the Negro question—in preparation for future activity in this field.

The effects of this change and preparation in the ’20s, brought about by the Russian intervention, were to manifest themselves explosively in the next decade. The ripely favourable conditions for radical agitation and organisation among the Negroes, produced by the Great Depression, found the Communist Party ready to move in this field as no other radical organisation in this country had ever done before.

I I I

Everything new and progressive on the Negro question came from Moscow, after the revolution of 1917, and as a result of the revolution—not only for the American communists who responded directly, but for all others concerned with the question.

By themselves, the American communists never thought of anything new or different from the traditional position of American radicalism on the Negro question. That, as the above quotations from Kipnis’ and Shannon’s histories show, was pretty weak in theory and still weaker in practice. The simplistic formula that the Negro problem was merely economic, a part of the capital-labour problem, never struck fire among the Negroes—who knew better even if they didn’t say so; they had to live with brutal discrimination every day and every hour.

There was nothing subtle or concealed about this discrimination. Everybody knew that the Negro was getting the worst of it at every turn, but hardly anybody cared about it or wanted to do anything to try to moderate or change it. The 90% white majority of American society, including its working-class sector, North as well as South, was saturated with prejudice against the Negro; and the socialist movement reflected this prejudice to a considerable extent—even though, in deference to the ideal of human brotherhood, the socialist attitude was muted and took the form of evasion. The old theory of American radicalism turned out in practice to be a formula for inaction on the Negro front, and—incidentally—a convenient shield for the dormant racial prejudices of the white radicals themselves.

The Russian intervention changed all that, and changed it drastically, and for the better. Even before the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distinguished from all other tendencies in the international socialist and labour movement by their concern with the problems of oppressed nations and national minorities, and affirmative support of their struggles for freedom, independence and the right of self-determination. The Bolsheviks gave this support to all “people without equal rights” sincerely and earnestly, but there was nothing “philanthropic” about it. They also recognised the great revolutionary potential in the situation of oppressed peoples and nations, and saw them as important allies of the international working class in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism.

After November 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.

It took time for the Americans, raised in a different tradition, to assimilate the new Leninist doctrine. But the Russians followed up year after year, piling up the arguments and increasing the pressure on the American communists until they finally learned and changed, and went to work in earnest. And the change in the attitude of the American communists, gradually effected in the ’20s, was to exert a profound influence in far wider circles in the later years.

I I I

The Communist Party’s break with the traditional position of American radicalism on the Negro question coincided with profound changes which had been taking place among the Negroes themselves. The large-scale migration from the agricultural regions of the South to the industrial centres of the North was greatly accelerated during the First World War, and continued in the succeeding years. This brought some improvement in their conditions of life over what they had known in the Deep South, but not enough to compensate for the disappointment of being herded into ghettoes and still subjected to discrimination on every side.

The Negro movement, such as it was at the time, patriotically supported the First World War “to make the world safe for democracy”; and 400,000 Negroes served in the armed forces. They came home looking for a little democratic payoff for themselves, but couldn’t find much anywhere. Their new spirit of self-assertion was answered by a mounting score of lynchings and a string of race riots across the country, North as well as South.

All this taken together—the hopes and the disappointments, the new spirit of self-assertion and the savage reprisals—contributed to the emergence of a new Negro movement in the making. Breaking sharply with the Booker T. Washington tradition of accommodation to a position of inferiority in a white man’s world, a new generation of Negroes began to press their demand for equality.

I I I

What the emerging new movement of the American Negroes—a 10% minority—needed most, and lacked almost entirely, was effective support in the white community in general and in the labour movement, its necessary ally, in particular. The Communist Party, aggressively championing the cause of the Negroes and calling for an alliance of the Negro people and the militant labour movement, came into the new situation as a catalytic agent at the right time.

It was the Communist Party, and no other, that made the Herndon and Scottsboro cases national and worldwide issues and put the Dixiecrat legal-lynch mobs on the defensive—for the first time since the collapse of Reconstruction. Party activists led the fights and demonstrations to gain fair consideration for unemployed Negroes at the relief offices, and to put the furniture of evicted Negroes back into their empty apartments. It was the Communist Party that demonstratively nominated a Negro for Vice-President in 1932—something no other radical or socialist party had ever thought about doing.

By such and similar actions and agitation in the ’30s, the party shook up all more or less liberal and progressive circles of the white majority, and began to bring about a radical change of attitude on the Negro question. At the same time, the party became a real factor among the Negroes, and the Negroes themselves advanced in status and self-confidence—partly as a result of the Communist Party’s aggressive agitation on the issue.

The facts are not disposed of by saying: The communists had their own axe to grind. All agitation for Negro rights is grist to the mill of the Negro movement; and the agitation of the communists was more energetic and more effective than any other at that time—by far.

These new developments appear to contain a contradictory twist which, as far as I know, has never been confronted or explained. The expansion of communist influence in the Negro movement in the ’30s happened despite the fact thatone of the new slogans imposed on the party by the Comintern—the slogan of “self-determination”—about which the most to-do was made and the most theses and resolutions were written, and which was even touted as the main slogan, never seemed to fit the actual situation. The slogan of “self-determination” found little or no acceptance in the Negro community after the collapse of the separatist movement led by Garvey. Their trend was mainly toward integration, with equal rights.

In practice the CP jumped over this contradiction. When the party adopted the slogan of “self-determination”, it did not drop its aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front. On the contrary, it intensified and extended this agitation. That’s what the Negroes wanted to hear, and that’s what made the difference. It was the CP’s agitation and action under the latter slogan that brought the results, without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular “self-determination” slogan and all the theses written to justify it.

I I I

The communists turned Stalinists, in the “Third Period” of ultra-radicalism, carried out their activity in the Negro field with all the crooked demagogy, exaggerations and distortions which are peculiar to them and inseparable from them. But in spite of that the main appeal to equal rights came through and found an echo in the Negro community. For the first time since the abolitionists, the Negroes saw an aggressive, militant dynamic group of white people championing their cause. Not a few philanthropists and pallid liberals this time, but the hard-driving Stalinists of the ’30s, at the head of a big, upsurging radical movement generated by the depression. There was power in their drive in those days, and it was felt in many areas of American life.

The first response of many Negroes was favourable; and the party’s reputation as a revolutionary organisation identified with the Soviet Union, was probably more a help than a hindrance. The Negro upper crust, seeking respectability, tended to shy away from anything radical; but the rank and file, the poorest of the poor who had nothing to lose, were not afraid. The party recruited thousands of Negro members in the ’30s and became, for a time, a real force in the Negro community. The compelling reason was their policy on the issue of equal rights and their generalattitude, which they had learned from the Russians, and their activity on the new line.

I I I

In the ’30s, Communist Party influence and action were not restricted to the issue of “civil rights” in general. They also operated powerfully to reshape the labour movement and help the Negro workers gain a place in it which had previously been denied. The Negro workers themselves, who had done their share in the great struggles to create the new unions, were pressing their own claims more aggressively than ever before. But they needed help, they needed allies.

The Communist Party militants stepped into this role at the critical point in the formative days of the new unions. The policy and agitation of the Communist Party at that time did more, 10 times over, than any other to help the Negro workers to rise to a new status of at least semi-citizenship in the new labour movement created in the ’30s under the banner of the CIO.

I I I

It is customary to attribute the progress of the Negro movement, and the shift of public opinion in favour of its claims, to the changes brought about by the First World War. But the biggest thing that came out of the First World War, the event that changed everything, including the prospects of the American Negro, was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labour, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement.

It adds something, but not much, to say that the Socialist Party, the liberals and the more or less progressive labour leaders went along with the new definition, and gave some support to the claims of the Negroes. That’s just what they did; they went along. They had no independent, worked-out theory and policy of their own; where would they get it—out of their own heads? Hardly. They all followed in the wake of the CP on this question in the ’30s.

The Trotskyists, and other dissident radical groups—who also had learned from the Russians—contributed what they could to the fight for Negro rights; but the Stalinists, dominating the radical movement, dominated in the Negro field too.

I I

Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the Earth. This thunder is still rolling, louder than ever, as the daily headlines testify.

The American communists responded first, and most emphatically, to the new doctrine from Russia. But the Negro people, and substantial sections of American white society, responded indirectly, and are still responding—whether they recognise it or not.

The present official leaders of the “civil rights” movement of the American Negroes, more than a little surprised at its expanding militancy, and the support it is getting in the white population of the country, scarcely suspect how much the upsurging movement owes to the Russian Revolution which they all patriotically disavow.

The Reverend Martin Luther King did remark, at the time of the Montgomery boycott battle, that their movement was part of the worldwide struggle of the coloured peoples for independence and equality. He should have added that the colonial revolutions, which are indeed a powerful ally of the Negro movement in America, got their starting impulse from the Russian Revolution—and are stimulated and strengthened from day to day by the continuing existence of this revolution in the shape of the Soviet Union and the new China, which white imperialism suddenly “lost”.

Indirectly, but all the more convincingly, the most rabid anti-sovieteers, among them the liberal politicians and the official labour leaders, testify to this when they say: The Little Rock scandal and things like that shouldn’t happen because it helps communist propaganda among the dark-skinned colonial people. Their fear of “communist propaganda”, like some other people’s fear of the Lord, makes them virtuous.

It is now conventional for labour leaders and liberals—in the North—to sympathise with the Negro struggle for a few elementary rights as human beings. It is the Right Thing To Do, the mark of civilised intelligence. Even the ex-radicals, turned into anti-communist “liberals” of a sort—a very poor sort—are all now pridefully “correct” in their formal support of “civil rights” and their opposition to Negro segregation and other forms of discrimination. But how did they all get that way?

It never occurs to the present-day liberals to wonder why their counterparts of a previous generation—with a few notable individual exceptions—never thought of this new and more enlightened attitude toward the Negroes before Lenin and the Russian Revolution upset the apple cart of the old, well-established and complacently accepted separate-but-unequal doctrine. The American anti-communist liberals and labour officials don’t know it, but some of the Russian influence they hate and fear so much even rubbed off on them.

I I I

Of course, as everybody knows, the American Stalinists eventually fouled up the Negro question, as they fouled up every other question. They sold out the struggle for Negro rights during the Second World War, in the service of Stalin’s foreign policy—as they sold out striking American workers, and rooted for the prosecution in the first Smith Act trial of the Trotskyists at Minneapolis in 1941, for the same basic reason.

Everybody knows that now. The chickens finally came home to roost, and the Stalinists themselves have felt impelled to make public confessions of some of their treachery and some of their shame. But nothing, neither professed repentance for crimes that can’t be concealed, nor boasts of former virtues that others are unwilling to remember, seem to do them any good. The Communist Party, or rather what is left of it, is so discredited and despised that it gets little or no recognition and credit today for its work in the Negro field in those earlier days—when it had far-reaching and, in the main, progressive consequences.

It is not my duty or my purpose to help them out. The sole aim of this condensed review is to set straight a few facts about the early days of American communism—for the benefit of inquiring students of a new generation who want to know the whole truth, however the chips may fall, and to learn something from it.

The new policy on the Negro question, learned from the Russians in the first 10 years of American communism, enabled the Communist Party in the ’30s to advance the cause of the Negro people; and to expand its own influence among them on a scale never approached by any radical movement before that time. These are facts of history; not only of the history of American communism, but of the history of the Negro struggle for emancipation too.

I I I

For those who look to the future these facts are important; an anticipation of things to come. By their militant activity in earlier years, the Stalinists gave a great impetus to the new Negro movement. Then, their betrayal of the Negro cause in the Second World War cleared the way for the inch-at-a-time gradualists who have been leading the movement unchallenged ever since.

The policy of gradualism, of promising to free the Negro within the framework of the social system that subordinates and degrades him, is not working out. It does not go to the root of the problem. The aspirations of the Negro people are great and so are the energies and emotions expended in their struggle. But the concrete gains of their struggle up to date are pitifully meagre. They have gained a few inches, but the goal of real equality is miles and miles away.

The right to occupy a vacant seat on a bus; the token integration of a handful of Negro children in a few public schools; a few places open for individual Negroes in public office and some professions; fair employment rights on the books, but not in practice; the formally and legally recognised right to equality which is denied in practice at every turn—that’s the way it is today, 96 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

There has been a big change in the outlook and demands of the Negroes’ movement since the days of Booker T. Washington, but no fundamental change in their actual situation. This contradiction is building up to another explosion and another change of policy and leadership. In the next stage of its development, the American Negro movement will be compelled to turn to a more militant policy than gradualism, and to look for more reliable allies than capitalist politicians in the North who are themselves allied with the Dixiecrats of the South. The Negroes, more than any others in this country, have reason and right to be revolutionary.

An honest workers’ party of the new generation will recognise this revolutionary potential of the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labour movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system.

Reforms and concessions, far more important and significant than any yet attained, will be by-products of this revolutionary alliance. They will be fought for and attained at every stage of the struggle. But the new movement will not stop with reforms, nor be satisfied with concessions. The movement of the Negro people and the movement of militant labour, united and coordinated by a revolutionary party, will solve the Negro problem in the only way it can be solved—by a social revolution.

The first efforts of the Communist Party along these lines a generation ago will be recognised and appropriated. Not even the experience of the Stalinist betrayal will be wasted. The memory of this betrayal will be one of the reasons why the Stalinists will not be the leaders next time.

Girl, 17, Dies of Abortion

Where Does the Guilt Really Lie?

by Judy Mage

[First printed in The Young Socialist, Vol.1 #5, February 1958]

“Girl, 17, Found Dead: Victim of Bungled Abortion.”  So read the headlines in the New York papers one chilly evening this past December. Reading further we could learn more of the grim, typical story: the unwanted pregnancy, the helpful boyfriend, the “surgeon”—in this case a hat-check girl—the operation on the floor of a hotel room, death within the half hour, a secret burial in a trash-filled grave; and then, discovery, and the charges of manslaughter.

Yes, another tragedy, another victim—of what? Of a “bungled abortion,” of a hat-check girl operating on a dirty floor with crude instruments? Or rather, another victim of that law which illegalizes this operation, transforming what could be relatively safe and minor surgery if performed under strict antiseptic conditions by a trained physician, into a dangerous, often crippling, and sometimes fatal affair.

HOW MANY VICTIMS?

How dangerous? Experts estimate that from 100 to 150 women and girls die each week in the United States as a direct result of “criminal” abortions. Estimates of the total number of illegal abortions which occur in this country each year vary from the conservative approximation of 330,000—about 1,000 daily—to as high as two million.

It is of course the poorer women and girls who are the chief victims of the “kitchen” abortion, also known medically as the “suicide abortion.” Those with more money to spend are much more apt to find a “real” doctor who can supplement his income considerably in return for undergoing a certain risk. Going prices, according to a study made two years ago, ranged from $250, a low average for physicians, up to $400, $600, and well over $1,000.

Particularly shocking to anyone who does any research in this subject, is the discovery that between eighty and ninety per cent of the illegal abortions are performed, not on wild-eyed, delinquent teenagers (or even on nice, naive teenagers, as the 17-year-old described above), but on married women, most of whom are already mothers. In addition, some researchers estimate that half the criminal abortions are performed on women who aren’t even pregnant.

What is the solution? There are some countries which have advanced to the point of permitting abortions on other than “therapeutic” grounds. In Denmark, Austria, Cuba, Switzerland, the Soviet Union (after a throwback of 20 years), Sweden, Japan, and a few other countries, legal grounds include economic, psychiatric, eugenic and other social factors.

In the United States, opponents of any “softening” of the abortion laws summon up a number of arguments ,but there are two which stand out above the rest. The first is maintained in particular by the Catholic Church, which argues that since an embryo is a “living person” it would be a sin to take its life. One might question the consistency of this pure-minded organization which stood by quietly while unbaptized embryos were destroyed at great quantities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and which has justified and continues to justify the murder, in big and little wars, of hundreds and thousands of “living persons” who happen to be outside the womb.

GUARDIANS OF MORALITY

The other argument, also advanced by the Church but by many others as well, concerns the torrent of promiscuity, especially among youth, which would presumably result if the fear of pregnancy were removed as a deterrent. But by what right do these people declare themselves the arbiters of what is right and wrong? Who elected them? Why not let young people decide for themselves what their standards of sexual morality should be, rather than impose someone else’s standards upon them?

It is true that legalizing abortion is not the complete answer. Even more important is the encouragement of a form of “preventive medicine’; i.e., birth control. Although disseminating birth control information is not illegal in most of the U. S., the major agency in this field, Planned Parenthood, finds its greatest organized barrier, again, in the Catholic Church.

However there is another important factor hampering the success of widespread birth control, and that is the absence of any really simple, cheap, and effective contraceptive.

The search still goes on for what is popularly called “The Pill;” a substance taken by mouth that would be both safe and reliable in preventing conception. Planned Parenthood maintains a research program, but the amount devoted to it is extremely small. As one woman involved in this research put it: “We could have the answer within ten years. What we need is a Manhattan Project—a crash program!”

But there is no crash program —and in the absence of adequate birth control information and guidance, in the absence of humane and realistic abortion laws, 17-year-old girls and 35-year-old mothers will continue to fall victim to the “bunglers” knife.

Lenin jako filozof

Peter Fryer
„Lenin jako filozof”

Z „Labour Review”, pisma Socialist Labour League w Wielkiej Brytanii, wrzesień-październik 1957

W pierwszym numerze The New Reasoner’a znajduje się artykuł dyskusyjny autorstwa E.P. Thompsona pod tytułem „Socjalistyczny humanizm: list do filistrów”. Jedna z sekcji tego artykułu, pod tytułem „Kwestie teorii”[1], zawiera odniesienie do filozoficznego dzieła Lenina „Materializm a empiriokrytycyzm”. Autor dąży do pokazania, że kilka cech charakterystycznych ideologii stalinowskiej mają korzenie we wkładzie Lenina do filozofii marksistowskiej- że mogą zostać prześledzone do „niejednoznaczności w myśli Marksa i, tym bardziej, mechanistycznych błędach w pismach Lenina”, przy czym owe „błędy” są spowodowane przez „jego troskę o pierwszą przesłankę materializmu.” Lenin jest oskarżony w szczególności o posiadanie „pasywnej”, „automatycznej” teorii wiedzy, o zagubienie pojęcia ludzkiego działania w groteskowym” „determinizmie”, o przemianę marksistowskiego poglądu na stosunek wolności i konieczności w teorię, zgodnie z którą ludzka „”wolność” staje się niewolą wobec „konieczności””, i o bycie tak „zaabsorbowanym filozoficznymi niuansami”, że „przeniósł przyczynę zmiany społecznej z działania człowieka do działania ekonomicznej konieczności.” Atak Thompsona podsumowany zostaje w tych słowach: „Natchnionemu geniuszowi politycznemu Lenina nie dorównał geniusz na polu filozofii.”

Continue lendo

Don Harris and His Epoch

Don Harris and His Epoch

By Tim Wohlforth

[First published in Left Wing Bulletin, April 1957, Vol. 1 #2, published by the Left Wing Caucus of the Young Socialist League. The Caucus opposed Max Shachtman’s plan to liquidate his organization and it’s youth group into Cold War Social Democracy]

Menshevism is something more than a particular evaluation of the Russian Revolution. It involves a whole approach to Marxism and with it a whole method of analysis and thought about politics and history which is the antithesis of the dialectical method, the mainspring of Marxism.

Here I do, not intend to dwell on the pros and cons of the Menshevik theory of the Russian Revolution whether as expounded by a Martov or by a Plekhanov or a Dan. Instead I wish to focus on Menshevik methodology. The basis of all Menshevik thinking is certain static conception of Marxism, not as a dialectical interrelation of many factors developing, at different tempos and each in turn influencing the development of the others, but rather a view of history as a series of necessary and absolute stages applicable to all places and all times. Thus the Menshevlks In Russia insisted that Russia must go through all the stages of development In the same general way as did the German social democracy.

This general view Trotsky exploded with his general law of combined and uneven developmen (see the JanuaryLabour Review for an excellent treatment of this) and the specific application of this law to underdeveloped countries in our epoch, the theory of permanent revolution. This general view wasbased on the supposition that stages are sometimes skipped and that the working class in one country never has to repeat in exactly the same way the stages gone through by the working class of another country. The working class can take advantage of the lessons of the class struggle in other countries, just as the capitalist class in, say, Japan can take advantage of the techniques of modern capitalist development so as to race through a whole stage in Its development.

However there is a second and highly significant element in Menshevik thought. This element Is in fact the most basic of all. It is that in any given historical period the Menshevik discovers one reason or another why the working class cannot carry out its tasks and why we must support other and alien class forces (critically, of course). The classic example of this is found in the Menshevik approach to the Russinn Revolution, where they critically supported the liberal bourgeoisie and ended up in this camp instead of the camp of the working class.

These two basic conceptions of Menshevik thought have nothing In common with Marxism even though the Menshevik relies on a schematic conception of Marxism to justify his position. In feet the Menshevik will tell you as he did in 1917he and only he is a genuine Marxist and that his Bolshevik opponents are sectarian and the like.

The Menshevik mode of thought, alas, did not pass away with the passing of the Russian Mensheviks and has a significance in many areas. An excellent example of this has been furnished in our movement by Don Harris. For months now the ISL and its supporters in the YSL have been talking about unity with the Social Democrats, about joining the SP-SDF with its present leadership as loyal members, and about the role of this SP-SDF in the regroupment process today and in the future of the American working class. However most of this talk has been on the pure tactical level and very little of it has probed into the theoretical questions involved. Comrade Harris deserves the commendation of the whole movement for clarifying the discussion by placing it on the theoretical plane.

He and he alone has offered the only theoretical justification for the present unity moves. That the majority realises this is well illustrated by the way in which they Immediately defended Comrade Harris’s approach and by the way in which many ideas similar to Comrade Harris’s have sneaked half-baked into a number of articles written by the supporters of unity.

Comrade Harris’s basic views can be summed up in the following manner: 1. We are living in the epoch of the social democracy;2. The task of Marxists for the next historical period  is therefore to build a  mass social-democratic movement; 3. With the help of this movement and under the impetus of the labor bureacracy (which is to the left of the working class) a labor party will be formed; 4. Within this labor party the social democrats, with our aid, will struggle against the liberals for control of the party; 5. After the socialist labor party is formed under the leadership of the social democracy and only then will the differences between social democrats and revolutionaries be of any significance; 6. Sometime after this (we must be the the middle of the 21st Century by now!) the epoch of social democracy will close and the epoch of revolutions and wars announce falsely by Lenin and Trotsky a century or two earlier will be ushered in.

This grandiose and detailed map of the stages through which the working class must pass is obviously aMenshevik method of analysis. Here we find all the characteristics of the earliest Menshevism. Marxism is reduced is reduced to a dead scheme. We in America must pass through the identical stages passed through by the British working class. Other comrades with a similar mode of thought blithely talk of the revival of the “Debslan” party (minus all that Debs stood for, of course)A second characteristic found in this theory is the familiar one of handing history to someone else. In this case Harris hands the epoch to the SP-SDF even though it seems to have little interest in accepting this gift, nor does it show any sign of being capable of carrying out the historic tasks laid out for it so magnificently by Harris. Thus the development of socialism, at least for the next epoch, is placed not in the hands of the working class but in the hands of the privileged labor bureaucracy and its lieutenants in the socialist movement, the SP-SDF.

As a concomitant of this Harris feels he must critically support and build, not an independent working class movement, but the social democracy which supports the capitalist class. This Is similar to the Menshevik support of the liberal bourgeoisie to which they also handed the next stage of the development of the working class.

Thus we see that the mode of thought symbolized by HarrIs and adopted in a half-baked way by the right wing is essentially  a Menshevik one. However to label it so does not prove it to be incorrect. I believe Menshevism is just as fallacious in this period as it was in 1917. Let’s look at reality. The first important factor ignored by Harris is the development of American capitalism. America is no longer the country it was in 1900. Capitalism is more highly developed, the working class infinitely larger and potentially more powerful, and America is the major world imperialist power.

This presents an entirely different situation for the development of the American working class. The workers are more highly organized and when they move, they will undoubtedly move more swiftly and with much more force than was true in 1900 when the capitalist system still had some capacity for reform.

When the present crisis of U.S. capitalism which expresses itself in the need for massive subsidization of the economy — primarily for military objectives, in the hope of survival — exhausts the present and future resources of labor either absolutely or relatively the class struggle will be sharpened on a plane much higher than in the Thirties. Furthermore, considering the international situation its significance will be even greater.

Thus to postulate a whole epoch for social democracy is to state that American capitalism can not only survive for an epoch, but also that it can afford the luxury of reformism. Such a supposition can only be substantiated by claiming, in chorus with the liberals, that American capitalism has solved its contradictions at least for the next epoch. If this is your view state so honestly and present us with an alternative view of development than that furnished by Marx and developed sincehis time by the Marxist movement.

Also to postulate such an epoch, one must be blind to what is going on throughout the world. Trotsky and Lenin characterized our epoch as the epoch of “wars and revolution” — the epoch of imperialist decay. When we look at the world we see Trotsky’s and not Harris’s view confirmed. We see the masses in motion in the colonial world against imperialism and in the Stalinist empire itself. We do not see th social democracy holding out anywhere except in Western Europe where it lives off American aid and and military support. The future of these social democrats is likewise bound up in the stabllity of American capitalism.

Thus we see that all evidence tends to disprove Comrade Harris’s theory. However, I for one am not willing to exclude any particular variant suggested as the possible course of the Amerlcan working class. But I do reject out of hand Comrade Harris’s theory that the worklng class must only developin the way he describes.

I think the development will be more radical and that certain of the stages (namely the SP-SDF) will be skipped over. I am open to the suggestion that maybe theworking class will go first to the SP-SDF before it comes to revolutionaries. But before I base a move such as the dissolution of our movement on this gamble I insist upon evidence. Namely, I insist that the right wing present evidence of such a movement on the part of the working class. So far it has not done so. And as I have stated, all the evidence seems to point in the other direction.

In order to facilitate the discussion I hope the right wing comrades will state their feelings on this matter. Do they or do they not agree with Harris’s theory? If they do not, what theory do they offer as a  substitute?

Also, and this goes particularly for Harrington, I hope they will answer the arguments we raise and not distortions of these arguments. Comrade Harrington please note: I do not exclude moderate evolutionary development. I just have doubts about it and demand evidence. Furthermore I do not say that today is the same as 1917. In fact an important part of the argumentation is that it is not, and that is one reason why the rebirth of a “Debsian” movement is at least questionable.

However, no matter which way a labor party is formed (Comrade Harrington, we are FOR a labor party) I do reject out of hand the notion that it will be the bureaucracy that forms it as a force to the left ofworking, class. The bureaucracy will break from capitalist politics only if forced to in the interests of keeping its privileged position. As a Marxist, I feel that such a basic change as the formation of a labor party can only grow out ofclassstruggle — that is, the struggle of the working class for it’s own interests — interests which conflict with the bureaucracy as well as the capitalist class. Thus no matter how the labor party is formed, those who are closest to the working class and at the same time furthest from the bureaucracy will play the greatest role in its formation.

The SP-SDF represents in its ideology the labor bureaucracy. Today the labor bureaucracy is not social democratic. The day it becomes social democratic will be the day when it needs to do so as a protection against the militant  pressure of the working class, to prevent it from taking power. To hold otherwise is to deny the whole history of the development of the social democrats as well as to deny Marxism which sees as the motive force in our epoch the working class, not a privileged stratum which, while part of the working class, uses its apparatus in order to protect its seperate interests from the workers and in order to defend the bourgeois order to which it is inextricably tied.

Those who enter the SP-SDF are entering the camp of the labor bureaucrats and will find their hands tied in the struggle for a labor party which will be in part a struggle against this very same labor bureaucracy. This is the proposition before us and it is this that Comrade Harris is trying to find a theoretical justification for in his Menshevik theory.

THE SHAMAN AND THE SWAMP

THE SHAMAN AND THE SWAMP

by S. Aesop

[First published in Left Wing Bulletin, April 1957, Vol. 1 #2, published by the Left Wing Caucus of the Young Socialist League. The Caucus opposed Max Shachtman’s plan to liquidate his organization and it’s youth group into Cold War Social Democracy]

Once upon a daydream, not too long ago, in a mighty nation, not too far away, there lived two groups of people, very far apart.

One was called the Redmen, no one quite knew why; the others were called the Others, because they were. The Redmen were very few but there were lots and lots of Others. This was not always the case, it was said, and the tribal tablets told of a time when lots (but never lots and lots) of Others were Redmen. This was long ago.

The Redmen were a quarrelsome lot, few as they were, and did not live together. They lived in separate tribes, each being the True Redmen tribe, and when Redmen from two tribes met they sometimes argued most noisily. They only agreed, all of them, that one day, the Great Power would fix it so everyone would be a Redman. And they, or most of them, tried to help the Great Power from time to time, but never did too well.

Nevertheless, in between quarreling, and changing tribes, the Redmen thought hard about the Great Power and performed many rituals and made strong incantations to bring its day closer. Each tribe had its own ritual and sometimes several– for though the tribes were small there were many views and oftimes a tribe would be divided into clans each with its own ritual.

Now one day it came about that all the Redmen began to quarrel about a new idea. This idea was that all Redmen should join together and make one bigger small tribe instead of several smaller small tribes.

It would seem that this idea came together because the biggest tribe of Redmen — which was not really a Redman tribe but only just said it was — because this tribe’s Mighty Medicine Man had died and the new Shaman could no longer hide the badness of his ritual. It was a very very bad ritual indeed and real Redmen began to leave this tribe.

Now ithappened that each of the little tribes (except for one that lived on ahigh plateau, and another that lived in a swamp) wanted these Redmen to come live with them, or best yet, as was stated, for all Redmen to come live together and form one bigger small tribe.

One of these little tribes was very excited. Its strongest clan was run by a sort of Redmen who was called Mighty Shaman. He was headman because he had made his own ritual, could make awsome incantations, and mainly because out of the many tribes he had been in he had made this one.

Mighty Shaman’s tribe wassmall and old but it lived right next to a younger and stronger tribe. This younger tribe bowed down to Mighty Shaman and used his ritual and made his nephew, Little Shaman, headman because Little Shaman knew the ritual real well and could make almost as much noise as Mighty Shaman.

The Redmen in Little Shaman’s tribe were even more excited about tribal unity and talked about it all the time.

But Mighty Shaman had a strange idea of his own. In his wanderings he had once lived with the tribe in the swamp and he always regretted leaving it. He had heard that another tribe (of very pale Redmen to be sure) was coming back to live in the swamp andmake it even better for swamp dwellers.

Now, it should not be thought that the swamp was not a nice safe place for a Redman to live.It was.In the swarmp a Redman could ooze down into the warm mire up to his neck and almost no one know he was a Redman if he did not tell them.

Besides, in the swamp a Redman was safe from the Other’s. The Others (or some of them) were sometimes very mean to the Redmen and not let them hunt or fish in certain places and even worse. But not in the swamp. In the swamp the Others did not do bad things to Redmen and if the swamp tribe behaved well (which they were very good at doing) and kissed the feet of the Others and took parts of the Religion of the Others into the tribal ritual (which they did) why then they were allowed to hunt and fish all over.

Well, Mighty Shaman decided he was lonesome for the swamp and called together his Pow-wow council. Some of the witch doctors on the Pow -wow Council thought the slime was too deep in the swamp but they were hooted down by the elders who kept thinking of how warm and safe and comfortable it would be.

So it happened that Mighty Shaman called in LittleShaman and told him to prepare the younger tribe to march into the swamp. Little Shaman went back to his tribe and incanted long and loud. The other leaders of his clan finally gave in because he allowed them to think that the real reason for going into the swamp was to pump out all of the mud and build a fine strong tribe which would gain many Others.

Some of Little Shaman’s tribal brothers rebelled, however, and formed a new clan. They pointed into the swamp at the unhappy younger swamp dwellers, and also that they did not want to give up their ritual for that of the swamp. They called for a new bigger tribe of all the Redmen, including the unhappy swamp dwellers, on firm dry land and with a good ritual.

Mighty Shaman and Little Shaman and their lesser headmen became very unhappy because of this. They sent out the story that the new young clan was not loyal to the ritual and was made up of scouts and spies from an enemy tribe.

This was a big untruth but it scared many of the undecided members of Little Shaman’s tribe and some of them stopped thinking rebellious thoughts and came again to sit placidly at the feet of Mighty Shaman.

They noticed, however, that Mighty Shaman’s feet gave off a strange odor and were covered with clay and slime, due to his explorations in the swamp.

Many of them just could not stand the odor and they went to the new clan and made it strong.

Finally the Shamanites could not stand dry land any longer and they gathered up their followers and, after begging the permission of the muddiest swamp dwellers, they snuck into the swamp to live.

They found it so pleasant that most of thern, slipped all the way down in the muck and buried themselves so deeply that after a very short while no one, Redman or Other, ever heard from them again.

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